The Naga Peace Accord

As characteristic of the people, the Naga insurgency had also been a very hardy and perseverant problem which had meandered through a tortuous route of successive negotiations, ever since the  first sign of Naga resistance was seen in the formation of the Naga Club in 1918   The landmark peace accord signed on Monday last  by the government and the NSCN-IM, the dominant rebel group in Nagaland, is a “framework agreement” that will pave the way for a final and lasting solution to one of the longest running insurgencies in Asia 

The Naga hills became part of British India in 1881. In 1946 came the Naga National Council (NNC), which, under the leadership of Angami Zapu Phizo, declared Nagaland an independent state on August 14, 1947. Challenged by the central government Phizo went underground in 1952, forming the underground Naga Federal Government (NFG) and the Naga Federal Army (NFA). The Government of India sent in the Army to crush the insurgency and, in 1958, enacted the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. The Naga Hills, till then  a district of Assam, was upgraded to a state in 1963, by also adding the Tuensang Tract that was then part of North East Frontier Agency(NEFA).

In 1975 came an important breakthrough when the government got a section of NNC leaders to sign the Shillong Accord, under which one section of NNC and NFG agreed to give up arms. However a group of about 140 members led by Thuingaleng Muivah, who were at that time in China, refused to accept the Shillong Accord, and formed the National Socialist Council of Nagaland in 1980. But in 1988, the NSCN split into NSCN (IM) and NSCN (K). The NSCN (IM) came to be seen as the “mother of all insurgencies” in the region   

 What did the NSCN (IM) want?A “Greater Nagalim” comprising “all contiguous Naga-inhabited areas”, along with Nagaland. That included several districts of Assam, Arunachal and Manipur, as also a large tract of Myanmar. The map of “Greater Nagalim” has about 1,20,000 sq km, while the state of Nagaland consists of 16,527 sq km. The Nagaland Assembly has endorsed the ‘Greater Nagalim’ demand — “Integration of all Naga-inhabited contiguous areas under one administrative umbrella” — as many as five times: in December 1964, August 1970, September 1994, December 2003 and as recently as on July 27, 2015. The claims have always kept Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh wary of a peace settlement that might affect their territories.

Insurgency continued and Muivah, Swu and other top NSCN (IM) leaders escaped to Thailand in the early 1990s. Indian leaders, a succession of them,  however kept up the negotiations abroad,  The Government of India signed a ceasefire agreement with NSCN (IM) on July 25, 1997, which came into effect on August 1, 1997. Beginning with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who met them in Paris on September 30, 1998, over 80 rounds of talks between the two sides were held subsequently.

For the NSCN (IM), the Modi government continues from where Vajpayee left. The RSS’s Northeast veteran P B Acharya is currently Nagaland Governor, and Joint Intelligence Committee chairman R N Ravi, with his IB background, is an old Northeast hand. The state’s political scenario has changed, with T R Zeliang’s Naga People’s Front, an NDA ally, persuading all groups in the Assembly, including the Congress, to become partners in an all-party government.

Leaders cutting across party lines have preferred to wait and watch. Nobody in these three states would allow even an inch of their land to be added to a ‘Greater Nagalim’, Not much details have emerged abot the accord. it is called a “framework agreement” that will pave the way for a final and lasting solution It is however given out that NSCN-IM’s most contentious demand – the creation of Nagalim or Greater Nagaland comprising all Naga-inhabited areas of the northeast – had been “set aside for now”. The accord will be “confined to Nagaland”, Within this framework agreement, details and execution plan will be released shortly.

   Before the NSCN-IM agreed to ink the accord, Muivah met top “kilonsers” or ministers of the rebel group at the group’s Camp Hebron in Nagaland on July 27. At the meeting, the NSCN-IM leadership vetted and approved the draft of the accord. In that context  both sides described the signing of the accord on Monday as a key breakthrough in efforts to end the insurgency and unrest in Nagaland and to make the NSCN-IM part of the mainstream.