There is a contradiction at the heart of Naga public life that can no longer be politely ignored. In churches, in community halls, in the rhetoric of tribal councils and student bodies, the word respect is invoked with frequency and reverence. It is cited as a cornerstone of Naga identity, a value passed down through generations, encoded in customary practice, worn as a mark of cultural distinction. And yet, every morning, on every arterial road across the State, that same value is abandoned without ceremony the moment a steering wheel is gripped. What is witnessed on Nagaland’s roads is not merely poor driving. It is a quiet, daily theatre of contempt.
A non-Naga resident recounted that the roads of Nagaland carry an anxiety beyond the ordinary hazards of traffic. For those perceived as outsiders, the experience of a minor road incident is rarely a neutral exchange. Blame, it is said, arrives before any conversation does. The incident is settled not by the facts of the road but by the identity of those involved. That such a climate has been allowed to persist, and has been normalised, is a matter that ought to disturb every conscience invested in the idea of a just and dignified society.
Equally troubling is the account offered by a Naga auto-rickshaw driver, small vehicles, modest livelihoods, fragile margins. When a larger vehicle takes a wrong turn or executes a reckless overtake, it is the auto driver who is made to feel at fault. The implicit hierarchy communicated in such moments is unmistakable, the larger the vehicle, the greater the presumption of right. Size has been conflated with status, and status with immunity. The question posed by these drivers is one that deserves to be heard clearly, ‘Are they really richer or bigger with that kind of behaviour?’ The answer, of course, is no. What is displayed in such moments is not affluence. It is the insecurity of those who can only feel large by making others feel small.
Beyond the dynamics of power and identity, there exists an everyday catalogue of road behaviour that reflects, in miniature, a society in poor civic health. Spit is launched from moving vehicles onto shared public roads. Wrappers and waste are discarded through windows as though the road were a private receptacle. Vehicles are parked with a sovereign indifference to the obstruction caused to others. Horns are leaned upon in traffic jams, as though sound could dissolve gridlock, while overtaking is attempted in conditions where overtaking is not merely illegal but irrational. Two-wheelers are ridden upon footpaths, those narrow strips of pavement that represent one of the few concessions the city makes to pedestrian dignity. Indicators, those small lights that exist precisely so that one’s intentions may be communicated to fellow road-users, are treated as optional accessories.
Each of these behaviours, taken alone, might be dismissed as a minor lapse. Taken together, they constitute a posture; my convenience is the only convenience that matters. It is not sufficient to attribute these failures to ignorance of traffic regulations. The regulations are not obscure. What is operating here is not unknowing but choosing, a daily, repeated choice to treat the road as a space exempt from the obligations of shared humanity.
This is where the contradiction becomes most acute. A society that places respect at the centre of its self-understanding cannot confine that respect to the spaces where it is observed by elders, or recorded in custom, or performed for community. Respect, to mean anything, must extend to the stranger in the auto-rickshaw navigating the same potholed road. It must extend to the pedestrian stepping off the footpath because a two-wheeler has claimed it. It must extend to the driver from outside the community who is as entitled to road justice as anyone else.
The road, precisely because it is anonymous and unobserved, is where character reveals itself most honestly. And what is being revealed, with considerable consistency, is a gap between the values that are professed and the values that are practiced.
No external authority is likely to resolve this. Traffic enforcement in Nagaland, whatever its limitations, cannot be present at every junction, every wrong turn, every moment of contempt delivered from behind tinted glass. What is required is something more demanding than compliance with regulation, it is the internalisation of a principle: that the road is shared, that other lives on it are as legitimate as one’s own, and that the respect spoken of so readily in other contexts does not have a geography that excludes the highway.
The Naga community has, in many domains, shown a capacity for self-reflection and self-correction that is genuinely admirable. That capacity is now called upon in a less glamorous arena. There is no ceremony attached to using an indicator. There is no applause for not spitting. There is no communal recognition for yielding to an auto-rickshaw. But there is, in each of these small acts, the practice of a value that has been claimed as foundational. The question being posed, not by outsiders, but by fellow Nagas sharing the same road, is a simple one, “If respect is real, where does it go at the intersection?”
