An ambush in the Tirap sector of Arunachal Pradesh that killed an Assam Rifles soldier on Tuesday has put the focus back on China’s role in fueling the insurgency in the northeast. Tuesday’s attack by the Nagalim National Socialist Council (Isak-Muivah) came a week after China’s propaganda arm warned Narendra Modi’s government against signing a highly speculated trade pact with Taiwan, threatening that Beijing could retaliate by supporting the northeastern separatists and stop by recognizing Sikkim as part of India.
Indian security officials said the timing of the attack by the NSCN-IM, which has had a long history of ties to Chinese state actors, was mostly likely coincidence, but the threat from Chinese state media had exposed a truth shrouded in many layers of denial in the past: links between the insurgent groups in the northeast and Beijing.
Although links between the Naga and Manipur insurgents with elements of the Chinese establishment date back long before the 1971 war, the 1975 Shillong Agreement between the Government of India and the Naga National Council opposed leaders such as SS Khaplang and Thuingaleng Muivah, which were then called the China Return Gang. Together, Khaplang and Muivah formed the Nagalim National Socialist Council (NSCN) in 1980. They split eight years later in 1988 to establish their own teams; Muivah formed the NSCN (IM) faction together with Isak Chishi Swu, while Khaplang called his faction NSCN (K).
Clearly, the NSCN (IM), which is currently in talks with the government to solve the Naga problem, maintains that it has no ties to the Chinese government. This claim, however, has been furiously contested by security officials and independent experts.
As the Swedish-born Northeast expert Bertil Lintner, who, in his 2016 book “Great Game East: India, China and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier,” documented how leadership first, the NSCN (IM) , and then Manipur’s People’s Liberation Army, were entertained by Chinese leaders for years. NSCN (IM) co-founder Isak Chishi Swu, who died in 2016, had taken a leisurely trip to Beijing for the last time in 2009.
Almost 15 years earlier, a senior leader of the insurgent group Asom Lohit Deuri United Liberation Front had given security agencies graphic details of how unmarked Chinese weapons were transferred from Chinese ships to the Bangladeshi dhow on the high seas and taken to the northeast. from India, particularly Mizoram by land during the joint Indo-Myanmar crackdown in the mid-1990s, codenamed Operation Golden Bird. Deuri, who belonged to the Paresh Barua group now called ULFA Independent, surrendered in 2000.
Detailed interrogation of the subsequent arrests of ULFA leaders also revealed that Chinese actors were behind the supply of 10 truckloads of weapons to the ULFA, All Tripura Tiger Force and the EPL in Manipur in 2004. The huge quantity of weapons, grenades, Rockets and munitions seized from the Chittagong fertilizer jetty in Bangladesh on April 1, 2004 had been transferred back to a dhow from a Chinese ship offshore in the Bay of Bengal.
On August 2, 2010, Anthony Shimray, a senior NSCN (IM) insurgent who oversaw the supply of weapons to the team, was picked up at the Patna airport by Indian security officers. His questioning led Thai police to arrest arms dealer Willy Narue on August 31. Interrogation of these two arms suppliers confirmed that two Chinese arms companies would be paid $ 1 million for supplying arms to northeastern insurgents via ship from the port city of Dalian in China and then transported to the India through the overland corridor in northern Myanmar in October. November 2010.
In January 2011, Indian agencies captured Chinese intelligence agent Qing Wang after she eluded local officials to enter Dimapur from Nagaland without the mandatory restricted area permit and held an unauthorized meeting with Thuingaleng Muivah. She was deported for violating the conditions of her visa. During his detention, security officials, however, recovered his photographs with MI Muivah leader, Nepal’s Maoist leader Prachanda and the Kachin insurgent leaders on his laptop. A Beijing resident, Qing posed as a journalist and went to Dimapur by Brahmaputra Mail from the Old Delhi railway station on January 15, 2011 with the young Naga. It was discovered that he was an agent of the People’s Security Bureau and had visited India with a different passport in August 2010 when landing in Kolkata from Kunming in China’s Yunnan province.
People familiar with the northeast insurgency said ULFA leader Paresh Barua, who is on the run in India, lives in Ruili in Yunnan province, across Myanmar’s border with China. It’s not the only one.
The Chinese link with the Northeast groups was raised by India’s National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon with State Councilor Dai Bingguo at the 15th India-China Special Representative Talks in January 2012. Dai totally denied participation. China and instead accused India of training and financing Tibetans. insurgents against China.
One of India’s leading experts on the northeast insurgency said that China’s ties to insurgent groups often use Pakistan’s deep state ties to Bangladesh and the region. “But it is common knowledge that China wants to keep the pot boiling for India in the Northeast with calibrated escalation,” added another Northeast expert on the national security system.
The Chinese propaganda machine has just explained the truth.
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