Benito.Z. Swu
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t was said that the sun never did set in the British Empire. More than any other power, it was the British power that was able to fine-tune the art of conquests and thereby imperialism to a very great extent. And this was made possible because of India. From amongst all her conquests, the Indian sub-continent was the goose that laid the golden egg. Even much more than the very rich natural resources of India that the British exploited without reservation and guilt along with the cheap labor force in their millions, it was the brave Indians which made up the bulk of the British foot soldiers who fought and died in every nook and corner of the world. From much before, during and after the 1st world war and till the 2nd world war and after, it was the brave Indian soldiers who fought, sacrificed and won battles and war for the expansion of the imperial British empire. It is not that the British did not reciprocate the sacrifices. Make no mistake, so many factors were involved for India getting her independence but ultimately it was because of the ‘British gratitude’ to the millions of Indian foot soldiers who gave their ultimate sacrifice to enable the sun not to set on the British empire. Who were those Indian foot soldiers? They were the marginalized, they were the Dalits, they were the untouchables, they were the tribals and yes, they were the Nagas. Had the Nagas made a deal with Subhas Chandra Bose or the Japanese in the later part of the 2nd World war, not just India but the world itself would have looked very different from what we see today, now. I have no hesitation when I say that it is us, the Nagas to whom the world as we know today is indebted to. Without attempting to be politically correct, it is our right that the BJP government of India today must realize that it is their prerogative duty to correct the wrongs of the Indian National Congress towards the Nagas for 60 long years.
When the intrepid Japanese fighting machine stormed its way across Southeast Asia, shattering Malaya and Singapore and Burma, its soldiers were seized with two strands of conflicting ideology. One, that it behoved any great nation to be a colonial power. Two, that Japan was freeing the enslaved people of Asia from the dominion of Europe. Thus they actually were expecting to be met with open arms by the native population. However to their surprise many of these natives were neither grateful, nor cowed by their might.The clash of cultures was most acute in the Northeast of India, where the Japanese rapidly advanced upon Nagaland. The British had been scrambling desperately to stem the rout of their forces in Burma, and attempting alliances with the nationalist Chinese in the border areas. At the same time, they tried hard to co-opt the Nagas to their side. This proved especially hard, because only two or three decades earlier, they had brutally suppressed rebellions against their rule by these same peoples. For the average Naga chief, the main question was: why should they fight for the British when they hadn’t fought for the local Hindu ruling dynasties or even the local Naga bosses? They considered themselves neither Indian nor British, and had attachments mainly to their tribe.
Some tribes had raised levies to support the British in the First World War and retained some vestige of loyalty to the British. Others were bitter about the slaughter of their cohorts and cattle by white men in the uprising of the 1920s. Furthermore, what would happen to their wives and children were they to support the British and then the Japanese won? Still others felt that the British had brought order to the hills, and had established roads and salt markets, and hence were worthy of their support. The anthropologist Ursula Graham Bower who was present at the meetings of the Naga chiefs (and indeed had spent time among the Nagas) noted clearly that colonial politics and patriotism were too vague concepts for the tribes; what would determine their participation in the war effort was inter-tribal and inter-village rivalries.
Meanwhile, the incessant stream of refugees out of Burma was causing untold strain on the local population. The Nagas died in their thousands, their immune systems unadapted to the virulent strains of dysentery brought by the refugees. In many cases, village chiefs refused the help of doctors and depended on medicine men, which exacerbated the epidemic. Still, the Nagas were helpful and cared for the civilian flood. They were also drafted into the levies by Ursula Graham Bowers and the British military, their decaying muskets replaced with newer weaponry. They were drilled firstly as scouts, then as a defence force that eventually became the formidable fighters that threw out the Japanese in 1944 and 1945. The Nagas provided stellar services in the war effort. They led British and Indian troops through the jungle, silently and quickly, to assail Japanese foxholes and camps. They gave misleading information to the Japanese regarding allied troop numbers. An army intelligence officer wrote in the summer of 1944: The quantity and quality of operational information received from the local population has been one major factor in our success to date. A high percentage of our successful air strikes have been the direct result of local information. For the Japanese, the encounter with the Nagas and other hill-tribes was shocking. First, they thought that the hills people were nothing better than unlettered savages, even more primitive than the aborigines they knew of both in Hokkaido and Taiwan. Secondly, they could not understand that anyone might oppose their plans for ‘liberation’ – anyone who was against their Asia for Asians policy, they thought, had been bribed or bullied into being so. Their contempt for the people they had ostensibly liberated resulted in spectacular oversights. For example, they allowed the Nagas to wander in and out of their camps, and kept no tabs on their activities. General Slim, the British Commander, told this tale: The Japanese commanders on the Manipur front employed a number of Naga orderlies as batmen in the early months of 1944. Naturally, they treated them as illiterate numbskulls. Two of the Nagas decided to steal an operational map which they saw lying around in a commander’s tent. Only too well aware of the estimate the Japanese put on their brainpower, they covered their tracks by pretending that this had been an ordinary theft, and made off with clothing and small pieces of equipment as well as the map. Within a few hours, the map was on Gen. Slim’s table at British headquarters. As the attack developed, Slim was astonished to find that the Japanese commanders had not modified their plan one iota, so sure were they that no mere Naga orderly could have understood the significance of a battle plan.
It is a sad fact that Indian history has nothing at all to say about the Northeast. And yet the ‘peripheral’ people have indeed made great contributions to the history of our country, even throughout the British domination, and their stories remain untold. The irony, of course, is that we depend on British historians now to uncover these stories and reveal them in popular discourse.
India, instead of paying its due to these vast majority of her society which
included the minorities, without whose selfless contribution and sacrifice the very idea of India as a diverse, secular and a democratic nation would not have even germinated, instead segregated, labelled and downgraded these categories of people on the basis of caste to that level which they had never ever experienced before independence under the British rule.
As independence for India beaconed, both Dr.Ambedkar and Gandhi were seriously concerned about the fate of minorities, particularly Muslims and untouchables, but they responded to the approaching birth of the new nation in very different ways. In Gandhi’s understanding, swaraj, or self-rule, lived in the moral heart of his people, though he made it clear that by “his people” he did not mean the majority community alone.
For Dr.Ambedkar, “the people” was not a homogeneous category that glowed with the rosy hue of righteousness. He knew that, regardless of what Gandhi said, it would inevitably be the majority community that decided what form swaraj would take. The prospect of India’s untouchables being ruled by nothing other than the moral heart of India’s predominantly Hindu people filled him with foreboding. Dr.Ambedkar became anxious, even desperate, to maneuver himself into becoming a member of the Constituent Assembly, a position that would enable him to influence the shape and the spirit of the constitution for the emerging nation in real and practical ways. For this he was even prepared to set aside his pride, and his misgivings about his old foe, the Congress party. Dr.Ambedkar’s main concern was to legalize “constitutional morality” over the traditional, social morality of the caste system. Speaking in the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948, he said, “Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.” Dr.Ambedkar was seriously disappointed with the final draft of the constitution. Still, he did succeed in putting in place certain rights and safeguards that would, as far as the subordinated castes were concerned, make it a document that was more enlightened than the society it was drafted for. Dr.Ambedkar thought of the constitution as a work in progress. He believed that unless every generation had the right to create a new constitution for itself, the earth would belong to “the dead and not the living.” (The trouble is that the living are not necessarily more progressive or enlightened than the dead. There are a number of forces today, political as well as commercial, that are lobbying to rewrite the constitution in utterly regressive ways). As the Law minister in post-independence India Dr. Ambedkar worked for months on a draft of the Hindu Code Bill. He believed that the caste system advanced itself by controlling women, and one of his major concerns was to make Hindu personal law more equitable for women. The bill he proposed sanctioned divorce and expanded the property rights of widows and daughters. The Constituent Assembly dragged its feet over it for four years (from 1947 to 1951) and then blocked it. The president, Rajendra Prasad, threatened to stall the bill’s passage into law. Hindu sadhus laid siege to Parliament. Industrialists and zamindars warned they would withdraw their support in the coming elections. Eventually Dr.Ambedkar resigned as law minister. In his resignation speech he said: “To leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu society, and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap.”
In Dr. Ambedkar’s own words, “Because we have the misfortune of calling ourselves Hindus, we are treated thus. If we were members of another faith none would treat us so. Choose any religion which gives you equality of status and treatment. We shall repair our mistake now. I had the misfortune of being born with the stigma of an Untouchable. However, it is not my fault, but I will not die a Hindu, for this is in my power.”
Maybe Dr. Ambedkar, here, went a bit too far and allowed his emotions to do the talking. But no, he was dead sure about what he was talking about. He converted to become a Buddhist. Being a Naga in today’s time does equate us to understand and sympathize with the doctor. Nagaland is a small state but very much unlike any other state, big or small in India, as far as her problems are concerned. Nagas are all tribes of the mongoloid stock and speaks in some two dozen odd languages with no two tribes speaking or understanding the tongue of the other. Even the dress code, food, dance, festival, matrimonial relationships and many other social customs and obligations differ from one tribe to another. Nagaland today is festered with some half dozen Naga Political Groups claiming to be fighting for self determination and are a law unto themselves, the solution for which is said to be just at the next bent or corner for at least some decades now, with the general public always made to live and think at tenterhook. With no industry, public or private, and with the oversaturation of jobs in the government sector, basic agriculture is the main mainstay of the people. With the tendency of the younger generation, bereft of any future prospect, to go the anti-national way, the government of the day from whichever political party literally survives on the goodwill of the Central government. Even without adding any more woe, and there are many, to the above mentioned realities, it is a tight rope walk for the state government of the day. There is practically no room for manoeuvre but to take risks.
When India which preaches ‘Unity in Diversity’ fails to sympathize and be in our shoes but start picking holes instead of plugging them, when our intentions are misinterpreted, when our view is devalued because of political considerations of the third view, when we are valued not because of our worth but because of our birth, we can very well imagine how it was for Dr.Ambedkar to feel the way he had felt.
To conclude, allow me to add that, more than anything else, what Dr. Ambedkar brought to a complicated, multifaceted political struggle, with more than its fair share of sectarianism, obscurantism and skulduggery was intelligence and we remain thankful for that. Let us try to learn to think alike and pray for it.
Ultimately, the common good is what we all want as the end result.
