The homecoming of one of the world’s oldest rebels

Last week, a helicopter appeared over the green, rolling hills of Ukhrul in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur.

By the time he landed at a makeshift helipad outside the village of Somdal, the crowd had already begun to sing. When the door opened, the crowd turned towards a thin man with dark glasses and a black suit. He was quickly wrapped in a traditional scarf.

After more than half a century, Tuingaleng Muivah, India’s oldest rebel, has returned home.

Now 91, Mr. Muivah is the general secretary of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isaac-Muivah), or NSCN (IM), the most powerful of the Naga rebel factions that once fought the Indian state in one of Asia’s longest insurgencies – although today the organization is often seen as a shadow of its former self.

His supporters see him as the guardian of a demand that India has never recognized – a separate state for the Naga people. His critics have something else in mind: a movement accused of targeted killings and running a parallel government in Nagaland through “taxes”, many call extortion – charges the NSCN (IM) denies.

Nagaland, a predominantly Christian state wedged between Myanmar and Bangladesh, is home to a people spread across the neighboring states of Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. Muivah seeks either full sovereignty or a “Greater Nagaland” uniting Nagas across borders, especially in Manipur.

Muivah himself was born in the present-day state of Manipur – a reminder that the Naga identity extends far beyond the borders of Nagaland.

It was his second attempt to return home – the first, in 2010, was blocked by the Manipur government, which cited the risk of unrest and security concerns. When he finally returned with his wife last week, almost the entire village gathered to welcome Avaharar – “the greatest father” as they called him. Among them was his only surviving sibling, 84-year-old Asui Muivah.

“The generation comes and goes but the nation remains,” he wrote in a message read aloud by his deputy VS Atem, as he was too weak to speak for himself. “The problem we’re fighting for is bigger and older than most of us.”

Muivah had left this same hilltop village in 1964, heading east to join the Naga struggle for sovereignty – a journey that would take him to the jungles of northern Myanmar, the ideological camps of Maoist China and the negotiating tables of Delhi.

After walking out of the 1997 ceasefire jungle, Muivah lived in Delhi and a sprawling camp in Hebron in Nagaland that served as the headquarters of the NSCN (IM), replete with signs declaring, “Freedom is the birthright of all nations.”

“His return to the village is more personal than political – driven by homesickness. His calls for a separate Naga flag and constitution are expected and help him remain politically relevant. But the larger idea of ​​a ‘Greater Nagaland’ has largely faded over the years,” says Pradeep Phanjubam, editor-in-chief of the Imphal Review of Arts and Politics.

The Naga struggle predates India itself. In 1918, returning workers from the First World War formed the Naga Club to assert a separate identity. When India became independent in 1947, Naga leaders refused to join the new republic, saying, “We are not Indians,” and held their own unrecognized independence plebiscite in 1951.

As the armed conflict began to intensify, the Indian government sent in troops in 1955. What followed were decades of insurgency, factional divisions and ceasefires. The insurgency claimed thousands of lives, displaced generations and militarized the predominantly Christian hill country.

“The Naga conflict,” says political scientist Sanjib Barua, “is among the least known but longest-running armed movements in the world.”

Muivah was born in March 1935 in Somdal, where his family often went hungry. Educated in a local Christian school, he was early attracted to the ideas of revolution and Naga nationalism.

By his teenage years, Muivah was already a Naga nationalist, singing “God Bless My Nagaland” at school and questioning why his people were living in “humiliation” under the colonial government. After studying at St Anthony’s College in Shillong and reading Marx, Hegel and Rousseau, he joined the Naga National Council (NNC) – the first Naga political organization to demand independence from India – in 1964.

Two years later, Muiwa, 31, joined more than 130 guerrillas on a 97-day trek through the jungles of northern Myanmar to China’s Yunnan province. “We carried our own rice and slept on grass in the meadows,” he said in a 1998 interview. “I endured hunger, but sometimes there was no water to drink.” They crossed rivers on bamboo rafts cut through dense undergrowth and continued walking in sub-zero temperatures.

Beijing trains the rebels in guerrilla warfare, Marxist-Leninist theory and “people’s war”. Muivah studied briefly at the College of Diplomacy in Beijing, visited Vietnam and returned speaking reverently of Mao and Zhou Enlai – though he would later fuse their ideology with a deeply Christian nationalism. He returned to Nagaland after five years.

In 1980, Muivah and his comrades Isak Chishi Swu and SS Khaplang founded the NSCN, breaking away from the older NNC, which had controversially signed peace agreement with Delhi.

Their faction later split again – into NSCN (IM) and NSCN (K), led by Khaplang from Myanmar – creating smaller branches in the northeast.

In its heyday, the NSCN (IM) was the mother of all insurgencies in the region, training and arming smaller ethnic groups and running what Indian intelligence agencies called a “shadow state” across the hills, according to Subir Bhaumik, a veteran chronicler of the region. The group faced accusations of extortion, murder and human rights abuses.

Critics within the Naga insurgency also point to a legacy of violence. The Zeliangrong United Front (ZUF) has accused Muivah for ordering “merciless killings of many prominent leaders” and arson in villages “in the name of taxation or fighting the Indian army”, leaving “ordinary Nagas” to bear the cost, his spokesman Louis Gangmey said.

Over the years, Muivah has transformed himself from a jungle commissioner to a political negotiator. After decades of exile – in Thailand, the Netherlands and the border areas of Myanmar – he entered into a ceasefire with India.

But his demand for a separate Naga flag and constitution remains a stumbling block. In a 2020 interview, Muivah told journalist Karan Thapar: “The Nagas will never be part of the Indian Union, nor will they accept its constitution. There can be no solution without our flag and our constitution.”

The Indian government offered greater autonomy, but rejected any concessions implying sovereignty; on 2015 Framework Agreementonce hailed as a breakthrough, now fading away. “We have not given up our free existence and sovereignty,” Muivah said last week. “Whatever happens, we will defend it to the last.”

Yet over the past decade, as Muivah’s health deteriorated and the movement splintered into dozens of factions, the NSCN’s (IM) once-massive influence waned. The younger Nagi generation, tired of blockades and extortion, are now increasingly seeking peace and economic stability.

At the same time, experts like Prof. Barua say the “proud display of Naga flags in his native village testifies to the vitality and resilience of the Naga movement” – a reminder that though its horizons have narrowed, the sentiment lives on.

More importantly, he adds, “even objectively strong states may opt for live-and-let-live agreements with armed groups rather than trying to disarm and demobilize them.”

Muivah says his group has held more than 600 rounds of talks with New Delhi on the Naga homeland since the late 1990s. Critics, however, remain relentless. The Manipur-based ZUF dismissed his return as “empty-handed”, claiming “there is no reason to glorify a man who has failed the Nagas on all fronts”. Supporters believe he is war-weary, insecure about peace and still waiting for the political settlement that has defined the struggle of his life.

Back in 2006, he told Mr Bhaumik, the journalist: “I am very tired. I feel doubly tired because there seems to be no result in the negotiations.” The wait continues.

Additional reporting by Abhishek Dey