Intelligence

Seven states of rebellion

TheStar.com - Seven states of rebellion

Nearly 60 years after independence, India faces bloody insurgencies on its eastern and northern borders.

MARTIN REGG COHN
ASIA BUREAU

GUWAHATI, India — Dealers at the Fancy Bazaar bargain over the best blends of Assam tea, oblivious to monsoon rains.

But when the bombs go off, all bets are off. The merchants shut their eyes and shutter their shops.

By the time security forces rushed to the scene of a bomb blast here last month, the shopkeepers claimed to have seen nothing. In strife-torn Assam state, being a police witness to deadly attacks is no way to stay alive.

Opening a burlap sack of the finest blend, Kailash Sharma insists he wasn't around when separatist insurgents planted bombs outside his teashop.

Nor was he alarmed by the blast — the latest in a series of daring strikes that have left more than 80 dead here in the past six months.

"The rebels need to make their presence felt," he shrugs, carefully sorting the fragrant tea grains on his counter. "It's part of our daily life."

This remote, rain-soaked Indian hill state has been a battleground between guerrillas and the security services for nearly 25 years.

The fighting has left more than 10,000 people dead, the economy on life support and the tea industry withering.

Assam's strife is hardly an isolated case. Nearly six decades after independence, New Delhi is still struggling to wipe out perennial rebellions along its border regions.

Groups like the National Democratic Front of Bodoland, the Kuki Revolutionary Army, the Hynniewtrep International Liberation Council and the People's War Group see India as the enemy.

More than 30 rebel armies hiding out in five tribal states along India's northeastern fringe — sandwiched between Bangladesh and Burma — still bitterly resist central rule.

Alongside Assam, Nagaland's former headhunters have been at war with the country since India attained independence in 1947, in the subcontinent's longest-running insurgency.

With more than 25,000 lives lost, a temporary truce is in effect, but the rebel leadership threatened against last month to resume fighting unless its goal of a Greater Nagaland is granted.

Fighters in Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura states are also at war.

Maoist Naxalite rebels in Andhra Pradesh, along India's east coast, are waging ideological warfare and a peasant-style rebellion against Hyderabad, the high-tech state capital that is home to India's software giants, leaving more than 6,000 dead over the past 30 years.

Islamist militants in the disputed Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir have been fighting since 1989 to break free from predominantly Hindu India, leaving an estimated 80,000 dead and prompting border conflicts with neighbouring Pakistan in the northwest. Analysts blame cross-border infiltration from Pakistan, which has provided logistical support for Islamist fighters since the early 1990s.

In sharp contrast to these entrenched conflicts, the western state of Punjab — where Sikh separatists waged a vicious decade-long war in the early 1980s that left 17,000 dead — is now at peace.

Canadians were reminded of Punjab's turmoil last month when a Vancouver court acquitted two Sikh-Canadians of plotting the bombing of an Air India flight in 1985 that left all 329 passengers and crew dead.

Punjab remains the only success story among the festering conflicts plaguing the Indian federation, made up of dozens of major linguistic and ethnic groups sprawled across the subcontinent.

Through a combination of tough — sometimes brutal — policing and superior intelligence-gathering, Punjab's local government achieved what other embattled states have so far failed to do.

"We have been arguing for a long time that India should be following the Punjab model in Kashmir and the northeast," says security analyst Suba Chandran of New Delhi's Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

"Unfortunately, we never learned the lessons of the Punjab, which was a great success story."

Regional alienation is hardly surprising in a country of 1 billion people covering a huge landmass. The violence stems from a combination of ethnic resentment, police brutality, local corruption and incompetent politicians.

"It has to do with the heterogeneous nature of society and the failure of local government," Chandran argues.

Political scientist Harish Puri, who has researched separatist movements across India and as far away as Quebec, says people felt exploited by a central government that extracted their resources but neglected their needs.

"The average Assamese always felt that the rest of India totally ignored them, so when the fighters gave hell to the government, there was a vicarious satisfaction," says Puri.

Over time, grassroots support for separatist violence across India has declined as battle fatigue set in. Yet despite their declining popularity, the rebels have become deeply entrenched in Assam, thanks to strong cash flow from extortion and corruption.

"They have lost legitimacy; they're in the business of trading arms and drugs," says Puri. "It's part of an industry, and they have links with the police and the bureaucracy."

Running a rebellion is a big business. Equipping the rebels — and enriching the movement — requires a well-organized system of "taxation" by intimidation. Tea traders and plantation owners are among the biggest targets for extortion tactics.

Anil Jain, a merchant in the colonial-era Fancy Bazaar that was bombed last month, describes how a climate of fear has paralyzed the state capital and stunted economic development over the past 20 years.

Rebels fight the government in

the northeast states of Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura, as do Maoist Naxalites in Andhra Pradesh and Islamist militants in the disputed Himalayan

state of Jammu and Kashmir
"All of Assam is paying a price, in fact the entire northeast," he complains.

Jain was expected to make his own contribution to rebels from the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), who assessed him with a so-called "demand note."

When he refused to remit, the rebels sent an envoy who led him away on a scooter for a month-long interrogation that almost cost him his life after a death warrant was issued.

As a prominent merchant, Jain had enough connections to survive. But not everyone is so lucky in encounters with hardened insurgents hungry for cash flow.

As one of Assam's most successful tea brokers, Kamal Das travels to various plantations tasting the best teas and hearing the worst stories.

For plantation managers who must survive in isolated locations, acquiescing to rebel extortion has become a way of buying peace and a cost of doing business.

"No one wants to have a confrontation that stops their business, because if they don't pay, they could be abducted," Das says.

So-called taxation collected by the rebels ranges from $40,000 to $275,000 a year for the bigger plantations, subject to negotiation.

"They forward a demand note and thereafter you negotiate a settlement," Das explains, sipping a cup of tea made from fresh leaves he has just brought in from a plantation visit.

"Then, they add this to the cost of production."

During his years in the jungles of the northeast hinterland and neighbouring Burma, former rebel leader Sunil Nath came to count on extortion cash flow to fund his operating budget in the propaganda department.

"You need funds because it's a parallel organization," he says.

After years in jail, Nath swore off his rebel ways. But he says Assam's indigenous peoples feel hemmed in by the uncontrolled influx of Muslim migrants from nearby Bangladesh, which exacerbates unemployment.

"The boys think that India is an empire run out of New Delhi, and Assam is a colony," says Nath. "They are willing to give up their lives for the cause and believe the next generation will carry on the revolt."

Nath, however, says his time in jail convinced him that the fight against India was futile and that ULFA had lost its way.

More instability creates greater poverty, he says, and sympathy has been replaced by fear.

"People have lost faith in ULFA's capacity to succeed in the fight."

An attack in August that killed 15 people — including many schoolchildren — outraged the public. More bombs rained down on Assam and Nagaland in October, leaving 80 dead.

"Sorry to sound pessimistic, but I don't foresee any positive developments," says Nath. "It's too difficult for the military to eliminate them."

Assam's recently retired police chief, Harekrishna Deka, agrees that "the rebels are well entrenched ... their back is not broken."

The insurgents are motivated by a sense that "the country was decolonized at independence, but it was followed by a new form of colonization by the Indian heartland," says Deka, a former intelligence chief.

"Even now, they can do a lot of mischief, with the potential to harass the security forces and the government."

Indeed, just days after Deka retired from the force, rebels planted bombs at the state capital's parade grounds, where the chief minister was reviewing an honour guard. The politicians and police fled in a panic. The security services are more accustomed to dishing it out than dodging bombs.

Deka acknowledges that there were widespread concerns about police tactics before he took over the force in 2000.

"They call it `secret killings.' It was (alleged) before me, but I didn't feel it could deliver the goods," he says.

Defence lawyer Bashkar Dev Konwar says widespread human rights violations have driven more young people into rebel camps.

"The term we use is `administrative liquidation,' and it's a form of state terror to repress another form of terror," says Konwar, pulling out a sheaf of files listing the dozens of people who died in police custody from beatings or torture, or during staged "encounters" with army commandos in civilian clothes.

"It's as if the state machinery is above the law."

But India's new army chief — Gen. Joginder Jaswant Singh, himself a Sikh from the Punjab — promised earlier this year to try a softer style.

"Kashmir, Assam and Manipur are an integral part of India, so our approach has to be different here: winning hearts and minds," he said.

"It's an over-1 million-strong army facing challenges in every corner of the country."

From end to end, with no end in sight.

April 10, 2005 at 01:14 PM in Far East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home