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Heart of the matter
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=14&theme=&usrsess=1&id=131710
By DN Bezboruah
The year-old peace initiative to get the United Liberation Front of Asom (Ulfa) to the negotiating table has gone up in smoke.
After several recent developments, the Centre called off the ceasefire on Sunday. Political analysts will now get down to chronological details of who did what and when, to fix responsibility for the breakdown of talks that were to take place.
But not many will accept the fact that the real casualty has been peace and progress for the people of Assam. Indeed, there are many who are both astonished and saddened by the fact that the ambience for the talks that had been created with such care over the last year should have come to nought in just a matter of weeks.
But many others have just a sense of deja vu about the unfortunate failure of the talks. And there are others who did not want any talks to take place. But they are all pretending that they are terribly disappointed. What makes the latest peace effort different from the ones that have gone before is that this time an eminent Assamese writer and academic, Dr Indira Goswami (better known in Assam as Mamoni Raisom Goswami) had undertaken the onerous task of getting the Ulfa leaders to sit down for negotiations with the Centre. She was far from the world of politics and lacked the political acumen needed for such a task.
But she made up for this by her sincerity of purpose. As a first step, the Ulfa handpicked the People's Consultative Group (PCG) that was to pave the way for direct talks between the government and the Ulfa. The PCG had two rounds of talks with the Centre, and things seemed to be moving well for direct talks with the Ulfa. The present deadlock arose from the fact that this time the Centre wanted some guarantees from the Ulfa that the leaders would not change their minds at the last minute on one pretext or the other.
So, the Centre insisted on a letter from the Ulfa, stating that it wanted direct talks with the Centre. The Ulfa had two objections to issuing such a letter. First, it said it was against the spirit of the Ulfa constitution to put on record that it was willing to sit for talks with the Centre.
Second, the matter would have to be cleared by Ulfa's executive body. But the Ulfa executive committee did not even have a quorum for the meeting, since five of its top leaders were in jail.
So the Ulfa leaders kept insisting that there could be no talks until the five Ulfa leaders in prison were released. And the Centre kept insisting that they could be released only when the Ulfa sent that all-important letter. At one point, the Ulfa just stopped talking about the letter. The Centre remained insistent that it would not budge without that letter. We are not aware that the Centre had insisted on such letters from the Mizo National Front (MNF) many years ago or from the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah faction) in recent years. There were other tokens of double standards also in respect of the Ulfa.
The Centre did not agree to the Ulfa's original demand that the talks should be held outside India, though it did concede this demand in the case of the NSCN (I-M) and the MNF. Besides, the ceasefires with the Ulfa have been brief affairs compared to the NSCN. But this has been an unavoidable departure from the norms adopted with other insurgent groups because the Ulfa has generally used such ceasefires to attack soft targets or to carry out acts of sabotage. The Centre had agreed to suspend counter-insurgency measures during this build-up to the talks with the Ulfa leaders.
The ceasefire had been extended several times, obviously in the hope that there would be a speedier farewell to arms by the Ulfa. But nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, and as in the past, Ulfa took advantage of the ceasefire to kill a policeman and a tea garden manager.
Both were shot at point- blank range ~ the policeman, last Friday, for being on a team investigating an Ulfa extortion demand of Rs 30 lakh from a tea garden manager, and another tea garden manager for not heeding an extortion demand for a million rupees. The Centre made it clear that in the context of the Ulfa refusing to send the letter demanded by it and becoming active again, there could be no question of either talks or a ceasefire extension. The Centre believes that the counter-insurgency measures against the Ulfa would have to be resumed right away.
It is unfortunate that the year-long initiatives of Mamoni Raisom Goswami and the PCG should have failed in this way, partly due to the intransigence of the Ulfa and partly due to the Centre choosing to take a hard line, though it has not done so in the case of the NSCN. Yet, the Centre feels that Ulfa has lost its sense of direction, its sense of purpose and much of the support of the people.
What is worse for most people in Assam, is that Ulfa now appears to be under the control of the ISI of Pakistan. Ulfa's ISI connection has never gone down well even with its supporters. Besides, even if the talks had got started, they would have got bogged down over the sovereignty issue. It is one thing for the Centre to bring up the issue just as a talking point, but it is too much to expect it to preside over the liquidation of the Indian Union.
On Sunday, the Centre's act of terminating the ceasefire with Ulfa provoked the outfit to issue a threat that all Indians who live in Assam but do not belong to the state, must henceforth pay monthly "taxes" that "outsiders" have long been required to pay in Nagaland and Manipur.
Even government officers have to pay up, but you can't catch any one admitting it. It now remains to be seen whether the Assam government can prevent such taxes from being collected, or whether it will be as ineffective in preventing something that will erode the government's authority. All this brings us to the heart of the matter. I had said at the beginning that there were people who did not want the talks to take place. This is because many people in Assam have managed to turn insurgency into an industry in a state where there are no industries worth talking about.
This is an industry that siphons off easy money from the Centre's development grants. This is bound to happen if a colonial government at the Centre effectively blocks all real development in an entire region and yet pretends that it has poured billions of rupees into the region.
Who will tell the rest of India how little of this money, alleged to have been spent here, has remained in the state or the region instead of finding its way to the cow belt through suppliers of goods and services sold at extortionate rates.
Insurgency as an industry has become such a vested interest that its beneficiaries include politicians, bureaucrats, police officers, government employees, industrialists, traders and even student leaders. And no one wants to kill the goose that lays golden eggs. The armed forces have remained too long in Assam on the pretext of tackling insurgency. It is time they hurried up. It is also time they did without two draconian laws that enable them to kill civilians at will and stage fake encounters. Such fake encounters create more insurgents. The two laws are the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and the Disturbed Areas Act.
There are many more disturbed areas in India without such laws.
Finally, insurgency creates fence-sitters everywhere. It is normal human psychology for people to want to be on the winning side. When there is a crisis of leadership, and we have a government that fails to deliver on every count, people are in serious doubt about which is going to be the winning side.
That is when they start sitting on the fence, so that joining any winning side becomes an easy task. Any government that wishes to control insurgency must become the winning side through good governance ~ so that people can easily identify it and join it instead of sitting on fences.
(The author is the founder-editor of The Sentinel, Guwahati.) |
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