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        Separatists everywhere are a strange and unreliable set of people.They begin their struggles ostensibly for winning a cause but the cause becomes invisible or gets transformed into a demand that can never be reconciled with national solidarity and integrity. For instance, the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA ) wished originally for action on the part of the government of India to answer its ethno-autonomous aspirations. Not only it sought to bomb its way to its goal snuffing out the lives of innocent citizens but refused to participate in dialogue with the administration except indirectly through the People's Consultative Group. It was trying to create the impression that it was like a government at war that could talk with its enemy only through a neutral embassy. That this is no prejudiced comment should be clear from the fact that it insists that sovereignty for Asom ( that is how they spell it ) is one of their core demands and that, for the dialogue to start, the Centre should issue a note stating inclusion of this item in the agenda for talks. It has been vexatious exercise all through with the Centre receiving and responding to ULFA's'proposals through the Consultative Group.With the insistence on sovereignty for Asom, the gap between the dialogue partners has widened to the extent of being unbridgeable and the mediator for the talks has become irrelevant.

        ULFA's intransigence is exposed further by its asking first for the production of five of its missing leaders and then for 14 others who went missing in the operations of the Army. Insurgency has a price for both sides, its originators and its opponents. In these circumstances, that they were assured safe passage to and fro for participating in the dialogue is courtesy enough. And, on a par with it stands the suspension of army operations.

        Asking for sovereignty is the road to national disintegration and the administration would be presumed to have lost its wits if it obliges ULFA with an extension of ceasefire. As is the case with all such militant groups, it will only be a ploy for regrouping its resources.

        It is fairly clear that those who did not abandon acts of violence even when the dialogue and ceasefire were on would be only more destructive when they sense that their crucial demand of sovereignty would never be met. As desperadoes, they would act more cruelly and callously It is incumbent on the Centre to shed complacency and strive to prevent ULFA rank and file regrouping themselves by eliminating their camps in Arunachal Pradesh without the slightest delay. India has offered Dhaka a list of wanted insurgents and the response to it awaits the outcome of the polls n Bangladesh. The saving grace here is that, in Assam, popular support for insurgents has never been so low as now. India should exploit that advantage in dealing firmly with ULFA insurgency.