Yet again, there is much talk about talks with United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), whose numero uno, Paresh Baruah, owing total allegiance to Pakistan via its Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and now added support of China also, is busy trying to resurrect the outfit and remote-contolling attacks in Assam. Yet, Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi is once again going overboard by offering talks at 24 hours notice to an outfit whose leaders deserve to be tried for cold-blooded murders of thousands of innocent people, including women and children.
Contrary to a spate of speculative reports and Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi welcoming the “surrender” of United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) leaders “responding to the wishes of the people of Assam”, its ‘chairman and deputy commander in chief’, Arabinda Rajkhowa alias Rajiv Rajkonwar, Raju Baruah and Raja Bora were handed over to India near the India-Bangladesh border in Dawki, on 4 December, 2009. Earlier, in a well planned Indian intelligence operation, based on inputs about Rajkhowa’s plans to escape from Bangladesh received soon after the “surrender” of ULFA finance secretary Chitrabon Hazarika and foreign secretary Shashadhar Chowdhury in early November, he was apprehended at Cox’s Bazaar near Chittagong, while trying to cross over to Myanmar.
All this has been made possible, albeit 20 years after ULFA top leaders crossed over to Bangladesh, owing to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s the commitment to cooperate with India by denying shelter to ULFA, following her coming to power again with Awami League’s (AL) unprecedented 2008 electoral victory. Mr Hasan Mahmud, Bangladesh’s foreign minister and special assistant to Sheikh Hasina, during his visit to New Delhi on 18 February 2009, promised a Bangladeshi crackdown on militant groups. However, ULFA’s ‘commander- in- chief’, Paresh Baruah along with a sizeable group, escaped to China just before AL assumed charge.
ULFA was formed on April 7, 1979 by Rajkhowa, Baruah, and six other cronies, at the Rang Ghar in Sibsagar to establish a "sovereign socialist Assam" through an armed struggle.
In the 1980s it began a spree of targeting the Marwari community and tea gardens in Assam for large scale extortions at gun-point and point-blank killing of those who failed to pay up or those who earned its ‘displeasure’. In end November, 1990, just before the Army launched Operation Bajrang, Paresh Barua and the top honchos privy to 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, including women, brutally killed by ULFA.
In Bangladesh, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) officers posted at the Pakistani High Commission, effectively took charge of ULFA leaders. Passports in various names and travel were arranged for at least 300 ULFA cadres who were trained at Rawalpindi and other locations in Pakistan in the use of rocket launchers, explosives, assault weapons, counter intelligence and disinformation. Barua, a frequent visitor to Karachi since 1992, was reported to have met Osama bin Laden there in 1996. Sent to a camp on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, Barua not only received assurances of military help in the form of arms and ammunition, but also of co-operation and logistical support of all international organisations owing allegiance to bin Laden, including the International Jehad Council, the Tehrik-ul-Jehad, Harkat-ul-Jehadi-e-Islami (HuJI), apart from the Al Qaeda. ULFA leaders also paved the way for ISI to enter India’s North East and link up with other insurgent groups there.
ULFA’s extorted money was well invested in media consultancies, soft drink manufacturing units, 3 to 7 hotels, a private clinic, and two motor driving schools in Dhaka. Barua reportedly personally owns /controls several businesses in Bangladesh, including a tannery, a chain of departmental stores, garment factories, travel agencies, shrimp trawlers and transport and investment companies. His split with Rajkhowa was over sharing of these spoils, at least 75% of which Barua controls, while ULFA’s cadres roughed it out in Assam’s jungles.
ULFA’s neck-deep involvement in narco-terrorism connected with Myanmar, i.e., trafficking of narcotics and illicit arms by and for terrorist groups in India’s North East, got further exposed after a three of its operatives were captured by Indian Army in December 2006 with Rs 103 lacs and heroin -based brown sugar related to a narco-arms deal involving Myanmar’s military junta and Kachin Independence Organisation. Chinese arms were supplied to ULFA with Muslim United Liberation Tigers of Assam (MULTA) and Muslim United Liberation Front of Assam (MULFA) facilitating their traffic through Bangladesh.
In 2000, ULFA killed at least 100 Hindi-speaking people and its 2007 new year’s gift to ISI was the massacre of over 70 Bihari migrant workers settled for decades in Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, and Dhemaji. The second attack came as an immediate direct response to Chief Minister Gogoi’s offer to ULFA for peace talks while discounting sovereignty from the dialogue agenda.
ULFA’s deafening silence on the steady influx from Bangladesh, the very issue which lead to the 1983 agitation and riots and was its platform to popularity as ‘saviours of Assam’ was broken in the 15 December 2006 issue of its mouthpiece, translated “Freedom”, which published 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.
As an absolute tool of ISI for over two decades, ULFA’s wide range of anti-national deeds including sabotage, spreading fake Indian currency and being a major catalyst in the process of causing demographic shifts in eight of Assam’s districts coupled with the State Government’s consistently soft and vote-bank based policy has already cost the country dearly. After a long time, by effectively trailing and catching Rajkhowa, Union Home ministry has proved its capability. But Baruah, c/o China, Burma or wherever, is continuing with anti-India operations and trying hard to revive violence in Assam-this time with Chinese help.
While Bangladesh, under Sheikh Hasina, has indeed made meaningful moves on cooperation against terror, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao has made a strong statement on sheltering terrorists to India’s other neighbours. Baruah and remainder ULFA elements are as god as enemies of India and must be nabbed alive, if possible, to get much information about anti-India activities out of them and all those guilty of crimes must be tried and punished appropriately. If not, it will be mockery of the law of the land, with no justification left for other murderers and anti-state actors to be kept in jails.
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