Bengal on alert as dormant KLO regroups after making peace overtures

The West Bengal police has found tell-tale signs of proscribed Kamtapur Liberation Organisation (KLO) regrouping again close on the heels of it getting in touch with the BJP-led Assam government for peace parleys, ignoring Bengal’s ruling dispensation.

After remaining dormant for years, the KLO last month held a six-day long general body meeting from June 15 to June 20 at an unverified location to form its new central committee and chart its future course of action.

Police sources said apart from constituting the central committee, the outfit in the meeting discussed how to strengthen the organisation and establish an operational base near its proposed Kamtapur homeland.

The KLO leaders are now holed up in Myanmar, from where they find it difficult to operate in western Assam and northern Bengal, the areas the group plans to carve out to form a separate state of Kamtapur.

The proposed Kamtapur includes six districts of West Bengal and four districts of Assam. The West Bengal districts are Cooch Behar, Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri, North and South Dinajpur, and Malda. In Assam, it is eyeing Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon, Dhubri and Goalpara.

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To press for the homeland demand, the outfit was established in December 1995 by a breakaway group of West Bengal-based All Kamtapur Students’ Union headed by Tamir Das alias Jeevan Singha, Tom Adhikari and others.

In the June meeting, Jeevan Singha was once again appointed as the outfit’s president.

Last year he had sent feelers to the Assam government expressing interest in joining the peace process. “In continuation with (the) Govt of India’s efforts to bring lasting peace in the region, I welcome the desire of KLO leadership to join mainstream at an early date to resolve all issues through political dialogues. (The) Govt of Assam would fully reciprocate this goodwill measure.@Amit Shah (sic),” Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma tweeted in December last year.

Soon after Sarma reciprocated the offer, the KLO released a video message welcoming the positive response of the BJP governments at the Centre and Assam to its peace offer.

“The KLO appreciates and supports the proposal of the government of India to hold peace talks with us. We thank the Prime Minister, the Union home minister and the chief minister of Assam and want a permanent solution to the political problem through the talks,” self-styled foreign secretary of the outfit Koch Pavel said in the video message.

Since early this year, the KLO has launched social media campaigns to propagate its ideology in a bid to attract new recruits and also stepped-up extortion drives, police sources in Bengal claimed.

The suspected KLO militants shot at and injured two businessmen in Assam in separate incidents on June 4, the sources pointed out, adding there were many more instances of extortion demands served to the businessmen by the outfits in Assam and West Bengal came to light in the past few months.

The outfit, of late, released a series of video messages on social media attacking West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, her government and Trinamool Congress general secretary Abhishek Banerjee.

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Through video messages, the KLO chief has also threatened to intensify the Kamtapur movement, putting the West Bengal police on high alert. Interestingly, in one of the videos, the KLO chief claimed that several BJP leaders from Bengal supported the outfit’s demand.

“Several MPs and MLAs who have won election from the region such as John Barla, Nishith Pramanik, Jayant Roy have backed our demand,” the KLO chief was heard saying in one of the videos, in which, he called the TMC government as “outsider” and warned chief minister against visiting north Bengal.

He was perhaps referring to some BJP leaders’ recent demand that northern districts of Bengal should form a separate Union territory or state. Police said such a demand only encourages the separatist elements.

As part of its regrouping plan, the KLO is trying to set up a base in Nepal, police sources said, citing recent intercepts and statements of arrested militants.

The state police’s Special Task Force (STF) arrested a Myanmar-trained KLO member, Swapan Barman alias Dhankumar, from the Indo-Nepal border in West Bengal in May this year while he was trying to sneak into the neighbouring country.

During interrogation, he reportedly confirmed the outfit’s plan of trying to set up a base in Nepal.  He was tasked by Singha himself to expand the outfit’s base, sources said. Earlier, the outfit used to operate from Bhutan, where it was trained by the undivided United Liberation Front of Asom.

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The KLO was forced to shift out of the Himalayan kingdom after the Royal Bhutan Army carried out Operation All Clear from December 5, 2003 to January 3, 2004 to flush out Indian separatist groups operating from its soil.

Along with ULFA leaders, the KLO chief moved to Bangladesh. There he shared a safe house with his ULFA mentors. The outfit suffered another blow when Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League government in Bangladesh launched a crackdown against Indian insurgent outfits soon after returning to power in 2009.

Since then, the KLO has been operating from Myanmar. But, by and large, it was active only in paper. The last KLO-linked incident in which a civilian was killed was reported way back in 2014.