POLITICAL AND MILITARY CAMPAIGNS AGAINST THE NAGAS

In pursuance of their declared national decision, Nagalim refused to join the Indian Union when India was declared a republic in 1950 for the first time, saying "the Nagas do not accept the Indian Constitution," and the Naga people launched full civil disobedience movement and successfully boycotted the first and second general elections of Free India in 1952 and 1957. When the prime ministers of Burma and India, Messrs. U Nu and Jawaharlal Nehru, made a joint visit to Nagalim on 31 March 1953, the whole Naga assemblage in Kohima walked out en masse, jeering and drumming their buttocks because of the refusal of these leaders to give a hearing to them and for not allowing them to submit their memorandum.

In response to this peaceful protest, the propounders and advocates of "AHIMSA" (nonviolence) started pouring thousands of their soldiers under ruthless and notorious commanders into helpless Nagalim since 1954. It was a complete volte-face of the statement made on 7 August 1952 by the first prime minister of Free India, Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru, in the Indian Parliament: "We want no people in the territory of India against their will and with the help of armed forces....We want no forced marriages or forced unions. This great Republic of India is a free and friendly union of states of India."

The unprovoked invasion and forcible military occupation, often attempted to justify with flimsy philanthropic and arrogant pronouncements, that "India wants nothing from Nagaland. Nagaland has not enough and cannot be left to perish in the jungle even if the jungle is beautiful", has given rise to this spell of fifty-one years of bloody conflict. With this self-imposed and hypocritical duty of protecting the Nagas from "perishing in the jungle", India is perpetuating genocidal campaigns in Nagalim with impunity.

More than two hundred thousand Nagas have died as a result of Indian armed forces’ bullets, torture, rape, detention, and privation and epidemics in the Indian military concentration camps. Besides, countless are rendered disabled and unnerved for life.

In the name of counter-insurgency measures, military powers were made absolute in Nagalim and a number of black laws, such as the "Armed Forces (Special Power) Act" of 1958, "Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act" (TADA), "National Security Act" (NSA), etc., have been imposed upon the Nagas. The occupational Indian armed forces have subjected the innocent Naga villagers to innumerable ordeals as curfews and prohibitory orders, collective fines, forced labor, looting, grouping of villages and rounding up of the public, destruction of crops and livestock, burning down of houses and granaries, desecration of churches and sacred institutions, combing and mobbing-up operations, unwarranted searches and shootings, arbitrary arrests and detentions, indiscriminate torture and rape, unaccounted deaths and disappearances, extrajudicial executions and wanton killings in fake encounters took their tolls.

In an attempt to camouflage these mounting crimes perpetrated on the Nagas by the Indian armed forces, Mrs. Vijayalaksmi Pandit (Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister) flagrantly made the following hypocritical statement in Paris in the august United Nations General Assembly: "We are not the aggressor nation and we have no aggressive intentions towards anyone outside or inside our borders." If such claims would have been true, then would not all the acts that turned the land of the Nagas red with blood have been spared?

As a last resort to disintegrate the solidarity of the Naga people and to derail their national aspirations, India unilaterally declared the central portion of Nagalim as one of her constituent states in 1963. The Naga people, of course, never gave their assent to it and, to show their condemnation to the treason committed to the Naga cause and assert that "traitors do not represent the people", Mr. Imkong Liba, the main signatory of the statehood deal, was eliminated. The following year, the Naga people scored a mark when India officially admitted the gravity and validity of the Indo-Naga issue and to hold "peace talks" with the then Federal Government of Nagaland at the prime ministerial level. Thus, a cease-fire came into being on 6 September 1964 and political negotiations dragged on for two years until India unilaterally abrogated the agreement and resumed her genocidal campaigns in Nagalim with greater ferocity.

The fate of the Nagas in the Burmese-occupied territories are no better. Hundreds of beastly atrocities have been perpetrated on the hapless Nagas by the occupational Burmese armed forces. For instance, in the months of March and April 1992, inhuman military operations were carried out by the Burmese troops against the innocent Naga villagers in Khianmungan, Lainung, Konyak and Pangmi areas and massacred 1545 persons and many refugees were left stranded for more than a year across the so-called Indo-Burma border.

The Nagas in the Burmese-occupied territories are completely neglected and denied anything and everything by the Burmese Government. As a result, the people here subsist mainly on their meager produce from slash-and-burn cultivation. And as there are no educational institutions here, the literacy rate is very low. Since no roads are made, most of the villages here are tucked away in deep jungles, making them isolated, exposed and vulnerable. Taking full advantage of the socio-economic backwardness, the marauding Burmese troops raid these defenseless villages every year, always leaving nothing standing behind them. Granaries are forcibly ransacked, livestock requisitioned, women raped at will and menfolk abducted and used as porters, minesweepers and human-shields in the frontline. Many who became too weak to continue are simply shot dead in the name of safeguarding operational secrecy. Many villages are raged to the ground on the flimsy excuse of being proved uncooperative ! and inhospitable. Having no access to the outside world, this is the vicious recurring oppression the helpless Nagas are made to bear mutely year in and year out.