ON the occasion of ULFA’s 40th Foundation Day on 7 April 2019, its Chairman, Arabinda Rajkhowa, had sent out a congratulatory message addressing the cadres and families of the martyrs of the armed struggle. Updating them about developments in the peace talks with the central government from 2011 on, Rajkhowa’s words recorded satisfaction with the welfare schemes aimed at securing rehabilitation for the disarrayed lives overground. However, he expressed concern for the stalled political settlement on matters of resource ownership, land rights, and constitutional safeguards for the multiethnic and indigenous communities of Assam.¹

In his address, three issues stood out. First, their inability to secure any information on the missing cadres after their arrest during Operation All Clear in Bhutan in 2003. Second, their successful negotiations in obtaining land and infrastructure for the development of designated camps called Asom Navnirman Kendra in Assam. Third, he reiterated the adamant stand of the overground ULFA against participating in Indian electoral politics, at least till the completion of the peace process.

At a time when peace processes, particularly in India, are carried out in an atmosphere of suspicion, silence, and secrecy, any update on the ongoing peace talks based on these neat success stories of the chairman can bring hope. However, the political currents of present-day Northeast India in general, and Assam in particular, make a comprehensive conversation on peace both difficult and complicated. This article briefly revisits some of these areas of contention that could lead to a durable resolution of the conflict.

For the unversed, the insurgent organization, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), was established on 7 April 1979, at the royal amphitheatre of the Ahoms called the Rang Ghar, in Sivasagar district in the Indian state of Assam. The armed struggle led by ULFA aimed at establishing swadhin Asom (independent Assam) against the alleged illegal occupation of Assam by India and the exploitative policies of the central government in New Delhi towards the resource-rich state of Assam. ULFA’s movement ran parallel to the Assam agitation against illegal immigration. The agitation ended with the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985 by the then Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, and representatives of the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP) and All Assam Students’ Union (AASU). However, dissatisfied with the accord, ULFA’s movement continued, and its members took up weapons to fight for a sovereign Assam. In fact, many members of AASU and Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuva Chattra Parishad (AJYCP), who actively participated in the Assam agitation, had later joined ULFA.

Initially, as an overground organization, ULFA had recruited cadres from almost every district in Assam due to the mass support it enjoyed. Part of its success was due to what Uddipan Dutta aptly phrased, the Robin Hood image that the organization cultivated.² From being social vigilantes, ULFA soon took upon itself the obligation to secure justice on its terms, most of which involved the use of violence. ULFA leadership was trained at the camps of the undivided National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) beginning in 1983 at the Ukhrul district, which was followed by new groups being trained at Kachin.³ As long as its targets were non-Assamese, or for that matter non-indigenous, there was a comfortable silence on the plethora of killings carried out by ULFA that the Assam of the 1980s and 1990s had witnessed.

 

The organization, by and large, had justified those killings in the name of the nation. It was an open secret during the time that ULFA was patronized by the regional political party, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), formed in 1985 as a result of the Assam Accord.⁴ It is only in more recent times that ULFA has spoken about the help it extended to the then students’ leaders in executing political murders. Those same people today occupy political positions.⁵

ULFA had aimed to bringing peace through unleashing violence against its ‘enemy’ that primarily comprised of the government in New Delhi. To pressurize the government, the insurgent organization had resorted to killings, abductions, extortions, and bomb blasts, most of which had paralyzed civilian life. In retaliation, the state of Assam was declared a ‘disturbed’ region on 28 November 1990, thereby empowering the armed forces with special powers of impunity to carry out operations under the Armed Forces (Special) Powers Act (AFSPA) in Assam.

 

On 29 November 1990, the first major army operation against ULFA, codenamed Operation Bajrang, was declared and ULFA was banned. Ever since 1990, there have been multiple army operations against the militant group, both in Assam and outside Indian territory. Some of the major operations include Operation Rhino I and II in 1991 and 1992, respectively; Operation All Clear in Bhutan in 2003, in collaboration with the Royal Bhutan Army; and most recently, Myanmar’s Tatmadaw occupied insurgent camps in the Taga region, in 2019. The unarmed civilians in Assam, no matter to which community they belonged, have been at the receiving end in this violent struggle between state and anti-state entities. This necessitated the urgency of peace talks at different moments in the political history of Assam.

Akhil Ranjan Dutta has categorized three phases that elaborate the significant responses of civil society in Assam to the conflict between ULFA and the Government of India.⁶ The Asom Ganatantrik Nagarik Sanstha undertook the first initiative in the 1990s that addressed the atrocities perpetrated by ULFA and the coercion resorted to by the army. However, ULFA’s continuous engagement using violent means, particularly the abductions and subsequent killing of bureaucrats and officials of public sector undertakings in 1991, did not bear any fruition. Instead, army operations were resumed after a brief ceasefire.

 

The second initiative for talks was taken when ULFA nominated nine members from civil society on its behalf and formed the People’s Consultative Group (PCG) in 2005 to renegotiate with the government. Mamoni Raisom Goswami was its chief coordinator, and Rebati Phukan was appointed as the co-coordinator. Three rounds of positive discussions were held between 2005 and 2006 on the release of ULFA’s top leaders from jail, and also to seek information on the cadres missing since 2003. However, the talks were abandoned when ULFA continued to kill, extort, and resorted to bombings. Hence, the army was forced to resume operations in September 2006.

Professor Hiren Gohain led the third initiative in 2010 under the umbrella of the Sanmilita Jatiya Abhivartan. More than a hundred civil society organizations, along with individuals in different capacities, participated in the convention. The convention called for free passage and subsequent release of top ULFA leaders, and favoured the holding of talks between ULFA and Government of India, be it on any issue including sovereignty.⁷ However, to date, there has been no breakthrough towards attaining a sustainable peace based on the recommendations of the convention.

Instead, the state successfully managed to create a rupture within the armed struggle as early as in 1992. Through attractive rehabilitation packages, it succeeded in enticing hundreds of underground cadres to surrender. Though it was initially a blow to the underground outfit, a number of these surrendered cadres later began to engage in anti-social and criminal activities with the patronage of the state.

Popularly known as SULFA (surrendered ULFA), these cadres were mobilized into unofficial death squads by the police to execute suspected ULFA sympathizers and family members of their former colleagues.⁸ These secret killings had unleashed terror throughout the social fabric of Assam between 1998 and 2001. The functioning of the SULFA was akin to that of the Ikhwanis in Kashmir or the Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh. Suppressing the armed movement in Assam without a proper plan towards a resolution had only created a precarious society where violence was to resurface time and again.

 

In the last decade, India’s strong diplomatic ties with the neighbouring countries of Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar have had severe repercussions on the insurgent groups from North East India. While these countries extended support to India through joint operations and agreements against insurgency, what surfaced was India’s poverty of intention and innovation in upholding the peace. For instance, the suspension of Operation Pact, signed between the central government, the Assam state government, and the overground ULFA leadership in 2011, had placed utmost importance on the status report on the missing ULFA leaders and cadres. Ironically, eyewitness accounts implicate the Indian Army for their disappearance, and on which the Indian government continues to maintain silence.

 

One of the women insurgents from ULFA whom I met as part of a research project, narrated the pain of those last goodbyes. I shall call her Purabi to protect her real identity. She was arrested during Operation All Clear in 2003. Without any hesitation, leaving me with the scope to testify her words, Purabi spoke eloquently.

‘Before we were handed over to the Indian Army, we were taken to meet these cadres. There was Hema Hansipi baideo⁹ with me. Since then, her husband Ashanta Bagh Phukan is also missing. There were so many other men like Robin Neog, Nobo Changmai, and Banning Rabha. We shed tears the last time we met, and then we were brought to India. We do not know what the Indian and Bhutanese government had done. Inspite of continuous petitions by these women cadres, the government has overlooked the entire matter. Both countries blame each other on the fate of the missing cadres. The commanders did not die at war; they disappeared from custody. We were together in the jungles, we ate together, and we came out together. It was not like they were killed at camps. We thought they were senior members, so they were kept separately for interrogation. Later Bhimkanta Buragohain was handed over.’¹⁰

My conversations with Purabi and, for that matter, with many other cadres and commanders arrested in Bhutan, corroborated the same testimony. Rumours and assumptions relating to the death of those missing cadres are central in remembering them today. The extra-judicial killings, manifested through fake encounters, custodial deaths and disappearances, had only normalized violence as an essential counter-insurgency measure. A democratic resolution of conflicts becomes difficult when both sides fail to address these uncomfortable conversations.

 

While the peace talks have been underway from 2011, the Extradition Treaty of 2016 signed between India and Bangladesh resulted in the extradition of ULFA’s General Secretary, Anup Chetia. He was imprisoned in a Dhaka jail since 1997. Though Chetia’s release was anticipated to be a significant boost to the ongoing peace talks, ULFA broke into two factions – the overground ULFA led by Chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa and the underground ULFA-Independent (ULFA-I) led by Commander-in-Chief, Paresh Baruah. Since its inception, ULFA(I) has been involved in extortions and killings, the most recent being the grenade blast in front of a busy shopping mall in Guwahati in May 2019, and the serial bomb blasts in Upper Assam on Republic Day in January 2020. Even though the oldest leaders of the organization have been overground, the formal split in ULFA has created new challenges to the peace talks.

It is challenging to dissociate oneself from the ongoing peace talks since much is at stake. There is an urgent need to revisit, rephrase, and redefine the territorial idea of swadhinota (independence) in a Swadhin Asom where independence is needed from past wrongs. The accords should be able to contest the liberal understanding of peace that offers a template approach.

 

The one size fits all models may not necessarily be effective in every conflict zone. This was clear from the peace initiatives undertaken so far – they could only generate conflict fatigue over a solution, if that be considered significant. This was partly because of violence and force that have been on standby mode under the ambit of peacemaking in the past. As such, to limit ULFA’s peace talks over the issue of ‘sovereignty’ alone, would be discarding thousands of deaths and disappearances resultant from both insurgency and counter-insurgency as ‘soft’ and ‘normal’ issues, could be underrated.

It is essential to question the agenda of conflict and the conditions under which peace is agreed upon. Peace could be judiciously utilized as a platform for correcting past wrongs. Even though the people of Assam have recently expressed their mistrust on the treacherous policies and laws of the central government in the wake of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019, they were not in any way inclined towards insurgency. This could not take away from the bitter truth that people have still not restored their lost faith in the violent tactics of the ULFA, in the same way they disapprove of the undemocratic state control of dissent.

Roger Mac Ginty in his book No War, No Peace: The Rejuvenation of Stalled Peace Processes and Peace Accords (2006), writes: ‘The implementation of the peace accord becomes a technocratic exercise of ticking boxes, counting heads and weapons, amending constitutions, and reconstructing housing units, while the more thorny affective and perceptual issues of reconciliation, exclusion, and the restoration of dignity are left unaddressed. Amidst the hubbub of technocratic and neo-institutional peace accord implementation it may be difficult to notice that the peace is not working or that the main parties to the conflict have not actually addressed the core grievances that have caused and maintained the conflict.’¹¹

 

The present politics in Assam, particularly around the issues of citizenship, has been a reminder to the Assam Agitation that it had once not only mobilized the masses against illegal immigration, but had also laid a fertile ground for the insurgency to flourish. While there have been fresh recruitment of young cadres into ULFA(I) since 2018, the people’s protests against CAA 2019 have been entirely democratic. Yet, the state resorted to extreme violent means, killing people in an extra-judicial way, beyond doubt. Time and time again, events such as these bear witness to the rigid state machinery in addressing and suppressing the core contentious issues.

The anti-state sentiments against the central government have contested its construction of development agendas and success stories in governing the North East region. Draconian laws like the AFSPA, the National Security Act (NSA), or Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act further criminalize dissent and social lives in the region. It is time to perceive peace beyond a pilot project aftermath conflict, and attempt to establish it as a sustainable culture. For this, there is a need to reconnect and accommodate the voices of civilians in the peace processes, and specially in matters of conflict. To confine peace to distant conference rooms in a secretive manner where territories are demarcated, powers transferred, or public money allocated, would only disconnect the masses from governance. Further, such arrangements for peace under the influence of secrecy and suspicion have also left civil society vulnerable.

 

For instance, Rebati Phukan, a childhood friend of Paresh Baruah, was an erstwhile member of PCG. He has been missing from Guwahati since 22 April 2018. In a petition to the Supreme Court seeking information about his whereabouts, Phukan’s son claimed that his father had been working as a peace negotiator from 1990, and was currently a part of the peace negotiation with ULFA(I).¹² His disappearance for almost two years now has raised questions like: Do stakeholders in the current peace talks want to see Paresh Baruah surface at all? If not, why the silence on Phukan’s disappearance from Guwahati in 2018? It is necessary to question the ulterior political motives at stake when peace is achieved.

Peace talks should not only be guided by the philosophy of ‘give and take’ but should be about recovery and rebuilding human lives. When civilians have faced and experienced the wrath of four decades-long violence in Assam, it is only pragmatic to expect the current peace talks to be transparent and also accountable about human losses in the past. There is a need to question if peace processes are inclusive at all. The absence of that would make peace half-hearted and disconnected from the masses where both the insurgents and counter-insurgents and their talks lose credibility and get reduced to being yet another political matter subsuming the social repercussions.

 

Footnotes:

1. Lecture of Chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa on the occasion of ULFA’s 40th Foundation Day on 7 April 2019.

2. Uddipan Dutta, Creating Robin Hoods: The Insurgency of ULFA in its Early Period, Its Parallel Administration and the Role of Assamese Vernacular Press (1985-1990). Wiscomp, New Delhi, 2009.

3. Nani Gopal Mahanta, Confronting the State: ULFA’s Quest for Sovereignty. Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2013, pp. 73, 86, 88.

4. Udayon Misra, The Periphery Strikes Back: Challenges to the Nation-State in Assam and Nagaland. Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 2000, p.156.

5. Subhajit Sengupta, ULFA Accuses BJP Leader Sonowal of Using Cadres for Political Murders. https://www.news18.com/news/politics/ulfa-accuses-bjp-leader-sonowal-of-using-cadres-for-political-murders-1220935.html/ (accessed on 26 January 2019).

6. Akhil Ranjan Dutta, ‘Civil Society’s Engagement with ULFA in Assam: A Historical Exploration’, Studies in Indian Politics 2(1), 2014, pp. 43-54.

7. Nani Gopal Mahanta, Confronting the State: ULFA’s Quest for Sovereignty. Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2013, p. 283.

8. Dixita Deka, ‘Living Without Closure: Memories of Counter-Insurgency and Secret Killings in Assam’, Asian Ethnicity, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2019. 1639492

9. In Assamese language, elder sister is addressed as baideo.

10. Purabi in conversation with the author on 28 June 2016 in Guwahati. First published in Dixita Deka, Underground: Lives, Activism and Representation of Women in ULFA. Unpublished MPhil dissertaton, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati Campus, 2017.

11. Roger Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace: The Rejuvenation of Stalled Peace Processes and Peace Accords. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2006, pp. 3-4.

12. The Assam Tribune, ‘SC Notice to Centre on Rebati Phukan Missing Case’, 2 June 2018, pp.1-4.