Z KATIRY
Keyake, Kohima
While addressing the Joint Forum meeting of Kohima District GBs Federation and DBs Association organized by the Joint Forum Working Committee (JFWC) at Indoor Stadium, Kohima on 18th October, 2007 T. Manen, Additional Chief Secretary & Commissioner of Nagaland said, “Suspicion hinders Peace.” According to him, whenever any initiative was taken up for our people’s welfare, they didn’t see the good sides but viewed it with a negative bent of mind. What he said reminds me of Karl Marx’s philosophy of the good side and the bad side of economic system - the good side of economic system ensures equality whereas the bad side of economic system breeds inequality.
If we go by these words of Karl Marx, there can be no peace in the world even if one shouts ‘peace’ from the roof-top of a house with folded hands, so long as there is concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people through the unprecedented legitimization of corruption. Hopefully, the generation that is waiting in the wings will work towards creating a non-populist egalitarian society - inclusive, proud and dignified. T. Manen himself is a successful bureaucrat, yet he failed to bring out the sources of suspicion.
Well, if Nagas are truly yearning for peace, then we need to scrutinize the whole situation now - identify the sources of hatred and the well-springs of suspicion with the aim to clear stereotypes and misunderstandings that besiege the Naga society. This will surely pave the way to gradual reconciliation, not just among the underground factions but also among the different Naga tribes which will slowly but surely heal the land. We need to study carefully the feelings and attitudes of people and the sources of conflict. All our efforts toward this should be guided by reason, and not by emotion. No one should add more pain to the anguish already suffered enough. Perhaps, this is the time when we must open the eyes of our people by force in order for them to see the light (truth). But let me ask frankly: who had created most of the stereotypes, suspicion and cycle of confusions among the Nagas? Are not the Naga elites and the so-called politicians who had created all these in order to satisfy their own selfish interests? Even the much-talked about patriotism, as the need of creating a better future for the Nagas, has but vanished.
The kind of patriotism we have at present is actually self-interest that had led to the present situation where we have so many divisions and countless underground factions with conflicting interest, arrogantly irreconcilable with each other. Cannot the Nagas look beyond the prism of caste, creed and tribe in order to retain the relevance of what we are preaching with big sounding words such as universal love, universal brotherhood, Christian love etc.? As for me, I do not believe in fragmentation of Naga Society into self-seeking groups for the simple reason that the interest of Nagas as a whole is more important than the interest of just one tribe or a few tribes as the whole is important than the parts. My whole life I have lived in pleasant thoughts, envisioning things in the interest of the Nagas, and nothing else had interested me. Tell me, how many people are there in today’s Naga society, who is genuinely working to glue together the broken vase, the same way the Jews worked day and night to save people during economic recession in Europe?
It is said that to be a Jew meant to bear serious responsibility not only to their own community, but also toward humanity. For the last several decades, the Nagas have been trying vainly to change each other which had often resulted in mutual insult; spewing at each other with diabolical words as in theatrical films a dragon would emit fire from its mouth. Well, in every society, it is the elites (not the sweaty class of people) who create or make opinions at different levels, and on the basis of which key decisions affecting the whole society are taken. Have they done that? Have the Naga elites and intellectuals ever attempted to break down the stereotypes and barriers created by the so-called politicians and propagandists? Have they told them what they must say, and how to avoid reopening the old wounds? Have they told the editors of Newspapers not to publish those write-ups and criticisms which can further create more stereotypes and suspicion among the Nagas? No matter from what angle you look at the present situation, the reality is soaked up in hatred and mutual suspicion among the Nagas.
The cause of it is mainly attributed to politics of hatred and envy (whether underground or over ground) which had blown Naga society into fragmentary bits. Every Naga must oppose these evil forces which are working with intense energy for the destruction of Naga society and its future. For all the chaos and confusions in our society, we often brand it as the handiwork the government of India. But a closer look at the situation shows that the evil which is an ever-present option is not “out there”; it is lurking “inside” ourselves, cunningly disguised as devotion or idealism. Politics of 21st century is not politics of the 50’s and 60’s of the 20th century. Much has changed between then and now. Alongside those changes, the trend of underground movement for sovereignty has also undergone a sea-change, affected by others’ politics in the same way many countries are affected by the politics of super powers. Therefore, the whole situation needs to be reassessed on a down-to-earth pragmatic basis, and a beginning should be made to address those core issues seriously in order to usher in a real and permanent peace. It is unfortunate that the Naga political movement which had created huge expectation in the early decades of its movement has turned so destructive to Nagas themselves. For more than half a century, the Nagas have been living insufferably with taxes and extortions heavily weighing the people down under the deceitful notion of “national interests.” Let us shed the pretense of being nationalists. Once we shed this “pretense”, sovereignty will follow automatically. Personally, I do not agree with T. Manen when he said that today only 5% of the Nagas are for sovereignty while the rest are against it. All my life I have never believed that independence is something which only big nations may have. If that was the case, then today more than half of the nations of the world would have been stripped of their nationhood status. I cannot understand why the government of India is so adamant to concede to the demand of a population that longs for freedom. However, if everything goes well with the Nagas themselves, who on earth can prevent us from being a sovereign people?
To begin the process of reconciliation, the first step should be to dissolve our anger which has almost reached a climax amongst the underground factions, and the second step should be to make peace not just amongst the underground factions but also among the different tribes. Only then the stereotypes and mutual mistrust that exist in the Naga society, with threatening dimension will begin to disappear and hatred would die out. Toward achieving this objective, we also need to treat all the underground factions as true equals vis-à-vis the Naga political issue. There can be nothing more appropriate to quote than a phrase from Alvin Toffler’s, “The Third Wave”, as the correct premise on which we must deal with various underground factions for reconciliation: Oh, Nagaland ! in spite of all thy faults, I still love thee.
