
Dimapur, November 13 (MExN): The peace talks between the Government of India and the “Naga people” are on, yet the “rubber stamp approach of the Government of India needs to be criticized”, says the Naga international support center.
A note from the NISC said that the government of India needs to “instruct the management of South Asian Terrorism Portal to rectify its declaration on the NSCN and NDFB and all other organizations which have wrongly been declared”.
The government also needs to direct both the Assam Rifles commanders and the state government to immediately “reform the troops, their commanders and those whom they receive their orders from” according to the NISC. This way, the NISC explained, in the peace talks the “creditworthiness” of the representatives of the Government of India can be restored and ‘there is no more peace talks on while they are being undermined under the table’.
The NISC argued that the South Asian Terrorism Portal, SATP, declared more than 150 Indian organizations as terrorist organizations of which the “National Socialist Council of Nagaland” and the “National Democratic Front” were also. “Yet the Government of India sponsored SATP declined to show evidence to that supposed fact and did not entertain the declaration of the Government of India that the NSCN, with which it is engaged in peace talks for over a decade, is no terrorist organization” the NISC claimed. According to the center, the conflict between India and Nagaland cannot be solved militarily and is not just a matter of law and order, but can only be solved politically. “It should be obvious then to the SATP also that no Government can be present at the negotiation table when the ‘other’ party is a terrorist organization” the NISC said.
The NISC also stated that the 41 battalion of the Assam Rifles at Wokha town under jurisdiction of the state government and with a camp adjacent to the public ground where festivities were held created unprecedented havoc among the Lotha Naga People. “Was it only because the people rose to the occasion and confronted the soldiers who shot blanks at them that their commonly known misbehavior was broadly reported in the local press?” it queried.
The inquiry authorities agreed to conduct inquiry in the wake of the protests against the Assam Rifles deflects the attention from the root cause of this and other now so well reported incidents, the NISC added.