New Delhi:
The Home Ministry and Intelligence agencies have reportedly found the Tarun Gogoi government in Assam extremely lax in the way it has handled the riots in the state in the last month.
Mr Gogoi has been slammed from all quarters for what is perceived as poor handling of the spiraling ethnic clashes that hit the state; the state government had failed to step in after some incidents of murder were reported in early July and these later spiraled into ethnic clashes in lower Assam.
Home Ministry sources confirm that, saying the Gogoi government wasted opportunity to stop the violence in the first few days. The sources point out that the state government failed to make preventive arrests all through the month-long violence even though rounding up likely troublemakers is standard operating procedure that acts as a deterrent during such situations. Sources also add that Assam government allowed groups to call bandhs, which could fuel more violence. Yesterday, Home Secretary RK Singh asked the Assam government to take stronger and more decisive action and make preventive arrests immediately.
The state government, the ministry reportedly finds, has also not taken any action against senior officials like Superintendents of Police and District Magistrates in Lower Assam districts like Kokrajhar and Chirang, which were the epicenter of the ethnic clashes that have left more than 90 people dead and rendered about 4,00,000 people homeless. By being soft, sources say, Assam has now entered a spiral of violence, where incidents trigger more incidents.
Sources say that in it its criticism of the Gogoi government's handling of the situation, the Home Ministry has compared it to how the Centre handled the Kandhamal violence in Odisha in 2008. When the VHP called for a bandh in the sensitive area on Christmas Day, 20 companies of central paramilitary forces were flown into the state and deployed. The then Home Secretary GK Pillai had flown in too and got an undertaking from the senior officials of the region that the law and order situation would be brought to normal immediately.
Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi has however denied that his government had acted late. Speaking in his defence earlier this month, he said he had asked for Central forces as soon as news came in that four people had been killed. But it took those forces four days to reach Assam, he claimed.