The riots in Assam and now its retaliation in Indian metros, which largely got instigated through hate SMSes that went viral all across, highlight the repetitive indolent behaviour of the government towards an entire set of people belonging to one region. The choreographed hate messages played a significant role in the migration of people of Northeastern states from Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Mumbai; and such a migration clearly is a blow to the pledge of a free India with equal rights for all.

The government on its part banned bulk messages for 15 days, as well as MMS of over 25 KB throughout the country. The government also blocked a total of 310 web pages, which provided morphed images of riots in Assam, which had been instigating hate sentiments among over 60 million Indian net users. Our ruling elites have perchance presumed that banning SMS texts and some social networking sites is enough to stem the trouble. What our policy makers forget is that till one and a half decades ago, there were no social networking sites, yet there had been numerous catastrophic riots in the region. The government should have rather deployed and mobilised resources that could have traced the source of such hate messages, filtered them and brought the real culprits to task at the soonest.