The Indian government and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah) signed the historic Naga Peace Accord on Monday. This flows from the ceasefire of 1997 and will hopefully help settle the Naga peoples’ historic demand for safeguarding their “rights against all encroachments…” and be left “alone to determine for ourselves as in the ancient times,” albeit within the Indian Union.
To understand the Naga problem better we must first recognise certain historical facts. The first of these is that the Naga Hills was the very last British annexation in the subcontinent. That annexation began with the establishment in March 1878 of the chief administrative centre for the region at Kohima, then a large Angami village. This was completed in 1949 when the new Government of India extended its authority to the Tuensang region. Before this the Naga tribes were independent of the powers centred either in Assam, Burma or India. This is, thus, very unlike Jammu and Kashmir.
The Naga tribes are generally considered to be of Tibeto-Burman stock, ethnically very distinct and separate from the people of the Indo-Gangetic plains and peninsular India. According to Hokishe Sema, a former chief minister of Nagaland and later governor of Himachal Pradesh, it becomes difficult to categorise the Naga tribes. Sema has written in his book, Emergence of Nagaland: Socio-Economic and Political Transformation and the Future, that while it is possible to categorise the Garos as a Tibetan race, the Khasis as Mongoloids with connections with Thais and Cambodians, and the Mizos with the Chins of Burma, the Naga tribes “defy a common nomenclature”.
He further writes: “This is because there are no composite ‘Naga’ people... among them are many distinct tribes having more than 30 dialects, with almost every tribe constituting a separate language group. Moreover, their cultural and social setup varies vastly from tribe to tribe. Even their physique and appearance differ from group to group, place to place. The nomenclature ‘Naga’ is given to these tribes by outsiders.” The lingua franca Nagami is a still evolving pidgin of Assamese and English with a good bit of Hindi also thrown it. Quite clearly, there is no sound basis to claim a common Naga identity, let alone a nationality, but it is there thanks to our maladroit ways.
The third and now possibly the most important factor has been the rapid spread of Christianity in the Naga Hills. The first missionaries went there in 1836, when Reverend Miles Bronson set up a mission in Namsang, now in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tirap sub-division. But the real impetus to Christianity came after the advent of an American Baptist missionary, Reverend E.W. Clarke. Clarke’s efforts struck pay dirt when he managed to baptise nine Nagas in 1872.
The Baptists never looked back since and now maintain more than 800 churches and have a majority of Nagas under their fold. While it must be acknowledged that the missionaries have played a pioneering role in establishing modern health and educational facilities, we must not remain unaware of the role of the Baptist Church in creating a new awareness and sense of oneness among the Naga tribes.
The initial impetus to this unity was provided in 1918 by the setting up of the Naga Club, with the tacit encouragement of the British authorities. Its members were important village headmen, officials and educated Nagas, including some recent graduates from Indian universities. Given the character of its membership, the Naga Club soon acquired political overtones and became a vehicle to express local aspirations.
Thus, when the Simon Commission visited the area in January 1929, the Naga Club pleaded: “We pray that we should not be thrust to the mercy of the people who could never have conquered us themselves, and to who we were never subjected; but to leave us alone to determine for ourselves as in ancient times.” They demanded the return of their liberty when India got her Independence.
When Lt. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi’s Japanese 15th Army launched their attack on March 7, 1944, World War II came to India. This attack along the Kabaw Valley faltered at Imphal where four Indian divisions held their ground. For three long months the fate of India teetered on the forested ridges of Manipur as two great armies fought furiously and savagely. The Nagas contributed enormously to the allied effort. This spontaneous loyalty was largely motivated by the hope that the British will support their quest for independence.
After the Japanese defeat in April 1945, with the active encouragement of Sir Charles Pawsey, British deputy commissioner of the Naga Hills between 1937-47, the Naga Hills District Tribal Council was set up with the intention of uniting all the Naga tribes. This became the Naga National Council (NNC) the following year.
The initial aspiration of this mother of all later Naga political parties seemed only to get local autonomy within Assam. But on December 6, 1946, T. Aliba Imti Ao, the secretary of the NNC, addressing a public meeting in Kohima called for the unification of all the Naga tribes and raised a demand for freedom. It is possible to discern the subtle hand of the soon to depart British in this.
The Naga insurgency of 1954 saw the re-entry of the Indian Army once more into the region. Sadly, the Army’s pro-mise to “exterminate terror-ism” mostly degenerated into an indiscriminate and often lawless campaign of terror and destruction. It might have succeeded in quelling the insur-gency but only exacerbated the alienation. Mercifully, today’s Indian Army has learnt its lessons well and Indian public opinion is also more sensitive to human rights, particularly in insurgency-ridden areas.
Our political and bureaucratic leadership don’t seem to have learnt anything or, worse, forgotten anything. We have, since the formation of Nagaland in December 1963, lurched from one political compromise to another. Consequently, the Naga Hills region — Nagaland and Manipur — have had the most uncaring and corrupt state governments with little to show on the ground despite the nation’s highest per capita development expenditure.
To compound our problems, the region falls alongside Burma, which is riven with insurgencies and is the world’s major production centre for heroin. Imphal, Kohima and Dimapur are astride one major heroin highway to the outside world. It is bad enough that narcotics and terrorism go hand-in-hand, but now we are faced with a major addiction problem in the region and the indiscriminate use of needles has caught Nagaland and Manipur in a vicious maelstrom of HIV.
India’s long-term security interests, and the steady expansion of Chinese influence in Burma in the areas abutting our borders, equally require our military and administrative presence in the Naga Hills as it does a general stability. The answers to these can only be found in new and innovative political and administrative arrangements that factor in not just the culture of the Naga tribes, but also the geography of the Naga Hills. Article 371A of the Indian Constitution does provide some safeguards, but clearly these are not enough.
The writer held senior positions in government and industry, and is a policy analyst studying economic and security issues. He also specialises in the Chinese economy.
