China wooing NE insurgents in Myanmar

India has received specific information about recent contacts between insurgent organisations of the country’s northeastern states and Chinese intelligence agencies in Myanmar.

New Delhi recently stumbled on the fact that its success in working with Dhaka to step up the heat on the insurgents and flush them out of Bangladesh had given the Chinese an opportunity to establish contacts with all of them in Myanmar.

“India’s success in Bangladesh had given an opportunity to China to deal with these outfits at one place in Myanmar and use them against India,” a top official was quoted in an internal document being circulated within the security establishments in New Delhi.

The document also referred to inputs received by the Special Branch of Assam Police about recent visits by operatives of both Chinese and Pakistani intelligence agencies to the Indian insurgent organisations’ camps at Taka in Myanmar.

The official also noted that Chinese intelligence agencies’ role in bringing together some insurgent organisations of Manipur.

Reason to worry

“In July 2011, seven Meitei outfits of Manipur with the support of NSCN-K had made a united front, which had been advocated by China since long,” he was quoted in the document. “These outfits were getting weapons from China, which was a matter of serious concern.”

Several insurgent groups active in Assam, Manipur, Tripura and Meghalaya since long had camps in Bangladesh. Since 2009, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League Government in Dhaka reversed the policy of the erstwhile Bangladesh National Party regime to allow the anti-India elements to use Bangladesh as safe haven and set up bases to carry out hit-and-run guerrilla attacks.

After Hasina took over as the Prime Minister of an Awami League-led coalition government in Dhaka, counter-terrorism cooperation between the two neighbouring countries has resulted in the detention of several top leaders of the proscribed United Liberation Front of Assam (Ulfa) from Bangladesh.

All of them, including chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa, had been handed over to security forces in India in November and December 2009. Ranjan Daimary, chief of the outlawed National Democratic Front of Bodoland, and R K Meghan, who headed the Manipuri insurgent group United National Liberation Front, too, were detained in Bangladesh and handed over to India in 2010.

As the security agencies of Bangladesh stepped up heat on the insurgent organisations from India, some of them shifted their bases and cadres to Myanmar. Ulfa’s armed wing chief Paresh Barua and a few other insurgent leaders too shifted to Myanmar.

Notable progress

“Since the incumbent government took over in Dhaka, notable progress has been made towards dismantling anti-India terrorist infrastructure in Bangladesh,” a highly placed official is understood to have mentioned in an assessment of India’s security environment in South Asia.

He, however, noted that some of the insurgent groups of Tripura were still based in Bangladesh.

Though security agencies had since long been suspecting links between Indian insurgent organisations and intelligence agencies of China, it was the first time after the crackdown on the anti-India elements in Bangladesh that New Delhi received inputs about Beijing’s interests in reaching out to them in Myanmar.