Congress holds Assam after the state's map shrinks
What happened
Indian National Congress held on comfortably, extending a run of victories from the state's earliest elections.
It won 95 of the 114 seats on offer.
That left it well past the 58-seat majority mark — a landslide by any reading.
Independent candidates trailed far behind, with just 10 seats.
What changed
This was the first election held under Assam's new, much smaller boundaries.
Several regions that used to send members to this assembly became separate states and union territories of their own.
The assembly itself became smaller, moving from 125 seats to 114.
Notable numbers
A few numbers from that election stand out.
The closest race: Rangiya, Assam was decided by just 4 votes — the margin, how far ahead the winner finished, in votes, over whoever came second.
At the other extreme, Bongaigaon, Assam was a rout, won by a margin of 79.4% of the vote.
About 58.7% of registered voters turned out to cast a ballot, the highest share Assam had recorded up to that point.
The backdrop
By this point, INC had not lost a single election in Assam's short history as a state.
That made 5 wins in a row.
That redrawing was the result of the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act, which split off several of Assam's former regions into new states and union territories.
The North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act, 1971, enacted 30 December 1971 and effective 21 January 1972, created the states of Manipur, Tripura and Meghalaya and the union territories of Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh out of the former state of Assam, reducing Assam's territory to its present boundaries.