GUWAHATI, Sept 24: India formally called off a ceasefire on Sunday with a dominant separatist group in the restive north-eastern state of Assam and resumed military operations after renewed attacks by the rebels.
The army rushed troops to suspected strongholds of the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) in oil and timber-rich Assam following the ceasefire’s expiry.
“We are moving troops to Tinsukia, Jorhat Nagaon, Barpeta and Darrang to prevent the ULFA from re-grouping,” a top army commander said in New Delhi.
“Operations have begun and we are going after the ULFA cadres who were responsible for killing or abducting tea garden officials,” he said after the home ministry announced the end of the one-month ceasefire.
Combat troops attacked heavily armed suspected guerrillas and shot dead a wanted top ULFA guerrilla at Mamoroni village in the easternmost Tinsukia district, military officials said in Assam’s main city of Guwahati.
“Gunbattles are on at Mamorani and the nearby Pengeri area,” one official said, adding that soldiers were searching for militant hideouts in Guwahati.
Two attacks at the weekend have been attributed to the ULFA which had announced a “cessation of hostilities” early this month in response to the government ceasefire that has since lapsed.
Although the ceasefire expired last week, Delhi had not announced a resumption in anti-insurgency operations. Instead on Friday it asked rebels to commit in writing to peace talks as a condition for renewing the truce.
But the militants, who have been fighting for an independent homeland in Assam, have said they cannot give such a pledge until five jailed rebel leaders are freed.
State police said the rebels killed two people at the weekend. A tea plantation manager in Tinsukia was gunned down late Saturday, a local official said.
“Two ULFA militants came on a motorcycle and asked the manager to come out of his residence and then pumped four bullets from close range,” district official Absar Hazarika said.
Police believe the manager was killed for refusing to pay the rebels one million rupees (22,000 dollars).
“The garden management refused to pay the money and probably that was the reason why the manager was killed,” said a senior police official who asked not to be named. “He was told to pay the extortion money or face death.”
Rebels have in the last month demanded sums of one million to 15 million rupees from many of Assam’s 800 or so tea plantations, security officials said.
A policeman investigating one of the extortion demands was shot dead on Friday.
The murders and the aggressive extortion drive have cast a cloud over Assam’s tea industry, which produces more than half India’s annual output.
Rebel groups in Assam depend on money extorted from tea, oil and other businesses to purchase weapons for their campaign against security forces.
In January, the state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corporation received a demand from ULFA for five billion rupees but refused to pay.
At least 30 rebel armies operate in northeast India with demands ranging from greater autonomy to secession in conflicts that have left more than 50,000 people dead since independence from Britain in 1947. —AFP
