Thepfulhouvi Solo, IFS Retd [RR-68]
When I was thinking about the things I would say in today’s celebration, the programme print reached me; and to my great surprise, I found the themes in the two songs this morning coincided with the topic I was thinking; firstly: ‘the great blessings the Ceasefire of 1964 has brought to all the people in Nagaland’ and secondly: ‘the tremendous burden of the Ceasefire lying on the future of the land because the Tempest Is Still Raging!
In 1972, the Governor of Nagaland without any prior notice, unilaterally abrogated the Indo-Naga Ceasefire of 6 September 1964 between the (FGN) Federal Government of Nagaland and the Government of India (GoI); and poignantly, the post ceasefire future of the land, is still hanging in the air. Nonetheless, the FGN and the people of Nagaland joyfully celebrate the great Ceasefire brought tremendous peace, security and succour to all the people in Nagaland.
For 132 years, from 1832 to 1964 Ceasefire, none of the other Mongolian Hill People, Meiteis of Manipur included of the Northeast India, suffered intermittent violence as much as the Naga people in the struggle for their Freedom; village after village were burned, some as many as 13 times, and the population suppressed, man, woman and children were left to the mercy of the jungle.
The more able bodied ones of those male and females in the jungle, took the dangerous and risky task of going to their houses in the village at death of night, to carry back a basket or two of their rice from their houses to the hungry in the jungle hide-outs, but they became targets of the Army sentries hiding in the smouldering village. No villagers found anyone, anywhere, to provide protection to the villagers except the jungle in the forests.
Villages like Chedema bore prolonged and untold heavy punishments at the hand of the Army, for not producing their member Biseto Medon of the FGN, the last Kilonser from the jungle to the authorities in the Capital; Biseto never surrendered nor was the Army able to get him by any means. The honourable Kilo Kilonser never took any rehabilitation gifts from any government for his lifelong service rendered to his government.
Those born after the middle of the 20th Century 1950, may not fully know what a terrible time the Naga Hills endured at the hands of the newly formed Assam Police Battalions, known as AP Battalions and the Assam Rifles. I intend, therefore, to give a very short account of persecutions the Naga Hills suffered before 6 Sept. 1964 Ceasefire.
This has not the malice of intending to create bad feeling between two ancient neighbours, future ones too. For, they will be neighbours till this educative world comes to an end. A people group like the Naga hoping for a great future cannot forget its experiences of the past: There is no future without the past; the Naga cannot afford to forget the past for the sake of their future hope. There is no future without the past!
Assam became a separate STATE on 20 January 1950; two years after, it raised its Armed Police Battalions in 1952 for guarding border posts. Neither the Battalion Commanders, nor any of the lower level Cadres have had much time of training in dealing with law and order situations or in the help of state managements, other than the use of force and the gun. The AP Battalions in early fifties were a poorly trained, poorly discipline terror force in the Naga Hills.
During school education, the cadres must have had their history of Assam. In the early nineteenth Century, Assam and Manipur were under helpless subjugation of inhuman and cruel `Maans’ of the Burmese: the AP Battalions appeared to have applied the Maan’s treatments of the Ahoms to Naga Hills. People vividly recollect notorious AP Battalion officers: Deka, Gohain, Phukon, Manik, or Boruah, for their brutal, senseless persecutions of beating, clubbing and shooting of helpless and luckless villagers for no other reasons than being Naga villagers.
The ignominious surrender of a whole AP battalion at Satakha, and on 24th March 1956 releasing them to walk down to Kohima 117 km, which they reached rag-tag faltering on support of staff torn from wild plants on the way and bare foot ultimately bandaged with their torn shirt or torn long pants; led them to their final complete withdrawal from Naga Hills around 1956; replaced by superior, more formidable Indian Army.
The Soldiers began to exert heavy pressures of Army operations on the Naga Home Guards hidden in the jungles. The Naga guerrilla forces chose the places of their ambush with care before hand at acute curves of the stony road snaking up or down steep mountain sides or some precipices or surrounded on both sides of the road by thick forested trees. The army casualty incidentally was often heavier at the deadly strategic places of ambush took place and the unsuspecting army convoy and soldiers met their end. The villagers still look at the places with quiet approvals before they leave. The Naga system of maintaining its fighting force was: `ten biological families in the village supported one soldier in the battle’.
The Army prevented the villagers to go to their jungle cultivations and the government imposed Indian Penal Code Section 144; and civilians were prevented the freedom from moving from place to place freely without Permits or Pass Word changed every day. The soldiers secretly set up ambush parties in the jungle tracts, recruited secret informers and kept look-outs for smokes that went up to the sky from the cooking fires of the Naga guerrillas under dense leafy crown of big trees in the forest.
On 1st December 1963 India set up an obedient 16th State of Nagaland out of the Naga Hills in expectation of normalcy to come, but the Naga’s longing for freedom was not satisfied by the STATE and the FGN Naga National Council continued.
The Indian Army, with their shining armours promised the highest authorities of the country that it would crush the ‘Misguided Naga Groups’ in matter of weeks, but the guerrilla fight continued. More divisions of troops were brought into the state to bear down on the small people. The FGN fighters ran short of not only of their daily food rations and went without food for days on end, their ammunitions also ran scarce against the Indian army with inexhaustible modern arms. Slowly, one after another, the so called hostiles were hunted down, killed, maimed, and caught or surrendered tribe by tribe; only two communities continued.
The Army had expected to bring the so called ‘Naga insurgency’ into submission quickly; they could however, neither eliminate nor find them even in the jungles; days passed into week, weeks into month and months into years, then more than half a dozen years passed, despite rigorous army operations.
At last the Authorities in India found there can’t be military solution to the Naga problem and concluded for a political solution.
Naga elders, Church leaders, senior Naga bureaucrats, with the initiative of Nagaland Baptist Church Council, and in support and consent of the government of India, a Peace Mission of Rev. Michael Scot, a clergy friend of India from England, Bimala Prasad Chaliha Chief Minister of Assam and prominent freedom fighter of India, Jayaprakash Narayan, were constituted into a Peace Mission that finally cobbled a ceasefire between the Nagas and India at the interior Chakhesang village of Sakraba on 6th September 1964.
In contrast to the lndo/FGN September 6th Ceasefire of 1964: there are today other ceasefires between the GoI and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-IM), several of its factions, the NNPG, and I heard, 26 in all, of patriotic Naga opaque confidential underground groups today. The ceasefires with them, however, created only apprehensions, suspicions, insecurity, and generates much complicated troubles to the public, to the society, to the rich and the traders.
The tempest is still raging, the billows are still surging over the sea; the burden of persuading the tempest to be still, and the preservation of the native Naga policy of life, lay more appropriately on the shoulders of the oldest NNC Federal Government of Nagaland than on other groups sooner than later!
All policies and programmes of all democratic governments originate from the policy of the political parties of the land. In Naga democracy, the government originates from the institutions of: the family, the clan, the khel, the village and the tribe of progressive echelons. The Naga National Council is not a political organization; it is the Institution of the Naga life.
Naga democracy likes the government that governs the least, “everyman follows the dictates of his own will, a form of pure democracy which it is difficult to conceive of as existing even for a day, yet that it does exist here is an undeniable fact“, said Captain Butler, the first white chronicler of the Naga life, the first to take charge of the first government HQ station at Chümoukedima, Naga Hills in the nineteenth century.
Among the Nagas, all are equal; man and woman have equal social status in the society; there is no caste. The land belongs to the people and not to any other; every man cultivates his own land, builds his own house in his own land and pays tax to no one. Even if the Constitution of India were possibly given in exchange for his democracy, no Naga would hesitate to decline the offer.
The mosaic law of “an eye for an eye: a tooth for a tooth” is the principle spirit of the sense of Justice in many a violent action in the days of yore, yet involuntary and unintentional acts of mishap, has conscionable form of exile and refuge available in the Naga, and God instructed Moses and Joshua to establish villages of refuge spread in the land of Canaan for unintentional misfortune. Surprisingly, capital punishment was almost unheard of in a society that had developed the tradition of head taking of the foe.
Unnatural behaviour is anathema to human life; and head taking is an adopted tradition, not a custom nor the culture; marriage of the same gender is simply unthinkable. “When sharing things with others, take the least yourself, and shameful it is, to be much obliged to others“, are some of the old adages; even the dog is given its own traditional share of portions of meat in a successful hunting.
All traditions, practices cultures, were honed out of long life of common reality, of which freedom is the most valued, followed by equality and justice. Freedom without equality is not justice. Unbelievable as it may seem, a foe may run into a house for safety from his pursuers, is immediately offered sip of wine or a morsel of food by the master of the house and instantly the fugitive enemy gains the status of a sacrosanct. All democracies in the world first originated from small people groups; the Nagas developed its moral ethics and democratic values long before the Ten Commandments reached them in the Naga Hills.
I hope God sees all of us in Nagaland.
