Response to: “Uproar Over Vande Mataram In Nagaland Assembly” by Jagdamba Mall (7 March 2026)
THE ANATOMY OF A THREAT:
A Point-by-Point Dismantling of Jagdamba Mall’s Argument Made Against Naga Rights
Jagdamba Mall has done the Naga people a favour. Not by accident, but by excess. In 1,721 words published on 7 March 2026, he has assembled, in one place, every tool in the imperial playbook: theological coercion, economic blackmail, historical fabrication, explicit death threats, the delegitimization of faith, and the naming of individual Naga intellectuals as targets of political pressure. He has written, in effect, a complete confession ofHindutva India’s coercive impositions on Nagas.
We do not respond out of obligation. We respond because clarity is a sovereign act. Because every argument he has made has a specific, documented answer. And because the next generation of Naga people deserves to inherit a record of this moment that does not flinch.
We address each of his claims in turn.
I. WHAT VANDE MATARAM ACTUALLY IS: THE THEOLOGICAL TRAP EXPOSED
Before engaging Mall’s arguments, it is necessary to state plainly what Vande Mataram is — because the entire coercive apparatus of this mandate rests on a deliberate confusion between cultural symbol and theological act. Vande Mataram is not a patriotic song with religious overtones. The full six-stanza composition — the version now mandated by the Ministry of Home Affairs — is a hymn of worship to the goddess Durga-Kali, the ten-armed divine mother of Hindu cosmology. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay embedded this theology deliberately and inseparably into the text:
Thou art Durga, Lady and Queen, With her hands that strike and her swords of sheen — Thou art Lakshmi lotus-throned, And the Muse and Giver of Delight —
This is not metaphor. This is invocation. Asking a Christian, a Muslim, a Jain, a practitioner of indigenous Naga cosmology to recite this text in full is not asking them to be patriotic. It is asking them to perform a religious act of worship to a deity they do not worship. The difference is not a matter of sensitivity. It is a matter of the most fundamental right of conscience.
Critically, this is not a new observation. The Indian National Congress’s own Working Committee, under Jawaharlal Nehru, passed a resolution in October 1937 stating that only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram — precisely those that do not contain the Durga invocations — could be sung at Congress sessions, because the remaining stanzas were incompatible with the participation of Muslim members. Nehru wrote explicitly that the full song could not be imposed. The Congress party itself, in the founding generation of the Republic, drew this line.
The Ministry of Home Affairs has now, in 2026, crossed a line that even the architects of the Indian nationalist project refused to cross. Vande Mataram should not be politicized in the interest of any particular faith or religion. It should remain a symbol of shared national heritage, not a tool for political mobilization.
Furthermore: Vande Mataram is NOT India’s National Anthem. Jana Gana Mana is. The “Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act 1971” was designed to protect the National Anthem. Its extension to the National Song is legally novel, untested, and — as any competent constitutional lawyer will confirm — almost certainly an overreach that will not survive judicial scrutiny. Mall presents this threat of three years imprisonment as settled law. It is, at best, a legal dare.
II. THE SUPREME COURT THEY FORGOT TO MENTION: BIJOE EMMANUEL (1986)
Mall invokes legal threat without once mentioning the single most important Supreme Court ruling on this precise subject. That omission is not accidental. It is the most revealing moment in his entire article.
In Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala (1986, AIR 1987 SC 748), the Supreme Court of India addressed the case of three Jehovah’s Witness children who stood respectfully during the National Anthem but did not sing it, on the grounds of religious conscience. The Court ruled in their favour. The judgment, written by Justice O. Chinnappa Reddy, stated unequivocally:
“The State does not appear to have had any particular interest in forcing school children to participate in the singing of the National Anthem in violation of their freedom of conscience. The proper response to the exercise of freedom of conscience is not coercion but persuasion.”
The Court held that compelled patriotic singing violated Article 19(1)(a) — the freedom of expression, which includes the freedom not to be compelled to express what one does not believe — and Article 25, the freedom of conscience and religion.
If this protection applies to the National Anthem itself, it applies with greater force to Vande Mataram, which is not even the National Anthem, and which carries explicit theological content that the National Anthem does not. The Supreme Court has already given the Naga people, and every conscientious objector in India, their answer. Mall wants to forget that answer exists.
The legal blueprint for a Public Interest Litigation challenging this mandate is not speculative. It is waiting to be filed. The precedent is binding. The outcome is foreseeable.
III. THE INTERNATIONAL LAW FRAME: RIGHTS THAT DO NOT REQUIRE DELHI’S PERMISSION
India is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Article 18 is unambiguous:
“No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.”
Article 19 protects freedom of expression. The right not to speak — not to sing, not to recite — is as protected as the right to speak. This is not a Western invention imposed on Naga culture. It is a universal protection ratified by the same Republic that now threatens jail for non-compliance with a song.
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007 — and which India voted to support — further provides, in Articles 11, 12, and 13, the right of indigenous peoples to maintain, protect, and develop their cultural heritage and traditional practices, and to maintain, protect, and have access to their religious and cultural sites and ceremonial objects. The coerced abandonment of one’s theological identity and the forced performance of another’s religious ritual are precisely what these articles were written to prevent.
Mall frames this as an internal administrative matter. It is not. The moment a state compels children in schools to perform religious invocations under threat of criminal punishment it has entered the territory of international human rights law. And in that territory, the Naga people have allies that Mall has not calculated.
IV. THE DOCTRINE OF PRIOR SOVEREIGNTY: OUR HISTORY DOES NOT BEGIN WITH YOUR INK
Mall writes as though 1947 was the beginning of the political universe. For the Naga people, it was a moment of interruption in a history that runs far deeper.
On 10 January 1929, the Naga Club — the first formal political body of the Naga people — presented a memorandum to the Simon Commission, which was then deliberating on the future constitutional arrangements for India. The memorandum stated:
“We, the Nagas, pray that our country may be allowed to remain as it is, and as it has always been in the past — our own, managed by ourselves, according to our own customs and traditions.”
This document was submitted to a formal British constitutional commission. It is not a rebel tract. It is a sovereign political statement, entered into the official record of Empire, predating the Indian National Congress’s own resolution on complete independence (Purna Swaraj) by exactly one year.
The Naga National Council’s declaration of independence on 14 August 1947 — one day before India’s independence — was not a reaction to Indian nationalism. It was the assertion of a distinct political existence that had been articulated for nearly two decades.
The Atlantic Charter of 1941, to which Britain was a signatory, affirmed “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” The Indian Independence Act 1947 did not contain any provision specifically annexing the Naga hills into the new dominion of India. The accession of Naga territory to India has never been the product of a free and informed act of Naga self-determination.
We do not make this argument to re-litigate the past. We make it because Mall’s entire case — his demand for “reciprocated nationalism,” his threat of “Delhi’s wrath,” his insistence on compliance — rests on the assumption that Naga political identity begins at 1947. It does not. Our sovereignty is older than his Republic. That is not a claim. It is a fact documented in the archives of Empire.
Delhi will point, as it always does, to the Shillong Accord of 1975 as proof that the Naga people accepted Indian sovereignty and that everything since has been the stubbornness of a defeated cause refusing to acknowledge its own defeat. Let the record be precise about what the Shillong Accord actually was — and equally precise about the political climate in which it was extracted.
The year was 1975. Indira Gandhi had declared a State of Emergency across India in June of that year — suspending civil liberties, imprisoning political opponents, and concentrating executive power to a degree that the Supreme Court itself would later characterise as a constitutional crisis. This was the moment Delhi chose to sit down with Naga leaders. Not in a period of democratic normalcy, not from a position of mutual respect, but at the precise moment when the Indian state had suspended the very constitutional protections it was simultaneously demanding the Nagas accept. The Accord was not negotiated in good faith across a level table. It was extracted in the shadow of a national emergency by a government that had just demonstrated, to its own citizens, that it recognised no limit on its power when sufficiently threatened.
The specific leaders who put their names to the Accord were operating under conditions that international law has a precise term for: duress. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties — the foundational international instrument governing the validity of agreements between parties — is unambiguous that a treaty procured by coercion, whether of a state or its representatives, is void. Not voidable. Void. The Shillong Accord does not merely lack moral authority. It lacks the basic legal architecture that would make it binding under the very international law framework India invokes in every other context when it suits Delhi’s interests.
Furthermore: the Accord was signed by a faction — a fragment of an already pressured NNC leadership, not by the Naga people through any democratic process. No plebiscite. No assembly. No mandate drawn from the same democratic wellspring as the 1951 plebiscite, in which 99.9% of the Naga people had already placed their thumbprints in a formal, witnessed, recorded act of collective self-determination. The Shillong Accord did not supersede that mandate. A handful of men in a room —
however exhausted, however cornered, however threatened — cannot extinguish by signature what an entire people expressed by democratic will. The legal hierarchy is not ambiguous: a popular plebiscite outranks a coerced factional agreement in every court of law and every court of history.
The repudiation was immediate, decisive, and historically consequential. Senior figures within the Naga national movement who refused to sign rejected the Accord not as dissidents or splinters but as custodians of the original, uncompromised Naga national position — the same position the Naga Club had articulated in 1929, the same position the NNC had declared on 14 August 1947, the same position the 1951 plebiscite had ratified with 99.9% of the Naga people’s thumbprints. Their refusal was not rebellion against the NNC’s founding vision. It was fidelity to it. The NNC, in its various expressions across the decades, represents the living continuity of that original Naga national conscience — the insistence that no solution imposed from outside, and no agreement extracted under duress, can substitute for a settlement that the Naga people themselves have freely, fully, and democratically owned. By 1980, that refusal had taken organised form — demonstrating, with unmistakable clarity, that the Accord represented neither consensus nor closure. When a political agreement produces, within five years, a permanent and principled fracture in the movement it was meant to dissolve, it has not settled anything. It has deepened everything.
But the most devastating answer to the Shillong Accord is not historical — it is logical, and it comes from Delhi’s own subsequent conduct. If the Accord settled the question of Naga sovereignty in 1975, why did the Government of India spend the next five decades at the negotiating table? Eighty rounds of talks. Eighteen years of sustained engagement. A Framework Agreement signed in August 2015 by the Prime Minister’s own representative, using the unambiguous language of shared sovereignty, unique history, and peaceful coexistence of two entities — language that no government uses with a people whose political question it believes was closed forty years earlier. Every round of talks India entered after 1975 was, by its own logic, a formal admission that the Shillong Accord settled nothing. Every time Delhi sat down across that table, it was acknowledging — in the only language that power ever truly speaks — that the Naga people’s claim was alive, was legitimate, and had never, in truth, been extinguished.
The Shillong Accord is not Delhi’s trump card. It is Delhi’s confession.
V. THE VIOLENCE LEDGER: WHO OWES WHOM AN ACCOUNTING
Mall cites a figure of “40,000 innocent victims from Naga samaj” and attributes this to militant organizations. We do not dispute that the decades of armed conflict caused immense suffering among the Naga people. We dispute, categorically, the framing that strips the Indian state of all responsibility for this toll.
The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958 — AFSPA — has been applied to Nagaland without interruption for over six decades. Under AFSPA, any commissioned officer of the Indian armed forces may fire upon any person in a “disturbed area” based on suspicion alone. No civilian court can prosecute a soldier acting under these orders without prior sanction from the Central Government — a sanction that has been granted precisely zero times in the history of Nagaland’s designation as a disturbed area.
Under this regime, massacres have occurred. On 4 December 2021, Indian Army personnel of the 21 Para Special Forces ambushed and shot, in broad daylight, a group of daily wagers and coal miners from the Tiru mines below Oting village in Mon district — mines that belong to the Angh of Oting — as they travelled in an open truck back to their village after a day’s work. The killings did not end with that first ambush. When villagers came out searching for their men, they were hunted down with sophisticated night-vision equipment and killed in the long grasses and at the Tiru mines where they had taken shelter. The dead were killed in two separate batches on 4 December, with one further death during the protests in Mon town that followed.
Thirteen Naga lives in total. These were not militants. They were miners and their neighbours. The Army has not been prosecuted. AFSPA protected them.
This is not an isolated incident. It is a structural feature of India’s relationship with Nagaland: a legal architecture that removes accountability for state violence while prosecuting resistance as terrorism.
Mall then makes a statement so extraordinary that it deserves to be quoted in full, without paraphrase, so that every reader can reckon with what has been said:
“If the Delhi turns towards Naga militant cadres, thousands will be killed.”
This is a threat of mass killing used as a political argument. Not a warning. Not a legal caution. A threat: comply, or we will kill thousands of you. No legitimate political discourse accommodates this sentence. Under Article 20 of the ICCPR, any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to violence is prohibited by law. Under international humanitarian law, threatening civilian populations is not a political position. It is a war crime.
We record this threat in full and place it before every human rights body, journalist, and court that may one day be asked to account for it — published under a named byline, in a circulated article, on 7 March 2026. Jagdamba Mall cannot claim he was misquoted, cannot claim context, and cannot claim ignorance. He knew exactly what he was doing when he put his name to a public call for the mass killing of a people.
One more point on Operation Hot Pursuit: Mall invokes the 2015 surgical strike against NSCN-K operatives in Myanmar as proof of what Delhi will do to Naga resisters. NSCN-K is a distinct organization that had recently killed 18 Indian soldiers in an ambush. It is not NSF. It is not the Naga citizenry of Nagaland. Mall’s conflation of an armed faction that conducted a military ambush with the civilian student body of NSF, or with the Naga people as a whole, is not an argument. It is a collective punishment logic. It is the same logic used by every empire that has ever committed atrocities against a people by refusing to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
VI. THE ECONOMIC ARGUMENT: UNRAVELLING THE MYTH OF
INTEGRATION’S GIFT
Mall points to Arunachal Pradesh and Assam as examples of what Nagaland could achieve through compliance, and frames Nagaland’s economic difficulties as the self inflicted consequence of resistance. This is the economics of the master explaining to the tenant why the harvest has been poor.
Let us examine what Mall does not. Nagaland’s economy has been structurally oriented, since 1963, around a government-employment model deliberately constructed to make the state dependent on Central transfers rather than organic economic development. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the documented consequence of a fiscal federalism that keeps frontier states on financial life-support while preventing them from developing autonomous economic relationships with their natural trading partners — which, for Nagaland, are Myanmar and the broader Southeast Asian corridor.
The Tuli Paper Mill and the Weziho Cement Factory, which Mall cites as symbols of wasted potential, were established under Central Government-backed schemes. Their decline was not caused by insurgency. Their decline was caused by decades of neglect, misallocation, and the absence of any strategic interest in making Northeast India economically self-sufficient — because a self-sufficient Northeast would have less reason to remain grateful to Delhi.
Mall blames “brain drain” on insurgency. The more precise cause is well-documented: Naga youth with qualifications are blocked, by virtue of geography and political status, from the economic opportunities available to mainland Indians. They are simultaneously denied investment from Southeast Asian neighbours by virtue of India’s protectionist frontier policies. They are squeezed between two worlds and told it is their own fault for being difficult.
Contrary to Mall’s characterization of Bharatvarsh as “the leading country in the world under the dynamic and thrusting (sic) leadership of Modiji and his committed team,” India ranked 130th out of 193 countries in the 2025 UNDP Human Development Report — below Bhutan (125th), behind Vietnam (93rd), with income inequality eroding a further 30.7% of whatever development gains exist. Mall offers integration into this as a prize. It is not a prize. It is a tether.
VII. THE CHRISTIANITY SMEAR: HISTORY AGAINST THE ACCUSATION
Mall’s accusation that Christianity is an “American” import that destroyed Naga indigenous culture is perhaps his most historically illiterate claim. It requires a complete correction. American Baptist missionaries arrived in Naga hills in the late 19th century. Within one generation, Naga Christians — working with and alongside these missionaries — had developed written scripts for languages that had never previously been recorded, established schools, published literature, documented customary law and oral tradition, and created the educational infrastructure through which the Naga intelligentsia of the 20th century emerged. The Naga writers, teachers, lawyers, and political thinkers who articulated the case for Naga sovereignty — including those who drafted the 1929 memorandum — were educated in mission schools.
This is not the erasure of indigenous culture. This is indigenous culture choosing its instruments. The Naga people did not passively receive Christianity; they actively and selectively incorporated it into their own cosmological framework in a way that made sense of their collective experience as a people bounded by distinct common identity across village republics.
Mall’s critique comes from a movement — the RSS and its affiliated Hindutva project — that is itself a 20th-century ideological construction, drawing on selective readings of Sanskrit texts and 19th-century European romantic nationalism to construct a “Hindu civilization” that, when applied to the actual diversity of the Indian subcontinent, requires the systematic erasure of every non-conforming tradition. The RSS was founded in 1925. The Naga Club was established in 1918 — predating it by seven years. If we are discussing foreign ideological imports, Hindutva’s intellectual debt to European fascism and ethnic nationalism is well-documented by scholars from Marzia Casolari to Christophe Jaffrelot.
Furthermore: Article 371A of the Indian Constitution specifically protects Naga customary law and practice. Mall wants this Article scrapped. Which means he wants to expose Naga customary law — the very “indigenous culture” he claims to want to protect — to the full operation of Indian codified law, including laws that would require assimilation into a Hindu nationalist civic framework. The contradiction is total.
VIII. THE ZELIANGRONG GAMBIT: THE OLDEST COLONIAL TRICK
Mall dedicates a significant portion of his article to the creation of the Frontier Naga Territorial Authority (FNTA) and the rise of Zeliangrong political aspirations, framing these as threats that will divide Nagaland further if the Naga people resist Delhi’s directives.
Let us name what this is: divide and rule. It is the same strategy the British East India Company used in every territory it administered. It is the same strategy that produced the Partition of Bengal in 1905 — reversed after mass resistance. It is the same strategy that created the administrative boundaries separating Naga communities across Nagaland, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and Assam in the first place.
The fragmentation of Naga administrative geography is not a consequence of Naga resistance. It is the instrument of Naga suppression. The answer to fragmentation is not capitulation — willing surrender and submission — to the power that fragments. It is the deepening of Naga solidarity across every administrative line that has been drawn to divide us.
The Zeliangrong people — the descendants of HaipouJadonang and Rani Gaidinliu, who resisted British and Indian domination long before NSF existed — deserve their own political aspirations. Those aspirations are not a threat to the Naga nation. They are part of it. Mall’s attempt to weaponize Zeliangrong aspirations against Naga unity reveals a fundamental ignorance of what the Naga nation actually is: not a monolith defined by Kohima, but a covenant of peoples defined by shared experience.
IX. THE SOROS SMEAR: ANATOMY OF A DELEGITIMIZATION CAMPAIGN
Near the end of his article, Mall frames Naga advocacy as the product of “anti-national forces” operating in service of the “American Deep State, Open Society Foundations of George Soros, OCCRP” and drug traffickers in the Golden Triangle.
This language did not originate in Nagaland. It is lifted wholesale from the standard BJP delegitimization template applied to every independent civil society organization, journalist, or advocacy body that challenges the Central Government’s policies in India. It was used to justify the forced closure of Amnesty International India’s offices in 2020. It was used to cancel the FCRA registrations of Greenpeace India, Lawyers Collective, and hundreds of other organizations. It is used to label every foreign funding source to an NGO as evidence of anti-national conspiracy — while foreign investment in BJP-aligned corporate entities is welcomed without comment.
The Global Naga Forum’s international advocacy is not foreign interference. It is a sovereign people exercising their right to speak to the world. The distinction between foreign interference and international solidarity is not difficult to understand. It becomes difficult only for a government that wants to suppress the latter by deliberately confusing it with the former.
Mall names the OCCRP — the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project — as a threat. The OCCRP is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism network. It has exposed corruption in governments across the world, including India. Naming it alongside drug traffickers is not analysis. It is defamation. It is the instinctive response of power to journalism that it cannot control.
X. THE 371A TRAP: MALL’S ARGUMENT AGAINST HIMSELF
Before Mall dismisses Naga customary life as a relic distorted beyond recognition, he might spend less time writing about it and more time witnessing it — because what is alive in these hills is not the carefully curated folkdance performance that Delhi photographs at Republic Day and then forgets, but something far more structurally robust and humanly complete than anything the integrationist project has managed to produce in seventy years of trying. The Naga traditional functions and authority of the clan, khel, and village derive not from any constitutional provision or administrative notification issued in New Delhi or state capitals, but from the continuously renewed consent of the people who live under them. Briefly, in Naga society, to become an atomised individual, answerable to no one, belonging to nothing larger than oneself — is not the definition of freedom. It is the definition of tragedy. The self that Hindutva holds up as aspiration is, in the Naga moral universe, a person who has lost the ecological and communal wholeness that makes life worth living.
Yes, culture moves — it is a river, not a specimen in formaldehyde. The Naga world has absorbed the missionary and the market, the smartphone and the seminary, and done what living cultures do: taken what serves it, discarded what does not, and remained, at its irreducible core, itself. What Mall calls distortion is adaptation. What he calls destruction is selection. What he calls redundancy is the ongoing, undefeated vitality of a people who have been absorbing external pressure for a century and emerging, each time, with their communal architecture intact. The corporate houses Mall wants to invite would not be entering a blank economic space cleared of inconvenient tradition. They would be entering a civilisation. And civilisations do not dissolve on administrative instruction.
Mall argues that Article 371A has become “redundant and irrelevant” because, in his framing, Naga customary law has been distorted to protect Christianity rather than indigenous practice, and because Article 371A prevents the kind of investment that would develop Nagaland.
He recommends that both Article 371A and the Inner Line Permit system be scrapped to “invite corporate houses.”
Before he makes that case, he should answer one question with his own government’s data. In fiscal year 2024–25, under a full decade of Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” programme — the most aggressive corporate courtship in independent India’s history — net FDI into India collapsed to $353 million: a 96.5% fall in a single year, the lowest figure ever recorded by the Reserve Bank of India. Foreign investors withdrew $49 billion from India in the same year they put $81 billion in. The corporate houses are not waiting for Article 371A to be scrapped. They are already leaving. Meanwhile Vietnam — which occupies the same Southeast Asian geography that is Nagaland’s natural economic neighbourhood — attracted $38.23 billion in FDI in 2024 in manufacturing alone. Vietnam did not achieve this by dismantling its people’s protections. It built connectivity, infrastructure, and sovereign economic relationships on its own terms. The answer to Nagaland’s economic future is not the destruction of its constitutional shield. It is the thing Delhi has withheld for sixty years: a direct relationship with its own geography.
Article 371A and the 1963 formation of Nagaland as a state were the instruments through which the relationship between the Naga people and the Indian Republic was given constitutional form. They were the terms of the arrangement. If those terms are now, as Mall argues, redundant — if the contract has failed on its own terms — then the 1963 arrangement is void. We return to the status that preceded it.
The status that preceded it is the one articulated by the 1929 Naga Club memorandum: our own land, managed by ourselves, according to our own customs and traditions.
Mall has made our argument for us. We are grateful. We accept the starting position he has defined. That destination is this: scrapping the Naga people’s last constitutional protection will deliver them — naked, unguarded, and stripped of every legal safeguard — into an economic wasteland that even foreign capital has decided is not worth entering. Mall is not offering the Naga people a corporate future. He is offering them dispossession without even the compensation of investment.
XI. THE NEGOTIATING TABLE DELHI CANNOT DISOWN
Mall writes as though the Naga political question is a provocation without a counterpart — as though the grievance were self-generated, the demand manufactured, the claim the product of foreign funding and bad faith. He does not reckon with what Delhi itself has done for the last three decades. He cannot afford to.
Apart from the eleven Prime Ministers who governed India between 1947 and 1991, at least five in particular were directly and deeply engaged with the Naga political question. Since 1991, six successive Prime Ministers representing every political formation that has governed the Republic have likewise chosen to sit across the table with Naga leadership and engage in negotiations. Not admonish. Not administrate. Negotiate. That is what states do when they recognise that the other party possesses standing, has a legitimate claim, and cannot simply be managed into silence. In addition, successive governments appointed four Interlocutors and two Advisors for the North East to carry this process forward. These were not peripheral figures. They were the instruments through which the Indian state formally acknowledged, across eighty rounds of talks over eighteen years, that the Naga people’s political question requires a political answer.
Mall asks how the Naga people can resist “reciprocated nationalism.” We ask him a simpler question: why did six Prime Ministers negotiate rather than simply govern? You do not negotiate with a law-and-order problem. You do not appoint four successive Interlocutors to a territorial dispute with your own citizens if those citizens are merely being difficult. You negotiate because you have recognised — in the only language that power speaks honestly — that the claim is real, the history is distinct, and the question will not dissolve on its own.
Every ceasefire agreement, every round of talks, every interlocutor’s mandate is Delhi’s own signed testimony against Mall’s argument. He cannot dismiss the Naga political position without simultaneously dismissing the judgment of every Prime Minister his own Republic has produced in the last thirty years. The Naga people did not invent their sovereignty at the negotiating table. But Delhi confirmed it there.
XII. THE WHATABOUTISM ABOUT HINDUS IN NAGALAND
Mall raises the question of “racial discrimination and killings of Hindus in Dimapur, Kohima and other parts of Nagaland” as a counter to Naga grievances about discrimination elsewhere in India.
Violence against any civilian, of any background, is wrong. If non-Naga residents of Nagaland have been subjected to violence or discrimination, that violence should be investigated and prosecuted under existing law. The GNF has never advocated for the targeting of any civilian population.
But whataboutism is not an argument. The documented pattern of violence against Nagas in mainland India — the murders of Naga students in Delhi and elsewhere, the racial abuse, the landlords who refuse rooms to people from the Northeast, the restaurant owners who turn away Naga faces — does not become less real because Mall points in the opposite direction. Two wrongs do not cancel each other. They compound to make more urgent the case for a political arrangement that removes the conditions of mutual hostility.
What Mall has inadvertently acknowledged, in raising this counter-claim, is that the integration project has not produced unity. After seventy-plus years, it has produced mutual resentment. If integration were working — if it had delivered what it promised — this resentment would not exist on either side. The failure is the integration model itself.
XIII. TO THE NAGA PEOPLE: WHAT THIS MOMENT ACTUALLY REQUIRES
Mall ends his article with a command: “Willingly or under compulsion, Nagas must reciprocate nationalism.”
“Willingly or under compulsion.” Read those words again. This is the entire sentence of Empire in eight words. It does not ask for consent. It demands an act of submission. It does not distinguish between genuine conviction and forced compliance. It wants the open mouth, the moving lips, for Vande Mataram — the visible enactment of a surrender that every Naga person in that room will know is a lie — and it wants this because a lie performed in public, under compulsion, is the oldest instrument of occupation ever devised.
Jagdamba Mall writes as an advocate of patience and compliance. He does not mention — because he cannot afford to — that the Indian government itself sat across the table from the Naga people for eighty rounds of negotiations over eighteen years, and in August 2015, in the presence of Narendra Modi himself, signed a Framework Agreement that its own interlocutor RN Ravi put his name to. That agreement, in its own language, recognised “the unique history and sovereignty of the Nagas” and spoke of “shared sovereignty” and “peaceful coexistence of two entities.” Modi called it historic. Hope was not imagined — it was signed, witnessed, and announced.
Then the RSS factor arrived. The NSCN-IM stated explicitly: “The irony is that this matter was already resolved long back but the RSS factor came in between, questioning how there can be two flags and two constitutions. The manifesto of the RSS/Hindutva sharply contradicted the principle agreement of the Framework Agreement. The actual point of delay started from here.” In August 2019, the Modi government abrogated Article 370, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its separate flag and separate constitution. Having done so, accepting the same provisions for Nagaland that had just been demolished in Kashmir was ideologically impossible. RN Ravi became the instrument of this reversal — ruling out, in a gubernatorial address in December 2020, the very demands his own signature had accommodated, and deliberately downgrading the negotiations from a political issue of Naga sovereignty to an internal law-and-order problem. The man who signed the agreement became the man who denied its contents.
This is the government whose agent, Jagdamba Mall, now demands that the Naga people sing its songs, accept its symbols, and be grateful for its groceries. The same government that signed “shared sovereignty” in 2015 and then sent the RSS to erase the words from the page now threatens jail for a closed mouth. The Naga people have not moved. Delhi has.
This is the deepest confession in Mall’s article. Because genuine nationalism — the kind that builds nations — cannot be produced by compulsion. Every political philosopher from Rousseau to Ambedkar understood this. A nation that requires coercion to sing its songs is not a confident civilization. It is a brittle one, propped up by the threat of three years in jail.
The Naga people are not brittle. We have survived sixty years of AFSPA. We have survived assassination campaigns against our political and intellectual leaders. We have survived fragmentation, manipulation, and the systematic underdevelopment of our economy. We have not survived by compliance. We have survived by the depth of our own identity — by the village republic as a model of self-governance, by the covenant that runs between our communities, by the faith that is ours by choice and not by conquest.
To the Naga youth reading this: Mall’s article is not a political argument to be feared. It is a diagnostic tool. It tells you exactly how the integrationist project thinks about you — as a raw material to be processed into “Bharatmata’s children,” or, if that fails, as a threat to be eliminated. There is no third option in his framework because his framework has no room for what you actually are: a sovereign people whose history predates the Republic that claims you, whose identity is not reducible to either militancy or compliance, and whose future is not “through Delhi” but through the full exercise of your intellectual, cultural, and political capacities on a global stage.
The answer to Mall’s threat is not rage. It is clarity. It is the kind of clarity that fills an archive, that builds an international legal case, that educates a generation, that connects the Naga hills to every other indigenous people on earth who has faced a version of this same document — this same command, dressed in the language of development, nationalism, and survival.
Justice, in the end, is not what a Supreme Court gives you. But a Supreme Court — including India’s own, as Bijoe Emmanuel demonstrated — can be made to confirm what you already know: that no state has the right to reach inside a human being’s conscience and rearrange its contents. That no song is worth three years of anyone’s life — and let that be clear: three years is not a metaphor. It is the exact prison term that the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act 1971 authorises for disrespecting the National Anthem, a penalty this government is now attempting to extend to a song that is not even the National Anthem. Three years in jail for a closed mouth. Three years taken from a student, a teacher, a parent — not for violence, not for harm caused to any human being, but for the silent, dignified refusal to invoke a goddess they do not worship. That a people who have never surrendered their political identity in seventy years of pressure are not going to surrender it for a recitation.
The Naga Hills were not empty when your Republic was born.
The Global Naga Forum (GNF) is an international advocacy organisation representing the political, civil, and human rights interests of the Naga people across Nagaland, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagas in Myanmar, and the Naga diaspora worldwide. GNF works at the intersection of indigenous rights, international law, and democratic accountability — engaging with governments, intergovernmental bodies, civil society organisations, and international media to ensure that the Naga people’s voice is heard with clarity, credibility, and consistency on the global stage. GNF is neither aligned with any armed organisation nor defined by any single political solution — it is defined by its unwavering commitment to the Naga people’s right to determine their own future by their own will, on their own terms.
KUKNALIM
Media Cell
Global Naga Forum (GNF)
