Angami Zapu Phizo (16 May 190430 April 1990) was a Naga nationalist militant leader who was the president of the Naga National Council (NNC) from 1949 until his death. He led campaigns for a separate Naga state in South Asia.
Born in Khonoma, Assam Province, British India, he rose from relative obscurity within the early Naga political movement to become its most uncompromising and internationally recognised voice. Phizo declared Naga independence on 14 August 1947, one day before India gained its own independence from British colonial rule, and subsequently conducted a plebiscite in 1951 in which the overwhelming majority of participating Nagas stated their desire to remain a free and sovereign nation.
When peaceful engagement with the Indian government broke down irrevocably in the mid-1950s, Phizo established an armed underground administration, the Federal Government of Nagaland, and later made a clandestine journey to the West to place the Naga case before the international community. He spent the final three decades of his life in exile in London, where he continued to press the Naga cause through diplomacy, journalism, and public advocacy until his death in 1990. He is regarded as a highly influential figure among Nagas across the political spectrum.
Background and family
To understand Phizo, one must first understand Khonoma. The village sits on a high ridge in the Angami heartland of the Naga Hills, roughly 20 kilometres west of Kohima, at an altitude that made it naturally fortified and historically resistant to outside authority. Khonoma's Angami inhabitants had been among the last in the region to submit to British colonial control, and the village remained a symbol of pride and defiance long after that submission was formally made. The community practised intensive terrace agriculture, unusual among the Naga tribes, and maintained a reputation for self-sufficiency and vigour that its people carried into every sphere of life.
The final Anglo-Naga confrontation at Khonoma took place in 1880, following a series of earlier clashes dating to 1847. The battle saw the Nagas ultimately defeated after a lengthy siege, but the story of that resistance was handed down through Khonoma's oral tradition with great care and intensity. Phizo's great-uncle, Pelhu, had commanded the Naga defenders in the last stand and famously refused all British overtures toward negotiation or surrender. Phizo was keenly aware of this family legacy. In later life he stated plainly that his own family were historically "the ones who made history for the Nagas," and he saw himself as continuing a lineage of anti-colonial resistance that stretched back generations.
Phizo was born on 16 May 1904 into the Merhuma clan (khel) of Khonoma and belonged to the Angami tribe. As a child he suffered a paralytic attack that left his face visibly twisted for the rest of his life, a physical mark that those who met him often noted with some surprise given the commanding quality of his presence and speech. He grew up in a household that was deeply conscious of the village's historical importance, and from an early age internalised a worldview in which the Nagas were a distinct people with their own history, customs, and entitlements.
Education and early formation
After spending his early years in Khonoma, Phizo moved to attend the Kohima Mission School, which had been established by American Baptist missionaries who had been active in the Naga Hills from the 1870s onward. In 1922 he was baptised by Dr. Sydney W. Rivenburg, a committed American missionary and evangelist who ran schools across the Naga Hills with the dual aim of providing education and propagating the Baptist faith. Rivenburg saw Naga education not as an intrinsic good in itself but as a means of fashioning a modern Naga Christian subject, and his schools worked to socialise converts into Western habits of time, hygiene, and dress. Phizo absorbed both the Christian and the educational dimensions of the missionary project, becoming a committed Baptist whose faith remained a bedrock of his personal identity and political vision throughout his life, while simultaneously developing a conception of Naga nationhood that drew on pre-colonial traditions of village self-governance rather than any external framework.
The model of the Khonoma village community exercised a lasting influence on his political imagination. He envisioned the future Naga state not as a centralised bureaucratic structure on the model of the Indian or British state, but as a scaled-up version of the village republic, in which individual families and communities retained full authority over their own land and affairs, and in which decisions were made collectively through a nested system of local, tribal, and regional councils, with the Federal Government of Nagaland at the apex as a coordinating rather than dominating institution. Naga mutual interdependence, Phizo maintained, would underpin a system of village republics in which each family or tribe would have full authority over its own affairs, including land, community organisation, and social and religious customs. Village chiefs were to be first among equals, and decisions concerning multiple villages would be made through group, tribal, and regional councils ascending toward the FGN at the top.
In the years before Indian independence, Phizo worked for some time in Burma, where he came into contact with the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War. He sided with the Japanese forces and collaborated with them, a decision driven not by any ideological affinity with Japanese militarism but by the Japanese promise to recognise Nagaland as an independent sovereign state if they prevailed in the conflict. The majority of Nagas did not side with the Japanese and remained loyal to the British, providing guides, porters, and intelligence throughout the Battle of Kohima in 1944. The Japanese offer came to nothing after the Allied victory at Kohima and Imphal, but Phizo's wartime calculation reflected a strategic disposition he would employ throughout his career: seeking the support of whichever outside power appeared most likely to advance the cause of Naga independence, regardless of that power's broader ideology.
Entry into politics and early activism
The political awakening of the Nagas as a collective entity had begun well before Phizo's rise to prominence. The Naga Club, formed on 15 January 1918 by educated Nagas including government employees and veterans of World War I, had submitted a memorandum to the Simon Commission in 1929 stating clearly that the Nagas had nothing in common with the peoples of the Indian plains and requesting that the Naga Hills be administered directly by the British government rather than through Assam or any future Indian dominion. As a result of that memorandum, the Naga Hills were placed outside the Reformed Scheme in the Government of India Act of 1935 and classified as an Excluded Area. By the mid-1940s, as Indian independence appeared increasingly inevitable, the Naga Club reorganised itself into a formal political body, the Naga National Council, with the objective of working out the Nagas' relationship with whatever authority would succeed the British.
Phizo entered this political arena in the late 1940s. Before rising to the NNC leadership he had led a separate organisation called the People's Independence League, which advocated outright independence without qualification. As the British departure from India drew near, he took it upon himself to reach out to the leaders of other hill peoples in northeastern India, meeting separately with representatives of the Assamese, Garo, Khasi, Lushai, Abor, Mishmi, and Meitei communities. His goal was to persuade each of these groups to pursue independent statehood rather than joining the proposed Union of India, thereby creating a series of sovereign buffer states along India's northeastern frontier. None of these overtures succeeded.
In July 1947, Phizo led an eleven-member delegation to New Delhi to meet Mahatma Gandhi at his Bhangi Colony residence. The meeting has assumed an almost mythic character in Naga nationalist memory. In Naga accounts, Gandhi assured the delegation that the Nagas had every right to independence if they chose not to join the Union of India, and that no one would force them to do so. When the delegates raised the fear that Assam Governor Sir Akbar Hydari was threatening to use military force against the Nagas, Gandhi reportedly exclaimed that Hydari was wrong and declared that he would come to the Naga Hills himself and be the first to be shot before any Naga was harmed. Gandhi went as far as to say "Why wait until 14th August? Why not even declare your independence tomorrow?" The NNC secretary T. Sakhrie had expressed similar fears in a letter to Gandhi prior to the meeting, writing that the Indian government might use military force to occupy the Naga territory. Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948, before he could act on any such undertaking.
On 19 July 1947, the deputy commissioner C. R. Pawsey sent a telegram via Governor Hydari dismissing the Naga delegation as representing an "unimportant minority" and advising that they be ignored, though the telegram may have arrived too late to prevent the meeting with Gandhi. A month before the Gandhi meeting, on 26 June 1947, the NNC and Sir Akbar Hydari, then Governor of Assam, had signed the Nine-Point Agreement, also known as the Hydari Accord. The agreement recognised the right of the Nagas to develop themselves according to their freely expressed wishes and created a framework under which a Guardian Power, represented by the Assam Governor, would oversee Naga affairs for ten years, after which the Nagas could choose to extend the arrangement or negotiate a new one. Naga nationalists interpreted the ten-year clause as a firm promise that India would respect Naga independence at the end of that period. The Indian government interpreted it as providing no such guarantee, and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had not been prime minister when the accord was signed, declined to treat it as binding. By 1951 the Indian government formally repudiated the agreement, informing the Nagas that it would no longer be considered operative in any form.
On 14 August 1947, the day before India's own independence, Phizo formally declared the independence of the Naga people at Kohima, hoisted the Naga national flag, and sent telegrams to the United Nations in New York, to the British government, and to the new Indian government in New Delhi. The telegram to New Delhi was intercepted by the district administration and never delivered. Scholar Shibani Kinkar Chaube has observed that there is no conclusive evidence that the NNC as an organisation had formally resolved to make this declaration, and that it was primarily Phizo's personal initiative.
Arrest and rise to the NNC presidency
In 1948, Phizo was arrested and imprisoned in Presidency Jail, Calcutta, on charges related to stirring trouble in the Indo-Burma borderland. He wrote from the prison to C. Rajagopalachari, the first Governor-General of independent India, providing his account of the circumstances surrounding the Hydari Agreement and protesting the Indian government's treatment of the Nagas. From prison he continued to articulate the Naga case, insisting that the Indian government had entered into a binding agreement with the Nagas and was now betraying it.