Remembering Niketu Iralu’s shining arc: Peace activist, bridge between Nagas, mainland India

Niketu belonged to a prominent Nagaland family – his father Sevilie Iralu was among the first Naga doctors and his maternal uncle Angami Zapu Phizo led the Naga National Council (NNC) which declared Nagaland’s independence on August 14, 1947. He however chose another path – and came to be known as a peace activist dedicated to the pursuit of solutions through non-violence, dialogue and reconciliation.

As news spread of the death of “uncle Niketu” as he was popularly known, social media was flooded with glowing tributes. Hundreds gathered at the Dimapur airport to pay their last respects as his body arrived from Delhi. People lined up at the roadside villages to say a final farewell as the convoy made its way to his home, Kerunyu Ki or “The House of Listening”, in Sechu Zubza town in Kohima district, where many had sought wisdom and healing touch from him.

Niketu Iralu (Credits: Wangyal)

I met Niketu Iralu in Delhi first in the mid-1960s. He became my introduction to the Northeast. In 1968, he took me and Kalpana Sharma, both aspiring journalists then, to Chedema perched on a hilltop surrounded by lush green vegetation, not far from Kohima. A peace camp had been set up there which had negotiated a ceasefire in 1964 between the rebel Naga Federal Government and the Government of India, kindling hopes of a resolution after years of insurgency by those demanding a sovereign Naga state.

For the first time I got a glimpse into the history of the Naga struggle and their aspirations, and the challenges facing the Indian government — a conflict which has not yet found a solution though a new ministerial panel was formed by the Centre last week to take forward the stalled talks.

Our Chedema visit was a discovery of the colourful tapestry of tribes and communities that make up the Northeast region – a confluence of diverse races, a gateway to Southeast Asia connected to the rest of India by a narrow “chicken’s neck”.

We experienced the Nagas’ incredible hospitality, and saw the amazing community spirit of a clan. This was visible even as Niketu lay in a Delhi hospital during his last days, with many nieces and nephews who had accompanied him and his wife Christine— a city girl from Mumbai who made the Naga hills her home — to the national capital for his treatment. They took care of him round the clock, along with his son Kevipulie.

Niketu’s long journey

The life of Niketu ran parallel to the saga of modern Nagaland. He would recall the time when the Japanese Army invaded Nagaland in 1944 during the Second World War. Their village Khonoma was run over by the invaders, forcing them to escape to the forest. One day, Niketu and his brother were fishing in a stream when they suddenly found the Japanese soldiers bathing nearby. He looked straight into their eyes and ran in the opposite direction, through the thorny bushes. When his mother and a teenaged sister went back to their home in Khonoma to pick some provisions, they found a Japanese soldier helping himself to a Naga shawl. Incensed, his sister slapped the soldier. His mother was petrified about what the soldier would do. But he just bowed slightly, and left. Recalling the incident years later, Niketu said: “Maybe he also had a sister back home.”

The Japanese retreated after the battle of Kohima. Had they not been halted, they might have reached the Brahmaputra valley and then on to mainland India – and history would have been written very differently. The words at the Kohima War Cemetry, which Niketu took us to visit, were to stay with me for a long time: “When you go home, tell them of us and say, for their tomorrow, we gave our today.”

In many ways, Niketu came to be a bridge between the Naga people and the rest of India. When Phizo died in April 1990 in London, Niketu was asked by the NNC leaders to help them get his body back to India. Phizo had been in exile since 1960 when he left for the UK to mobilise world opinion for the Naga cause.

The V P Singh government was then at the helm in Delhi. Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, was a Janata Dal Rajya Sabha MP, and Niketu’s friendship with him went three decades back as they had worked together in an organisation, Initiatives of Change, to bring about social transformation through “personal change”.

The Janata Dal-led government was worried that bringing back Phizo’s body might lead to violence in Nagaland. Rajmohan told PM Singh and Union home minister Mufti Sayeed, “Let the Nagas grieve as much as they want. If we don’t allow that, then there might be violence.” Finally, they agreed. The then finance minister Madhu Dandavate, who used to start his day early, met Rajmohan and Niketu at 5 am at his residence. Niketu told him he did not need money, which the Nagas had collected, but only foreign exchange clearance.

Rajmohan received Phizo’s mortal remains and Niketu at the Palam airport’s technical area. The casket was immediately shifted to a Home Ministry plane which took the group to Kohima where the funeral was held.

One of the enduring images I have of Niketu is of him getting out of a Maharashtra state transport bus in which our group were travelling, and rushing to a wash room at a village stop – cleaning it with water and bare hands, for all of us to use. The gesture reflected his care, and respect, for other people.

Humour and music were his language, and it endeared him to the young and old alike. He used to describe his first encounter with mainland India when he left for Madras Christian College in the 1950s for studies: “When I reached Kolkata… the number of people trying to board the train made me say to myself we have no chance to survive in this – India, which has so many people!”

Even on his hospital bed a day before he passed away, he joked about the balding head of one of his old friends who had rushed from Pune to see him, and then clung onto his hand. While deeply committed to his people, he had befriended many across India.

A Naga elder associated with many prominent organisations in the Northeast, who was recipient of several prestigious awards including the Bhupen Hazarika Integration Award, Niketu’s work deepened the idea of peace and reconciliation today in the midst of spiralling global conflicts. This was summed up in a tribute in Ukhrul Times by a young writer Markson V Luikham, who never met him but was in touch with him on the phone and through emails. “He was a deeply human man who spent decades asking Nagas to… confront their failures, resist hatred and recover the courage to listen.” Niketu did not see reconciliation as weakness, he wrote, adding that to him moral courage also involved “telling one’s own side what it does not want to hear”.

When she heard of his passing away, a Parsi friend of Niketu, sitting far away in London, decided to honour his memory by singing to herself a song he loved: “Kohima, all night the stars salute you, your forests dark and towering hills above, deep in our hearts, though far away and few, we yearn for home, a land we love.”

And now he lies in rest, forever under those Nagaland stars, as he wanted to, in the garden of his house in Sechu Zubza.

(Neerja Chowdhury, Contributing Editor, The Indian Express, has covered the last 11 Lok Sabha elections. She is the author of ‘How Prime Ministers Decide’.)