Novelist Speaks for Rebels in Turbulent Part of India

Every week or so, the phone rings in the professor’s home, and a voice echoes from a guerrilla hide-out far to the east.

The professor, Indira Goswami, is a prominent scholar of the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic. She is also the best-known novelist in India’s northeastern state of Assam. Her books reverberate with the struggles of India’s vast underclass.

Her caller, Paresh Baruah, has spent 20 years on the run, leading a militant group fighting to take control of the forests and towns of Assam. Working from secret bases, many apparently in nearby Bangladesh, he controls the military wing of the United Liberation Front of Assam, the most powerful militant movement in an isolated region riven by poverty and ethnic turmoil.

The writer and the gunman have never met. But their relationship, forged over bad phone lines and under the watch of Indian intelligence agents, has become the cornerstone of renewed efforts to bring peace to an area that has known little but violence for three decades.

Amid a recent surge in militant attacks in Assam that have killed at least eight people and left more than 80 injured, the government is set to hold its third round of talks Thursday with the “consultative group” that Goswami heads, and that meets with officials on behalf of the militants.

So the pressure is on to avoid a stalemate.

“This is a rare chance for us after so many years,” said Goswami, 63, who for nearly two years has been the main conduit between the government and the ULFA militants, thrusting her into the largest of a cluster of conflicts that have killed about 10,000 in the last 10 years. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

Her critics dismiss her as a dilettante misled by extremists. She shrugs at such talk. All she knows is the talks have eaten up immense amounts of time, her phones are tapped and she has neglected her writing.

“But I’m happy I could help move this peace thing -- that I could open the door for the boys,” she said.

India is, in many ways, a patchwork of humanity. Though dominated by Hindus from a handful of ethnic groups, its 1.02 billion people represent all of the world’s major religions, hundreds of ethnicities and more than two dozen languages.

If the patchwork holds together in most places, the northeast is India’s stepchild: seven states about 1,000 miles from New Delhi and connected to the rest of the country by a narrow land corridor. The ethnic groups making up their population of 38 million have physical features that tie them closer to Myanmar or Tibet than to the rest of India.

The Michigan-sized area is rich in natural resources, but hobbled by geography, ethnicity, poverty and unemployment.

The situation has nurtured dozens of militant movements whose fights with the central government, and one another, scatter the region with corpses.

But there is no Al Qaeda here, and the region holds little importance to Western policymakers. So the little wars get almost no attention outside India.

The struggle of the ULFA guerrillas fighting for an independent Assamese state -- “the boys,” as Goswami calls them -- has left about 3,000 people dead since guerrillas took up arms in the late 1980s.

If northeasterners have grown increasingly weary of the cycles of attack and reprisal, along with the extortion the guerrillas use to raise funds, Goswami remains a firm believer. She sees them as they see themselves: fighters for social equality battling the erosion of Assamese traditions and the bigotry of the rest of India.

Violence, she said, “is the only power they have.”

Her open sympathy gave her credence with the militants, and her links to New Delhi’s literary high society -- her living room is scattered with photos of her with people such as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and novelist V.S. Naipaul -- gave her access to Indian political circles.

“She has the confidence of both sides,” said Sunil Nath, a writer and former ULFA official. “A lot of people had wanted to mediate talks, but ULFA scoffed at all of them.”

Her work began in late 2004, when she reached out informally to the prime minister, whom she knew from his days as an economics professor, urging him to bring peace to Assam. A year later, the militants asked her to head the small consultative group, made up mostly of political activists, that communicates with the government.

Today, she speaks to Baruah, 49, anywhere from a couple of times a week to once a month. He calls her -- she has no way to reach him -- and she never asks too many questions.

The two, who speak in Assamese, make an odd pair.

Goswami is an exuberant woman, a name-dropper and a fixture on the society circuit.

Baruah, on the other hand, “travels on a forged passport ... lives on money obtained from extortion or robbery and can handle all kinds of weapons,” according to his wanted poster from the Assam police.

It was Goswami’s writing that first took her to an ULFA base in the late 1990s.

It happened during a gathering in Assam, one of many she attends to discuss her books, when a young man emerged from the crowd and quietly asked if she’d like to visit a militant camp.

Her guides drove her through the night, arriving at a compound where heavily armed fighters had gathered.

“I was already writing about them, and without firsthand knowledge I just cannot write,” she said.

Years later, she tries to remain positive about Assam, but worries the peace talks could be smothered by the violence.

Baruah, in statements e-mailed to journalists, has denied that ULFA is behind many of the recent attacks. But Goswami told him that things need to calm down quickly.

“I sent a message that if things go on like this, it’ll be difficult to move ahead with peace.”