September 24, 2003	Wednesday	Rajab 26, 1424

GUWAHATI: At 21, Sunil Nath was an idealistic rebel fighting Indian troops. Twenty years later he has become a businessman disillusioned with a cause he feels has become corrupt yet still waiting for a peace that may never come.

Nath offers a rare and frank insight into the minds of the men who joined dozens of separatist insurgencies in India’s troubled north-east, but who appear no closer either to victory or settlement with the government.

Today, he has business interests ranging from coal to construction, a taste for whisky and a passion for the film “Braveheart” on Scots independence warrior William Wallace.

Nath says he was a romantic when he joined the underground United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) fighting what he saw as unjust Indian rule.

In the late 1980s he went to a rebel military training camp in neighbouring Myanmar before returning to a life on the run in the state of Assam.

“We never used to sleep in the same place for two days. If we had dinner in one place, after dinner we would move to another village more than 10 km (six miles) away,” he said in an interview in Assam’s main city, Guwahati.

ULFA gradually developed into a full-fledged parallel government, collecting taxes and enforcing laws.

“Say a girl is raped. Police don’t do anything. What we do is we hold a people’s court and if the verdict is death, our boys carry it out,” Nath said.

In the early days the militants won the loyalty of the people with such actions, and tried hard to keep it.

But over time those running the parallel governments became corrupted by power, interested only in currying favour with the senior leadership, says Nath, who left the movement in 1992.

“Our boys started becoming like government officials,” he said. And many would have too much to lose now to be interested in peace talks.

“It is a stalemate. The stalemate was reached 10 years ago.”

It is a pattern repeated in different variations across the northeast, which comprises seven states nearly encircled by Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and China.

Joined to “mainland India” by a strip of land only 32 km wide, the area has spawned underground groups fighting both Indian rule and each other, who hide out in the jungles and across the open borders with Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Many started with idealistic dreams of carving out greater autonomy from India but over the years drifted into extortion, gun-running, kidnapping and even heroin trafficking.

“Insurgency was originally sold as the cure for the ills of the northeast. Today the cure is worse than the disease,” says Paul Lyngdoh, Minister for Sports and Youth Affairs in the northeastern state of Meghalaya.

“When a movement loses its idealism, it becomes as bad as the mafia,” he says. “In most cases, these outfits have lost their idealism.”

Rich in oil and a potential tourist paradise, the region is an important strategic bulwark.

But its people, many of them from tribes which wandered in from east Asia many centuries ago, often seem very different from “mainlanders”.—Reuters