A few years back, on orientation day at my college, a Punjabi girl came up to me and asked me where I was from. I told her I was from Nagaland. She seemed delighted at that knowledge and then said, “Oh! How long have you been in India?” Keeping sarcasm in check, I politely explained to her that Nagaland is in India. In fact, Nagaland was the 16th of the now 28 states to be included in to the Republic of India. India received her independence in 1947. Nagaland became part of the Indian Union in 1963 under the Ministry of External Affairs till 1972 when it finally came under the Ministry of Home Affairs. Back then, there was one consolidated group that fought for Naga independence from the Indian Government – the Naga National Council (NNC). In 1975, a group broke away from the NNC who named themselves the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN), of which there are now four different factions after further differences arose.
The socio-economic condition of the Naga people is affected directly and indirectly by our complicated relationship with the parent Indian Government and the confused social circumstances within which Naga society finds itself.
The Naga identity was given to us by outsiders. We were never ‘Naga’ before the British (and along with them, the Indian Government) and the Christian missionaries came. We were simply Angami or Ao or Lotha or Sumi or Konyak, etc., i.e., we identified ourselves only by our separate tribal identities. Before the British stronghold on Nagaland and the advent of Christianity (in the 1870s), our social system consisted of trade by barter, agriculture dependence, oral tradition of record-keeping, craftsmanship, animism, head-hunting, etc. Then, what most civilisations and societies build up to for centuries, our society was made to rush up to in mere decades. This caused major gaps in the ideological and social beliefs/values between the generation that was before and the generations that followed. Hence, I believe, that the history of our collective ‘Naga’ identity and the upheaval of our social systems brought upon by the advent of the British and Christianity are the broad causes of the Naga identity crisis. Modernity and development, modern system of formal education, communication technology, organised religion, pop-culture, modern means of transport, manufactured foods, retail industry – it all came flooding in. All of this, while the leaders of the Naga people were (and some still are) trying to negotiate our freedom from the British/Indian Government and, at the same time, benefitting from our affiliation to them in terms of monetary subsidies, development grants, administrative grants-in-aid, etc.
Here is what the Naga society looks like in its current state:
1) We have both constitutional law and customary law at work – double jeopardy.
2) We had the ‘Naga’ identity imposed upon us which no Naga knows how to fully identify with yet, because what is the Naga identity really, when tribalism is put before the collective identity that we are supposed to represent.
3) We are a 90% Christian population. The remaining 10% are all non-Nagas who live in Nagaland. There is an ever raging but unacknowledged (by most) battle between our religious values and our traditional customary values.
4) The NSCN forcefully (as opposed to ‘on free will’) takes taxes from the people, oppresses the citizens by instilling fear of getting kidnapped and/or shot at, fights amongst and within themselves for power and control (or usually something as insignificant as personal disputes), pokes their noses into church matters (singing “Hallelujah!” here while shooting or extorting from someone there), and endangers the lives of the people whose freedom they claim to fight for.
5) Examinations & interviews for Government jobs are rigged. Even before the examination, a number of the vacancies advertised are either:
a) reserved by ministers, politicians, and ‘underground’ members (as we like to lovingly call our “freedom fighters”), or
b) reserved by some rich people with under-achieving children who ultimately won’t even show up for work themselves.
All of the above presents to us a situation of regional and representational imbalance where:
a) under-developed areas or areas that need rejuvenating are neglected by the people in power because they will only bring improvements to their own tribal areas (tribalism at play),
b) the 3 eastern districts receive almost double the funds (an approximation) than the other “advanced” tribes receive, especially in agriculture and road development, and yet insist on remaining “backward”,
c) there is a growing number from an already large number of educated unemployed for lack of sustainable job opportunities and losing available job opportunities to under-hand activities,
d) self-employment suffers at the hands of the taxation and under the harassment of the underground,
e) our political leaders misuse public funds to invest in their own capital which they later promote as “growing industry and enterprise of the Naga people” (private resorts and clubs, farms, hotels, etc.).
I believe that the root of our socio-economic problems lie at the multiplicity and incongruity of our fealties which is a manifestation of our identity crisis. We shuffle our allegiances between the different identities (and ideologies that those identities prescribe) as and when different situations confront us – separate tribal identity, ‘village of origin’ identity, clan identity, collective Naga identity, religious identity, traditional identity, modern identity, Indian identity. Most Nagas are either apathetic to or ignorant (or just plain confused) about the injustices and imbalances prevailing in our society. I believe that this confusion is a result of the chaos that sudden modernity brought to our traditionalism. We are in a transition period, and it is a violent period in the development of any society. Unless we have visionaries, strong voices and workers to help steer ourselves towards the growth and sustenance as a community, we might be in for self-destruction. Our identity as a people is under threat of being lost to ourselves, let alone to outsiders. Who will stand up and speak/act against injustice!
Lanusongla Lemtur
Aoyimti, Dimapur
