The Naga Political Struggle
- Part 1 -

Dr Lokendra Arambam *

State of Nagaland, India with districts and their HQ :: Pix - Wikipedia/Wikigringo

(This is the text of Dr Lokendra Arambam's speech at the inauguration of the Naga Archives & Research Centre, Dimapur, Nagaland on November 7, 2015)

Allow me to express my deepest respect and gratitude to Reverend Dr VK Nuh and his distinguished members of the Board of Directors including elder brother Niketu Iralu, who had been kind and considerate enough to invite me and my friends from Manipur to this auspicious occasion of the inauguration of the Naga Archives & Research Centre at Dimapur.

The start of a precious institution, in the establishment of a repository of exciting material, on the subject of the struggle for freedom of the Naga people would indeed be very special. I am sure the study of the Naga Independence Struggle had become one of the most anxious subjects all over the globe, by virtue of its being one of the longest human struggles ever for freedom and emancipation, and generations after generations of Nagas who had experienced and lived through these chapters of agony and pride, of triumphs yet tragedies and suffering, would inspire the future in their profound human appeal. Generations of my age who had listened as a neighbor to the stories of those sacrifices are chastened and humbled by the experience.

As a simple student of history, especially of the emerging first peoples of the Northeast, I felt that I should endeavour to add to the ensuing collection of Reverend Nuh's records certain additional information about the reception, response, and contribution to the enhancement of the Naga struggle by the neighbouring community of the Meetei in the Manipur valley.

These stories I would like to narrate would require research and verification from Rev Nuh's archivists, record managers, manuscript curators and new young scholars interested in various dimensions of human struggle. The narratives from Manipur would, I hope, help expand the dynamic nuances of the course of the struggle, because of its very universality, as well as its common angst experienced by peoples together under colonial and imperialistic bondage. This bondage was perpetrated by ambitious inheritors to the dissembling British Empire. The Indian State was the common enemy for the decolonizing Northeasterners.

Angami Zapu Phizo, in his urge to secure more support for his peoples' struggles was learnt to have visited Imphal, and met the Manipur Chief Minister Maharaj Kumar Priyobarta, to discuss the possibility of a common endeavour to fight against the Indian state. Stephen Angkang, an elderly Tangkhul, told me of the anguish of Phizo in the Manipur peoples' response, their inability to fraternize with the precious cause. The period indeed was one of the most critical periods in Manipur's modern history.

I remember, the people, after 56 years of British protection and rule was struggling in the wake of the end of the devastating second world war to retrieve the vestiges of their ancient legacies of hills and plains unity, give themselves a proper democratic constitution, respecting human rights and adult suffrage, adapting to the realities of pluralism, engaging with double representation in single constituencies of separate communities, and also being aware of outsiders and their impact on the socio-economic anxieties of the emerging population.

Three important constitutional measures were adopted, namely the Manipur State Constitution Act of 1947, the Manipur Hill Peoples (Administration) Regulations of 1947, and the Manipur Naturalization Act of 1947. These three measures reflected the restoration of the recovered nation status of the pre-colonial Asiatic state, becoming a constitutional monarchy with democracy as its working principle of governance, and taking care of decentralized empowerment of hill population with admixture of customary laws with more precious inputs from Indian legal systems introduced under British colonial rule (1891-1947).

It also saw to the context of migrant populations like Indians and Nepalis etc. as foreigners, if they could be assimilated and absorbed in the social structure like in the pre-colonial past. However the equilibrium of the polity was destroyed through forced integration into India in 1949, and the new Dominion of India rapidly suppressing the peoples' risings for a socialist republic under the leadership of the revolutionary communist leader Hijam Irabot (1949-1951).

The Naga independence struggle could be hastened from a priori thesis of the Nagas not being Indians before, while that of the Meetei was after long period of Indianization, which was countered by a conscious effort of de-Indianization, and the new struggles that emerged after the forcible integration into India in 1949 and the suppression of the peasants armed movement under Irabot was based on the principles of self-determination being absorbed by young generations, and aware of the possibility of a Pan-Mongoloid unity.

The new generation of armed opposition groups which emerged amidst the valley population in the sixties sought a new kind of Pan-Mongoloid collective, transcending ethnic considerations on struggle, yet respecting identities and gestured cooperation to the NNC, which was then at the forefront of the struggle. The Founder of the United National Liberation Front, formed in 1964, late Arambam Somorendra, in his efforts to seek understanding and collective endeavour made a trip to Kohima early in August 1968 to meet General Kaito and General Mowu Angami. It seems General Mowu Angami had left for China, and General Kaito was just recently assassinated, and he returned, a little disappointed.

However, the post-Shillong Accord scenario of mutual antagonism amidst the stalwarts of the struggle, and violent repression by the Indian army resulted to intense dislocation and displacements amongst the hill populations of Manipur, and the valley community of the Meetei rendered yeomen service to hide the then stalwarts of the NNC in the suburban households of Imphal, providing hospitality and infrastructural support to printing of leaflets and propaganda materials etc. for the cause.

Names now famous in the NSCN (IM) hierarchy, Angelus Shimray, Raising, Livingstone, V. Atem and others were mentioned who were sheltered in the Meitei homes in these critical periods. In the late seventies and eighties armed opposition groups from Manipur were reported to have established contact and shared the vicissitudes of the new theatre of engagement in the Burmese geography.

New groups of different leaderships amongst the Meeteis had also emerged and lent new dynamics in what is now termed in official establishment circles as ethnic insurgencies. Their history together with the ethnic brotherhood of the Kachins, the Konyaks, the Pangmis, the Tangkhuls, the Semas, the Ahom, the Shans, etc. in the tumultuous ethnic maze under the ferocious onslaughts of the Burmese Junta, during the eighties, I am sure, are yet to emerge in the annals of the post-Shillong Accord struggles of the Nagas.

I would like to narrate two incidents in the entire scary episodes of the drama and tensions amidst the violences of war, depredation and survival. The one is that of April 30, 1988 when new histories were made in the course of the Naga struggle. The opponents of the Shillong Accord, the NSCN that was formed in 1980 broke into two factions in 1988 when Thuingaleng Muivah and Isaac Swu had to part with S.S. Khaplang and the resultant rift in the Naga community had serious implications on the role of the traditional Meetei groups, who were sheltered by Baba Khaplang but were also friendly to the Muivah group.

It so happened that the UNLF was the first organization who became aware of the intensions of Baba Khaplang, who became suspicious of Muivah's alleged overtures to the Indian administration, and our informants mention certain incidents at the village Longwa, when Khaplang vowed elimination of Muivah and his group who were camping side by side with the UNLF cadres in the Hangshen village.

It so happened in the early morning of April 30, that the camp was raided by the forces of Khaplang to eliminate Muivah, and he was informed by the Meetei brothers to run away from the camp. Muivah survived the onslaught along with his better half due to the timely hint of the Meeteis, and the massacres that followed as a result of the rift was experienced by the pained Meetei brothers, who themselves were pounced upon by the Burmese army with mortars and gunshots subsequent to the intra-Naga crisis.

Some 110 Tangkhul bodies were learnt to have been sacrificed within a few days of the rift, and the river bank of the Chindwin were spread with the stenched bodies of the cadres of the Muivah group and it seems the blood of the ethnic brothers turned into thick sheets of clod. The UNLF cadres had to be running round and round chased by the Burmese army, and had to revisit Hangshen three times in the milieu, and later as they trudged farther into the jungles, experienced another incident at Tisha village.

It was here Capt. Khrang of Khaplang's group who had captured a group of Tangkhul men and women, and amongst them was a Tangkhul doctor named Nelson. They were about to be eliminated by Khaplang's soldiers, but the Meetei brothers earnestly pleaded to Baba Khaplang not to tar the future history of the struggle with such violent acts, and the leader listened to the pleading of the Meetei friends and spared the group including Dr. Nelson. I gather that the doctor is still serving at a Kohima Hospital.


(This is the text of Dr Lokendra Arambam's speech at the inauguration of the Naga Archives & Research Centre, Dimapur, Nagaland on November 7, 2015)

To be continued..