Page "Srinivas Kumar Sinha" Paragraph 4

In 1997 General Sinha was appointed Governor of Assam at a time when insurgency in that State was at its peak.

He crafted a three prong strategy of unified command, economic development and psychological initiatives.

Heavy attrition was inflicted on the militants through co-ordinated and intensified military operations breaking the back of the militants.

He was instrumental in installing one lakh shallow tube wells in Brahmaputra valley turning Assam from a rice deficit State to a rice surplus State.

His psychological initiatives had a large emotional content.

Such an approach was tried out for the first time and it yielded rich dividends.

His 42-page printed report to the President on illegal migration from Bangladesh addressed the root cause of insurgency in the State.

This report was serialised and published in full in all newspapers of the State.

His recommendation on scrapping the Illegal Migration Detection By Tribunal ( IMDT ) Act, which facilitated illegal migration and applied only to Assam and not to other states, took the people of Assam by storm.

Although controversial in some circles at the time, the Supreme Court struck down the IMDT ACT quoting extensively from his report.

He started being referred to as " our man in Raj Bhavan ".

His attempts to make the people of Assam proud of their past and the rest of India proud of Assam, touched the emotional chords of the people.

He projected the three icons of Assam, Saint Shankardev, General Lachit Borphukan and the great statesman Gopinath Bordoloi as national heroes.

Documentaries on their lives were prepared and shown on Doordarshan.

A statue of Lachit was installed at National Defence Academy, Pune and a gold medal instituted in his name for cadet with best officer-like qualities.

Guwahati airport was renamed Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi airport and a posthumous Bharat Ratna was obtained for him fifty years after his death.

His bronze statue was installed in the Lok Sabha at Delhi.

These and other such measures were successful in winning the hearts and minds of the people and bringing them back into the national mainstream, completely isolating the militants.

The senior and most respected journalist of Assam, Shri D N Bezboruah, former President of Editor Guilds of India, wrote abut him, " a Governor who far outshone all his predecessors in not being just a titular Head of State, but a Governor who served the State brilliantly with deep commitment to its people for six glorious and eventful years.

He sought to rebuild the psychological alienation that crept in between Assam and the Indian heartland.

" When he departed from Assam in 2003 insurgency was virtually over in the State and he was popularly referred to as " a true son of the soil of Assam.