Mr. President, Sir, some of the aspersions that have been made here are really very unfortunate and they are based on a lack of knowledge of the conditions of the hills people in Assam. I wish that those honourable gentlemen, my friends who come from Assam, had visited these places, had mixed with the people and had known the feelings of these people, had known the desire of these people as expressed in meetings, in Committees and before the Sub-Committee also of which I was a member. Sir, the first principle for bringing about a feeling of reconciliation between people who are estranged from one another is that one must place himself in the place of another. I wish some of my friends who had spoken would place themselves in the place of these tribal people, place themselves in their conditions, study their views, realise what their ambitions and their aspirations are, and whether it they were in that place they would like those feelings and aspirations to be crushed to pieces and themselves just cowed down by the sword, or whether they would like to be won by love and by association and by the gradual understanding of one another. The attitude manifested in the way that speeches have been delivered by some friends of mine here perhaps due to lack of knowledge, if kept up, would actually upset the good association between the hills people and the gentlemen who have spoken; but I thank God for a leader like the Honourable Mr. Gopinath Bardoloi who is known to be very kind and sympathetic to all these hills people and who has been respected by these hill tribes wherever he had been, and who has studied, very closely the position of these hill tribes.
