India asks Bhutan, Myanmar to flush out militants

GUWAHATI: India on Thursday asked Bhutan and Myanmar to help evict Indian militants, including the Bodo rebels who are believed to have bases there. Security forces scouring the area for NDFB (Songbijit) killers fear they might have slipped into Bhutan and Myanmar after the massacre of 76 adivasi villagers in Assam on Tuesday.
“One country has assured cooperation, and we are sure the other will also cooperate,” said Union home minister Rajnath Singh, who is on a two-day visit here to assess the situation.
The leader of the Bodo group, I K Sonbijit, is based in Kachin, Myanmar, and shares camps with the Paresh Baruah faction of Ulfa.
Shaken by the magnitude of the violence, the Centre has decided to change its stance towards militancy from a soft approach to a tough one. Singh made it clear the government will not bring the Songbijit faction to the peace process but act against it militarily.
“I want to clarify that there will be no talks with such organizations but only action,” Singh said before leaving for Delhi. “We do not want to talk to people who can hold a gun to a five-year-old girl’s head and shoot her.” He said the action would be time-bound and the Centre was extending help to the state government in this regard.
Singh said external affairs minister Sushma Sawaraj spoke to the premiers of Bhutan and Myanmar. “She called me and said she has spoken to the premier of Myanmar for action,” he said.
Singh and his deputy Kiren Rijiju have both been assessing the situation in Sonitpur and Kokrajhar since Wednesday. Union tribal affairs minister Jual Oram, who has come here with Singh, has been asked to extend his stay to oversee the return of normalcy.
There were some reports of the torching of houses by Bodo and adivasi villagers on Thursday. “We have reports of a few houses being torched,” said Pallab Bhattacharya, additional director general of police (special branch), Assam Police.
Singh and chief minister Tarun Gogoi’s chopper ride from Biswanath Chariali to Kokrajhar ran into rough weather when the aircraft developed a technical snag mid-air, forcing the pilot to go for an emergency landing at an IAF base in Tezpur. Within a couple of hours, another helicopter was flown in from Guwahati.