The reason for selecting 1971 was clear: it marked the creation of a new nation. Those who came from the new entity, Bangladesh, were not entitled to settle in India without valid papers, she argued. Detection of the immigrants could begin right away with intensive revisions of electoral rolls and census data; deportation could then follow.

The students were also adamant, although they had eased their demands. First of all, they had sought the deportation of all ‘illegal immigrants’ from Assam after 1951. Then they scaled this down to those who came after 1961. The Government of India had problems with this as well—among the nearly one million people who came between 1961 and 1971, illegally, of course, not less than 920,000 were Bengali Hindus who had fled the pogroms of the late 1960s in East Pakistan.

As the talks faltered and finally failed, Mrs Gandhi decided to try and break the movement by political force and put the students through a crucible—she would ask the people to give a mandate on their demands and her responses. Voting was ordered for the Assembly as well as for the eight out of fourteen seats to Parliament which had not been filled since 1980 (there were boycotts organized by the students that year which blocked voting in these constituencies although in six others, the voting came through). The 1980 general election returned Indira Gandhi to power after a three-year period in opposition. Leading the Congress Party’s charge in Assam was Hiteswar Saikia, a stocky politician with the guile of a fox and the organizing skills of an army general.

Assam: a Profile

It is important at this point to survey the condition of Assam. A land of 82,000 square kilometres, watered by the vast Brahmaputra river, prone to severe floods, it is inhabited by a medley of communities professing a range of faiths: Hindus, Muslim, Christian and Sikh. Its nearly 25 million people are bunched together in the narrow Brahmaputra Valley, barely 90 to 100 kilometres wide at its broadest.