Barua and the top leadership of the ULFA, as well as those of many other militant groups of Northeast India, were safely ensconced in Bangladesh during the decades when the military and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) were in power in that country. However, after Awami League under Sheikh Hasina came to power in that country in early 2009, a severe crackdown was launched against the ULFA and other Indian militant outfits. A number of top leaders of the ULFA, including its chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa, its deputy commander-in-chief Raju Baruah, finance secretary Chitraban Hazarika and foreign secretary Sashadhar Choudhury were nabbed and deported to India. The training camps and shelters as well as logistics facilities of these outfits were destroyed and thousands of their cadres had to flee Bangladesh, mostly to neighbouring Myanmar. So severe was the crackdown that the ULFA and other militant outfits had to issue a fervent public appeal to the Bangladesh government to stop the crackdown and allow them to stay.

Paresh Barua, who managed to flee Bangladesh before the authorities there could get him, received another major setback in April 2014 when a court in that country sentenced him to death in connection with the April 2004 Chittagong arms haul case. That arms bust, in which ten truckloads of arms--4,930 different types of sophisticated, mainly AK-series, firearms, 27,020 grenades, 840 rocket launchers, 300 rockets, 2000 grenade launching tubes, 6392 magazines and nearly 11.5 lakh rounds of ammunition--meant for the ULFA was apprehended, dealt a debilitating blow to the ULFA. Had those reached the hands of the ULFA and had they been smuggled into Assam, it would have created mayhem in the state.

What was also important is that all the arms confiscated in Chittagong port were made in China. This is hardly surprising, say experts, who add that the flow of sophisticated weapons and ammunition made in China to rebel groups in the north east and the Maoist terrorists in India continues unabated.

China has, since the mid-1960s, aided Naga and Mizo militants. Hundreds of these militants trekked through Myanmar into China’s Yunnan province in the decade between 1966 and 1976 to receive training in guerilla warfare that Mao’s men had mastered. They also received arms and ammunition from China and returned to wage a bloody insurgency in India’s northeast. The Pakistanis had already started aiding north east militants and the first batch of 150 Naga rebels trekked to (then) East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) though the plains of Barak Valley in April 1962 (all this has been detailed in Bertil Lintner’s seminal book, Great Game East: India, China And The Struggle For Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier).

Though China officially denies any role in harbouring and aiding Northeast Indian militants, the fact remains that China supplies arms to them. The confessions of a major Thai gunrunner Wuthikorn Naruenartwanich who was extradited to stand trial in India earlier this year has given Indian agencies a rich body of evidence against the Chinese. Wuthikorn, alias Willy, told his Indian interrogators that he mediated a massive sale deal (worth more than $1.2 million, or Rs 815 lakh) between the NSCN faction led by Isak Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah (which is engaged in peace talks with New Delhi) and China’s state-owned arms industry called Norinco in 2010.

The arms--1000 AK-47 and AK-56 rifles, 50 universal machine guns and as many rocket launchers--were to have been brought in through Cox’s Bazar port in Bangladesh. But the deal fell through with the arrest of the NSCN(IM)’s principal arms procurer Anthony Shimray by India’s NIA in 2010. That China was supplying sophisticated arms from its own factories to the NSCN(IM), which is armed to its teeth anyway, at a time when the rebel outfit is engaged with peace talks with the Government of India, speaks volumes about Beijing’s duplicity and its eagerness to keep the fires alive and burning in India’s restive Northeast. NIA sources say that the NSCN(IM) had planned to sell the China-made rifles and ammunition to other rebel groups in the Northeast and to the Maoist terrorists in Central India, something that China was well aware of and had, in fact, encouraged.