It made for a wonderful keepsake photo opportunity when leaders of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) visited New Delhi for preliminary tripartite peace talks in August. There were smiles all around, and word was that peace was soon going to return to Assam.
Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ends as of now. If you go beyond the headlines and hark a little into the past, you will find that things will progressively appear worse. That would be because there are many talking points and a bunch of thorny issues at hand.
Do talks between the Centre, the Assam government and the ULFA mean anything significant? One cannot forget that almost all top ULFA leaders were either in jail or had surrendered when the negotiations began. Talks between the victor and the vanquished often mean precious little.
When the Suspension of Operations agreement was signed in early September, a statement issued by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs said, “ULFA had earlier agreed to abjure violence and find a solution to the problems as perceived by them through peaceful negotiations with the Government of India and Government of Assam.” The operative phrase here was not about abjuring violence, but finding “a solution to the problems as perceived by them.” The ambiguity here makes one read the statement again, this time with circumspection.
What can these problems be besides the issue of sovereignty? India always asserted that discussions on sovereignty would never be held. ULFA leaders, for their part, keep insisting that they have not given up the demand. But the cries of sovereignty for do sound less shrill now. The ULFA is no more negotiating from a vantage position, it is on the backfoot. There’s very little that the insurgents of yesterday can do today beyond rhetoric or chest-thumping.
The same leaders who visited New Delhi had, in 2005, constituted a People’s Consultative Group (PCG) comprising well-known intellectuals of Assam to negotiate with the Indian government. The PCG remained in the news for the wrong reasons – from being repeatedly discredited by the state government to being seen as suspect from all quarters. The ULFA’s demand for sovereignty to be a key issue to figure in any subsequent peace negotiations was dismissed by the Indian government. The peace process soon fell apart.
The tide turned overwhelmingly against the ULFA with the arrest of its top leaders, including Chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa, in Bangladesh. With the latter’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina more than willing to help the Indian government in its drive against the insurgents in exchange, perhaps, for waters and land, the outfit lost the sanctuaries it had fought from. Captives, as they were, the ULFA leaders would sooner or later have to concede the sovereignty factor.
And if the issue of sovereignty could indeed be kept aside, most of the so-called “problems” that the Centre has insinuated at could be linked to the Assam Movement of the late 70s and early 80s. The failure of the Assam Accord of 1985 has ensured that the aspirations of the people have not died out, the issue of illegal migrants has not been solved, and the exploitation of the state’s natural resources remains unabated. And if a settlement indeed is reached with the ULFA, it would be interesting to see whether it goes beyond the 1985 accord.
Other technicalities remain unresolved. The Indian government has still not lifted the ban on ULFA. Sooner or later it will have to; the government cannot possibly reach a negotiated settlement with an outlawed organisation. The reason for this could be that hardliners led by Commander-in-Chief Paresh Baruah are against the ongoing talks. Baruah may have only 200-odd cadres left with him holed out in Myanmar, and he may also an eroded credibility to nurse, yet he remains a leader who will be seen as a person who did not compromise on sovereignty.
Baruah has little public support left, and lesser resources in its arsenal– both firepower and manpower. If anything, his ULFA faction has only nuisance value, and the only thing he can claim would be a moral high ground. Baruah has described the peace parleys as a “sellout at gunpoint”. He has a point there because the ULFA leaders who have come overground have no other option but to talk within the framework of the Indian constitution.
The All-Assam Students Union (AASU), which had spearheaded the Assam Movement, is unlikely to play a spoilsport. The union is no more the force that it once was, and those of its leaders who went on to form the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) stand electorally marginalised. There is a political vacuum that needs to be filled in. If the group that’s to talk with the Indian government rises up to the occasion, it can both do this and change the course of history too.
