When Will Assam Stop Silencing Its Truth-Tellers?

The news of a retired IAS (promoted) officer allegedly threatening journalist Rana Deka, his eight-year-old child during a phone call is not an isolated aberration. It is a symptom of a disease that has festered in Assam's body for decades, one that reached its most virulent form during the nightmarish years of 1998-2001, when the state became a killing field and journalists who dared to speak became marked men. 

Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. And Assam, it seems, has a dangerously short memory. For me, as a child then, it is if the horrors are back again. The symptoms are at play. 

The Dark Years: When Night Brought . Death

Between 1998 and 2001, Assam witnessed what many historians call its darkest chapter. The “gupto hathya”— “secret killings” were not random acts of violence. They were systematic, state-orchestrated executions that claimed so many lives. 

The pattern was chillingly consistent: the dreaded knock on the door at midnight, masked gunmen, bodies discovered at dawn in swamps, hanging from trees, floating in the beels and embankments of the Brahmaputra. 

The Justice K.N. Saikia Commission, constituted in 2005, laid bare the horror. The Commission coined a term for this carnage: "Ulfocide" the systematic targeting of anyone connected, however tenuously, to the insurgency. The motive, as the Commission noted, was "perpetuation of... rule by villainy, treachery and monstrous cruelty." 

Neighbours spoke in hushed tones about vehicles arriving at embankments in the dead of night, about screams piercing the darkness, about severed limbs discovered by farmers walking to their paddy fields. But no one dared speak aloud. To speak was to invite death.

The Blood Price of Truth: Parag Kumar Das

No name embodies the dangers of journalism in 1990s Assam more than Parag Kumar Das. On the afternoon of May 17, 1996, as he walked home from his son’s school with his eight-year-old son Rohan, four gunmen in a Maruti 800 pumped thirteen bullets into him in broad daylight in Chandmari, Guwahati. His child was severely injured. The executive editor of *Asomiya Pratidin*, founder of the human rights organisation MASS (Manab Adhikar Sangram Samiti), and one of Assam's most fearless voices was silenced forever at age 35. 

Note the chilling parallel: a journalist. An eight-year-old child. Threats and violence. Nearly three decades separate, these incidents, yet the playbook remains unchanged.

Parag Kumar Das had committed the unforgivable sin of documenting truth. Through his publications *Boodhbar* and *Aagan*, he had exposed the nexus between security forces and extrajudicial killings. He had challenged the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. He had given voice to the voiceless. For this, he was arrested twice under draconian laws. And when that failed to silence him, he was murdered in front of his son.

A Culture of Impunity

This is what makes the alleged threat against Rana Deka so deeply troubling. It is not merely the act itself reprehensible as it is. It is what it represents: the persistence of a culture where those in positions of power believe they can threaten journalists and their families without consequence. 

The gupto hathya period officially ended in 2001 when the AGP government fell. But did the mindset that enabled it ever truly disappear? The willingness to use intimidation, threats, and violence against those who speak inconvenient truths? 

Assam's journalists continue to work in one of India's most dangerous environments for the press. Since 1987, at least 23 journalists have been killed in the state. Many more have faced threats, harassment, and legal persecution. The methods may have evolved from midnight knocks to phone calls, from bullets to FIRs but the intent remains the same: to silence, to intimidate, to make examples.

When Threats Target Children

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the alleged incident is the targeting of Rana Deka's eight-year-old child. This is not merely intimidation; it is terrorism in its most cowardly form. It echoes the trauma inflicted on young Rohan Das, who watched his father murdered before his eyes and carries those scars to this day. 

What kind of society allows its children to become collateral damage in battles against the truth? What kind of desperation, what kind of entitled arrogance, leads someone to threaten a child?

The Questions That Demand Answers

When a retired civil servant allegedly feels emboldened to threaten a working journalist and his child, we must ask uncomfortable questions:

What mechanisms exist to protect journalists in Assam? Why do those who intimidate the press so rarely face consequences? How many threats go unreported because journalists have learned that complaints lead nowhere? And most importantly: have we, as a society, become so inured to the silencing of dissent that we accept it as normal? 

The ghosts of gupto hathya demand answers. The memory of Parag Kumar Das demands answers. The journalists still working in the shadow of intimidation demand answers.

A Call to Remember, A Call to Act

Assam cannot afford to forget its dark years. The secret killings were not just a political aberration; they were a collective moral failure, enabled by silence, protected by impunity, and normalised by a culture that valued power over truth.

Every threat against a journalist today is a reminder that the same forces, thoughts, attitudes that enabled gupto hathya still lurk beneath the surface. The irony is a retired bureaucrat giving out such a threat. A father trying to protect his son, threatening another father, with the life of his son. Every attack on a truth-teller is an attack on democracy itself. Every child threatened is an indictment of our collective conscience. 

The alleged threat against Rana Deka must be investigated thoroughly and, if proven, punished severely. Not because journalists deserve special treatment, but because a society that cannot protect our members from the high and mighty will turn into savagery. Moreover Rana Deka, if he is at fault investigate but we cannot understand any circumstances return to days of Gupto Hathya, secret killings. 

The midnight knocks may have stopped. But until we dismantle the culture of impunity that made them possible, Assam will remain haunted by its ghosts. 

And the next knock, whether it comes at midnight or through a phone call on a Friday night, is only a matter of time.

 (Anshuman Dutta is a digital transformation professional and a published columnist. Assam is home and home is what he talks about. )

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anshumandutta 

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