‘You either wrest your destiny, or resign yourself to your fate’
Lt Col Ginlunmang Tungnung (Retd)
Dimapur
It was not so many years back that anyone with a mongoloid feature, not readily identifiable as someone coming from Garhwal, Assam or from Nepal was openly and widely addressed with the sobriquet of ‘Chinky’, especially on the streets and in the halls of the capital city, Delhi. Though harmless and innocuous in itself, the use of the term of address, over time, came to embody and manifest a stereotype with an underlying sense of contempt and condescension for the target individual and group of people from the various states located in the hilly, mysterious regions of North Eastern India. It came to be widely accepted to connote that such slant-eyed fellow citizens were somehow lacking in grey matter between their ears, and consequently imbued with an inherent inferiority to their mainland counterparts in intellectual capability and understanding. The attitude, conversely, implied that the user of the sobriquet, the sharer of such a mindset ennately enjoyed a superiority in worth and ability.
A logical surmise of the origin of such a negative discrimination would be that, though entrenched in the age-old contempt of the civilised plain-dweller for the apparently backward and less civilised inhabitants of the harsh, remote and underdeveloped hilly or mountainous areas, the overt and antagonistic interpretation of the use of the term became widespread and fashionable in the aftermath of the Chinese debacle of 1962. Before the ignominy of the military rout, the Indian Armed Forces in general, and the Indian Army in particular were touted as the most modern, well-trained and effective military force in continental Asia( excluding the then USSR). Northern India, which was closely identified with Indian martial prowess in recent centuries, and which most severely felt the humiliation of the unexpected military debacle at the hands of a peasant conscript army of the newly established Communist Chinese Republic, reacted in self-preservation to re-assert its sense cultural and martial superiority by venting its angst on the nearest available physical reminders , those people who bore a physical resemblance and shared racial ethnicity – the inhabitants of the Indian North East.
Despite the words and spirit contained and enshrined in the Preamble of the Indian constitution, racial discrimination is as true a fact as the continued subsistence of discrimination based on caste and community identities in our country. Thousands of years of inbred prejudices and biases will take a few generation yet to be effectively overturned.
But that does not excuse or justify the manner in which we, the people of Nagaland have repeatedly acted out our imputed role of an intellectually and morally hollow and inferior race in letter and spirit in the manner in which we have conducted our politics, and the management of the governance of the state. The term ‘banana republic’ would be a flattery in case used to refer to the state of affairs of the State of Nagaland over the past decade or so, and over the last several years in particular.
Any sense of morality, conscientiousness and democratic accountability has been markedly absent in the conduct of the governance of the State, or in the political shenanigans resorted to by all the actors in the political arena in Nagaland. We have repeatedly voted back a dysfunctional political outfit to run the government of the State. We have lowered ourselves to kowtow to morally sterile and rampantly corrupt persons as our sole, undisputed elected leaders. We have turned a blind eye and become willing parties to blatant and shameless corruption and subversion of rule of law in public life and public offices. A state, which ranked amongst the more developed of the North-Eastern hill states a couple of decades back, is now ranked last in almost all indices of development in the neighbourhood.
The worst of it is that we too harbour a reverse racist antipathy towards those from the heartland of the country, and we have manifested that attitude by trying to adopt the worst stereotypical traits of those very same people, and have striven to outdo them even, in our practice of blind material pursuits, in the resigned acceptance to gross abuse of position and power by those holding public offices at the will of the people, us the electorate. We have degraded ourselves in ostentatious display and utter adoration of material wealth, whether acquired by fair means or foul. We have slavishly copied the highly condemnable parochialism and nepotism that is the bane of the larger Indian mindset by a descent into mindless tribalism and subservient capitulation to blind, unquestioning tribal loyalties, when historically and traditionally, the Naga people have never subscribed to such a cultural outlook.
We have assiduously striven to prove true to the stereotype of an uncivilised people who cannot manage or govern themselves properly.
It is not even that we have no example or roadmap to try and emulate in our immediate neighbourhood. Mizoram, a state comprised of people almost as ethnically diverse as Nagaland, and to a lesser extent, Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya have all shown us that good governance can be delivered despite the numerous roadblocks that exist. Today, even the strife-torn state of Manipur is leaps and bounds ahead of Nagaland in the provision of basic public amenities and administrative infrastructure.
And now, in the ongoing elections to the State Legislative Assembly, we seem to be heading for the pinnacle, for the crowning glory of all our ineptitudes, of our collective indifference to the future of our State and our children, of our collective failings to overcome internal and inter-tribe divisions, of our lack of concern for and disdain of morality, of our spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy.
We are on the very verge of proving and establishing that we are indeed truly worthy of being held with contempt, and to be made the laughing stock at all discussions. A man who exemplified mal-governance, immoral loot and corruption for eleven of the past fifteen years is likely to be validated as the face of the long-awaited and prayed for change for the better! All those standing with him are the same faces from his years of mis-governance and plunder. Who is opposing this stalwart? The very same colleague and bosom buddy of yesteryears who was an equal participant and willing partner in the loot perpetuated on the state and its people to the detriment of us all. A drama was staged of parting of ways, and, believe it or not, we seem to have all fallen for it.
No other alternative or option is available. They made sure of that, by hook or by crook. Is there anyone willing to take a bet that we are not going to see an ‘emotional reconciliation’ sometime down the line, with the leader of the larger flock of elected representatives being sworn in as our next Chief Minister, and the other will inevitably be headed to the Lok Sabha as a Member of Parliament?
Awake, O my good people of Nagaland! We have no one else to blame for our state and for our fate but ourselves.
A pathetic and wailing citizen of Nagaland
