Mazie Nakhro, PhD
The Naga National Groups have been regrettably divided due to the Shillong Accord (SA) of 1975 because they view it from two completely opposite perspectives. This has in turn resulted in further dividing our Naga civil society along tribal and party lines.
All the groups belonging to the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) view the SA as follows:
1. The signatories of the SA represent the Naga National Council (NNC) and therefore the SA must be necessarily equated with the NNC.
2. The SA is a sell-out agreement which A.Z. Phizo failed to condemn.
3. Based on the first two points, the NSCN argues that the signatories of the SA are traitors and the NNC must be considered as having forfeited the mandate of the Naga people and as having lost its right to exist.
4. For the above three reasons, now the NSCN must be considered as the new legitimate group to represent the Naga national cause.
On the other hand, the NNC offers the following counter-arguments:
1. The SA has no legal binding on the NNC, because it was neither endorsed with the official stamp of the NNC nor signed by the six-member central political authority of the NNC, namely: A.Z. Phizo, lmkongmeren, Isak C Swu, Th. Muivah, Khodao Yanthan, and Yongkong Ao.
2. The signatories of the SA lacked proper authority to represent the NNC or to decide the fate of the Naga nation, according to the Naga Yehzabo Article 139 and 140.
3. The SA avoided any mention of NNC, FGN, Nagas or Nagaland; instead, it used the term “underground organization” which had neither form nor substance. This implies that the act of surrender in the SA was not on behalf of any real entity. At most, it was only a surrender of the signatories in their individual capacities.
4. The Government of India (GoI) had no choice but to acknowledge the fact that the name NNC could not be incorporated into the SA document because it had failed to remove its earlier tag of NNC as an unrecognized organization. For this reason, the then Nagaland Governor Mr. L. P. Singh who represented the Indian side also admitted, “The political process will have to be delinked from the peace process. The political process will be handled by the Indian politicians and the Central Executive Council of the NNC,” but that never took place.
5. The signatories were made to sign under duress in the midst of an intolerable situation brought about by the Revolutionary Government of Nagaland (later absorbed into BSF) which worked hand-in-hand with the Indian Army in the early 1970s. Hence, the Naga armed group of RGN/BSF were the real traitors.
6. Indeed, the signatories of the SA committed an act of surrendering themselves to the GoI, but they were neither collaborators with the enemy nor traitors of their own people because they only offered themselves as scapegoats so as to provide some respite to the Naga people of that time.
7. Mr.Phizo, according to his daughter Adinno Phizo, had no part with the SA because he was never consulted prior to signing the accord.
8. Contrary to the opinion of his accusers, Mr. Phizo did condemn the SA. For the international audience, he publicly denied his alleged acceptance of the SA as appeared in the London Times on 25th November 1975. And for the Naga audience, he also wrote to P. Pushu Venuh, the then Vice President of the NNC, stating, “I had nothing to do with the Shillong Accord. However, if India thinks that a settlement has been made through the Shillong Accord, then let them raise the issue and I will reply them.” Similarly, he wrote personal letters to General Mowu Gwizantsu and several others expressing the total absurdity of the SA.
9. The General Session of the NNC held at Khonoma on the 11th and 12th May in 1978 studiedly ignored the SA, assuming that to keep bringing up the topic of the SA would be tantamount to making an admission that the NNC had made a political blunder which in turn could be like legitimizing an invalid document.
10. After many meetings and debates, the Phizo people of Khonoma village, attempting to put the never-ending controversy of the SA to rest once and for all, publicly declared their rejection of the SA in November,1995.
Why was the SA controversy not resolved in the late 1970s? From the perspective of Mr. Muivah, it was because the SA is a sell-out agreement by the NNC which Mr. Phizo failed to condemn. But in the opinion of Mr. Phizo, it was because Mr. Muivah continued to make a big issue of the SA by equating it with the NNC. According to Mr. Phizo, the baseless accusation that the NNC had surrendered the political rights of the Nagas to the GoI would be like admitting that the GoI has acquired ownership of the Naga political future by conquest and now the only way for the Nagas to reclaim it would be by secession alone, which is unimaginable.
In addition, somewhere along the way Mr. Phizo developed some distrust of Mr. Muivah, who he suspected to have adopted a Mao Tse-tung’s socialist revolutionary ideology and was possibly working on something else. Whether this suspicion on the part of Mr. Phizo was right or wrong, it resulted in their communication breakdown.
Although the points mentioned above are based on investigative research of historical documents and personal interviews, they are not to be understood as political statements or a declaration of final conclusions. Rather they are simply products of research. As such, if any point of this researcher can be proven wrong, it should be done so with counter-evidences. After all, his real objective is to present a starting point for further discussion and debate so that all the facts will eventually emerge and truth will triumph at last.
