(28 Feb 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Longwa, Nagaland, India – 12 December 2024
1. Tilt down from pots and pans, corn cobs hanging over a cooking place in a kitchen to Tonyei Phawang, Tribal Chief drinking tea
2. SOUNDBITE (Nagamese) Tonyei Phawang, Longwa Angh (Chief):
“At that time even if they had tried to explain, they (our forefathers) would not even have understood. They did not know Nagamese, Hindi, English.”
3. Close of Phawang
4. SOUNDBITE (Nagamese) Tonyei Phawang, Longwa Angh (Chief):
“Up until now, Longwa has been like this (Reporter asks: Do you have dual citizenship?). I am both in India and in Burma. I vote for the Burmese election. And when the Indian election comes I vote there too.”
5. Various of two sides of the entrance of Tonyei Phawang, Tribal Chief’s house with Myanmar and Indian flags
6. SOUNDBITE (Nagamese) Longhi Konyak, 40, Village Council member
“For our land, for our village, for our people, we can even turn violent. We will never let the fencing be erected, that is our decision."
7. Top shot of Longwa village and surrounding areas in Myanmar
8. SOUNDBITE (Nagamese) Yanlang, a 45-year-old Village Council member:
“For us there is no Burma Longwa or India Longwa. Longwa is one. We do not want FMR removed. And we will oppose any initiative to fence the border. This does not have our consent. Longwa family and even the Angh’s house will be divided in the middle.”
9. A local villager carrying wood cut from a forest, end of Indian road at the Indo-Myanmar border
STORYLINE:
To the people who live there, Longwa is a typical hilltop village.
The most imposing structure is a corrugated tin roof belonging to the Angh, a hereditary tribal chief.
But recently, residents worry about another, less visible, local landmark: the border between India and Myanmar, which runs right through the village.
National boundaries never mattered before to the local Konyak tribe.
“I eat in Myanmar and sleep in India,” says Tonyei Phawang, the Angh, whose house sits on the border.
The Indian government is now seeking to stop border crossings for the first time, revoking a system that made it legal for Indigenous people to cross freely and threatening to build a border fence that could cut villages like Longwa in two.
On a Thursday in December, Longwa’s marketplace was bustling with shoppers from the Myanmar side, motorbikes loaded with as much salt, flour, biscuits, clothes, milk, tea and soap as they could carry. The nearest town with a market on the other side of the border is Lahe, a full day’s drive away.
Locals have long come and gone to shop, study or seek medical care. The only sign that they’re crossing an international border is a small marker on a hilltop in the village.
The Angh and village council members say their forefathers had no idea that the concrete pillar was meant to divide them when it was built in the early 1970s.
“At that time we had no idea this is India or Myanmar. It was a free land. There was nobody who understood English or Hindi. They understood nothing,” Phawang says.
Like dozens of other Indigenous Naga tribes, the Konyak’s land straddles the mountains that divide India and Myanmar. Naga villages are usually built on hilltops for security, something that wasn’t considered when the British East India Company drew the border in an agreement with the then-Kingdom of Burma.
The Constitution of India does not allow dual citizenship, but people in Longwa see themselves as belonging to both countries.
The reach of the Indian state was very limited in these borderlands until recently.
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