Timely Reminder
by Rita Manchanda
The Telegraph
December 28, 2023

Rita Manchanda looks at the part women have played in the Naga movement and seeks a more substantive role for them in the ongoing talks.

From the reports on the “historic” return of the top Naga leaders — Thuingaleng Muivah and Isak Chishi Swu — to the peace table, one could hardly imagine that a critical constituent in mobilizing support for the peace process and reaching out across the factional divides are the Naga women. The Naga Ho Ho or Council of Tribal Elders occasionally get mentioned, but the rest get subsumed in the catch- all phrase of “various Naga social organizations”— a euphemism for what approximates to civil society.

It is crucial to emphasize the role of the Naga social organizations and the women’s groups in particular. All too often, peace negotiations get reduced to an exercise in power sharing between the armed protagonists, producing new cycles of violence. Marginalize the multiple stakeholders that have worked to sustain the ceasefire in the last eight years, and you marginalize the possibility of bringing to a just and dignified closure India’s longest-running insurgency. When the ceasefire agreement was concluded in July 1997, there was limited support for pursuing peace negotiations. It was mediation by these organizations that gave social legitimacy to the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) to speak for Naga aspirations at the peace table.

Today, the government and the NSCN (I-M) would find it difficult to walk away from the peace table without provoking widespread public disaffection. It is the result of the sustained efforts of the Naga Ho Ho, the United Naga Council, the churches, Naga Peoples Movement for Human Rights, the students’ organizations and, above all, the Naga Mothers’ Association and Naga Women’s Union of Manipur. At their “consultative table” in Bangkok, the NSCN (I-M) gave the women a seat at the table because, as they put it, “we need them”.

Within the community, the decade-long campaign of “Stop All Bloodshed” of the Naga women has produced a social expectation of their peace role. The story is apocryphal — NMA President Neidonuo Angami bursts forth in the midst of a battle between warring factions in Phek township and appeals — “Listen to your mother, before you kill your brother”. It has become part of folklore, socially reinforced by the traditions of pukrelia or demi. A pukrelia would burst forth amid warring groups holding a stick to stop the killing of men who were her kin by blood and marriage. Another tribal tradition has an elderly woman drop her mekla and shame the men into stopping the war.

The tradition was relived in Imphal in July, when Meitei women protested in the nude outside the Assam Rifles headquarters. It reinforced the agitation against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Under pressure, New Delhi agreed to Assam Rifles’s vacating their camp HQ at Kangla Fort and to withdrawing the AFSPA in some areas. However, the Meira Paibis, who had been in the forefront of the protest were derided and discredited in the local media. It was a reminder of the road blocks in the pathway of women. Post-conflict undervaluation of women’s contribution is not new. At issue is not only demographic equity but that of women making a difference in both the praxis and substance of peace-building. Consequently, there is need to recover the story of the women in the Naga peace process.

From the head-hunting days to now, Naga women have used their “exclusion” from politics as a resource to negotiate with the state and non-state armed actors to protect their communities; to mediate between warring factions of the Naga underground; to sustain the ceasefire and to build inter-community people-to-people dialogues.

At the peak of the conflict during the Sixties, it was the women who stepped forward between the villagers and the soldiers. When the Naga national movement splintered, “we mothers would go to the warring factions, walk to their camps and plead with them not to kill each other and not to harass the villagers.” When inter-factional violence went out of control in 1994, the NMA initiated the “Stop All Bloodshed”. Interventions were made through tribal affiliation of the groups. In Kohima, it was the women of the Sumi Totemi Ho who went with the Sema Ho elders to appeal to the Khaplang cadre to stop the bloodshed. Nearly a decade later, the NMA in 2003 re-pledged its commitment to stop all violence.

Post-ceasefire, the women extended their role to arranging a meeting between the top leaders. In January 1999, the women went to Bangkok and met the NSCN leaders and later went on foot across the border to Myanmar to S.S. Khaplang’s central headquarters. On their return they were debriefed by 16 of the top leaders of the NSCN. Naga women were now being trusted to be interlocutors between the two factions. The meeting between the two NSCN factions did not happen but the women did manage to facilitate a meeting between the NNC Federal and the NSCN.

A month after the ceasefire agreement, the women were a party to a 22-member action committee. Their pressure has resulted in revising the ground rules to include safeguarding the human rights of civilians. Women’s groups were integral to the campaign to sustain the ceasefire despite the strains following the arrest of Muivah, tension over the territorial extension of the ceasefire to all Naga areas and endemic ceasefire violations. It is in recognition of this that the women were called to the Naga consultative meetings convened by the NSCN in Bangkok. Contrary to the January meeting, in May, six senior women of the Isak-Muivah faction were present. Camp Hebron may revitalize the ties.

Representatives of the state institutions have been reluctant to democratize the peace table. The ceasefire monitoring cell convenor, R.V. Kulkari, even tends to view social organizations as “fronts” and dismisses the women as ineffectual and irrelevant. However, at this stage when the “unity” issue and the demand for the integration of the Naga peoples could derail the peace process, the role of the Naga social organizations has emerged as most vital, particularly that of Naga women. Let this be one peace process where women are not marginalized.

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