Robert A. Silverstein
One of the most difficult things to do is to debate someone who has admitted your main contention. I wrote an article, titled, “The World and Time in Reverse: The March Back to the Primitive.” It appeared in The Morung Express on February 16th 2017, and in the Eastern Mirror on February 17, 2017.
Today, February 18th, Kahuto Chishi Sumi, in an article titled, “Perceptions,” responded in The Morung Express and the Eastern Mirror The last two sentences of my article state, “The people of Nagaland are marching backward into their past, as tribal communities in which each were laws unto themselves. Backward into a primitive history that makes them unworthy of even being recognized as a state within India, let alone a nation among civilized nations.”
The last two sentences of Kahuto Chishi Sumi’s article state, “All that you see around you in the Towns of Nagaland are just a Façade of Modernity, a veneer over a primitive people still trying to come to terms with modernity. We are not a modern people regressing back to our primitive instincts; rather, we are a primitive people trying to find our way and our Place in the modern world.”
The first paragraph of the author’s article, referring to me, states, “Being a lawyer himself, I feel he just cannot accept the fact that people or organizations would bypass what seems to be a perfectly adequate Judicial System in favor of mass protests on the streets.
“Bob [disclosure: the author and myself have corresponded for a number of months] sees our present scenario in the context of the civilized, orderly and largely law abiding modern day U.S.A.”
The author then continues, throughout his whole article, until the last two sentences, quoted above, to use analogies to the present Nagaland situation with those of colonial America and what led up to the American Revolution, also the French Revolution, Kristallnacht (the destruction of Jewish property by the Germans under the Nazis on one night, famous as Kristallnacht due to all broken glass of Jewish establishments), the “Final Solution,” that is the name used to describe the plan by the Nazis to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, and even the KGB (the secret police) of Stalin.
And all of these events and factors leading up to them, according to the author, are analogous to the present situation in Nagaland, and the British government in the 18th century, the French government before the Revolution, and Nazis and Stalin governments, are all analogous to the present Nagaland state government.
The author even goes on to say, after describing the use of water cannons, etc., against teachers, “Before things got to the stage of the Government’s Final Solution for the Nagas, we decided to rise, en masse, and find our own solution.”
Jews throughout the world have been accused of “using” the Final Solution (otherwise known as the Holocaust or Shoah in Hebrew) too frequently and for political reasons. And other ethnic groups have used and abused the words as well. But to use it here, as an analogy for the present Nagaland situation, is absurd and to many Holocaust survivors and academics, it would be insulting. Putting aside numbers (six million Jews gassed, shot, etc., versus, what? Three in this latest incident, and even in relation to these three, there is a Judicial Inquiry Commission to be formed to examine what exactly happened), the analogy itself is nonsensical. Jews versus Nazis, Naga people versus who? Naga politicians? Corrupt Nagas? Nagas planning to exterminate all other Nagas? Is the author joking? Here is what happened to the author, not just in this article, but in articles leading up to this one: he emotionally came to his conclusions about the Nagaland state government and then used his considerable intellect and writing abilities to find the most brutal analogies to it he could find. In other words, his intellect was used to rationalize is emotions, rather than using his intellect to test the accuracy and truth of his emotions.
Does the author really want the reader to believe that the present Nagaland state government is similar to the French Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette?, to the Russian Empire of Tsar Nicholas II?, to the British under George III? If so, he is not familiar with the situation leading up to the revolutions against those regimes. For example, the author quotes the famous colonel American cry, “’No taxation without representation.”
Well, during the colonial period, the Americans literally had NO REPRESENTATION in the British parliament, when certain taxes were voted on that affected the colonists in America. In Nagaland, the people have representatives whom they themselves voted in, both in the state legislature and in the Centre Houses of Parliament.
If there is any complaint to be made it should be made about the NSCN (IM) for coercing taxes out of the people, taxes being paid to members of the NSCN (IM) who were not elected by the people! But the Naga people are too afraid to change that situation; it is easier to go after a government which, even though it is suffused with corruption, certainly does not have the same power to intimidate and coerce as the NSCN (IM).
The author talks about “mass protests on the streets.” He also quotes the Father of American civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau: “’Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we succeed, or shall we transgress them at once?’”
The above quotes, from the author and from Thoreau, are a slight of hand by the author, a deception. Those quotes are fundamentally misleading. The nature of civil disobedience is that you perform your protest, and if it is illegal, you calmly accept arrest by the police, making your point to the greater public that it is an unjust law you are disobeying and by disobeying it and being arrested you are hoping that the greater public will force, through public pressure, the reformation of the unjust law. That is what happened during the 1950s and 1960s in America, when African Americans sat in at segregated restaurants and sat in the front of the bus, reserved, by law, for whites.
That is NOT what has happened here. The Nagaland police force, for all practical purposes, does not exist. The JCC and the NTAC have not disobeyed a law and allowed themselves to be arrested. They did not “protest,” in the Thoreau, Gandhi, or King sense of the word “protest.” They have committed assaults, burned property, threatened and intimidated women, and committed other criminal acts. And the fact that the author has decided to rationalize all this destruction and bloodshed due to the “primitive” nature of the Naga public does not change the nature of their acts. They’ve acted like a mob of intimidating and violent people, not just the JCC and the NTAC, but the AYO and other youth groups like them, and also let us not forget, the women going along with them.
Unlike the situation in colonial America and pre-revolutionary France and Russia, the judicial system in India is a viable one, proven by the fact that the NMA used it successfully. The JCC and those following it chose to take the illegal route and that cannot be excused because they are “primitive.”
They’re not primitive, they’re simply violent, Nagas who decided that they had a better chance of getting what they wanted by using violence than by using the courts.
