ARE the K.P.S. Gill tactics of setting a group of militants against their colleagues employed to curb Punjab militancy being replicated in Assam? That's the question uppermost in most people's mind in the state for the past couple of months that have seen a spurt in fratricidal clashes between the militants of the banned United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and their erstwhile colleagues, collectively known as SULFA (for surrendered ULFA).
At least 25 militants and their former colleagues have fallen to one another's bullets in the past two months. And most people hold a new tactic employed by the authorities for this rise in killings. Although the state government and the Unified command, under which the army, paramilitary and the police forces are working in tandem, deny extending any help to the SULFA, the ULFA leadership sees a definite design in the new tactics. It says the government is allowing the surrendered militants to go after "our cadres."
In most cases though, the identity of the killers has remained a mystery, prompting the Opposition Congress to charge the Prafulla Kumar Mahanta government with having let loose a gang of "secret killers". "The AGP government has shown a total indifference towards the secret killings. We apprehend that these killers may make even political opponents of the ruling party a target," says Silvious Condo-pan, leader of the Opposition in the assembly. He also criticised the Centre for turning a blind eye to the incidents. "Both the PM and the home minister have said that the law and order situation is satisfactory. They are obviously ignoring ground realities."
Intelligence sources, however, read the situation a little differently. They feel that the authorities are only following a classic counter-insurgency tactic by helping one faction strike against their opponents. "The clash between ULFA and SULFA is of their own making. The police and the army are taking advantage of the situation which is but natural," a retired counter-insurgency expert points out. The term SULFA first emerged in the collective lexicon of Assam in 1992 when the outfit split and many of its top leaders, including a self-styled deputy commander-in-chief, a self-styled "foreign secretary," and the chief of its publicity wing, led 3,000-odd cadres overground.
The roots of the current clash between the two groups can, however, be traced to August 10, 1998. That day, a prominent Dibrugarh businessman and a SULFA activist Tapan Dutta was gunned down in the heart of Guwahati. He was accused by the ULFA of having misappropriated a huge amount of the outfit's funds. His killings triggered a fratricidal war with SULFA members targeting family members of top ULFA leaders such as chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa and publicity chief Mithinga Daimary. Rajkhowa's elder brother and five members of Daimary's closest family were also gunned down in August. Since then, there has been a spate of killings all over the state.
On December 3, another prominent SULFA leader Diganta Barua and two of his bodyguards were killed in Guwahati in a well-planned operation. Whether Barua's killing was linked to the slaying of key ULFA hitman Alok Goswami, who was killed in southern Assam's Silchar town a fortnight earlier, is not known. Before Goswami was killed, a prominent surrendered member, Rishiraj Sinha, fell to ULFA bullets, again in Guwahati. Sinha, at one time the outfit's assistant general secretary, had come out of
the ULFA and was critical of its top leadership for having gone astray from the original path. More crucially, Sinha had played a vital part in organising the surrender of 190-odd ULFA cadres this year. The ULFA has also suffered in the bargain. On December 8, the commander of one of its battalions was killed in an encounter near Guwahati.
Alarmed by the increasing attacks, the surrendered militants have of late pooled forces again. In a significant move, at least 400 former ULFA rebels recently met in upper Assam's Sibsagar district under a former territory commander and decided to take on the ULFA. "We are not afraid of traitors like Rajkhowa," they said in a statement. The battlelines are drawn between these two groups. The state government and the army, surely happy that the two groups are killing each other off, is in no mood to put an end to it. In the process, as a concerned elder put it, "a lot of our young boys are being killed unnecessarily".
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