The issue leaped into the headlines of the national media, putting additional pressure on both the state and Central governments. But there was always a extreme fringe, which did not believe in peaceful protests and used force to secure financial gain for themselves and terrorize the prosperous business community. They later coalesced with the ULFA. Indeed, one of the initial ‘actions’ of ULFA was the killing of a prominent Marwari businessman in Guwahati. He was killed not because of an ideological bias but because of a dispute about the amount of money demanded from him as a ‘contribution.’

However, the basic contention of the students put the Government of India in a bind. The students were not asking for anything that went either against the Constitution or common sense. Indeed, for the first time, the North East had an influential group which wanted a Constitutional settlement of their problem, not one that was outside it, like that demanded by the Nagas, Mizos and Meiteis and later the Assamese too, through ULFA.

The students were raising a very basic question: who had the right to vote in an Indian election? Indians, of course. So why should Bangladeshis, or people from any other nationality, exercise that right? This had long-term implications that Assam found very disturbing—accepting this situation was, in effect, sanctioning ‘foreign control’ of the politics of the state and other parts of the country.

The Assam movement and its demands thus raised the question of whether the Indian Constitution was an adequate tool to deal with a problem of such far-reaching consequence, having its roots in foreign soil. (This is an issue I propose to tackle in the concluding segment of the book.)

Tired of the inconclusiveness of the political situation, Indira Gandhi decided to force her way out of the logjam. She called fresh elections to the state legislature along with the elections to the fourteen Lok Sabha seats which had been unfilled since she returned to power in 1980 (at that time, AASU had blocked the elections to eight of fourteen elections in the state and also stalled the census operations: the latter was a foolish decision for it set Assam back by a decade in terms of census data—raw material that could have helped the agitators to better showcase their own issues.