New Delhi: The anti-talks faction of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA Independent) has claimed responsibility for two grenade blasts that occurred in Assam within a span of the last 20 days. In a public letter, the banned armed outfit said that those blasts were a warning to the state’s director general of police, G.P. Singh, over the consequences of “treating Assam Police as his ancestral property”. While one blast had occurred on November 22 when two unidentified men on a two-wheeler lobbed a grenade near an army camp in the state’s Tinsukia district, the other attack was on December 9 evening near the Jaisagar CRPF camp in Sivsagar district. Nobody was hurt in that attack.While the police had stated that the November 22 blast looked like a handiwork of ULFA-I, the outfit has claimed responsibility for it only after the December 9 blast. These blasts came as a reminder to the public of the dark days of insurgency in the 1990s in the north-eastern state.With the Union home ministry stating that insurgency in Assam is under control, some areas of the state have seen removal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. However, the districts where these attacks had occurred are still under the Act.In the ULFA-I’s letter, it accused the DGP of “arrogance”.It said: “We don’t have any personal animosity with Assam police. They all are sons of our soil. But the recent blasts were to prove to the recent DGP of Assam GP Singh that Assam Police is not personal property. Using and showing them to be his own personal property and power shows how ill-intentioned he is.” It added, “The previous DGP of Assam, Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, never did that.”“The arrogance shown by GP Singh by treating the Assam Police as his ancestral property has hurt the self-respect of the officers/members working in the Assam Police and his arrogance cannot be acceptable,” the letter further said.Singh, active on X, has been sharing not only photos of youth surrendering to the state police after having deserted ULFA-I but has also been issuing appeals of family members who have left them to join militancy in recent times.
