Nagaland's Shadow Government

In Nagaland, for a really long time, there was a shadow government led by insurgent Naga nationalists who were fighting for statehood. Later in school, I learned about them in detail as we visited Nagaland and other North Eastern regions in India during our Grade 11 school trip, delving deeper into the history, culture, and systems that defined this region. As we read and learned from experts, I realized there were many parallels to stories I had heard growing up about my family and friends who had firsthand experience living in the region during different stages of their lives, and this incentivized me to go back and speak to these people to look at their stories with a fresh historical lens. 

Now that I had visited the place and spoken to a diverse range of people, like the Naga nationalist Dr. Visiye and residents such as Hekha Sir (Konomah Village), their passion for their people and the preservation of their culture, history, and traditions broke my previous biases about the movement being a manifestation of misplaced anger toward the central government. Instead, I understood how years of neglect and a lack of long-term sustainable development that addressed grassroots-level problems translated into the violent insurgent movement. Hence, no one party can be solely blamed for the political dissent and unrest of the region; it is an amalgamation of miscommunication, lack of unity, etc.

The nuances of this idea require academic research by scholars to truly break down and understand, as has been done by numerous scholars locally and internationally. However, my article will focus on the personal anecdote from an interview I conducted with an anonymous source whose father experienced a firsthand account of the actions of the shadow government, highlighting the corruption within the region and the gravitas of the situation. The source of this story is a trusted one; however, they must be kept anonymous for privacy reasons.

Interview transcript with the Son of a former government employee stationed in Nagaland: 

One night, they came to our house. My parents were sleeping under a mosquito net when armed men arrived. They lifted the net and told my mother that they were taking her husband. They said there would be no need for resistance—they were just kidnapping him.

They took my father to some unknown hideout. There was no way to know where he was—no phone, no message, nothing—because it was during the 1970s, before mobile phones were invented.

At the time, he was working with the Ministry of Finance. The reason they kidnapped him was money. The insurgents considered themselves a parallel government and demanded funds. My father refused. He believed that government money should go to the government, not to a shadow administration. That refusal led to the dispute, and then to the kidnapping.

Then something unexpected happened. Indira Gandhi declared an Emergency across the country (1975). With the Emergency, the army was deployed in full force. Once that happened, the insurgents—the Naga nationalists—began to flee. Many of them ran across the border into Burma.

They couldn’t take my father with them while fleeing, so they abandoned him. They dropped him in the middle of the road, somewhere completely unfamiliar, and left him there.

Then he somehow came back home.

There were no phones and no way to inform anyone. He stood on the road and waited. Very few vehicles passed through those areas in those days. When one finally came, he hitched a ride, asking the driver to drop him wherever possible.

At the time, our family was living in Mokokchung. Life there was shaped by fear, silence, and uncertainty. Incidents like this weren’t talked about openly, but they stayed with us.

This firsthand interview is just one of many incidents that have taken place, and I will write about more. I chose to start with this because, after my school trip to Nagaland, the sociocultural context of it was still fresh in my mind.