Mother of insurgencies or reinvention?

Mother of insurgencies or reinvention?
M. S. Prabhakara - The Hindu

In an article titled "Mother of insurgencies or reinvention?" by M.S. Prabhakara in The Hindu he write with the question; "Is the peace talk with the mother of insurgencies and the Indian Government achieving to a better term of reinventing insurgencies".

He writes, "Since the mother of all insurgencies began speaking to the government, other insurgent or terrorist groups have become active; these outfits have survived and even prospered by their capacity to reinvent themselves, though not their stated aims and objectives, and are carrying on".

According to him, long before the idea of 'restoration of sovereignty' disaffection manifested itself among other people of the region, tribal and non-tribal, Angami Zapu Phizo; leader of the Naga National Council (NNC), political face of the oldest of the insurgencies in the region, himself had tried on the eve of Independence to enlist the support of the largest and most advanced of the people, the Assamese, as well as other tribal people who, in course of time, were to form the core of Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya and Mizoram — the last two then politically and administratively part of Assam — for realizing his plan for an Independent Nagaland.

He also urged them to seek an independent status outside India. He further writes, early years in Manipur, Naga insurgency was active those days in the Naga-inhabited hill districts mainly in Tamenglong, while in the Imphal Valley, several outfits, some of them fighting one another as much as the Indian state, were active: the United National Liberation Front (UNLF), the Peoples' Liberation Army (PLA), the People's Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak (PREPAK) and the Kangleipak Communist Party (KCP).

And the objectives of all these organizations were broadly the same: independence and sovereignty, the restoration of sovereignty that 'lapsed' to the people these organizations claimed to represent when the British left India but which India refused to concede.

He points out in the article that the settlement of the "Naga political issue," that is restoration of Naga sovereignty and independence — the resolution of what has come to be known in the Naga nationalist rhetoric as "the mother of all insurgencies" in the region — is central to resolving the other problems in the region. This perspective has been expressed several times by T. Muivah since the NSCN (I-M) began talking directly to the Government of India nearly 15 years ago. With the talk he feels that peace of a kind has prevailed in Nagaland and in the Naga inhabited areas of Manipur, though the "Naga political issue" remains unresolved.

He raised the important question as to, "How has this unique "resolution of the Naga political issue" impinged on the ferment in the rest of the region? Has the "mother of all insurgencies" in the region, whose leaders now travel on Indian passports with all implications of securing such a document, come to terms with its unrealized and indeed unrealizable sovereignty aspirations and injected a dose of realism into the sovereignty aspirations of other groups with far less legitimate claims than the Naga people who, under Phizo, formally declared Independence on August 14, 1947?.

He feels that arresting the leaders or ULFA and UNLF is one significant development in the insurgency scenario. But even though the senior leaders of ULFA has resolved to hold talks with the Government of India without any precondition however; UNLF chairman Rajkumar Sanayaima, who is still in the prison, defiant about not talking to the Government of India except on four preconditions being accepted, the core of which is a plebiscite under U.N. supervision to ascertain if the people of Manipur want to remain part of the country.

The striking and most interesting idea Prabhakara posed is, "Will the UNLF follow NSCN (I-M) and the ULFA's suit, as the relatively realistic approach of the first two which too were insisting that the core issue in any talks with the government had to be sovereignty?"

You can read the entire article at The Hindu here.