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Awami League in Bangladesh following the December 2008 parlia-
ment elections, are far more limited than Mao s ever was. Even
far more limited than the men who liberated Bangladesh and East
Timor. The Bangladesh government has now issued a look-out notice
for Paresh Barua, implicating him in the April 2004 Chittagong
arms haul case, and blaming him in the redrafted charge sheet as the
intended recipient of the huge cache of weapons that were seized by
Bangladesh police at Chittagong port. Demoralized by the change
of guard in Bangladesh, more and more ULFA guerillas are surren-
dering. With the Burmese army launching periodic attacks against
the NSCN(Khaplang) bases in upper Burma, which the ULFA has
been sharing, Barua will find it difficult to organize a safe neighbour-
hood sanctuary. With Bhutan gone, the Burmese bases under attack
and the new regime in Bangladesh determined to punish the ULFA for
their alleged bias towards the political rivals of the Awami League,
Paresh Barua has only one hope Chinese support. He has told this
author that the Chinese are upset with India s growing strategic
relationship with the United States and he sounds optimistic of
securing Chinese backing. But that does not seem to be happening
immediately and Barua s only real option lies in opening a dialogue
with India, even if it is for limited purposes to seek a breather.
Going by available indications, the Indian intelligence agencies
will continue to make efforts to lure Paresh Barua out of his lair in
Dhaka for talks and on their terms. If they fail, they will try to
attack him and try open negotiations with Chairman Arabinda
Rajkhowa and other moderates, even as the security forces deployed
in Assam attack locally deployed rebel units, encouraging them to
surrender or face liquidation. Paresh Barua, for his part, is known to
be watching closely the negotiations between Delhi and the NSCN.
A breakthrough in Nagaland may encourage him to come forward
for negotiations, but for any change of line, he would have to look
sideways to ensure the absence of dissent within his own group.
Insurgency, Ethnic Cleansing and Forced Migration 125
Unlike the ULFA, the National Democratic Front of Bodoland
(NDFB) has already started negotiations with Delhi after suffering
huge reverses in Bhutan during Operation All Clear . Much younger
than the ULFA, the NDFB (originally Bodo Security Force) grew out
of the Bodo movement for a separate state. In 1987, the All Bodo
Students Union (ABSU) and the Bodo Peoples Action Committee
(BPAC) began their agitation for a separate Bodo state carved out of
Assam. From the very beginning, the Bodo movement was marked
by extensive violence. For the fi rst time, armed Bodos used terror
tactics, such as blowing up of buses and trains. The Bodo Volunteer
Force (BVF), which maintained close links with the ABSU BPAC
combine but operated on its own, was behind the violence. The AGP
government, pushed on the back foot by the Bodo agitation demand-
ing that Assam be divided fifty-fifty , resorted to heavy-handed police
operations to quell its pitch. State repression provoked the Bodos to
more violence. They controlled the gateway to the North East and
terror attacks on the region s road and rail networks gave the Bodos a
clout much in excess to their numerical strength and resources.
After Assam came under president s rule, intense behind-the-scenes
negotiations with the ABSU BPAC leaders started. With the Con-
gress back in power, Indian minister Rajesh Pilot piloted an agree-
ment in 1993 with the ABSU BPAC combine that promised a
territorial council for the Bodos in western and central Assam. Chief
Minister Saikia felt slighted because the deal was struck behind
his back. He made sure it did not work. The Assam government
refused to hand over thousands of villages that would fall into the
agreed boundary of the Bodoland Territorial Council. The impasse
on the council s boundary torpedoed its future. Saikia got one of
his favourites in the Bodo movement to head the Territorial Council
on an interim basis, but the body never went through elections and
failed to find an institutional footing.
As the ABSU BPAC combine stood discredited with a kingdom
which had no boundaries , the NDFB emerged from the shadows
to intensify its armed insurgent movement. Besides taking a leaf
out of the ULFA s book by using systematic extortion of the tea
industry and other businesses in the Bodo area, shifting major bases
to Bhutan and resorting to select assassination of rivals within the
community the NDFB also went about its programme of ethnic
126 Troubled Periphery
cleansing. The Assam government was refusing to give the proposed
Bodoland Territorial Council possession of 2,570 villages because it
claimed there Bodos were less than 50 per cent of their population.
In order to create a Bodo majority in areas lacking one, the NDFB
unleashed a violent campaign, targeting one non-Bodo community
after another. The worst of these campaigns led to the death of
hundreds of Adivasis (descendants of the Santhal, Munda and Oraon
tribesmen brought to Assam from central India by the British) dur-
ing the 1996 elections.
The Adivasis soon set up their own militant group, Cobra Force,
to fight back the NDFB and it also found a challenger within the
Bodo community itself. The remnants of the old BVF had organized
themselves into the Bodoland Liberation Tigers Force (BLTF) on the
demand of a separate Bodo state. The BLTF, which was backed by
the ABSU BPAC combine, endorsed an autonomist agenda because
it found the NDFB s secessionist agenda far too unrealistic and
unattainable . The BLTF also teamed up with groups like the Bengal
Tigers, formed to defend the Bengalis attacked by the Bodos, to fight
the NDFB. So while the ULFA, though much weakened, has never
had a rival in the ethnic Assamese community to challenge its primacy
in the underground, the NDFB is locked in a fierce fratricidal feud
with the BLTF elements who have surrendered after the 2003 accord
but then organized themselves into a political party, Bodoland Peo-
ple s Progressive Front (BPPF).
The BPPF led by the former BLTF veterans not only control the
Bodoland Territorial Council that was set up under terms of the 2003
BLTF Centre accord but its support is crucial for the survival of
Tarun Gogoi s Congress-led coalition government in Dispur. Rarely
has a Bodo political group controlled its own homeland area so
strongly and has simultaneously had so much influence in a state gov-
ernment in Assam. That gives the BPPF leader Hangrama Mohilary
an unusually dominant position amongst the Bodos and he appears
to be in no mood to share his preserve with a NDFB that s much
weakened after the reverses suffered in Bhutan. That the BLTF was
used by Indian security forces against the NDFB is now an open
secret and that its former guerrillas, now with the BPPF, retain much
of their pre-accord arsenal is clear from the gun battles it is fighting
with the NDFB. But the BPPF is now split and Mohilary and his
Insurgency, Ethnic Cleansing and Forced Migration 127
colleagues are smeared by allegation of large-scale corruption. The
one-time feared bomber, known within his underground group by the
pseudonym of Thebla, is reported to have spent millions of rupees on
his marriage in 2008 and when Assam s leading newspaper Asomiya
Protidin reported it in some detail, Mohilary s supporters banned
the entry of the daily in areas under the Bodoland Council and burnt
down copies of it to enforce their diktat.
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