India kills in Naga homelands because it treats violence as a legitimate tool to secure its territorial design, confident that Nagas lack the leverage to alter that map. New Delhi does not respond to grief, justice, or conscience; it responds only to the calculus of control. Yet this very mindset carries its own consequence: ruling through occupation weakens India’s own eastern frontier, erodes its legitimacy across the Northeast, and accelerates the longterm conditions under which its authority in Naga territory becomes untenable.
On this day of remembrance, we face Oting not as an emotional tragedy but as a national wound. Those who were killed carried the future of our people, and their deaths were meant to break us as a nation under military occupation. The loss is not merely personal; it is political — it was an assault on the Naga idea itself, an attempt to remind us that force, not consent, is India’s chosen language in our homeland.
On 4 December 2021, thirteen Naga men were killed by the 21 Para Special Forces in a premeditated operation that exposed the brutality of India’s military occupation. Even after this massacre, India’s own Supreme Court has failed to deliver accountability, reinforcing a system where uniformed violence is protected rather than punished.
But we Nagas have seen this pattern before. Our ancestors — the warriors who guarded these hills long before India existed — taught us to recognise the design behind domination: tighten control, dull memory, fracture unity, normalize occupation. Oting was not an aberration. It was the mask falling off. It was the occupying force revealing its true face without hesitation or shame.
And let this be understood without ambiguity: the superiority of India’s weapons, numbers, or geography does not create authority. Occupation does not become legitimate because the occupier is strong. Violence does not become governance because uniforms pull the trigger. A forced union does not become nationhood because it is repeated in Delhi’s rhetoric.
India is not a rightful authority in Naga homelands. It is an occupying force, and Oting laid bare the cruelty and contempt inherent in that occupation. A state that kills a people it seeks to rule — and then shields the killers — forfeits every claim to governance, trust, or moral standing.
Nagas are a sovereign people living under imposed Indian control. No collaborator, no manufactured division, and no political paper can rewrite this reality.
And let India understand the consequence with precision: every act of impunity in Naga lands further destabilizes the Indo-Myanmar frontier, weakens New Delhi’s long-term Northeast strategy, and opens geopolitical space no occupying force can manage indefinitely.
And the deeper truth is this: Naga political destiny cannot fit inside Hindu-Indian
nationhood. Our worldview is rooted in clan, land, consent, and ancestral autonomy — not in the majoritarian, centralised, homogenising idea of India.
We are a different political people with a different civilizational map, and no amount of force can fuse two incompatible worldviews into one nation.
Oting is a line we will not cross, not forget, and not forgive. Remembrance is our resistance. Sovereignty is our inheritance. And our future remains unbroken.
Media Cell,
Global Naga Forum
Tuesday, January 27, 2026