Who are the Naga militants who fired at Indian troops along the Myanmar border?

Moneycontrol News

The Eastern Command of the Indian Army on Wednesday said that a column of Indian Army personnel was fired upon by unidentified insurgents while operating along the Indo-Myanmar border.

The army personnel quickly returned fire and forced the militants to scatter and retreat. It was reported that the insurgents suffered heavy casualties in a fire fight that lasted a couple of hours, that but none of the Indian Army soldiers involved in the incident went down.

The insurgents are believed to have belonged to the Khaplang faction of National Socialist Coucil of Nagaland (NSCN-K). "Heavy casualties reportedly inflicted on NSCN(K) cadre. No casualties suffered by Indian Security Forces," the Eastern Command said in a tweet.

Earlier this month, the army carried out another operation against the NSCN-K along the Indo-Myanmar border in Arunachal Pradesh, in which one militant was killed and another injured, according to media reports.

In 2015, the Indian Army had conducted a surgical strike in the border zone against the NSCN-K following an attack by the militants that resulted in the deaths of 18 Army personnel in Manipur.

The Naga insurgents have been fighting the Indian army for quite some time now. Nagaland has been declared a "disturbed area" because of law and order problems and militancy and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) is in force.

But who are these Naga militants? What is it that they want and since when has this been going on? Let us take a look at their history and what they hope to achieve through their skirmishes with the Indian army.

The history of Naga militancy

The Naga insurgency is a by-product of Naga nationalism, which hinges on sovereignty and unity of Naga people—an identity comprising several ethnic tribes in and around Nagaland.

The ultimate goal of the Naga militants is to secede from India and create a ‘Greater Nagalim’ or Greater Nagaland, which comprises parts of Assam, Arunachal, Manipur and also Myanmar.

There is a significant number of Nagas living in Myanmar and cross-border insurgency has been a long-drawn issue for the Indian government.

The emergence of the Naga struggle can be traced back to as far as the foundation of the Naga Club in 1918, following a new-found unity among Naga tribes during their the deployment of their people in the British army of World War I.

In 1946 came the Naga National Council (NNC), which drove the socio-political movement for self-determination in an organized way. They were not militant yet, and demanded autonomy within India with a separate electorate.

Under the command of Angami Zapu Phizo, the NNC took up the secessionist agenda, and declared Nagaland an independent state a day before the Indian Union got its freedom in 1947.

Nagaland was officially a part of Assam in the initial years of independent India. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru first held talks with Phizo but these talks did not bear any fruit. Once the talks had failed, Nehru sent the army to Nagaland and the conflict started face on.

Phizo’s army was fighting a guerrilla war and running and a parallel government after the leader went underground in 1955. Phizo went to London in 1960 to garner international support for their struggle.

In 1963, after a violent movement for decades, Nagaland was recognised as a separate state within India. The following year, Nehru signed a ceasefire pact with the militants.

However, the 1964 ceasefire agreement did not last for long and the government decided to launch a counter-insurgency operation to put an end to the armed struggle.

The National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) was formed in 1980 and its parent organisation, the NNC, ultimately fell due to internal conflicts while Phizo remained in exile abroad till his death.

Eight years later, SS Khaplang, a Naga from Myanmar, created a split in the NSCN and formed his faction, the NSCN-K. The other faction, NSCN-IM operated under the leadership of Isak and Muivah.

From the early 1990s, efforts of peace talks emerged again and finally in 1997, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government signed yet another ceasefire pact with the NSCN-IM faction. Another pact was signed by Khaplang-led NSCN-K in 2001.

This ceasefire lasted more than a decade but was finally broken by the militants in March 2015.

However, in August 2015, the new BJP-led government headed by PM Narendra Modi, and mediated by Naga civil society groups, signed a “historic” peace accord with NSCN-IM. The NSCN-IM entered the peace accord with alteration in the goal of complete independence and shift to greater autonomy under the Indian constitutional framework.

Meanwhile, the conflict between the army and NSCN-K kept continuing.  The NSCN-K remained stringent about its demand for complete sovereignty of Greater Nagalim.

In June this year, Khaplang died of old age and Indian-origin Khango Konyak succeeded him as the chairman of NSCN-K. This is expected to change the attitude of the militant insurgency group.

Union minister of state for home, Kiren Rijiju, has told the media that he was ready to offer rehabilitation to the Indian-origin militants of the faction if they surrendered. But he shunned any talks with the Myanmar side.