The All Assam Students Union tends to become active on the eve of elections. This would not happen if the governments at the Centre and the State take a firm stand on the controversial Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983. The AASU claims that Deve Gowda assured them of scrapping the Act but the former prime minister says he told them that only those amended laws which "proved" to be ineffective will be repealed. Later he told Parliament that unless a consensus is reached there was no question of doing away with it. The matter rests there. Despite repeated pressure from the AASU the ruling Asom Gana Parishad has not spelt out its stand. Student threats to carry out a mass movement have not materialised. Chief Miniser Prafulla Kumar Mahanta plays safe by saying that irrespective of whether or not the Act is scrapped the interests of minorities will be safeguarded. He wants a uniform law but is silent over whether he is agreeable to making the Act uniform. During the AGP’s first tenure, detection and deportations of alleged foreigners were far from their thoughts as they were busy feathering their nests. Even the AASU, which has been vociferous over the foreigners issue, did not make a noise. Atal Behari Vajpayee favoured withdrawal but his Home Minister L.K. Advani announced that Delhi proposed to provide even non-citizens with identity cards that could serve as work permits. Although such cards do not confer citizenship, it does imply that they cannot be forcibly thrown out.

Assam Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta’s remark, that the root cause of the Bodo trouble is the "bad drafting" of the 1993 Accord, may help cover up his government’s shortcomings but why does he take so long to discover it? And having done so, is he taking appropriate action to rectify the mistakes? Already the tangled skein of the problem has become worse. The last tripartite talks were a non-starter following refusal by the leaders of the All Bodo Students Union and the Bodo Peoples Action Committee to sit with non-tribal organisations. It may not have suited them but such attitudes are to be regretted given the fact that there are more non-tribals in the region than Bodos. They cannot be treated as second class citizens. If the Bodos have the right to live honourably elsewhere it is necessary for them to allow others the same privilege.

The rejection of the Congress in Mizoram after a decade in power is evidence of increasing assertion of regional parties in the North-East. While at one time the national party ruled all seven states, it is now in power only in Nagaland. The disenchantment is clear. The Congress got only six seats, compared to 23 and 16 in 1989 and 1993, respectively. This time too regional parties made a clean sweep of the eight urban constituencies in the Aizawl area. The verdict also indicates a serious erosion of Congress influence in traditional rural bases where it had earlier endeared itself by implementing village schemes and weaning away tribals from khum cultivation. Chief Minister Lalthanhawla’s humiliating defeat is a major reverse as he was with the Congress from the very beginning. His remark that the large number of ticket-seekers reflected the party’s popularity is proved wrong. So is his strategy of fielding ten new faces because they are not tainted.

The Congress would not have acquired the kind of popularity it did if the cadre-based Mizo Union had not merged with it in 1974 at the instance of Indira Gandhi. It was not a happy union. This explains why even after the merger it took as many as ten years to come to power on its own. The BJP’s failure for the second time to find a foothold suggests it was unable to influence ethnic voters.