New Delhi: NSCN (IM) General Secretary Thuingaleng Muivah will land in Delhi from Amsterdam on Wednesday on a month-long visit to India – his second in 39 years of exile – on the invitation of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Muivah is likely to put up at the same address on Lodhi Road where he had stayed during his last visit in 2004.
Muivah will be flying in here straight from Amsterdam and he is likely to be in Delhi later on Wednesday. The outfit's chairperson Isak Chishi Swu is expected to reach New Delhi only after Christmas.
A seven-member team of top NSCN-IM rebel leaders from Nagaland has already landed in New Delhi to receive their top leader. Naga cultural troupes will be there at the airport to accord Muivah a civic reception on his arrival.
While everyone is tightlipped as to what warranted such unplanned talks to be scheduled so urgently, there have been speculations that the two sides seem to have come around some amicable formula to solve the prolonged Naga crisis and the PM wants to push the top leadership to get around it.
"The two leaders are on a political mission. They will hold direct talks with the PM," this is all the NSCN-IM leaders and the Home Ministry officials are revealing as of now.
While the urgency in which the direct talks have been called can also be seen as a crisis situation in the peace front requiring urgent intervention by the PM, both sides here are talking of only 'forward movement'.
Sources said that the itineraries of Muivah's meeting with the PM or other ministers (including Home Minister Shivraj Patil) are yet to be worked out. It is likely that Centre's interlocutor in the peace talks will meet Muivah on Wednesday itself and work out the details.
This is the second time in 39 years that the NSCN-IM would be holding peace talks on Indian soil. In 2004, Muivah and Swu held talks with former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in New Delhi. The Centre and the NSCN-IM have held more than 50 rounds of peace talks in the past nine years to end the violent insurgency that has claimed around 25,000 lives since the country's independence in 1947.
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