ABSTRACT
Came the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, or more accurately, the dismemberment of Pakistan, and almost as if a tap had been turned off all reports about the detection and deportation of illegal migrants and indeed the very issue of illegal migration into Assam virtually disappeared from the newspapers. The state government took out a series of advertisements in newspapers highlighting this link, and asking the rhetorical question: ‘Who is the enemy of the people?’, a description that the Assam agitation leaders had routinely applied to Saikia. With the assassination of Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975, however, the problem came to be resurrected in the form of the illegal migrants from Bangladesh. No political formation can come to power in Assam without building an alliance with the very sections that have been now and for long routinely reviled as infiltrators.
