“The Indian government is trying to sabotage everything”

On 3 August, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah) organised a 12-hour shutdown in the state to protest the Indian government’s inaction on a framework agreement signed on the same date in 2015. In the agreement—signed by NSCN(I-M) leaders and the Indian government’s interlocutor, the retired intelligence officer RN Ravi—the Indian government “recognized the unique history and position of the Nagas,” and both sides, “cognizant of the universal principle that in a democracy, sovereignty lies with the people,” resolved to reach an agreement over how to share sovereign power in order to ensure peaceful co-existence. Two weeks later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took credit for having resolved the decades-long insurgency in Nagaland.

In the six years that followed, such an agreement has not materialised. The Modi government opened talks with seven other Naga National Political Groups and, in November 2017, signed a written agreement with the NNPGs. Both the NSCN(I-M) and the NNPGs claim to represent the Naga people, and the various groups have fought against each other in the past. In a letter to Modi, written in February 2020, the NSCN(I-M) accused Ravi of “segregating the Naga civil society” by holding talks with the NNPGs. The letter also criticised the government for appointing Ravi as the governor of Nagaland, in 2019, even as he continued as interlocutor. His appointment, the NSCN(I-M) argued, was a “deliberate deviation” meant to downgrade the negotiations from a political issue to an internal law-and-order problem of the Indian government.

Ravi has grown increasingly hostile towards the NSCN(I-M) since being appointed governor. In his Republic Day speech this year, he claimed that a final solution