When Mani Kumar Subba, the Congress MP from Tezpur, was involved in a nationality row, Ripun Bora, a known Subba baiter, hailed the Central Bureau of Investigation as a “premier investigative agency” for its role in “exposing” Subba. Less than a month later, Bora, Assam’s education minister, walked right into the trap that the agency laid out for him as he tried to allegedly bribe his way out of a murder case.

One of the three minister-spokesmen of the Tarun Gogoi government, Bora announced in 2006 that he would clean up the “Augean stable” that the state education world had turned into between 1996 and 2001, first under the AGP and later under his own colleague and senior Congress minister Bhumidhar Barman.

Only last month, Bora claimed that he had taken former chief minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta to AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh in 2006 and arranged for a sum of Rs 3 crore so that Mahanta could ensure the defeat of the AGP that had expelled him in 2003.

Bora was a student leader in the prestigious Cotton College, where former Assam chief minister Hiteswar Saikia, then a young home minister in the Congress government, spotted him in 1973.

In 1984, he joined the Assam Civil Service and soon became close to Saikia, who had by then become the chief minister, and got plum posts including that of Officer on Special Duty (OSD) at Assam Bhawan in New Delhi. Bora could bypass as many as 70 officers in the ACS seniority roster to be posted as Sub-Divisional Officer at Gohpur, his hometown, a post that enabled him to nurse the Gohpur assembly segment, which became his springboard for politics.

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