A top Ulfa functionary and an Indian journalist were arrested by the Myanmar Army yesterday. Home Secretary RK Singh has confirmed about the arrest of the two people to the media. Shishir Gupta reports.
A top Ulfa functionary and an Indian journalist were arrested by the Myanmar Army on Saturday. Home Secretary RK Singh has confirmed about the arrest of the two people to the media.
The top Ulfa functionary arrested is not Paresh Barua but the so called Lt Col Jibon Moran. He was the finance secretary of Ulfa. The journalist arrested by the Myanmar army Rajiv Bhattacharjee was working in newly started Guwahati newspaper called Seven Sisters Post.
HT Image
{{^htLoading}} {{/htLoading}}
Rajiv Bhattacharjee had recently posted on Facebook and Twitter that he was going to interview Ulfa leader Paresh Barua in November first week in the Myanmar jungles. Since then the Myanmar media is agog with news that Paresh Barua has been arrested.
It seems that journalist Rajiv Bhattacharjee was either arrested while he was on route to interview Paresh Barua or he was meeting Jibon Moran. According to intelligence inputs Paresh Barua operates between Chengdu province in China and Kachin state in Myanmar.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
Catch every big hit, every wicket with Crickit, a one stop destination for Live Scores, Match Stats, Infographics & much more. Explore now!
