NE States moot strategy to fight terrorism

Syed Zarir Hussain
The Pioneer: 2 November, 2006

Guwahati: Security heads in India's Northeast and the eastern States of West Bengal and Sikkim on Wednesday called for a coordinated strategy to combat the twin threats of separatist insurgencies and Islamist terrorism in the region. "There is a need for an effective counter-insurgency operations having full synergy between all security forces to deal with the many insurgencies in the region, besides the serious threat from fundamentalist pan-Islamic groups," Dipak Narayan Dutt, police chief of Assam, said.

Dutt was addressing a two-day conference of police chiefs of the seven northeastern States of Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh. The meeting, that opened on Wednesday in Guwahati, was also attended by police chiefs of West Bengal and Sikkim, besides top army, paramilitary, intelligence and Home Ministry officials. "Smuggling of arms and explosives, narcotics and counterfeit currency notes is another area of serious concern in the region," the Assam police chief said.

Northeast, wedged between Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and Myanmar, is home to more than 30-odd rebel armies with demands ranging from secession to greater autonomy and the right to self-determination. More than 50,000 people have lost their lives to insurgency in the northeast since India's Independence in 1947. "The need of the hour is to have a joint approach among regional States to fight insurgency, besides sharing intelligence and other vital inputs," Assam chief Minister Tarun Gogoi said inaugurating the meet.

Most of the rebel groups in the northeast operate jointly and take shelter in adjoining States to escape security offensives in their areas of operation. "If we are to make a dent in the insurgency front, it should have to be a joint fight rather than individual States trying to combat the problem," SK Kabilan, Assam's top bureaucrat, said.

The Northeastern State Governments are presently dealing with insurgency without coordination among the regional States. "The idea of this conference is to work out a comprehensive strategy to fight insurgency and other issues," Amod Kant, police chief of Arunachal Pradesh, said. The two-day meeting is expected to come up with a strategy where security forces in the regional States share intelligence inputs and jointly carry out offensives as and when required. "Of late we have noticed that the northeastern militant groups were using Sikkim and West Bengal as transit or even to cool their heels when there are stepped up operations in the Northeast. So we need to have better coordination with the security forces in these two States and hence their top officials are here for the meet," a top Indian Home Ministry official said.