To my mind, the Assam government’s affidavit in the Supreme Court saying there had been no secret killings is nothing but a masterly act of deception after having failed to honour the election pledge. They just want to keep the issue of secret killings alive for the next elections and, if possible, thereafter.

Secret killings are those whose perpetrators are not known to the people. Only the government is privy to such knowledge. It is impossible that such killings could have taken place without the government’s knowledge and sanction.

So, if the government was sincere enough, it should have implemented its election pledge of getting to the bottom of the matter. But the Tarun Gogoi government has not done that even into its second term.

The government should have published the report of the second judicial commission headed by Justice J.N. Sarma. It ought to have placed the interim report of the third commission under Justice K.N. Saikia in the Assembly. But it did not.

Whenever there is something that goes against the government, it forgets all about its election promises and hides it.

A case in point is the Jeevan Reddy Commission report on the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. The government announced its constitution with much fanfare amid a strong movement for its repeal.

The commission went all over the Northeast to gather public opinion. So much time and money was wasted, but the government is yet to make the contents of the report public.

I have a strong feeling that the state government filed the affidavit as a strategy to protect its own back and get a clean chit for itself if such a need were to arise in future, because it, too, has been found to indulge in acts that are in line with the secret killings.

I want to ask whether the youth killed in a so-called encounter at Gorchuk recently was really an Ulfa militant or an innocent man, as claimed by his brother .

Otherwise, why should it take such a long time to find the truth behind the secret killings that took place so many years ago?

This is the third commission that the government has constituted to investigate the murders, but the people are still in the dark about what actually happened and who the killers were.

Actually, our leaders lack real political culture. They only believe in gimmicks and resort to every possible means to cling on to power.

They are past masters in politicising things. Here, I am reminded of the Vohra Commission report, which had spoken of a deep-seated nexus among the mafia, politicians and the bureaucracy, which runs a parallel government, pushing the state apparatus into irrelevance. In the name of democracy, there is only mafiocracy.

On the secret killings, I am also astounded that the government had refused to compensate the next of kin of those killed. If the government can pay compensation to the families of victims of the attacks on Hindi-speaking people, then why not to the victims of the secret killers? What wrong did they commit to be so deprived?

But no matter what they do, a time will come when they will have to answer to the people. The government cannot bypass its accountability to the public.