Story of Nagaland Insurgency: Part-1

To understand the insurgency in Nagaland, we need to go into its history. The present Nagaland state is home to the Naga people, who did not have any strong social, legal, cultural, commercial or political relation with rest of the India. Like many other small sovereign states before the arrival of British, the Nagas were also free people.

The British invasion brought many kingdoms under  single political authority and this applied to Naga people also. The first British invasion happened in areas of present Nagaland state during 1830s but their repulsion was so strong, that Britishers did not interfere in their civil and criminal administration. By 1880s, Nagas had agreed to Great Britain having one military base in limited areas in Naga Hills.

The Naga Club and NNC

In 1918, the educated Naga youth created a Naga Club at Kohima with an objective to represent Naga interest to British Government. By that time, a clear picture of what later was known as Naga Nationalism had not appeared. In 1929, the Naga Club submitted a memorandum to the Simon Commission and requested the British Government to leave the Nagas as free people and not to include them within the Indian Federation in the upcoming Government of India Act. In the Government of India Act 1935, the Naga Areas were declared as Special Backward Area and later the Excluded Area status. Before India’s independence, the Nagas wanted such an arrangement by which they could remain directly under the British. [This implies that when British leave, Nagas are not left alone, and then forced to be a part of indestructible union of destructible states].

However, the Naga areas were parts of Assam province then. Before British left India, the Naga Club was renamed as Naga Nationalist Council (NNC) in 1946 and this NNC asserted Naga’s inalienable right to be a separate nation and an absolute right to live independently.

The Hydri Agreement

To resolve the problem, Sir Akbar Hydri, Governor of Assam visited Kohima. A Nine-point Hydri agreement was signed between Assam and Kohima in June 1947. This agreement recognized the indisputable rights of Nagas to protect their culture, society and customary law as per their own free wish but article 9 of this agreement became contentious and later proved to be crux of the political problem. This article read as follows:

“The Governor of Assam as the Agent of the Government of the Indian Union wm have a special responsibility for a period of 10 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.”

The wording of the above article was too vague and created a dispute very soon after it was signed. The NNC interpreted that after end of ten years i.e. in 1958, they would be free to claim independence and secede from the Union of India. But the government interpreted that after ten years, there would be a review of the situation and a fresh agreement widely accepted to the Nagas would be arrived at [without sovereignty to Nagas].