When I was a child, I feared the dark and ghosts; with the passage of the years, my old fears were replaced by new ones; and my most recent fear is opening our Daily Newspapers in the morning. Every night I go to bed dreading the morning ritual of opening one of our dailies and reading yet another idiotic statement by the Naga People’s Front Party. Being an apolitical animal, I am unacquainted with the many Nagas who inhabit the Naga Political Sphere; and who make up the bottom feeding dregs of the animal kingdom, but I would love to be an unseen spectator while members of the N.P.F. Party prepare their press releases. My guess is that they go about preparing their statements in three easy stages:-
Stage 1:- A group of N.P.F. party functionaries gather around for a brainstorming session (that is if the mass of fleshy grey matter that exists in their thick skulls can be called brains). They put forward the most outrageous and unrealistic statements that they can think of.
Stage 2:- Having decided on the most outrageous of the statements to be issued; they then prepare the statement, occasionally pulling out their dictionaries to check for the meaning of the words and to ensure that no spelling mistakes have been made.
Stage 3:- This is the most important stage; this is when they pull out their Big Gun, The Almighty Thesaurus. They check the thesaurus for the synonyms of every word and replace the words in the original statement with the biggest synonym they can find; not caring that the meaning may disappear in the process. And so the process ends.
There may have been more grandiose statements made during the course of the history of mankind; but two come readily to my mind:-
1. “The Thousand Year Reich” promised by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party and which lasted for a tithe of the 1000 Years promised by them.
2. “The Mother of All Battles” promised by Saddam Hussein and which turned out to be, not a mother of a battle, but the aborted foetus of a skirmish.
But both these statements pale in comparison to the N.P.F. Party’s statement that they will remain in power, “Till the Second Coming of Christ”. Even Adolf Hitler, with the people of Germany and its vast industrial and war machine behind him, had the humility to promise his people a reign of a thousand years. The arrogance of the N.P.F. Party in stating that they would remain in power, “Till the Second Coming of Christ”, boggles the imagination.
Now the N.P.F. Party has come up with another gem of a moronic statement by calling the Against Corruption And Unabated Taxation Movement as ,”an un-mandated organisation with a few busy-bodies spearheading its supposedly social crusade with the grandiose and utopian aim to cure the society of all social ills in a matter of months”. Just reading the sentence, which contains no punctuation of any sort, leaves me breathless. I would like to remind the N.P.F. Party of a few points that are the basis of every society on earth:-
1. The mandate that you so casually mention, comes, not from the government, but from the people. The will and the consent of the people make up all laws which government is based on. It is necessary for any government to have the mandate of a section of the people to govern, but any popular movement of the people does not require a mandate from any governmental authority. People can exist without government but government needs people for its existence.
Where would modern day democracy be if the French people had not decided that they had had enough of the government by kings and aristocrats? Wasn’t The French Revolution an un-mandated movement, spearheaded by a few busy-bodies, with the grandiose and utopian aim to cure French Society of all social and political ills in a matter of, not months, but an instant? Speak of what you know, don’t use hyperbole and bombast to try to cover your ignorance and the fact that you are just spewing empty word without knowing what you speak of.
2. As to the A.C.A.U.T. sponsored “Common Platform on Naga Issue”, I admit that I cannot say whether it was a, “huge flop and a slap on its face” since I was not present there. But I can state for a fact that during the Congress (I) rule in Nagaland during the 80s and 90s the U.D.F. Party, the older avatar of the N.P.F. Party, wasn’t only a flop, but managed to exist because a few of its members were unable to learn new tricks, and leaving aside the question of a slap on the face, it didn’t even have a face to be slapped.
3. It would behove the N.P.F. Party to keep in mind that no matter how small a percentage of the population of Nagaland support A.C.A.U.T., they have the support of people and they owe their existence to the people. Whereas you, the N.P.F. Party, were born of political opportunism and you owe your existence, not to the people, but to the symbol of the cock. Leaving aside “The Second Coming of Christ’, if you were to contest the next election with a symbol other than a cock, I guarantee you that you’d be wiped out of political existence. If i were in you place, I would envy the A.C.A.U.T. its handful of supporters instead of ridiculing them. For those handful come with conviction and purpose, concepts that are alien to you; whereas those who come to you see only the symbols printed on paper, whether it is the face of Mahatma Gandhi or the Image of the Cockerel.
4. I will not lower myself to the level of ridiculing all your claims to battling corruption, its eradication and the alleged statement of your team captain, the chief minister, that he will show the “Red Card” to any defaulter, the right to show which I thought resided with the referee; except to let you know that I, along with all Nagas who are not members of the N.P.F. Party, have grown past the stage of believing in Fairy Tales.
I end with the earnest request to the N.P.F. Party to please stop issuing such ridiculous statements. I understand that as political animals, lying comes instinctively to you, and that you would sell your brothers in the twinkling of an eye if you thought that you had anything to gain by it. But you have to realise that other Indians in other states can come across your printed statements; and I cringe with embarrassment that they could approach us to supply them with organic fertilizers, in the, not unmistaken belief that since the N.P.F. Party generates so much BS, we must surely have enough manure to export.
