Speech by Hokato Vusshe, Ato Kilonser of NSCN/GPRN-K (Khango-Hokato Vusshe), on the occasion of Naga Independence Day.
On this momentous commemoration of the 80th Naga Independence Day, I extend my revolutionary greetings to you all; to the tribes of the homeland, to the villages that have kept faith through eight decades, and to the diaspora who carry Nagaland in their hearts wherever they stand. This day signifies the resilience, the unwavering commitment, and the sacrifices of our brothers-in-arms, who were martyred while expressing the desire of the Nagas to be a free Nation, as once it was. I pay my tribute and homage to the martyrs and the pioneers, on whose foundation we stand tall, and I reaffirm our commitment to uphold the legacy they have left behind for the present generation to carry forward.
Let us be clear about what we commemorate. We do not mark the anniversary of a request. We mark the anniversary of a declaration. On 14 August 1947, sovereignty was not something our forebears asked the world to grant; it was something they declared because they knew it already belonged to them, as it had belonged to their fathers before foreign maps were drawn across our hills. The Nagas were not conquered into another nation's fold. We were counted into it on paper, without our consent.
Since then, governments in Delhi have changed many times and empires elsewhere have ended in less time than we have waited. Yet the Naga people have never said that their historic claim was mistaken. That unwithdrawn claim is the inheritance we commemorate today, and I address you as one of its custodians.
The NSCN-K remains committed to the collective objective of an honorable and inclusive Naga solution. In the wider peace process, the Government of India signed the Framework Agreement with the NSCN-IM on 3rd August 2015 and the Agreed Position with the Working Committee of the Naga National Political Groups on 17th November 2017. These were significant political instruments. Yet even after a decade of signing these agreements in letter, they still await implementation in spirit. A people can forgive a hard bargain; a people do not easily forgive a promise left to gather dust.
Nor has the world stood still since those agreements were signed. GST reshaped the Union's fiscal structure. Article 370 was abrogated in 2019, and with it any illusion that a constitutional guarantee, however solemnly given, is beyond the reach of amendment. New laws transformed forest regulation, data protection, telecommunications and criminal justice. Carbon markets, semiconductor policy and wider private participation in space have opened new questions of resources, technology and economic power.
Some changes touch the Naga people directly. The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act created an exception for forest land within one hundred kilometers of an international border when proposed for strategic linear projects of national importance and national security. Because this covers most of Nagaland, where much of the forest is community-owned, the Nagaland Legislative Assembly resolved in September 2023 that the Act must apply subject to Article 371A. In February 2024, the Ministry of Home Affairs decided that the Free Movement Regime should be scrapped and recommended its immediate suspension, affecting movement our people had practiced across the Indo-Myanmar border for generations.
The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026, now remains pending before Parliament, and our Churches and civil society have raised serious concerns. We do not claim that Article 371A silences every law of the Union. But where regulation reaches into Naga religious and social practice, our constitutional protection is engaged. Let our Hohos, Church bodies and representatives place the Naga case on record—clearly, in writing, with the provisions and reasons stated. We were not adequately consulted on our forests or our border. Let no one say that we were silent on our faith.
These developments bear upon Naga land, law, faith, movement, data and opportunity. No political instrument can remain frozen in the year of its signing while the world beneath it is rewritten. Our children will inherit artificial intelligence, carbon markets, digital borders and data sovereignty. A solution that does not equip them for that world is not a living settlement; it is a monument to a moment already passed. It was in this spirit, and solely for the welfare of the Naga people, that the NSCN-K submitted its Charter of Convergence—A Path to Naga Destiny, as an Addendum to the Agreed Position, to Shri A.K. Mishra at Dimapur on 11th September 2025. Our Charter was not conceived as an instrument of divergence, but as a constructive contribution to supplement the existing agreements—not to compete with them and not to delay them. It belongs to no office and no single author. It belongs to every Naga who has paid the price of this cause and to every Naga yet to be born who will inherit what this generation chooses to finish.
The Government of India must now demonstrate sincerity, honor its commitments and bring the negotiations to a comprehensive and inclusive solution without further delay. We have placed our case before it. The next move belongs to New Delhi, and history is watching how it responds.
The Naga cause draws its strength and courage from our history. But to live only in the past is an illusion. Memory is not a strategy. Memory is the reason we still stand; strategy is what we do while standing. The present moment demands unselfish action.
I will not pretend that our house is whole. The Naga political groups remain divided by pride, mistrust and positions held too tightly to release. This is the moment to bury the hatchet, lay aside vanity, walk the talk and come together for the early solution for which our people have waited so long. This is not a call for anyone to surrender a position. It is a call for leadership to end the division that leadership helped creates. No foreign power ever broke the Naga will. We alone have allowed division to weaken it, and we alone can mend it.
This is also no time to mislead our people with impractical dreams merely to win popular support. The Naga public is educated, informed and fully capable of recognizing falsehood. We must speak honestly about the limits New Delhi has placed on the negotiations: one inclusive solution, without sovereignty and without physical integration. Yet the Agreements contain provisions that can foster the emotional and financial integration of all Naga-inhabited areas. To tell our people a comfortable falsehood is not loyalty to the cause. It is a betrayal dressed in the cause's clothing.
And yet sovereignty ultimately lies with the people. It is not a gift conferred by any government and therefore not a possession any government can withdraw. What may be deferred at a negotiating table is its exercise; what cannot be surrendered is the principle itself. That principle is not extinguished by an agreement. It is the foundation to which every agreement must answer.
In our understanding, the Agreements leave space for a future Naga generation to decide its destiny once our people have become self-reliant. The political solution is therefore a two phase concept. The first phase is what we must build now—in law, institutions, constitutional protection, education, economic strength and accountable governance. The second belongs to those who come after us, when a self-reliant Naga people can choose its future in freedom and from strength.
The order matters. A people without self-reliance may proclaim sovereignty, but it cannot fully exercise or sustain it. Our forebears proclaimed it with courage in 1947, and they were right. Our task is to build, brick by brick and clause by clause, the schools, institutions, productive economy, trained minds and accountable governance that turn proclamation into capacity. We are not trading away the destination. We are constructing the road.
To the young listening today and to the unborn who may one day read these words: we do not ask you to renounce that horizon. We hand it to you intact. We ask only that this generation build the ground upon which you may one day stand and reach it.
The NSCN-K will remain steadfast in its commitment to the Naga cause, guided by freedom, justice, dignity and the welfare of our people. This has not changed while the flag has flown, and it will not change.
Lastly, I call upon our civil society organisations, non-governmental organisations, Church leaders, student bodies and every stakeholder in Naga public life to rise above personal interest, tribalism, favoritism and self-ambition, and become catalysts for the Naga solution. No document, however complete, and no negotiation, however earnest, can succeed without a people who choose unity over faction. That choice is not the Government of India's to make. It is ours. Seventy-nine years ago, our forebears declared what they knew to be true before the world was ready to hear it. Today, on the 80th observance of that declaration, we do not declare something new. Through the discipline of law and the patience of statesmanship, we carry forward what they declared with the courage of conviction. They gave us a claim that has never been withdrawn. Let us give our children a foundation that can never be taken. Let ours be the generation that finally carries the Naga cause home.
KUKNALIM!
Hokato Vusshe
Ato Kilonser, NSCN/GPRN-K (Khango-Hokato Vusshe)