The legislative Assembly in Nagaland, where the Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party and the BJP are in power in a coalition government, on Friday unanimously passed a resolution urging the Centre to reconsider its decision to seal the Indo-Myanmar border. Earlier this week, the Mizoram Assembly had passed a similar resolution. In February, the Union government announced its decision to end the Free Movement Regime (FMR) agreement with Myanmar and fence the entire length of the border. The FMR agreement had allowed tribes living along the border on either side to travel up to 16 km inside the other country without a visa and stay up to two weeks. The Indo-Myanmar border is 1,643 kilometres long and runs along Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Nagaland and Manipur. While the Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh governments welcomed the decision to scrap FMR, civil society groups and the governments in Mizoram and Nagaland have opposed it. In the Nagaland Assembly, the resolution against the decision was moved by Deputy Chief Minister Y Patton, who is from the BJP. This represents the strongest and clearest stance taken by the Nagaland government on the issue. Both Mizoram and Nagaland have extensive ethnic ties to Myanmar. The Mizos of Mizoram and the Chins of Myanmar are of the same ethnicity, and Myanmar also has a sizeable population of Nagas, mostly in the Naga Self-Administered Zone in Myanmar’s Sagaing region. The Nagaland Assembly resolution states that the end of the FMR and the fencing of the border would not only cause “hardship and inconvenience”, but also “agony to the Naga people living in the Indo-Myanmar border areas due to the fact that the traditional land holding system straddles across the international border in many areas, and people have to cross the international border on a daily basis for their normal cultivation activities”. It also stated that these measures would “seriously disrupt the age-old historical, social, tribal, and economic ties of the Naga people living on both sides of the international border”. The resolution urged the Centre to reconsider its decision, and called for a consultative process to work out regulations for the movement of people across borders, involving the people living along these borders and the village council authorities concerned. During the discussion in the Assembly on the question of the Indo-Myanmar border, Nagaland’s other Deputy Chief Minister, T R Zeliang, said the Nagas on both sides of the border “lived as free people without any artificial borders until the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826 which established the current India-Myanmar boundary”. The decision to seal the border has been premised on security concerns such as the influx of illegal immigrants, drugs and smuggling, and the free movement of insurgents seeking shelter in Myanmar – all issues that have been spotlighted since the outbreak of violence in Manipur last year. Zeliang said these reasons were “precarious and unjustified” in the context of Nagaland. He said “the issue of influx of illegal immigrants, like that of the Chins, Rohingyas etc. into India has no similarity with the Naga issue”, and that “that the Chin-Kuki-Meitei problem cannot be equated with the Naga situation because the Naga people have been living together peacefully as a family unlike the case of Chin-Kuki-Meitei in Manipur or in other parts of India”.
