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Beyond the ‘separate Naga identity’ lie similar aspirations

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Beyond the ‘separate Naga identity’ lie similar aspirations
Published August 9, 2015 | By admin
SOURCE: EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

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The skull of a mithun is strung atop an imposing iron gate that marks the entrance to Camp Hebron, a heavily guarded fortress that serves as the headquarters of the Isaak-Muivah faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, the NSCN (IM).

On August 3, the largest of the seven Naga insurgent groups announced a historic peace agreement with the Centre, agreeing to, among other things, create mechanisms for greater autonomy for Naga tribes living in Manipur and decommissioning of arms held by the NSCN(IM). A couple of days later, there’s guarded anticipation at the headquarters.

“This is only the preamble to a final agreement,” says Rh Raising, ‘home minister of the Government of the People’s Republic of Nagalim (GPRN)’ that runs out of Hebron. Raising and the other Naga leaders have just emerged from a church inside the complex — they had been fasting and praying for the health of their ‘yaruiwo’, president Issak Chisi Swu, who is on ventilator support in a hospital in New Delhi.



Hebron, 35 km from the town of Dimapur, in the Jalukie-kam area of Nagaland’s Peren district, houses the three most important bodies of the NSCN(IM) — the central headquarters, the general headquarters of its army, and the Tatar Hoho or parliament. There are separate quarters for president Swu, prime minister Thuingaleng Muivah, chief of army Lt Gen Phunting Shimrang, and many other top functionaries, besides barracks for soldiers and other workers.

Standing outside the church, Raising says, “Our leaders are still engaged in a political dialogue with the Government of India. But our stand is that we are a separate people and a separate nation, who practise a distinct culture, who profess a distinct religion and who have a history that has nothing to with the history of India.”

But much before the peace deal was signed, the NSCN(IM)’s political leadership had realised that its strident position on “separate Naga identity”, the core of the outfit’s ideology, had been faltering. Across villages and towns in Nagaland, that sense of Naga exception had been witnessing a gradual change, making way for individual aspirations and a search for other, more personal, identities — a father who has sent his daughter off to work in Mumbai, a girl who plans to take the UPSC examination, a vegetable vendor for whom sending her children to school is more important than any peace deal.

Raising knows times are changing so he quickly adds: “Circumstances compelled us to sign this framework agreement. The condition of our chairman (Issak) is very serious. Remember, we are not secessionists like other movements. We are only trying to protect ourselves.”

***

About 100 km from Hebron, Kedovitha Hesielie has been trying to do just that — “protect himself” — for much of his life. He is now tired, he says, and wants the peace deal to work.

The 60-year-old retired headmaster of a government primary school in Peducha, 14 km south of Kohima, was only 10 months old when the entire population of his village had to run away during the first big Army crackdown on armed Naga rebels in 1956.

Those were the days of the first major armed uprising led by Angami Zapu Phizo’s Naga Federal Army, following which the Army was deployed, laying the grounds for the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act to be enforced in 1958.

“Our family spent those days in the forests. My aunt used to say that as a baby, I would be perpetually slung from a cloth on my mother’s back as villagers had to keep moving through the forests to hide from the Army. About three months after we had fled the village, my father came down from the forests to our paddy fields with a few other villagers. But a group of Army jawans fired at them and my father died. A few months later, my mother left me behind and went away with another man,” says Hesielie, who grew up in the care of his maternal aunt, “eating one meal a day”.

After all that struggle, “identity” to him is what he has earned over the years — his matriculation, the teacher’s job he got, the BA degree he earned on the side, the pension he now gets — and what his children have grown up to be. “My daughter works as a guest relations executive in a hotel in Lonavala near Mumbai, my second child will soon begin his MSc in Information Technology in Shillong. My two other children are in college in Kohima,” he says.

He hopes the deal will change his life for the better. “I am not sure what is in it. But if they have done it sincerely, then it is good for the Nagas,” he says.

He is “fed up of life under self-appointed governments”, Hesielie adds. Both rival factions of the NSCN — IM and the Myanmar-based Khaplang — and other Naga outfits have their own “governments” or GPRN with jurisdictions that extend to all Naga areas. ‘Officials’ of these factions collect both annual and monthly ‘taxes’ from people, both Nagas and non-Nagas. “I pay them an annual house tax. But if a family has to pay up to Rs 10,000 a year to different factions in the name of ‘national cause’, it’s wrong. I know they will kill me if I don’t pay. Will this accord bring an end to all this?” he asks.

His son Vilhuru is glad things are changing. “I am the third generation in my family to have suffered from this six-decade-long conflict. It’s good that Muivah has signed an accord,” he says.

Sixty km short of Kohima, Viketoli Angami, mother of six who sells pineapples in Zeliangbasti, a village on National Highway 29 near Medziphema town, has her own worries — Naga identity isn’t among them.

“Don’t ask me about politics. For me, sending my children to school regularly and selling 200 pineapples a day is more important than anything else. All I want is that I should be able to come to the market without any trouble and get home safely. Many people have died. There shouldn’t be any more deaths.”

***

Back in the 19th century, when the British carried out expeditions in the Naga Hills after annexing the Ahom kingdom of Brahmaputra Valley, they faced stiff resistance from the Nagas, particularly from Khonoma, a village of Angami tribes 17 km from Kohima city. A plaque on a monolith displays an inscription attributed to Khrisanisa Seyie, “the first president of the federal government of Nagaland”. It reads: “Nagas are not Indians. Their territory is not a part of the Indian Union. We shall uphold and defend this unique truth at all costs and always.”

The village “that created the Naga identity”is home to several Naga heroes, among them Angami Zapu Phizo, whose Naga National Council was the first to lead an armed resistance against the Indian government. Many others from Khonoma followed Phizo — Khrisanisa Seyie, the first ‘president’ of the underground government, T Sakhrie and J B Jasokie (in 1955, both broke away from Phizo, which led to Sakhrie’s murder in 1956 and Jasokie’s decision to come overground and become chief minister of Nagaland for a brief period in the mid-1970s).

Khonoma is now a changed village. People still talk about the armed resistance of those years, but villagers now talk of other smaller, more peaceful revolutions. “Have you heard of the conservation project in Khonoma?” says Tsile Sakhrie, who heads the Khonoma Nature Conservation and Tragopan Sanctuary Trust, an environmental group that got the village council to agree to a self-imposed ban on hunting in 1989.

“This region has produced many good officers and social workers. There are at least 200 gazetted officers from here and two IAS officers currently serving in Kohima and Dimapur,” says Sakhrie.

Meneno Chucha, with an MA in philosophy, hopes to add that to that number. “I want to join the IAS. Last year, five Nagas cracked the UPSC, though they were at the bottom of the rank list. There are a lot of things one can do for our state and people,” she says. She is happy about the deal. “There had to be a solution, good or bad. This proves armed movements are not the solution,” she adds.

Old-timers in Khonoma such as Khreikhotuo Mor still like to sit back for a good political conversation. “If this agreement that Muivah has signed is in tune with our expectations, we will celebrate. If not, we will raise our voice,” says the 65-year-old retired headmaster, who is also joint secretary of the Angami People’s Organisation.

What are his expectations? “Well, it may vary from tribe to tribe. So far, Naga political groups have been promising us sovereignty. But that could be hard to get. Even if we don’t get what we want, we cannot go back to killing each other again,” he says.

Niketu Iralu, a prominent Naga peace activist, grew up in Khonoma at the height of the insurgency, with his uncle, Phizo, leading the armed resistance. “If that isn’t enough, Issak Chisi Swu and I were classmates at the Union Christian College at Barapani (near Shillong) in 1954-55,” says the 80-year-old, sitting in his house in Zubza, 15 km from Khonoma.

But Iralu chose a completely different path for himself. While many of his friends from Khonoma joined the NSCN(IM), Iralu chose to “work for peace”. He worked with Initiatives of Change, a global peacebuilding group, in different parts of the world before returning to Nagaland 20 years ago. After 1997, when the NSCN(IM) entered into a ceasefire with the Centre, Iralu, as advisor to the Naga Hoho, an apex body of 18 Naga tribes, got the NSCN(IM) to listen to the civil society’s demands on Naga issues.

He says he had his reasons for choosing peace — he had seen violence up close and knew he had to stay away. “While my mother was the elder sister of Phizo, my sister Rano was the only Naga woman to have been elected to the Lok Sabha,” he says. Rano married Lungshim Shaiza, a Tangkhul Naga from Manipur, who, along with his brother and former Manipur chief minister Yangmasho Shaiza, were assassinated by the NSCN(IM) about 40 years ago.

While “eagerly waiting” for details of the peace deal, Iralu says he is worried about something else: factional rivalry breaking out between the Khaplang and the IM factions over the peace deal.

Iralu says close to 70,000 Nagas have been killed in the last six decades of the separatist movement.

“There are three types of deaths. First, those who died fighting the Indian army. Second, innocent villagers who starved to death at the height of Army operations in the late 1950s and early 1960s. And then you have those who got killed in internecine clashes,” says Iralu. On April 30, 1988, at least 140 of Muivah’s men — most of them Tangkhuls from Manipur — were killed in a clash with Khaplang’s supporters, leading to the first split in the NSCN.

“Khaplang, like Swu and Muivah, is growing old. Unfortunately, he cannot be part of this agreement because he belongs to Myanmar. But he cannot be a lesser Naga just because somebody had drawn the boundary between India and Myanmar cutting through Naga territory. Whatever happens, I hope the deal will work for the good of all Nagas so that after this, we will not kill one another again,” says Iralu.

The initial demand

A “Greater Nagalim” comprising “all contiguous Naga-inhabited areas”, along with Nagaland. That included several districts of Assam, Arunachal and Manipur, as also a large tract of Myanmar. The map of “Greater Nagalim” has about 1,20,000 sq km, while the state of Nagaland consists of 16,527 sq km. The claims have always kept Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh wary of a peace settlement that might affect their territories. The Nagaland Assembly has endorsed the ‘Greater Nagalim’ demand — “Integration of all Naga-inhabited contiguous areas under one administrative umbrella” — as many as five times: in December 1964, August 1970, September 1994, December 2003 and as recently as on July 27, 2015.

The new thinking
Muivah, Swu and other top NSCN (IM) leaders escaped to Thailand in the early 1990s. While Nagaland Governor M M Thomas, a Church leader from Kerala, extracted the first positive response from the NSCN(IM), then prime minister P V Narasimha Rao met Muivah, Swu and others in Paris on June 15, 1995. Talks were also held during the tenures of H D Deve Gowda and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The Government of India signed a ceasefire agreement with NSCN (IM) on July 25, 1997, which came into effect on August 1, 1997. Over 80 rounds of talks between the two sides were held subsequently.

Naga rebels
NSCN(IM): NSCN was formed on January 31, 1980, after Issak Chisi Swu, Th Muivah and S S Khaplang broke away from Anjami Zapu Phizo’s Naga National Council in protest against the Shillong Accord of 1975. NSCN split further into NSCN(IM) and NSCN(K) in April 1988. NSCN(IM) signed a ceasefire agreement with the Centre on August 1, 1997. The outfit has been fighting for a sovereign Nagalim, covering all Naga-inhabited areas of the Northeast and Myanmar. Chairman Isak Chisi Swu and general secy Thuingaleng Muivah are among prominent leaders.

NSCN(K): Chairman S S Khaplang is a Naga from Myanmar. Demand: Sovereign Nagalim. Signed ceasefire with the government of India on April 28, 2001. Abrogated ceasefire in March 2015.

NSCN(Khole-Kitovi): Formed on June 7, 2011, by Kitovi Zhimoni, till then ‘prime minister’ of NSCN(K)’s underground government, and Khole Konyak, co-founder of NSCN(K), who quit NSCN(K) complaining of Khaplang’s ‘dictatorial leadership’.

NSCN(Unification): Founded on November 23, 2007, by former NSCN(IM) ‘home minister’ Azheto Chopey. Is close to NSCN(K).

NSCN(Reformation): Formed on April 6, 2015, by NSCN(K) senior ‘minister’ Y Wangtin Konyak and spokesperson P Tikhak after Khaplang expelled them following NSCN(K)’s abrogation of its ceasefire with Centre. Wants to continue ceasefire.

NNC: While Naga Club of 1918 was replaced by Naga Hills District Tribal Council in 1945, it became Naga National Council in 1946. Originally headed by Mayangnokcha Ao and Imti Aliba Ao, NNC was taken over by AZ Phizo in 1946 and he declared Naga independence on August 14, 1947.

Other NNC factions: Formed by former NNC vice-chairman Khodao Yanthan after Phizo’s death, it is fading out slowly.

– See more at: Beyond the ‘separate Naga identity’ lie similar aspirations | The Indian Express
 

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