NEW DELHI, 14 December 2004 — The most powerful underground group in India’s volatile northeast has rejected Prime Minister Manmohan Manmohan’s offer of peace talks, saying it could not accept a pre-condition to give up violence.
Manmohan on a tour of oil and tea-rich state of Assam last month said New Delhi was ready to hold talks with United Liberation Front of Assam and urged the rebels to shun the path of violence that has killed thousands over the past quarter-century.
But ULFA chief Paresh Barua, fighting for independence of Assam state since 1979, said in a statement late on Thursday that Manmohan had reneged on a promise to hold unconditional talks.
Barua, referring to a letter written by Manmohan’s office to Assamese writer and mediator Indira Goswami accepting her offer to mediate with the ULFA, said the government’s stand was contradictory and confusing.
“The prime minister’s letter on one hand said there will not be any precondition for talks, but on the other hand the letter says the prime minister will talk with the groups willing to abjure violence, which itself is a precondition,” Barua said.
“Under the circumstances, it is simply not possible for the ULFA to proceed further,” he said in statement e-mailed to reporters in Assam’s largest city Guwahati. The ULFA and dozens of other insurgent groups, some fighting for secession and others for greater autonomy, accuse the federal government of plundering the region’s resources of oil and timber and neglecting the local economy.
The mountainous northeast, bordered by Myanmar, China, Bangladesh is home to hundreds of ethnic tribes, who have more in common with the neighboring nations than mainland India. Manmohan this week met exiled leaders of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isac-Muivah), the oldest rebel movement in the northeast, and both sides said they would try to end the decades-old insurgency in the state of Nagaland.
