By Syed Zarir Hussain, IANS
Guwahati : Northeast India’s most potent separatist group, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), appears to be on the back foot following a spate of surrenders of its cadres, indicating that like most people in Assam, the fighters in the outfit too could be hit by ‘conflict fatigue’.
On Thursday, a group of 64 ULFA militants, including Ujjwal Gohain, ‘finance secretary’ of the group’s crack fighting unit called the ’28th battalion’, surrendered to the authorities at an Assam Police base in Guwahati. In recent weeks, around 50 other ULFA rebels had given up, generally accusing the group’s leadership of being ‘autocratic’ and failing to give the homeland movement a ‘direction.’
The ULFA itself as well as groups or individuals supporting it would like to dismiss these surrenders as drama, stage-managed by government agencies. The fact, however, remains that the rebel group cannot ignore the development in view of the wide media coverage that such surrenders receive even if some of those who are shown as having surrendered could have been thrown out earlier by the ULFA itself.
Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi has said that a total of 655 ULFA militants had surrendered so far since the peace process between the government and the ULFA-appointed negotiation panel called the People’s Consultative Group (PCG) broke down in September 2006.
Gogoi, the army and police top brass in the state, as well as several surrendered ULFA rebels, have said the fighters of the group were giving up because of “lack of democracy” within the organisation and the “autocratic” behaviour of its leaders.
What could actually be the case for an apparent disillusionment among the rank-and-file of the ULFA is the long absence of its topmost leaders from the insurgency theatre of Assam, resulting in the cadres on the ground suffering from a lack of direction.
Assam Police’s intelligence chief Khagen Sharma has been quoted as saying the ULFA had held its last general council meeting way back in 1998. After that, the commanders operating in Assam may not have got any opportunity of interacting directly with the group’s chairperson Arabinda Rajkhowa or commander-in-chief Paresh Barua, who are believed to be operating from Bangladesh.
The surrenders cannot be ignored by the ULFA, not just because of the impact that they create in the minds of the people, but because of the quality of fresh cadres that it can hope to induct at short notice.
Already, security agencies have been citing instances of the ULFA outsourcing to people to plant explosives and carrying out ‘stealth bombings’ to prevent exposing its own cadres to the risk of being captured or getting killed while planting the devices.
What has been damaging from the ULFA’s point of view is that its cadres are giving up although the peace process has not shown any sign of resuming just yet. However, analysts say this is only a temporary setback for the ULFA and that the government must actually try to resolve the conflict itself for lasting peace in the state of 26 million people.
But news about the surrender of rebel cadres by the dozen has the potential to raise doubts even among ULFA’s diehard supporters in rural Assam about the capability of the organisation to achieve its objective – a “sovereign, socialist Assam”, free from “exploitation by New Delhi”.
The surrenders have come at a time when the sustained counter-insurgency offensive has prevented the ULFA from acting as the cohesive fighting force it used to be in the late 1980s. Besides, after the military blitzkrieg by the Royal Bhutan Army in December 2003, expelling the ULFA rebels from bases inside the kingdom, the group has lost its main staging area.
Following their expulsion from Bhutan, most of its top leaders have been reportedly operating from unspecified locations in Bangladesh. According to reports, ULFA has since relocated its camps to hideouts in Myanmar, Mon district of Nagaland, Garo hills of Meghalaya and Tirap and Changlang districts of Arunachal Pradesh.
Considering New Delhi’s improving relations with Yangon, the ULFA cannot be complacent about the junta in Myanmar leaving them undisturbed. The spate of surrenders, as also the killing of more than 150 of its trained cadres in recent months, besides the arrest of several of its key commanders, goes to indicate that the government is at an advantage, at least as of now in the deadly cat-and-mouse battle across Assam.