DIMAPUR, May 24: The NSCN-IM, in its latest edition of the periodical news bulletin ’Nagalim Voice’, has strongly voiced out against the scrapping of the Free Movement Regime (FMR).
The news bulletin said, “Nagas have had enough of the Government of India tormenting the Naga people for over 75 years and will not allow the state’s hegemony to go unchallenged”.
It then said that gone are the times when the Naga people were treated as no better than ‘sub-human’ and kicked around to suit the administrative convenience of the ruling authorities, British India, India and Burma (Myanmar). “With such disregard for the human rights of the Naga people as indigenous peoples, the Nagas were divided in half between India and Myanmar, without taking the rightful consent of the Naga people”, the NSCN-IM mouthpiece said. Not enough of this division, in India, Nagas were again made to come under different administrative controls in Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh, it added. “The same thing happened in Burma where the Nagas were placed under different state controls, Sagaing and Kachin”.
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The NSCN-IM mouthpiece then said the Government of India is up again testing the nerves of the Naga people, scrapping the “time honored Free Movement Regime (FMR) and then starting the border fencing, blatantly ignoring the sentiment of the Naga people residing on both sides of the artificial border”.
Significantly, the NSCN-IM news bulletin said the mass protest rallies against these two issues have already witnessed unprecedented heights of Naga nationalism not seen in the history of Naga political movement. “The Naga political struggle is to defend the history, culture and political identity of the Nagas as a people and as a nation”, it also said. “This heightened scale of protest has taken the nature of something to call a ‘wake-up call’ for the final showdown with the government of India. The mode of the mass rally across the four corners of Nagalim is clearly seen, ‘No surrender no retreat’”, the NSCN-IM mouthpiece added. (NNN)
