The Global Naga Forum (GNF) has said that no government or organisation– local, state, national or international — has the authority or the right to edit a Naga tribe out of their history or remove Naga people from their homeland.
In a statement, the forum also declared its full support to the recent statement by the Rengma Naga People’s Council (RNPC) of Karbi Anglong in Assam opposing the renaming of East Rengma Mouza as East Mouza.
Though removing the word Rengma from East Rengma Mouza might seem harmless, the forum said it was not, terming the removal an insidious move.
According to the GNF, it was part of a well-documented history of dispossessing the Rengma Naga people of their ancestral land, a systematic process of alienating them from their indigenous rights and de-legitimising their identity as a people.
“We don’t say this lightly. Our statement has the backing of history going back to the creation of the Rengma Hills in 1841.
Thereafter, Rengma Hills was divided and placed under different district administrative units of British Assam. It came under Naga Hills district in 1867 and Nagaon district in 1898; and in 1887 the Rengma Reserved Forest was put under the Sivasagar district administration,” the statement claimed.
As the RNPC had made clear, the GNF alleged that the Rengmas in Assam had not fared better under independent India. Since the late 1970s, the Assam government has used the Rengma Reserved Forest to settle refugees and ex-service personnel and their families, including from Nepal and Bangladesh. And now, the forum pointed out the new local Sarkari Gaon Burah Association wanted to remove the Rengma identity altogether from East Rengma Mouza.
Calling for Nagas in other parts of India and in Myanmar not to kid themselves, the forum stated that the separation and de-legitimisation of the Rengma Nagas in Assam was a microcosm, a synecdoche, of the larger story of the Nagas as a whole. Naga people’s modern history, 1947 to 2020s, shows this.
The forum alleged that division of ancestral Naga lands into several separate administrative units had led to a steady de-recognition of the peoplehood of the Nagas.
According to the GNF, when British left the subcontinent in 1947, it left the Naga people separated in two countries, India and Burma. The same year, India did not only keep the colonial-era division of the Naga people in place and did even worse. When Nagas reiterated their long-standing demand for political self-determination – an appeal going as far back as 1929 – India sent the full force of its army into Naga territory in the mid-1950s to suppress the Nagas.
It did not stop there. The Indian government separated the Naga people in four states – Assam (1947), Nagaland (1963), Manipur (1972, and Arunachal Pradesh (1975). Fast forward to today. Indian armed forces continue to keep a tight control over the Nagas under the extra-judicial Armed Forces Special Powers Act ((AFSPA), 1958, while Indian government functionaries and agents had started removing the word Naga from Naga areas in Arunachal Pradesh and ethnic Naga names like Rengma from Naga areas in Assam.
Pointing out that this was what the RNPC of Karbi Anglog was protesting against, the forum assured its complete support to the council. Along with RNPC, it also appealed to the Assam government and the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council (KAAC) to stop the Sarkari Gaon Burah Association from their ill-conceived action.
The forum hoped that the people and the Government of Assam would act decisively to safeguard the historic rights of the Naga people and refrain from becoming part of Government of India’s alleged systematic annulment of Naga peoplehood.