Limhachan Kikon
Duncan Bosti
The latest exchange over SC Jamir’s reading of Naga history and Professor Xavier P. Mao’s response in the public space is about more than a disagreement over the past. History deserves scrutiny, but historical disagreement should not become a contest over who is entitled to belong to the story. The more consequential question is where this history is taking us—and what kind of future our arguments are preparing.
The Naga political journey must also be seen against the turbulence of the twentieth century: the dismantling of European empires, the Second World War, decolonisation and the rise of national self-determination. Across Asia and Africa, societies emerging from colonial rule faced a fundamental question: what political form could carry their aspirations forward? Democracy, socialism, communism and national development offered competing answers.
The Naga movement weathered these storms too. Its experience is particular, but not exceptional. Its passage from revolutionary assertion towards constitutional expression can therefore be seen not as abandonment, but as a search for a political form in which a plural society could retain its distinctiveness while negotiating its future.
It has increasingly chosen dialogue within a constitutional expression that guarantees recognition to plurality. The present reality is evidence of that choice: the constitutional framework of Nagaland, the protections associated with Article 371A, and the later political understandings represented by the Framework Agreement and the Agreed Position all hold the tension between inherited political aspiration and an existing constitutional order. The question now is whether political imagination can give that tension timely and workable form.
The more useful way to read this history is as a movement through political registers—and through political time. The distinction between 1960 and 1963 matters enormously. The Sixteen-Point Agreement was reached in 1960; within three years, that negotiated compact had matured into the constitutional creation of Nagaland. The political question did not disappear with statehood. It continued through ceasefires and negotiations, entering another register with the Framework Agreement of 2015 and the Agreed Position of 2017. These were serious political understandings, not footnotes to the process.
That sequence matters because politics without time has no gravity. Between 1960 and 1963, political negotiation moved towards institutional form. Between 2015 and 2017, the process produced further political understandings. But eleven years after the Framework Agreement, the final settlement remains unfinished. The contrast is not between one history and another. It is between a political process that once found visible institutional movement within three years and a contemporary process whose clock has become increasingly difficult to see.
Naga tribal diversity is a historical reality, not a perpetual political dilemma. It belongs within the larger diversity of India—a constitutional order in which a written compact can give proportionate recognition to distinct histories, institutions and aspirations without requiring them to disappear into a uniform whole. The question is whether diversity can become a basis for inclusive unity, rather than reproduce divisions and postpone settlement.
There is also a difficult institutional contrast. The Sixteen-Point process emerged through the Naga People’s Convention and representatives of different Naga communities. The 2015 Framework Agreement, by contrast, was concluded between the Government of India and the NSCN(IM), while its contents were not made public. Whatever the intentions, the difference in political architecture matters when a settlement is expected to carry a deeply diverse people into a common future. Is there another layer here?
The deeper issue may be recognition itself. Jamir’s emphasis on the political experience that developed within what became Nagaland deserves to be understood on its own historical terms; Mao’s detailed invocation of participation, encounters and political activity likewise seeks to establish that the southern Naga experience forms part of the larger history. Neither necessarily requires the other to be diminished. The Naga political movement had multiple centres, uneven participation and changing political geographies; no single later territorial boundary can retrospectively monopolise its history.
Recognition of one Naga experience therefore need not become a denial of another. History need not be a zero-sum game in which one community’s inclusion diminishes another’s claim to the past.
This is where the argument should take us beyond ownership. What moves, and what remains?
But accommodation requires more than political imagination. It requires generosity, consent, consultation, participation and time. Generosity recognises another community’s history without treating recognition as surrender. Consent matters because arrangements affecting people cannot simply be imposed. Consultation gives voice; participation gives a stake.
Eleven years have now passed since the Framework Agreement. The appointment of Ajit Lal as the new interlocutor on 24 September may signal renewed effort to move the process forward, but it has not yet put a visible clock on the process.
The passage from revolutionary zeal to constitutional expression cannot become a reason to suspend ordinary life. The world around us does not wait for political imagination to catch up. Economies move, generations grow and opportunities shift. People must live while politics deliberates. Their clock never stopped.
Patience can build confidence; indefinite process can also become postponement. A serious process therefore needs movement, milestones and credible direction. A future repeatedly deferred eventually becomes part of the problem it was meant to resolve.
This is why the argument over who owns Naga history deserves more generosity. Nagas across present boundaries have their own experiences; Nagaland has its own institutional history. Different generations have carried different parts of the story. None needs to be diminished for another to be recognised.
Trophy or possession is not approved by history. History is not a title deed awarded to whoever can produce the strongest narrative of suffering, sacrifice or precedence. Its value lies in helping us understand how we arrived here—and what we can responsibly carry forward. The next chapter will not be written by deciding which history prevails, but by deciding what from all these histories can still be carried forward.
Every society has to find its own level of political comfort. What must move, what must remain, and what are we prepared to build together from here?
