GUWAHATI /NEW DELHI, 21 November 2003 — As hundreds of Hindi speakers started fleeing ethnic violence in Assam which has claimed 30 lives in the past week, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee yesterday asked Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, Rashtriya Janata Dal President Laloo Prasad Yadav and Railway Minister Nitish Kumar to take immediate steps to check the carnage.

They were told to make all efforts to restore peace and harmony.

Vajpayee assured Yadav full cooperation and promised to send additional federal forces to Assam to check violence against Hindi-speaking Biharis there.

Federal troops, meanwhile, arrived in the state in a bid to quell the bloodletting, Gogoi said. “A battalion (1,000 personnel) of the paramilitary Border Security Force has already arrived ... and another battalion is arriving on Friday,” he said.

Night curfews were imposed in several parts of eastern Assam on Thursday, police said.

Railway officials said trains leaving Assam were full, while witnesses said lines of people were forming at bus stations.

With police reporting another six people killed by mobs and separatist rebels overnight, a sense of panic began to spread through members of the Hindi-speaking community, many of whom hail from the eastern state Bihar.

“Life is not secure here and so we are waiting for the first possible train to get out of Assam,” Madhav Prasad, a 45-year-old trader, in Guwahati said. “There are no tickets available in any of the trains that would take us to Bihar,” he said.

Prasad and his family of four were among hundreds of Biharis either waiting to leave or who had already fled the state by bus or train.

Officials appealed for calm, while the federal government said it could not allow the situation to continue.

“We urge the Hindi-speaking people not to panic and leave the state. We are taking all possible security measures to ensure their safety,” Gogoi said.

The violence has been led mainly by militants of the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), which is fighting for an independent homeland.

In the latest bloodshed, police said the ULFA killed three Hindi-speaking people late Wednesday in Nalbari town in western Assam, 70 kilometers from Guwahati.

In another incident, three members of a Bihari family, including a two-year-old child, were hacked to death by an armed mob in eastern Assam’s Tinsukia district, they said.

The violence was triggered when Assamese youths prevented Bihari candidates from taking recruitment tests for jobs at the state-run railways on Nov. 9. Groups of Bihari youth retaliated three days later by attacking trains bound for Assam, injuring 50 people.

The ULFA issued a statement on Saturday warning all Hindi-speaking people to leave the state immediately or face attacks.

That night, rebels shot dead a Hindi-speaking businessman in western Assam- the first of the killings.

The influential All Assam Students’ Union called a 24-hour general strike in Assam on Monday to protest the attacks on train passengers in Bihar, sparking a chain of violent clashes and arson.

At least 600 houses of Hindi-speakers have been torched by angry mobs, while the ULFA has killed 20 people in separate attacks across the state. Another ten have been killed in mob violence, police said.

Indian Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, on the campaign trail in central Madhya Pradesh state, described the situation as “very serious.”

“The federal government cannot be a passive spectator in such serious situations. We are taking steps to see the situation becomes normal,” he said without elaborating.

Tensions have simmered in the state for years, with rebels accusing the Hindi-speakers of north India of moving into the area and taking away jobs.

In 2000 ULFA killed up to 150 Hindi-speaking people in a series of attacks.

Railway Minister Nitish Kumar said that railways could in no way be held responsible for the violence and that the state government should take strict measures to maintain law and order.

“Assam should adequately compensate the next of kin of the 30 killed in the violence and rehabilitate their families,” Kumar told reporters.