The Northeast burns again

Offbeat

 Migrant Biharis killed in upper Assam; families waiting at railway stations to flee back to Bihar. The images have a familiar ring. It does not take long to go back in memory 25 years to the late 1970s.

 I was then paying my first visit to Assam as a reporter. The night bus from Guwahati, then still Gauhati, dropped us in the morning at the bus stand in upper Assam. The ultimate destination was Doom Dooma tea estate where two tea garden labourers had been killed.

 It was the beginning of that particular agitation in Assam, directed at