"We Failed To Assess": Assam Minister On Violence Over Citizenship Act

The Assam government on Monday admitted that it did not have intelligence inputs about the large-scale violence during protests against the citizenship law and said it is monitoring social networking sites to find out posts spreading hate messages.

The administration has detected at least 206 posts related to law and order issues such as fake news items since December 9, Assam Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said at a press conference in Guwahati.

"No Assam Police official thought that anyone would ever try to burn the Secretariat. We never thought that leaders of the opposition parties will be doing Facebook live after burning a stage on the road," he said in reply to a question regarding intelligence failure.

"We never had such information. If you say that was a failure, then yes, we failed to assess that," Mr Sarma said.

The senior BJP leader last week alleged that there may be a "deadly nexus" among a section of Congress workers, "urban Naxals" and Islamic outfit PFI that tried to burn down the state secretariat during December 11 protests.

Mr Sarma had earlier claimed to have evidence of Assam Youth Congress president Kamrul Islam Choudhury being involved in the attack at the state secretariat in Dispur on GS Road and alleged that he had set the dais built for Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on fire.

"We are monitoring the social media to see if anybody is engaged in inciting violence or spreading fake news and hate messages. So far, we have registered 28 cases for offensive provocative social media posts," he said.

The police arrested 10 people in these cases and five were released on bail, while the rest were remanded to judicial custody, Mr Sarma said. He said 21 more people were called to various police stations with their parents and were allowed to go after counselling them not to repeat it.