There is still a way to go. T. Muivah continues to talk of war between ‘India’ and the ‘Nagas’, even when he says the war has ended. His bottom line remains a sovereign state for the Naga people. He maintains that the next round of talks could be held anywhere, not necessarily in India. But at least the process is on. Nearly six long years ago, in 1997, the cease-fire between the faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland led by Isak Swu and T. Muivah, on the one hand, and the Government of India, on the other, went into effect. For all these years, the chief minister of Nagaland, S.C. Jamir, has been reminding the Centre that a cease-fire cannot be an end in itself; it must be the basis for launching a process of negotiation. While the Centre has lurched from one extension of the cease-fire to the next, no attempt had been made to convert the cease-fire into a political process— until last week. It is the upcoming elections to the Nagaland state assembly next month that has concentrated the BJP’s mind so wonderfully. They have woken up to the prospect of derailing a Jamir victory by opening a process which should have been initiated any time in the last five years. Anyway, better late than never. And if the only hope of saving this nation is BJP opportunism, so be it. Yet, unless matters are put in perspective, the mine-field that the peace process is crossing will not be cleared. The NSCN (I-M) ceased fire because the balance of military advantage was overwhelmingly on the Indian side. Jamir did nothing to press that advantage. For over half a century he has seen the terrible consequences for his people of the insurgency launched in their name. As a very young man, he threw in his lot with peace and the Indian Union. In the mid-fifties, he deliberately chose Allahabad University, now notoriously linked to Murli Manohar Joshi but then still renowned as a great bastion of the freedom movement, to complete his graduate studies. It was the time A.Z. Phizo was transforming a political agitation into an armed militancy. Jamir saw even then that an independent Naga state was a chimera, a dangerous chimera at that, fraught with untold and unending suffering for the Naga folk and without roots in Naga society, culture or history. His Bedrock of Naga Society is an experiment in truth, testimony to satya of an order not seen otherwise in contemporary Indian politics. Jamir was associated with the 16-point political settlement devised in 1960 as the alternative to military confrontation. It was a settlement which brought statehood, democracy and development to Nagaland. But it also spawned the NSCN, split since some years into rival factions led respectively by IM and Khaplang. Peace cannot be purchased with Isak-Muivah alone. Khaplang has to be part of the process. That is still to happen. Advani has only now indicated that Khaplang will be brought into the process. The 1997 cease-fire has certainly reduced military engagements within Nagaland. But it has contributed to the spilling over of NSCN militancy into areas adjacent to the state, particularly Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. The NSCN insurgency has also earned the name of the ‘Mother of all Insurgencies in the North-East’ because of NSCN patronage to extremist outfits by whatever name called not only in regions abutting Nagaland but relatively far afield in Tripura, Meghalaya and the lower Brahmaputra valley. The immaturity of the NDA government in not taking these linkages into account was nakedly revealed in June 2001 when I-M succeeded in slipping language into the cease-fire extension accord that the Indian negotiator, the superannuated bureaucrat, K.Padmanabhaiah, did not comprehend, resulting in Manipur going up in flames. The peace process cannot be treated as a matter involving only the Centre and, at most, the Nagaland government. It has to integrally involve other state governments in the region. The all-party delegation that has descended on Delhi from Imphal is a reminder of the all N-E character of the process. Because Vajpayee and his colleagues do not understand this, or do not wish to, a delighted Muivah gives Vajpayee top marks for ‘maturity’. The NSCN (I-M) mean precisely the opposite. While I-M depredations in Nagaland have certainly decreased since the cease-fire, they have by no means ended. It is a measure of the maturity of the man that Jamir has steadfastly stood for the maintenance and continuance of the cease-fire despite unending violations of its terms by the NSCN (I-M) and the almost complacent restraint shown by the Indian armed forces. The cease-fire, to Jamir, has always held higher priority than reprisals for violations. This was most forcefully demonstrated when the NSCN (I-M) ambushed his carcade on the Dimapur-Kohima highway, killing his driver and several of his security detail. Jamir himself had a miraculous escape. A lesser man would have bayed for the blood of his assassins. Not Jamir. In Gandhian fashion, he put revenge aside and pursued the larger cause. As with Gandhi, eschewing vengeance has been part of a broader Jamir strategy. He has been urging that the monitoring of the cease-fire at a non-political, bureaucratic level, which is all that has hitherto been done, be superseded by a political process at the political level through a politically-empowered interlocutor. But the central government have only now started casting around for a Shourie or Feranandes to initiate a political process. The state election in the offing is clearly the siren call for this overdue initiative. Jamir has also been stressing that the process needs to be ‘comprehensive’ and ‘durable’, that is, it must embrace the spectrum of discontents and not be confined to just one faction if peace is to last and the settlement be lasting. Peace aimed at winning a state election cannot be ‘durable’. Tragically, the NDA have so timed the beginning as to be shamelessly partisan. Jamir raises no objection. He is too Gandhian to stoop so low. Write to msaiyar@expressindia.com
