With Isak Chisi Swu death, leadership issue likely to crop up

In his death, National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) leader Isak Chisi Swu is being remembered for his overarching sense of calmness and composure during the course of the ongoing negotiations between the Naga underground leaders and the government representatives.

With the talks getting emotional many a time and at times threatening to derail, it was Swu’s attitude that used to save the day.

“I met him many times for the talks. Whenever the participants in the talks would get agitated over some matter of discussion, Swu would intervene and suggest that we all pray. That would cool down things and we would start all over again. That way he really smoothened creases in the talks that would creep up,” R.S. Pandey, who was an interlocutor for four years after his retirement as a Nagaland cadre IAS officer, told this newspaper.

“His interventions were rare, but whenever he did so, it really mattered and weighed a lot.”

The leader’s demise has also thrown up a leadership question too. While Thuingaleng Muivah is inarguably the leader and the senior-most in the organisation, he comes from the Tangkhul tribe, which largely inhabits Manipur’s Ukhrul district.

“It is important for the NSCN(IM) to have a Naga from Nagaland to replace Swu in the top leadership. In all possibility, it will be a Sema, who are present in considerable number in the NSCN(IM), as compared to the other tribes from Nagaland,” a source who is familiar with the developments said.

Otherwise the NSCN(IM) is overwhelmingly dominated by Tangkhuls. The Isak-Muivah duo had put its weight behind a peace effort with the government that led to talks that kickstarted in 1997. Since then, talks have taken place in Paris, Geneva, Zurich, Amsterdam, New Delhi, Chiang Mai (Thailand), Bangkok, London, Osaka, Malaysia, The Hague, and Dimapur.

The current interlocutor for the talks, R.N. Ravi, is the fourth one after Swaraj Kaushal, former Mizoram governor and a key figure of the Mizo Accord, who was succeeded by former Union home secretary K. Padmanabhaiah in 1999 and then by R.S. Pandey in 2010.

Called the “mother of all insurgencies” in Northeast India, the seeds of the Naga armed insurgency movement were sown well before India’s independence. While government figures say about 3,000 have died in the conflict till now, unofficial figures put the number at about 50,000.

There are three major outfits of the Naga insurgents—NSCN (Isak-Muivah), NSCN (Khaplang) and the NSCN (Unification)—with about 4500, 2500 and 1000 armed guerrilla fighters respectively.