Dimapur, Jan. 7: The border fencing in the Pangsha areas along the Indo-Myanmar border is a state-sponsored attempt by India and Myanmar to rewrite the history of Nagas, the Naga Hoho has stated.
The organisation issued a press release on Saturday denouncing the move of the government to fence the border. “The construction of Border fencing in the heart of Pangsha, one of the Naga village is an attempt by India and Myanmar to rewrite the history of Nagas. It is akin to state sponsored race divisions and cultural intrusion by aliens,” the Naga Hoho stated.
“Nagas cannot allow any authority to divide our history and remove the feeling of oneness among the Naga family. Naga people have the absolute rights to protect their ancestral land and no man made authority should segregate Nagas into pieces basing on the fact that Nagas are bound to protect their identity and territory.”
‘Unsurprisingly,’ the press release stated, the Naga people cannot accept the ‘imaginary boundary fencing between India and Myanmar.’
The Naga Hoho has appealed to the Home Ministry of the Government of India to “redraw the policies” in consultation with her counterpart Myanmar and “listen to the cry of the Naga people by fulfilling our wishes and dreams without further delay.”
The organisation also appealed further to the government of Nagaland to “bring out tangible solution with the government of India, not forgetting the 1834 Naga Hills Map which may be acceptable to the Nagas.”
Simultaneously, Naga people irrespective of tribes or region should put collective efforts to restore their inherent rights, the statement added.
“There is no cultural divide or ideological differences among the Nagas to live together and we have the inherent rights since time immemorial to be together. History, political science and geography have taught us through the 20th century that Europe and Asia were two separate continents.”
The reasoning, according to the Naga Hoho, was based more on cultural variables than on physical facts.
“Naga people have been living together in their own land even before India and Myanmar achieved the status of sovereign states of which history cannot deny the facts,” it explained.
In the words of the organization, people and their land can be divided only when there is lack of history or evidence with different cultures, language and practices occupying different territories.
The organization illustrated it this way: In recent years, the concept of boundaries has been at the center of influential research agendas in anthropology, history, political science, social psychology, and sociology and as such the notion of boundaries with neighbouring states has become one of our most fertile thinking tools among the Nagas at present and people have become more conscious.
The Naga Hoho also referred to the McMahon Line. The McMahon Line is a line agreed to by Britain and Tibet as part of the Simla Accord, a treaty signed in 1914. It has become the basis of boundary demarcation between India and Myanmar.
Thus, the Naga Hoho stated, the Naga people were ‘forced to divide in the eastern sector.’
It is also an undeniable fact that “we were divided through unilateral decision of (former Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal) Nehru and U-Nu through aerial survey in 1953 of which the Nagas does not accept till today.”
