From Left of the centre to Right, Asom Gana Parishad has seen it all

The AGP returned to power in 1996 but it never touched the heights it soared to a decade earlier

“To capture a wild elephant you have to first ride an elephant,” Prafulla Kumar Mahanta (pictured) declared from a podium in Jorhat, in 1983. He was then president of the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), the genesis of which was traced to a Lok Sabha by-election in Mangaldoi in 1978, occasioned by the death of then sitting MP, Hiralal Patowary. The AASU deman­ded that the election should be deferred because it alleged that the electoral rolls, which were being revised, were overrun with the names of “lakhs” of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. Three Ds — detection, deletion (from the voters’ list)