Muivah, at least in private, recognised the difficulties. Instead of hoping for a resumption of the aid from China, he had built up a network of contacts with other underground movements in India, banking on the belief that the strong regionalism in the Subcontinent is the divisive factor which could result in the chaos the Nagas would need to break away. He clearly realised that the only hope the Nagas had to achieve their independence would be if India itself broke up. At his Oking, Muivah played host to Assamese and Manipuri insurgents. He claimed too to have good contacts with Sikh militants in the Punjab and even the separatist movement in Kashmir. And he fervently hoped a similar movement would emerge among the Tamils of southern India—which would indeed plunge the country into the anarchy he desired.
When I was free from my interviewing, and Hseng Noung had put the baby to sleep, we were frequent visitors at the Assamese rebels’ house. They had, we discovered, the best tea in the camp and on hearing Hseng Noung was Shan—and thus a distant cousin—they pressed their hospitality on us. The group was called the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA)—Asom being a more indigenous name for Assam—and they carried out their own bank robberies, political assassinations and gun-snatching forays on the Indian side of the border. Their spokesman, one Mr Gogol, resembled some Sub-Continental Che Guevara. From beneath an aquiline nose he sported a large, unkempt beard while long wiry hair stood out like an old kitchen broom from a blue corduroy cap pulled down low almost to his ears.
“We’re also Mongol people and we must unite with our Naga brothers against the Indians who are encroaching upon our country, Sir,” he proclaimed in a lilting Indian accent.
The ULFA’s young nationalists had not forgotten that they were remote descendants of Shan invaders who had entered the Brahmaputra valley in the 13th century. One of them even had a song written in what he described as “ancient Assamese”. He read it out to Hseng Noung who found she could understand almost every word. They were reassured, delighted.
“See! We’re the same people!” And more steaming hot tea with powdered milk was served by an orderly.
Zekope often joined us on our walks around Kesan Chanlam village and the nearby headquarters area. We liked him for his openness and sincerity. But, as was the case with Sakulemba, he had an unshakeable faith in the inevitability of Naga independence, based on a fatalism very typical of his people.
“So many Nagas have died and been massacred. They didn’t sacrifice their lives for nothing. Surely, we’ll get our independence.”
To remind him of Armenians, Kurds, Baluchis or other divided peoples who had also suffered and died was pointless. The conviction that the Nagas were God’s Chosen People was one that went to the root of his philosophy and in this he reflected the thinking of many of his brethren. Nor did he share Muivah’s view that cooperation with other regional movements in India was necessary.
“I’ll never cooperate with those Indians,” was for him the beginning and end of the question.
Sometimes indeed, Zekope and his politics worried us. The NSCN was not a movement noted for its tolerance of dissident views. He was also a Chakhesang, a tribe of which the NSCN’s Tangkhul-Sema-Konyak leadership was very suspicious.
One of the few other Chakhesangs at headquarters was Vedayi Moire, a retired Naga Army brigadier of advancing years who had now become the NSCN’s head chaplain. He lived in a newly built bamboo house near the village church together with an attractive young wife, a Chakhesang women in her late twenties. They had just had their first child, a baby boy, so we took little Ee Ying there quite often. Vedayi radiated an extreme blend of religious and political zealotry and there were times when I wondered about the stability of the mixture. He always sported a broad smile and eyes staring violently, talked incessantly of the Lord, the Holy Spirit and the number baptised since the NSCN “pacified” the eastern hills in the early 1980s.
In 1968 Vedayi had fought in the famous battle at Jotsoma, undoubtedly the bloodiest encounter ever between the Naga guerrillas and the Indian Army. It is generally accepted that the Indian side suffered extremely heavy casualties while Naga losses were remarkably light. I had heard from Zekope that as many as 600-700 Indian troops had died on the battlefield at Jotsoma. Vedayi leapt to his feet and raised a finger accusingly.
“No, no! That’s not right. I’m a good Christian. I don’t tell lies. We killed at least 1,000 Indians! And our soldiers shouted ‘Praise the Lord!’ every time they fired their weapons.”
Zekope himself had a very similar attitude to religion and underground activities, as the manner in which he had joined the NSCN revealed. While he had been editing his Oking Times in Kohima, he had been approached by an NSCN captain on a clandestine mission in “the West”.
“He asked me to help him rob a bank in Dimapur. At first I hesitated. But he said if I was really as sincere about the national cause as my newspaper implied, then I must help him.”
Zekope told the NSCN captain he would most likely lose his nerve at the crucial moment inside the bank, where both of them were going to be armed with pistols.
“Have no fear!” the captain told Zekope. “Have faith in Jesus and it will be all right!”
“Jesus? How can you mention His name in connection with a bank robbery where you’re going to steal money and possibly even kill people?” Zekope had asked, somewhat taken aback.
“The national cause is more important than that. We’ll just take the money and give it back to our people’s struggle. Jesus surely supports that,” came the reply from the captain.
With or without the assistance of Jesus, the robbery went off as planned. It was in fact the raid we had read about in the Indian press while in New Delhi. But having relieved the bank of 1.5 million rupees, Zekope could no longer stay in Kohima and was obliged to flee to “the East”. By comparison, I reflected, my own law-breaking activities in India paled to insignificance.
I was also astounded at the manner in which the NSCN had subdued and Christianised the eastern hills. It had, in effect, been conversion at gunpoint. And even when they had been subdued, the task of convincing the eastern tribals to join the movement had not been an easy one.
“When we first came, the eastern Nagas didn’t understand our struggle for independence,” Isak explained during one of our many talks. “Most of them hadn’t even heard the word ‘Naga’—they just knew the name of their own village cluster.”
Once, he related, they had brought an 8 mm projector from across the border and screened suitably uplifting productions such as “The Ten Commandments” for their eastern cousins. The semi-naked assembly gaped awestruck as moving technicolour images flickered as if by magic on a stretched white cloth, and Charlton Heston backed by a cast of thousands played out Hollywood’s conception of Biblical history. But magnificent Egyptian palaces and the slow-flowing River Nile meant about as much to the audience as the new concepts of political philosophy their Indian cousins had brought across the border. After some thirty minutes of Pharaonic splendour, one of the eastern Nagas sitting next to Isak leant over and asked breathlessly: “Is this what it’s going to be like after independence?”
The first stop in northern Burma was Kesan Chanlam, the NSCN’s headquarters in the Naga Hills of northern Sagaing Division.
From our standpoint it was almost impossible to gauge or judge how popular the new conquerors really were. We gained some indication, however, on interviewing Khaplang. He came over to our house quite often and although he spoke Burmese with a heavy Naga accent, it was quite comprehensible and Hseng Noung acted as interpreter. Khaplang, it turned out, had led his own eastern Naga Army in the 1960s and 1970s with the support of the KIA. But when the Indian Nagas were driven across the border and began building up their base area in “the East”, Khaplang’s cooperation was essential for Isak and Muivah.
Heavily armed Naga guerrillas pose for the camera. But when their headquarters was attacked in December 1985, they showed little fighting ability. The Lintners escaped
unscathed, but many people were killed in the fighting.
The stay at Kesan Chanlam provided the first exciting opportunity for interviews with NSCN leaders and veterans of the Naga struggle.
Somehow, they managed to win him over, though by what means remained unclear. Although he never said anything openly, my own suspicion was that Khaplang regretted that decision. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the Naga rebels were greater in number and better equipped than the Kachins. Today, the Nagas are weak while the Kachins have grown strong, well-organised and are far better armed.
The long talks with Khaplang gave us a unique insight into the life in the eastern hills which I believed no one before us had recorded so fully. We found out that the last head in Kesan Chanlam was taken in 1983, in the same year as the NSCN gained control over the Kesan villages. Heads were lopped off in warfare against rival village clusters or, more commonly, by buying a slave and having him decapitated.
“The man to be sacrificed could either be a prisoner-of-war, or more often, just somebody a village wanted to get rid of—a thief, an adulterer or a handicapped person who could not do any useful work,” Khaplang explained. “But he had to come from another village cluster. If he spoke the same language as the people who were going to sacrifice him, it was considered inauspicious.”
A few days before the sacrifice, the slave’s face would be smeared with charcoal and he would be fed every few hours with fried pork and huge quantities of liquor. When he was stuffed full to the brink of nausea and almost unconscious, a strong village warrior would approach him from behind—and severe the head with one single stroke.
“If more than one stroke was needed, it was a bad omen and the villagers would get frightened,” Khaplang went on. “The body would be buried, but the head was paraded around the village on a bamboo rod amidst singing and dancing people. The festivities usually continued for five days with lots of food and drink and then the head was placed on the wall of the house of the man who had sponsored the festival and bought the slave. Our people believed the strength of the spirits of the sacrificed man would be inherited by the family that kept his severed skull.”
It was a different story with heads that had been captured in tribal warfare. Every Naga village has at least one morung, or community hall, where the old men meet and adolescent boys stay until marriage. As soon as a boy reached puberty, he was no longer permitted to sleep in his parents’ house but had to move to the morung. And the walls of these morungs had to be decorated with human skulls. Otherwise, the village would feel weak, ashamed and unprotected—and the crops would not be plentiful. The bringing of heads and the days of feasting that followed were believed to enhance the fertility of the village, and not only in regard to the crops.
“What would the girls say if a man returned without heads? They would not consider him a real man.”
Virginity was considered a sin and most young men usually went through several trial marriages in the darkness of the morung with girlfriends who slipped in at night, before they settled for a permanent partner. Kesan Chanlam had three such morungs and they still served as meeting halls for the village committee. But the extramarital love-making had been suppressed by the religious zealots of the NSCN for whom that practice rather than virginity was the sin.
We often went to one or other hall to have a look at old wood carvings and take pictures since the morungs were the only buildings in the village which looked different and contained some art objects. The buildings were huge—nearly 20 metres long and 10 wide—and wooden posts, elaborately carved with human and animal figures, held up a large, thatched roof. We had half hoped there would still be some human skulls kept there, at least as evidence for future generations of the evil deeds of the past. But only tiers of buffalo horns and monkey skulls remained; any human bones had been banished from the morungs and buried by the new dispensation.
There was, however, one object outside one of the morungs which puzzled us. It was a rusty old Dakota engine block, which had been stripped of all its parts for iron to make into spears and knives. We assumed it had come from an old World War Two plane which had crashed on its way over the “Hump”—air crew slang for the rugged mountain ranges which separate India from China. During that war, hundreds of Allied planes carried materiel from air strips in Assam to the Chinese forces resisting the Japanese. The airlift continued until the completion of Gen. Stilwell’s famous land link along the same route: the Ledo Road.
We asked the villagers where and when they had found the Dakota engine, but no one could give us a satisfactory answer. Their grasp of time and distance was hazy at best, and the details of the crash site were never more precise than “not far from here”. The mystery remained. But Hseng Noung took pictures of the engine while I tried—in vain—to find a serial number which would have made identification easier.
Hseng Noung went for daily walks around the village with Ee Ying in a cloth sling on her back. I had my own routine of interviews and both of us began to feel almost at home in the remote eastern Naga village. Ee Ying slept much of the time and we had already grown accustomed to being surrounded by half-naked villagers and to seeing sections of Naga guerrillas marching through Kesan Chanlam.
I did most of my writing at night, when it was quiet and both Hseng Noung and Ee Ying had gone to bed. A crude, wooden table with a paraffin lamp beside a small fire which burned in the hearth on our hut’s earthen floor served as my study allowing me to set out my maps, notebooks and diaries. Occasionally the distant howling of a dog would disturb the stillness of the night.
Keeping a fire burning had also become necessary since it was now increasingly cold at night. Fortunately, we had a whole stack of Naga shawls which, according to the tradition had been presented to us as guests. The Assamese had given us a packet of tea from their state and occasionally the NSCN’s supply department managed to bring in a jar of Nescafe from India.
Many were the nights I would sit by the fire pondering the complexities of the situation in the Naga Hills. No feasible political solution that would satisfy the aspirations of all parties involved in the conflict was apparent. It was, in fact, much easier to pinpoint what was wrong. The total neglect of the Rangoon government was probably the most appalling aspect of the imbroglio; absolutely nothing had been done to improve the living conditions of these people. And it was this neglect that had enabled the NSCN to build up its base area in these remote mountains which are part of Burma in name only on official maps.
I had spent almost a whole month talking to the NSCN’s leadership, collecting more than a thousand pages of notes of Naga insurgency, Naga history, customs and even geography. I felt almost like an adventurer of the Victorian age exploring a new frontier. And in many ways, that was exactly what I did. It was not only that large tracts of the territory we had trekked through were marked “Relief Data Incomplete”; soon we discovered that even the mapped parts were grossly inaccurate.
The facts I had collected would hopefully serve to shed light on the political tangle I was attempting to analyse. But my attitude towards the NSCN underwent a profound change when Isak invited me to visit what he called “the Iphai Missionary Centre”. Since our arrival at Kesan Chanlam, we had wondered about the total absence of bunkers, trenches and other military installations normally to be found at a major rebel base. Now, we were to find the answer.
Isak and some other NSCN leaders proudly led us into the mission centre building. I noticed three women sitting in a row on a wooden bench with their heads lowered.
“We don’t make any important decisions without asking God for guidance.” Isak glanced expectantly at the women. “And God talks to us all the time. Through these three women.”
He waved his hand in their direction. I did not know quite what to make of this. In some confusion I looked at them. There was a tension in their pose as they sat with their hands clasped in their laps and their heads still bent forward. None of them had looked up at me even once. But I instantly recog
nised the oldest as Isak’s wife. A much younger woman in her late twenties was Brigadier Vedayi’s wife. The third I did not know. All three of them had long hair and were wearing Naga longyis. They had Chinese army plimsolls on their feet. But it was Isak who spoke first.
“The rulers of India and Burma will be like Herod of Egypt. If they don’t obey God, it’ll be to their own cost. Armies of rats will devour their lands. This God has told us. In 1982, God said he felt pity for the Nagas. At that time we had our headquarters on a hilltop in the jungle. ‘I love you Nagas very much’ God told us. ‘I won’t let you live in the jungle any more. You must move down to an open place and build a new camp there. It should be called Iphai and you’ll not have to worry about defending the place. ‘I’ll take care of that’ God assured us.
“We moved down to this place a year later and nothing has happened. God protects us. He also told us to erect the big crucifix,” Isak said, pointing in its direction in the centre of the headquarters area.
I was at a loss for words. Security arrangements decided by direct consultations with the Almighty in the course of séances? Clearly, some comment from my side was expected. The most I could manage was a feeble attempt at changing the topic.
“What language is Iphai? What does it mean?”
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