The din created by the Opposition parties in Assam over the deteriorating law and order situation forced the Governor Shiv Charan Mathur to cut down his inaugural Assembly speech to a mere five minutes and leave the House. The Opposition members cutting across party lines raised loud protests with Chandra Mohan Patowari,Leader of the Opposition,declaring that the Congress-led government had failed to protect the lives and properties of the common people. Members of the AGP,BJP,Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF),CPI and CPI(M) too joined the protests,with some members displaying placards to protest the governments failure. Governor Mathur,who struggled to read out the first two paragraphs of his 46-page speech,initially tried to pacify the Opposition members but turned to the last paragraph of his speech a few minutes later and left the House. Patowari later told newspersons that it was ridiculous on the part of the governor to claim that government policies on the law and order front paying dividends when the serial blasts and ethnic violence had claimed over 200 lives in Assam in the past three months. It was only four days ago that five innocent lives,including that of a child,were lost in three serial blasts in Guwahati,and this despite the Centre having shared intelligence with the state government about the militants plans to cause explosions in the capital, Patowari,president of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) said. Governor Mathur,in his speech that was taken to have been read,claimed that a multi-pronged strategy adopted by the Tarun Gogoi government to deal with militant groups had paid rich dividends. The government had on one hand continued sustained counter-insurgency operations against active militant groups and on the other hand made peace overtures to groups open to a negotiated settlement,Mathur said. He,however,admitted that ethnic violence in Darrang and Udalguri districts and the serial blasts in Guwahati and three other towns during October were major setbacks. The government had subsequently decided to set up a specialised group along the lines of the National Security Guards (NSG) and another on the lines of RAW,Mathur said.
