CALCUTTA, 25 July 2004 — Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will meet secessionist National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN)’s top leaders Isak Chishi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah in Bangkok next week to take the floundering peace process forward.
K. Padmanabhaiah, former home secretary and federal government’s chief interlocutor in talks with Naga rebels, is flying to Bangkok today to prepare the ground for Manmohan’s meeting with Muivah and Swu.
On Thursday, Manmohan will lead an Indian delegation to Bangkok for a Bangladesh-India-Myanmar-Sri Lanka-Thailand Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) meeting.
A senior Home Ministry official said in Calcutta that Muivah and Swu sought an appointment with Manmohan in Bangkok and the prime minister agreed to meet them. The current cease-fire between the Indian Army and Naga rebels lapses July 31.
The armed rebellion for an independent country in predominantly Christian Nagaland is India’s oldest and one of the world’s longest-running insurgencies. Socialist leader Jai Prakash Narain once described Nagaland as ‘India’s Vietnam’.
Last January, Swu and Muivah returned to India after 31 years in exile for much-hyped peace talks with then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani and other top leaders.
Their visit raised hopes that the guns will fall silent forever in Nagaland where as many as 30,000 Nagas have died fighting since India’s independence from Britain in 1947.
But there has been no forward movement since then and analysts fear that India’s biggest peace initiative in the insurgency-wracked northeast might collapse.
According to Naga leaders, Vajpayee’s National Democratic Alliance government promised to ‘unify’ the Naga-majority areas of Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh with Nagaland, but has done nothing so far.
Independent observers say that as New Delhi has given its word to the Nagas, it should take the next logical step to overcome Meiti and Manipuri resistance by appointing a boundary commission to find out whether the population of Naga-majority areas outside Nagaland wants to merge with Nagaland.
Naga leaders are keen on a fresh dialogue at the political level as they are disappointed with Padmanabhaiah and former Intelligence Bureau director K.P. Singh who have been meeting them regularly.
Manmohan will not be setting a precedent by talking to Naga leaders in a third country. Former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao met NSCN leaders in Paris in 1995, while Inder Kumar Gujral met them in Zurich.
