Aheli Moitra
Isak Chishi Swu (1929-2016) was born, and lived, in the most significant times of modern Naga history. The year he was born, in 1929, saw the first on-paper collective articulation (from the Naga Club to the British Simon Commission) of the Naga right to self-determination. In the 87 following years, the Naga people led one of the most well designed and motivated peoples’ movements in the world that managed to create working relationships with neighbouring nation states (of India and Burma) without ever being completely colonised—with the continued, and often thought impossible, desire to live as free peoples.
For a major part of those years, Swu remained a steadfast leader of the Naga movement for self-determination—a Prism that produced the Rainbow.
Swu was more educated than most Naga peers of his times. He had studied at an American missionary school and later graduated from St. Anthony’s College, Shillong, a Don Bosco institution set up in 1934. He had the opportunity to further his education and join the elite club of the enfranchised; he chose instead to join his people in their struggle to uphold their freedom and dignity, against colonisation and injustice.
The brutal oppression of the Naga people in the hands of an unrelenting Indian establishment became intolerable for the young Isak Chishi Swu. He told Gavin Young, a journalist from the Observer in London, how he found “no reasonable alternative” but to “work for the national movement” after the burning of six villages, including his own, Chishilimi.
Right up to his middle ages, Swu undertook at least three missions to China to strengthen the armed struggle. These included walking through the treacherous forested hills of the region between the Naga territories and China—on one occasion, only a few men survived; on another, the team was denied entry to China.
Despite myriad setbacks, Swu was not known to have turned sceptical. He remained a man of faith and the rock on which social-democratic principles rooted in Christianity were developed by the Naga national movement. He is said to have been one of the first to take the gospel to the Naga areas in Burma. This marked the beginning of structured education in the Eastern Naga areas, connecting them firmly to their more educated brethren on the Indian side.
Over the years, the Naga movement under the leadership of Isak Chishi Swu, Thuingaleng Muivah and others paved way for internationalising the Naga national issue and institutionalising it. In January 1993, the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) was admitted to the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO), internationally recognising Nagalim as ‘Occupied Territory.’
Even after a ceasefire was declared between the NSCN and the Government of India in 1997, Swu maintained (in a 2006 budget session speech) that a ceasefire gives “no time for pleasure and recreation.” It is a time of preparation for the worst of situations as well as the best of a future for the nation, he noted.
In a trait uncommon among Naga leaders, he publicly spoke of the moral and material degradation that had set into the NSCN during the period of the ceasefire. He raised critical questions, answers to which may not have been found to date—one of them pertained to the need for an accountable, transparent and honourable relationship between national workers and the general public both in towns and villages.
Isak Chishi Swu’s life signified not just the strength of the individual that he was, but also the strength of a collective.
It was in conjunction with Th. Muivah, and other Naga leaders that the movement graduated from an armed struggle to peace talks- from direct action to negotiations. As the omnipresent guide of the process, in his gentle but firm demeanour, Swu provided the ‘see’ for Muivah’s ‘saw.’ Without one, the other, or even the whole, may not have emerged the way they did.
Swu’s soul may have departed before the Naga and Indian people move into a time of reconciliation (if and when a situation of Just Peace is created through Indian de-militarisation and Naga self-determination), but the legacy he has left us will become the bedrock of the future we build.
As we move ahead, Isak Swu’s words will resonate thus:
“The movement of the Nagas is inspired by the spirit of change from bondages to freedom, from darkness into light, from village-state to nation-state, from the traditionalist world to the revolutionary world and from the rule of autocratic kings to that of democratic people. We have started the movement and we must finish it.”
More stories about the leader may be shared at moitramail@yahoo.com
