Morung Express News
Dimapur | December 18
As was first reported in this newspaper, NSCN (IM) General Secretary Thuingaleng Muivah will arrive in New Delhi on December 20 after exactly a gap of two years. According to an NSCN (IM) official who has rushed to Delhi in order to make necessary arrangement for the visit, Chairman Issac Chishi Swu will also join his colleague after Christmas. The NSCN (IM) Collective Leadership is expected to hold talks with the Central leadership to carry forward efforts for a peaceful solution to the Naga political issue.
Swu and Muivah, who had last visited India in December 2004 and held talks with the Vajpayee-led NDA government, are coming barely days after they held dialogue with the Group of Ministers led by Union Labour Minister Oscar Fernandes in Amsterdam.
According to a PTI news report from Delhi, though it was not immediately clear with who all the NSCN (IM) leaders would meet, sources in the Government said they would try and iron out the differences with the Centre on key issues, including the sovereignty demand under which the NSCN-IM has proposed a federal relationship with Indian Union.
The delegation is expected to continue its discussion with the central leaders over the limits of flexibility within the Constitution and whether a “sub-national constitution” could be accommodated within it.
The two leaders were also expected to visit Nagaland for Christmas celebrations besides addressing to the issue of recent clashes between the cadres of NSCN-IM and its rival NSCN (Khaplang), which resulted in the death of several people in the recent past, according to the PTI report.
Meanwhile, according to an ANI report, the NSCN (I-M) leaders Muivah and Swu wanted an assurance in writing on an independent Naga Constitution. They were also firm that interlocutors provide a roadmap for political dialogue between New Delhi and the so-called ‘leadership of Nagalim’.
The NSCN (I-M) leaders apparently reverted to their hardline stance as they felt that the Centre’s interlocutors had gone back on an assurance they had given in the July 29 meeting in Bangkok.
The two sides had been discussing “a non-paper” by Kreddha, a Netherlands-based NGO run by Michael C Van Walt Van Praag, which spelt out the roadmap ambiguously, the ANI report states adding that New Delhi and the NSCN (IM) apparently discussed Praag’s non-paper in the last couple of rounds. It is learnt that this paper talks about a Naga Constitution, which the Centre’s interlocutors interpreted as a sub-section of the Indian Constitution.
