The run-up to the election was ominous. With every passing day, the rhetoric became shriller, the political temperature a little higher. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then leader of the rump Bharatiya Janata Party (it was barely four years old, having been formed after the three-way split in the Janata Party in 1979), declared that the ‘rivers of blood’ would flow if the Government went ahead with the election. The BJP had just two seats in Parliament out of a total of 542, including Vajpayee’s own. Barring the Congress and the Left group, most other parties decided to fall behind the agitators and boycott the elections. Vajpayee was in Assam to campaign against the vote. His voice and that of many others added to the growing hysteria.

It was at this time too that a distinguished soldier from Rajasthan made his entrance on the political stage: Jaswant Singh of the bushy eyebrows and gravelly, ponderous voice was selected by the BJP to be the observer for the state. It was, as he said many years later, his ‘karmabhoomi’.

Many rumours did the rounds. One evening at the Bellevue Hotel, where many of us hacks had camped, a shout went around that a group of miyahs in a boat had landed on the river front and were rushing towards the hotel. Frantic calls were made to the police; a search party went out from the hotel. Of course, there was no one to be found.

In another case, someone’s fevered imagination reported that men in black (this was well before the popular film about Extra Terrestials!) were being dropped from helicopters to start riots! And the local media lapped it all up, adding to the general confusion.

Despite the rumours, the Congress Party won the elections handsomely. In some places, no one participated in the polling. In others, voting was about 1 per cent of the total electorate.

Few remember that Hiteswar Saikia, the short, stubby Ahom from Nazira in Upper Assam then became chief minister. What they do remember is the violence and the brutality as the hate and anger of a hundred years poured out of the hearts and minds of communities across the Brahmaputra Valley, from Kamrup to North Lakhimpur, from villages to islands in the river.

However, one area remained peaceful—at the time, it appeared as if the Barak valley was in a time warp. There was hardly a single incident of violence. But then this area had never supported the anti-foreigner movement anyway. The population of the Barak valley was overwhelmingly Bengali-speaking—both Hindu and Muslim. Calls for bandhs in the Brahmaputra Valley rarely found an echo here. They would be ignored while the Bengalis would organize their own anti-Assamese bandhs, decrying the agitators as parochial, narrow-minded and anti-minority. Reflecting on this, Shekhar Gupta, then the resident correspondent of the Indian Express, and now its chief editor, said that the story of Assam is that of two valleys—the Brahmaputra and the Barak.