Repatriation of Anup Chetia, the general secretary of the Indian banned outfit United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), is a matter of political decision, said Home Secretary CQK Mustaq Ahmed on Friday.
“Yes, the IGP (Inspector General of Prison) has sent us a letter but we are yet to decide on it,” Mustaq told the Dhaka Tribune.
He said the government needed to talk to him to make sure if he really wants to go back to his motherland India.
“This is a political decision whether we will handover him (to Delhi),” said the senior secretary. “We have the institutional mechanism to hand him over to Indian authorities,” the official added.
Anup Chetia, whose real name is Golap Baruah, is now in Rajshahi jail from where he petitioned the government expressing his desire to go back to his homeland.
The home ministry received the petition on May 13.
Meanwhile, GD Tripathi, home secretary of India’s north-eastern state of Assam, reportedly said the country had been trying to bring Chetia back at the earliest. “The efforts are on and once everything is finalised the details will be shared.”
Anup Chetia detained in Bangladesh since 1997 has backtracked from his previous decision of seeking political asylum either in Bangladesh or a third country.
He is likely to face trial for spearheading separatist movement in India.
The ULFA leader, arrested on December 21, 1997 in Dhaka, was jailed for seven years for illegal entry into Bangladesh. He finished his jail term on February 25, 2007.
On December 7, 2008, he, in a letter, requested United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Chief Antonio Guterres to grant him refugee status and sought political asylum in Bangladesh or in a third country referring that his life would be in danger if he was sent back to India.
In his letter to the government on May 12, Chetia said it was better to go back to India instead of languishing in Bangladesh jail. He also expressed his intention to take his two detained aides Laxmi Prasad Goswami and Babul Sharma with him.
Foreign and political analysts and experts say Anup Chetia is one of the persons for whom India and Bangladesh have finalised an extradition treaty, which is in the final stage of signing aimed at exchanging fugitives arrested in either countries.
Anup Chetia is one of the founders of the separatist group ULFA in 1979.
The group aimed at establishing a sovereign Assam in the India’s Northeast through arms struggle against New Delhi that banned it in 1990 terming it a ‘terrorist organisation’. The US termed the ULFA ‘another group of concern’.
The ULFA issue has had a huge impact on the relation between Bangladesh and India.
Until Sheikh Hasina’s government came to power in January 2009, the Indian government had a common complaint that Dhaka fuels the ULFA and other separatist groups in the seven states of the Northeast separated by Bangladesh from the mainland India.