The real scorcher in Home Minister L.K. Advani's abortive White Paper on Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) activities in India was not the situation in Jammu and Kashmir but details of its cosy relationship with the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). The recent kidnapping and murder of BJP candidate Pannalal Oswal, who was contesting the Dhubri Lok Sabha seat, for refusing to raise the issue of a sovereign Assam in Parliament, is a grim pointer to the days ahead.Advani, who sees the ISI hand in practically every law and order problem in the country, was horrified at the extent of the agency's penetration into the ULFA and its ominous consequences for the neglected Northeast. Chairing a meeting on the subject before Kargil, the Home Minister is reported to have told officials that if he was so ignorant of the havoc Pakistan was wreaking in the Northeast, the awareness level of the rest of the country could only be imagined.Officials of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research and Analysis Wingof the Cabinet Secretariat, who have repeatedly been ringing the alarm bell on the ISI-ULFA nexus, ruefully acknowledged the minister's concern. Says an IB official who prepared the agency's input for the White Paper: ``Kashmir is sexy, the North-East is not, and unfortunately the ULFA seems to have understood that if they want to grab the limelight they will have to execute twice as many spectaculars.''There have been `spectaculars' (Irish Republican Army parlance for bomb blasts) aplenty. Post-Kargil, the ULFA went on a spree, spurred on by the ISI. Sixty-six people were killed in 11 incidents. There were a large number of blasts, including the one on a rail bridge near Guwahati on August 19. Before that, there was a blast every other day. On August 14, a bomb in a passenger train killed 18 people. On August 11, the Delhi-bound Rajdhani narrowly escaped disaster. What the White Paper - fated not to see the light of day - reveals is a well-documented network of terror. There are details of payments oflarge sums of money by the ULFA to the ISI. ULFA money went into several bank accounts in Bangladesh, the Isle of Man and Sri Lanka, in return for training and weapons. The payments are spread over the last six years and show a sharp upswing in the last two years. The White Paper says that a conservative estimate would put the ISI-ULFA transactions at around Rs 650 crore, and this is likely to go up as the ISI is looking to sharply up the ante in the neglected Northeast.Interestingly, the LTTE is also getting a commission out of the payments made to the ISI in Sri Lankan banks, according to intelligence reports appended to the White Paper. The ISI has been training ULFA cadres at the latter's training camps in Bhutan. When Thimphu showed some reluctance about playing host, the training modules were promptly shifted to the LTTE haven in Jaffna. The ISI provides a complete package, including videos of atrocities allegedly committed by Indian authorities in the Northeast. The videos revile the Indian stateand have actors playing Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, Union Home Minister L.K. Advani and Union Defence Minister George Fernandes. The unknown actors strut about and abuse the Northeast.This psychological warfare has the IB worried. Says a senior official: ``First, they are in a sense preaching to the already converted. Secondly, the young boys fresh from the villages who form the core of the ULFA are easily swayed by the moving images.''The Army, which has been at the forefront of counter-insurgency operations in Assam, recently took the unprecedented step of making its concerns on the ISI-ULFA relationship public. On July 31, Major General B.P. Bopanna, GoC 21 Mountain Division, expressed his misgivings about some madrasas (schools) in Nalbari and Barpeta districts of Lower Assam and the southern Barak valley which were actively encouraging the ISI. On August 5 Lt General D.B. Shekatkar, GoC 4 Corps, said that over 100 ISI agents were operating in Assam.More startling disclosures followedwith the arrest of Bilal Ahmed, a close relative of top Jamaat leader Abdul Haq, on August 4 from Karimganj. According to Home Ministry reports, Abdul Haq couriered messages from ULFA leaders Arabinda Rajkhowa and Paresh Barua to the ISI. On August 7, the Assam Police arrested four ISI agents.However, what has upset the Home Ministry and the IB no end is that politicians promptly entered the fray and made statements to the effect that the ULFA, in league with the ISI, was dreaming of setting up a new Islamic state in the Northeast. The plan was apparently to create ethnic disturbances, siphon off money from the state through extortion and pump in fake currency.Senior officials dealing with Assam point out that such extreme and wild statements tend to detract from the main problem and give it an undue communal emphasis.Says the officer bitterly: ``Either we are dealing with a counter-insurgency situation or we allow these irresponsible people to twist it any way they want to give it a convenientemphasis.'' Senior officials say that while demographic changes are a reality, it is not an Assam-specific problem: it's the same story in all the border states. While there are reports that in Assam, Nagaland, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh there has been infiltration from across the border and towns such as Chopra and Islampur near Siliguri are packed with migrants, analysts say that since their presence is so conspicuous that the problem is magnified out of proportion.Officials say that a clear distinction has to be made and while hard decisions must be taken on the ISI-ULFA nexus, it is important to ensure that the problem is not communalised.A recent Home Ministry policy paper points out that despite the ISI angle, the only way to tackle the simmering insurgency problem in the Northeast is to remove the sense of alienation and provide good administration. Not a flashy solution, which is why it may not find to many takers among the power players of the Northeast.
