Tussle For Bodoland

Ranjan Daimary along with nine other members of NDFB are sentenced to life time imprisonment for the 2008 serial bomb blast.

It is impossible for people in Assam to forget the unfortunate case of the 2008 serial bomb blast. Countless innocent civilians lost their lives and the families of the deceased demanded justice for years, but to no avail. It was only after the case was shifted to the special CBI court in Chandmari that the people gained renewed hope, and rightly so. On 30th January 2019, after eleven years since the incident, Ranjan Daimary along with nine others of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), were sentenced to lifetime imprisonment by the special CBI court. The judgment, made in the midst of the ongoing peace talks, was welcomed by the people of the State; although families of the victims shared that they were expecting capital punishment for the convicted.

After the announcement, Daimary was determined to go to a higher court.

Flashback

The 2008 Assam bombings took place on October 30 around noon, with at least 11 bombs going off almost simultaneously in Guwahati, Bongaigaon, Barpeta, and Kokrajhar. The CBI had earlier revealed that RDX and ammonium nitrate and Trinitrotoluene (TNT) were used to trigger the blasts. Apart from the 88 people who died, as many as 470 people were reported to have suffered from serious injuries.

The 2008 serial blasts in Assam are believed to be one of the worst terror strikes in India, carried out a little less than a month before the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. Condemned internationally by the UN and then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, the incident was seen as a failure of the Tarun Gogoi-led Congress government to maintain law and order in the State.