In the moments before the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, nationalists in what is now the Indian state of Nagaland declared their own region independent.Footnote ¹ The Naga claim is key to understanding postcolonial state-making in the decolonizing world because it represented the limits of what could be an independent state in an era of seeming nationalist possibility. Nagaland articulated the boundaries of national self-determination by demonstrating the practical restrictions of an international system in which national self-determination remained an aspiration rather than a right. Postcolonial state-making foreclosed the prospect of international recognition for many nationalist claimants, yet sovereignties that can only be seen outside the lens of their ruling state government persisted, even as they held conflicting claims of statehood.Footnote ²

Where Is Nagaland?

The Naga Hills are located in two different political geographies. The first is that of the Indian Northeast, which, as its modifying adjective makes clear, is an Indian concept, viewed from the perspective of New Delhi.Footnote ³ The term lumps together a host of ethno-linguistically defined peoples, territorially delineated by their relationship to “mainland” India. Some of these peoples, such as Nagas, have been categorized as a collection of tribes rather than as a nation. The term “Naga” itself was coined in British anthropologies of the late nineteenth century, while “nation” was a label certain Nagas applied to themselves.Footnote ⁴ In this geography, the Naga Hills were the ultimate frontier and a place of restricted travel under both British and Indian rule.Footnote ⁵ The region’s only national border with the mainland, the Siliguri corridor in North Bengal, is often called the “chicken’s neck,” accentuating its (Indian) national security vulnerability.Footnote ⁶ This political geography claims the Northeast as Indian and then underscores its directional difference from India’s center.

The second political geography, a Naga one, is where Nagaland lies at the junction of China, Burma, and India. The portion of Nagaland that is in Burma is sometimes described as twice the size of Naga territories in India, but the population is the other way around: in 2019, according to Naga accounts, there were approximately three million Nagas in India and approximately half a million in Myanmar.Footnote ⁷ One would not find these numbers in either India’s or Myanmar’s official statistics.Footnote ⁸ It is impossible to set an accurate number for the Naga population because the Indian census has perennially underreported this population (and Myanmar does not report it at all) and the Nagas’ own figures are vague as they do not have the mechanisms in place for carrying out a comprehensive census. More important than arriving at an accurate figure of the Naga population is understanding that the mechanisms of their ruling states are set up to miscount, and therefore discount, them.

Existing national frames obscure seemingly easy-to-establish facts such as where Nagaland is and how many Nagas there are. This strategic absence challenges notions of counted and categorized postcolonial-state citizenship.Footnote ⁹ Naga territories are spread across five political units. Their villages, even the Naga capital of Kohima, nestled in the Himalayan foothills, seem to inhabit the fold of a map – literally present but rendered invisible by the nationalist, cartographic, bounded conception of postcolonial nation-states of India and Myanmar, and elsewhere across the globe.Footnote ¹⁰

Globally, hill regions are often considered ungovernable, “uncivilized” spaces. In 1961, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India compared geographically distinct hill spaces when he proposed a “Scottish pattern of administration” for tribal regions in the Indian Northeast.Footnote ¹¹ In scholarship, James C. Scott famously (and ironically) asked, “Why cannot civilizations climb hills?” while Lauren Benton categorized mountainous regions as “primitive with the potential to become increasingly but never fully modern” in her discussion of uneven imperial geographies.Footnote ¹² Benton actively searches for sovereignty, while Scott looks for its absence, but they arrive at much the same place – with the hills as a non-state space, a geography of resistance.Footnote ¹³

Worldwide, regions seeking independence from postcolonial states laid strong claim to hallmarks of “modern civilization” such as nationalism, statehood, and, in the case of Nagas, Christianity. At the same time, these claims of modernity, of civilization, of sovereignty were rendered invisible to outsiders. From the outside world, “Where is Nagaland?” is a seemingly impossible question to answer. Therefore, for Nagas, conceptualizing a “national territory” became “an act of narration and imagination” – an act of self-determination.Footnote ¹⁴

World War and Nationalist Claims-Making

As with many peoples seeking to define their sovereignty, a set of geopolitical processes – war, religion, empire, decolonization – produced Naga nationalist claims-making. During the First World War, approximately 2,000 Nagas served in the French and Mesopotamian theaters as military laborers.Footnote ¹⁵ On their return home, some of them tried to join the British officers club in Kohima and were refused because they were not considered of the appropriate rank or race. In response, they formed the Naga Club in 1918, a proto-nationalist civil society organization.Footnote ¹⁶ A decade later in 1929, the Naga Club met with the British Simon Commission, a group of seven British Members of Parliament (no Indians) sent out to study constitutional reform for British India.Footnote ¹⁷

Indian nationalists from multiple parties reviled the Simon Commission, which denied that India had a legitimate national claim and therefore that it deserved independence. For them, the commission embodied the dominant logic of empire: that India was a collection of incompatible peoples over which Britain alone could keep the peace.Footnote ¹⁸ Both the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League refused to meet with the commission. Instead, they waved black flags at demonstrations, which the colonial police violently suppressed.Footnote ¹⁹

However, Naga nationalists, alongside other disenfranchised communities in British India, rejected the Indian nationalist interpretation of the Simon Commission as a tool of continued British imperialism.Footnote ²⁰ When Naga Club members met with the commission, they submitted a memorandum stating “that the British Government will continue to safeguard our rights against all encroachment from other people,” and that, on British withdrawal, Nagas “should not be thrust to the mercy of other people … but to leave us alone to determine ourselves.”Footnote ²¹ In Naga nationalist accounts, this meeting with the Simon Commission served as the point of origin for the public articulation of the Naga nationalist claim.Footnote ²² As a result, the Simon Commission became a source of legitimacy for Naga nationalism. While there is debate on how many Naga Club members had served in the First World War, the Naga nationalist narrative drew a causal chain from the Nagas’ return from war, to their racial exclusion from the British officers’ club, to the formation of the Naga Club, to the Memorandum to the Simon Commission.Footnote ²³ Like many nationalist narratives, this one wields mythic power rather than strict accuracy. The Naga Club’s 1929 petition to the Simon Commission remains a founding sovereign document.

The overlapping interactions between indigenous claim, colonial encounter, and neighboring (Indian) majoritarian nationalism that conceptualized Nagas as not “appropriately” Indian shaped the critical geopolitics of Naga nationalist claims-making. This call for sovereignty in the hills was a response to and repudiation of the sovereignty of “mainland” India, which had been created by a partition that decoupled the Northeast from what had been a united Bengal in Eastern India. The “chicken’s neck” link to the mainland could always be snapped, making the Northeast both a place of perpetual insecurity from the perspective of New Delhi and of ambiguously belonging to the rest of India. Several years after the Nagas’ 1929 Memorandum to the Simon Commission, in 1936 the British declared the Naga Hills to be an “excluded area,” which meant that it would be administered by the governor of Assam rather than from New Delhi – attenuating the chain of authority that connected the region to its ruling government.

Excluded area or not, Nagaland became central rather than peripheral to international relations when the armies of the Second World War invaded the region. It is not accidental that the political geography of Nagaland as the junction of China, Burma, and India shares a name with the China-Burma-India theater of the Second World War. In 1944, the Allied forces – the British colonial army made up of South Asian, West African, and East African troops, with US air support flying out of Calcutta and engineers running the railways through Assam – halted the Japanese march westward at the Battles of Kohima (the Naga capital) and Imphal (137 kilometers from Kohima, down a rough road in neighboring Manipur).Footnote ²⁴ The violent presence of foreign troops, airplanes, and trains transformed a region that the British Raj had left purposely undeveloped since it was cheaper and easier to govern with a light footprint.Footnote ²⁵ Notably, few Nagas officially fought in that war, though many joined partisan units; only one is buried in the Commonwealth War Cemetery in Kohima. And not all Nagas chose the Allied side, since the Japanese actively courted Asian anticolonial nationalists within the British Empire.Footnote ²⁶

After the Japanese captured Rangoon in March 1942, they advanced into Burma, cutting off Allied supply lines to China. The defeated British and American command ordered a retreat into India in May 1942. Indians living in Burma, if they could not afford to leave by boat, walked nearly 1,500 kilometers to Northeast India, through Naga territories. Their slow and unprovisioned passage meant that they often needed aid from Naga villagers. Following the Japanese victory in Burma, the British rebuilt its army in the Northeast, while American forces regrouped and turned their attention to China, using long-range penetration units in Burma to reopen supply routes.

Frustrated by the continued Allied control of supply routes into China, the Japanese decided to brave the difficult jungle and mountainous terrain and invade India. Catching the British off guard, Japanese troops laid siege to Kohima and its surrounding villages in early April 1944; the battle dragged on until June. From a Naga perspective, the battle involved the Japanese capturing villages that the British then relieved; forced and voluntary civilian population removals; and the employment of many as laborers, interpreters, and partisan fighters.Footnote ²⁷ Eventually, with superior airpower and fierce fighting, the British colonial army drove the Japanese out of Kohima in late June. During a similar time period (March–early July 1944), the Japanese attacked and laid siege to Imphal in neighboring Manipur – approximately a two-day march south from Kohima – and eventually were defeated and retreated from that city.

A poll conducted by the British National Army Museum named the Battles of Kohima and Imphal as Britain’s greatest victory, more significant than either Waterloo or the Normandy landings – yet the battles do not loom large in histories of the Second World War because of their location.Footnote ²⁸ Mirroring international perceptions of the region in which they fought, the British colonial army, officially the Fourteenth Army, was nicknamed the “Forgotten Army.”Footnote ²⁹ The trope of a forgotten army, a forgotten war, and a forgotten region haunts the political geography of Nagaland. Of course, the armies, wars, and territory are never forgotten or unknown to those who live there and those who fought there. However, the formation of that trope was not accidental. It was produced both by a departing empire that strategically forgot its past responsibility and violence and by a new ruling government that had its own ambivalent relationship with the Second World War – a war that split India’s independence movement: some sat it out in prison, while others allied with the Japanese.

Not only did some Indian nationalists, such as Indian National Army leader Subhas Chandra Bose, ally with Japan, but the Nagas’ most prominent nationalist leader, Angami Zapu Phizo, did so as well. Phizo was a member of the Angami tribe from Khonoma village, in the Kohima region. The Angamis of Khonoma had held off the British twice, in 1847 and 1879, so Phizo embodied a nationalist call of historic resistance.Footnote ³⁰ Growing up, he held a leadership role within his peer group before he left for school in Kohima.Footnote ³¹ After receiving an English-language education from US missionaries, he became a traveling insurance and Bible salesman, working on commission for US and British firms based in Calcutta.Footnote ³² Finding it difficult to make a living in Nagaland, Phizo relocated with most of his immediate family to Rangoon, Burma.Footnote ³³ There, he made contact with Japanese intelligence, which sought to use indigenous anti-imperialist sentiment against Western empires to garner local allies on their march into India.Footnote ³⁴ In Burma, Phizo “was very active in politics … He was with the Japanese army and he was with Netaji, Subhas Chandra Bose.”Footnote ³⁵ “Netaji” as well as “many Japanese officers” visited the Phizo family regularly in their Rangoon home during the war.Footnote ³⁶ Phizo’s own movements during the Second World War – whether he fought with the Japanese, or with the Indian National Army led by Subhas Chandra Bose, or at all – are not clear. He was ambivalent about Bose’s end game (Indian independence) and worried about how much space an independent India would have for an independent Nagaland: “[Phizo] could not escape entirely the man’s charisma and boundless energy, but he refrained from joining the cries of Jai Hind whenever and wherever Bose appeared.”Footnote ³⁷

The Indian National Army–Japanese alignment affected how the Naga question was understood in India. In 1961, the Department of Tribal Areas for the State of Assam (which administered the Naga Hills) believed “that the Nagas were still worshipping the ideals of Netaji [Bose].” Indeed, “Netaji’s appearance at this critical time would have solved the [Naga] problem” by giving the Indian government a representative who would have been a trusted authority in the Naga Hills.Footnote ³⁸ This belief in Subhas Chandra Bose as someone who would “solve the [Naga] problem” is more a symptom of Indian misunderstanding of Naga allegiances than an accurate assessment of Bose’s past influence on Naga politics. Given Phizo’s wariness of Netaji even when they shared the goal of driving the British out, it is unlikely that the latter’s presence would have enabled Nagas to trust the Indian government. Yet the Tribal Areas Department’s revisiting of the Second World War show how the legacies of the “forgotten” war were never themselves forgotten – or, were forgotten only by those who had a vested interest in doing so.

World war globalized the Naga Hills but did not lift the trope of invisibility from the region. There is a concerted effort in Nagaland today to memorialize the Second World War and to celebrate the efforts of Nagas who supported the British.Footnote ³⁹ The Kohima battlefield cemetery functions as a pilgrimage site for British veterans and, therefore, as an international portal for Naga claims-making. Descendants of veterans, often from rural British villages traveling to a non-Western country for the first time, are met by delegations of Nagas who ask, Why did you abandon us to India? Caught off guard, some of these British visitors respond that the United States made them leave before they were ready.Footnote ⁴⁰ Even this simplification of the tensions between US and British concerns that accelerated Indian independence show the continued presence of postimperial links.Footnote ⁴¹ Affective ties remained strong between individual Nagas and the Westerners who were intermediaries between them and the Allied forces. These ties, which are explored in depth in Chapter 2, did not necessarily translate into international support for Naga independence, but they provided the foundations of international advocacy on behalf of the Naga nationalist claim.

Mission and Nation

Alongside world war, Christian conversion connected the “excluded area” of the Naga Hills to a wider, global community. The Indian state of Nagaland in recent times is nearly 90 percent Christian and 75 percent Baptist.Footnote ⁴² Percentagewise, it is the most Baptist “state” in the world, followed by the US state of Mississippi.Footnote ⁴³ From 1868 onward, a small group of American Baptists sparked outsized rates of conversion and English-language education in the region. Nagaland is the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society’s great success story, though it is important to note that most Naga conversion occurred in the years after Indian independence, when American missionaries left the region. Being invaded by armies and bombed from the sky may have made many Nagas more receptive to a religious intervention.

In addition, the rise of Naga nationalist claims-making increased the value of a Christian identity that contrasted with stereotypical Hindu Indian-ness.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the years between the Simon Commission (1929) and Indian independence (1947), American missionaries continued to convert Nagas and teach English, particularly those who lived in the Kohima district and sought jobs as translators for the British colonial authorities.Footnote ⁴⁵ George Supplee, a missionary schoolmaster in Kohima, had a printing press at the school on which the Naga Club printed their English-language newssheet, the Naga Nation, starting in the mid-1940s. Earlier, in the 1930s, they had printed a newssheet in Tenyidie, the Angami language, on Supplee’s press.Footnote ⁴⁶

The independent Indian government disliked the activities of American missionaries, which they correctly saw as a source of global connections for Nagas that short-circuited India, but incorrectly viewed as supportive of Naga nationalism. The government selectively refused to renew visas of missionaries departing for home leave, arguing that they undermined Naga loyalty to the Indian Union. Therefore, by 1953, there were no more American missionaries in the Naga Hills, and the American Baptist Convention transferred church leadership to indigenous clergy.Footnote ⁴⁷

The most successful Naga Baptist missionary was Longri Ao, born in Mokokchung in northern Nagaland in 1906. Longri’s life and work contrast with the Naga nationalist narrative promulgated by Phizo and his supporters. Back in 1930, Longri pondered how the Lord’s “ministry of reconciliation,” which extended to all men – including “the British” – could align with the Indian independence movement’s call for political separation from imperial rule.Footnote ⁴⁸ This was not necessarily a resolvable question; rather, it was one that demonstrated how Christian beliefs and networks distanced Nagas from the mainstream Indian independence movement. Longri studied and taught at the Baptist Bible School in Jorhat Assam from 1930 to 1950, then spent seventeen years as a Baptist missionary to the Konyak Nagas in Northern Nagaland and the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), where he converted over 10,000 people; he also traveled extensively in the United States.Footnote ⁴⁹ He eventually headed the Nagaland Baptist Church Council and had credibility as a successful missionary who “sought to make the private and public life of the largely Christian Nagaland state a testimony to the power of Christ.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Under Longri’s leadership, the Nagaland Baptist Church Council became a powerful institution in the region, though it remained wary about New Delhi’s perception of it as potentially disloyal to the Indian government. In spite of their historic ties, American Baptists were hesitant to bring young Nagas to the United States for education.Footnote ⁵¹ In the early 1950s, they had helped Vichazelie (Challe) Iralu, a nephew of Phizo, go to Chicago for study, under the assumption that he would become a doctor and return home to serve his people. Instead, he remained in the United States, became an epidemiologist, and provided funding for Phizo’s endeavors. Afterward, American Baptists only brought Nagas, such as Longri, over to the United States for short-term theological training and were adamant that they return home.Footnote ⁵²

American Baptist heritage connected Nagas to a wider global community. Christianity provided a powerful modernizing discourse, legible to the Western world, that linked Nagas to wider global networks. However, fearful of New Delhi’s wrath, the Naga Baptist Church did not directly support Naga nationalist claims-making.Footnote ⁵³

Language and education are important tools of conversion and nation-making.Footnote ⁵⁴ Missionary education policies provided many Nagas with the ability to speak, read, and write in English.Footnote ⁵⁵ Naga nationalists produced masses of field notes and atrocity lists, typed up in English on a typewriter that the insurgents had with them in the jungle during the first decade of insurgency (1954–1964).Footnote ⁵⁶ These lists were written to be circulated to Western audiences, secretly handed to some of the few journalists who were allowed in the region, given to Indian and Western advocates whom Nagas used in their pursuit of independence, and published in Naga histories.

While these documents may include elements of British colonial bureaucratic organization, they also correspond to Naga traditions of reciting detailed family genealogies in the form of oral lists.Footnote ⁵⁷ Naga nationalism worked with and adapted the elements at hand – the geography of the Naga Hills as both an excluded area and a strategic junction; the experience of empire, war, Christian conversion, and English-language education. These elements formed the critical geopolitics of sovereignty in the hills, posing a critique of the international legal structures of decolonization that recognized some people-territorial matches as sovereign states, but not others.

Tribe, Constitution, and Categorization

The sovereign document of postcolonial India, its constitution, includes a list or schedule of castes and tribes who have specialized relationships to the Indian state. On their political incorporation into India, Nagas were broken down into a series of tribes – Angami (Phizo’s tribe), Ao, Konyak, Lotha, Rengma, etc. – and were not listed as Nagas. When the Naga Hills became the Indian state of Nagaland in 1963, it did so under Article 371a of the constitution, which gave it special status: non-Naga Indians cannot legally own land in most of Nagaland; when they travel there, they must apply for an Inner Line Permit (a holdover from Nagaland’s colonial past), and foreigners must register with the police.Footnote ⁵⁸

The term “Naga Nation” predated Indian independence and contrasted with the notion of Nagas as a premodern “tribal” people.Footnote ⁵⁹ Imperial rulers defined Nagas (as well as Pashtuns in Afghanistan or American Indians)Footnote ⁶⁰ as a “tribe” rather than a “nation” in order to legitimize their conquest. In North America, as imperial expansion hardened into settler colonialism, American Indian nations also came to be termed “tribes,” diminishing their political status.Footnote ⁶¹ Globally, rendering peoples into tribes subordinated them within the colonial expansionist and postcolonial consolidation projects. In the Indian context, a Naga nation escaped the structures of caste in a Hindu-dominated society and rejected the Indian constitutional category of “tribe,” with its connotations of colonial anthropological classification.Footnote ⁶² The concept of “nation” also linked Nagas to the idea of a biblically chosen people, such as the Hebrew nation of Israel.Footnote ⁶³

In Northeast India, the term “tribe” was a marker of difference that could indicate either subordination or separation, depending on the perspective. Some Nagas as well as other Northeastern ethnic groups embraced aspects of tribal categorization and identity for their own goals. For instance, a slogan for Mizo nationalists in nearby Mizoram, another Northeastern region, declared: “Long live Tribal Unity, We want [a] Hill State, We want [an] Eastern Frontier State, Down with Traitors, Separation is the only Salvation.”Footnote ⁶⁴

While the concept of a Naga (Christian) nation occupies the political geography of a Nagaland as a strategic junction, the categorization of Nagas as “a collection of tribes” who inhabit India’s Northeast not only defined them in early-twentieth-century anthropological monographs but also in the Indian constitution. Verrier Elwin, a British anthropologist who took Indian citizenship after independence, became Prime Minister Nehru’s advisor for the North East Frontier Agency and advised on the special provisions for the scheduled tribes’ section of the Indian constitution.Footnote ⁶⁵ He believed that the tribal areas of the Northeast should be kept separate from the rest of India so that tribal peoples could be slowly modernized and Indianized in the “right” way, and lured away from what he perceived as their racial affinity with China and affective sympathy with the British Empire.

Just as the term “tribe” can cut in two different directions, and just as there are two dueling narratives of the Simon Commission as well as two distinct political geographies for Nagaland, there are also two different sets of scholarship on modern Nagaland, “modern,” meaning after the Anglo-American colonial and missionary encounter and its consequent defining, categorizing, ruling, and writing about the region. One body of scholarship is that of empire. The second is that of nationalist claims-making. Interestingly, until relatively recently few “mainland” Indian scholars studied the Naga region. Decades of violence do not produce an accessible research site, and India’s own historiographical nation-building project required writing Nagaland out of India rather than into it.Footnote ⁶⁶

British colonial officials and anthropologists (who were sometimes also colonial officials) and American Baptist missionaries either wrote about Nagaland or were the central subjects of the imperial works of scholarship. They were also the men and women “on the spot” when the Japanese invaded during the Second World War. As mentioned earlier, missionary George Supplee ran an army hospital, the Kohima school, and the printing press used for Naga newssheets. Anthropologist Ursula Graham Bower Betts led a Naga reconnaissance unit. Colonial administrator Charles Pawsey liaised with the British colonial army and the Naga population, drafting native translators and laborers. The reporting, correspondence, and monographs of Bower Betts, Pawsey, Supplee, and their colleagues shaped how Westerners understood Nagas in the subsequent decades. Early-twentieth-century anthropology defined Nagas as premodern head-hunters, uncivilized tribal peoples in a forgotten corner of the world – residents of Zomia, the borderlands regions of Upland Southeast Asia, before the term was coined.Footnote ⁶⁷ This imperial scholarship also came to shape elements of Nagas’ own sense of history. On the shelves of nearly all libraries in the region, in many homes, and even at certain Nagaland state government promotion events, one finds copies of these anthropological texts, which have maintained continued relevance, even as they become dated.

The second dominant, documented set of scholarship for understanding Nagaland has been written by Nagas themselves, particularly those who engaged in the nationalist struggle and its concomitant peace negotiations. These writings are based on personal records from the Naga nationalist movement (many of which are included in the source base for States-in-Waiting) but do not always conform to Western-discipline modes of history writing – they are not necessarily linear in narrative nor do they have extensive citations.Footnote ⁶⁸ Their primary audience has been an internal Naga one, even as they were written in an effort to “get the story out.” What historical narrative gains the largest public and expert acceptance? Frequently, that which produces the easiest-to-read sources. Nagas themselves know this, which is why these books are written in English and include large appendices of historical documents. The same geopolitical and epistemological orders that make “Where is Nagaland?” and “What is the population of Nagas?” seemingly impossible questions to answer are mirrored in the marginalization of these histories. Since they deal with a political geography that centers on Naga sovereignty and Indian “colonialism,” they do not tell stories that a non-Naga audience is easily equipped to comprehend; they are also often self-published and collaboratively written.Footnote ⁶⁹ The results of this marginalization – being strategically forgotten, being rendered invisible – are characteristics shared with its subject, but these books are not notes from Zomia. They articulate an indigenous claim of sovereignty that began in contact with, and in the conquest by, Western empire.

Struggle for Independence

For all the contestation surrounding their status within India, Naga nationalists are emphatic about what they are not – a secessionist movement – because Phizo’s political party, the Naga National Council, declared independence on August 14, 1947, the day before India gained its independence.Footnote ⁷⁰ The Naga National Council made its declaration to the United Nations (UN), in a telegram that is often reprinted in Naga nationalist document collections. Naga nationalists allege that they received a return telegram from the UN acknowledging that the international institution had received their declaration of independence.Footnote ⁷¹ In this narrative, the receipt – now lost – provided literal international recognition. Over time, loss of that receipt became an emblem for the tragic outcome of their struggle, of the United Nations’ deliberate ignorance of their existence, and of Nagas’ own failure to keep their claim safe from internal dissent.

In late June 1947, before both declarations of independence, the governor of Assam, Akbar Hydari, signed a nine-point accord with the Naga National Council. The agreement gave administration of the Naga Hills to the National Council, promoted the aspiration of bringing “all Nagas” in all territories “under one unified administrative” unit, and allowed for both sides to revisit the agreement in ten years.Footnote ⁷² Naga nationalists believed that the opportunity to revisit the Hydari Accord after a decade meant that India would respect Naga independence at that later date. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru did not read the Hydari Accord in that manner and never officially approved the agreement, which occurred before he was prime minister. In Naga nationalist narratives, the Hydari Accord joined the Memorandum to the Simon Commission and the missing UN telegram receipt in their collection of founding documents that provide validation for their claim.

Angami Zapu Phizo (narrowly) won the presidency of the Naga National Council in 1948 because many Nagas were frustrated with the Indian government’s rejection of the Hydari accord. Alongside Phizo, the Council’s secretary was Theyiechüthie Sakhrie, editor of the Naga Nation, who had attended university in Calcutta. Then in his early twenties, Sakhrie played the more moderate (or realistic) intellectual to Phizo’s nationalist firebrand; from different clans, they were both Angami Nagas from Khonoma Village.Footnote ⁷³

Under Phizo’s leadership, the Naga National Council held a plebiscite in May 1951, in which Nagas unanimously rejected the Indian Union.Footnote ⁷⁴ Phizo traveled throughout the Naga Hills, drumming up support for an independent Nagaland. On a 1952 visit to Kütsapomi village in southern Nagaland, he emphasized Christianity, sovereignty, and education as the interlocking platform that supported Naga nationalism.Footnote ⁷⁵ He also often discussed economic and material conservation as an important aspect in preserving Naga patrimony. For instance, he argued that bars of soap – an expensive, imported item – should be cut into strips and stored vertically, so that they did not needlessly dissolve in water and become mushy and useless.Footnote ⁷⁶ Here, soap became an emblem for a rare, precious necessity that Nagas needed to preserve and guard, like their sovereignty. Phizo repeatedly preached national unity and resource conservation.Footnote ⁷⁷

In 1952, due to the success of Phizo’s campaigning, Nagas boycotted the first Indian general election, refusing to be counted as Indian; in many Nagas’ view, their refusal to vote made the application of the election results to the Naga Hills inherently undemocratic. After a joint visit of Nehru and U Nu of Burma to Kohima in 1953 (Nagas were banned from presenting petitions and therefore boycotted the event), Phizo turned to violence, threatening the physical safety of Nagas who worked for the Indian government.Footnote ⁷⁸ As a result, the Indian government suspended rule of law in the Naga Hills and sent in the military, deploying approximately 40,000 troops.Footnote ⁷⁹ In response, Phizo formed a rebel government, declaring the region the “People’s Republic of Nagaland” (later renamed the “Federal Government of Nagaland”). He also established the Naga Home Guard to fight the Indian army, while the Naga National Council remained the nationalist political party.

Neither the war in the Naga Hills nor politics within the National Council went Phizo’s way. Throughout the 1950s, the Indian government forcibly relocated the villages of his (alleged) supporters, with tactics reminiscent both of the British “villagization” processes used during the concurrent Malayan Emergency and Nehru’s forced relocation of communities following the Indian annexation of Hyderbad in South India in 1948.Footnote ⁸⁰ For many Nagas, these violations also called to mind the Japanese army’s invasion of their villages during the Second World War.Footnote ⁸¹ And within the Naga National Council itself, Sakhrie, who was willing to seek an accommodation with India, and Phizo fell out. In January 1956, Sakhrie was assassinated, allegedly on Phizo’s orders. Subsequently that year, after losing control of his struggle against both the Indian government and Sakhrie’s allies within the nationalist movement, Phizo left the Naga Hills, walking approximately 750 kilometers to East Pakistan, where he remained for four years.

From East Pakistan, Phizo sought external alliances and international attention. A 1958 field report written by Captain Perhicha Meyasetsu of the Naga Home Guard focused on the need to gain international visibility: “We requested [the Pakistanis] to help us to send abroad [lists of] Indian atrocities and [descriptions of] our tribulations to the wide world.” Perhicha wrote that they had asked the Pakistanis to “send out these papers through their Ambassadors.” From Pakistani intelligence, Nagas “received some confidential news … that the UNO had accepted our appeals, [knew about] Indian atrocities and our announcement [of independence]” and was going to consider it. The institution would “also send some Observers” to Nagaland.Footnote ⁸² The United Nations did not respond to Naga nationalist appeals nor send in observers, but this report communicated how Naga nationalists wanted the UN to act; its reference to “Observers” may have been a wishful comparison to Kashmir, where there has been a UN observer mission since 1949. Even given Pakistan’s aid in disseminating the atrocity lists, these lists had remarkable circulation for a nationalist movement that did not control its own mail delivery – though they never generated the recognition of a UN observer mission or committee hearing.

Captain Perhicha’s report continued, noting that the Nagas had “learned that one Britisher named Mr. Graham Green[e] a journalist was arrested at Kuda (Dimapur) when he was coming to explore our country in 1956.”Footnote ⁸³ It is unlikely that Greene, who crisscrossed the globe, actually traveled to India, let alone to the Northeast, in 1956, though he was planning an overland journey to China via the Soviet Union in that year.Footnote ⁸⁴ However, he had a global following as a critic of imperial wars against nationalist movements, particularly in Vietnam and Cuba. His novel The Quiet American (1955) eviscerated US covert intervention in the then-French war in Indochina, and he supported Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolution (1953–1959). The invocation of Greene linked Naga nationalism to a wider set of anticolonial nationalist liberation movements, particularly in Southeast Asia. This fit how Nagas themselves saw their struggle: as one of many torches in the “ring of fire burning all along the tropics.”Footnote ⁸⁵

With Phizo in Pakistan, Nehru reached out to Phizo’s Naga opponents. According to Naga nationalist accounts, this was not the first time Nehru had attempted to co-opt Naga leadership. During the dueling declarations of independence in August 1947, Nehru allegedly gave Phizo the signed blank check, asking him to name his price.Footnote ⁸⁶ In Naga nationalist retelling of this encounter, Phizo refused to be bought off. However, other Nagas chose otherwise – not necessarily (or not only) for monetary reasons, but also because they wanted to make the best deal they could with the means they had. In time, the Indian government attempted to cut Phizo out of the political equation completely by negotiating an agreement with his political opponents.

How some degree of Naga autonomy would interact with the Indian constitution and linguistic-nationalist movements throughout India – particularly in contiguous Assam – was New Delhi’s primary concern. These questions had dangerous repercussions for both Naga moderates and the Indian government. In July 1960, the Naga People’s Convention, a group of moderates under the leadership of Dr. Imkongliba Ao, negotiated a sixteen-point agreement with Nehru. This group, opponents of Phizo’s, made a trade: instead of independence, Nagas would have a Naga state within the Indian Union.Footnote ⁸⁷ Critics of Nehru argued that the creation of an Indian Naga state emboldened and exacerbated separatist demands throughout India, particularly elsewhere in the Northeast.Footnote ⁸⁸ A year later, in August 1961, militant Naga nationalists assassinated Imkongliba Ao as he returned home from his medical clinic in Mokokchung, northern Nagaland.

While the agreement did establish a Naga state in India, Nehru refused to budge on the constitutional categorization of “tribe” as well as on Naga “integration” – the incorporation of all Naga territories (in Assam, NEFA, Manipur, and Burma) into one political unit, which had been discussed in the Hydari Accord.Footnote ⁸⁹ From Nehru’s perspective, these demands were too destabilizing to Indian domestic and regional security dynamics to even begin to address. However, leaving them out of the July 1960 sixteen-point agreement between the Naga People’s Convention and the Indian government undermined the possibility of a lasting, peaceful settlement.

Interestingly, like his Naga nationalist opponents, Nehru saw the Naga claim through the lens of global decolonization. He wrote to Bimala Prasad Chaliha, the chief minister of Assam, suggesting that the Naga Hills needed the “largest possible autonomy” because any other attitude “will be contrary to what is happening in Africa.”Footnote ⁹⁰ “New States, big and small – and some very small – are appearing on the scene every few weeks as independent States. We support them and encourage them. We cannot therefore, oppose full autonomy” for the Naga Hills, he wrote. However, in spite of the need to show the world that India supported self-determination, he said that Nagaland would be part of India – but it would be a “special type of State” within the Indian Union.Footnote ⁹¹ “Naturally,” he said, “[Naga] autonomy will be limited because of law and other conditions.”Footnote ⁹² For security reasons, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958, which placed the territory under martial law, continued to apply (as it does as of this writing); and New Delhi administered Nagaland through the Ministry of External Affairs rather than the Home Ministry until 1972 – even as India categorized the Naga question as a “domestic,” rather than an international, concern.

For the Indian government, the debates surrounding the creation of a Naga state in India were Indian political affairs. The issues of Sikh and Tamil nationalisms, linguistic movements throughout the country, particularly in neighboring Assam, as well as labor unrest in central India framed Nehru’s negotiations with the Naga People’s Convention.Footnote ⁹³ In Nehru’s declassified correspondence, during the summer of 1960, when he was articulating the prospects and limits of an Indian Naga state, the issue of Goa in Western India was not prominent. In Goa, India supported the nationalists against Portuguese empire and invaded a year later, making Goa an Indian Union territory (rather than a state). For Nehru, Goa was an international issue that needed to be made Indian, while Nagaland was an Indian issue that needed to escape international attention.

Obviously, the Naga question was a decolonization issue for Naga nationalists, who sought independence and international recognition. Less obviously, the context of global decolonization also framed the Naga question for the Indian prime minister, who had the most at stake in labeling the Naga claim a “domestic concern.” Nehru was the person who had to deal with the fallout of creating a Naga “special state” within a country riddled with many other claims of difference or separateness, as he called India’s “fissiparous tendencies.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Against this background of Indian instability, Nehru decided to create an Indian Naga state in order to undermine the Naga claim to national independence and to pacify the territory. He did so while attempting to demonstrate his ostensible support for national liberation on the decolonizing African continent – being careful to separate the Naga claim from that of anticolonial nationalism.

Conclusion

Within postcolonial India, Nagas posed a fundamental challenge to state authority. They were the “mother of all insurgencies” and the first nationalist movement within the country to declare independence.Footnote ⁹⁵ Over time, the “special-ness” of the Indian Naga state and the “exceptionalness” of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act were extended to other regions, particularly Kashmir and elsewhere in the Northeast, making Indian Nagaland a template for how the Indian government could deal with its unruly pieces. Outside of India, Nagas are one of many “tribal” or Fourth World peoples whose existence and political mobilization threaten not only empires but also both settler colonial and postcolonial states.Footnote ⁹⁶ They likewise challenge Cold War ideological and developmentalist orders of so-called First, Second, and Third Worlds. Asking “Where is Nagaland?” in the process of global decolonization is not only asking a question about Nagas themselves. It is asking a question that makes visible the many nested claims within, and obscured by, each and every demand for national liberation.

During global decolonization, the international community – the United Nations, the United States, the Soviet Union, dissolving European empires, and new postcolonial states – came to recognize and therefore legitimize one slice of nationalist claims-making as legitimately “national” and capable of becoming postcolonial nation-states. This process led to difficult queries: “Whose nationalism is legitimate?” “What is the “correct” political unit (i.e., nation) deserving of independence?” The sovereign recognition provided by a postcolonial, state-based international order was built upon national liberation for some and the subsequent exclusion of others, such as Nagas.

Naga nationalist claims-making had a specific history derived from Nagas’ geographic location, imperial confrontation, missionary encounter, and wartime experiences, as well as their anthropological and Indian constitutional categorization. At the same time, the Naga claim is emblematic of the general challenge states-in-waiting posed to the international community as decolonization transformed international order, revising and then entrenching hierarchies of power. Peoples such as Nagas were forgotten and ignored because international attention directed toward them would have upset the balance of decolonization. Recognition of the Naga claim, its critical geopolitics, and that of other similar claims made by “marginal” or “minority” peoples would have redrawn the postcolonial map in ways that the international legal order and emergent postcolonial nation-states desperately and successfully sought to avoid.

Angami Zapu Phizo himself understood the weakness of a sovereign claim when virtually no one outside of a region realizes it exists; he left Nagaland in order to place his case before an international, Western audience. The following chapter features the networks of advocacy that connected Naga nationalist claims-making to international politics, and Phizo’s efforts to mobilize them. Yet these networks – which included some of the same missionaries and anthropologists who had spent their careers in the Naga Hills under empire – were imperial remnants rather than catalysts for subsequent decolonizations.

Phizo left Nagaland so that Naga nationalist claims-making could utilize international advocacy to confront the structural limits of an international system in which national self-determination did not become, in practice, a universal right. This tactic was emblematic of nationalist claims-making throughout the postcolonial world – with the African continent the epicenter of these upheavals in the early 1960s. The United Nations’ 1945 Charter, its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and its 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and People all focused on the rights of states and the rights of individuals within states. None of these structuring documents addressed “the rights of peoples who did not happen to be in the mainstream of, or [reject the] control of, a state” – such as Nagas.Footnote ⁹⁷ In the words of David Maybury-Lewis, an indigenous-rights activist who supported Naga claims-making, as well as an anthropologist of Latin America, born to a family of imperial civil servants in British India and therefore intimately familiar with this conundrum through professional advocacy, scholarly expertise, and family heritage: “It is the lack of correspondence between states and peoples … or between states and nations … that is the difficulty.” International institutions “have so systematically [yet] unsuccessfully attempted to suppress these units of identity” since they destabilize their member states.Footnote ⁹⁸

The place of minority peoples in new postcolonial states presented the international community with a quandary: if national liberation presumed that dependent peoples deserve self-rule, what should the world’s response be to peoples within newly independent states who demanded political autonomy? In order to move their claims onto the international stage and win the support they required, nationalist claimants – on the African continent, in India, and elsewhere across the globe – had to find and work with advocates outside their communities.

In 1960, Angami Zapu Phizo, the most prominent nationalist leader of the Naga people who claimed independence from India, journeyed to London in search of such advocacy in order to generate global support for the Naga cause. The history of internationalized Naga nationalist claims-making emerges through the complex of correspondence, journeys, identities, and friendships that made possible Phizo’s journey to London. These advocates were faced with the disquieting question of states-in-waiting within the solidifying borders of newly independent states, peoples who may have, at times, seen little difference between the ambiguous “protection” of empire and the direct control of national government. Because nationalist claimants from these “forgotten” regions of the world were virtually unknown to global publics, advocates used newspapers to disseminate narratives to intended and unintended audiences, at times conflating reporting and advocacy. The attempt to internationalize the Naga claim illuminated the issue of minority peoples within postcolonial states at the height of nationalist possibility in the early 1960s. The tenuous route the Naga claim traveled also revealed the fragile limits of this process.

The advocates who populate Phizo’s journey – in their roles as gatekeepers and with their connections to resources and to the press – were involved in many other political struggles. They made repeated analogies to the Algerian War, to Katanga’s secession from newly independent Congo-Leopoldville, to white settler colonial rule (of apartheid South Africa, South West Africa, and the Rhodesias), painting a picture of connected conflict in the decolonizing world and of the limits of the United Nations institution as the forum for handling such conflict. However, while these advocates celebrated decolonization and national liberation in much of the African continent, the political question of “minority” peoples trapped within newly independent states posed a significant challenge for those who had supported Indian independence and joined the global anti-apartheid movement.

Updating the “Minority Question” for the 1960s

The situation of the Nagas within postcolonial India, the efforts by their leader Angami Zapu Phizo to gain international advocacy and recognition for their nationalist claims, and the subsequent reporting on the Nagas’ situation by Western newspapers brought global attention to the issue of “minority” peoples within postcolonial states. Inspired by the Naga question, in the fall of 1960 – a year when fourteen African countries became independent and the year that Phizo traveled to London seeking international assistance – the British anti-apartheid activist Reverend Michael Scott wrote the following opinion piece in the Observer newspaper:

The piece had a far-flung circulation even among interested peoples without an Observer subscription, as copies independently found their way into archival collections in Dimapur, Nagaland, and in Windhoek, Namibia.Footnote ² In his op-ed, Scott pinpointed the limits of the United Nations both as an institution and as a system of international order. The UN institution, meant the bureaucracy set up in 1945 in San Francisco, while the UN system of international order, referred to the political organization of the postwar world reshuffled by decolonization and frozen by the Cold War.

There were extensive differences between the place of minority and/or dependent peoples in the League of Nations before the Second World War compared to their place in the United Nations, its successor institution.Footnote ³ The League of Nations created and administered two international oversight regimes: the minority protections system for Eastern Europe and the mandate system for the former Ottoman and German empires. Petitioning played a central role in both oversight regimes. The minority protections system provided a form of redress short of national recognition for minority populations within fourteen “new” Eastern European states. The mandate system looked outside of Europe. It was the “first effort to begin the radical project of transforming colonial territories into sovereign states,”Footnote ⁴ though not until the peoples living in those territories were “ready.”Footnote ⁵ Petitions (and the right to petition) were controversial and restricted in scope and language.Footnote ⁶ Petitions could be brought forward by individuals or groups, interested third parties, or the peoples themselves.

Since South West Africa had been a League of Nations mandate, the UN Committee on South West Africa was a vestige from the League that made its way into the UN. With this important exception, the post-1945 United Nations got rid of the League petitioning processes, which is one reason why the UN system can be considered a more restrictive international-legal regime than that of the League.Footnote ⁷ Therefore, circumnavigating these limitations required political savvy and gave well-connected, concerned individuals such as Reverend Scott a role in helping nationalist claimants maneuver through the interstices, the unregulated spaces, of international politics.

Nagas had been seeking United Nations intervention since Indian independence in 1947, sending letters directly to the UN Security Council and to national delegations at the UN.Footnote ⁸ Many of the letters never left India, since the Indian government attempted to control the information flow in and out of the Naga Hills.Footnote ⁹ Those that reached their designated state government or United Nations correspondent were ignored. In 1956, the Naga leader Phizo went into voluntary exile in East Pakistan as a tactical bid to fight international unresponsiveness, to put a face and a voice behind the Naga cause, and to reach a wider Western audience in order to make them know and care about what was happening in Nagaland. In contrast to international ignorance and apathy about that region, Naga nationalists closely followed and distributed international news, listening to the radio and reading press bulletins about the wars of decolonization and new nations receiving independence on the African continent.Footnote ¹⁰ If the United Nations itself would not listen to the Naga claim, perhaps there were people with access to that institution who would, once they met Nagas in person. In 1960, Phizo made his way to London to find out.

Enter the Gatekeepers

Phizo’s journey to London highlighted the tactics, ideals, and logistics necessary to transport a nationalist insurgent claim into international politics. National self-determination was a process that the “self” – the people in question – did not get to determine in a vacuum. Instead, peoples relied on the access, and its accompanying forms of external recognition, conferred upon them by advocacy networks made up of gatekeepers – individuals with the prestige, connections, and expertise to move a nationalist claim through the United Nations system of international order. While this process is most easily visible for a small movement like the Nagas, other dependent peoples that felt trapped in independent states (such as India, China, South Africa, and elsewhere) used similar tactics and often the same set of advocates: South West Africa, with its vestigial League of Nations mandate status and UN committee, is the most famous example. With a combination of political connections, moral suasion, and social prestige, advocates moved political claims and claimants across the hardening borders of postimperial and postcolonial states.

In June 1960, Phizo arrived in London after a secret journey that took him from Nagaland, to East Pakistan, and then to Switzerland, on a fake El Salvadorian passport. Four years earlier, Phizo had sneaked into East Pakistan, but the Pakistanis looked on the Naga cause with suspicion and kept his activities constrained. Neither Pakistan nor China, however inimical to India, would directly foment separatist sentiment in the region when they had to contend with their own nationalist claimants in nearby East Pakistan and Tibet. Eventually, with money and the fake passport procured – through his nephew Vichazelie (Challe) Iralu, an epidemiology PhD student studying in Chicago – Phizo made his way to Zürich under the name “Prudencio Llach,” though he considered it “a sorry fact for a Christian” to use an “assumed name.”Footnote ¹¹

While Phizo was stranded in Zürich, Challe (in Chicago) read an article in the New York Times about the Herero people of South West AfricaFootnote ¹² petitioning the United Nations for support against South African rule, with the help of Reverend Scott.Footnote ¹³ This was a model for how a people, small in number and politically disenfranchised, could reach the United Nations – through a Western advocate connected to but not representative of state power. Inspired by the article, Challe wrote to Scott. Scott did not reply to Challe’s first letter because he worried that the Naga cause would distract him from his advocacy work for African anticolonial nationalist movements.Footnote ¹⁴ So Challe wrote to Laura Thompson, an American anthropologist based in Brooklyn, who had conducted fieldwork in Melanesia and Micronesia and taught Challe’s wife, Tefta Zografi Iralu, at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.Footnote ¹⁵ As a result, Thompson then also wrote to Scott, attempting to persuade him to take a closer look at Phizo and the Naga question. Scott remained ambivalent. On the one hand, the Indian delegation at the United Nations had supported his Southern African causes; Scott knew that supporting the Naga cause could upset his important working friendships with Indian prime minister Nehru and with Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister, who had been the Indian ambassador to the United Nations and was high commissioner to London in 1960. But on the other, he felt that there might be something significant to the Naga claim.

During that spring of 1960, Scott’s colleague E. J. B. (Jim) Rose of the Institute of Race Relations, a British think-tank concerned with the security questions generated by decolonization, was holidaying in Switzerland with his family. At Scott’s urging, Rose visited Phizo in Zürich that May and found him “an odd, troublesome little man” but deserving of attention.Footnote ¹⁶ As a result of Rose’s recommendation, Scott went down to Zürich in June and brought Phizo to London, bamboozling his way through passport control with his priest’s collar, his over six feet of height, and his name-dropping of the eminent people who were board members of the Africa Bureau, Scott’s nongovernmental advocacy organization for African anticolonial nationalist claims.

Under the label “former imperial citizen,” Phizo was provisionally admitted into the UK.Footnote ¹⁷ Scott’s patron, David Astor – son of the American heiress and British politician Nancy Astor, as well as the editor and owner of the Observer newspaper – brought in a collection of former colonial officials and anthropologists to confirm Phizo’s identity; he also dispatched a reporter to Nagaland to investigate Phizo’s allegations of Indian atrocities. Scott gave Phizo an office at the Africa Bureau, in Denison House, Pimlico, in which Phizo quickly got to work writing a booklet on the history and politics of Naga nationalism in order to promote his cause to a Western public.Footnote ¹⁸

Phizo’s arrival in London was well timed. The year 1960 was a moment of tremendous optimism in the potential of national liberation. Scott and Astor saw the need for a nongovernmental work-around to the United Nations in order to address nationalist claims within new postcolonial states. They believed that the crucial challenge for new postcolonial nation-states would be how they handled their minority populations; with the “multiplication of sovereignties,” Scott thought, “what redress would minorities have against injustice?”Footnote ¹⁹ Scott and Astor argued that the Naga question in India’s Northeast could be “a test case for the new countries” in decolonizing Africa.Footnote ²⁰

In response to this perceived need, Astor set up the International Committee for the Study of Group Rights – eventually renamed the Minority Rights Group and funded by the Ford Foundation with some support from the US Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anticommunist advocacy organization that the US Central Intelligence Agency founded and financed.Footnote ²¹ It is crucial to note that the aims of the Minority Rights Group differed from those of the “minority” for whom they advocated: Phizo and other Naga nationalists claimed independence, not minority rights protections. The Minority Rights Group drew up “memoranda and interviewed United Nations people,” but its work was not considered “anybody’s business in the realm of high politics.”Footnote ²² Whose business, then, were national claims within new postcolonial nation-states? The question remained unanswered. The business of minority rights and the business of the Minority Rights Group were no one’s priority.

The vacuum of international interest in, and ability to handle, minority rights questions was double-edged – both opportunities and challenges existed in addressing an issue that was “no one’s business.” This attention void gave the Minority Rights Group room and purpose to exist. In addition, the group’s claim to apolitical, unbiased reporting allowed it to address contentious questions. Yet, this power and attention vacuum meant that the question of minority rights within the UN order remained off official agendas; so, while Scott, Astor, and their colleagues had incredible scope and influence regarding minority rights questions, the role of the Minority Rights Group underscored the weakness of the Nagas’ own claim. The weakness of a nationalist movement and the strength of its advocates were intertwined.

Nationalist Claimants’ Path to International Politics

The primary function of a gatekeeper was to vouch for the legitimacy of a claimant from a place and people little known to the Western Anglophone world, so that the claimant could potentially enter more influential spheres of international politics. Since nationalist claimants could not, on their own, access the United Nations,Footnote ²³ their best chance to enter the world stage was through networks of advocates – people already accepted internationally for their moral, political, or scholarly prestige in the related region or cause, who could act as gatekeepers to international forums through their personal, political, and at times financial connections. When Phizo arrived in Britain, after Reverend Scott had slipped him past immigration, he needed to establish his identity; for this purpose, David Astor asked a collection of individuals who had known Phizo in the Naga Hills before the Second World War. Anthropologist Ursula Graham Bower Betts from the Isle of Mull, retired colonial official Charles Pawsey from Suffolk, and anthropologist/retired colonial official/Naga-skull collector J. H. Hutton from Powys, in Wales, congregated in London to sign affidavits certifying that Phizo was, indeed, Angami Zapu Phizo born in the Naga Hills in the former British India in 1903.

The presence of Phizo and, later on, other Nagas, in London led to a reunion of sorts for Western experts on Northeast India, some of whom did not approve of Phizo or did not get along with each other, or both. Charles Pawsey and George Supplee, the American Baptist missionary who had worked in the Naga Hills, exchanged letters on Phizo. Supplee expressed concern about the perceived political implications of Phizo’s “Che Guevara mustache,” which he believed might brand him a communist.Footnote ²⁴ J. H. Hutton reported to Verrier Elwin, a British anthropologist who took Indian citizenship after 1947 and became Nehru’s advisor on tribal peoples, that Phizo was “a thoroughly bad hat who is exploiting his people for his own benefit.”Footnote ²⁵ Hutton blamed Phizo for killing his rivals in Nagaland and felt that the real reason he had come to London was to escape reprisals at home. Amidst the reminiscence of friends and enemies, all were cognizant of the international – possibly even Cold War – ramifications that Naga nationalism might cause. Elwin copied Hutton’s letter and sent it to the Indian governor of Nagaland, Vishnu Sahay. The letter was leaked to the Indian press, which presented its mention of the Cold War as proof that the Nagas were in collusion with the Chinese.Footnote ²⁶

Elwin himself disliked many of his fellow anthropologists. He thought that Western anthropologists were conspiring with the tribal peoples they studied to keep them from integrating into the Indian Union:

While Elwin was not quite fair to his colleagues, he had touched on an important feature of some Westerners’ sympathy for the Naga cause: colonial nostalgia. For a “small people” like the Nagas in a “forgotten” corner of the world, the porousness of imperial boundaries and categories had allowed them more freedom than did the postcolonial Indian state. In addition, imperial notions of “the white man’s burden” undergirded the qualified support that some interested Westerners, such as Ursula and Tim Betts, gave to Naga nationalists. In contrast, for critics of empire, such as Astor and Scott, notions of the white man’s burden intensified with decolonization. Their support for anticolonial nationalism in India, Africa, and elsewhere made them feel responsible for peoples who did not feel liberated by the end of colonialism.

The act of vouching for Phizo’s and other Naga nationalists’ identities and claims gave a group of former colonial officials, anthropologists, and missionaries an opportunity to rehash old alliances and gripes from the time when the Naga Hills were British. The “new” politics of national liberation overlaid older imperial relationships. These older relationships were predicated on notions of protection – of a dependent people who were obliged to rely on Western advocates as gatekeepers to international politics. Paternalist ideas of the white man’s burden may have undergirded significant elements of Western support for the Naga nationalists, as they have for many global humanitarian endeavors.Footnote ²⁸ Yet to discount that advocacy because of this critique accepts the Indian statist frame that has worked to undermine the legitimacy of Naga nationalist claims-making. This advocacy was a necessary first step for potential Naga recognition. Having known authorities personally vouch for Phizo – for his identity only, as Pawsey and Hutton did, or for the need to investigate his claims, as Bower Betts, Astor, and Scott did – was crucially important for Naga nationalists. It allowed them to garner global attention for their allegations against India.

In Phizo’s travelogue, many advocates stood at metaphorical and literal gates – Challe Iralu, Laura Thompson, Michael Scott, Jim Rose, David Astor – facilitating his passage. Most of them then dropped out of the story; they had served their purpose and had passed Phizo’s nationalist claim on to the next advocate.

Michael Scott was one of the advocates who did not drop away.Footnote ²⁹ He was drawn to seemingly hopeless causes. While he knew that taking up the Naga question could test his relationship with Indian friends and politicians to the breaking point, he could not turn Phizo down. Phizo was the incarnation of Scott’s life project: to speak for those for whom no one else wanted to speak. Certain advocates perceived Phizo as unlikable and rude to the Africa Bureau office staff.Footnote ³⁰ Scott’s Indian friends considered Phizo a violent criminal. All Phizo had were detailed, typed-out-in-English allegations of atrocities, with no formal avenue of redress. The difficulty of Phizo’s claim – the small size of the Naga population, the tiny amount of up-to-date information on Nagaland available to outsiders, and the problem of upsetting India – made championing Phizo irresistible for Scott.

Scott had begun his advocacy work in South Africa in 1946. Following the Second World War, he was posted to a congregation in the shantytown of Tobruk, outside of Johannesburg. His protests against racist land-tenure legislation in South Africa caught the attention of Mrs. Pandit, head of the Indian delegation to the UN. Scott first got to the UN in 1946, when Maharaj Singh, the governor of Bombay, took him on as a member of the Indian mission to Lake Success and helped him get a visa to the US.Footnote ³¹ At the UN General Assembly, Scott testified in support of Mrs. Pandit’s case against South Africa’s 1946 Asiatic Land Tenure and Representation Act. The Herero people of South West Africa took notice. When Britain would not let Tshekedi Khama of Bechuanaland travel to New York with the petitions of the Herero of South West Africa (there were also Herero in Bechuanaland), those South West African Hereros sent their petitions through Scott. He then testified at the UN on their behalf under the auspices of the Indian UN delegation – something he continued to do for decades.

Scott spoke as the personal representative of Chief Hosea Kutako of the Herero people in South West Africa/Namibia. He asked for international protection and recognition of South West Africa as a mandate to be held in sacred trust by the international community, not as a de facto fifth province of South Africa. He compared the lack of economic development of the South West African mandate held by South Africa unfavorably (and incorrectly) with that of the British Southern African protectorates, where “Africans are grateful that their land is protected for them.”Footnote ³² His advocacy in the late 1940s and 1950s focused on the grievances of the Herero people in South West Africa and their need for international protection, rather than on independence for the territory of South West Africa. This echoed the rhetoric of nineteenth-century missionaries in Southern Africa, who viewed European empire as a source of moral and technological progress while considering settler colonialism a wicked, inequitable system.Footnote ³³

This type of advocacy was politically practical in the 1950s and more aligned with the interests of the board members of Scott’s advocacy organization, the African Bureau, including captains of industry Ronald Prain of the Rhodesian Selection Trust (mining) and Jock Campbell of Booker Brothers, McConnell, and Co. (sugar), who funded the Africa Bureau.Footnote ³⁴ However, it also highlighted the paternalist mode of Scott’s advocacy, which often saw white settler governments, not continued empire, as the primary enemy of African liberation. Unsurprisingly, Scott had contentious relationships with younger nationalists, who began to make it out of South West Africa in the mid-1950s and eventually supplanted him at the UN. Scott served as a gatekeeper for Namibian claims-making, the older form of claims-making that asked for international protection rather than the newer form that called for national independence.

From 1947 to the early 1960s, Scott testified nearly annually in New York City before the UN Committee on South West Africa. For the first decade he served as the sole spokesperson for the people of South West Africa. In the mid-1950s, he was joined by Mburumba Kerina (Eric Getzen), who, in 1952, snuck aboard a fishing boat in Walvis Bay to be able to reach and attend Lincoln University, a historically Black college in Pennsylvania.Footnote ³⁵ While an undergraduate at Lincoln, Kerina contacted Scott about joining the latter at the United Nations. Scott was ambivalent because Kerina had no invitation from the Herero Chiefs Council, but he agreed. (Later on, other South West Africans/Namibians joined Kerina and Scott in New York, representing different nationalist organizations and tribal/ethnic/religious groups.) Kerina and Scott had a contentious, asymmetrical relationship. Kerina called himself Scott’s “little brown boy,”Footnote ³⁶ while Scott complained to Chief Hosea Kutako about Kerina’s politicking, fearing that too many disagreeing South West African voices undermined their cause and that Kerina was representing himself rather than the South West African people.Footnote ³⁷

Scott was correct in elements of his assessment: Angela Brooks of the Liberian UN delegation hosted an informal summit where she tried to smooth over the differences among South West African UN petitioners (in order to facilitate her own country’s advocacy on their behalf).Footnote ³⁸ In addition, South Africa did its best to exacerbate and publicize internal South West African divisions.Footnote ³⁹ Yet Scott also held a divergent position from that of Kerina, speaking for the Herero Chiefs Council, asking the international community for protection from South African misrule; while Kerina and other Namibian UN petitioners sought national independence. By 1960, Scott’s efficacy as a gatekeeper for Namibian nationalist claims-making was on the wane. Namibians could speak for themselves, even if not with one voice.

Reporting or Advocacy?

After Phizo reached London in June 1960, he started writing a report on Naga nationalism and alleged Indian human rights abuses. Two years later, George Patterson, a reporter for the Observer, presented Phizo’s report on the “Naga problem” at a public meeting where Hutton and other advocates vouched for the identities of four more Naga nationalists (Kaito Sukhai, Mowu Gwizan, Khodao Yanthan, and Yongkongangshi Longchar) who came to London to meet with Phizo. Patterson, a former missionary to Tibet, had provided information to Indian, US, and British intelligence about the Chinese invasion of Tibet (1950) and the organizing around the Dalai Lama’s flight to India (1959), while based in Darjeeling and working for David Astor’s Observer newspaper.Footnote ⁴⁰ In 1962, he had recently returned from a visit to Nagaland and Pakistan, where he had researched news stories and conducted negotiations with Mrs. Pandit and Pakistani officials in Karachi on behalf of Phizo.

David Astor personally paid Patterson’s expenses as “adviser to Phizo and as a general propagandist”Footnote ⁴¹ and also provided the funding for the four other Naga nationalists to travel from Pakistan to London. Eventually, Astor grew ambivalent about directly supporting Naga nationalists. He decided to give the cash he had assigned to the Naga cause to the nongovernmental advocacy organization he had cofounded (the Minority Rights Group) and to pay money to Phizo “as from that body.”Footnote ⁴² At Astor’s urging, the Minority Rights Group employed George Patterson “as its salaried director or general secretary.”Footnote ⁴³

Astor’s financial support of Phizo, his Observer’s investigative reporting on the Naga question, and his creation of the Minority Rights Group formed a tangled financial knot. The personal nature of advocacy politics meant that finances, the infrastructure of a nongovernmental organization, and newspaper publicity could all originate from the same well-placed individual. It could be easy for the multiple facets of Astor’s advocacy on the Naga question to appear – and be written off – as a rich man’s side project. Astor himself was aware of this when he created the Minority Rights Group to address multiple “group-rights” concerns, bundling the Naga question with that of Kurds, Basques, and Aboriginal peoples in Australia (among others).Footnote ⁴⁴ The concept of “group rights” also neatly sidestepped questions that specific labeling – such as “nationalist,” “minority,” or “separatist” – inevitably raised. Creating a group rights organization to handle the Naga question (“question” being another term that sidestepped a specific political stance on an issue) also attempted to distance Astor’s advocacy from the courageous and innovative investigative reporting that the Observer did in Nagaland (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Naga nationalist insurgents, 1961.

Photo: Gavin Young

Independent news reporting from Nagaland was no easy feat. After violence broke out in the region in the early 1950s, the Indian government unofficially banned the international media from the region. An exception was made for a carefully chaperoned group of journalists in 1960, which included Henry Bradsher, Rawley Knox, and Neville Maxwell, who were taken about to cultural dance performances.Footnote ⁴⁵ They found the Indian government’s “performance” of peaceful cultural harmony difficult to watch, and drafted a satiric poem in response:

Alternate lines were swapped into the poem – “Do not be fissiparous, do as you should do” – alluding to Nehru’s label for separatist movements within India. Then, at the end of a performance, the dancers gave Bradsher an amulet that, on close examination, contained carefully folded up lists of allegations of atrocities committed by the Indian Army in the Naga Hills, typed in English.Footnote ⁴⁷

A classic tale of weapons-of-the-weak-style subversion, this anecdote illustrates how Naga nationalists could use their status as a premodern tribal people to appear harmlessly apolitical to Indian authorities. At the same time, Nagas disrupted this stereotype with their reams of typed, English-language documents protesting against India and asserting their national sovereignty.Footnote ⁴⁸ They also consciously presented themselves as modern and therefore respectable to international and Indian audiences. Elwin complained that the Nagas in London were “dressed up like members of the YMCA,” and Indian commentators groused that the Naga nationalists wore the clothes of “life insurance salesmen.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Naga nationalists made a point of displaying themselves as modern, English-speaking, Western-oriented, and, most importantly, Christian, in contrast to the rest of India.

Nationalists of all sorts made important sartorial and linguistic choices in demonstrating their claims in person, on paper, and in their environment – from Yasser Arafat (Palestine)’s wearing Fidel Castro (Cuba)’s military fatigues and aligning his cause visually with left-wing revolution, to new nationalist elites’ renaming cities, streets, countries, and even their own selves. Usually, this nationalist branding occurred in reaction to Western-ruled imperial pasts or current opponents. In regard to Nagas, however, India had a vested interest in portraying them as an exotic, premodern tribal people; what Ursula Graham Bower Betts called the “spear-and-feathers contingent.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In opposition, Naga nationalists emphasized their Western-ness – a contrast that deliberately set them outside of India’s own international political self-presentation of sari-clad Mrs. Pandit speaking in the United Nations on behalf of disenfranchised South Asians and Africans in South Africa.

While Naga nationalists looked toward the Western Anglophone world, foreigners (who required an Indian visa) were not officially allowed to enter Nagaland. David Astor first disregarded India’s embargo when another of his Observer reporters, Gavin Young, snuck into Nagaland through Burma in 1961. Young, an Oxford graduate – like Elwin, Hutton, and Astor himself (and most of the Observer staff) – was a charismatic, alcoholic foreign-news correspondent who always traveled with a Joseph Conrad novel.Footnote ⁵¹ He served in Palestine in the late 1940s, then picked up Iraqi Arabic and roamed the Middle East as a freelance correspondent until the Suez Crisis. In 1960–1961, he was reporting on the Algerian war and Katanga’s secession from newly independent Congo-Leopoldville when, at Astor’s urging, he flew to Burma and met up (inside the Rangoon zoo) with Phizo’s Naga contacts.Footnote ⁵² Young and his escorts then took a boat up the Chindwin River to Upper Burma and walked into Nagaland pretending that Young was a Baptist missionary.

Those, like Young, who reported on the end of empires while they usually supported national liberation, were engaged in a postimperial project in spite of themselves: they connected far-flung postcolonial war zones back to their former metropoles and their careers mirrored those of imperial civil servants from earlier decades. In some ways, Young was a postcolonial version of an imperial-era adventurer who brought tales from distant corners of the world to Western elite publics. He compared the Naga struggle to that of Algeria, particularly the nationalists’ intense concern for how they “played” to an international audience.Footnote ⁵³ Young praised the “disciplined Naga” who scanned the daily news from “the BBC, Voice of America, All-India Radio, Moscow, Beijing and Pakistan” and distributed it in digest form to the members of their movement.Footnote ⁵⁴

A few months after he published his Naga articles, Young was an eyewitness to violence between UN peacekeepers and Katanga’s “refractory mercenaries” in Congo; several years later, he watched Buddhist protests and self-immolations in Vietnam.Footnote ⁵⁵ Besides telling fascinating stories, Young’s life and work linked Nagaland to the world’s other political-conflict hotspots – Algeria, Katanga, and eventually Vietnam – on which Young also reported with analytical verve and in dangerous circumstances. For Young, his journey to Nagaland was not a one-off job. It formed part of a pattern of international political bushfire-jumping during the wars of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century.

Young wrote three investigative articles on Nagaland as part of a series titled “The Commonwealth’s Unknown War.” He broke the story of the extensive, ongoing guerilla war in the region and interviewed a captured Indian pilot, Captain Misra, whose sister was married to a Bollywood actor.Footnote ⁵⁶ (The Bollywood connection and Misra’s capture by Naga nationalist insurgents may have led to this being the first time that political unrest in Nagaland made the mainstream Indian news.) Young also took a number of striking photographs of armed Naga nationalists and Misra’s downed Dakota plane, images that were repeatedly used in reporting on the Naga cause.

Young’s investigative journalism represented the success of Astor’s conflation of reporting and advocacy for Naga nationalist claims-making. Astor knew its power. He attempted to negotiate with the Indian High Commission in London, then headed by Mrs. Pandit, on the timing of the publication of Young’s articles, to try to persuade the Indian government to consider the idea of an independent fact-finding mission into Phizo’s allegations. Astor’s proposed mission would be led by Conor Cruise O’Brien, an Irish diplomat and writer (sometimes for the Observer) who had recently finished a controversial assignment as United Nations special ambassador to the secessionist province of Katanga in Congo.Footnote ⁵⁷ Astor, O’Brien, and Mrs. Pandit were all old friends. Astor viewed his offer to delay publication on Young’s stories as a gesture of his good faith in his Indian friends.Footnote ⁵⁸ Mrs. Pandit considered it quasi-blackmail by a Western meddler in a sovereign Indian affair that was none of his business.Footnote ⁵⁹

Fissures and Fractures

The disagreement between Scott, Astor, and Mrs. Pandit illustrated a central disconnect between Western advocates and their Indian partners on questions of political justice. Nehru and Mrs. Pandit were Indian leaders with constituents and direct political responsibilities, who viewed the Naga question as an Indian concern, not an international question. Indians and Westerners could work together on African decolonization matters but most definitely not on issues that exposed the limits of India’s own decolonization. Indian politicians considered those issues part of India’s own nation-building project. Astor and Scott were interested in how a Nagaland could be a test case for addressing the pressing questions concerning minority peoples within new postcolonial nations.Footnote ⁶⁰ Their position on the Naga question obviously differed from that of the Indian government, but it also contrasted with that of Phizo.

Phizo wanted independence for the Nagas. He sought an international investigation or intervention as a means to achieve that end. He argued that Nagaland was not part of India and should never have been part of the territorial consignment of British India to the independent governments of India and Pakistan in 1947. For Phizo, as for other nationalist leaders, sovereignty was a form of “written, legal magic” that embodied the authority of a people to claim to be a nation that deserved a state.Footnote ⁶¹ He used the language of sovereignty as an incantation to span the gap between his exile in London and his nationalist ambitions.

Astor and Scott advocated for an unbiased international investigation of Phizo’s claims, not for an independent Naga nation-state. It is not completely clear whether Phizo himself caught the difference between what he and what his backers wanted for Nagaland.Footnote ⁶² However, his seeming recalcitrance and perceived ingratitude for the hospitality he had received from Astor and the Africa Bureau make sense if he knew that his advocates were using him and his cause for their own ends. From this perspective, he was willing to go along with the inconsistency in goals as the price of their support, but he did not need to be grateful. Phizo cared about Naga sovereignty. Astor and Scott cared about the general issue of minority rights and the particular subject of Naga humanity, specifically, Phizo’s allegations of India’s human rights abuses.

India was also most concerned with sovereignty – Indian sovereignty. Mrs. Pandit found it “rather odd that a group of people should form themselves into a committee and sit in judgment between the Government of a country and a man who has committed acts of violence” – that is, was a criminal – “in that country.”Footnote ⁶³ As she wrote to Astor, she believed that Phizo was leading him and Scott down a rabbit hole: “I feel like Alice in Wonderland and the strange tale of Mr. Phizo gets curiouser and curiouser as also does your part in it.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), the Indian peace activist and civil society leader who was a friend and close colleague of Astor and Scott, also participated in the disagreement between Western advocates and Indian politicians over the Naga question. JP tried to persuade Scott and Astor of the perspective of those in India, where, with justification, “public opinion is most unsympathetic to Phizo, who is looked upon as the person chiefly responsible for the violence in Nagaland.”Footnote ⁶⁵ While as integral a figure as Astor and Scott in the same network of transnational advocacy that supported anticolonial nationalism, JP operated across significantly more constrained political terrain. He had much more domestic political clout – and therefore public responsibility – in his home country of India than Astor or Scott did in the UK. That influence meant that he had to be careful and considerate of the possible ramifications of his political statements in a manner that his Western civil society colleagues did not. These operational constraints illustrated the asymmetrical relations between advocates from postcolonial versus postimperial states. Scott and Astor had a freedom to speak in public and in private on polarizing issues about which their Indian colleagues had to be much more reserved.Footnote ⁶⁶ Further, for India and Indians, as JP pointed out, there were national security dimensions to the Naga question. “In view of Chinese troublemaking all along our northern borders, India is most sensitive to any separatist moves.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Krishna Menon (Indian minister of defense, who had previously been Indian high commissioner to the UK) also highlighted how the Naga question was a threat to Indian territorial integrity and the idea of India as a whole. If the Nagas were granted independence, “other minority peoples within the Union would then also demand it. The Indian union would be nibbled away.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Menon, borrowing from the early-twentieth-century anthropology that categorized the Nagas as “a collection of tribes” rather than a nation, said that they were not “a people like the Karens in Burma”; the Nagas were not “asking for national independence but for tribal independence.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus, for most Indian politicians, Nagas were both a domestic matter and an international threat. They saw the Nagas as a tribal people, not a nation. Nagas represented one of many separatist challenges within India that had the potential to undermine Indian national security from within by inspiring the Tamils, Sikhs, and others; and from without by opening the border to the Chinese.

Astor and Scott had become friends with Mrs. Pandit, Menon, and JP because of their shared support for Indian independence and for the rights of Indians in Southern Africa in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote ⁷⁰ Scott and JP continued to be close collaborators in advocacy work for anticolonial nationalist movements into the 1960s. Behind the barbed annoyance of Mrs. Pandit, Menon, and JP toward Scott and Astor, however, was “colonial hangover”: a reaction to Brits interfering once again where they were not wanted, even if Astor et al. had been important metropolitan backers for Indian independence. International advocacy for a minority people within India upset notions of the success of India’s own national liberation. It created an avenue for meddlers from the former colonial power into the affairs of the postcolonial state. It was the backdoor for third-party intervention – a door that Indian politicians sought to keep firmly shut. Astor and Scott, on the other hand, saw their Naga advocacy as evidence that they were equal-opportunity critics of injustice. Their activism against the French in Algeria or against South Africa in South West Africa was not about personal animus against France or South Africa: rather, it was a principled stand against injustice everywhere, even in a country that was governed by their friends.Footnote ⁷¹

The moral question of pacifism hid in the background of the disagreements between Western advocates and Indian (state and non-state) leaders. JP and Mrs. Pandit condemned Phizo because he used violence and had led an insurgency that remained ongoing; JP argued that Phizo’s violence invalidated his cause.Footnote ⁷² In contrast, Indians had achieved their national liberation through nonviolent means, at least in the popular imagination. Phizo also applied the Gandhian legacy to his own cause: “Nagaland is a country of Mahatma Gandhi’s dream” because “every village is a small republic and has its own councils and assemblies.”Footnote ⁷³ Reverend Scott himself was not a pacifist, though he espoused nonviolent protest and was a member of War Resisters’ International, the largest organization of the international peace movement. He felt that there were some causes whose innate justice and lack of alternative recourse made violence justifiable.

Neither Phizo nor Scott nor JP was directly religiously motivated in their political pursuits, but they were all strongly religiously oriented. Their faith – Baptist, Anglican, Hindu, respectively – interacted with their pursuits; even the agnostic Astor called Scott his “guru in the religion of doubt.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Their faith also placed them on the First World’s side of the Cold War against “godless” communism. Scott’s theology was that of practice rather than preaching. While he and his colleagues grounded their politics in morality, and suffered physical and financial repercussions from grueling travel and espousing unpopular causes, they were not ideologues – nor would many in their circles consider themselves leftists.Footnote ⁷⁵ Overarching concern with social justice had led Scott to join the Communist Party before the Second World War, but the rise of Stalin made him leave by war’s end. According to retired British civil servant Richard Kershaw, the Africa Bureau itself was funded by “mandarins, ex-intelligence, millionaires,” who “mistrusted the movement for colonial freedom.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Kershaw felt that “[t]hese Establishment figures wanted to remedy injustice but not advance communism … they wanted freedom, but not at all costs” and that these “rich, tough, old fashioned imperialists” backed Scott and his projects as an “action wedge” during decolonization – an element they could use to prop open a political door, maintaining access to sites of investment as governing authorities shifted from colonial to postcolonial.Footnote ⁷⁷

Astor recommended Reverend Scott to US national security advisor McGeorge Bundy as the leading expert on African nationalist movements. When doing so, he was careful to emphasize that while Scott’s status as an Anglican priest, his complete “discretion,” and his unbiased political positioning allowed him to hold “the confidence of the African political leaders in all circumstances,” he was “by no means an uncritical supporter.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Scott’s “religion of practice” – he almost always wore his priest’s collar and lacked any concern for personal financial gain – made him a safe pair of hands for his backer’s interests, while his “religion of doubt” made him a welcome interlocutor for government officials accustomed to operating in political shades of gray.

In Reverend Scott’s formulation, the onus was on the international community, the UN institution, and the UN order to eradicate injustice before oppressed peoples had no choice but to resort to violence. He recognized the limitations of presenting himself as a savior or gatekeeper for oppressed peoples but continued to perform in that mode. In his own words,

While advocating for nonviolence, he also used the prospect of violence as blackmail to get the international community to act. In the end, these contradictions, which were embodied in Scott’s political philosophy or “religion of doubt,” were incapacitating, not just for him but also for many others who took on the roles of advocates and gatekeepers for nationalist claims in international politics.

The job of the gatekeeper was to open the gate for a nationalist claim to pass through and then drop away, not to make himself or herself the essential ingredient for the claim’s success.

John Davies, then the Anglican chaplain at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and eventually the bishop of Shrewsbury (UK), pinpointed this tragic paradox of the advocate for anticolonial nationalism: “The enslavement of the ‘white liberal’ is his sense of indispensability: it is necessary, but difficult, to shake this off … if necessary by leaving.” Anticolonial nationalists were doomed until they got “far more real power, including the behind-the-scenes power which so often remains white while the more conspicuous power is taken by blacks.” Regarding the role of the advocate, he wrote, “One must speak, one must protest, one must do all that one can. Yet every time one does so, one is in effect supporting this conspiracy to keep blacks silent and powerless.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Davies’s point – concerning the double-edged nature and eventual incapacity of advocacy – held across geographies of land, space, and power beyond the specific dynamics of apartheid South Africa.

Advocacy was a fragile business. The disagreement over the legitimacy of the Naga claim between Scott and Astor, on the one hand, and Mrs. Pandit and JP, on the other, showed in reverse how vital Indian support had been for Scott’s advocacy work in Southern Africa. In a similar manner to other international advocates (including Scott), JP also took on the role of gatekeeper for anticolonial nationalists in Southern and Eastern Africa in the early 1960s, appearing with Julius Nyerere (of Tanzania/Tanganyika), Kenneth Kaunda (of Zambia), and Jomo Kenyatta (of Kenya) at rallies and testifying on their behalf at the United Nations. In addition, he advocated for disenfranchised peoples within India, which was the frame in which he placed the Naga question. JP and his Indian colleagues found Scott and Astor’s support of Phizo dangerous because it was breaking apart an alliance between Western advocates and the Indian politicians who had supported their shared political justice projects.

Conclusion

India and Indians played an integral role in international advocacy on behalf of anticolonial nationalist liberation movements. Therefore, the arrival in London of Phizo, a Naga nationalist, destabilized the network of concerned individuals who combined moral prestige with political connections to advocate for disenfranchised peoples within international politics. The bureaucracy of the United Nations institution may not have had room for minority peoples, but it had space for advocates such as Scott and JP to speak in favor of particular anticolonial nationalist claims – as long as they were brought into the room by state backers within the UN General Assembly. While advocates in international politics spoke in favor of anticolonial nationalists, their advocacy held imperial undertones – of paternalism, of elite responsibility, of speaking for those who were not allowed to speak for themselves – that could undermine the autonomy of the causes for which they served as conduits. Phizo came to London during the summer of 1960, a moment when new nations were becoming independent every week and the potential of a liberated postcolonial world seemed strongest. Yet a national claim from within a postcolonial state – especially India, the postcolonial state that served as the model for peaceful national liberation – dimmed the promise of national liberation even then.

The early 1960s was a transitional period when categories of “people,” “nation,” and “state” were fluid. Who was a minority and who a nation seemed to be subject to flexible interpretation. This perceived mutability created the space for well-placed individuals to navigate between nationalist claims and international politics without having the power or responsibility of actual national representation. During this period, most advocates of anticolonial nationalist liberation agreed upon the legitimacy of an independent Algeria from France as well as upon the illegitimacy of an independent Katanga from Congo-Leopoldville and of South African rule of South West Africa. They sought to spread that consensus to other questions, to nationalist claimants within independent states (such as Nagaland and Tibet) that did not enjoy the same supportive international consensus. Importantly, Astor and Scott believed that their “meddling” in Nagaland could be a possible model for advocacy interventions on behalf of minority claimants elsewhere around the globe. They and Phizo repeatedly compared the Naga question to anticolonial nationalist conflicts on the decolonizing African continent – particularly those in Algeria, Congo, and South West Africa. JP himself often made analogies between Tibet and these same African conflict zones.Footnote ⁸¹ More than direct comparisons, the repetition of injustices perpetuated in Algeria, Congo/Katanga, and South West Africa functioned as an invocation of legitimacy for particular nationalist claims.

Despite their differences of opinion regarding Naga nationalism, two months after Phizo arrived in London, JP reached out to Scott about the Naga question and recommended tabling it until they could talk in person at the “War Resisters International conference next Christmas.”Footnote ⁸² JP was “very much looking forward to meeting” Scott again, who, he wrote, seemed to be “growing younger judging by [recent] photos!”Footnote ⁸³ JP and Scott had work to do together, to find nonviolent solutions to global decolonization, and their work was predicated upon mutual friendship and shared beliefs in the importance of peaceful national liberation and political justice. For JP, peoples who pursued their independence peacefully were more deserving of Scott’s attention than the Nagas: “Phizo and other Nagas like most ‘good Christians’ seem to believe in violence.” JP emphasized to Scott how important the latter’s personal Indian connections were for accomplishing his advocacy work; that the Nagas were waging armed insurgency; and that the range of global problems facing international advocates like themselves was broad.

On the agenda of the upcoming War Resisters International Conference was the formation of a World Peace Brigade, an international civil society organization that JP and Scott would lead. Their mission was to help decolonization escape its “entrapment in violence.”Footnote ⁸⁴ They had significant work to do; JP did not want that work derailed by what he perceived as the distraction of the Naga cause.