Lone ranger

Talking terms: Home Minister P. Chidambaram with pro-talk Ulfa leaders in Delhi
ULFA
Peace process is on in Assam, but Paresh Baruah is not yet done with guns
Syed Nazakat/Jeraigaon, Assam
Things might have turned out differently for Assam, and its thousands of youth, if a tall, thin boy from Jeraigaon village in the state had not been an outstanding football player. It was on the football ground, high in a tea garden above Dibrugarh, where Paresh Baruah, then 22, first got the attention of youngsters.
It was mid 1979 and Assam was on fire as angry students had begun agitating for the expulsion of all illegal migrants in the state. Baruah showed little interest in politics and religion initially, as he was busy playing football. But as the protest intensified, he started talking about the migrants and the rights of local people. In December 1979, he moved out of the football ground, left his job at the Tinsukia railway station and disappeared into the jungle.
Baruah came back as a radically changed man and soon became the commander-in-chief of the United Liberation Front of Asom. He recreated himself as an armed rebel and encouraged others to join Ulfa. He called the armed challenge “the 18th war of independence”, referring to the 17 wars fought by Assam’s legendary king Lachit Borphukan in the 1600s against the Mughals.
“Paresh came to meet me and sat there on the ground,” said Bhimkanta Buragohain, 82, an Ulfa patron who is widely called Mama. “He was very upset with the police excesses against the student agitation and wanted to join a guerrilla organisation.” When Mama told him that it was going to be tough to take up arms against the state, Baruah replied: “I’ll not turn my head right or left till we win a separate Assamese homeland. India’s atrocities will only bring the dawn of freedom closer.”
Thirty years later, however, that looks like a remote possibility. Today, Baruah is Ulfa’s last standing armed commander. Many of the founders of the organisation, including its chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa, vice-chairman Pradip Gogoi, deputy military commander Raju Baruah, are in talks with the government to end the armed conflict.
Baruah, who fled Bangladesh, where he had been hiding for long, after the crackdown against Ulfa in 2009, is still reluctant to join the peace talks. His whereabouts have remained elusive and he has been photographed just twice in the past 30 years. According to Mama, Baruah established an empire on his own and his ambitions went far beyond Assam. As an ideologue, Mama was perhaps the first person who sensed this drift.
“He used to travel from Bangladesh to Bhutan to meet me in training camps,” said Mama. Soon Baruah began travelling to Bangkok, Malaysia, Singapore, Pakistan, Afghanistan and some European countries. Investigators are shocked to discover how widely and secretly Baruah travelled across the world on forged passports. After the arrest and interrogation of Ulfa commanders in Bangladesh, the investigators figured out that one of his first foreign trips was to Afghanistan where he met the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in the 1990s.
In the spring of 1991, Baruah and some other Ulfa commanders went to Pakistan and the Pakistan army took them to a camp in Paktika province in Afghanistan. It was during those days that he developed connections with arms dealers and other terrorist groups. A year later, he made a trip to the Philippines, where he met leaders of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group.
Sasha Chaudhury, who had represented Ulfa at different forums including the UN as its ‘foreign secretary’, was one of the 12 commanders who went to Afghanistan. “It was there we learned to handle various weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades. Most of the focus, however, was on mental preparation,” he said. Those days it was easy to get fake passports in Bangladesh. He had 11 passports and had obtained an advanced diploma in international diplomacy from a university in the Philippines. “I was sent there on the recommendation of East Timor’s President Jose Ramos-Horta, who was then a rebel commander,” he said. Sasha was arrested in Dhaka in 2009 along with other Ulfa leaders.
Sasha said they were not aware of al Qaeda’s involvement in setting up the camp in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the connection with Hekmatyar and other Afghan warlords broadened Ulfa’s network, as hundreds of Baruah’s men got training and weapons. Baruah returned to Bangladesh the following spring and started recruiting more men. “Today he is the best connected arms dealer in this region,” said an Assam Police officer. “He recently attempted to seek help from China, which is a significant departure.”
Baruah’s contacts in China ensured his organisation’s survival after the arrest of the top leaders. He has travelled to Chinese territory bordering India and Myanmar, and visited Beijing and Shanghai last year. He met an insurgent leader from Manipur, R.K. Sanayaima alias Meghen, in Shanghai. Meghen was arrested in Dhaka on September 29, 2010 and was brought to India. He told the National Investigation Agency that he had met Baruah during the Shanghai World Expo in June 2010 and the Ulfa leader had good connections with the Chinese authorities.
According to a charge sheet filed by the NIA in a special court in Guwahati, Baruah tried to procure weapons with the help of “some persons of Chinese origin”. The Assam Police say he gets his supplies from the state-owned China North Industries Corporation. India has officially made explicit comments on the Chinese involvement. “The armoury being acquired from China by the insurgent groups is being smuggled through Thailand and the China-Myanmar border to the northeastern states,” said Mullappally Ramachandran, minister of state ?for home affairs, in Parliament on March 9.
According to a recent analysis by the Assam Police, Baruah operates four camps in Myanmar and commands about 200 heavy armed militants from there. “A fortnight ago we traced him in Tagunsa camp in Burma,” said an Assam Police officer. “He leads a spartan life and no longer has a comfortable camp.” A footage obtained by THE WEEK shows Baruah’s camp in Burma, with shelters and a huge stock of arms. Also, Baruah had released a photograph of him with 100 armed cadets in uniform. The police said he had recruited boys from upper Assam before the Assembly elections.
In the 1990s, the darkest days of insurgency, Ulfa killed people for casting vote. This time, judging the mood of the people, it did not even issue a boycott call. Even Baruah’s mother, Miliki, voted. “We have lost everything here. I don’t know why they [Ulfa leaders] left my son there [in Myanmar]. They all went there together. They should have brought him back,” she said.
People are relieved that Ulfa is no longer active in Assam. “There used to be daily attacks and killing. But now the violence is almost over,” said Dinesh Sharma, additional superintendent of police, Dibrugarh.
Baruah, however, seems to be far from done. On February 7, he sent an email asking the people of Assam to oppose the state government, which was anti-people and an Indian servant. It said Ulfa remained opposed to India’s peace proposal. The police traced the IP address of the mail to China’s eastern coastal province of Zheijang.
Baruah’s biggest challenge today is his lost base in Assam. Some 8,500 Ulfa cadres have given up arms. The outfit’s key military wing, 28 BN, has surrendered, and on April 7, on the organisation’s 32nd Raising Day, all the Ulfa leaders in Assam supported the talks with the government. “People still respect us. But they want us to talk and discuss. There is no support for violence. The public mood has changed,” said Sasha.
Sasha said there had been differences between senior Ulfa leaders and Baruah. However, what pulled the outfit apart was the Chittagong arms delivery in April 2004. Baruah had procured 10 trucks of arms and ammunition (enough to arm two brigades of an army) without informing the outfit. When Raju Baruah, deputy commander in chief of Ulfa, asked him about it, he said: “We’re taking China’s and Pakistan’s help to fight India.” After this incident Baruah never attended executive meetings of Ulfa.
As he built his own syndicate, Baruah became more brutal and less clear about what he was up to. The outfit unleashed a series of civilian kidnappings and killings. A bomb attack on a school bus, taking 15 lives, on August 15, 2004, shocked the people in Assam. It became a turning point as people openly protested the brutal act. But the killing spree continued. Three months later, 62 migrant workers, mostly from Bihar, were killed by Ulfa.
Another decisive mistake Baruah, who lived in Bangladesh from the 1990s to 2009, made was providing weapons and logistic support to Bangladeshi radical groups. This infuriated Dhaka. Soon, Ulfa leaders were arrested one after another by Bangladesh and deported to India.
“Today, we are fighting somebody else’s war,” said Ashyut Raj, 26, a former Ulfa cadet. He was 16 when he took up arms and went to Myanmar. In revenge, the Assam Police traced his home in Nalbari and killed his mother. Raj and his friend Hitish Rabha returned to Assam and joined a faction of the outfit which had announced ceasefire. This angered Ulfa, and in 2009, it killed Rabha. “My tragedy is that I was not even able to attend the funeral of my mother because there were cops all around,” said Raj.
To ensure that cadets like Raj do not go back to militant ways, the government has kept them in camps in Nalbari and Tinsukia under police protection. While the government wants all Ulfa men to surrender their weapons before a substantial dialogue begins, the Ulfa men want to keep the arms in joint custody. But a central question still revolves around Baruah. Home Minister P. Chidambaram wants him to be a part of the peace process.
Standing outside his house, Mama conceded that the time for gun was over. “We are having crucial talks with India. I’m sure if we make some progress in the talks, he [Baruah] will have no choice but to join us,” he said. “But if we fail, he will have a big party in jungle.”