During an interaction with the media on the eve of Army Day 2011, Army Chief Gen. V.K. Singh, answering a query by this newspaper, stated that the United Liberation Front of Asom (Ulfa) is dormant and that its 28th battalion is in Burma. He further stated that while the attempt at talks should be made to see the results, the Ulfa must lay down arms and the cadres should be amalgamated and rehabilitated. Gen. Singh’s input was confirmed days later when Ulfa chief Paresh Baruah sent the first ever video showing him and cadres, including women members, doing the Bihu dance with guns slung on their backs at an undisclosed location. Also shown were cadres lined up with their guns raised shouting pro-independence slogans and weapons displayed at their camp. Baruah, believed to be in and out of China and Burma, has various “investments” in Bangladesh, including real estate, hotels, manufacturing, shipping and extensive arms and drugs trafficking, all worth hundreds of crores. Financial disputes between him and other terrorist colleagues, including “chairman” Arbinda Rajkhowa, caused a rift leading to a split.
With elections due, Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi has spared no effort to release Rajkhowa from jail on bail on New Year’s Day, 2011 and also said the ban on Ulfa may be lifted when it sits for “formal talks”. Contrary to a spate of speculative reports last year of Mr Gogoi welcoming the “surrender” of Ulfa leaders “responding to the wishes of the people of Assam”, Rajkhowa and Raju Baruah, with their family members, were handed over to India at Dawki, near the Indo-Bangla border. Some other senior Ulfa leaders involved in anti-India activities handed over by Bangladesh have also been released on bail. This daily had reported earlier that Justice Sonika Bora, judge of the designated Tada court in Assam, had reminded Assam’s political leadership and executives working overtime to release jailed Ulfa leaders caught and evicted from Bangladesh of their responsibility towards the society — that collective interest of the society is more important than interest of an Ulfa leader. Her landmark judgment said, “The courts, while dispensing justice under the Tada (P) Act, should keep in mind not only the liberty of an accused but also the interest of victim, collective interest of community and safety of nation... In a given situation the collective interest of community may outweigh the right of personal liberty of accused.” Senior advocate of the Gauhati high court and former advocate-general of Assam and Mizoram government P. Pathak had said, “Justice Bora should be congratulated for her bold observation and judgment.”
Following his release, Rajkhowa enjoys a three-layer security, while a 30-member group of Ulfa cadres keeps a closely guards him. He reportedly said stated: “Ulfa always believed in a political way out and the arms struggle is only a mean to achieve our political end. Armed revolution has many drawbacks. Our boys have died while on missions to buy arms. In this respect the arm dealers have benefited the most,” The “always believed in political solution” part is an outright and ironic lie.
The handing over of Rajkhowa and some other terrorists of Ulfa and other groups is part of the process of revival of Bangladesh reviving friendly ties with India following Sheikh Hasina and her party Awami League’s (AL) massive electoral victory in December 2008. Thereafter, three agreements between Bangladesh and India, related to (a) joint cooperation on criminal justice issues, (b) mutual legal assistance on criminal matters/transfer of sentenced persons between the two countries and (c) combating international terrorism, organised crime and illicit drug trafficking, were much criticised by its Opposition party. Ulfa has been involved on all these counts and much more.
Opposition leader Khaleda Zia has made an issue of Hasina “failing to guard Bangladesh’s interests while talking to the Indian leadership”. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its ally Jamaat-e-Islami have claimed that the “agreements only secured Indian interests in helping New Delhi deal with its own separatist movements”. While the AL government has rejected such claims it has had to tread warily in trying to undo all that the BNP had done to drag Bangladesh to the brink of being a Southeast Asian hub of terrorism. The pro-Pakistan BNP, during its rule allowed a large presence of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which, since December 1990 took charge of Paresh Baruah and his top honchos, who had escaped to Bangladesh just before the Indian Army was called into Assam to deal with its terrorist activities.
A reality check is relevant.
In the 1980s Ulfa began its spree of targeting the Marwari community and tea gardens in Assam for largescale extortions at gun-point and point-blank killing of those who failed to pay up or those who earned its “displeasure”. In November-end 1990, just before the Army launched Operation Bajrang, Paresh Baruah and the top honchos, benefiting from an intelligence leak, escaped to Bangladesh, leaving behind thousands of cadres and lower leaders who abandoned some camps with low-grade weapons, clothing and rations left intact. In two such camps in the dense forests of Lakhipathar and Charaiphung, the Army unearthed mass graves of many innocent civilians brutally killed by Ulfa. The Ulfa’s deafening silence on the steady influx from Bangladesh, the very issue which led to the 1983 agitation and riots and was its platform to popularity as “saviours of Assam”, was broken in the December 15, 2006 issue of its mouthpiece, Freedom, stating that Biharis, Rajasthanis, Bengalis and Marwaris who migrated to Assam were “illegal migrants” and that “Indian occupational forces”, including the Indian Army and all non-Assamese Indians, must be expelled from Assam before those who had trespassed into it from Bangladesh and Nepal. Ever since December 1990, when the Ulfa’s top leadership came under the control of the ISI in Bangladesh, the directives to this outfit were to assist illegal Bangladeshi migrants to settle with the aim of creating major demographic changes in Assam, create communal problems, sensational sabotage and not to sign any peace accord with the government of India or the state government. It repeatedly used all its “offers” for talks only as ploys to regroup, re-arm and re-launch anti-India operations.
In March 2005, the then inspector-general of police Khagen Sharma had said that the bombs and other explosives used by suspected Ulfa militants in the then recent attacks in Assam were made in Pakistan. “The bombs are highly sophisticated and are made of RDX and penta erythritol tetra nitrate (PETN), one of the strongest known explosives,” said Sharma. PETN is more sensitive to shock or friction than the more commonly used TNT (trinitrotoluene), Ulfa’s 2007 new year’s gift to Pakistan’s Bangladesh-based ISI was the massacre of 70-odd Hindi-speaking/Bihari migrant workers in Assam’s eastern districts of Tinsukia, Dibrugarh and Dhemaji. Most victims were from Bihar and had made Assam their home for decades, doing odd jobs in brick kilns, fishing, construction and milk-selling. In 2000, its terrorists killed at least 100 Hindi-speaking people in Assam in a series of well-planned attacks after promising to free the state of all “non-Assamese migrant workers”, who they claim take away their jobs. Ulfa’s neck-deep involvement in narco-terrorism connected with the neighbouring Burma, i.e., trafficking of narcotics and illicit arms by and for terrorist groups in the north-eastern region got further exposed after a trio of Ulfa was captured by the Army in December 2006 with `103 lakhs of money and heroin-based brown sugar-related to a narco-arms deal involving Burma’s military junta and Kachin Independence Organisation.
Ulfa’s control of smuggling routes through the Siliguri corridor on behalf of the ISI to smuggle drugs and counterfeit money through Siliguri in exchange for weapons and explosives also involved supply of weapons supplied to Naxal groups spread across 11 states which were earlier equipped with traditional weapons. According to media reports, Central security agencies had inputs about Naxal outfits being supplied arms by Ulfa, which were provided by ISI through its network in Bangladesh. These included AK series rifles, self-loading rifles and explosives now common with the Naxal groups. Landmine blasts carried out by these groups in Andhra Pradesh and certain parts of Bihar and Jharkhand showed a considerable advancement of technology in their armoury.
While all attempts for peace must be pursued, talks can only succeed if the head of the serpent — Paresh Baruah and his component — is caught and defanged at least. Also, peace will be elusive if talks are pushed for political expediency. Justice Bora’s judgment and Gen. Singh’s observations must be taken seriously. If Mr Gogoi and his colleagues are desperate for Ulfa’s “electoral support” (which they have reportedly had for long), then the future of talks or peace in Assam and security of India’s Northeast is rather dim.