Wildly fluctuating and suspiciously rounded figures (10 million in 1997 by CPI’s Indrajit Gupta, 20 million by BJP’s L.K. Advani in 2003, 12 million by Congress’s Sriprakash Jaiswal in 2004) of alleged illegal Bangladeshi migrants, based on nothing in particular or attributed vaguely to ‘intelligence reports’, have dominated the discourse on the ethnic strife in Assam. Yet, official census figures tell a completely different story.