At 8.55 in the morning on August 15, 2004, five minutes before the Indian National Flag was to have been unfurled at the main Independence Day parade venue at a district town in the northeastern State of Assam, a powerful bomb went off...13 people, including six school children, died and twenty-one others were injured. Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, and the insurgency-wracked State's security establishment, held the separatist United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) responsible for the attack at Dhemaji, a perennially flood-ravaged town, 462 KM east of Guwahati, Assam's capital. The ULFA has been fighting for a 'sovereign, socialist Assam' since the group came into existence in 1979.
Strikes called by insurgents in Northeast India, coinciding with important dates in the country's national calendar have been a routine affair for nearly two decades now, and a similar call by the militants earlier this month did not surprise anyone. Groups like the ULFA would attack symbols of governmental authority like railway stations, rail tracks, oil pipelines, police stations or a security patrol around such important dates. The ULFA had clamped a ban on the screening of Hindi films from India's 'film capital' in Bombay Mumbai - Bollywood, as it is loosely called - beginning November 15, 2003, and had since carried out four earlier bomb and grenade attacks at theatres showing such films. But, the attack at the Urvi Theatre on August 14, 2004, came as a surprise because a Bengali movie was being shown. The incident has been projected in some quarters as a demonstration that the ULFA was bent on creating general terror in the State, and had given up its earlier strategy of hitting out at select targets alone.| I'm sensing a pattern, here. |
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