ULFA women cadres flay lifestyle of top brass

THE captured ULFA women cadres, recently handed over by the Royal Bhutanese Army to the Indian authorities, criticised the outfit’s top leaders for leading luxurious lives while they suffered cold and hunger in camps. “The top (ULFA) leaders don’t think about us in the camps .. under what conditions we were living. They are leading luxurious lives making us suffer in the camps,’’ Rupali Thakuria, one of the 37 captured women cadres said.

“Severe cold conditions prevail in Bhutan now. But our leaders don’t bother to give us any woollens. There are no blankets even for our children in the camp. It breaks our hearts to see our children suffer in such conditions in the camps,’’ she said. ‘’We will never go back to our Bhutan camps to suffer there,’’ she added.

“We have come here because the conditions in our camps inside the dense jungles of Bhutan are very bad. There is shortage of food and warm clothes in the camps,’’ Rupali said. Rupali, who is in her late 20s said, ‘’Good that we have come back to our own state. We had no electricity there and no school for our children. There was no stability in our lives there and we were in a constant state of flux moving from camp to camp with our children on foot,’’ she said. ‘’What will be our children’s future in the jungles,’’ Rupali asked.

Similar sentiments were expressed by the other women cadres. They said they would persuade their husbands to desert ULFA and return to mainstream. The 37 women cadres, brought to Tamulpur from Bhutan camps on December 24, were later remanded to 48-hour police custody by Nalbari Chief Judicial Magistrate. The 27 children, accompanying them, were either allowed to remain with their mothers or sent to their relatives.

NDFB still chasing an utopian dream: ex-leader

Even though the Royal Bhutanese Army’s (RBA) offensive against the ULFA, NDFB and KLO in Bhutan dealt a bloody blow to the Bodo outfit with large number of its cadres getting killed and several others surrendering, the outfit is still sticking to its demand of a ’’sovereign Boroland’’. Dreaded NDFB militant N Orkhi alias Abhinash Narzary (33), who surrendered before the district administration recently, said that the NDFB has not still softened its stand on the sovereignty issue. 

He said, ‘’The sovereignty is a vague issue and it is against the interest of the Bodos.’’ Orkhi, who joined the NDFB way back in 1993, informed that a high-level delegation of the NDFB led by ’captain’ B Fwjoukhang alias B Priyananda, met the Bhutanese PM at Thimphu regarding the winding up of the rebel camps in Bhutan before the RBA offensive against the outfit. ‘’However, the outcome of the talks were not conveyed to the lower-level cadres by its top guns,’’ he said.

Recalling his days with the outfit, the NDFB leader said, to strengthen their coffers, he along with some of his associates, were collecting tax and trying to abduct some businessmen from lower Assam for ransom. Orkhi was involved in a fierce encounter with the security forces at Singhimari where five CRPF personnel were killed.  He said he had met the NDFB supremo D R Nabla alias Ranjan Daimary only once a couple of years ago.

The surrendered militant further informed that nearly 400 arms including LMG, HMG, M-16, snifer, rocket launcher, RPG, mortars, high explosive bombs and grenades were available in the 2nd battalion headquarters of the outfit.

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