Kekhrie Yhome
Naga society is today flooded with Christian and Priestly presence everywhere: be it a new shop ‘prayer’ inauguration, a good sermon, or fasting for an “early and honourable solution.” Naga society is also perpetually hounded with historical and electoral politics: be it cynicism, selfishness, hypocrisy, or jingoism, all at their bests. Of these two extremities: one is viewed as palatable (religious) and the other debatable (political). This is a public lie!
The Church has done its bits: 52 Sundays in a year is not enough to save the lost souls – the Sunday afternoon, Monday morning prayer, CE and Senior CE fellowships, prayer cells and retreats, or the occasional home and hospital visits, etc. Now, with 2013 Nagaland Assembly election at our doorstep, the Nagaland Baptist Church Council (NBCC) has decided to enlarge a perspective on how the State leadership should be formed, by transcending dogmatic, moral, and pastoral expressions, through a proposal impugning celestial meaning with earthly purpose, by calling for a clean election campaign!
Was it the protesting Naga Students Federation (NSF), wagging its tail to the tune of NSCN-IM and NPF-led Government, which saw Christ Himself walking into the corridors of Indo-Naga peace talks? Embedded with possibilities of scuttling it through misrepresentation (to the “outside people involved in the process”)? Or, is it, the patriarch of NPF, recently expressing his fear or high wisdom, about the moral (“wrong”) involvement of the Church, in the consultative meeting of the Joint Legislators Forum (JLF)? By judging the body of Christ, is Shürhozelie Liezietsu conferring that Christ should be kept away from “hard politics”?
The idea of mixing religion and politics is inevitably a very old discourse – because both of them are eventually creation of humans, for humans, and about humans! The rhetoric(s) repeated today are therefore highly prostituted ideas, masquerading petty intents, but caught in content and form! The event(s) of invoking Christ as a sweeper of malpractice and corruption, displaying Grade IV level praxis, is, but entrenched in miasmas of hope and secular! The church-state-society debacle is a historicized clamor.
Believers propounding that theological practice and faith should not interface with politics source their belief in the difference of Monotheism and Trinitarian dogma. In pre-Christian period, Aristotle advanced concepts like oikonomia (“administration of the house”), by tracing distinction of differential politics between the oikos (house) and polis (city). The birth and conquest of Christianity eclipse into directly challenging ancient Greek thoughts, particularly the confrontation with late Stoics, whose remnants are contemporary to successive Roman emperors! By preaching humanity as based on individual equality (before the eyes of God), the panoptic views of aristocratic Antiquity were displaced, in Christian tenets. Ancient Greek concept like “barbarian” (reference to anyone not Greek) was eventually removed from the social lexicon – in the Christian assertion that humanity is one, laying the doctrinal foundation of universalism.
Moreover, by importing the Judaic concept of “love” as central to Christian thoughts – it cleverly reiterated the Greek’s attitude on overcoming love-as-attachment; subversively substituted a socio-political dimension on love as universal, and, finally, revolutionarily constituted a love-in-God as eternal. The Triumph of Christianity twisted older temporal ideas on eschatology (death) by giving a dimension of timelessness (eternality) in salvation. What is of primary importance here is that fundamental Christian theology is integral to politics since the substructure of radical socialism and ontology is intrinsically woven into the teachings on incarnation. Emerging Christianity however attempts to displaced the “politics” in oikonomia by replacing it with “‘economic’ administration of divine life, which extends from the heavenly house to the earthly manifestation.”
In 325 AD, initiated by the Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great, the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea was held – laying the canonical laws of modern Christianity. The imperative of political theology therein is inscribed, through the ceremonial positions enjoyed by Eusebius of Caesarea. Couple of decades later, it would be left to Christian apologetic St. Augustine to take on Eusebius, by charting out the unbridgeable distinction between the City of God (civitas Dei: religion) and the City of Earth (civitas terrena: politics). This fight over origins and explications of theocracy (‘divine monarch’) was continued through 20th century between Erich Paterson and Carl Schmitt, irreducibly stuck in “political theology” versus Christian “political action.”
Around 16-17 centuries – ostensibly through the works of Nicolaus Copernicus (1543), Galileo Galilei (1632), René Descartes (1644) and Isaac Newton (1687) –an upheaval of the Church and the World was introduced, with a new radical theory of knowledge system. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s homo homini dues (the anthropology of liberalism); Thomas Hobbes’ homo homini lupus (the anthropology of authoritarianism) and Carl Schmitt’s homo homini homo (a man is a man to another man) – decentered metaphysics and placed man as the centre of the universe! This principally led to a period of democratization, reconnecting the church and society, and liberating perspectives for the modern secular and of the laity, and in giving birth to Protestant liberalism. Protestantism during Reformation was a thirst of human beings for politics – ius reformandi (right to reformation).
The introduction of Christianity as a religion amongst Naga areas, some would like to argue its account – without citing its historical antecedents – as purely divine providence! Catchy clichés like “it is not coincidence but God’s incidence” provide fast food for our immediate hunger! It is fanatical vanity in osmosis, without roots!
Given its first-comer status (also, accounting its predominant population), the influence of Protestant Baptist denomination via NBCC in statecraft and interference into politics is manifold. Whether these actions are guided by the liturgical, doctrinal or messianic propensity is no mystery. The mystery remains exposed in the details. NBCC or Catholic Association and, also, not discounting the many other denominations, are all but spiritual brand names, geographically contained. Religious institutions, in contrast to politics too, have many factions! This illustrates not so much of conflict over a secular import but the agenesis enthusiasm of establishing God’s Kingdom on Earth, as an undertaking of power in economy, governmentality, and glory (Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
Similarly, the churning of God’s words, as spiritual fodders, for the laity, is not totally innocent as it appears! Doctrinal theology and pastoral teleology, given its hermeneutics of interpretations and its practice of vindictiveness, for the lay people, is but deep ideological conflicts within the Church. Nagaland’s various factions of Christianity are an outcome of conflicts in doctrinal interpretations, between various Church associations overseas. The trademark of how a pastor nurtures his/her congregation would be, by the end of the day, dependant on the kind of orientation and biblical interpretation a particular theology school trained him/her! Naga Christianity remains a laboratory, stifled by Western theologians! The unheard obfuscation of freewill – any Church as a Temple of God, whether as naivety or nativity, is a testimony to such rigidities, intolerance, foolishness, and righteousness.
Post-independent India saw the Church (specifically NBCC) aggressively interfering and influencing the workings of Naga politics. India’s first Prime Minister, one amongst many a Hindus bourgeoisie, viewed Christian activities and missionaries in the ‘North-East’ as instigating “separate independent states,” which was later defended by chroniclers like H.K Barpujari. Apart from the Rev. Michael Scott, the Church’s involvement in politics is guided by confusion rather than rights-based – but it mostly benefitted the Church, as statistics rather than socio-political liberation. Keviyikielie Linyü, in his Christian Movements in Nagaland, highlights the event of “revivalism” during the peak of Indo-Naga war, by referring to the murder of Rev. Pelesatuo by Indian Army in April 1956: it “roused the Christians to proclaim the Christian faith more bravely in the midst of ruthless repression.”
In Naga politics, the Church affirms status quoism with the Indian state. The anti-communism waged as a Baptist movement, which further ostracized the Nagas, was a virulent campaign against the “Nagaland for Christ” socialists who went to China, confirms betrayal to a prevailing Cold War propaganda machine, as simply parroting empty ranting of political ideology, as apologetics for its American benefactors! The Church needs to know the currents of politics and the language of politics, in doctrinally defending its involvement. The present Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR), having the sanction of NBCC Peace Department’s participation, is, at its best, a social engineering propaganda, using the emotive appeal of popular religion, without any foundational or conceptual framework on politics! Such is the pathetic level of the Church’s involvement in politics, then and now!
Today the Church continues to enjoy the patronage of the State. Priestley presence in almost every State function is representative of how religion plays a fundamental role in social polity. There is a State Chaplain too, apart from Naga Christian Fellowships (NCF) in various Indian cities. The NBCC, since its advocacy in the early 1970s, continues to influence the legislative legitimacy of Nagaland Liquor Total Prohibition Act since 1989.
Mixing politics and religion, historically, amongst the Nagas, was a clever craft, during British colonialism. British politics of expanding their economic designs in Assam and Naga Hills – with the hope of accessing land, cheap labour and natural resources – was mediated, through the invitation extended to the American Baptist Missionary Union, aided by the Charter Act of 1813! Dr. Miles Bronson administered the first Christian sermon to the ‘Namsang Nagas’ (Singphos and Noctes) in the late 1830s. Christian missionaries then were invited through the patronage of the Company; and there exists records of European politicians and businessmen patronizing Dr. Miles Bronson’s religious activism with monetary handouts. This historical trend has not changed.
The discovery of tea in Naga Hills in 1823 by Robert Bruce (confirmed by the next year by Dr. N. Wallich, Calcutta’s Botanical Garden, and a report submitted a year after field visit, in 1834) accidentally heightened the inevitable coming of Christianity! The aristocratic culture for a cup of tea was much in vogue in 19th Century Britain, previously introduced to the King of England by the East Indian Company as early as 1644, and registering predominance even amongst the working class. The overall demand for tea in England in the early 1830s was 32 million pounds. The finest tea was then monopolized by China – and the possibilities of producing the same between 27th and 28th Parallels in the then Assam – with bonuses of downsizing the Chinese tea price (then Rs. 12 per seer) by more than 60% was too much an economic lure to ignore. With the prevailing “reverence” for Chinese expertise, about 300 Chinese workers were brought to Assam, which proved to be an economic disaster, as pointed out by Jayeeta Sharma (Empire’s Garden, New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2012). The need for cheap and local labourers gained new momentum. The Charter Act of 1838, euphemized as “wastelands,” literally gave the East India Company a freehold over the subcontinent’s entire land, precluding a good tiding for Europeans’ wild scampering for tea-land.
Europeans preference for hardy Naga labourers over Chinese labourers was a delight since Nagas were more accustomed to clearing thicker vegetations through “slash and burn” cultivations but, more importantly, the employment of these “wild people” (sic!) comes for free as there was no use of money. The Nagas were induced into clearing jungles “by presents and good treatment” (cowrie shells, beads, rice etc. and an occasional “buffalo feast”). By 1835, the Singphos of Arunachal Pradesh were shipping their first consignment of tea products to London through Calcutta and by 1841 it was auctioned along with the products of Assam Company, Assam’s first tea company formed in London, in 1839, with its Headquarters at Nazira.
Consolidating Assam and ‘North-East’ as the world’s largest growing tea region today is yet another story! In December 1886, when the golden jubilee of the Assam Mission of the American Baptist Missionary Union was held, at Nowgong, the Rev. P.H. Moore highlighted the “[R]eligious conditions of Assam” – citing its export-import balance sheet: tea alone was accounted as export value of Rs. 30, 238, 450 (1885-86 rates). Interestingly, he also pointed out the abundant presence of mineral resources, including coal and petroleum! The British Crown was by then directly administering; and Naga lands were rampantly transferred for tea cultivation. Labourers engaged in tea cultivation in 1885 were pegged at 107, 847 persons (R.P. Behal, “Power Structure, Discipline, and Labour in Assam Tea Plantations under Colonial Rule,” in IRSH, 2006, pp. 143-74). The harvest was indeed plentiful but the labourers were few!
Christian missionary is not innocent, although it has brought an idea of modernity to many indigenous peoples. It is vexed in politics of power and glory, motivated by economic interests and pervading sense of humanism. Politics and Christianity are avowed: intertwined, whether it is historical or contemporary, whether intimate or public. The friction of seemingly colossal interests among the Nagas, in the context of impregnating a religious and political hybrid as illicit, between its high priests, opens new vistas for thoughts, which are pertinently misguided, in interpreting themes concerning concepts, doctrines, politics, and historicity. An opportunity scavenging on a timely societal issue like this eventually allows us to differentiate, define, and even deconstruct the meaning of politics and religious space and practice.
To however believe or advocate an impossibility of “mixing” politics and religion, laced as cautionary moral tale, is also to betray a double bind of hegemonic thinking, maliciously protecting its own puritanical righteousness as substance ontology (as in the poor example of ‘oil’ and ‘water’), on a case, where, to paraphrase Carl Schmitt, all debated concepts of the modern theory of politics and the State are but secularized theological concepts. Without understanding how religion took roots (Christianity is a historical religion), there is no basis for NSF or the NPF President to impose personal opinions on the tasks of the Church. Salvaging salvation involves the social and the individual! One does not see any remarkable political philosophy or theological enterprise emerging from such vainglorious one-liners, but over some profound history of ideas and events!
[The author is a columnist for Eastern Mirror’s Thursday edition, featuring A Little Chat]
