The Kohima walkout, it was said later, hardened Nehru against the Nagas. In truth, Phizo and the NNC had set their minds on independence anyway. They were already collecting arms and organizing groups of ‘home guards in the villages. The state, for its part, was moving platoons of the paramilitary Assam Rifles into the district.
By the summer of 1953 the top NNC leadership had gone underground. Searching for them, the police raided Angami strongholds, further alienating the villagers. Apart from local knowledge and local support, the rebels had one great advantage – the terrain. It was indescribably beautiful: ‘The scenery was the loveliest I have seen, remarked one British visitor. ‘Range upon range of forested hills which change their grouping continually as we climb and climb. The tops rise out of the mist like islands in a white sea.26 It was also perfectly suited for guerrilla warfare: as a veteran of the Japanese campaign observed, this was ‘a country where a platoon well dug in can hold up a division, and a company can hold up an Army Corps’.27
This was a war conducted completely out of the vision of the wider world. No outsiders were allowed into the district, and journalists least of all. Reconstructing its history is a difficult task, relying as it must mostly on narratives gathered later by reporters and scholars. From these it appears that in 1954 things took a turn decidedly for the worse. In the spring of that year an army officer riding a motorcycle in Kohimah accidentally knocked down a passer-by. A crowd collected in protest, whereupon the police fired in panic, killing a respected judge and NNC member.
This incident created great resentment among the Nagas; it ‘increased the depth of their hatred of the “unwanted Indians” and precipitated the revolt’. The extremists gained control of the NNC; petitions and demonstrations were abandoned, and preparations made for an armed uprising. The rebels began transporting weapons to a safe haven in the Tuensang area. In June 1954 the Assam Rifles attacked a village believed to be sympathetic to the guerrillas. In September some rebels declared the formation of a ‘federal government of Nagaland’.
By now killings and counter-killings were occurring with fair regularity. There were villages loyal to the government which were targeted by the rebels; villages sympathetic to the freedom struggle which were attacked by the authorities. A division of the Indian army was called in to quell the revolt, reinforcing the thirty-five battalions of the Assam Rifles already in action. In March 1955 a bitter battle broke out in Tuensang; when the firing ended and the smoke cleared, sixty houses and several granaries were found to have been burnt down.28
Despite the civil war, some channels of communication were still open. In September 1955 Phizo himself went with two colleagues to meet the Assam chief minister. No details of the meeting are available and after it was over the Naga leader returned to the jungle. However, one of his key aides, T. Sakhrie, had come round to the view that the Nagas could not ever hope to defeat the Indian army. Having made their point, the NNC guerrillas should lay down their weapons and their leaders seek an honourable settlement with the government in New Delhi.
Phizo, on the other hand, had pledged himself to a ‘war that would not admit of truces, retreats or compromises’. The suggestion that he negotiate offended him greatly; not least because Sakhrie was, like him, an Angami from Khonomah, indeed from the same khel or clan of Merhuma. ‘Phizo was absolutely furious with Sakhrie’s softening posture’, which came when many young men were flocking to the rebel cause, with the guerrilla army at an all-time high of 15,000 members. But Sakhrie was convinced that they still stood no chance against the mighty Indian nation. He began touring the villages, preaching against Phizo’s extremism and warning that violence would only beget more violence.29
In January 1956 T. Sakhrie was dragged out of bed, taken to the jungle, tortured, then killed. It was widely believed that Phizo had ordered the murder, although he denied it. In any event, the message had gone home – this is how betrayers to the cause would be treated. In March afresh announcement of a federal government of Nagaland was made. A national flag was designed and commanders appointed for the different regions of the designated homeland. Then, in July, occurred a killing that hurt India’s image as much as Sakhrie’s murder had hurt the NNC. A group of soldiers, having just beaten off a rebel ambush, were returning to Kohima. The town was under curfew; no one was supposed to be out on the streets. Catching sight of a solitary old man, the soldiers ordered him off the road. When the man protested the jawans beat him with rifle-butts and finally pushed him off a cliff.
The walker that the soldiers had so callously killed was a doctor named T. Haralu. He was, in fact, the first allopathic practitioner in the Naga hills and, as such, known and revered in and around Kohima. His killing dissipated any propaganda advantage the Indians might have received from Sakhrie’s murder. For if that death had ‘intensified defections from [the NNC] to New Delhi, exactly the reverse happened by the killing of Dr Haralu’.30
Meanwhile, the army presence had increased considerably. The newly named Naga Hills Force consisted of one regiment of mountain artillery, seventeen battalions of infantry and fifty platoons of Assam Rifles. The rebels also had their own military structure – headed by a commander-in-chief (a brilliant strategist named Kaito) with four commanders under him, their troops grouped into battalions and companies. The Nagas were equipped with British and Japanese rifles, and with Sten guns and machine guns, all part of the massive debris left behind after the Second World War. The rebels also used locally made muzzle-loaders and, in hand-to-hand combat, the traditional Naga sword or dao.
To add to the regular Naga forces there were highly effective bands of irregulars, divided into ‘volunteer parties’, ‘courier parties’ and ‘women’s volunteer organizations’. The last-named were nurses who could, when called upon, fight very well indeed. And there was also the silent support of the ordinary villager. As part of their counter-insurgency operations, the Indian army brought isolated hamlets together in ‘grouped villages’; the residents had to sleep here at night, going out in the morning to work in the fields. Intended to break the chain of information from peasant to rebel, this tactic merely increased the army’s unpopularity among the Nagas.31
By the middle of 1956 a full-scale war was on in the Naga hills. In a statement to Parliament in the last week of July, the home minister, Govind Ballabh Pant, admitted that the Indian army had lost 68 men while killing 370 ‘hostiles’. Pant accused Phizo of murdering Sakhrie – whom he called the ‘leader of the sensible and patriotic group’ – and of ‘leading them [the Nagas] to disaster’. The talk of Naga independence he dismissed as ‘mere moonshine’. Pant expressed the hope ‘that good sense will prevail on the Nagas and they will realize that we all belong to India’.32
The Indian (and international) press was not covering the conflict, but we can get a sense of its scale from letters written by a Naga doctor to the last British deputy commissioner of the Naga hills, Charles Pawsey. A letter of June 1956 describes a tour in the interior where ‘every night we looked up and saw villages burning in the hills – set alight by either the rebels or the army, no one knows.’ As for the rebel leader,
Phizo is being absolutely horrible to any Naga Government servant he catches, and even more so to any Naga who was on his council and has left him, as many have, because of his extreme methods . . . Many dobashis [headmen] have vanished and no one knows whether they are in hiding or Phizo’s got them. Of course, their position is very difficult, for if they go about Government business Phizo gets them, and if they don t, the Government gets them.
Two months later, the Naga doctor wrote to Pawsey that
As I see it, .5 per cent of the Nagas are with Phizo; 1 per cent are more moderate, and want to break away from Assam and come under Delhi, and 98.5 per cent just want to be left alone’ . . . Of course the way the army has behaved and is behaving means that now voluntary co-operation between the Nagas and any Government is beyond hope.
The methods of the army, he added, were such
that they ‘will affect Naga/Indian relations for the next 50–100 years’.33
In August 1956 there was an extended debate in the Lok Sabha on the situation in the Naga hills. A Meitei member from Manipur recounted how, on a recent visit to the region, the convoy of vehicles he was travelling in was attacked by the rebels. Based on his enquiries, it appeared that ‘it is very difficult to bring them round to our way of thinking and ways of life; more especially, Phizo is a hard nut to crack’. He agreed that the Nagas could not ‘have separate independence’, yet thought that they should immediately be granted a separate state within the Indian Union.
The next speaker was the Socialist MP Rishang Keishing, who mounted a fierce attack on the army for burning villages and killing innocent people (Keishing was himself a Thangkul Naga from Manipur). ‘The army men have shown an utter disregard for the sentiments of the local Nagas, for, they have tried to terrify them by carrying the naked corpses of the Nagas killed by them. When Phizo had met Nehru in 1951 and 1952, said Keishing, ‘the parties did not try to understand each other’s mind and the atmosphere was soon vitiated and tempers lost’. He wished ‘that the prime minister had displayed here the same amount of patience and psychological insight for which he is famous in the field of international diplomacy’. In the years since, brutal methods had been used by both sides. ‘Who can boast of an untarnished record?’ asked Keishing. ‘Who can dare fling the first stone and assert that they are not sinners? I ask this of the hostile Nagas as well as of the government.’ He recommended ‘an immediate declaration of general amnesty’, the sending of an all-party delegation of parliamentarians to the disturbed region and a meeting between the government and the Naga National Council. He also appealed to Phizo’s men to agree to a truce, ‘because the continuation of hostilities means the ruins of innocent citizens’.
The prime minister, in reply, admitted that there had been some killings – including that of Dr Haralu, ‘which has distressed us exceedingly’ – but claimed ‘that by far the greater part of the burning is done by the Naga hostiles’. He argued that the government was seeking the co-operation of the Nagas and that, as he had several times told Phizo, New Delhi was always willing to consider suggestions to improve the working of the Sixth Schedule, which allowed tribal areas great autonomy in the management of their land and resources. He did not, however, think the time ripe for sending a delegation of parliamentarians to the Naga hills. And he insisted that ‘it is no good talking to me about independence [for the Nagas] . . . I consider it fantastic for that little corner between China and Burma and India – apart of it is in Burma – to be called an independent state’.34
In December 1956 a publication issued by the Indian High Commission in London reported the ‘success’ of army operations in the Naga hills. It claimed that the military had broken the back of the rebel resistance and was now ‘engaged in mopping-up operations’. The news appears to have been swallowed whole, for weeks later the Manchester Guardian ran an item with the headline: ‘Naga Rebellion Virtually Over’. The Indian government, it said, was taking steps ‘to arrive at some understanding with the Naga moderates, whose ranks are swelling steadily’. There was, however, no evidence of any independent confirmation of this new dawn said to be emerging.35
V
Through the 1950s the Jharkhand movement carried on its campaign for a province within India run for and by adivasis. When the States Reorganization Commission visited the area in January 1955, they were met everywhere by processionists shouting ‘Jharkhand alag prant!’ (Jharkhand must be a separate state). As one participant in the protests recalled, the ‘Jharkhand demand was writ large on every Adivasi face’.36
Across the country, in Manipur, a struggle was afoot to have that former chiefdom declared a full-fledged state of the Indian Union. Back in 1949 a popular movement had forced the Maharaja to convene an assembly elected on the basis of universal adult franchise. But the assembly was dissolved when Manipur merged with India. The territory was now designated a ‘Part C’ state, which meant that it had no popularly elected body and was ruled by a chief commissioner responsible directly to Delhi.
Manipur covered an area of 8,600 square miles. There was a mere 700 square miles of valley, inhabited by 380,000 Meiteis owing allegiance to the Vaishnava traditions of Hinduism. The larger, hilly section was home to 180,000 Naga and Kuki tribals. It was one such tribal, the aforementioned Rishang Keishing, who in 1954 began a movement for representative government in Manipur. Keishing and his fellow socialists daily picketed the office of the chief commissioner in Imphal. Thousands of satyagrahis courted arrest, many of them women. But the government would not yield. Speaking in Parliament, the home minister said that the time was not ripe for the creation of legislative assemblies in Part C states such as Manipur and Tripura. ‘These states’, he said, ‘are strategically situated on the borders of India. The people are still comparatively politically backward and the administrative machinery in these States is still weak.’37
One does not know whether the Naga National Council took cognizance of the struggles for Jharkhand and Manipur, and of New Delhi’s reluctance to give in to them. In any case, Phizo and his men were holding out for something much more ambitious – not just a province within India, but a nation outside it. The demand might have been ‘absurd’, yet it inspired numerous Nagas to abandon their villages and join the guerrillas.
At this time, the mid-1950s, there were roughly 200,000 Nagas in the district that bore their name. There were alike number in the adjoining districts of NEFA, with another 80,000 in Manipur. Half a million Nagas in all, with perhaps just 10,000 of them participating full time in the struggle. However, weakness in numbers was amply compensated by strength of will. A small community of rebels had forced the Indian state to send in large contingents of military to suppress it.
Few Indians outside the north-east knew of the Naga conflict at the time, and virtually no foreigners. Yet the conflict had serious implications for the unity of the nation, for the survival of its democracy and for the legitimacy of its government. For now here else in the country, not even in Kashmir, had the army been sent in to quell a rebellion launched by those who were formally citizens of the Indian state.
In its first decade, this state had faced problems aplenty – among them oppositional movements based on class, religion, language and region. These had been handled by reason and dialogue or, in very rare instances, by the use of regular police. The conflict in the Naga hills, on the other hand, would not admit of such resolution. There was a fundamental incommensurability between what the NNC was demanding and what the government of India was willing to give them. This was an argument which, it seemed, could be ended only by one party prevailing, militarily, over the other.
Jawaharlal Nehru keenly understood the uniqueness of the Naga situation. Writing to his Cabinet colleagues in March 1955, he alerted them to ‘the rather difficult problem in our tribal areas of the North East . . . [where] we have not succeeded in winning the people of these areas. In fact, they have been drifting away. In the Naga Hills district, they have non-cooperated for the last three and a half years and done so with great discipline and success. 38
A year later, Nehru wrote to the chief minister of Assam that while the army would be deployed so long as the rebels had arms and were willing to use them, ‘there is something much more to it than merely the military approach’. While ‘there can be no doubt that an armed revolt has to be met by force’, said Nehru, ‘our whole past and present outlook is based on force by itself being no remedy. We have repeated this in regard to the greater problems of the world. Much more must we remember this when dealing with our own countrymen who have to be won over and not merely suppressed.’39
Hidden away from the eyes of the world, unknown even to most Indians, the Naga rebellion was withal a serious headache for the government of India. Otherwise, Nehru’s regime seemed secure and stable. It had been democratically elected, with a comfortable majority,
while behind its foreign and domestic policies rested a wide national consensus. Soon, however, other challenges were to arise, these not in the peripheries, but in regions considered to be solidly part of India.
PART THREE
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SHAKING THE CENTRE
14
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THE SOUTHERN CHALLENGE
Jawaharlal derives strength from the people. He likes vast crowds. Personal popularity leads him to believe that the people are satisfied with his administration: this conclusion, however, is not always justified.
NARENDRA DEVA, socialist, 1949
As the years rolled by, the very foundations on which Nehru’s prestige and reputation rested began to weigh him down. At one time, he had a solution to every difficulty; today, he faces a difficulty in every solution.
R. K. LAXMAN, cartoonist, 1959
I
THE YEARS 1757 AND 1857 ARE much memorialized in Indian history. In the first, the East India Company defeated the ruler of Bengal in the battle of Plassey, thus gaining the British their first bridgehead on the subcontinent. In the second, the British faced, and eventually overcame, the massive popular uprising known to some as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ and to others as the ‘First War of Indian Independence’.