Assam’s brush with insurgency began in the the mid-fifties when the Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI) led by cultural icon Bishnu Prasad Rabha indulged in sporadic acts of violence for a brief span before fizzling out because of a government crackdown. There were other groups a decade later such as the Lachit Sena whose sole objective was to check the domination of outsiders in the state.
The ULFA’s (United Liberation Front of Asom) emergence in the early 1980s was a new chapter in the history of insurgency in Assam as it was much bigger and better organised than the previous outfits. By 1987, it had already despatched a group of 87 functionaries to Myanmar’s Kachin and subsequently more batches for training and procurement of weapons. By the mid 1990s, the outfit had blazed a trail to Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, and Bhutan and eventually to more countries resulting in a network that was second only to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) in South Asia.
From the early 1990s to the present times, efforts were made as many as four times for a negotiated settlement between the ULFA and the government. The efforts failed in the previous occasions owing to a combination of many factors. Every time, different circumstances had kickstarted the exercise only to be derailed after some time.