Revisiting Palestine in Mokokchung and Understanding the Naga Struggle

I had been to Palestine in 2005 as part of a solidarity delegation, and saw life under occupation for the first time. The Israeli military state, occupying the whole of historic Palestine since 1948, could be witnessed taking over the best land in many cities in the West Bank and Gaza, subjecting the local people to humiliating checkpoints and blockades, denying them access to grow olives on soil, which they had been cultivating on for centuries, usurping resources and sovereignty, and of course, brutally suppressing any resistance.

I never realised that I would see much of the same in a region that’s not too far away from my own homeland in South India.

Militarism in Mokokchung: Mokokchung is in the Naga Nation, as a friend told me, and it must strenuously be clarified that the Naga Nation is different from Nagaland, a state within the federal union of India...part of India’s Northeast region. The Naga Nation doesn’t have any sovereignty or realisation of an honest national aspiration…a struggle that many intellectuals and activists call the longest standing international conflict of modern times. The Indian state has ensured the complete oppression of the Naga people through what can only be termed as an occupationary presence.

Traveling with a senior academic and Naga human rights activist in Mokokchung, one witnessed the overwhelming presence of the Indian military. Central Reserve Police Force barracks built over beautiful forestland, and vast army campuses sprawled over the landscape were everywhere, cordoned off from the rest of the population. My friend spoke of a huge green commons where he and his buddies used to play in when they were children. Now all that remains of the park is a tiny gazebo-like structure, where young couples come and stargaze, surrounded by military buildings and soldiers. Youngsters, especially young men, are often harassed and detained by the military, and last year the entire town went off the boil upon learning that a young woman was sexually harassed by a soldier.

Many old structures in Mokokchung were torn down and now serve as official military offices. Vast tracts of hilly forestland that villagers would often practice cultivation on for their sustenance, are now completely off limits…taken over, rather occupied, by the armed Indian state. Army-men, obviously from outside the region can be spotted everywhere, either armed and on patrol or unarmed and walking around in civvies.

My friend said that one of the primary reasons for such a huge Indian military presence in Nagaland was the usurpation of forest resources, of which the region is very rich in. Furthermore, with the Indian Government’s new “Look East” policy with respect to trade and commerce, Nagaland, especially the frontier town of Dimapur, becomes critical as a gateway to expanding trade-relations with Southeast and East Asian countries. Indeed in Northeast India, the region’s first two Special Economic Zones (which are separate deregulated enclaves started by the Indian Government for promoting private company-led exports) have come up in Dimapur. Thus there are strong economic and commercial overtones to the occupationary presence of the Indian state.

Mokokchung itself is a classic example of military cantonments taking over prime land across Northeast India. My friend said that last year, locals in Mokokchung agitated for land usurped by the Assam Rifles to be given back to the civic administration of Nagaland. A sympathetic and well-liked Indian Civil Service officer, Abhishek Singh, who was the District Commissioner at that time, was apparently very supportive of the cause and even went lengths to prevent further land acquisition.

He was transferred out of the region soon after.

The sights in Mokokchung gave me a strong feeling of déjà vu with my trip to Palestine in 2005. Replace the Indian military with the Israeli one, and Nagas with Palestinians; add in some desert land with olive trees, and I could well have been in Bethlehem or Hebron. The historical similarities between the Naga struggle and the occupation of Palestine are also eerily analogous, with British colonisers playing an instrumental role in the subjugation of both populations, laying the groundwork for the oppression to continue under the newly formed nation-states of India and Israel, who now play the role of regional imperialists.

Mokokchung is however, but a small manifestation of the larger Naga struggle and their quest for realising a national identity.

The Naga Struggle: The Naga Nation has been in a perennial state of war ever since the early part of the 19th century when the Nagas valorously fought and lost against the infinitely better-armed British who then soon created the North East Frontier to protect their Indian dominion. This effectively cleaved the Naga Nation in two with the creation of an artificial boundary between Burma and then colonial India. This state of war continued into the 20th century, and was particularly acute during World War II, where the region became a critical battle theatre for Allied success in the Indo-China region, with the Nagas placed at the center of the Japanese invasion.

Following the Nagas’ uprising against the British and their soldiering in someone else’s war, they continued to engage in the national struggle with the formation of the Naga National Council by the legendary AZ Phizo, and declared independence on August 14th 1947, a day before India did, with the declaration sent to Delhi, London and the UNO.

Niketu Iralu, convener of the Naga Hoho (Assembly) Coordination Committee, the apex body of the Naga peoples' struggle, in a finely written article states that:

India was about to celebrate her historic achievement of freedom the next day, in addition to being preoccupied with the trauma of the partition and the massive bloodshed that followed. It was not surprising that Delhi was not aware of what the Nagas had declared. But to the Nagas, the legal, historical and political validity of their case stands on the fact that they had clearly made known their position before India became independent. They have fought with heroism to defend their position with a free conscience, not hampered by any sense of being treasonous towards India, because theirs is not a secessionist, separatist or anti-India movement. Nagas maintain that they are not trying to secede or separate themselves from a union they had given their consent to earlier. They are clear that they are not anti-India. This is at the heart of the Naga problem. Nagas cannot be expected to just give up all that they have sacrificed and achieved, small as it may seem in real terms, for a settlement that will not recognize the facts of their history and the honour and dignity of their struggle. Yet we too know that India is not in a position to recognize Naga independence and leave Nagaland.

In an indication of the then Indian nationalists’ willingness to validate the Naga national cause, Iralu further goes on to state:

Here the story of the memorable meeting between Mahatma Gandhi and some Naga leaders should be added. A delegation of the NNC called on Gandhi at his Bhangi colony ashram a few weeks before India’s independence day. When the Nagas said that they had come to get India to recognize their freedom and independence, Gandhi said, "You must become free. I became free long ago." To their point that the British were still ruling in Delhi, he said, "My freedom has nothing to do with whether the British are in Delhi or London." He said he envisioned the new India to be like the garden outside his ashram with flowers, where diversity gave attractiveness and strength, instead of producing division and harm. He said that he considered the Nagas to be a part of the Indian household. But if they thought they were not, India would be the good neighbour the Nagas could depend on. When he was told that the Governor of Assam had threatened to use military force to control the Nagas if they refused to fall in line, Gandhi, according to the report the Nagas brought back, replied with passion that he would come all the way and be the first to be killed before any Indian bullet killed the Nagas. Our leaders returned and told our people that under Gandhi’s leadership our problems could be solved satisfactorily. Soon after their meeting with him, Gandhi was assassinated. Gandhi knew how to talk to the Nagas. He made a bid to stretch their thinking beyond political freedom with sensitivity.

Further validating this, Adinho Phizo, president of a much weakened present-day NNC, in an interview with the Sangai Express, said:

The Naga leader AZ Phizo led numerous Naga delegations to meet with emerging independent Indian leaders for bilateral talks with the aim of establishing mutual understanding and respect between the two peoples. In none of the many talks with the Indian leaders, Mahatma Gandhi, C Rajagopalachari, Ali Jinah, Gopinath Bordoloi etc. was there any suggestion of Indian political ambition to deny Nagaland independence.

It thus becomes of paramount importance to view the Naga struggle from a historic lens going beyond the post-colonial construct of the Indian nation-state. The Naga people continue to be subjected to Indian state hegemony with its obdurate constructs of nationhood and boundaries. With an even more repressive military regime in Burma, the historic oppression of the Nagas has spanned the colonial era and continues to exist in the post-colonial environment of the South Asian region. India continues to insist on nationalising space, sometimes brutally, without even considering slightly more progressive forms of federalism.

The National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isaak-Muivah), the most comprehensive Naga Nationalist movement at present, gave a proposal to the Indian state that included genuinely progressive alternatives to the present standoff. This included suggestions of shared sovereignty, and the sharing of defense with India, while still maintaining India’s political boundaries and national space in international forums like the United Nations. Such initiatives, were they to be met with less pig-headedness by the Indian state, would be historic leaps in the idea of nation building along egalitarian lines. More than any other party, it is the Indian state that stands to gain, both politically as well as in socioeconomic terms. India and the Naga people would be path breakers in developing potential solutions to other conflicts of occupation and hegemony such as that of the Tamils in Sri Lanka or the Basque people in Spain. It is difficult for an oppressed people to take further strides in attempting to meet a hegemonic state mid-way, and it is important that the Indian state makes efforts along the same lines, else the current conflict stands to only serve the deleterious purpose of naked hegemony. Hegemony has never won and foaming discontent with alarming brutality without stepping back and understanding historical oppressions has never resulted in anything other than mass upheaval, and if that’s the path that the Indian establishment chooses to trod on, then the ruling elite best be prepared at some time or the other for another conflagration, one that might go greater lengths in taking them down.