As is his wont, Modi has once again pulled his cake out of the oven before it has been baked. There is no Naga 'accord'. T.R. Zeliang, the chief minister of Nagaland, has clarified that it is only a 'formula'. Muivah himself concedes that there is only a “better understanding”. So, since the Union government does not even know whether it has an agreement or not, it has decided to keep the terms of the alleged agreement a secret. This must be without precedent in the annals of political agreements anywhere in the world!
Why the secrecy? Clearly because there is no agreement! Then why announce an agreement? The obvious answer is that Modi wanted to extract some credit for his “governance” at a time when Parliament was a shambles entirely because Modi adamantly refused to order Sushma Swaraj to step aside. The other is that one of the two leaders of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah), Isak Chisi Swu, is on his deathbed at AIIMS and wants to sign an agreement, reached years earlier, before he passes away.
If an agreement had been reached in 2011 when the UPA was in office, why was it not formally concluded then? Well, the answer is that while an agreement had been reached with the NSCN(IM), it was felt that, for the agreement to be lasting, it was essential to draw in all the factions of the NSCN and not make the agreement the starting point for further fratricidal conflict among the many militant Naga groups. The most important of these is the NCSN (Khaplang). Earlier, the leader of that faction, S.S. Khaplang, was the more favourably inclined of the two factions to reach an agreement with the Indian government. But, when it seemed that Isak-Muivah had stolen a march over him, Khaplang holed himself up in a sanctuary in Myanmar. It was from there that he organised the terrorist attack on an Army convoy that killed 18 jawans. The Nagaland assembly is now planning to send a delegation to his jungle hideout to persuade him to come on board.
Moreover, if peace is really to break out, it is essential to get other armed factions on board. These include the NSCN(KK), led by Kitovi and Khole, the Naga National Council, the Zeliangrong United Front and the Manpiur Naga Revolutionary Front, none of which will accept an agreement brokered only with the NSCN(IM).
To complicate the picture further, there is the very dynamic Naga civil society, which is decisively influenced by the Naga Hoho and the Baptist Church. They have apparently not been consulted in the last round of talks. If the ‘better understanding’, ‘framework', ‘accord’ or ‘agreement’—whatever it is—is to have any moral validity, it would have to be endorsed by these institutions as well.
Illustration: Jairaj T.G.
Finally, the chief ministers of Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh have to be persuaded that their territories will not be alienated to appease the votaries of Nagalim, or Greater Nagaland. The Naga claim is that several districts in each of these states have an overwhelming or significant Naga population and that they have to be brought within the ambit of any peace settlement. Extraordinarily, Modi, the self-vaunted advocate of “cooperative federalism”, has not seen fit to keep any of the chief ministers informed of what is happening, let alone securing their consent, to enter into whatever it is that he has entered into with the NSCN(IM).
There are many remaining loose ends—what is the meaning to be given to Naga ‘sovereignty’; what are the Constitutional provisions to be made to accommodate the “unique history” of the Nagas; what becomes of the concerns of the Meiteis of Manipur, the Kukis of Churachandpur, the Ahoms of Assam and numerous non-Naga tribes of Arunachal Pradesh? There is also the question of the surrender of arms and the integration of former armed insurrectionists into the mainstream of democratic Nagaland politics.
Pushing these questions aside, Modi has jumped the gun. There is every danger of the understanding going the way of the Ufa understanding, and all because Modi politics is not about consensus but about “Make in Race Course Road”.
