From Guns to Roses

Surrendered militants include Bhaiti Gogoi, a close aide of ULFA commander-in-chief Paresh Barua, Upper Assam area second-in-command Ramu Mech, and Lower Assam top leader Akan Swargiary, apart from Dwipamani Kalita who came overground in April.

Intelligence officials say that ULFA is not sending its cadres, mostly holed up outside the state to Assam, fearing that they will surrender. About 100 to 120 ULFA members live in Bhutan, between 600 and 800 in Megahalya’s Garo Hills and about 200 in the Myanmar.

‘‘It will be only about another 200-odd who are presently inside the state but are lying low with the security forces enforcing total dominance over the situation,’’ said a senior officer in the Assam Police. Two top functionaries, general secretary Anup Chetia and vice-chairman Pradip Gogoi on the other hand are in jail in Dhaka and Guwahati respectively for several years. While Chetia was arrested in Dhaka in December 1997 for possessing forged passports, a satellite phone and some foreign currency, vice-chairman Gogoi has been in the Guwahati jail for over five years now.

But the most interesting angle to the situation is the increasing public resistance to the militants, the officer pointed out. More and more people are reporting extortion notices from the ULFA and that has helped the police nab them.

According to official records there have been at least 30 instances of people resisting ULFA militants’ extortion or abduction bids and about 30 ULFA cadres have been lynched or hacked to death by mobs in the past three years. The people’s resistance movement was initiated by a retired BSF jawan turned shopkeeper Umesh Rabha who mobilised people in the northern part of Nalbari district to say no to militants. Rabha was attacked four times and killed three years ago. The state government has instituted a bravery award in his memory.

‘‘Statistically the ULFA does not possess the lethality that other insurgent groups have. Its armed activities are, in general, more in the nature of selective killings and acts of sabotage against state-owned economic assets rather than aimless terror tactics,’’ says Sunil Nath, a former central publicity secretary of the ULFA, who was among the first to surrender in 1992 and is now a columnist and writer.

Meanwhile, there are many signs that show that the situation in Assam has improved. ‘‘Business and entrepreneurial activities have definitely increased in the state in the past few years. And in Guwahati, shops and markets are open till quite late in the evening,’’ points out J P Saikia, chairman and managing director of North East Development Finance Corporation (NEDFi). The organization has seen an increase in the number of applications for loans and queries from investors outside the state.

In Guwahati, for instance, the number of restaurants have gone up in the past three years and dining out late in the evenings is catching up. ‘‘This was unthinkable a few years ago,’’ claims chief minister Tarun Gogoi.

Even on the tourism and festival front, things are beginning to look up. The state’s tourist season that ended recently organised as many as ten major festivals in different districts including the Brahmaputra Beach Festival in Guwahati, the Elephant Festival in Kaziranga National Park and the Dehing-Patkai Festival in Margherita in Upper Assam.

‘‘While more domestic tourists are arriving in Assam in recent years, the number of foreign tourists too has gone up,’’ said K Goswami, managing director, Assam Tourism Development Corporation. The authorities however are yet to compile data of tourist arrival for the season that has just ended.

But ULFA’s shadow continues to haunt the state. The series of mortar attacks in the state since last October is a new phenomenon. While the group first struck in the state secretariat in Guwahati, it also blew up

a naphtha storage tank in the Digboi refinery last month besides an attack in an IAF mess in the Guwahati air base.

‘‘The ULFA, which had earlier refused to comply with the ISI’s pressure to target oil installations saying those were national assets of the Assamese people, has in the recent years indeed targeted pipelines and other oil installations,’’ says Jyotirmoy Chakravarty, DIG, special branch, Assam Police. This, he says is a desperate attempt by the group to prove that it is still alive, especially after the surrender and killings of several of its top members.