India, Jan. 19 -- For a good century and a quarter, Assam has lived under a dual threat of its culture and ethos being marginalised. On occasions, the threat came from immigrants whose language would overshadow the indigenous tongue, pushing it into the background. And there were times when there were deliberate designs to reduce the sons of the soil to a religious minority. It has been a tale of continual tension caused by neighbours to the south and frequent anxiety emanating from friends in the west. The Assamese could not always be sanguine that their own sons were playing the sly role, enabling the neighbours who were short of fertile lands to till and live off them. A threat engineered and egged on by persons within is worse than a ...