(Sandeep Phukan is Deputy National Editor with NDTV)The news of the Assam massacre broke at 8:30 pm on Tuesday. By 11 pm, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had spoken to Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi and issued a statement, calling the killings "an act of cowardice."
The number of dead was rising by the hour and by Tuesday midnight, the death toll had crossed 40 and at the time of writing this, stands at 71. Yet, the Chief Secretary of the Assam Government, Mr J Khosla, didn't think it was time for him to cancel his holiday in Kaziranga and continued with his elephant safari this morning.
"That is not good on the chief secretary's part. He should have immediately come back," Mr Gogoi said when he was asked at a press conference in Guwahati why Mr Khosla did not cut short his trip.
Local TV channels reported about Mr Khosla's trip, along with visuals of the elephant ride he took with his family this morning at the Kaziranga National Park.
In a series of attacks by NDFB(S) terrorists on Tuesday night, spread across the districts of Sonitpur, Kokrajhar and Chirang, 65 people were killed. Five more people were killed this morning when police opened fire on violent protesters in Sonitpur.
Around 2,500 people have fled their homes and are staying in relief camps after the attacks. Yet, these statistics have neither moved the top bureaucrat of Assam nor the top cop, Khagen Sharma, who is yet to visit the affected areas to instill a sense of security among the victims.
Contrast this with how national politicians reacted: by this morning, Congress President Sonia Gandhi issued a statement calling it a "cowardly attack" and the Union Cabinet observed a two-minute silence in memory of the victims of the massacre.
Will Mr Tarun Gogoi, under whose watch Assam has seen several ethnic conflicts, take the cue and shake up an insensitive and incompetent bureaucracy? If he doesn't, the people of Assam will give their response a year and a half later through the Electronic Voting Machines.
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