National Liberation Front of Tripura

The National Liberation Front of Tripura (abbreviated NLFT) is a banned Tripuri nationalist terrorist organisation based in Tripura, India. It has an estimated 550 to 850 members.

Quotes

• The most prominent among the terrorist outfits of Tripura is the NLFT (National Liberation Front of Tripura). It employs terror tactics to effect mass conversion to Christianity (The Statesman 1999, 2000; Ghosh 1999) and is a predominantly Baptist (Protestant) organisatian. Whatever token non-Christian representation it had, it has lost recently. Nayanbashi Jamatiya, a Hindu leader, led a revolt against the policy of forcible conversion of the NLFT and left a rebel camp in neighbouring Bangladesh with his followers. On April 8, 2001, while his party was moving towards the Indian border; it was attacked by the main group; seven activists were killed and he himself was seriously injured and taken to a government hospital in Bangladesh.
  • Separatism in North-East India– Role of Religion, Language and Script Autorius (-iai): Dr. Kunal Ghosh

• In Tripura there were several cases of reverse persecution of non-Christians by Christian members of the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), a militant tribal group that often is evangelical. For example, NLFT tribal insurgents have banned Hindu and Muslim festivals in areas that they control, cautioned women not to wear traditional Hindu tribal attire, and banned indigenous forms of worship.
  • Report. USCIRF 2000, Section I. quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

• With regard to the violence by the Christian separatist group NLFT, the report again employed ambiguous and generalized statements to dilute the horrific acts of terror committed in the name of Christianity. While acknowledging Christian violence, it referred to the Hindus as the ‘majority religious community’ even though in the northeast Indian states where most such violence occurs, it is Christians who constitute the overwhelming majority not only numerically but also in terms of controlling the government and other civic institutions. The report mentioned the Christian violence as something which others have ‘accused’, and not as a matter of established fact, despite there being numerous official verdicts and reports in India proving that violence... It concludes its very brief paragraph on this matter by rationalizing the violence as the fault of the Hindus: ‘The group contends that the dominance of Hinduism has resulted in the marginalization of Christians in Tripura’. In other words, Christian violence is caused by their alleged ‘marginalization’, and is hence justified, even though Hindus have been systematically ethnically cleansed from that region. Unlike its reporting of the alleged atrocities against Christians, where the Hindu side of the story is never given, here the NLFT’s reasoning is given prominence... The specific events of killings of Hindus by NLFT are never discussed. USCIRF simply ignores the numerous reports by South Asian Terrorism Portal (www.satp.org), a terrorism watch group run by professional police and intelligence bureaucrats, that listed twenty-one violent incidents involving NLFT Christians for that year.
  • About alleged bias in USCIRF reports with regard to human rights violations by the NLFT. Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines