New Delhi, Aug. 2: It was a flood of emotions, and Shankar Ghose temporarily allowed himself to drown in them.

“I can’t even describe what I feel. What I am going through is just so complicated,” he said, taking breaks between sentences, trying to keep his voice steady.

The father of social activist Sanjoy Ghose, kidnapped and brutally killed by the United Liberation Front of Asom in 1997, had only a while ago learnt that his son’s killer had been shot dead.

It was the grandfather in Ghose who resurfaced first. “I remember the trauma Joyika and Anando — 10 and six years old respectively then — went through,” he said of Sanjoy’s children.

Ghose says he feels no sense of his son’s death having been avenged by the death of Mridul Hazarika, the Ulfa militant who is believed to have killed Sanjoy when he was trying to escape.

Instead, he says, he would have preferred it if his son’s killers had been arrested, charged and convicted.

His son, he says, had taught him to look beyond “one’s own personal emotions,” at the larger picture.

“A life sentence to the killers would have been the message to send to those who kill people like Sanjoy, who give up everything for a larger cause,” said Ghose.

Sanjoy — an Oxford graduate in agricultural economics, and a post-graduate from Johns Hopkins University in community medicine — had taken after his mother, says Ghose.

“She, too, did things in life like no one else would. She married me, refusing to join the IAS,” he said.

Sanjoy, he feels, was killed because he espoused the cause of development in the area around Majuli island — the world’s largest riverine island.

“His belief in introducing transparency in all financial contracts between private contractors and local government bodies had upset the Ulfa,” he added.

The Ulfa is believed to receive extortion money from contractors, which they pay out of the contracts signed with government bodies.

Ghose, who has taken over Sanjoy’s NGO, Charkha, after his death, says he hadn’t supported his son’s decision to put his life at risk by working in Ulfa-dominated regions of Assam.

“I was also worried because he was a Bengali, and the way they are often perceived in Assam,” he said.

After long arguments, where father tried to convince son of the “irrationalities” of his choice, it was finally two questions Sanjoy posed to his father that settled the debate.

“Do you feel the region (Majuli) needs development?”

The father hesitantly answered, “Yes.”

“Whose son should go?”

Shankar Ghose had no answer.