-The Nagas

India's 'unknown' war

George Patterson

The Nagas are to India what the Irish are to the United Kingdom. They are a proud, independent, stubborn, brave and attractive people who have lost an appaHing percentage of their inhabitants fighting a war they can't win against a central government who persist in doing too little too late in the worst possible circumstances for the best possible reasons. But, in addition, the Indian Government compounds its mistakes by forbidding any unbiased observer or groups — press, UN missions, Red Cross, Society of Friends or others — to visit the area to talk with the Naga underground leaders who have steadfastly refused to be coerced into recognising the arbitrary annexation of their lands and peoples by India.

The astonishing lengths to which the Indian Government was prepared to go in preserving this secrecy and isolation can be gathered from the pressure it exerted on the British government, for example, to forbid Nagas entering this country ten years ago to present their case to what they fondly hoped was a friendly war-time ally. For no less a personage than Field Marshal Slim had declared in his book that the war in Burma could not have been won without the Nagas, who had fought the Japanese, hidden escaped British soldiers, resisted Japanese torture — and refused payment in cash or kind, then or later. But a perfidious British government chose to break its commitments to recognise Naga independence, ignored Naga appeals for unprejudiced investigations of claimed Indian atrocities, even went out of its way to please the Indian government by putting pressure on BOAC not to carry four representative Naga leaders as passengers to London (including one recipient of a British award for gallantry) and, when this was exposed, attempted an outrageous detention at and expulsion from London Airport. It took the threat of legal action — which the Home Secretary lost — conducted by the International Committee for the Study of Group Rights to free the Nagas to be heard in this country. And still the war, and repression, and conspiracy of silence goes on. At the time of the visit of the Naga leaders to Britain in 1962 they claimed that 70,000 Nagas had died in their war of independence with India. Many thousands haVe died since.

The Nagas are the most militant of a proliferation of tribes inhabiting the border areas between Burma, India and China. They comprise some sixteen sub-tribes and total about one million people, according to their own estimates. The occupation of this and other neighbouring territory in the North-East Frontier of India cost the British Indian Government as many as fourteen major mili tary expeditions between 1832 and 1880, including the second Burmese War. But while

the Government claimed as British territory the whole country up to the boundaries of Manipur and Burma, it treated the North-East Frontier as outside Assam for all civil purposes. Even in 1911 the boundary was shown in some maps as an extension of the southern border of Bhutan.

It is against this background of a history of Naga refusal to be absorbed by Britain, or within the Indian Union, twenty years of war, and now widening involvement in an extremely sensitive and strategic area between India, Burma and China, that the Minority Rights Group Report No 17 made its appearance a few weeks ago.

It was written by Neville Maxwell, for eight years the Times correspondent in India, and

himself an officially invited visitor to the Naga capital ,of Kohima, along with five other foreign correspondents in 1960. He describes the situation at that time:

Presumably the decision to take this selected group of correspondents to Nagaland had been taken in Delhi at the highest level of the Department of External Affairs, with the corollary decision to trust to their objectivity and to India's strong case to produce reports generally sympathetic to the Government. Much was heard before we left and on the way about our being able to talk to anyone, to see anything we desired; but somewhere between Delhi and Kohima this fine intention was lost or perverted, and by the time we got to Nagaland we found ourselves marked men, watched 24 hours of the day, and with a tightly timed tour in front of us, consisting of very long and dusty jeep drives, calls

at friendly villages to watch tribal dances, and drink deep bamboo beakers of mudu, a weak rice beer, and to listen to speeches by tame Nagas

From the first day in Kohima official plans went awry. The 'overground' (i.e. active sympathisers with the rebels, in close contact with them) had learnt of our itinerary, and in the speeches we heard in the villages we visited were by their men, not the

loyalists whom the Government had expected to greet us. These were all affirmations of the Nagas' determination to win their independence ...

In his Report No 17, Maxwell gives a lucid presentation of the very complex history of relationships between the Nagas and Britain and, later, between the Nagas and India. But 1 have a mild objection to his confident %assertion that "there is no doubt that the British considered the entire Naga area theirs to administer if they so wished."

Sir Robert Reid, a former Governor of Assam, has stated:

It was impossible to draw a line as the boundary of our area of control and to say that we should be blind and deaf to all that went on across that line. Trans-frontier (my italics) Nagas raid our administered villages ... After the occupation of Kohima and Wokha in 1878 the general policy appears to have been one of consolidating our rule around those two centres . . .

Also, in his History of Assam (published 1926) Sir Edward Gait KCSI, CIE, stated: The hilly tract inhabited by the various tribes known to us collectively as Nagas had never been subjugated by the Ahoms, and it was no part of British policy to absorb it (my italics) ...

So whatever might-have-been the record shows that the British only administered a limited group of 'subject Nagas' and left the 'tree Nagas' to their own affairs.

There seems little doubt that the first Indian leaders after Independence saw it this way, too. For Maxwell quotes Gandhi: Nagas have every right to be independent ... I believe in the brotherhood of man, but I do not believe in force or forced unions. If you do not wish to join the Union of India nobody will force you to do that ...

Prime Minister Nehru:

We can give you complete autonomy, but never independence ... We will use all our influence and power to suppress such tendencies.

Governor-General C. R. Gopalacharia:

They (Nagas) were at full liberty to do as they liked, either to become part of India or to separate if they felt it would be best in their interests to be isolated ...

Governor of Assam, Sir Akbar Hydari:

The. Governor of Assam as the Agent of the Government of Indian Union will have a special responsibility for a period of ten years to ensure the due observance of this agreement; at the end of this period, the Naga National Council will be asked whether they require the above agreement to be extended for a further period, or a new agreement regarding the future of the Naga people arrived at.

This last statement of Hydari's was incorporated in an official Nine-Point Agreement, and the Nagas interpreted it as a right to opt out of the Indian Union in ten years if they wished. The Indian Government interpreted it differently and Nehru, with typical impatience and arrogance, brushed aside Naga protests and sent in the Assam Rifles to "suppress Naga revolt" in 1955, thereby making the most representative Naga spokesmen 'rebels.' Since that time the situation has steadily deteriorated, with the Nagas claiming almost 100,000 of their people killed, over 100,000 in concentration camps, and hundreds of villages and churches (the former head-hunting Nagas are 60 per cent evangelical Christian) destroyed by a 40,000-strong Indian occupation army — supplemented, ironically, by Tibetan exiles from a Chinese-occupied Tibet being trained in India.

Reports in India's own newspapers over the past six months or so indicate that the war is now spreading dangerously, fuelled by military supplies and training from China — an involvement curiously under-played by Maxwell, who says next to nothing about this except for two lines, and even these contain errors of fact. He writes:

Naga contact with the Chinese Government. made in 1967, apparently elicited expressions of interest and sympathy, and possibly a few weapons; but made no difference to the situation.

But here are some recent Indian reports.

UN!, Kohima, April 28: "Nearly 200 underground Nagas, returning from China are awaiting the onset of monsoon next month to sneak into Nagaland through Tuensang district bordering Burma, according to reliable reports received here ...."

UNI, Kohima, July 25: "About 80 Chinese-trained underground Nagas, eluding the security forces, sneaked Into Nagaland through Tuensang district bordering Burma in small batches recently, according to informed sources here. The group brought a sizeable amount of rocket-launchers, light machine-guns, automatic rifles, grenades and other ammunition from China ..."

PTI, Imphal, August I: "The Army has been alerted in Manipur following a spurt in the activities of Naga hostiles who have killed 17 jawans and two civilians during the past two weeks. Ten jawans were also injured by Naga hostiles during this period ...

A high level conference of the Army, police and Assam Rifles was held in Kohima today to review the law and order situation in Nagaland and devise ways and means to curb violence. The Army, police and other pars-military forces throughout the State have been asked to be in readiness to meet any eventuality ..."

Maxwell is also misinformed on his dates of Naga contacts with China. I was informed personally by Naga Generals Kaito and Mowu, who were accompanied by other Naga politicians, in Pakistan in 1962 (and who later stayed with me in this country for several months) that Chinese 'advisers' had visited Naga territory as early as 1960 (see my book, Peking versus Delhi, published in 1963). I know of a meeting, tpo, held between. Nagas and Chinese outside India in 1962.

On January 21, 1962, Mr A. Z. Phizo, the exiled Federal Naga President, at a press conference in London said that he would seek aid from any source willing to provide it — and that would include China; and later that same year I was present at a meeting when Kaito and Mowu declared that if India did not respond to their offer at that time to help defend Indian borders against the imminent NEFA border attacks by China, but under their own and not Indian military command — as they had done under the British during the second world war — then they would certainly take whatever aid China was prepared to give in repelling Indian domination of their land and peoples.

Later, Kaito was reported to have gone to China before he was murdered, and Mowu was captured by the Indian Army (and held incommunicado and untried) together with Chinese printed and military material after his reported visit there. This, with other considerable evidence available in India, would hardly support Maxwell's two-line dismissal of Chinese interest and involvement.

Finally, Maxwell concludes that there is no

way in which the Indian Government could have conceded the Federal Nagas' full demand for independence without, in its own view, gravely compromising the unity of India as a whole. But he makes a very salutary point that just as Bangladesh was not only a military victory for India, it was also, from another point of view, a successful secession by a minority people despite apparentlY monumental political, economic and religious obstacles.

With a back-door now opened to China, the Nagas, together with a restless Assam and an unstable Sikkim, Bhutan and NEFA, could present the Indian Government with a minor Bangladesh in reverse.

George Patterson, author of Tibetan Journey, was a newspaper correspondent in China and South-East Asia for many years and has since written several documentary films dealing with th■-' Dart of the world.