Guwahati:
Twenty eight-year-old Naren Tumung's memory loss is slowly getting better. But the memory that keeps coming back to him is not something he will want to remember. On October 30, 2008, he had taken a break from driving his autorickshaw for a cup of tea. He left his auto under the Ganeshguri flyover. Even before he had had a few sips of his tea, a huge explosion shook the area. Naren's instinct was to run towards his auto, when a second explosion blinded him. He can't recall anything after that. "After that second blast, it's all a blur," he told NDTV.
Around him, close to a hundred people were dead in one of the worst terror attacks in Assam. Many hundreds were injured, some of them with permanent disabilities. Like Naren, the survivors and their families, four years later, feel they have not been treated kindly.
Naren's memory is slowly returning, but his left hand and leg are still paralysed. He needs physiotherapy but his mother Gulabi Tumung can't afford it. The Rs 1.5 lakh they were given as compensation by the government quickly ran out, even before his treatment could be completed. Gulabi says that even there, the government didn't live up to its promise. "We were to get Rs 5 lakh as compensation," she told NDTV. "But eventually we only got Rs 1.5 lakh."
She also said that several ministers came and promised all help while her son was in the hospital. They said he would be taken outside the state if required and the government would take care of his recovery. She has already used up her savings from her salary that she got at a government-run school for adult education. Now even that source has dried up, because she's had to give up her job to take care of her son. Naren's elder brother drives an auto cargo van but the money from that isn't enough to pay for the treatment.
"Today I am alive but tomorrow I will be gone who will take care of him? I want him to get treatment and rehabilitated," she lamented.
The district administration, however, maintains that Naren has been given his entitlement. "Rs 50,000 from the state and Rs 1 lakh from the Centre, that's what he is entitled to and that's what he has got," Kamrup District Commissioner Ashutosh Agnihotri told NDTV, pointing out that rules have to followed.
Meanwhile, like Naren, hundreds of other victims and their families are still waiting for justice. 14 of the 22 accused are in jail including the mastermind Ranjan Daimary chief of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland but nobody has been convicted yet. A memorial, however, has come up in one of the sites of the blast - a promise the government says they have kept. But for those still living the horror of the blasts, that's clearly not enough.