The Arabinda Rajkhowa faction of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) had joined peace talks with the Centre in 2011, and it took it 12 years to sign a memorandum of settlement with the Union Home Ministry and the Assam government last week. The fact that it took this long to arrive at an agreement on issues the ULFA has been fighting for, including protecting land rights for the indigenous people and an end to illegal migration, is an indication of the complexity of the situation. In the initial years, one of the key aspirations of the ULFA was sovereignty and an independent Assam.
At the signing, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma brought up the elephant in the room when he said doors were open for the Paresh Baruah faction of the ULFA, which has been hostile to the process, to join the talks. The ULFA (Independent) is a much weakened force but Baruah has found sanctuary in the Myanmar forests, which have sheltered many insurgent outfits of the Northeast in the past.
The origins
Tracing the ULFA movement’s rise and decline, Sanjoy Hazarika dedicates a chapter to it in Strangers of the Mist where he writes that the ULFA took shape in 1979 at the deserted Rang Ghar pavilion in Sibsagar, once the seat of the Ahom kingdom, and the sporting and cultural centre of that dynasty of immigrants who ‘assimilated’, as did many others, with the people they conquered.
The young men who met there, he says, were to become household names a decade later — Rajiv Konwar, better known as Arabinda Rajkhowa, Golap Barua (also known as Anup Chetia), Samiran Gogoi and Paresh Baruah. In the years that followed, particularly the 1980s and 1990s, ULFA leaders and cadres “virtually dismantled the administration and ran a parallel government”, striking terror through the State. Unhappy with the Assam Accord of 1985, particularly the clause on the cut-off year for citizenship in Assam being 1971, the ULFA ranks began to swell with youngsters flocking to the movement.
Some of the key figures of the ULFA belonged to dispossessed communities like the Motoks (who lost their lands when the British set up tea plantations) and this factor, points out Hazarika, bonded them to other disaffected ethnic groups. An intelligence official told him: “ULFA began really as an expression of opposition to more than 100 years of exploitation.”
Ascent to power
The ULFA’s ascent to power, says Hazarika, coincided with the years of the Asom Gana Parishad regime. But by 1990, widespread extortion campaigns, attacks and killings were attributed to the ULFA cadres and the outfit was declared a terrorist and secessionist organisation and banned. There’s a detailed account of the first ULFA camp that was struck by the Army at Lakhipathar, in the heart of a forest near Digboi and Dibrugarh, the oil and tea capital of the State.
“ULFA’s power was not drawn solely from money and arms, though both were crucial factors,” he writes. “It lay in its understanding of the Assamese who were fed up with annual floods, failure of political promises, growing unemployment, unease that the anti-alien [those who migrated from Bangladesh] movement had not won them tangible gains despite the AGP’s presence and the knowledge that New Delhi was still trying to bulldoze its diktat through.” For peace to prevail, this perception will have to change.
At the agreement signing in Delhi, Mr. Biswa Sarma harped on the key points of the peace accord, pointing out that at least 96 out of 126 Assembly seats in Assam would be reserved for indigenous people and the future delimitation exercise would follow this principle. “This will address the question of political insecurity of the people of Assam,” the Chief Minister said. He spoke about protecting land rights and putting restrictions on migration from one constituency to another.
Several books have documented how the ULFA campaign became internationalised with the outfit’s leaders reaching out to Bangladesh and Pakistan in the late 1980s. Later, facing pressure from security forces in Assam from late 1990 and after Operation Bajrang and Operation Rhino, the outfit set up camps in Bhutan which were ultimately dismantled in an army operation in 2003.
Foreign links
For his new book, The Mirage of Dawn, Rajeev Bhattacharyya travelled the ULFA trail which took him to remote places in Assam — to rebel camps in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and New Delhi. He writes about the outfit’s “conflicting accounts of its history, the internecine squabbles within and the wide range of clandestine activities in neighbouring countries, not all of which were known to all of its own leadership.” He puts a greater focus on the ULFA’s foreign bases and operations — after all, the changing situation in the outfit’s foreign bases had a decisive impact on the trajectory of the separatist campaign in Assam.
Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty’s two books, Assam: the Accord, the Discord and The Assamese: A Portrait of a Community, also go into the backdrop of why such a movement like the ULFA could hold sway in Assam, looking into issues of identity, language, religion and other social and economic factors.
Will there be peace until the Baruah faction comes on board too? “The firm stance taken by the Baruah faction,” writes Barooah Pisharoty, “is hinged on the outfit’s original argument that the British usurped Assam not from the Assamese but from invading Burmese forces as part of the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826, and therefore, once the British left Assam, India should have returned Assam to the Assamese and negotiated the terms for political co-living.” But as Hazarika points out, the insurgency movement has been weakened for several reasons, not least the decision of one of the most powerful groups in the region, the National Socialist Council of Nagalim, to seek peace talks (a framework agreement was announced in 2015, but awaits a final settlement).
“That process is critical to the continuance of peace in the Northeast,” says Hazarika.
