In honor of the Naga Republic Day
Some years back, one of our Ministers said “Nagas must learn how to live under the rule of law since our forefather’s have never lived under the rule of law.” I was irritated by his statement but failed to correct him and am doing so only today.
Yes our forefathers did not have a written Constitution or lived under any civil administrative system under a stipulated book of law. But far from being a lawless people, we were one of the most disciplined and law abiding society in the world. Living under the codes of our unwritten traditional laws and unique culture we were a proud and cultured nation. In that culture, every individual was respected and had an equal right before the cultural law of the clan village or range or tribe. Also every individual was indivisibly tied to a clan or village where injustice to an individual was considered an injustice to a whole clan or village. Under this just system of law, even inter village wars could erupt over an injustice inflicted to a single member of a village. On the other hand, a crime committed by an individual also always implicated his whole family or clan. This practice of collective owning of irresponsible behavior acted as a very good way of checking irresponsible behavior on the part of any individual in the Naga society of yester year. It was a very effective means of checking lawlessness in Naga society.
As for our polity, the democratic political system that our forefathers evolved was a political culture of equality where capitalism or hoarding of wealth by an individual or clan was not possible. As such, our democracy was a democracy bereft of any capitalist opportunities. This equality has its roots in the unique land ownership system that our forefathers practiced. Because our society had no Kings or Landlords who can own all the lands or a lion share of it, the question of the landed rich exploiting or ruling the landless majority did not exist in our democracy and culture. Now, the deciding factor or cause behind all forms of classes in societies is wealth and property in the hands of the higher classes or the people connected to royalty. But because Naga society had no royalty or bureaucracy, it never produced classes within the society. In this classless society of equal opportunities, if some individuals became richer then others through sheer hard labor, the individual instead of hoarding his wealth shared it with the rest of the clan or village by hosting lavish feasts of merit. Such individuals became respected persons in the community with entitlements of building their houses differently and wearing different designs of shawls.
Our society and polity were thus the purest form of both socialism in its true essence and democracy in its purest form. It was a socialism bereft of a so called dictatorship of the proletariat through a centralized command. It was also a democracy that did not yield any ground for capitalist opportunists. It is indeed a Democratic Socialism of the highest order which, I dare say, is none existent in any other society or nations of the world.
(To expand and explain in detail, our Naga political and cultural traditions, it would take a whole book to do justice to it).
But today, to our own tragedy, by bowing our heads and hearts to a foreign form of capitalist democracy and another form of imported socialism from the West, we are fast becoming a decadent society with the gap between the rich and the poor ever widening and expanding.
In today’s Naga society, any Naga politician who is ready to play to the tune of Delhi’s Pied Pipers are becoming crore paties with their agents and followers also becoming millionaires. Then there are also those National terrorists who are sucking the public dry with their exorbitant extortions- all in the name of national tax for their so called national cause.
In this vicious cycle of the rich getting richer by extorting and exploiting Naga society, where is the place of the poor man in present Naga society? With the price of every essential commodity skyrocketing with no government to check the prices, how does the poor man manage his family? When even a handful of wild vegetables cost Rs 20, a Kg of sugar Rs 45, a Kg of Beef Rs 110, a bundle of the cheapest CGI sheet Rs 3000, a Cft of timber Rs 650 etc, how does the poor man fare? In this kind of a throttling situation, how can a poor man built a house to shelter his family and purchase essential commodities to feed his family?
But in the midst of this poverty and misery, the rich goes on zooming through our towns and cities in their most modern Audi cars and Range Rovers with police escorts and their sirens blaring away.
Some rule of law indeed. Some form of government indeed! Long Live, the Naga Federal Republic.
Kaka D. Iralu
