Assam Congress chief & national youth wing president detained following protests against party worker’s death

The Assam Congress held protests in different parts of the state Friday against Mridul Islam’s death. Islam – a 45-year-old advocate and a district level office bearer of the party’s legal cell – had died Wednesday following a confrontation between Congress workers and leaders during a protest march towards Raj Bhavan. The police had deployed three tear gas shells against the protestors, following which Islam complained of uneasiness and died on his way to Guwahati Medical College and Hospital.

The Assam Congress had called for a gherao of the Dispur capital complex in Guwahati Friday but leaders and workers, including Borah and former Rajya Sabha MP Ripun Bora, were detained from Hatigaon, a few kilometres away from the secretariat.

Ahead of this march, the DCP Guwahati (West) issued prohibitory orders restricting gatherings of more than five people, protests, and processions within a kilometre radius of the capital complex. The order had cited information that “some specified and unspecified persons or groups of persons or organisations/associations are likely to disturb the normal functioning of offices, movement of public and flow of traffic in and around” the area and that they may “cause breach of peace and public tranquillity”.

The leaders and workers were taken into detention at the 10th Assam Police Battalion in Guwahati and were released late in the evening.

In the meantime, authorities arrived at the hotel of IYC national president Uday Bhanu Chib, who was also in Guwahati following Islam death, in the city’s Manik Nagar in the morning and placed him in “preventive detention” to stop him from joining the day’s agitation, a police officer said.

In a video taken and posted by a party colleague, Chib said: “They came at 5 in the morning and we don’t have our mobile phones. There is no law in this land which says that you can come at 5 am, take our phones and detain us in the hotel in this way. This is unconstitutional”.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma alleged that Chib had come to the state to “create a disturbance.”

“They have come from Himachal Pradesh to create disturbance in Assam. They should have been put in jail, but we have at least kept him in the hotel,” he told reporters in Nagaon.