India After Gandhi (48 page)

Jaipal Singh thought that these provisions would have real teeth only if the tribals could come to forge a separate state within the Union. He called this putative state Jharkhand; in his vision it would incorporate his own Chotanagpur plateau, then in Bihar, along with contiguous tribal areas located in the provinces of Bengal and Orissa. The proposed state would cover an area of some 48,000 square miles and have a population of 12 million people.
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The idea caught the imagination of the youth of Chotanagpur. Thus, in May 1947, the Adivasi Sabha of Jamshedpur wrote to Nehru, Gandhi and the Constituent Assembly urging the creation of a Jharkhand state out of Bihar. ‘We want Jharkhand Province to preserve and develop Adivasi Culture and Language’, said their memorandum, ‘to make our customary law supreme, to make our lands inalienable, and above all to save ourselves from continuous exploitation.’
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In February 1948 Jaipal Singh delivered the presidential address to the All-India Adivasi Mahasabha, an organization that he had led since its inception a decade previously. He spoke here of how, after Independence,
‘Bihari imperialism’ had replaced ‘British imperialism’ as the greatest problem for the adivasi. He identified the land question as the most crucial, and urged the speedy creation of a Jharkhand state. Notably, he simultaneously underlined his commitment to the Indian Union by speaking with feeling about the ‘tragic assassination of Gan-dhiji’, and by raising a slogan that combined local pride with a wider Indian patriotism: ‘Jai Jharkhand! Jai Adivasi! Jai Hind!’
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The Adivasi Mahasabha was now renamed the Jharkhand Party, and after several years of steady campaigning fought under that name in the first general election of 1952. With its symbol of a fighting cock, the party met with success beyond its own imaginings, winning three seats to Parliament and thirty-three to the state’s Assembly. These victories all came in the tribal regions of Bihar, where it comprehensively trounced the ruling Congress Party. At the polls at any rate, the case for Jharkhand had been proved.

Jaipal Singh and his Jharkhand Party offered one prospective path for the tribals: autonomy within the Indian Union, safeguarded by laws protecting their land and customs and by the creation of a province in regions where the tribals were in a majority. The Naga radicals offered another: an independent, sovereign state carved out of India and quite distinct from it. Among the Nagas this view was upheld most insistently by the Angamis and, among them, by a certain resident of Khonomah village, yet another of those remarkable makers of Indian history who is still to find his biographer.

The man in question was Angami Zapu Phizo, with whose name the Naga cause was to be identified for close to half a century. Born in 1913, Phizo was fair and slightly built, his face horribly twisted following a childhood paralytic attack. Educated by the Baptists, and a poet of sorts – among his compositions was a ‘Naga National Anthem’ – he sold insurance for a living before migrating to Burma. He was working on the docks in Rangoon when the Japanese invaded. Phizo joined the Japanese on their march to India, apparently in return for the promise of Naga independence should they succeed in winning their war against the British.
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After the end of the war, Phizo returned to India and joined the
Naga National Council. He quickly made his mark with his impassioned appeals for sovereignty, these often couched in a Christian idiom. He was part of the NNC delegation that met Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi in July 1947. Three years later he was elected president of the NNC and committed the Nagas to ‘full Independence’. He quelled the doubters and nay-sayers, who wanted an accommodation with India. Many young Nagas were willing to go all the way with Phizo. Travelling in the area in December 1950, the Quaker Horace Alexander met two NNC members whose ‘minds are obsessed with the word “independence”, and I do not believe that any amount of argument or appeals to the [Indian] constitution, still less any threat, will shake them out of it’.
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Phizo was a man of great energy and motivational powers. Through 1951 he and his men toured the Naga hills obtaining thumbprints and signatures to a document affirming their support for an independent Naga state. Later it was claimed that the bundle of impressions weighed eighty pounds, and that it was a comprehensive plebiscite which revealed that ‘99.99 per cent had voted in favour of the Naga independence’.
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These figures call to mind similar exercises in totalitarian states, where, for example, 99.99 per cent of the Russian people are said to have endorsed Stalin as Supreme Leader. Still, there is no doubt that Phizo himself wanted independence, and so did numerous of his followers.

By now India itself had been independent for four years. The British officers had been replaced by Indian ones, but otherwise the new state had not had much impact on the Naga hills. Busy with healing the wounds of Partition, settling refugees, integrating princely states and drafting a constitution, the political elite in New Delhi had not given these tribes much thought. However, in the last week of 1951 the prime minister was in the Assam town of Tezpur, campaigning for his party in the general election. Phizo came down with three compatriots to meet him. When the NNC president said the Nagas wanted independence, Nehru called it an ‘absurd demand which attempted ‘to reverse the wheels of history’. He told them that ‘the Nagas were as free as any Indian’, and under the constitution they had ‘a very large degree of autonomy in managing their own affairs’. He invited Phizo and his men to ‘submit proposals for the extension of cultural, administrative and financial autonomy in their land’. Their suggestions would be considered sympathetically, and if necessary the constitution could also be changed. But independence for the Nagas was out of the question.
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The NNC’s response was to boycott the general election. After the
elected Congress government was in place, Phizo sought another meeting with the prime minister in New Delhi. In the second week of February 1952 he and two other NNC leaders met Nehru in Delhi. The prime minister once more told them that, while independence was not an option, the Nagas could be granted greater autonomy. But Phizo remained adamant. At a press conference he said, ‘we will continue our struggle for independence, and one day we shall meet [Nehru] again for a friendly settlement’ (as representatives of a separate nation). The free state he had in mind would bring together 200,000 Nagas in India, another 200,000 in what he called ‘no-man’s land’, and 400,000 who were presently citizens of Burma.
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Afterwards the Jharkhand leader Jaipal Singh hosted a lunch for Phizo and his group. A journalist present found the NNC president to be a ‘short, slim man with [a] Mongolian look, with spectacles that hide the fires of dedicated eyes’. He also heard Jaipal say that, while he sympathized with the Naga cause, he ‘abhorred any further fragmentation of India in the form of a new Pakistan’. He advised Phizo notto ask for a separate sovereign state, but to fight for a tribal province in the north-east, a counterpart to the Jharkhand he himself was struggling for. His guest answered that ‘Nagas are Mongoloid and thus they have no racial affinity with the people of India’. Phizo said he hoped to unite the Nagas on this side with the Nagas on the Burmese side to form a country of their own. But, as the journalist on the spot observed, ‘according to the official view in Delhi, such a State cannot be viable, and as those haunting hills form a strategic frontier between nations, it would be dangerous to let the Nagas loose’.
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In October 1952 the prime minister spent a week touring the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA). He already had some acquaintance with the tribes of the peninsula, whose artistic traditions and zest for life he greatly admired. That past June, addressing a conference of social workers in New Delhi, Nehru had condemned those who wished to make stribals ‘second-rate copies of themselves’. He thought the civilized world had much to learn from the adivasis, who were ‘an extremely disciplined people, often a great deal more democratic than most others in India. Above all they are a people who sing and dance and try to
enjoy life, not people who sit in stock exchanges, shout at one another and think themselves civilized.’
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Nehru’s first extended exposure to the north-east renewed this appreciation of the tribals. As he wrote to a friend in government, his visit had been ‘most exhilarating’. He wished these areas ‘were much better known by our people elsewhere in India. We could profit much by that contact.’ Nehru found himself ‘astonished at the artistry of these so-called tribal people’, by their ‘most lovely handloom weaving’. However, there was the danger that this industry would come into competition with uglier but cheaper goods made by factories in the plains. Nehru came back with ‘a most powerful impression that we should do everything to help these tribal folk in this matter’.
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The prime minister wrote a long report on his trip, which he sent to all chief ministers. There was, he noted here, a movement for ‘merging’ . . . the tribal people into the Assamese’. Nehru thought that the effort rather should be ‘on retaining their individual culture’, on making the tribals feel ‘that they have perfect freedom to live their own lives and to develop according to their wishes and genius. India to them should signify not only a protecting force but a liberating one.’

The NEFA adjoined the Naga district and indeed had many Nagas within it. While dismissing the demand for an independent Naga nation as ‘rather absurd’, Nehru ‘had the feeling that the situation in the Naga Hills would have been much better if it had been handled a little more competently by the local officers and if some officers who were notoriously unpopular had not been kept there. Also, any attempt to impose new ways and customs on the Nagas merely irritates and creates trouble.’
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Even as Nehru was urging the officials to behave more sympathetically towards the Nagas, the NNC was issuing him with an ultimatum. This was carried in a letter dispatched to New Delhi on 24 October, while the prime minister was still in NEFA. In it, Phizo and his men insisted that ‘there is not a single thing that the Indians and the Nagas share in common . . . The moment we see Indians, a gloomy feeling of darkness creeps into our mind.’
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Six months later Nehru visited the Naga capital, Kohima, in the company of the Burmese prime minister U Nu. When a Naga delegation wished to meet Nehru to present a memorandum, local officials refused to allow them an audience. Word spread of the rebuff, so that when the prime minister and his Burmese guest turned up to address a public
meeting in their honour they saw their audience walking out as they arrived. In one account the Nagas bared their bottoms as they went. In another, Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, said into a live microphone:
‘Papa, wo jaa rahe hain’
(Father, these people are all leaving), to which he answered, wearily,
‘Haan beti, main dekh raha hoon’
(Yes, child, I can see them go).
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The Kohima walkout, it was said later, hardened Nehru against the Nagas. In truth, Phizo and the NNC had set their minds on independence anyway. They were already collecting arms and organizing groups of ‘home guards in the villages. The state, for its part, was moving platoons of the paramilitary Assam Rifles into the district.

By the summer of 1953 the top NNC leadership had gone underground. Searching for them, the police raided Angami strongholds, further alienating the villagers. Apart from local knowledge and local support, the rebels had one great advantage – the terrain. It was indescribably beautiful: ‘The scenery was the loveliest I have seen, remarked one British visitor. ‘Range upon range of forested hills which change their grouping continually as we climb and climb. The tops rise out of the mist like islands in a white sea.
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It was also perfectly suited for guerrilla warfare: as a veteran of the Japanese campaign observed, this was ‘a country where a platoon well dug in can hold up a division, and a company can hold up an Army Corps’.
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This was a war conducted completely out of the vision of the wider world. No outsiders were allowed into the district, and journalists least of all. Reconstructing its history is a difficult task, relying as it must mostly on narratives gathered later by reporters and scholars. From these it appears that in 1954 things took a turn decidedly for the worse. In the spring of that year an army officer riding a motorcycle in Kohimah accidentally knocked down a passer-by. A crowd collected in protest, whereupon the police fired in panic, killing a respected judge and NNC member.

This incident created great resentment among the Nagas; it ‘increased the depth of their hatred of the “unwanted Indians” and precipitated the revolt’. The extremists gained control of the NNC; petitions and demonstrations were abandoned, and preparations made for an armed uprising. The rebels began transporting weapons to a safe haven in the Tuensang area. In June 1954 the Assam Rifles attacked a village believed to be sympathetic to the guerrillas. In September some rebels declared the formation of a ‘federal government of Nagaland’.

By now killings and counter-killings were occurring with fair regularity. There were villages loyal to the government which were targeted by the rebels; villages sympathetic to the freedom struggle which were attacked by the authorities. A division of the Indian army was called in to quell the revolt, reinforcing the thirty-five battalions of the Assam Rifles already in action. In March 1955 a bitter battle broke out in Tuensang; when the firing ended and the smoke cleared, sixty houses and several granaries were found to have been burnt down.
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