agriculture minister nilamani sen deka tells prabin kalita that he dreams of becoming the sahityasabha presidentq your family and you too have been traditionally left loyalists how did you get into the congress a my uncle tarun sen deka was a leader of the rcpi and was involved in the arms struggle and had to spend three years in jail 19471952 when i was studying law i had a soft leaning towards the cpiml but sometime in 1982 during the antiforeigners movement i joined the regional party purbanchaliyo loka parishad plp in 1996 when all regional parties rallied behind the asom gana parishad i decided to join the congress in my second election in 2001 i defeated agps top leader chandramohan patowary and i was made the minister of state for finance and parliamentary affairs and it was during my tenure the states fiscal reforms startedq writing seems to be your primary interest a writing is my passion and comes before politics my interest is writing researchbased books i have written 18 books so far and 11 of them are researchbasedq you are heading one of the most active and successful departments in the state the agriculture department are you working on some books now in the middle of your busy schedule a right now i am working on three books an over 1000page book on the opium effect on assamese society during birtish raj is nearing completion i am also writing a book on hindu refugees which will contain correspondence between gopinath bordoloi and east pakistan now bangladesh government next in the pipeline is a book on the communist movement in assamq so when you say that you dream of becoming the president of the sahitya sabha are you actually serious a writing runs in our family we feel more proud to be known as writers than politicians my uncle was a writer and so is my elder brother kanak sen deka who was also the president of the sahitya sabha the sahitya sabha is the identity of assamese society and i would love to be its president one dayq you shot into international prominence in 1998 as an advocate when you fought a legal battle for a heart surgeon dhaniram baruah who shocked the world by transplanting organs of a pig into a human body and claimed to have kept him alive for seven days why did you switch over to politics from such a high pedestal a being an advocate you can serve the people by helping them get justice but one has to stay within the framework of law and no matter how much you want to go out of your way to help one cannot jump the legal parameters politics has a wider scope of delivering service to the people and writing gives you an unbound scopeq so a writer is above a politician or an advocate a a writer enjoys complete freedom to express his views many a time as a minister i have