Ulfa rising, act swiftly

The terrorists of a faction of the United Liberation Front of Asom (Ulfa), which earlier this month lined up and shot dead Bengali speakers on the banks of the Brahmputra in Assam, abducted a tea estate supervisor for ransom in Arunachal Pradesh on Monday, leaving little room for doubt that the extremist outfit, which thrives on Assamese sub-nationalism, is trying to get back into the limelight after spending several years, if not decades, on the margins. The BJP establishment has consciously promoted policies that excavate existing faultlines along religion and language, roiling Assam once again after the horrific period in the early 1980s in which death and destruction had become an everyday occurrence, most tragically seen at Nellie.

If the Supreme Court-monitored exercise to activate the National Register of Citizens is really meant to single out Muslim Bengali speakers as “infiltrators” (from erstwhile East Bengal or Bangladesh), although some Bengali Hindus have also found themselves trapped in the net of having to prove their Indian-ness, the real purport of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016 is to settle Bengali-speaking Hindus as “refugees” in Assam, while punishing Muslims. Together, these measures have come as a godsend to extremist sentiment across Assam, and in the wider Northeast. In an official communication recently, a senior Assam police officer, the special DGP (special branch), has cautioned that the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill is creating conditions for the resumption of Ulfa activity, that thrives on anti-Bengali sentiment being whipped up. Guwahati or New Delhi must pay attention to this, and take urgent action.