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Dealing with ULFA

Peace facilitators, individuals and groups, are once again getting active in Assam. The noted Assamese writer, Mamoni Raison Goswami, who suspended her exertions in the cause of forging peace between the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the Indian state, recently announced that she was resuming them. In this venture, she says she has the support of her “good friend,” M. Veerappa Moily, the AICC member in charge of Assam. There has been no corresponding comment from Mr. Moily. The two structures active for over two years in the same cause, the Peoples’ Consultative Group (PCG) and the People’s Committee for Peace Initiatives in Assam (PCPIA), have also bestirred themselves. The PCG, which withdrew from these efforts after holding three rounds of talks with the Central government, has now decided to “open channels of dialogue” with New Delhi. There are reports that the PCPIA may launch a “movement” to put pressure on the government to start negotiations with ULFA. Given the general perception, indeed the fact, that these efforts are being made with some sort of a clearance from ULFA, it looks as if the extremist organisation is having several tongs in the fire. The suspension and renewal of these facilitatory efforts clearly indicate that ULFA, which has come under intolerable pressure from the military and the State police and has been contained, wants to talk with the Central government — but on its own terms.

Herein lies the rub. In similar confrontations between the state and separatist structures in the Northeast region, although the state is committed irrevocably to its ‘territorial integrity’ and the separatist structure’s very raison d’etre is the challenge to and eventual destruction of such territorial integrity, there has always been an unspoken area where the two sides could meet and negotiate a mutually acceptable solution – asking for the moon and making do with sixpence, so to speak. Even the Naga insurgency, the oldest of its kind and in its rhetoric the most uncompromising, is moving in that direction. Unfortunately, such space has not until now been located in the case of ULFA. lf those who seek to play a good offices role genuinely want peace in Assam, they must strive earnestly and creatively to locate such a space and persuade ULFA of the honourableness of finding common ground rather than harp on claims that ‘Asom’ was never a part of India, and therefore its sovereignty is not negotiable. If this were so, what is there for the Indian state — irrespective of the political formation in office — to negotiate except its surrender and ceding a part of its territory? This is something that even the weakest of nation states does not do. It cannot be the argument of anyone in their right mind that India, for all its deficits and flaws, is a weak state.

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