NPMHR.ORG - NAGA PEOPLES MOVEMENT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Machiavelli’s Ceasefire and the Indo-Naga Peace Process

Thursday 9 April 2009, by Nandita Haksar

Mainstream, Vol XLVII, No 16, April 4, 2009

For eleven years the people in the Naga inhabited districts of Manipur have been living in peace ever since a ceasefire was declared between the Indian security forces and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isac-Muivah) or the NSCN (IM) in 1997. As a result a generation of children has grown up without knowledge or experience of the cordon-and-search operations which invariably resulted in human rights violations of villagers. These children had no idea what it was like to stand for hours in rain or bitter cold while the Indian security forces searched their homes, tortured the men and sexually assaulted the women and young girls.

The children in Shirui Village of Ukhrul District, Manipur State slept soundly and felt no fear when they heard the sound of jeeps coming to their village on January 19, 2009. In fact most of them did not hear anything at all till they were rudely woken up with noise and chaos and they saw hundreds of uniformed and armed Indian security forces occupy every nook and corner of their village. The children were filled with fear and some went silent with terror while others started screaming.

It was 2 am and the winter cold was still severe. The Assam Rifles woke up the young headman and occupied his house. Soon the villagers understood what was going on. The Assam Rifles had come with the intention of attacking the NSCN (IM) camp established in the Tourist Lodge near the village. The Tourist Lodge was supposed to accommodate the tourists who came every year to see the famous Lily which blossomed every year in May at the height of 2590 metres on top of the Shirui peak but like so many government projects it was left incomplete and the Lodge had stood like a haunted house with no windows or doors. The Lodge had been restored when the NSCN occupied it.

The villagers panicked because they knew that there were many NSCN cadres inside the camp and all of them were well trained and heavily armed. If the Assam Rifles attacked the camp, the NSCN cadres would retaliate and there would be many casualties. The villagers were horrified to see the Assam Rifles put a barbed wire fence around the NSCN camp and cut off their water supply.

The villagers decided to send all the children down to Ukhrul, the district headquarters 18 kms away, and that is how the Tangkhul women’s organisation heard of the siege of Shirui. The leaders of the Tangkhul women’s organisation met together and decided that they should send a delegation to Shirui and talk to the Assam Rifles officers. Representatives of the various Tangkhul organisations (Ukhrul is the home of the Tangkhul Naga Community) went up to the village. The CO of the 17 Assam Rifles was furious with the women, he said they were interfering in their work. They said they were just doing their job as peace-makers.

The Tangkhul women’s organisation (Tangkhul Shanao Long) organised a 24-hour vigil with groups of 50 women sitting all day and night out in the open next to the NSCN camp in the line of fire of whichever party decided to shoot first. They prayed, sang hymns and they even played games. The local villagers took courage from the show of solidarity from the women who came from neighbouring villages, from Ukhrul town and then as the news spread they came from distant villages. Naga public leaders also came from other Naga inhabited districts within Manipur and from Nagaland.

The siege continued for 15 days and the women had to organise food, tea and firewood for the women sitting all day and all night in the bitter cold. They also had to provide tea and snacks to the public leaders who visited the village and also those who took part in the sit-in at Ukhrul demanding the withdrawal of the Assam Rifles. The Assam Rifles personnel occupying the village numbered anywhere from 500 to 800 and they took vegetables, chicken and firewood from the village without paying any compensation. After the siege was lifted the villagers estimated that they had suffered losses amounting to 11 lakhs.

The siege was lifted and the problem was resolved because the Home Minister was going to visit Nagaland and Manipur and he wanted the problem resolved before he landed. Five Tangkhul elders were requested to negotiate with the Assam Rifles and finally it was agreed by all parties that the NSCN cadres along with their arms and ammunition would be escorted by the five elders and Assam Rifles to their designated camp at Oklong in Senapati District of Mnaipur State. More than 20 vehicles formed a convoy that left on February 2 from Shirui to Oklong.

Although the siege ended, it left behind in its wake a raging controversy about the legality of the NSCN camp and the ceasefire monitoring mechanism. A Manipur Government spokesman and some spokesmen of the Indian Army denied the existence of the NSCN designated camps in Manipur while others maintained that there were three camps which were “taken note of” but they did not include the camp at Shirui; and some denied that the ceasefire between the NSCN and the Union of India extended to Manipur while others said that the ceasefire was unofficially in place and that is why there had been no encounters for the past 11 years.

Four lawyers—Nandita Haksar, Timikha Koza, Sebastian Hongray and Edward Belho—formed a team and went into the whole question and released their report at Kohima on March 14, 2009 after a three-week study. The daily newspapers in both States carried the report but the national media ignored the entire issue.

The Lawyers Team found that the Shirui camp had been approved by the Ceasefire Monitoring Group way back in 2007. The letter written by the former Chairman of the Ceasefire Monitoring Group (CFMG), Lt Gen R V Kulkarni (Retd) to Shri Naveen Verma, Joint Secretary (NE) Ministry of Home Affairs No CFMG/IM/2007-1566 dated 06-02-2007 is on the “situation in Ukhrul District of Manipur” and clearly states that the new location of the camp of the NSCN “stands approved”.

The team met the PRO of the Indian Army, Col Rajesh Sharma, at Imphal and asked him about the position of the designated camps in Manipur. On March 2, 2009 the Colonel told the team that he would check with the headquarters and give his reply the next day. True to his promise he gave the team his official answers: he said, according to the Ministry of Defence and the Army, there were no designated camps of the NSCN (IM) in Manipur and that the NSCN cadres were not taken to any camp in Senapati.

This denial of the existence of the camps came as a shock since the Minister of Defence, Shri A K Antony, had written in his letter DO No 22 (1)2009/D (GS-1)/773-F/RM dated February 18, 2009 to Shri Mani Charenamei, MP that “NSCN (IM) cadres moved out from Shiroy on 2nd February, 2009 to Oklang (a camp taken note of) in Senapati District thereby defusing the situation”.

The present Chairman of the Ceasefire Monitoring Group, Maj Gen Mandhata Singh (Retd), told the team of lawyers that he had been contacted on the first day of the Shirui siege but when he checked with the Home Ministry he was told he had no jurisdiction in Manipur since the ceasefire did not extend to that State. When he was asked how the former Chairman had dealt with the incidents in Manipur he said he had no records of the decisions taken at the time and he had not ever met Lt Gen Kulkarni before taking charge as Chairman of the CFMG. This was indeed strange since Lt Gen Kulkarni had been handling the job for more than ten years.

Maj Gen Mandhata Singh refused to speculate on why the Assam Rifles had taken this provocative action in Shirui. However, a human rights activist told the lawyers’ team that during the Shirui siege one of the Assam Rifles officers had remarked that they were in a mess because of the Pfutsero incident a few days earlier.

In that incident a Captain of the Assam Rifles had driven right into an NSCN designated camp on January 8, 2009 in Phek District of Nagaland in violation of the ground rule which clearly states that the Indian security forces will not go within one kilometre of any designated camp. The NSCN had disarmed the Captain and his five jawans. On the intervention of the local leaders they had released the officer and jawans but handed the arms only the next day when Maj Gen Mandatha Singh had flown to Pfutsero in a helicopter. Although he had defused the situation and there was no controversy over the existence of the designated camp the question on everyone’s mind was why did a Captain “wander” into the NSCN camp in the first place. Curiously, the Captain had been a Meitei.

Neither the Pfutsero not the Shirui incidents are isolated incidents. The Assam Rifles has been behaving in a provocative way and the Addl Chief Secretary (Home), Nagaland Government, Mr Lalthara, told the lawyers team that his government had expressed its concern about the way Assam Rifles was patrolling near the NSCN (IM) designated camps in an “irritating way”. The CFMG cannot effectively stop the Assam Rifles but it can only intervene in specific cases brought to its notice.

The Ceasefire Monitoring Group was set up way back in 1997 after the ceasefire agreement was signed between the NSCN (IM) and the Union of India. The members of the CFMG consisted of members of the security forces, intelligence agencies, government officials and members of the NSCN. The job of the CFMG was to enforce the Ceasefire Ground Rules.

The ceasefire Ground Rules had been made in a Review Committee which consisted of members of both the Union of India and the NSCN (IM). Both parties sit together and make the rules and review the rules from time to time. However, the rules or even the ceasefire agreement are not signed documents.

In addition to the Review Committee there is a ceasefire monitoring cell of the NSCN (IM) as well and that has actively enforced the ground rules and disciplined its own cadres if they violate the rules.

The entire ceasefire monitoring mechanism was a unique experiment in democratic principles. However, instead of the ceasefire providing an atmosphere for the political negotiations it became the centre of political controversy. The State of Manipur objected to the formal extension of the ceasefire to the State on the ground that they were not party to the Agreement and that the ceasefire extension would amount to conceding the main demand of the Nagas: the integration of the Naga areas under one administration within the Indian Constitution. The Meiteis (the people living in Manipur Valley who are mainly Vaishnavites) civil society also opposed the extension of the ceasefire to the State on the ground that it would threaten the “integrity of Manipur State”.

Thus the controversy has raged and most of the 70 rounds of talks between Government of India and the NSCN (IM) has been around the issue of extension of the ceasefire to all territory where NSCN operates which includes parts of North-East which are clearly not Naga inhabited areas such as Tripura.

Thus there is a strange constitutional problem: the Nagas are demanding the integration of Naga inhabited areas which are all contiguous—the present State of Nagaland, four districts of Manipur, a part of Assam and a part of Arunachal. This political demand is a demand which can be easily accommodated within the Constitution of India since under our Constitution it requires a simple majority in Parliament to change the boundaries of the States which were created for administrative convenience and not with peoples’ consent. However, the Union of India has refused to concede this demand.

On the other hand the Meiteis are demanding that the integrity and unity of Manipur be respected since the boundaries of the Manipur State go back to 2000 years. The Indian Constitution does not recognise the “integrity and unity” of States within India. In order to fulfil this demand the Meiteis would have to fight for a more federal system by which the boundaries of States cannot be changed except through a complex political negotiation as in the USA.

Both these political demands need to be negotiated. However, these political differences are being utilised by intelligence agencies to create divisions between the Nagas living in the Hill Districts and the Meiteis living in the Valley. Both the Nagas and Meiteis had in the past come together to fight against the imposition of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 and together they had succeeded in making the issue a national issue. However, the tensions over the ceasefire has led to communalisation of the issue and a section of the Meitei civil society is even asking for more security forces to curb the NSCN.

This is the context in which the recommendation of the Lawyers Committee should be understood and supported: that the ceasefire should be “officially extended without territorial limit with an explicit clause to indicate that the extension of the ceasefire is a purely administrative measure and has no political connotations or implications”.

They have also recommended that the entire ceasefire monitoring mechanism must be made more transparent so that incidents such as the one at Shirui do not occur again.

The Indo-Naga political negotiations which started off as being a unique democratic experiment has been sabotaged by intelligence agencies to serve their Machiavellian politics of divide and rule.

The author is a human rights lawyer and writer.

WHAT WENT WRONG WITH THE NAGA TALKS?

BHARAT BHUSHAN, The Telegraph
20 June 2005 Monday

Problem of history

The first phase of intensive negotiations with the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah) is coming to an end. After one more round of talks with the government, its general secretary, Thuingaleng Muivah, is leaving for Amsterdam. The talks are stalled and Muivah says that he does not know whether or when he might return to India. The break from the negotiations should provide time to the two sides to analyze the 12 to 13 rounds of formal discussions they had. Several things went wrong for the Indian negotiators. The government of India had no proposals of its own. It only reacted to the proposals of the NSCN (I-M). The NSCN (I-M) submitted two sets of proposals — one on September 21, 2001 from Amsterdam and another as a memorandum on April 1, 2004 from Bangkok. The 2004 memorandum reformulated the first proposals by prioritizing the issues for discussion.

The NSCN (I-M) wanted to discuss the political issue first — negotiating “an appropriate federal relationship with India”; a division of competencies which would leave all subjects to Nagaland except defence, foreign affairs, communications and monetary policy, with the Nagas having a say in the first three, wherever their interests are affected; recognizing the legitimacy of the Naga demand for the reunification of their homeland and implementing it in a reasonable time frame; and a transitional agreement which would also convert the NSCN (I-M) army into a new regular armed force under the new state government. The reaction of the government was that the NSCN (I-M) proposals were not practicable. In effect the government was saying — ask for something that we can give. This reaction shows that the government was not ready for negotiations. The Naga proposals were known for three years before the NSCN (I-M) leaders were invited for an intensive dialogue in India. Why were they invited if the only thing that New Delhi wanted was for them to change their demands to those that could be easily met?

Another mistake that the government negotiators made was that they did not see the issue from the Naga perspective. The Nagas see their problem with India as unique, flowing from a history that was specific to them. The government negotiators, however, tried to equate the Naga issue with that of any other state of India — the logic being that nothing should be done for the Nagas which the government was not in a position to do say for the Tamil or the Telugu people. A specific problem situated in a unique history — of a people who do not consider themselves a part of India either by conquest or consent — was sought to be converted into a general problem of Centre-state relations. It seems to have been entirely forgotten that Nagaland, for nearly two decades, after independence was under the charge of the ministry of external affairs before being brought under the home ministry in the mid-Sixties. It was under the external affairs ministry that the state of Nagaland was created in 1960. There is no other Indian state which can claim that distinction. The specific history of Nagaland however seems to have been given the go-by.

Before now, the Naga issue has been addressed by giants like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi. They may not have been able to settle the Naga issue, but they did not resort to cheap subterfuge. Instead of trying to tune into their wavelength and understand what they want, the government was only clear about what it does not want to give the Nagas. As it is, the government has merely rejected what the Nagas want without making an attempt to reframe their proposals. This would involve redirecting the attention of the NSCN (I-M) leaders from the positions they have taken to identifying their interests, and then making specific proposals to find ways of meeting them. If for example, the Nagas propose that they want a say in foreign affairs, the attempt should not be to reject the suggestion out of hand but to convince them that if there were to be boundary rationalization with Myanmar abutting Nagaland, then they would be consulted; that a Naga affairs officer could be posted in the Indian mission in Yangon or that the Nagas would be included in Indian delegations to United Nations bodies dealing with tribal and indigenous people. The attempt ought to have been to redirect the Nagas towards a problem-solving framework.

There was certainly no handholding of the NSCN (I-M) to guide them towards a mutually acceptable framework of settlement. Underground groups are not equipped in the same way as governments are in understanding the tangle of constitutional law, Centre-state relations and the collateral impact of decisions in a huge country like India. Leaving them to their own devices is tantamount to hoping for a failure. The negotiations have to be changed from bargaining for advantage to solving the problem jointly and cooperatively. The handholding has to be done outside the negotiating room to create conditions conducive for an agreement on the negotiating table. The ratio of informal meetings to formal ones has to be overwhelmingly in favour of the former. The process of negotiation itself is a part of the solution. No one realizes this better than Thuingaleng Muivah who has taken the ritual of participation in the negotiations to new heights. In ceasefire negotiations his entire cabinet turns up. In peace talks, adequate representation is given to the various NSCN leaders and at each stage others not present are briefed in detail. This is his way of ensuring that when a compromise has to be made, they would be willing to make allowances they may not make otherwise.

On the Indian side, a similar joint effort is missing although the prime minister is sincere about a settlement. The home minister suffers from a no-concessions mindset; the national security advisor comes with the baggage of experience of handling several insurgencies. The only frontline political person with any gumption among the negotiators is Oscar Fernandes who has the tough task of balancing the forces tugging in different directions. The government has not educated itself and the NSCN (I-M) on the consequences of not reaching an agreement at all. The costs and consequences of not reaching an agreement with the Nagas are enormous. Besides the bloodshed that the Nagas have already witnessed, another generation of Naga youth would be condemned to the jungles. The bitterness that has already lasted three generations will go on for another three. If there is no progress in the Naga talks, one can write off any prospect of starting a peace dialogue with the United Liberation Front of Asom. There is some disturbing talk that the Indian army thinks that if the Nagas do not extend the ceasefire this time around, it would not mean much because the army can “handle” them. Of course the might of the Indian army would not allow the NSCN (I-M) to occupy land in Nagaland, but if the Naga issue could have been solved militarily why did it not happen up to now? Bravado clearly is no substitute for hard political thinking.

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