Two Questions about the Naga Declaration of Independence, 14 August 1947 | Paul Pimomo

Q1

Was 14 August 2025 the 78^th or the 79^thcommemoration of the Naga Declaration of Independence?

This technical question matters and needs clarifying because the day was observed as both. It is common knowledge that the global convention for commemorating and celebrating an important event is to count the completion of a calendar year of the event and to mark that date as the event’s first anniversary. So the Naga Declaration of Independence on 14^th August 1947 was one year old on 14 August 1948, hence its first anniversary. Aug 14, 1949 was its second, 1950 third, and so on, cumulatively. That is why on 14 August 2025 some Nagas, including the Global Naga Forum, commemorated the 78^th anniversary of the historic day.

People’s birthdays are observed the same way throughout the world. A baby born on 14 August 1947 turned one year old on 14 August 1948 and celebrated her first birthday on that day — not her second birthday — for the simple reason she was just one year old in August of 1948. And on 14 August 2025 she turned 78 (not 79). Likewise, the Naga Declaration of Iindependence turned 78 years old, not 79, on that day.

Many Naga groups, however,marked 14 August 2025 as the “79^th Naga Independence Day.” So did India, interesting enough, her “79^th Independence Day” on the following day, 15 August 2025. What we have here, then, is a rare case of agreement among Indians and many Nagas that their respective August 14 and 15, 1947 independence from British rule became their “79^th Independence Day” in August 2025. If this calculus sounds odd to you, it is. Why would Naga and Indian babies born on 14 or 15 August 1947 celebrate their 78^th birthdays in 2025, but commemorate their country’s 79^th Independence Day instead, since both their births and their people’s respective independence declarations occurred the same day, month, and year?

Be that as it may, one doesn’t need to argue that there’s something intrinsically wrong with this way of counting. For one, hasn’t India been the land of math prodigies? The point at issue goes beyond that, though, and it matters. By sidestepping the universally established practice of computing anniversaries and birthdays, and overshooting the count by one year, Indians and Nagas are creating unnecessary potential confusion for themselves and the rest of the world about something as historically significant as the year and anniversaries of their independence. Someone who doesn’t know India became independent in 1947, for example, and came acrossthe headline “79^th Indian Independence Day” in 2025, could falsely conclude that India became independent in 1946. Or someone reading on 14 August 2025 the headline,“79^th Naga Independence Day Celebration,”could have wondered if Nagas had been celebrating their newly negotiated Independence from India and Myanmar for 79 days, straight. So, it’s important to ask why and when this curious dating aberration came about.

The why is hard to establish. But the when is information that can be verified and determined. Turns out it is a recent phenomenon, circa 2014. That year, on August 15, 2014, the 67th anniversary of India’s independence according to the international standard, the Hindustan Times carried a story with the headline, “Indian media highlight challenges on Independence Day.” In it was reported that “Papers say India’s young population expects PM Modi to fulfil his poll promises. Media are celebrating India’s 68th Independence Day amid hopes of a better future [original emphasis].” But the report went on to quote other media sources that used the international standard count of 67 years, instead, including another article from the Hindustan Times (external) itself, which commented that “at 67 years India is young and we can feel good about where we are for several reasons.” It also quoted the Times of India that referred readers to the first Indian PM Jawaharlal Nehru’s “dreamlike ‘tryst with destiny’ 67 years ago this day,”a dream that, it commented, had only been “half realized.”

Now, why did the reporter in the Hindustan Times decide to override the international norm and refer to 15 August 2014 as “India’s 68^th Independence Day” while also quoting other articles that referred to the day and year as the 67^th Indian Independence? As I said, trying to determinethe motive behind the Hindustan Times dating change that particular yearis unlikely to get us far. But neither did the dating innovation get anywhere, it turned out. It got no traction in the rest of the Indian media for several years. And neither did it influence the Naga media.

The Naga Independence Day was observed according to the global standard till the year 2017, which was the 70^th anniversary. A report in the Burmese Link (online), for example, quotes Ms. Adino, saying, “to commemorate the 70^th anniversary is a great day for the Nagas.” However, the following year, August 2018, the same Burmese Link inexplicably skipped one number (71^st) and referred to the day as the 72^nd: “Seventy-Second Independence Day Speech of Gen (Retd.) ViyalieMetha, Kedahge (President), Federal Government of Nagaland.” The Nagaland Post, the longest-running local paper, followed suit, marking 14 August 2018 as the 72^nd: “Addressing the 72^nd ‘Naga Independence Day’ celebration held at Peace Camp, Chedema….” Predictably, back on the Indian side, the Hindustan Times echoed back to its previous (2014) position, calling 15 August 2018 the 72^nd Independence Day: “As the nation celebrates its 72^nd Independence Day, Bollywood celebrities….” One has to wonder how the 71^st Independence slipped away from both Indian and Naga historiesand became the 72^nd Independence Day.

The following year, 15 August 2019, as expected, the Hindustan Times celebrated India’s “73rd Independence Day: One Nation, One Constitution has become a reality: PM Modi.” So did Indian Times — an online news outlet. But the Times of India retained the international count, stating, “India celebrates 72 years of independence today. PM addressed the nation from the Red Fort.” Curiously, though, the Times of India also reported that the Naga Student Federation (NSF) had asked all its units “to mark the 73^rd ‘Naga Independence Day’.”

Long story short, this curious phenomenon of counting Indian and Naga independence one year ahead of the international standard seems to have started with the Hindustan Times in 2014 –incidentally the year the BJP and PM Modi came to power — and was picked up four years later, in 2018, by some Naga news outlets for commemorating the Naga independence.

On hindsight, one would have thought the arrival of the 75^th anniversary (Diamond jubilee year) in August of 2022 would have helped clear the doubtful air of the Hindustan Times new dating count. And indeed that seemed to have been the case. Papers like The Hindu correctly named 15 August 2022 the “75years of Independence,” and the Times of India announced that “The 75^th Independence Day would be celebrated across the country on August 15, 2022.” But an article in the Hindustan Times by Krishna PriyaPallavi, “Independence Day 2022,” subtitled “76^th Independence Day,” reported that (mark the number ahead) “India is gearing up to celebrate 75 years of its Independence on August 15.” Surely, Pallavi’s twin-number combination in the same article is something to chew on: 76^th Independence Day in 75 years?

Meanwhile, as Independence Day 2025 rolled along, Hindustan Times carried another piece by Krishna Priya Pallavi. It was titled “Independence Day 2025: Is It 78^th or 79^th this Year?: 79^th Independence Day,” where she offered a solution for the confusion she most likely had a hand in causing to begin with? “The confusion arises,” she explained, “when many people simply subtract 1947 (the year India achieved its freedom from British colonisers) from 2025 and arrive at 78. The mistake happens because they don’t factor in the first celebration itself. Therefore, the correct way is to count August 15, 1947 — the day India became independent — as the first Independence Day. So, then, 2025 will be the 79th celebration of India’s freedom.”

How does following a well-established worldwide dating practice become a “mistake” or “confusion”on India’s part is not clear. In any case, other papers in India accepted Pallavi’s suggestion. The Hindu, for instance, referred to 15 August 2025 in two ways: “78 Years of Freedom” and “79^th Independence Day.” As of 2025, then, ostensibly at the urging of a writer in the Hindustan Times, the Indian media’s standard for dating India’s independence seems to have boiled down to two interchangeable characterizations. India’s 78 years of Independence and/or India’s 79^th Independence Day. But the logic of the new Indian Year/Day distinction in this case still begs the inevitable question: Come 15 August 2026, will, say, an Indian baby girl born on August 15, 1947 be celebrating 80 Years of age but her 81^st birth Day? Wouldn’t that sound rather like saying that the same day will be her 80^th birthday and/orher 81^st Birth Day — a difference of one year marked by the way the words are spelled? Does anyone think they can have it both ways? But if you can’t have it both ways for counting a person’s birth anniversary, neither should you for the anniversary of India’sindependence. And, by the way, what’s the good of this international convention-defying dating neologism for India?

The question for Nagas is even more complicated. Should they continue to follow India’s practice even in the way they count the number of years for their Declaration of Independence? Or should they stick with the established international convention? If they follow India’s count, they’re being had as India’s colonized mimics; if they stay with the international standard, their declaration of independence could be seen by the rest of the world as one year behind India’s — when in fact Nagas declared independence a day before India did. Have the Nagas been put in a no-win position again by India’s obfuscation even in this?

That’s not all, though. An interesting footnote to this story is that India has managed to confuse not only the Nagas but Artificial Intelligence as well, no less. If you do an online search for the number of India’s independence anniversary for the year 2025, don’t expect to find the correct clear-cut answer of 78 years, because it will include AI-generated ambivalent information with two numbers: the standard 78^th Independence anniversary and the revised alternate 79^th Independence Day. Should we blame AI for this? No, because that’s what basic AI is engineered to do: collect, summarize, and give back to us whatever information it is fed. And Indian media has fed it confusing numbers for no apparent good reason. Or, are we to take the twin numbers as a Freudian slip that reveals the two incompatible sides of the modern Republic of India? Her manifest 78 years as a leading postcolonial nation-state and the largest democracy in the world, and the start of her latent 79^th year as a country currently weighed down by an authoritarian government with neocolonial proclivities that behaves more like an internal colonial power toward its citizens and some regions of the country?

For Nagas, meanwhile, yearly celebration of independence notwithstanding, their modern history, which began with British colonial rule, continues to be an unending relay of the same, only decidedly more menacing, under Indian and Burmese neocolonial rule. The Naga people’s declaration of Freedom from colonialism in 1947 ran up against a takeover military invasion by India, followed by extrajudicial laws like the Assam Disturbed Areas Act, 1955 and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA, 1958), which are still in force.

Q2

So, then, was 14 August 2025 a Celebration of Naga Independence Day or a Commemoration of the Naga Declaration of Independence?

Like it or not, the foundational basis for answering this question are two facts–one historical and the other political. The historical fact is that Nagas did declare independence on August 14, 1947. But the political fact is that all these years of struggle and strife later, as of 2025, the Nagas and their homeland are not an independent, sovereign country. And this is because of the reason mentioned above–opposition by India and Myanmar, two formerly colonial subject-peoples. Nagas know the opposition is a violation of the United Nations Organization’s principle of the right of freedom for the ex-colonized and the right of self-determination for indigenous peoples of the world. But as UN member-states India and Myanmar use its institutions and framework to delegitimize the Naga cause by dismissing it as an internal domestic matter.

More specifically, India and Myanmar rely on an international convention embedded in the colonial legacy of the nation-states world to checkmate Naga people’s rights. That convention requires of ex-colonized peoples who would be free, like the Nagas, to do two things: assert their will to be free and declare independence, which Nagas have done; but they lack the requisite second – recognition of their status by UN member-states. Recognition has not been forthcoming even from the British government, and has not come from any of the nation-states. India has stood between the Naga people and their right of self-determination in their ancestral homeland for nearly eight decades. This has had lasting real-life effects on the Naga psyche – beyond just the physical and political – a subject that has regrettably received little to no attention.

Fact is generations of some of the most enterprising and ambitious Nagas, given no choice of pursuing gainful professional lives outside of the Indian dispensation, have had to identify themselves with the Indian government through Indian state politics and civil service. This has come at varying degrees of psychological and emotional cost to most of them — at greater cost to the more thoughtful and enlightened among them. For many more Nagas, on the other hand, India’s unrelenting domination over their lives awakened two forms of self-preservation behaviors. One was physical, which is well-known, armed resistance in defense of their homeland and Naga rights. The lesser known took the form of psychological defense mechanism, notably denial and reversal of the Naga political reality. This group of Nagas maintains, to this day, that Nagas are a de facto sovereign country by declaration of independence from Britain and resistance against India’s illegal aggression thereafter. They rationalize their political conviction by combining the ethnic nationhood of the Nagas –going back to times before written history — and the Declaration of Independence in 1947, while adamantly ignoring the fact that their conviction, however firmly held, does not alter the political reality under the nation-states dispensation of the world. The disconnect between this brand of Naga political fundamentalism and the prevailing global discourse of nations-states is as glaring as it is ironic. Consider the fact that Naga nationalism is both a byproduct and the victim of colonialism’s legacy of the exclusive nation-states club, which accentuated the Naga people’s contumacious will to belong there when their freedom from colonial rule turned into Indian neocolonial subjection. The willful tenacity of this group of Nagas is visible every 14^th of August. They do not just commemorate the declaration of independence. They celebrate the 1947 Naga Independence as fact, regardless.

All said and done, and undone, one wonders what this long history of struggle would come down to for the Naga people by way of their political legacy. The impasse in the latest iteration of the Indo-Naga peace negotiation highlights this pivotal question. Is there such a thing as a Naga political DNA, if you will, in the history of the nation-states world especially since WWII? What political significance, if any, can the Nagas legitimately claim before the 21^st century world, still confronted by such vexed international issues as a people’s right to exist together and resist external conquest and war, as reflected in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza? The answer, I think, is a straightforward one. Regardless of what the current peace negotiation will produce, the Naga people’s political legacy for posterity has already been determined by their past, their long history of struggle. A tireless nation-in-struggle for freedom and self-determination is the Naga political brand. A brand shaped by resistance against British colonial domination going back to the 1870s, through the early 20^th century during the Simon Commission and the 1929 memorandum, to the ongoing Indian and Myanmar neocolonial rule since 1947. This is the political DNA Nagas can proudly claim for themselves before the world. It is a well-documented and historically verifiable brand.

Viewed against this historical backdrop, the Naga people’s struggle for freedom reflected in the yearly commemoration of the Declaration of Independence may be seen as an intentional human rights act of self-affirmation as well as opposition. It is a self-affirming demonstration of Naga peoplehood and commitment to self-governance in their homeland. It expresses Naga people’s desire for building and strengthening connections with one another — without coercive, divisive outside interference; a desire for nurturing peaceful co-existence with neighbors based on mutual respect and wellbeing; a vision for building collective, environmentally wholesome ventures alongside the people in the region, and cultivating relationships based on democracy, the rule of law,and human rights for all with communities and governments across the continent and around the world.

The commemoration also represents opposition: opposition to the forces that prevent the Nagas from pursuing these self-affirming goals, includingthe division of the Naga ancestral homeland and the people into multiple state boundaries that have made the Nagas — except in one state — into minorities among other peoples and have prevented their full civic participation and weakened their democratic voices; opposition to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and the Indian government’s travel restrictions in Naga lands,and the construction of India-Myanmar border fence that runs through the Naga homeland: in short, opposition to the unending subordination and subjection of the Nagas by India and Myanmar. These are the forms of political self-affirmation and resistance to domination patriotic Nagas associate with the commemoration of the Declaration of Independence in 1947, a pivotal historic event that brands the Naga political DNA for posterity.

Whether or not the final Indo-Naga peace negotiation will produce a settlement that is “just and honorable” to the Nagas in the context their history is an open question. The overall contour of the settlement rests with the democratic will of the people and their legitimate representatives at the negotiating table with India. Meantime, the Naga people see in the negotiation process hope as well as fear and danger. Hope that the negotiation will produce a significantly different, clear,and enforceable path to a better future. The fear is that it will be a replay of the same old my-way-or-the-highway model that has dogged Indo-Naga relations for too long. The real danger is that the settlement will be the culmination and formalization of India’s steady strangulation of Naga indigenous democratic governance values and system — manifested most starkly in the permanent militarization of the Naga homeland and the erosion of Naga leadership traditions of integrity and civic responsibility to community and the common good.

If the settlement goes the way of these fears, the rest of the northeast region and India as a whole, too, may have reason to fear the danger Delhi poses to civil society, human rights, and democracy. At a time when authoritarian forces are messing with India’s “tryst” with democracy, it would seem the more enlightened, conscientious, and democratic-minded Indians could easily do worse than find common ground with the Naga people’s long struggle for the right of democratic self-determination? Because, all said and done, all are in this together.

~ Paul Pimomo