In ULFA: The Mirage of Dawn (published by Harper Collins in 2023), Rajeev Bhattacharyya puts forward a fundamental question – what does it take for a group of people to launch an armed struggle against the Indian state? Oscillating between ten chapters and an epilogue, Bhattacharyya attempts to situate the pieces of this puzzle by looking at the social movement carried out by the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) dating back to the 1970s.  The text empirically engages with this question through Bhattacharyya’s first-hand engagement with the rebels and various other people who were key in laying the foundation of the outfit. In other words, this text provides a crucial account of the socio-historical landscape that led to the emergence of ULFA as an organisation and in great detail narrates the organization’s inner workings, emphasizing its international network that led to its worldwide prominence.

The book chronicles the gradual rise of ULFA with utmost attention to detail starting from its initial morning drill days in Margherita when it didn’t even operate under the aegis of ULFA till its evolution in Samdrup Jongkar where it had one of the largest base camps under a leadership that was almost running a parallel state in Assam. One can very well gauge from his language that Bhattacharyya is a seasoned expert in this field. Though the writing style is journalistic in its form, as it would be, given his professional background, it is indeed a task in itself to put together a text that details every aspect of ULFA’s formation simultaneously highlighting the part that the Indian state played in affirming its counter-insurgency endeavour in the region.

However, to return to the sociological question that appears time and again in the subtext – what does it take for a group of people to launch an armed struggle against the Indian state? As one delves deeper and deeper into the text, one cannot help but realise that it genuinely takes a lot to hold a certain kind of footing against the Indian state. The movement spearheaded by ULFA demanding sovereignty of Assam due to the Indian government’s paternalistic attitude and their inability to change the colonial economic order gained traction in a specific socio-political setting. However, manoeuvring an armed struggle under the sharp surveillance of the mighty Indian state is not easy.

Bhattacharyya depicts the uncountable difficulties that the initial central leadership of ULFA had to face not only in receiving training but also in managing an organisation. The people who were governing this organisation were common civilians who were fed up with the way the Indian state was handling the social, political, and economic crisis in Assam. Initially, the central leadership went to Myanmar to receive arms training by joining hands with other insurgent groups in North-east India. However, one of the key difficulties faced by ULFA in gaining a footing, as depicted in the text, was in procuring arms. Paresh Baruah, one of the members of the central leadership then and the one in charge of the outfit now, established links in Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka and various other locations to procure weapons on a mass scale. While these linkages helped ULFA to maintain an international network, the structure of the organisation was facing a comprehensive overhaul with the involvement of all these parties, as each one of them wanted to safeguard their interests in the region by helping ULFA. Therefore, when Operation All Clear came into being as a joint venture between the Royal Bhutanese Army and the Indian Army to completely wipe out ULFA’s prominent presence in Bhutan, one could see the internal divide that was creeping up the leadership. The external blow with this operation only accentuated the internal divide thus, leading to the formation of the pro-talk faction.

Bhattacharyya in his approach has left no stone unturned to make it an encompassing text. If one reads this text without any awareness whatsoever regarding the socio-political landscape of Assam, still one would gain a complete historical understanding of the violence that engulfed the state in the 1990s simultaneously gaining an insight into the key role ULFA played in it. Overall, this book does an impeccable job of shedding light on some of the lesser-known behind-the-door incidents involving political and economic scandals.

Moreover, it is refreshing to see that even though Bhattacharyya captures a wide range of themes to reflect upon, the text critically engages with aspects of gender, caste and class within the structural ambit of the ULFA. It looks at the fundamental ideology that ULFA engaged with and how that translated in the operative spectrum. One might argue after a speculative reading of this text that there is a vast gap that the organisation couldn’t fulfil between its fundamental ideology and operative structure. In other words, the promises that it held were not successfully translated into actions even though the path that it paved for itself through armed struggle was depicted as the faster way to meet the end. One cannot help but realise that it eventually turned out to be exactly like the entity it was fighting against in more than one way! Bhattacharyya was indeed right in hinting in his book title that the dawn that ULFA promised to the people of Assam was a mirage. 

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Nikita Sarma is a PhD scholar at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics (DSE), University of Delhi.