Anup Chetia’s appeal for return to India ‘being processed’: Govt

The home ministry is ‘processing’ ULFA leader Anup Chetia’s request for voluntary repatriation to India, state minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal has said.

The United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) leader, who has been in a Bangladeshi jail since 1997, asked for the repatriation in June last year.

The government has since been saying that the process is on to send the Indian insurgent leader back.

Kamal said to a question in Parliament on Sunday the home ministry was looking into his application for return to his own country.

Chetia, the general secretary of the outlawed ULFA, has been detained in Bangladesh prison since 1997.

He appealed to Bangladesh to let him go back home in June, 2013. He also wants his petition for political asylum in Bangladesh cancelled for which he applied in 2005, 2008 and 2011.

ULFA soon afterwards also sought Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s intervention into the matter.

On Aug 3, 2011, then the home minister Shahara Khatun said Anup Chetia will be sent back to India.

Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir who took office after her in 2012 said the process was on to send him back. It is apparently still continuing, as per Khan.

Chetia, whose formal name is Golap Barua, was arrested at Dhaka’s Mohammadpur and charged for illegal entry, carrying of foreign currency and a satellite phone.

He has been staying in a cell of Rajshahi Central Jail although his jail term ended on February 25, 2007.

File Photo

He was sentenced to three, four and seven years in jail for illegal trespass into Bangladesh, possession of forged Bangladeshi passports and foreign currency, and possession of a satellite phone, respectively.

On Dec7, 2008, he also wrote to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, urging it to grant him refugee status.

Since his arrest, India has been asking the Bangladesh government to hand over Chetia.

After India and Bangladesh signed the extradition treaty on January 28, 2013, that has become legally possible.

Chetia is wanted in India for crimes such as murder, abductions and extortion. He was arrested in Assam in 1991, but was freed by the state government.

New Delhi wants Chetia back so that he could join other leaders of the ULFA’s political wing in the peace process with the Indian government.

Paresh Barua, who heads the outfit’s military wing, is opposing all suggestions of peace talks with New Delhi.

Dhaka’s tacit cooperation with New Delhi in November and December, 2010 resulted in the arrest of as many as five ULFA leaders.

The ULFA has, since 1979, been pursuing an armed rebellion against the Indian government with the professed objective of liberation of Assam from what it calls “colonial rule of New Delhi”.