Shekhar Gupta: Playing with a secular fire

Assam will be a key issue for BJP in 2019. But it could also end up as a toxic cocktail that targets Hindus as well

Don’t ask me to tell you a story about Rwanda. Wikipedia would tell you more than me. You might not even need me to tell you stories about the great massacre of Nellie 35 years ago. It’s part of our political folklore now. Let me tell you, instead, about less familiar places: Khoirabari, Gohpur, and Sipajhar. These places on the north bank of the Brahmaputra must be remembered when a deeply polarising debate over the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam is raging.
 
In the killings of 1983 in the Brahmaputra Valley, about 7,000 people died. A little