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G Vinayak in Guwahati
After battling insurgency for almost two decades with a heavy hand, the Assam Police is now planning to change the orientation of its personnel towards innocents caught in the crossfire between the militants and the security forces.
A new campaign -- Aashwas -- launched on Thursday at Kekerikuchi village in Kamrup district aims to establish channels of communication between the local populace and the security forces.
The village had witnessed a massacre of 21 villagers on eve of the Assamese harvest festival Bihu.
The campaign would include peace rallies, self-employment schemes, academic assessment, inter-village sports festivals and medical camps.
The campaign will be run in collaboration with UNICEF.
Dadasaheb Phalke award winner and noted lyricist-singer-composer Bhupen Hazarika has agreed to lend a helping hand to the campaign.
The nodal officer of the project, Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, said the programme is the first in a series of six such sensitisation campaigns to be launched this year.
"Aashwas," he said, "is aimed at helping child victims of ethnic violence and insurgency in Assam."
Under the project, a juvenile justice board is being constituted under the Juvenile Justice Care and Protection Act, 2000.
The project aims to train policemen in handling arrests and cases in a humane way, and a group of specially selected trainers have been recruited for the purpose.
Nearly 1,200 police personnel will be given training in the next two years.
A baseline survey would also be conducted to make an assessment about the families affected in ethnic violence and insurgency in Assam during the last 10 years.
The Assam police have already approached a number of leading research institutes, including Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, for carrying out the study.
An estimated 5,000 families have been affected in such violence throughout Assam during the past 10 years.
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