Witoubou Newmai
For quite some time now the Naga struggle for dignity seems to be emulating the Tom and Jerry cartoon series where each one constantly tries to outdo the other within the community, and yet each character needs the other to remain relevant before the audience.
While the cartoon characters will survive as long as they bring brisk businesses to the producers, in a people’s movement such as ours, we can only expect a tragic fall of the protagonists when the issue of imbalance between the needs of the people’s movement and the needs of the individual becomes pronounced, driven by the universality of human motives and urges. This imbalance often crops up in a society dogged by sectarian politics.
Today, as the ‘Naga ambience’ is fast getting altered, triggered by smokescreen policies planted and nurtured by various agencies, there is a great imbalance in our movement for dignity.
The fact is, the Naga struggle for dignity is a people’s movement, but ours still operates without ‘unitary wholeness’. In any people's movement 'unitary wholeness' is a vital feature. And hence, there is a great deal of anxiety among the Naga people. The need to subdue this anxiety is urgent.
In order to subdue this anxiety, opportunities for open and participatory dialogue amongst all sections of the Naga people beyond what is provided by sectarian politics of tribal institutions is imperative, which, in our case, is absent. Again, the absence of such opportunities has brought about a great loss of ability to recognize and appreciate the materials which constitute a people’s movement.
The remedying of this grim Naga situation demands the society to stop ignoring the features and motifs which constitute a people’s movement, and start appreciating them. In doing so, the conversation of new visions is imperative as opined by many commentators in recent time.
Appreciating new visions demands retrospection on the alteration of the ‘Naga ambience,’ and also on the manner in which today’s Nagas are happily embracing the ‘new ambience’. This does not mean hanging on to the past. It purely aims to assuage the ‘new ambience’ that sanctions the dilution of the Naga conversation where tussles for ‘ownership’ of the Naga political issue come to a glaring focus instead of the core issues. This situation is a good comparison to King Solomon’s judgment on the fake and the genuine mother of a child.
Here in the Naga case, we seem to have only fake mothers because every engaging party does not bother to take the role of inhibitor of the maiming process.
Parties engaged with the Naga struggle for dignity must go to the heart of peoplehood, both its depth and values. Diversionary tactics have come to play such an important role today that we tend to lose focus of the primary and obsesses over the secondary. To rise above this, we must revert back the focus to our peoplehood urgently and find ‘unitary wholeness.’
