Assam’s most eminent regiol political amalgam, the Asom Ga Parishad (AGP), has sounded the panchayat poll bugle in the State by deciding to go alone despite it being an alliance partner with the BJP at Dispur. According to party president and State Agriculture Minister Atul Bora, the party would project and champion key regiol issues such as the foreigners tangle and mega dam controversy, of which the former obviously must outweigh others due to it being at the very genesis of the party. This party was a political offshoot of the six-year-long Assam agitation that sought to weed out every single illegal Bangladeshi from the soil of the State, which, unfortutely, is yet to be. The people of the State are definitely not oblivious of the fact that the AGP leaders were a highly spirited subtiolist response to what appeared then – when the agitation broke out in 1979 – to be a gradual and systematic Bangladesh-ization of Assam where one dark day the indigenous people would be reduced to a minority in their very land of birth. [This is indeed coming true, given the HS Brahma report that points to the domince of illegal Bangladeshis in 15 out of 33 districts in the State.] And such leaders, who were seen by the Assamese masses as the messiahs of a people whose existence as a socio-cultural entity had been badly jeopardized at the altar of vote-bank politics, looked as though once in power one fine day they would set all other priorities apart just in order to dedicate themselves to the Herculean task of liberating their beloved land of birth from a hostile and rapidly proliferating crowd of aliens from Bangladesh. Much water has flowed down the Brahmaputra since the Assam agitation was launched and the student leaders eventually stormed into the corridors of power at Dispur, with the people almost certain that now at long last they were in the safe hands of a dispensation that would go all out to free the State from the nefarious clutch of an alien population, with eventually, however, the AGP betraying not only their trust but also countering the very essence of regiolism. And today how does the party look like? A meandering boat that does not know where to go and how, or that cannot choose its way in the first place.