Lelen Singsit
The conflict over ownership of land is not new in Nagaland. Our state has boundary dispute with some of our neighbours and at the same time, we have land disputes within the state. Opposing villages have claimed rightful ownership over lands and forests and this has come up from time to time. Therefore, a question that arises is, ' Is there a liar amongst the debaters?' or ' Have we believed in something that was not true in the first place?'
When it comes to village or tribal history, some people may have exaggerated added masalas or plainly lied. There is no proper research on the current claims of people over ownership of some lands in Nagaland and Manipur. But, it is common understanding that if two people are both claiming ownership over a piece of land, then one party must be wrong.
To some extent, the roots of the conflicts starts at our homes. It is often seen that parents mostly tell to their children about the glorious past of their tribe and the injustices committed by the other tribes. But they skip the part where they had mistreated the other tribes.
Every tribe has a history and some of them are recorded. But generally, the tribal’s of the Northeast as a whole have no proper written history. It has mostly been an oral history passed down from the parents to their children. Therefore, there is no guarantee that those who tell or write history have themselves been wholly honest or had correct information when they wrote what they wrote. As such, some people can be very sincere but they can be sincerely wrong.
The art of writing a biased history is also seen in our country's relation with Pakistan. The school children in Pakistan study a different history and in their books, the Indian National Congress(INC) and Mahatma Gandhi are the villains and Jinnah is the hero. But in India, we study a different history where the Muslim League and Jinnah were mostly responsible for all the communal tensions and Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru etc are saintly figures. Therefore, it is seen that the real picture has somewhere been distorted in both countries.
Similarly, ordinary parents in our society have passed on oral history to their children. These information could be true, half-truth or completely false. It is because when there are tribal fights, one tribe do not give a correct or proper picture of the opposing tribes to their children. And these children grow up hating the other tribe; they grow up thinking that this or that land is theirs and that the other tribes are the encroachers. The young children later on become tribal leaders, MLAs, officers, historians and parents themselves.
The 2011 Census figures have also revealed how honest we are. In previous decades, our state had the highest decadal growth but when Electoral Photo ID and Biometric were introduced ,all of a sudden we had the lowest population growth. It was for the first time that a state had such vast negative growth in the absence of war or famine. It was made clear that to gain political power, many had inflated their population; in other words, they lied. Since we know how honest or dishonest some people are, we should take a second look when they say that the other tribe is lying and our tribe alone is speaking the truth.
Going back at the national level, in 1992 some thousand Hindus politically mobilised in the name of religion and destroyed the Babri Mosque in Uttar Pradesh. They claimed that a Muslim ruler, Babur, had demolished or modified a Hindu temple and built the Babri Mosque over it. There were claims and counter claims which resulted in a communal riot that killed about 2000 people! Later, on the order of the Supreme Court in 2003, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) conducted an in-depth study and reported that a Hindu complex existed on the disputed site. But the question is, should we damn our present and our future and live in the past? Some autocratic ruler did something in the distant past but we are still killing each other over it even today.
Similarly, in our Nagaland state and in Manipur, many villages were established, burnt down and again inhabited, sometimes by other tribes, then burnt down and again occupied by the same or a new tribe. Two or three tribes had occupied some disputed lands at one point of time or the other. Some villages were vacated by natural migration of its older inhabitants or were deserted after an armed conflict and are now occupied mostly or fully by a new tribe. While there are also some villages where two or more tribes had lived and fought as long as they could remember.
As different groups in Nagaland and Manipur are now claiming rightful ownership over lands, some of the claims may be correct, some may be false, while others may be complex and therefore partly justified and partly not. But in all these claims and rebuttals, let us not say things that we know are a lie. Because the truth will come out one day or the other and once our lies are exposed, we will become unreliable in the eyes of the world and our children. And in blur and complex situations, it will be better to reason with honesty without trying to apply the dictum- 'might is right'. It is because, if one use might today, then the other may also use might tomorrow when they become more powerful and the cycle will go on to the detriment of all of us.
