‘One hears the echoes of the movement for an independent Bangladesh in Assam today’, said a Dacca newspaper recently. The situation in Assam and the north-east is as difficult as it is complex. Although decades of political and economic indifference have pushed the Assamese into their present agitation, the movement has already acquired dangerous colours…
Three documents seem to indicate that the Assam problem is not about to be easily solved. Intractable and increasingly aggressive, the Assam agitation last fortnight edged closer to ugly confrontation. The deadline for a Central government decision on the foreigners issue set by the All Assam Students Union (AASU) and the Gana Sangram Parishad (GSP)…
The fuse has been burning for almost four years and the mood in the state has passed through all the faces of anger, despair and belligerence to arrive, on election eve, at the explosive. Gauhati has become unrecognisable. Once the citadel of lahe lahe, the Assamese philosophy of languor and peaceability, the capital now rumbles…
It was beyond the ken of a civilised society, a blood spattered vindication of a heartless government’s sudden constitutional piety. The carnage began with a few deaths on February 2; during the next three weeks, it rose every day with dreadful ferocity: a dozen at Cha maria on the 12th, a hundred at Gohpur on…