The Rediff Special

Days of the Guerrillas

On April 21, 1979, a few starry-eyed men gathered at the Rang Ghar, an entertainment theatre in the ruined palace complex of Sibsagar, once the seat of Assam's mighty Ahom kings. The palace symbolises a fiercely independent era in Assamese history, and the men had gathered there to pledge their lives for the cause of Assam's freedom. That day, 18 years ago, the United Liberation Front of Assam, or ULFA, was born.

Today, that fledgling front has grown into one of the toughest and richest insurgent groups in the North-East, keeping the government and the powerful Indian army constantly on tenterhooks.

According to army sources, ULFA presently has about 1,250 hard-core cadres, backed up by a body of sympathisers. About 450 of them are believed to be absconding in their hideouts in neighbouring Bhutan. Many ULFA guerrillas have received military training from the rebel groups of Burma.

ULFA is concentrated in the upper Assam districts of Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Sibsagar, Jorhat, Nagaon, Lakhimpur, Sonitpur, Darrang and Barpeta on the north and south of the Brahmaputra river. These districts also happen to be Assam's main tea-growing areas. The insurgent group is said to have divided the state into four sectors, and operations in each are overseen by one regional commander. Each region has a battalion of guerrilla fighters.

The party is run by a quartet comprising chairman Abrabinda Rajkhowa, general secretary Anup Chetia, vice-chairman Pradip Gogoi, and commander-in-chief Paresh Barua. The former three were, at one time, willing to discuss peace with the Centre, but Barua refused to compromise, made the others toe his line, and rebuilt the organisation after it was virtually decimated in successive army operations in the early nineties. He, however, still remains number four in the party hierarchy, but is the most wanted man from the government's point of view.

ULFA's avowed aim is to create an independent and sovereign state of Assam. It believes that Assam was never a part of India before it was annexed by the British. And since 1947, it claims, Assam has been reduced to an Indian colony whose natural resources are being looted.

The outlawed organisation had always maintained close links with the Asom Gana Parishad and the All Assam Students Union which shot into prominence in the early eighties through its violent anti-foreigners (read anti-Bengali) agitation. However, ULFA has never betrayed any overt ethnic bias.

If anything, it tried to base itself, at least initially, on Maoist principles of fighting a protracted guerrilla war and carrying on mass activities in rural areas. This policy paid rich dividends. By the late eighties, it virtually ran upper Assam through an elaborate network of social organisations. But a spate of killings in 1989-90 invited an army crackdown.

In the next two years, ULFA was -- or so it seems -- completely routed by Operations Rhino, Bajrang and Golden Bird. Many of its cadres were killed, many more were jailed, and others simply lost the nerve to keep up the fight. But Barua and the rest of the top leadership managed to elude the dragnet, and set about regrouping after the army operations were put on hold by the Congress government, headed by Hiteswar Saikia, that came to power in 1991.

In the last assembly election in 1996, ULFA tacitly backed the AGP, helping it to return to power with a massive majority, hoping that the AGP would withdraw the Armed Forces Special Powers Act that gave the army sweeping powers to fight the insurgency.

But relations between them soured quickly, as the AGP government, headed by Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, formed a united command of security forces comprising the army, police and the paramilitary to check ULFA and Bodo violence.

Now, with the government stepping up its campaign, ULFA faces a new challenge. And so does the government.

Kind courtesy: Sunday magazine

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