As kerosene lamps were lit inside houses in Assam on the evening of Independence Day, August 15, 1950, the mood was sombre instead of celebratory. Gopinath Bordoloi, the first chief minister, known as Lokopriyo or the people’s favourite, the man who almost singlehandedly kept Assam in India at Partition in 1947 instead of it going to East Pakistan, had passed away just 10 days earlier. People were still in mourning. All of a sudden, the earth started trembling and then shaking violently; pe