Witoubou Newmai
Next year, the Naga Club will complete 100 years. Naga labourers/porters who were part of the Labour Corps during World War I, recognizing the significance of nations, formed the Naga Club in 1918.
A hundred years down the line, it is imperative for the present Naga generation to retrospect/introspect whether the vision and aspiration of the Naga Club founders have been upheld. We are ignoring and undermining the vision of the Naga Club founders if we are not willing to step a bit further to check whether the kind of responses to various circumstances along these 100 years have changed the ‘Naga course.’
Nostalgia and the feeling of ‘alien-ness’ in alien lands had laid ground for the germination of ‘Naga political consciousness.’ This served as a unifying force for the Naga corps. The sparse Naga men in the foreign lands came to a 'unitary wholeness' as their consciousness became sharpened resulting in laying of the foundation for a new national movement. However, looking back to the ‘unitary point’ of 1918, the Naga campaign for dignity resembles a cone---becoming loose with a wide open mouth driven by widespread divisions. If this trend is not addressed urgently the ever unfurling of the 'Naga Cone' will leave us as just another plain-sheet, with all ends disconnected.
The best way to celebrate the centenary of the Naga Club founding should be to make efforts to reverse the fast unfurling of the 'Naga Cone'. In attempts to reverse this process, we need to ask ourselves today of the causes that are leading the Naga people to become shortsighted towards our campaign for dignity. Nagas need to admit many things in their efforts to address the farcical Naga situation.
The Naga people then ought to realize the urgent need of the ‘collective spirit’ the Native Americans in North Dakota displayed last year over the oil company issue.
Many peoples’ movements were inspired when the “resurrected fighting spirit of the forefathers” of the Native Americans rose as they “stood in unprecedented unity” to contest an oil company’s desecration of their sacred land in North Dakota. Internationally acclaimed columnist and author Ramzy Baroud puts it beautifully.
“To see them standing once more, along with their families, riding their feather-draped horses and fighting for their very identity is a cause for celebration. It brings hope to oppressed people all across the world that the human spirit will never be destroyed," the columnist wrote. “Methods of extermination differed, from outright murder to disease-infected blankets, to, as of today’s standoff, threatening their most viable resource: water, and yet, somehow, the spirit of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and numerous brave chiefs and warriors still roam the plains, urging their people to stand up and carry on with an overdue fight for justice and rights,” he noted. In fact, the “collective spirit of Native American nations was being vigorously revived,” Ramzy Baroud added.
It is time for the Nagas to admit that the inability to withstand the onslaught of ‘material culture’ and weakness for ‘convenience and comfort’ at the cost of the Naga principle and morality is fast steering the Naga course elsewhere. The Nagas also need to admit that the everyday business of vested interest, hypocrisy and tribalism is fast draining out our energies and resources.
