DIMAPUR — The Naga Students’ Federation (NSF) has reiterated that the Naga Club building belongs to all the Naga people and that no individual or group can claim ownership of the same.
“The Naga issue, the Naga political history and the resulting rights of the Naga people cannot be owned nor inherited by some individuals,” stated NSF.
In a letter to the Angami Public Organisation (APO), the NSF expressed sincere gratitude to the APO and the Kohima Village Council (KVC) for undertaking the initiative to usher in a peaceful resolution to the dispute between the federation and Naga Club over the Naga Club building.
It came three days after the Naga Club announced its acceptance of the APO and KVC recommendations, that the ‘matter of ownership and construction (of Naga Club building) be left to the Naga Club’; the building be used by all Nagas of the entire Naga homeland; and some rooms be given to NSF for its office.
However, the NSF, in its letter to the APO univocally stated that the present imbroglio over the Naga Club Building is not about the ownership of land and its building.
“For the NSF, the Naga Club and its building is not a mere standing infrastructure to be looked upon from its material perspective. The Naga Club building is a monument of Naga Nationalism and this spirit will always remain and the same will be passed on to posterity,” it stated.
Alleging that for some individuals, the Naga Club building and the land appear to be a structure for personal convenience to satisfy their “vested interest,” the NSF said such group of individuals fails to realise that the construction of a modernised palatial building sans the historic principle enshrined in the ‘Memorandum’ submitted to the Simon Commission in 1929, will be a dead structure.
“Indeed, the Naga Club building stands to symbolise the blood and tears shed by the Nagas in our struggle for freedom and this significance must not be allowed to vanish at the hands of thoughtless and visionless individuals,” it stated.
The NSF also claimed that it has been the sole custodian of the Naga Club building for decades due to the fact that the spontaneous continuity of the Naga Club by its pioneers and their successors could not be maintained due to various circumstances, mostly due to the turmoil unleashed by the occupational forces in their attempts to crash the Nagas’ revolutionary movement for self-determination.
“History is proof of the fact that, except the NSF, no Naga social organisation, including the Naga Club, could function to brave the storms during the period when the Indian army perpetrated unimaginable atrocities upon the Naga populace.”
“In such endeavour, the leaders of the NSF have undergone untold hardship, both physically and mentally, which have been proven and recorded for the generation of Nagas. For protecting the uniqueness of Naga History, NSF leaders were humiliated, physically tortured and jailed but their spirits have never been crashed,” it stated.
On the building which was ‘vandalised’ on May 27, NSF said it “would like to make it very candid that it will not be in a position to take any decision until the legitimacy of the Naga Club is laid to rest by involving all the Naga people sans any artificial borders.”
