The Global Naga Forum (GNF) has urgently appealed to the Government of India to uphold the Free Movement Regime (FMR) agreement with Myanmar. In a statement issued on January 11, the Forum stated that abrogating the agreement would put the Indian government in violation of international law and of the basic human right of Naga civilians to move freely in their homeland.

“We are talking here about a people who have been living in their ancestral homeland (in contemporary India and Myanmar) since prior to recorded time. We stand by the Naga people’s right to civil and human rights in their ancestral land and in the world’s largest democracy,” stated the media cell of GNF.

Given the living history of the Nagas in both countries, crossing the Indo-Myanmar border has been a time-honored practice among the Nagas.

The unilateral decisions by the Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and U Nu in 1953 which drew an imaginary boundary between India and Myanmar, without the consent of the Nagas resulted in an artificial separation of the Nagas and their lands across the international border.

“What were Nagas to do when the two national governments decided to divide them up, as though they did not exist, by drawing a line that ran right through the house of a Naga family, as India and Myanmar did in Longwa village? Nagas stood up for their right to be a free people and demanded political self-determination and autonomy,” asserted the Forum.

It also put emphasis on how the Indo-Naga relations has witnessed a complicated trajectory, marked by military invasion, armed resistance, ceasefires, bloodshed, imposition of AFSPA in the Naga homeland, peace negotiations, broken promises, and stalled agreements.

“After all these and more, now, for the Indian government to even contemplate reneging on the Free Movement Regime agreement with Myanmar – which would not only criminalize Nagas visiting with one another as they are accustomed to doing, but render establishing social and cultural ties extremely difficult, as well as make next to impossible the nurturing of communities for mutual assistance in times of need across the border – would be most unworthy of India’s high standing in world history, ancient and modern. And the Naga people would be justified in losing faith in the Indian government altogether,” the GNF pointed out.

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The Forum further considered the crisis in Manipur as having demoralized the people of the state and the region to a point from which recovery looked distant. “The Manipur Chief Minister may want the FMR scrapped for his own reason, but doing so would come at the expense of the Naga people again, whether it is the further disruption of the Indo-Naga political negotiations or the lives of civilian Nagas on both sides of the Indo-Myanmar border. On a broader note, the Nagas and the Northeast are an essential part of India’s Act East policy, and abandoning the Free Movement Regime agreement would go counter to the national policy,” stressed the Forum.

In this regard, the Global Naga Forum has earnestly appealed to the Prime Minister and the Home Minister to continue to sustain the Free Movement Regime agreement with Myanmar which will mitigate injustice and human rights violations of the Nagas at the border.