Aditi Phadnis: Mollycoddling militants

PLAIN POLITICS

Look at the recent Assam Police records of encounters and killings and you'll make a strange discovery. During the period when the Assam Gana Parishad (AGP) government was in power, the Assam police used to report nearly 30 to 40 encounters a month.

Militants based in Assam from the Kamtapuri Liberation Organisation (KLO) were wiped out altogether and hardly any traces of this organisation exist any more as a result of the Assam police's exertions.

Because of their vast network, the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) could not be uprooted completely but they were under so much pressure that they had to run out of Assam and find shelter in nearby countries that had open borders with India like Bhutan, Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Then came 2001, when the Congress "" led by then PCC chief and MP Tarun Gogoi "" came to power. Soon after he was sworn in as chief minister, Gogoi made a public statement that encounters would be ended.

Shortly after, he abolished the post of Inspector General of Police (Operations) the man who used to carry out 'encounters'(it is another story that the person who held this post, G M Shrivastava, was so much in demand that the Government of Tripura snapped him up).

The Assam police, Gogoi told his supporters, had to get used to a more peacable state. In August this year the Assam police reported just three cases of encounters with militants.

So when a bomb blast ripped apart an Independence Day function on August 15 in Dhemaji and an explosion killed 10 people in the heart of HongKong Bazaar in Dimapur, Nagaland last week, no one knew what had happened, except top intelligence and police officials who just looked at each other and smiled.

It was the price India was paying for its democracy, they suggested. Whom does the Congress represent in Assam, the state that has consistently and always given India more than it has got ? A small incident tells the story.

Devakant Borooah was the only president of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) from Assam. He got this prize in 1975 for standing by Indira Gandhi's side when she needed him most during the revolt of Congress satraps that began in 1967.

Borooah resigned from the Assam legislative assembly in 1966 and contested the Vidhan Sabha elections again in 1967. Even then the Assamese were an angry lot and Borooah was subjected to much heckling as he sought votes both for himself and for Mrs Gandhi.

At one public meeting the booing got louder and louder. Irritated and stung, he said angrily to the crowd: "why are you shouting ? So long as I have the Ali, the Coolie and the Bangali with me, I don't need your votes".

Today, the Ali (the migrant Muslim), the coolie (the labourers in the tea gardens) and the Bangali (Hindu settlers from West Bengal and now, Bangladesh) continue to be the backbone of the Congress.

Because migrants were like an unceasing wave, all Congress chief ministers looked the other way and went on protecting their interest. In return this became and continues to be a powerful and potent vote bank.

Tarun Gogoi saw no reason to discontinue a winning formula. Like Mufti Mohammad Sayeed who won the J&K elections by telling voters (especially new voters) he was going to wipe away their tears by disbanding the Special Investigation Taskforce (SIT), Gogoi too made things easier for ULFA and NDFB by an offer of talks.

Should you talk to militants when they are under pressure and anxious to put down arms for that reason, or when you sense they have become soft and lost their fighting edge? The judgement is a political one. Gogoi chose the soft option. The results are there to see.

In 2003, the NDA government, alarmed at the gains militants in Assam appeared to be making, sought the Bhutanese government's cooperation in destroying militant camps.

The Bhutanese lost a lot of men in the campaign but managed to drive away ULFA and NDFB. A number of these militants went to Bangladesh but many returned to Assam.

The chief minister had said, after all, that he was going to talk to them, hadn't he? Intelligence sources say the groups rearranged themselves, re-armed themselves and, taking advantage of the slowdown in police activity, struck. The August 15 incident was the beginning. More will follow, they say.

Assam is once again on the edge, this time more than ever. The Prafulla Mahanta government had made a mess of the state's finance and kept coming to Delhi, cap in hand, for more money. But law and order was not an issue.

It was during the AGP's tenure that the Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunal Act (IMDT) was sought to be scrapped and replaced by a stronger law because, as the then Governor, Gen S K Sinha, wrote to President K R Narayanan, the influx of illegal migrants was turning the lower Assam districts into a Muslim-majority region and it "was only a matter of time when a demand for their merger with Bangladesh may be made".

The UPA, in the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) says nothing about the IMDT. Its leaders say it is just a source of harassment of minorities.

With votebank politics at its naked best in Assam, it will be interesting to see how Tarun Gogoi gets on with Home Minister Shivraj Patil, whose task "" it is generally supposed "" is to quell insurgency and make sure those who break the law get no clemency.

Intelligence sources says Paresh Barua and Arabinda Rajkhowa, two of the most important leaders of the militant movement in Assam, are entrepreneurs in Bangladesh who own assets such as land and hotels.

It is entirely conceivable that taking advantage of the chief minister's offer, they hold talks with the Indian government.

When Atal Bihari Vajpayee was prime minister and a proposal was made to set up a unified command for the north east, Gogoi was one of the chief ministers who opposed the proposal vehemently.

He said he did not want to be saddled with a set-up that the BJP controlled. But in the context of the cocktail of insurgency, money and ethnicity in Assam that passes for politics in the state, Gogoi's motives might have been different. Migration into Assam is unlikely to cease "" not while Tarun Gogoi is chief minister.