Young, fidgety and soft-spoken, Lalon Das seems more of the ambulance driver he is now than the armed-to-the-teeth militant he was then. He talks passionately on the help advanced by the mobile medical unit he drives to the remote village of Joydebpur, a few kilometre away from the Kumargram block in Jalpaiguri district, where Bengal shares its border with Assam.

More importantly, there’s a hint of pride when he declares what it means to him to be attached to the state-run Primary Health Centre: a government employee. Recently though while returning from late-night duty, the police stopped him, held him up for four hours and beat him with lathis. ‘‘I told them that I work for the government now, but they continued to treat me like a terrorist,’’ recounts Lalon.

Today getting picked up and ill treated by the police is no longer Lalon’s worry alone. The government, which with the initiative of the Jalpaiguri district administration has chosen him along with 206 other surrendered militants of the Kamtapuri Liberation Organisation for rehabilitation under the Nava Disha self-employment scheme, too has reason to be worried since any estrangement with the ‘‘mainstreaming’’ process can put them back on the secessionist route again.

FOR Atul Roy, a first batch KLO militant who got arms training in a ULFA-organised camp in Bhutan in 1995, the seeds of secession were planted early when as a class IX student he was abused as ‘‘Saala Behra’’, an invective reserved for people of the Dalit Rajbonshi community, when he parked his cycle before a shop belonging to a non-Rajbongshi.

... contd.