Niketu Iralu
53 years ago today the first Indo-Naga Ceasefire was signed by the Federal Government of Nagaland and the Government of India. This occasion this morning is about the struggle of the Naga people to defend their right to be called a nation as justified by the facts of their history as understood by them. I do not need to narrate now the well-known written historical, legal facts legitimizing their claim.
Today we are remembering an event that is indeed historic for us, and it will be correct to say almost all Nagas were and are still proud of it as a very significant achievement. I believe the Ceasefire can be said to be the first sign of recognition in Delhi that a solution by suppression with force or economic development could not nullify the legal validity and legitimacy of the position the Nagas had established.
It is immensely important to the Nagas that their struggle cannot be treated as an illegal, anti-India, “anti-national” struggle for secession from India. The Nagas had clearly put it in writing to the British before the Empire ended that they, the Nagas, alone had the right to decide their own future. The Naga homeland was not a part of any other nation before the British came and sliced the western stretch of it and made it a district of their Empire in South Asia. Because of this unique fact the Nagas are not hampered by a sense of guilt or wrong doing of any kind about their struggle to be recognised by India as her honourable neighbour, though a very small one in size!
Having said all this about the struggle which means so much to all of us, we cannot deny something has gone seriously wrong. I believe it is in the functioning or process of the Naga struggle. The process has been badly damaged by all of us in our different ways. And now we do not trust the outcome of the process. We are afraid it will be something whose destructiveness and lawlessness will be beyond our collective capacity to control. The struggle has been internally damaged by the short-sighted stirring up of tribal animosity and reckless demonization of one another. This has resulted in the struggle destroying itself and the people for whom it was started. We should add here that exactly the same thing can be said of the “over ground” political process of the State Government of Nagaland. For some time now the State has been destroying itself and the people for whom it was supposedly created. The politicians get all the blame for corruption and everything else but what and where is the responsibility of the men and women of the bureaucracy who after all run the Government?
“The high ideals, and not long after, the dark dead end of man-made schemes” (Peter Howard) describes our crisis.
There is a line in a Christian hymn which says “Even the hour that darkest seemeth will His changeless goodness prove.” We will give ourselves and one another this liberating truth if we will first accept that the terrible destructiveness and lawlessness of our struggle and society, “underground” and “over ground”, is the outcome of the thoughts and lives of all of us.
Some of us will sincerely insist that others are greater rascals and criminals than us, and be able to give reasons that will not stand scrutiny! But our crisis is grave. It requires us to accept how God sees our common blameworthiness and ultimate responsibility for what has gone wrong.
This occasion today is a precious opportunity to take a bold hard look at what has happened and is happening. Year after year, we the older generation have looked at the past 60-70 years and made our own conclusions that reaffirm our long-held positions which we have defended for years.
But today we must consider how the younger generations of Nagas in schools, colleges and universities in Nagaland, across India and in countries abroad are seeing the Naga struggle, the society the struggle has produced for them and the difficult questions they are honestly asking. The most important questions they are asking are –
1. Did our grandparents do the right thing in launching the Naga struggle? Was it necessary at all when there is going to be “no shortage of money from Delhi for tiny Nagaland?”
2. Have the Nagas achieved anything or moved forward like others after all the costly sacrifices made by the early pioneers and countless fighters who responded to them from all Naga villages giving all they had, many of them their own lives?
Our honest answers to these questions will be the most important thing we will do for them and the future of the Naga struggle which they will have to conduct in a totally changed world. The highly challenging issues they are inheriting from us demand that our answers are truthful, realistic, sustainable and free from resentment, prejudices and selfish agendas.
I believe we should tell them their grandparents did the right thing in launching the Naga struggle. And they did it at the most opportune time taking full advantage of the right their history up to that time had given them. To their second question we should answer yes, Nagas have achieved something that is extremely important for their fullest development. Naga nationality is a fact that can no longer be disputed by anyone because of the price paid for it by the Naga pioneers. I believe their greatest achievement is the fact that the hitherto loosely related tribes of the Naga people rallied to the call of the Naga struggle to become a people and a nation. The coming generation of Nagas should be challenged to understand whatever their elders have achieved for them and build on it.
Let us today start to look also at our struggle and our accumulating problems the way God in his Heaven must be seeing them. I cannot help believing that, if heaven is what we believe it must be, the Nagas in heaven are also seeing our struggle and our problems the way God sees them! Aren’t the Nagas in heaven – think of who they are – really the biggest Naga faction after all? We should often use our imagination and ask what they have to say to us from their perspective to solve our problems. This sounds crazy but to widen our thinking this way will help us to find unexpected ways to reach out across the divides that are threatening to destroy us.
I think we will all agree we are deeply disturbed, insecure, and angry deep down in our hearts and minds because the problems we are creating are threatening to overwhelm us. Historian Titus Livius said of his Roman society in the first century BC, “We have reached the point where we cannot bear our vices or their cure”. This has become true of us also.
I want to bring in a passage in the Bible I often turn to, Genesis 4: 4-7, “….The Lord looked with favour on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favour. So Cain was very angry and his face was downcast. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.”
Is not God asking all of us also “Why are you angry? Why is your face showing the deep unhappiness inside you?” I know whenever I am angry, unhappy, regretful and so on, it is almost always because I know in my soul and conscience I should be different, or do something differently that will help others also to become better human beings and I am avoiding the need God is pointing out to me to answer. The things I am persistently angry about are the deepest truths in my life God wants me to face so that I will change radically for the sake of His plans.
All our leaders are deeply unhappy because of what has happened to the Naga struggle. Like us they know others are not the only ones to blame for the things that have gone so wrong in the Naga story. All the tribes are unhappy, especially the ones we call the Advanced Tribes, for reasons best known to them, God and alas, the “less advanced tribes!”
Can we and our leaders now end crusading and shouting against the wrongs and failures of other leaders and factions and show how to throw light on where we too are not happy, angry and need compassionate understanding from others that will help us to change and do better?
The Naga National Reconciliation process was launched on December 20, 2001 in the Kohima Football ground. One of the items that day was a pledge read out jointly by the Presidents of the 28 tribes with G. Gaingam, Vice-President of Naga Hoho: “We will go beyond seeing only where others have hurt us and be ready to see where we too may have provoked them to hurt us, so that forgiving and being forgiven will become possible”.
I believe it was an inspired thought God gave us for the healing of our relationships and restoration of our unity. We have not done well so far but God means us to work harder to achieve it. Trust and healing will become real if we can see where we too have provoked others to do the wrongs to us for which we have rightly blamed them so vehemently for so long.
Speech delivered by Niketu Iralu during the 53rd Anniversary of Indo-Naga Ceasefire 1964 at Chedema Peace Camp on September 6, 2017.
