Adinno Phizo

Adinno Phizo was admitted to Bethel Hospital in Kohima on the night of 5 October 2026 and died there on the evening of 8 October 2026, aged 94. PTI, citing hospital and NNC sources, said she died of age-related ailments at around 7.50 pm. Hub Network reported that the exact cause of death had not been confirmed.

Condolences came from the Naga People's Front, the Central Nagaland Tribes Council, the Kudawhi Union Dimapur and others. Family sources said her funeral would be held on Saturday, 10 October 2026, with the place of burial still to be decided.

Adinno Phizo was the eldest daughter of Angami Zapu Phizo, the Naga National Council leader whom supporters call the Father of the Naga Nation, and his wife Jwane Phizo. Her exact date and place of birth have not been made public; reports of her age over the years place her birth around 1932.

She later wrote that during her early childhood her father was in Burma, that she had very little connection with him, and that she used to wonder why he was not with the family. As she grew up she came to understand his work for the Naga people, and she said it came naturally to her that she should help him.

After the Naga Plebiscite of 16 May 1951, Indian forces moved against NNC leaders. Adinno recalled that when the army tried to capture her father, the family went into hiding in the deep jungles of Nagaland, where villagers supplied them with food, and that she hosted visiting leaders in caves with tea and snacks. Her father left the Naga Hills in the mid 1950s to take the Naga case abroad and reached London in 1960.

Details of Adinno Phizo's schooling and any formal higher education have not been made public. Her own accounts focus on the political education she received at her father's side, first in the Naga Hills and later as his secretary in London.

Adinno joined her father in London in 1963, seven years after he had left the Naga Hills. In her 2022 Outlook essay she said Assam Chief Minister Bimala Prasad Chaliha, concerned about the region during the period of the Chinese aggression, asked her to go to London and brief her father, telling her that he was already a leader in a foreign country and should come and lead this part as well.

From then until his death in 1990 she worked as his political secretary, looking after the house as well as his official correspondence and political work. Her younger brother Kevilevor followed in May 1966. Both told reporters that they were helping their father mobilise international opinion for the Naga cause.

Angami Zapu Phizo died in London on 30 April 1990. Within three hours, senior NNC Executive Council members Khodao Yanthan and Yongkong Nangshi, who were in London, appointed Adinno acting president at the NNC office there. She was 57. Speaking to reporters, she said it was not a case of establishing a dynasty but of promoting the cause for which her father had fought all his life.

On 12 May 1990 she was formally elected NNC president at a general meeting at Kohima Village Hall. A general meeting at Longmisa village on 14 and 15 March 1991, reportedly attended by more than 6,000 Nagas, reaffirmed her leadership, and Zashei Huire, President of the Federal Government of Nagaland, conferred political plenipotentiary power on her.

The NNC later split. The faction that followed her, known as NNC (Adinno), continued to uphold the organisation's original stand, while another faction formed around Khodao Yanthan. Adinno ran the NNC from London until 2013 and from Kohima after that, remaining president until her death.

Kevilevor Phizo, a Central Executive Council member of the NNC, died of a heart attack in London on 12 April 2013, aged 74. Adinno, then 81, accompanied his coffin home. Thousands of people gathered at Dimapur Airport on 27 April 2013 to receive his remains, and his funeral was held at the Mission Compound in Kohima the next day.

At the funeral she said: "We are returning to our beloved homeland, after 50 years for me, and my dear brother Kevilevor is coming home to rest after 46 years." She thanked her brother for his loyalty and for the support he had given her and the office of the NNC president. She did not go back to London, and spent her remaining 13 years in Nagaland.

Adinno consistently held to the NNC's original position that the Nagas were never part of India. She treated the declaration of independence of 14 August 1947 and the plebiscite of 16 May 1951, which the NNC says produced a 99.9 per cent vote for sovereignty, as the pillars of the Naga claim. She described statehood and other arrangements as attempts to cover up the occupation of Nagaland.

In her 2022 Outlook essay she wrote that the NNC had not demanded anything from India, and that other groups were making demands that did not reflect the Naga national stand. She argued that India should neither have brought ballot boxes nor the army into Nagaland.

Her annual messages repeatedly framed the struggle in religious and democratic terms. She called sovereignty a God-given inherent right, urged Nagas to stand united on the position set by their grandfathers and fathers, and called for the goal to be pursued by non-violent democratic means.

Adinno Phizo never married and had no children. She was one of several children of Angami Zapu Phizo and Jwane Phizo; her brother Kevilevor, the third child, died in 2013. Her mother stayed in Kohima throughout her father's exile, while Adinno spent about 50 years in London. After 2013 she lived in Kohima. A speaker at the 36th death anniversary of her father in April 2026 said six of Phizo's children, including Adinno, were still living.

For 36 years Adinno Phizo was the formal head of the oldest Naga political organisation and the principal custodian of her father's political legacy. She kept the NNC's founding position alive through decades of ceasefires, accords and negotiations conducted by other groups, and she remained a familiar presence at Plebiscite Day and Phizo death anniversary observances in Kohima.

After her death, the Naga People's Front described her as a towering figure and a strong custodian of Naga political history, and the Kudawhi Union Dimapur said her steadfast commitment to the political aspirations and identity of the Naga people was an important part of Naga political history. News outlets described her passing as the loss of one of the last direct links to the founding generation of Naga nationalism.

Adinno's public voice came mostly through written messages to the nation on NNC anniversaries, which Naga newspapers including Eastern Mirror, Morung Express and Mokokchung Times published in full, and through addresses recorded at NNC gatherings such as those at the Chedema Peace Camp near Kohima. In August 2022 Outlook published a first-person essay by her, "India Should Neither Have Brought Ballots Nor Army Into Nagaland", describing her childhood, her years in London and the NNC's stand on peace talks. Journalist Wasbir Hussain, who interviewed her in 2003, recalled that conversation for Northeast Live after her death.