Op-Ed
International Conference on “Rethinking the Nagas in the Contemporary,”
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ur conference theme, “Rethinking the Nagas in the Contemporary,” directly points to the importance of time and implies the importance of space as well, since time normally needs physical habitation called places to have lived reality. We get born at some time, in some place; we grow up, live, work, and die some time, some place. Life begins, progresses, and ends at intersections of time and space. Time and space are the two dimensions of human existence we cannot transcend either as individuals or as a people. So I’d like to think with you this morning about Nagas on two sets of questions. One having to do with space: Where are Nagas now and where will Nagas be? The second set has to do with time: Who are Nagas now and who will Nagas be? I will approach these questions in a sweeping bird’s-eye view kind of way and not get into a systematic analysis. And so we can start with the spatial and temporal facts of our conference.
First, we are meeting in New Delhi, the capital city of the leading postcolonial nation-state in the world. It is easy to assume, because Nagas have a long-standing political quarrel with the government of India, that Nagas are anti-India. But that is nonsense. Nagas are not anti-India.
We are a people who happen to like ourselves – at least half of the time. And liking ourselves doesn’t mean disliking India and Indians. Far from it. Nagas owe a lot to India, which is a matter of fact. We just need to look around and see where most Naga jobs and salaries come from. And we are grateful to the Indian government and Indians for this. And when it comes to space, physical geography, which determines so much of human existence, Nagas and Indians are nature’s next-door neighbors. It’s true we are different peoples and our relationship is complicated, but it is also close and intimate. And intimacy can generate friction and that has been the history of our relationship. But that can change, should change, in time, to the benefit of both sides. And it is because we believe in change for the better that we are gathered here.
Secondly, time. We are meeting in the shadow of the tragedy that happened three weeks ago in Dimapur. There is no skirting it, and we shouldn’t try to, not only because it was global news but especially because the incident shows Nagas have to get our act together. Whatever explanations can be produced — and there must be several — the fact remains that there was a total breakdown of public responsibility and social awareness in Dimapur for about a week leading up to and on the day of the lynching. So we need to talk about it together as a people in shame, less for laying blame than for understanding where we went wrong, and how we may improve the existing mechanism or develop new ones for preventing incidents like it in the future.
The failure of the local law enforcement has been universally noted. But as the local papers have pointed out, there were lots of people and agencies missing in action. When the signs of trouble were brewing for over a week the elected representatives of the people were nowhere on the scene. Nor were the civil society organizations, church leaders, tribal leaders, heads of colleges and schools and professors and teachers, and neighborhood elders and parents. Where were all our leaders and elders when the young people needed us most? This is a serious and legitimate question because a well-functioning society takes more than law enforcement to run.
I’ll have more to say later about how we can come together to refashion ourselves into a people and build a global Naga society with Nagaland as the home base so we can be better prepared.
But for now, I’d like to comment briefly on another aspect of the Dimapur tragedy: the extreme reaction against the Nagas as a whole that has emerged in its wake.
There is a small but powerful element in this country, with some grassroots following, which has gone so far as to equate the Nagas with ISIS and al Qaeda, and we need to protect ourselves against their calumny. In their eyes, Nagas have suddenly become, in one day, the worst people on earth because a Naga mob lynched an alleged non-Naga rapist. Nagas recognize and have condemned the lynching as a most horrendous and “barbaric” crime, and will need to do much more than condemning.
But anything Nagas do will be too little for these Naga haters because what they are really after is something else, and it is not justice or preventing violence. They have another agenda. For them, Nagas are the enemy, their Other, onto whom they subconsciously project their worst selves and fears. For them, Nagas have no right to resent Indian occupation and domination, past or present. If you ask them why, they can’t give you a coherent answer because there is none. They might grumble about the economic dependency of the Nagas on India, which is true, as we said. But if it is that, I understand Nagaland gets less than one-third of one percent of India’s annual tax revenue, which, though a substantial sum in
itself, would not be much more than what other states of similar size are getting from the central government.
So we wonder what these Naga denigrators want. And we realize that they are pulling a familiar Indian trick out of an old playbook going back to the earliest years of Naga nationalism. They are recreating the colonial image of the Nagas as too ignorant, backward, wild, and violent to deserve respect and equal treatment, much less full human rights. They are engaging in a propaganda strategy of containment and dissemination. By that I mean, they want to push contemporary Nagas into a make-believe corral of barbarism in Nagaland, based on the events of one day, and broadcast and disseminate the false fabricated image to the rest of the country and the world. The rhetorical ploy behind this Naga demonization, meant especially for Western consumption, says in effect: “See what Nagas have turned Christianity into in India! Christian ISIS. You understand now what the Indian government has had to deal with for so long.”
When we hear these self-righteous, boisterous voices in the halls of government in New Delhi, we wonder where the famous tradition of champions of human rights and civilization in the Indian parliament were when the Indian Army pillaged and terrorized Naga villages, desecrated churches, raped Naga women, tortured Naga men, and boasted that they were “better headhunters” than the Nagas. Think, for instance, the massacre in Yengpang village in 1954, when Indian soldiers under the leadership of the Political Officer in Noklak Camp massacred 356 innocent, peaceful villagers in two days.
In short, we need to counter this hatred of the Nagas, this neocolonial narrative of Naga barbarity, because it has deep mass psychological affect and wide physical and political consequences. We can’t let this discourse of Naga demonization as justification and fuel for Indian domination go unchallenged. Not again. We need to win this representational image battle this time around, with the help of our Indian friends, for the sake of our common humanity and the country’s. Let’s keep our eyes and ears open wherever we are in the world.
That said, when it comes to the Naga’s long standing political disagreement with the Indian government, we know that with each passing day the conventional sovereign-state nationalism of the type Nagas have fought for is headed closer and closer to the museum. Does anyone use manual Remington typewriters anymore? And I don’t say this in ridicule, not at all, on the contrary. But Nagas have to have the integrity not only to state the facts of history but the courage and intelligence to face the facts of life in the present, in the contemporary. And the 21st century world, though still in the grip of the nation-states arrangement of the world, offers multiple alternative forms of individual self-definition and group affiliation besides citizenship rooted in the sovereign nation. What I mean is, contemporary Nagas as a people are freer than we realize, and the whole world has quite literary opened up for us, as it has for other people, who are prepared to enter it and reshape it in the ways we and they want.
Nagas in the Contemporary World Let me digress a little here in order to loop back to my point. The original plan was for me to speak at this conference by Skype. Had I done that I would have been there in the US and with you here in Delhi, two places at once. It would have been night for me in Washington state and morning for you in Delhi: night and day, two different times at the same time. We obviously
live in a world in which the unprecedented advances in science and technology of the last few decades have compressed places and time differences for people continents apart into instantaneous events shared on simultaneous digital screens. We live in a globally interconnected world, and Nagas are part of it.
This revolutionary instantaneity of time and space in the contemporary world, coupled with another phenomenon — global migrations of peoples — has released two related trends in the world that are changing the course of human history. First, it is changing the way the human subject (in the philosophical sense) is being constructed and defined; second, it is restructuring the individual’s relationship to the State, which is the locus of political rights.
In the modernist territory-bound nation-state the relationship between the State and the citizen was and still is top-down. But this top-down structure is being transformed and replaced by the postmodern bottom-up relations engendered by what some have call the “media-State,” represented by the global reach of electronic communication, social media, and entertainment networks. Functioning in this postmodern, borderless, planetary, electronic State requires the self to be multi-faceted; in effect, the postmodern subject has become multiple rather than unitary.
And in the contemporary environment of global cultural flows and transnational migrations, the self can create culturally and ethnically hybrid locations and spaces that are beyond anything the nation-state imagined. And what the individual can do, a group can as well. This is a world in which the conventional State seems fated to always play catch-up with its citizens.
One of the hybrid human-groups whose numbers are growing is what Guillermo Gomez-Pena has termed the “Fourth World,” which is “a counterspace that challenges the privilege and identity of citizens, those who have a home” — a state-sanctioned home. It is “the world of the displaced, the exiles, immigrants, asylum seekers, and other mobile citizens” (Rodowick 17).
Gomez-Pena adds another category, the Fifth World, which is a more developed version of the “media-State.” The Fifth World is “a mobile space” of reciprocal exchange and of dialogue “where concepts of border and identity can be contested and reconfigured” (Rodowick 18).
Together, the Fourth and Fifth States constitute a conceptual space of heterogeneity composed of the “portions of all the previous worlds” the participants carry with them and inside them. In this way, the postmodern age has inaugurated the arrival of a new human being who is increasingly getting disengaged from the conventions of territorialized States.
To be sure, it is nation-states that still rule our lives and the world. But its hold on the people is oosening in many parts of the world. Given our history and present circumstances, it is a safe bet to say that the future of the Nagas will be determined not by the nationalism of the past but by the globalizing forces of the contemporary age.
Globalization has gotten a bad name, and rightly, if by the term we mean the unscrupulous financial institutions and exploitative multinational corporations. But there are other forms of globalization with real potential for good. Like creating awareness about human rights, promoting women’s rights, making available opportunities for transnational cultural exchange and enrichment, disseminating knowledge about global warming, and learning how we can live more ecologically-friendly lives. One specific and positive application of transnationalism, as a counter to global capitalism, comes from Etienne Balibar. Balibar gives transnationalism an activist’s turn by associating it with the belief in a common humanity. He makes it into an instrument for political and economic equality especially for minorities throughout the world, and for their access to self-governance; in his view, transnationalism is a form of resistance to
the “promulgations of Eurocentric universalism”. It is easy to see why people like the Nagas might find Baliber’s concept of transnationalism empowering. It offers nations without a State an alternative mode of belonging to meaningful global communities. This is part of the contemporary world Nagas belong in: a transnational world linked up by multiple channels of communication and united around the call for and practice of human rights for all.
End of History, Clash of Civilizations, and Nagas. There’s one trend in the contemporary world where, happily, Nagas don’t belong, and that is the ideological battle being waged on the question of which country should own the world and what civilization should own history. The agonistic discourse has huge policy and material implications and smells of the Cold War era. It has two versions, both from the perspective of the dominant West. I won’t rehearse them here because they are familiar, except to note that Francis Fukuyama’s master narrative of the “end of history” contends that Western liberal democracy and free market capitalism are the political and the economic systems humankind will ever need.
One wonders what the rest of humankind lived and worked for or why they bothered to build communities and civilizations of their own for millenia. And for people like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, the future of humankind will be decided by which of the half-dozen or so major civilizations of the world wins in the unavoidable “clash of civilizations” that lies ahead.
Huntington concludes that the clash of civilizations will essentially boil down to “the West and the Rest,” the forces of Western neo-liberal values and institutions against the “weakness and irrationality” of the Rest.
There are at least two reasons why Nagas don’t need to participate in these battles. First, politically speaking, Nagas are still in a neocolonial stage of history, having been excluded from the age of postcolonial freedom. In that sense, Nagas are twice removed from the power-struggle between the First and Second Worlds, which is the context in which these ideological wrangles are taking place. Secondly, and more importantly, these narratives of history and civilizational debates often end in wars and in violations of civil liberties and human rights.
Nagas: Then, Now, To be Briefly, then, where are the Nagas and who are the Nagas in the contemporary world? It can be said generally that Nagas have been politically aware and have demonstrated a high degree of group agency and decision-making capacity in the recent past. Some of the nodal moments of
Naga history can be summarized thus:
- In the old days, the village government was the stage, the territorial space, for participatory democracy – for the Naga men folk at least. Our ancestors lived their history, though they did not
put it into written records.
- Nagas were then suddenly thrust into the messy colonial age, and while the postcolonial age swept throughout the formerly colonized world, we were left behind in the colonial backwaters of the British Empire, and rendered anachronistic in the age of decolonization by Government of India, so that we find ourselves excluded from the nation-states narrative of history.
- Then came the forces of globalization and transnationalism which catapulted us into the brave new world of the 21st century. And now, Nagas are in Nagaland, Myanmar, Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and throughout India, including 30,000 strong in Delhi alone, and are all over the world, from Australia to Norway, China to the United States, and many countries in between.
- Contemporary Nagas are faced with two questions related to our place in the world: One is the unresolved political problem with India. This involves the commitment of both the parties, and should be settled quickly in a way that benefits both sides. (But this is a subject that will come up later in the conference.) The other is the yet-to-be defined place of the Nagas in the fast changing transnational world. And this is the subject I wish to conclude on.
Constructing a Transnational Naga society How do Nagas prepare for responsible citizenship in the heterogeneous, mobile, global, transnational, electronic-media world without losing our sense of the indigenous communitarian values we inherited from the past? This is too large a question to tackle in a few minutes, unless we take a specific case to illustrate the workings of the whole. And that’s what I want to do by returning to the Dimapur incident with which I started.
Three days after the incident, on March 8, the Overseas Naga Association tried to connect with one another globally and with our people in the homeland through a simple email. This is different from the Press Release which some of you may have seen. The email said:
“Dear ONA Members around the World:
As you know, news from Nagaland in the last few days could not have been worse. The events have scandalized and hurt us deeply.
This is the kind of time when we each retire into the privacy of our interior lives to find support and grace there. It is also the kind of time when Nagas as a people need to digdeep and find the cultural and spiritual resources, old and new, so we don’t despair. The old tradition of truth-telling and simple, honest living in intimate village communities produced a robust and generous people in our ancestors; and the new message of the redemptive power of faith and love reinforced those traditions, and together they continue to sustain the Nagas throughout the world. Nagas are now a global people and
we the members of the Overseas Naga Association are an important part of this expanding story. It is the story of a hearty, resilient people of goodwill. Let us keep it that way.”
The reason I’m sharing this email with you is to emphasize the need for a new kind of Naga society consisting of all the Nagas from around the world, with Nagaland as the ancestral home.
It practical terms, it will require serious renovation and improvements, among them:
- Eliminating unfair and corrupt practices in government that generate resentment and
anger among the people.
- Mending the divisions within each tribe; opening channels of communication and
creating a climate of co-operation between and among tribes.
- Putting in place a legal system and an effective enforcement mechanism to keep out
illegal immigration; at the same time, being tolerant of and reaching out to the non-Nagas
who are in Nagaland lawfully for peaceful, collaborative co-existence. This way, crime
and anti-social activity can be prevented, or quickly detected and dealt with when they
occur, because the community mechanisms we’ve put in place will be readily available
for use, unlike what happened on March 5.
- Improving relations with the people and the governments of the neighboring states will
be critical as well. This can be achieved by cultivating good will among the people
through cultural and educational exchanges, joint economic ventures and development
projects for mutual benefit. The effort will need to be various, and carried out at the
levels of both government and civil society.
- And very importantly, it will be remiss on our part to leave behind our fellow-Nagas in
the region and in Myanmar as we make life better for ourselves in Nagaland.
In short, what contemporary Nagas need is a vision and a comprehensive plan with a goalsoriented
set of actions to improve government, built and maintain infrastructure, develop the
villages, create peaceful and vibrant communities in the state, build social and economic bridges
with other states in the region, so that Nagaland can become (a) an exemplary provider of good
quality life for all its people, starting with the villagers and the working class in the towns; and
(b) become a leader in protecting human rights – ours and our neighbors’.
The idea behind a transnational Naga society is to recapture the vibrant self-help culture of our
ancestors and build upon the communitarian ethos of the Nagas village. That culture and that
tradition will be the gear driving the vision and plan for constructing the Naga society on a
transnational scale. If Nagas in the homelands and throughout the world can get invested in the
project in spirit and with goods and services, there’s no reason why we cannot reshape ourselves
into the people we want to be, and the land we take pride in calling home.
To do this, Nagas will need India’s support and friendship, Myanmar’s co-operation, and the goodwill of countries where Nagas have settled. In this way, in fifty years or less, this generation of Nagas would have built a Naga homeland where the participatory democracy of the traditional Naga village and its sense of community will find continuation in the contemporary world. We could say of ourselves then, that our Naga ancestors came to this part of Earth in the Naga Hills from “time immemorial,” and some headed further east, some west, others north and south, and we became a transnational, global people. But we have a homeland we are proud to claim our own, even from the ends of the world.
God bless the Naga people and our homelands!
God bless India and the World!
Thank you.
Works Referenced
Etienne Balibar, “World Borders, Political Borders,” PMLA.117(1) (January 2002): 68-71.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press, 1992.
Guillermo Gomez-Pena, The New World Border. San Francisco, City Lights, 1996.
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York,
Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic Monthly. Vol. 266.No.3 (September
1990): 47-58.
D.N. Rodowick, “Introduction: Mobile Citizens, Media States,” PMLA.117(1) (January 2002):
13-23.
Wislawa Szymborska, Poems: New and Collected, 1957-1997. New York, Harcourt, 1998.