Voices from within Naga civil society are asking who authorised any one group to speak for all Nagas — and warning that a solution without consensus may be signed on paper but will never hold on the ground.
By NIRENDRA DEV
Twenty-nine years after the first ceasefire, the Naga peace process has arrived at an uncomfortable reckoning — one that has little to do with New Delhi, and everything to do with what Nagas want from each other.
A recent article in the Ukhrul Times, penned by Jim Jajo, puts the question with unusual candour:
“The uncomfortable truth is this — the Naga political question is no longer just about recognition by the Indian state. It is equally about recognition within Naga society itself. If one group claims to speak for all, the question now being asked is — who authorised that claim?”
It is a question that has been building for years. Now, in 2026, it is being asked openly.
The Warning That Came Four Years Early
The ground for this reckoning was laid well before Jajo’s article. As far back as 2022, the NNPG Working Committee issued a warning that reads, in hindsight, like a precise diagnosis. “Nagaland today is a land where tenants, with the Government of India’s help, dream to be landlords through heckling, harassing and brutalizing the owners with symbolic tools like Integration, flag, constitution, Pan Naga Hoho etc,” the NNPG said.
The same statement noted pointedly that NSCN (IM) leaders — southerners who had been “warmly welcomed by hospitable Nagas into Nagaland” after the 1988 split — “did not own a hut then.
Today, in the name of political dialogue and extortion, these people have been able to purchase farmlands in Dimapur, Chumukedima and Peren districts.”
Some retired military officers have noted these were warnings hiding in plain sight. One observed:
“Things are still not late. The years 2026–27 offer a suitable time to strike while the iron is hot for an immediate solution. Otherwise, things are doomed to go the tragic way of Yugoslavia — multiplied a hundred times.”
A Timeline of Perpetual Process
The peace talks that began in 1997 have a longer prehistory. The first backroom channel of communication with Naga militants was quietly opened around 1994–95 by then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, when S C Jamir was Nagaland’s Chief Minister and the late Rajesh Pilot was Minister of State for Home, Internal Security.
H D Deve Gowda formally met NSCN (IM) leaders Thuingaleng Muivah and Isak Chishi Swu at Zurich in February 1997. The first ceasefire — announced for six months — came in August 1997, by which time I K Gujral was Prime Minister and CPI leader Indrajit Gupta was Union Home Minister.
Considerable progress was made under the Vajpayee government. The Manmohan Singh years between 2004 and 2014 saw little movement. The Modi government accelerated the process sharply, appointing R N Ravi as interlocutor and inking the Framework Agreement with NSCN (IM) in August 2015 — within just 15 months of taking office.
The timing mattered: the pact was signed months before the aging Isak Chishi Swu passed away.
Two years later, on November 17, 2017, came the quieter but arguably more consequential Agreed Position with the NNPG — signed, as the NNPG itself noted, without “camera flashlights, no hype or hoopla.” A veiled contrast with the August 2015 signing in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
NNPG leader G Naga, Kilonser (GPRN-NSCN Kitovi faction), described that afternoon: “The Naga delegation experienced a solemn moment with thankful hearts, sat at a round table when a historic document was signed.
The Government of India recognised the political and historical rights of the Nagas to self-determine their future in consonance with their distinct identity.”
The Flag, the Constitution — and What New Delhi Cannot Do
The peace process hit its most durable wall when NSCN (IM) insisted on a separate flag and a separate constitution for Nagas. New Delhi understood immediately that no government authority in Delhi could concede ground that cuts against the very spirit of the Indian Constitution — more so under Narendra Modi, whose NDA-2 government had already abrogated Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir.
Home Minister Amit Shah made the government’s position clear in Parliament: the true spirit of Article 371(A) and similar special provisions would not be diluted or deleted.
The stalemate has been visible for years to anyone willing to look.
The Manipur Dimension
Jajo does not shy away from Manipur. “Nowhere is this more sensitive than in Manipur,” he writes — a region where Naga aspirations intersect with Kuki claims, Meitei anxieties, and the fragile balance of a deeply contested state.
Muivah is a Tangkhul Naga, and his community has substantial presence in the hill districts of Manipur. His facilitated visit to his native hamlet of Somdal in October 2025 was a quiet but significant gesture by the Government of India — one that did not receive the recognition it perhaps deserved.
Veteran Naga politician S C Jamir — the only surviving signatory to the 1960 Statehood Agreement — has repeatedly said that the Nagas of Nagaland need not look to Manipur for direction.
Retired IAS officer Khekiye K Sema, writing in a newspaper column, put it more bluntly: the NSCN (IM) is “spearheading the negotiation with the Government and trying to decide the fate of the Nagas of Nagaland without letting us know exactly what our future is going to look like.”
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| S C Jamir with PM Modi - file snap |
The Tangkhul Shift — and New Delhi’s Patience
Jajo’s most striking observation concerns the very heartland of Naga political ideology. “Nowhere is ideological clarity stronger than among the Tangkhul Nagas of Ukhrul,” he writes. “As the home ground of Thuingaleng Muivah, the tribe has long formed the intellectual and organisational backbone of the NSCN (IM). Here, the idea of Nagalim is not abstract — it is lived, debated, and defended.”
And yet: “Even in this stronghold, a subtle shift is underway. Younger voices and civil society actors are beginning to ask uncomfortable questions: How long can a peace process remain perpetually unfinished? And at what cost does ideological purity come?”
These questions may not produce quick answers. But they offer a broad hint as to why New Delhi, at this particular moment, is in no hurry. Unity, as Jajo writes, “cannot be declared — it must be built.”
Nagaland’s metaphysical intellectuals, long comfortable in the shelter of the status quo, may now need to look within. The questions the younger generation is asking will not wait another 29 years.
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