Two eminent former Naga civil servants owing allegiance to the Central Nagaland Tribes Council (CNTC) - Alemtemshi Jamir, IAS (Retd) and K.K. Sema (IAS-retd) have been countered by the Global Naga Forum.
They say - on November 11, 2026, "two troubling narratives were placed before the public" -- first, the assertion by former Chief Secretary Alemtemshi Jamir, IAS (Retd.), that Nagas had little collective identity prior to 1917 and that Naga nationalism is a recent construct; and second, the ultimatum issued by retired IAS officer K.K. Sema declaring that Nagaland’s future would not be decided by the Tangkhuls and commanding "Southern Nagas" to either conform to his demands for transparency or "GET OUT."
In a statement, the GNF said - "When voices of authority use public platforms to shrink Naga history and tell fellow Nagas to leave their ancestral homeland, silence ceases to be restraint — it becomes complicity".
".... we hold up the mirror of documented history," the statement said.
"In treating the present state boundaries as the final culmination of the Naga issue, they are breaking up the very floor on which they claim to stand," the GNF media cell stated.
"Those who seek to partition the Naga soul bear the heavy burden of justifying why colonial cartography should triumph over bloodline, shared memory, and common sacrifice," it said also adding that -
"How can anyone claim exclusive ownership over the State of Nagaland on the basis of the 1960 16-Point proposal—an arrangement engineered by Jawaharlal Nehru and his domestic intermediaries specifically to submerge and erase the age-old sovereign nationhood of the Nagas".
The statement argued:
"Moreover, villages never fell from heaven in isolation: larger clan, phratry, and tribal bloodlines spread across villages, ridges, and modern borders long before colonial lines were drawn.
From Makhel and Khezhakeno to our shared lineages across Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Myanmar, our chief's house has been divided between two nations. Accepting a narrow state-centric narrative turns tribes divided across borders into strangers and enemies within their own bloodlines."
"Nagas did not "discover" one another for the first time in France in 1917. As early as the 1830s and 1880s, Nagas from diverse hills worked side-by-side in Upper Assam, organically forging Nagamese as our shared inter-tribal language.
"Nagas stood together in the frontier expeditions of 1911–12, mobilized over 2,000 men across tribal lines for the World War I Labour Corps, established the pan-Naga Naga Club in 1918, and jointly declared their right to self-determination in the historic 1929 Memorandum to the Simon Commission," the GNF said.
It further said: "... in 1956, liberal NNC leaders met Prime Minister Nehru regarding administrative unity, and Tangkhul Naga MP Reishang Keishing championed the integration of the Naga Hills, Tuensang, and Tirap on the floor of Parliament. To use a statehood born of pan-Naga blood to tell Tangkhuls and Southern Nagas to "get out" is an indefensible distortion of history."
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| Rishang Keishing : A Tangkhul veteran and former Manipur CM |
The GNF statement also stated that:
"Our deepest concern is for the rising generation of Naga youth.
When elders normalize the language of exclusion and frame fellow Nagas across artificial state borders as adversaries, they plant seeds of manufactured hatred that could take generations to uproot.
"Look around the world and across the subcontinent: diverse populations that share neither ancestral origin, customary law, nor ancient kinship have forged powerful political unions to secure their future.
"By contrast, Nagas share common genesis stories, unbroken kinship, egalitarian village traditions, and a century of shared graves. Reducing our collective destiny to the narrow defense of provincial boundaries, administrative postings, and central fiscal packages diminishes us all," it added.
ends
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