Ceasefire as Conflict

This chapter gives voice to ordinary villagers’ experiences, views, and concerns vis-à-vis Naga insurgency, and particularly evaluates the post-ceasefire practices and patterns they speak about. While a ceasefire connotes the cessation of hostilities, political stasis, reconciliation, and peace talks, the author shows ethnographically how the Indo-Naga ceasefire instead manifested itself as a complex and contentious social reality that saw the continuation of conflict by other forms and means. What inflated, after the ceasefire, was an enormous struggle fought out between seven or eight Naga...

This chapter gives voice to ordinary villagers’ experiences, views, and concerns vis-à-vis Naga insurgency, and particularly evaluates the post-ceasefire practices and patterns they speak about. While a ceasefire connotes the cessation of hostilities, political stasis, reconciliation, and peace talks, the author shows ethnographically how the Indo-Naga ceasefire instead manifested itself as a complex and contentious social reality that saw the continuation of conflict by other forms and means. What inflated, after the ceasefire, was an enormous struggle fought out between seven or eight Naga underground groups over historical legitimacy, ideological differences, leadership, and territorial and tribal domination within the broader Indo-Naga conflict. This chapter also probes the boundaries between state and national workers and illustrates the mutually beneficial, if illegal, relations that exist between them, which leads me, among others, to argue toward the critical importance of studying social networks as central to the functioning (and fragmentation) of the Naga Movement.