By Biswajyoti Das GUWAHATI, India, Dec 19 (Reuters) - A top leader of a powerful separatist group in India's northeast Nagaland state will make a rare visit to New Delhi on Wednesday in a bid to end a 60-year-old insurgency, a rebel spokesman said. Thuingaleng Muivah, general secretary of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-IM) has been living in exile since the mid-1980s, and has only once before held talks on Indian soil. He currently lives in Amsterdam. In 2004, he met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and leaders of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party in the capital. Muivah will be joined by NSCN-IM chairman Isaac Chishi Swu early next month and will hold talks with senior Indian officials, NSCN-IM spokesman Karaibo Chawang told Reuters by phone from Dimapur, Nagaland's main commercial town. "As of now I can only say Muivah will celebrate Christmas in New Delhi," said Chawang. "More details of his programme are not yet fixed. It will be decided only after his arrival." Indian officials remain candid about the rebel leader's visit. "There could be some progress in the peace process, otherwise he would not have come to India for talks," a senior federal intelligence officer in New Delhi said by phone. The NSCN-IM agreed to a ceasefire in August 1997 and launched a peace process to bring an end to the country's longest-running insurgency that has killed 20,000 people since 1947. Indian officials and NSCN-IM leaders have met more than 50 times in Thailand, Japan and Europe -- most recently in Amsterdam earlier this month -- but the nine-year-old peace process has made little progress. The talks have mainly been stalled over key rebel demands for the right to self-rule and the creation of a new state containing all Naga dominated areas in the restive region, which is opposed by other tribes living amongst them.
