The Assam government on Monday admitted that they did not have intelligence inputs about the large-scale violence that occurred during protests against the amended Citizenship Act and said it is monitoring social networking sites to find out posts spreading hate messages.
The administration has detected at least 206 posts related to law and order issues such as fake news items since December 9, Assam Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said at a press conference here.
"No Assam Police official thought that anyone would ever try to burn the Secretariat. We never thought that leaders of the opposition parties will be doing Facebook live after burning a stage on the road," he said in reply to a question regarding intelligence failure.
"We never had such information. If you say that was a failure, then yes, we failed to assess that," Sarma said.
The senior BJP leader last week alleged that there may be a "deadly nexus" among a section of Congress workers, "urban Naxals" and Islamic outfit PFI that tried to burn down the state secretariat during December 11 protests and the NIA has been asked to probe the matter.
Sarma had earlier claimed of having evidence of Assam Youth Congress president Kamrul Islam Choudhury being involved in the attack at the state secretariat in Dispur on GS Road and alleged that he had set ablaze the dais built for Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to Guwahati.
"We are monitoring the social media to see if anybody is engaged in inciting violence or spreading fake news and hate messages. So far, we have registered 28 cases for offensive provocative social media posts," he added.
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The police arrested 10 people in these cases and five were released on bail, while the rest were remanded to judicial custody, Sarma informed.
He said 21 more people were called to various police stations with their parents and were allowed to go after counselling them not to repeat it.
"We also found that 25 such posts were uploaded from outside Assam and India. Three of them were from Dubai. For the rest, we are still probing," the Minister said.
He said strict action will be taken against those involved in flaring communal tension or provoking to damage public properties.
The police has registered a total of 244 cases and arrested 393 persons across Assam since December 9.
Sarma warned people about a misinformation campaign that Bangladeshi people benefitting from the Citizenship (Amendment) Act will be settled in tea garden areas.
"We made a policy to allot additional tea garden lands among the tea tribe communities. In that land, nobody can be settled. If such misinformation goes on, we will take legal action," he added.
Sarma, who is also the Convenor of the NDA's regional wing North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), claimed that all the likely beneficiaries of the Act are already settled in different parts of the state and no new migrants will come.
Asked who is behind spreading this misinformation, he said, "This is a conspiracy to destabilise the peace in tea garden areas. Some political leaders are involved."
In the ongoing agitation against the contentious Act, huge participation from tea garden areas has been seen.
Assam has witnessed one of the most violent protests by the people in its history for several days since December 11 with three rail stations, a post office, a bank, a bus terminus, shops, dozens of vehicles and many other public properties being set ablaze or damaged. Five persons, including four in firing by security forces, have lost their lives during the protests.
To probe the violence that took place across Assam, the state government has formed an SIT headed by Deputy Inspector General (CID) Mridulananda Sarma.
Sarma had announced that the state would urge the Centre to depute an officer either from the CBI or the NIA to help in the investigations by the SIT.
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