Global Naga Forum’s (GNF) has made an “urgent appeal” to the Government of India to uphold the Free Movement Regime (FMR) agreement with Myanmar, saying abrogating the agreement would put the Indian government in violation of international law and of the basic human right of Naga civilians to move freely in their homeland.
GNF through its media cell affirmed to stand by the Naga people’s right to civil and human rights in their ancestral land and in the world’s largest democracy. The forum reminded that Naga people have been living in their ancestral homeland (in contemporary India and Myanmar) since prior to recorded time. It stated that crossing the Indo-Myanmar border has been a time-honored practice among the Nagas in both countries.
GNF asserted that decision of prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru and prime minister of Burma U Nu to drew an imaginary boundary between their newly independent countries in 1953, without the consent of the Nagas, resulted in an artificial separation of the Nagas and their lands across the international border.
“What were Nagas to do when the two national governments decided to divide them up, as though they did not exist, by drawing a line that ran right through the house of a Naga family, as India and Myanmar did in Longwa village?” GNF asked.
After all these, GNF said it would be most “unworthy of India’s high standing in world history, ancient and modern” for it to even contemplate reneging on the FMR agreement with Myanmar.
The forum stated that Manipur chief minister “may want” the FMR scrapped for his own reason, but doing so would come at the expense of the Naga people again “whether it is the further disruption of the Indo-Naga political negotiations or the lives of civilian Nagas on both sides of the Indo-Myanmar border.”
Therefore, GNF has appealed to the Prime Minister of India and the Home Minister to continue to uphold the FMR agreement with Myanmar, which it said “helps lower the injustice and human rights abuses of the Nagas at the border.”