Is Naga insurgency, India’s oldest and the most powerful ethnic rebellion, on its deathbed?
The Nagas, inhabiting India’s strategically critical northeastern region, were the first to challenge the very “idea of India” immediately after the Indian subcontinent’s dismemberment in 1947 as they wanted to carve out an independent Naga state, called Nagalim.
In fact, the Nagas have been suffering from an identity crisis right from the colonial days and consequently wanted to assert control over the physical space where they are in majority. The Naga leadership even approached the Indian National Congress led by the towering Mahatma Gandhi with their demand.
And when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a dramatic announcement earlier this month informed the nation about the finalization of a peace deal with one of the two main surviving insurgent groups, the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN-IM) led by the once indomitable Isaac Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah, the eventful Naga history seems to have come a full circle.
After all, this is the same faction, now willing to function within the ambit of Indian constitution, which waged a bloody, guerrilla-warfare against the Indian state for achieving an independent ethnic Naga homeland comprising of Naga dominated parts of the mountainous northeast and areas in neighboring Myanmar.
Besides, both Swu and Muivah were staunch hardliners, uncompromising in their demand for forging a Nagalim and even parted ways with the father of the Naga movement Angami Zapu Phizo, after he signed the Shillong peace accord with the Indian government in 1975.
The China-trained Muivah saw this understanding as a standard tactics of weakening the legitimacy of the demand for Nagalim and most importantly fracturing the Naga leadership who supposedly wielded enormous influence over the ethnic Naga tribes of all hue settled in extended territories that goes beyond the frontiers of India.
No doubt, NSCN-IM’s willingness to submit to the Indian Union is no mean achievement because they are among those violent non-state actors and paramilitary groups which posed a successful challenge to the mighty Indian state. But the big question is can such agreement, that shrewdly seeks to undermine pan-Naga nationalism, adequately address the sentiments of the Naga people or will it stoke a more vicious ethnic rivalry in India’s beleaguered northeast given the prevailing sense of wariness in the region’s non-Naga ethnic groups?
As RN Ravi, Modi-government’s interlocutor for engaging the disgruntled Naga rebel leadership in dialogue, himself acknowledges, “the term Naga is a rubric for a host of over 25 distinct tribes inhabiting the Nagaland state and adjoining areas of northeastern India and Myanmar.
Their mutual differences far outnumber their commonness. Each tribe is culturally distinct and linguistically unintelligible to the others.” According to Ravi, who played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in Modi’s bid for concluding a hasty peace deal, “NSCN-IM, notwithstanding its pan-Naga pretensions, is essentially a militia of the Tangkhul tribe of Manipur with little resonance with the broad Naga family.”
Ravi firmly believed that “any deal cut with NSCN-IM would not be acceptable to the Naga society” thus making it clear that all stakeholders, direct and indirect, associated with this struggle needs to be taken on board before finalizing any agreement.
Indeed, the Naga insurgency is all about inter and intra tribal rivalry as life in Nagaland begins and ends with localized and deep-rooted tribal customs and village traditions. There are empirical evidences to suggest that tribal and ethnic rifts have predated virtually all peace processes in Nagaland.
Ravi is therefore justified in his assessment because a disparate and divided Naga leadership means the Modi-Muivah photo-op in New Delhi will hardly enthuse the rebel foot-soldiers on the ground to give up violence for peace or abandon the general Naga attitude of indignation toward India even partially.
Anybody having an experience of venturing the Naga territories will find it hard to disagree that resistance to Indian norms is commonplace, as a distant Indian state is extremely unpopular to a vast majority of Naga people. And India is herself to be blamed because the ruling elites in New Delhi tried to maintain their grip over the region through iron fist.
Ironic it is that a vibrant democracy has to fall back on its military, draconian provisions of law and imperceptible development works to maintain harmonious relationship with the indigenous ethnic groups at the ground level.
In fact, the disgruntlement against the Indian state is such that there is a practice of dumping slaughtered cow or pig heads at street corners on the occasion of India’s Independence Day, which incidentally goes beyond the limits of Naga inhabited areas of India’s northeast.
It is good that Modi tried to amend the situation, resulting out of indiscriminate state highhandedness, by candidly acknowledging that the Naga problem has festered so long due to a lack of mutual understanding, complicated further by the colonial mindset of domination by force.
Ravi imagines an Anton Chekhov-style resolution of the Naga issue where “characters unhappy, disillusioned, even bitter but alive, braces themselves for a new beginning.”
But, the unique Naga socio-cultural milieu, varying from one tribe to another, will make the quest for permanent tranquility more difficult even as preservation of Nagamese identity remains an all-encompassing and uncompromising demand.
Now, the challenge for India is how to reconcile the “Naga by birth, Indian by accident” narrative with that of her strategic interest in the backdrop of an “Act East” policy, apart from harnessing the strengths of China and Myanmar to transform the region’s long neglected economy.
