Assam protests govt’s U-turn

Centre backtracks, decides to include Assam in land boundary agreement with B’desh

land swap.

The group also burnt copies of the official letter sent by the state to the central government on the issue.

The LBA was signed in 1974 but not ratified by Parliament. Gogoi accompanied then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Dhaka in 2011 where a protocol for the transfer of territories was signed and a constitution amendment bill was introduced in December 2013 in the Rajya Sabha by the UPA government.

That bill was referred to a parliamentary standing committee that submitted its report in December 2014.

The le gislation that is likely to come up in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday includes enclaves to be transferred to Bangladesh in the states of Assam, West Bengal, Tripura and Meghalaya and those that are to be acquired from the neighbouring country.

“The BJP is now saying that the LBA protocol with Bangladesh was signed by the UPA government and it can’t change the format. If that is the truth then why did the BJP earlier decide to delink Assam from the agreement?” asked state Congress president Anjan Dutta.

Opposition Asom Gana Parisda (AGP) chief Atul Bora panned the Modi government, terming the move to include Assam in the pact as “compro- mising on territorial integrity”.

“We doubted the BJP’s intentions from the very beginning. The Congress and BJP are two sides of the same coin,” he said.

Analysts said the Centre was keen to exclude Assam from the agreement with an eye on next year’s assembly polls as several political groups were resisting its inclusion.