Reprising the attack on the Opposition, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Tuesday, August 8, claimed that former President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had shown disregard for the northeast during their tenure.
Even as Prime Minister Modi has received flak for his tepid response to the recent violence in Manipur, Dr. Sarma slammed former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru for “abandoning” the northeast during the Chinese aggression of 1962.
“During that time, Nehru never came to Assam. Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed was sent to Tezpur but he fled that place without talking to the people, saying there was no point [in him staying on] if the Chinese attacked,” he told journalists on August 8.
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Tezpur, a major Indian Army base, is the Brahmaputra Valley town closest to Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang, which had briefly come under Chinese control during the India-China conflict in 1962.
At the time, Mr. Ahmed was a Minister in the Congress government in Assam. He went on to become a Central Minister and was elected to the Rajya Sabha to represent the Barpeta Lok Sabha seat.
His tenure as the President of India from 1974 to 1977 is best remembered for the promulgation of the Emergency on June 25, 1975, on the advice of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Dr. Sarma also took a swipe at Mrs. Gandhi for not taking any responsibility for the Nellie massacre of February 1983 and blaming it on the Assamese agitators. The massacre of more than 2,000 Bengali-origin Muslims, mostly women and children, happened during the peak of the Anti-Foreigners Agitation between 1979 and 1985.
“She spent five minutes at Nellie only to blame the agitators of Assam, without going into the details of the incident. She neither initiated a peace process nor [did she] suspend the election thereafter to bring peace in the State,” he said.
The BJP and some regional parties aligned with the party say Mr. Ahmed had stymied the then Chief Minister Bimala Prasad Chaliha’s bid to enforce the Prevention of Infiltrators Plan, which was based on the National Register of Citizens of 1951 and sought to identify and deport illegal entrants from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
