That the ULFA is a part of the ISI’s designs to destabilise the North-Eastern region where it has developed an elaborate network for smuggling of arms, narcotics, explosives and counterfeit money is an established fact. Anjan Jyoti Gogoi, former assistant general secretary of the ULFA who was killed by the outfit last year, had admitted that the organisation was being aided and abetted by the ISI and other fundamentalist groups such as the ‘Jamat-e-Islami’. He had also alleged that the ULFA top brass had become so inured to their bohemian lifestyles funded by these organisations, that the outfit had become a slave to them.

Further proof of the ULFA’s nexus with the ISI has been revealed in the ongoing Kargil conflict, with the Army’s interception of phone calls being made by the outfit to ISI agents in Pakistan on the movement of troops from the region. In two separate press statements, Arbinda Rajkhowa exhorted all the Assamese Army personnel to refrain from taking part in the ‘war’ presently going on and alleged that Kashmir, like Assam, was never an integral part of India and that the Kashmiri people, like the Assamese people, had all along been protesting against the ‘illegal occupation by India’. He also described the present conflict in Kashmir as a ‘pre-election strategy of the Hindu communalist Government of Delhi’.

National Democratic Front of Boroland (NDFB) has also launched a tirade against India over Kargil issue. It has accused India of initiating war against the people of Kashmir and Pakistan and opined that both India and Pakistan should leave the Kashmiris alone and allow them to decide upon their own destiny. In a press release B. Erakdao publicity secretary of the outfit alleged that the war launched by India against Pakistan was a ‘criminal act’ not only against the Kashmiri people but also against the people of the rest of the country. The outfit further alleged that while the Indian Government had been trying to draw the attention of the international community to the torture perpetrated on the captured Indian Army personnel by the Pakistani Armed Forces had themselves been indulging in large scale violation of human rights in the North East region. It averred that the Indian political system could never fulfil the hopes and aspirations of all the ethnic minorities striving for ‘self- determination’ and that so-called ‘unity and integrity’ was being maintained only by ‘unlimited use of power’ by the Armed Forces.

In view of the Kargil flare-up, the ISI has intensified its efforts to target vital installations in the North-East, with the backing of militant outfits such as the ULFA. The bomb explosion at New Jalpaiguri station in North Bengal on June 22, in which three Army personnel bound for Kargil were among the nine killed, is a part of the ISI’s game-plan to sabotage the war effort as also fulfil its subversive role in the region.