Jyotirindra Bodhipriya Larma, better known as Santu Larma, Chairman of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Regional Council and president of the Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti (PCJSS) crossed into Agartala, Tripura through the Akhaura land port. The stated reasons were routine enough: a health check-up, ancestral rituals, and religious observances. But the questions trailing this trip are anything but routine.
When journalists attempted to engage him on CHT matters at the border checkpoint, Santu Larma refused every question. His only remark was a studied deflection “Come visit Rangamati, then you’ll understand.” For a man occupying a constitutionally significant state office, this deliberate silence at the moment of departure is not humility. It is a habit, and by now a pattern demanding scrutiny.
What intelligence sources say happened next makes that silence considerably more revealing. According to security reports, Santu Larma did not visit any hospital or consult any physician during this trip. He traveled directly to New Delhi and took up residence at the home of a man known as Monogeet Jumma, born Karunalonkar Bhante, originally from Dighinala in Khagrachhari. This individual left Bangladesh shortly after the 1997 peace accord, settled in New Delhi under a changed identity reportedly with Indian intelligence facilitation, and has since styled himself as the leader of a so-called “Jumma Land” separatist movement. Agencies first flagged him in 2017, when credible evidence linked him to the delivery of 41 grenades, sourced from an Indian separatist network to PCJSS operatives inside Bangladesh. During Santu Larma’s stay at this residence, multiple individuals listed on terrorism registers were recorded entering and leaving the premises. Whatever this visit was, it was not a medical appointment.
The security assessment attached to these meetings is deeply troubling. Those gathered in New Delhi reportedly agreed on a strategy to replicate the template of Bangladesh’s July 2024 mass movement and redirect its energy toward the hill tracts. The operational plan involves PCJSS-linked networks based in India flooding digital platforms with anti-Bangladesh content targeting the armed forces, casting Bengali residents of the CHT as aggressors, and repackaging localized political disputes as systematic ethnic persecution for international consumption. Critically, this campaign is not merely planned. It has already started. Ordinary incidents of communal friction in the hill districts are being deliberately framed as coordinated atrocities and fed to foreign audiences through social media pipelines and sympathetic NGO channels.
This is precisely where the international dimension of the operation becomes visible and where a second track of the same strategy demands examination.
At the 24th session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in April 2025 at UN Headquarters in New York, Augustina Chakma, representing the PCJSS, delivered a statement on the situation of indigenous Jumma women in Bangladesh’s CHT, directly linking their insecurity to the unfulfilled implementation of the 1997 CHT Accord. The same session saw the PCJSS send three representatives — Chanchana Chakma, Augustina Chakma, and Manojit Chakma.
The right to raise genuine community concerns before international bodies is not disputed. What demands scrutiny is the institutional context in which that advocacy is taking place. The PCJSS is not a disinterested human rights organization appearing before the UN in good faith. It is the same organization whose leadership was, during that very period, holding covert meetings in New Delhi with individuals linked to arms trafficking and proscribed militant networks, meetings whose stated purpose, according to security assessments, was to artificially inflate instability in the CHT and damage Bangladesh’s international standing. When an organization runs a clandestine destabilization strategy with one hand while presenting itself at the United Nations as a victims’ rights body with the other, the two tracks cannot be treated as unrelated. They are the same operation functioning through complementary channels. The Delhi meetings produce the tactical blueprint. The UN appearances produce the international legitimacy. Neither is innocent of the other.
The structure of this two-track approach is worth understanding clearly. Ground-level tensions in the CHT some genuine, some manufactured are fed upward through PCJSS networks into the international advocacy pipeline. They arrive at forums like the UNPFII already shaped into a particular narrative: Bangladesh as perpetrator, hill communities as passive victims, the state’s security presence as occupation rather than governance. That narrative, once embedded in UN proceedings and international NGO reports, then cycles back to further legitimize the organization’s domestic political position and its foreign fundraising. It is a self-reinforcing system, and it has been running for years.
This pattern of operating simultaneously on domestic, regional, and international fronts is not new for Santu Larma personally. In May 2023, he made a similar trip to Delhi, again framed publicly as a medical necessity, during which The Hindu noted that his visit carried distinct political significance against the backdrop of ethnic tensions in the CHT. His own travel companions described his relationship with India as warm and long-standing. A serving state official maintaining an informal parallel channel with a foreign government is not a private matter. It is a governance failure that has been indulged for far too long.
Santu Larma has remained Chairman of the CHT Regional Council for nearly three decades without facing a single election, while enjoying the status and financial privileges of a State Minister of the Government of Bangladesh. He draws a government salary. His security is state-funded. And from within that position of state-conferred comfort, he has delivered threats that would end political careers in any functioning democracy warning that if the accord is not implemented, “the hills will burn,” and that even unarmed Jumma people would “take up arms in response” to state pressure. These are not the words of a frustrated peace process participant. They are the language of someone who treats armed mobilization as a standing instrument of leverage, while living unelected off the state he is threatening.
The Gauhati High Court, in a 69-page judgment on September 5, 2024, in the National Investigation Agency versus Rohmingliana case, characterized PCJSS as a terrorist organization while adjudicating the seizure of 31 AK-47 rifles, one LMG, one Browning Automatic Rifle, and associated ammunition belonging to the organization. As recently as February 2026, the BSF arrested an alleged armed PCJSS cadre near the Indo-Bangladesh border in Tripura, found carrying a walkie-talkie while illegally crossing into Indian territory. The organization has not demilitarized. It has repositioned.
The people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts carry real grievances accumulated over decades. Their aspirations for security, land rights, and genuine political representation deserve serious engagement from Dhaka not dismissal, not delay, and not the kind of managed neglect that allows organizations like PCJSS to position themselves as the only voice worth hearing. But that is precisely what prolonged institutional inaction has produced. When the state fails to create legitimate channels for CHT communities to be heard, it hands those communities and their concerns over to those whose interests are served not by resolution but by the continuation of conflict.
The hill people’s genuine suffering becomes the raw material for an international lobbying operation. Their land disputes become talking points at the UN. Their security concerns become justification for covert arms networks operating across the Indian border. And those coordinating all of this collect government salaries, hold unelected state offices, and fly abroad on medical visas.
Bangladesh’s government can no longer afford to process these visits as administrative paperwork or treat PCJSS’s UN appearances as harmless civil society participation. Transparent investigation, genuine accountability, and rigorous oversight of state officials conducting undisclosed foreign engagements are not optional responses to this situation. They are the minimum threshold of seriousness that the sovereignty and stability of the region demand. The questions being deferred today will not dissolve on their own. They will compound and the cost will be paid, as it always is, by the ordinary people of the hills whom this entire apparatus claims to represent.