Militancy may escalate again in North East
The insurgent attack in Manipur is a painful reminder that the relative peace seen in the North East in recent years is still fragile. Quite a few loose ends need to be tied up, before a permanent solution can be secured, and until then, there is no space for complacency. Thursday's attack on an Army convoy, that killed at least 20 soldiers and injured 11 more, was the bloodiest ever in decades. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the focus has been on two issues: Investigating why the loss of life was on such a large scale and tracking down the militants who carried out the attack. In the first case, the Army will be looking at a host of issues such as: Did the personnel follow all standard operating proceduresIJ Are there any loopholes in the protocol that need to be pluggedIJ Were there any intelligence inputs that were wrongly ignoredIJ In the second case, the Government has already launched a massive manhunt and a severe crackdown on militant camps in the region is expected.
Thursday's attack did not happen out of the blue. It was a well-planned offensive, carried out by heavily armed militants, who have turned up the heat with a series of attacks in the region. On March 21, two Gorkha soldiers were killed in Manipur. On April 2, four jawans were killed in Khonsa on the Arunachal Pradesh-Nagaland border. A month later, eight more were killed in another militant attack in Nagaland. And now, there is the Manipur attack. All attacks have been carried out by the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khaplang). On March 28, this group called off its 15-year-old ceasefire agreement with the Government of India, ostensibly because it has been sidelined in recent peace negotiations. The NSCN(K) is headquartered in Myanmar and aims to establish a larger Naga country of sorts, called Nagalim, that will include the Naga regions of Indian and Myanmar. The group already has an official deal with the Government of Myanmar which is conducting its own peace process with different ethnic armed groups. This deal allows the NSCN(K) to control, without almost any central supervision, Myanmar's Naga Self-Administered Zone along the India border. Such an arrangement is not possible within Indian borders and the NSCN(K)'s Nagalim dream has no basis in reality.
Chief Khaplang should be well aware of this, and it is expected that he will eventually pack up his operations in India. However, he won't just walk away without a fight. This is where his new umbrella militant coalition comes into play. The United National liberation Front of Western South East Asia was formed in April and includes at least five other outfits that are based in Manipur. Along with the NSCN(K), two of these allied groups have taken joint responsibility for Thursday's attack. The new combine is a challenge for the Armed Forces but not one that can't be handled. It, however, must be subdued promptly before it sparks unrest among other insurgent groups that are on the path to dialogue and peace. For India, it would have been helpful if Myanmar could pull its weight but the Tatmadaw already has too much on its hands and is hardly in a position to patrol remote border areas where it has little control anyway.