When Mani Kumar Subba, the Congress MP from Tezpur, was involved in a nationality row, Ripun Bora, a known Subba baiter, hailed the Central Bureau of Investigation as a “premier investigative agency” for its role in “exposing” Subba. Less than a month later, Bora, Assam’s education minister, walked right into the trap that the agency laid out for him as he tried to allegedly bribe his way out of a murder case. One of the three minister-spokesmen of the Tarun Gogoi government, Bora announced in 2006 that he would clean up the “Augean stable” that the state education world had turned into between 1996 and 2001, first under the AGP and later under his own colleague and senior Congress minister Bhumidhar Barman. Only last month, Bora claimed that he had taken former chief minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta to AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh in 2006 and arranged for a sum of Rs 3 crore so that Mahanta could ensure the defeat of the AGP that had expelled him in 2003.Bora was a student leader in the prestigious Cotton College, where former Assam chief minister Hiteswar Saikia, then a young home minister in the Congress government, spotted him in 1973.In 1984, he joined the Assam Civil Service and soon became close to Saikia, who had by then become the chief minister, and got plum posts including that of Officer on Special Duty (OSD) at Assam Bhawan in New Delhi. Bora could bypass as many as 70 officers in the ACS seniority roster to be posted as Sub-Divisional Officer at Gohpur, his hometown, a post that enabled him to nurse the Gohpur assembly segment, which became his springboard for politics.Bora quit the ACS in 1994 and joined the Congress to become the party’s candidate from Gohpur in 1996. Ganesh Kutum of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) won the seat and Bora attributed his defeat to Daniel Topno, a candidate of the All India Tiwari Congress, who had apparently sliced off some votes from the Congress vote base. Topno, an influential leader from the tea tribe community, contested as an AITC candidate only after the Congress denied him a ticket. After the Tiwari Congress merged with the parent party, Topno once again emerged as a strong contender for the Congress ticket. It was then that the 40-year-old Topno was murdered by some unknown miscreants. Though Bora was the suspect, he obtained an anticipatory bail from the Gauhati High Court. While the Assam Police could hardly make any headway in the case expect for arresting two local Congress members Bodheswar Das and Bakul Tamuli and declaring one Kanak Ali as the prime suspect, Topno’s brother Santosh moved the Gauhati High Court accusing the state police of not taking appropriate action and seeking a CBI probe into the murder.
