Naga Conflict Research Articles

Ending India's Naga Conflict

Abstract For quite some time now, there has been an effort to settle India's Naga conflict. Instead of ordering the developments in the conventional teleological narrative of a peace process, this article looks at certain facts on the ground created by the two-decades-old cease-fire and the negotiations that have gone on for almost as long. Dismantling these transitional structures will not be easy. This existing regime of “shared sovereignty”—to use a key phrase from the negotiations as a category of practice—is based on a form of informal partnership between state and nonstate armed entities. It serves to provide the kind of protection ideally suited for economic transactions associated with the so-called informal sector economy in the region. There are affinities between this emergent order and the indirect rule regime of the British colonial era.

Counterinsurgents’ use of force and “armed orders” in Naga Northeast India

ABSTRACT Recent works have highlighted deeply political variations in Indian counterinsurgency across space and time, leading to the emergence of a diversity of “armed orders” ranging from outright clashes to openly cooperative state-insurgent relationships. However, we know little about how variations in counterinsurgency strategy, particularly in the levels of force employed, shape the functioning of these armed orders. Drawing on original case study evidence from the Naga insurgency, this article builds on existing works on state-insurgent orders by developing a typology of variations in the use of force, accounting for counterinsurgents’ use of force to undermine, modify and uphold a patchwork of complex and fragile state-insurgent orders across space and time in India’s Naga conflict. In doing so, it contributes to debates on the use of force in counterinsurgency and the study of order in conflict in India’s Northeast.

The Conflict in the Indian Northeast

This paper looks at the conflict in the Indian northeast and revolves primarily around the different levels of conflict. The Indian northeast is most certainly one of the most under- researched conflict zones in academia. This paper uses Mary Kaldor’s ‘New War’ thesis as a theoretical framework to understand the situation, and pays special attention to its very complex and multifaceted nature. The paper argues that the levels of violence differ from one state to another in a region which has always had complicated relations with the rest of India since 1947. Poverty, corruption, administrative failure, police brutality, identity politics, human rights abuses and the role played by external actors such as China and Burma in the region are some of the key features associated with this conflict. There is a special focus on Nagaland since the Naga conflict is the oldest of all the conflicts in the region. The rest of the paper looks at some of the other states of the Indian northeast which include Assam, Manipur and Tripura and take them up collectively for discussion. Finally, after making an assessment of the entire region, the paper tries to suggest methods of peaceful building and conflict management as the way forward.

Revisiting the Naga conflict: what can India do to resolve this conflict?

Soon after India attained its independence from British colonial administration in 1947 the Nagas started waging an armed conflict against India to establish a sovereign independent state in Nagaland in the country's Northeast region. The conflict is today one of the world's longer running and little known armed conflicts. India's central government has tried unsuccessfully to tackle the problem through political reconciliation, use of force, and several development measures. Over the years, it has also undergone several changes in which the situation of conflict deepened whenever India's central government intervened. And yet, the road ahead also faces severe challenges because the demand for bringing the Nagas of India together into a single political entity will not go unchallenged from other ethnic groups. Moreover, a bitter leadership battle divides the Naga rebels and hence any future agreement is likely to be difficult due to factional politics as have happened in the past. Thus one way to satisfy the aspirations of different ethnic groups while protecting the boundaries of the existing states in India is to explore the option of cultural autonomy. This idea is not entirely new, but has lost significance over the years.

The Kuki–Naga Conflict In The Light Of Recent Publications

This brief article critically reviews various recent essays and publications on the Kuki–Naga conflict of the 1990s. The conflict has resulted in uprooting hundreds of villages, with the loss of more than a thousand lives, destruction of valuable properties and internal displacement. While British colonial policies of governance in Northeast India and the rise of ethnic nationalism among Kukis and Nagas in the post-independence period have been identified as major root causes of the Kuki–Naga conflict, the literature remains inconclusive and this article argues that today competing claims and perceived threats regarding land and territory appear to be the major cause of continuing tensions.

Media and Freedom of Expression

Freedom of Expression is an issue much talked about specially in conflict situations. Studies have been done on whether people can defeat the fear and regain the lost right to Freedom of expression. In the Naga case, decades of political struggle with India have made the Naga people to live under suppression from the right to freedom of expression. For many years, voices of political dissent have been silenced by the gun. People cannot voice their opinion freely for fear for their lives. A case in point in newspaper article shows a path in a different direction the society to take. All it took was for a writer who voiced his opinion by following his conscience. Is one conscience enough? Maybe to initiate, but to enjoy the right to freedom of expression, individuals and the public must raise their voice. Keywords - Freedom of expression and Political opposition, media, opinion, views, freedom expression of idea, regulate freedom of expression; kill an idea, Naga conflict.

A Decade of Ceasefire in Nagaland

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Gurinder Singh is Research Fellow at IDSA. Notes 1 Nagalim in Ao Language means land inhabited by Nagas which includes Naga areas of Manipur. Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Myanmar. 2 Nooral Huda ‘Ceasefire Extension in Manipur’, at http://www.cpim.org (Accessed August 19, 2001). 3 Nagaland Post, November 21, 2006. 4 Vivek Chadha, Low Intensity Conflicts in India, Sage Publications, New Delhi, pp. 301. 5 Naga Hoho is the apex tribal council of all Naga tribes. Members of Naga Hoho are invariably nominated by the respective tribe by consensus. 6 The Naga conflict dates back to August 14, 1947 when some Naga leaders declared independence ahead of India's independence the next day. 7 Sashinungla, ‘Nagaland: Insurgency and Factional Intransigence’, at http://www.satp.org/publicatio/faultlines/volume16/Article4.htm. 8 M.S. Prabhakra, ‘The Long-drawn Naga Dialogue’, The Hindu, October, 31, 2006. 9 Rajeev Bhattacharya, ‘Ceasefire agreement with NSCN’, Indian Express, New Delhi, August 01, 2006. 10 Syed Zarir Hussain, ‘Needed, a Roadmap’, Indian Express, New Delhi, October 30, 2006. 11 Bhibhu Prasad Routray, ‘Peace Games’, Institute of Conflict Management, New Delhi September 21, 2001, at http://www.satp.com. 12 Ibid. 13 The author, a serving army officer, was witness to the meeting during a field visit to Nagaland. 14 Sreeradha Datta, ‘Ethnic Dimension of Northeast Turmoil’, Northeast Complexities and its Determinants, Shipra Publications, New Delhi, 2004, p. 2. 15 A Khel is a group of houses in a Naga village usually belonging to one clan. A village may have three to eight Khels. 16 Charles Chasie, ‘Nagaland In Transition’, IIC Quarterly, 2005, p. 255.

Confronting Constructionism: Ending India's Naga War

One of the world's oldest continuing armed conflicts is also one of the least known: the conflict between the government of India and the Nagas. Since 1997, there has been a ceasefire between the Indian government and Naga militants, and there have been intermittent talks to end the conflict. Naga leaders appear to be willing to make concessions on their main demand of independence. But the peace process has stumbled on an unexpected hurdle: the Naga aspiration to the unification of all Naga-inhabited areas. Whether or not some people included in the Naga category should indeed be considered Nagas is in fact a highly contested matter. Since it is impossible to agree on who is a Naga and who is not, it has been difficult to decide what the Naga-inhabited areas are. The issue has generated some new conflicts in the region. As in all ethno-national conflicts, the politics of recognition is an underlying theme in the Naga conflict. But projects about recognition are also projects about constructing identities. The notion of bounded collectivities living in national homelands relies on a very different spatial discourse from the one of overlapping frontiers and hierarchical polities that precedes it. The article argues that the historical relations between hill peoples and the lowland states in this frontier region were premised on an especially complex spatial, cultural, and political dynamic. Saving the faltering Naga peace process will require confronting the constructionism of modern identities by the political actors themselves.