Ex-IPS officer Hiranya Kumar Bhattacharya passes away at 86

GUWAHATI: Hiranya Kumar Bhattacharya, former DIG of the Assam Border Police and writer passed away in the early hours of Monday in Guwahati. He was 86.

The Indian Police Service officer of the 1958 batch, was admitted to Guwahati's Nemcare Hospital last Monday. He had been suffering from prolonged illness due to old age. He breathed his last today.

According to reports, Bhattacharya’s last rites will be performed at Navagraha Cemetery today.

It was Bhattacharyya, posted as the DIG of the Assam Border Police in the late 1970s, who came up with thousands of names in the state’s voters’ list, particularly in the Mangaldoi assembly constituency, identifying them as “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh”.

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This act is often looked at in Assam as to have given a fillip to the movement-building up against ‘foreigners’, finally leading to the signing of the Assam Accord between the All Assam Students Union (AASU) and the Indian government in 1985.

In 1981, during the six-year-old Assam agitation, Bhattacharya was taken into preventive detention under the National Security Act (NSA) in support of the agitation before finally losing his job in the police force.

Bhattacharya had also trained the freedom fighters in Assam to liberate Bangladesh. In 2013, he was accorded with the prestigious Friends of Liberation War honour in 2013 by the Bangladesh government for training Mukti Bahani cadres

He has written books such as Betrayal of North East: The Arrested Voice and Operation Lebensraum – Illegal Migration From Bangladesh.

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