Imlisanen Jamir
There is a photograph now circulating of the South Lawn of the White House fitted with a 92-foot steel octagon, floodlit and roaring, while the President of the United States sat ringside. It was described as a celebration of nationhood. What it celebrated was something older and considerably less admirable: the recognition that an institution, once emptied of its original purpose, makes an excellent stage.
The process is not peculiar to America, and it did not begin last Sunday. It has been underway for some time across governments and continents, and it follows a pattern that is consistent enough to suggest something more than accident. The building is retained. The ceremonies continue, the speeches are delivered, the correct forms observed. What disappears, gradually and without announcement, is the interior life of the institution: the deliberation, the inconvenient argument, the sense that what happens within these walls carries obligations beyond the satisfaction of whoever is watching.
Legislatures were built for the slow and unglamorous work of contesting ideas until something resembling policy emerged from the friction. In many places they have become rooms in which prepared positions are performed for cameras while the actual business of governance proceeds elsewhere. Courts whose authority rested on the appearance of procedure and impartiality now conduct themselves with a visible awareness of the gallery. Universities have found that controversy attracts attention, and attention attracts funding, and so controversy is tended to with some care. Churches whose claim on congregations was partly the claim of a space held apart from ordinary power have become, in many instances, annexes of political organisation, the sermon adjusted to the calendar of whoever needs a platform that week.
In Nagaland the pattern requires little explanation for anyone who has sat through a session of the state legislature and watched the House resolve into performance, or attended a tribal hoho whose conclusions were settled before the delegates took their seats. The church here carries a weight of social authority that has not gone unnoticed by those in need of audiences. University convocations have become occasions for government, the academic occasion reorganised around the availability of ministers and the requirements of the official photograph.
What erodes in each case is not only the function but the expectation that function was ever the point. People adjust to what institutions actually deliver rather than what they were built to provide. They stop arriving at a legislature expecting legislation, stop sitting through a hoho expecting genuine deliberation, stop occupying a pew expecting something that does not also require a vote. The institution persists, fills its building, observes its forms, but the people inside have long since revised what they understand it to be for. That revision is never declared. It settles in through the accumulated experience of nothing consequential happening, until the spectacle becomes the only product on offer, and the memory of any other purpose begins to seem, in retrospect, somewhat naive.
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