Ekyimo Shitirie
Kohima
R.N.Ravi’s appointment as the governor of Nagaland came out of the blue, catching the establishment by surprise and unsettling the party on the other side of the negotiating table. An interlocutor for a Governor? (Or the other way round). Even as eyebrows remain raised and a cautious acceptance proffered, the interlocutor-cum-governor attempted to put to rest any misgivings about his appointment by stating in an unambiguous and reassuring term what his foremost mission was – to finally settle the Naga issue within three months. Wonders will never cease!
The statement sent ripples of hushed optimism across the masses and set the chattering classes parading their intellectual acumen in their analysis of the Naga issue. Like the bracing wind on a summer morning, their normative political commentaries on the issue refresh the weary soul in the thick of tired matters. A sudden combination of political romanticism and intellectual idealism has taken over the role of the academia and feeds the general understanding that everything hinges on political solution. That idea is a welcome relief from the harsh realities and for a moment we’d rather suspend disbelief in effete idealism and pretend everything will be hunky-dory once political solution is found. We’d rather wallow in a virtual world.
Less than a month on the job, Governor Ravi was stopped in his track on seeing the situation on the ground. In an interview with Nagaland Post, he diverged for a moment to put in something that had, perhaps, hit him hard; that at the functional level Nagaland government didn’t ‘appear normal’: that there is breakdown of institutions in the state, that transparency is in deficit, that accountability and fair play are mere words in the dictionary, that the state and people who matter are pathologically corrupt, that the public, destitute of everything modern, are deeply entrenched in the idea of political freedom without a hint of care for other freedoms. His observation of the state as dystopian was thrown in sharp relief against our utopian dream. He popped our balloon.
Ravi said his priority was to help Nagaland become a functional state. That is an interesting statement. He will have to deal with a state government that has sunk so low as to make itself abnormal and non-functional. He must know what he is up against: an institutionalized corruption that threatens to frustrate any effort at making the state normal and functional. Yet when the constitutional head of state has stated that he would help improve the situation, we might just as well expect some Operation Clean Up Nagaland initiative.
Ravi has his hands full, dual-tasking as interlocutor and as constitutional head of state. He has rough days ahead juggling his two very distinct tasks. The two roles don’t seem to fit very happily together. But we need to make concessions and take him at his word that his role as governor would give the needed impetus to take the peace talk to the desired conclusion. We keep our fingers crossed in eager anticipation of what the next two months will unfold.
The realities on the ground must have prompted him to say that mere political solution wasn’t enough. The benefits of the solution must reach the people. It’s a statement that is abstract and intriguing to the class of people who swear by hard politics and possess the received wisdom that only political solution matters.
Ravi’s statement is a pointed reminder that political solution can prove to be a mare’s nest without some economic structure and distributive justice. A workable political solution presupposes existence of functioning institutions, developed human resource, ready work force and all other basic and normal infrastructures like good roads, water, electricity, healthcare, education, … the works, and above all, transparency and accountability. The situation on the ground must enable a smooth transition from the present to the future. In other words, the situation must be normal.
In the absence of the elements of a free state, political solution will only be symbolic. The free state will have no choice but to lapse into banana republic. Real power will then lie elsewhere, in the hands of those who feed. That is the grim reality staring us in the face. However, we do not expect freedom fighters to have economic policies in place. And, why? Because they are freedom fighters. Having an economic policy and development plans are the job of the government of the day before the solution, which can be tweaked, improved upon, or changed by the ‘new government’ after the solution. The new government would build its economy on the backs of existing institutions, infrastructure, brainpower and manpower.
We speculate that the Framework Agreement of 3 August 2015 has broadly taken care of the above. The question remains: will any system of governance the Framework envisages work in Nagaland? That the Framework might have framed in larger geographical areas is beyond the scope of this discussion. But the fact that it encloses present Nagaland as the dominant area merits a study on its government, and may cause us to imagine it as a dry run for governance after the solution. If governance during the last fifty six years of statehood be any indication, no system may work in the way it should. We may be in for a rough ride after the solution.
If only the state government could help redeem whatever honour is left of itself and the people of the state, our pride as Nagas would be restored. At possibly the closing chapter of the government of a federating unit, it would do much good to itself by showing that the august house is not a den of thieves and iniquities. A top-down strategy of making good the plunders of the past would help salvage a little pride. That would be aligning with Governor Ravi’s top priority in improving the situation. In an ideal world this will be exactly what the state government would do.
As the atmosphere lie pregnant with expectations and anticipations, we are wary of possible conflicts between the negotiating parties, stress and strain from disunity, stop-go strategy of the government of India, hijacking of the solution, deviating from the spirit of the struggle or simply fizzling out, and above all a no-show state government. Despite the odds we are waiting in the wings as we, seriously, pray.
