A day after it was reported that a teenager was killed at the hands of National Democratic Front of Bodoland (Songbijit faction) cadres, other organisations have slammed the state for failing to resolve the militancy along the border. Anurag Kashyap reports
'If there are provocations and people try to exploit and manipulate the situation along linguistic, religious lines, then Assam might relapse into its troubled past.'
NRC State Coordinator Prateek Hajela said those people whose names have been excluded in the first list need not worry.
Sonowal's name as the party's face came as no surprise as he came with a clean image and no baggage and enjoyed the confidence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Kumar's comments at the party's national executive meeting came amid a strain in his ties with the Bharatiya Janata Party and appears to be a message to his ally, some of whose leaders have been linked to alleged communal tensions and violence in the state.
'As demonetisation showed us, the Shah-Modi duo can take big risks.' 'Risking economic damage for political benefit, however, is one thing, stoking old fires in complicated Assam is another', warns Shekhar Gupta.
'There is a design of fundamentalists that the north east must become an Islamic country.'
'The win in Assam is likely to have a ripple effect in other north-eastern states like Manipur and Nagaland which have been reluctant to embrace the BJP in the past,' says Nitin A Gokhale, the distinguished commentator on strategic affairs, who lived and reported from Assam between 1983 and 2006.
