There has been much speculation on the strategic significance of Thuingaleng Muivah's visit to his home village Somdal in the Ukhrul district of Manipur. From the official point of view, Muivah is the chief hurdle before a resolution to the Naga problem, for it is only he who continues to insist on two conditions deemed outside the purview of the Indian Constitution—a separate constitution and a flag for Nagas—as a precondition for a settlement.
This, however, is probably an overreading. Muivah is now 91 and not in good health. His abiding wish, hence, is probably to see his birthplace he left 61 years ago, not knowing if this would be his last chance. He is revered among Manipur Nagas, especially his tribe—the Tangkhul, for whom he is a father figure, an avakharar. As with anybody who has led an armed movement and has had to exercise brute coercive force to silence oppositions, there are also his detractors. On the eve of his home visit, the Zeliangrong United Front of the Zeliangrong Nagas, for instance, called for an apology from him for alleged atrocities inflicted on their tribesmen.
Naga underground politics too has become more complex, and Muivah does not command overwhelming support of all Nagas anymore, especially among Nagaland’s Nagas. The tremendous love and affection shown to him during his home visit, therefore, may not easily transform into the kind of political energy capable of lifting the Naga issue out of its present stalemate.
Most Nagas today have arguably reconciled to a solution within India. This has ironically complicated the matter further. The lofty ideal of Naga sovereignty, even if impossibly elusive, once provided an advocacy platform for a united Naga struggle. Acceptance of a settlement within India has meant the splintering of even the idea of a solution package between myriad emerging interest groups. Naga movement, too, had correspondingly fragmented unrecognisably.
Muivah joined the militant Naga National Council (NNC) led by A Z Phizo in 1964. From his testimony and those of other rebel colleagues published in Nandita Haksar and Sebastian M Hongray’s Kuknalim: Naga Armed Resistance, he earned respect for his commitment, determination and intelligence. He was also among the first Naga rebels to slip into China’s Yunnan province to get training as well as to woo international support for the Naga cause.
It was during one of his trips to China that a faction of NNC entered into the Shillong Accord in 1975 to resolve the Naga issue within the Indian Constitution. Muivah rejected this accord as a betrayal and together with Isak Chishi Swu and S S Khaplang left the NNC to create the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) in 1980.
Perhaps it is the recoil from this rejection that is inhibiting Muivah now from accepting another peace deal within the Constitution. If he did, the troubling question would be whether the additional 50 years of trauma for Nagas after his rejection of the Shillong Accord was meaningless.
The NSCN split in 1988 when Khaplang, a Hemi Naga from Burma, violently parted ways—an eventuality anticipated by Bertil Lintner in his book Land of Jade: A journey from Indian through northern Burma to China after having stayed in the NSCN headquarters in Burma in the mid-1980s. This split was broadly between the more backward Naga tribes, most of whom were in Burma, and Nagas from India.
The NSCN faction of Isak and Muivah (NSCN-IM) is still the most powerful and well-organised among the two dozen or so splinter groups of the original NSCN, most of which are under a federal conglomeration styled as Naga National Political Group. Almost all of them are united in their opposition to NSCN-IM.
The seeds of rebellion were evident even before the British left India. For instance, the Naga Club, which in 1946 morphed and radicalised into the NNC, made it clear in its memorandum to the Simon Commission in 1929 that Nagas were not Indians and would like to be left unaffiliated to India when the British leave.
The First World War was a game-changer in the consolidation of Naga identity. Disparate and often mutually hostile Naga tribes and villages came to be enlisted in the British Labour Corps, to be transported to Europe in the war effort. Exposure to the outside world and the realisation that they were treated as a category different from the rest—even other Indian soldiers—made the Nagas realise their common destiny.
It is no coincidence that the Naga Club, the seminal organisation that fostered a new Naga nationalism, was formed by war veterans with assistance of some British officials sympathetic to their predicament.
After the British formally annexed Assam at the end of the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1826, not just the Naga Hills, but the entire stretch of mountainous territories surrounding the Assam plains were left ‘unadministered’, although claimed as British territory. The Government of India Act, 1919 redesignated these ‘unadministered’ territories as ‘excluded areas’. The 1935 GoI Act upgraded some of these ‘excluded areas’ to ‘partially-excluded areas’.
When India's independence became a certainty, there were four British proposals to leave these excluded and partially excluded areas as a separate ‘crown colony’ as David R Syiemlieh writes in On the Edge of Empire: Four British Plans for Northeast India. The best known among these is by Robert Reid, a former governor of Assam. In a 22-page note in 1941, he contended the people of the region were alien to India’s nationhood and would be best left separate. The idea was ultimately dropped as other British officials felt such a place would be ungovernable.
This foreboding, however, proved somewhat prophetic and several separatist insurgencies were spawned in this region in postcolonial India; the Nagas were the first to revolt. Muivah’s heroic struggle and tragic failure in this way is a poignant portrayal of both the historical logics as well as the futility of rigidified rebellions, stubbornly hanging on to slogans made redundant by lapsed decades. Maybe it is also a pointer towards what a constructivist approach to a win-win solution can be to this problem endemic to the Northeast region.
Pradip Phanjoubam | Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics
(Views are personal)
(phanjoubam@gmail.com)
