Aheli Moitra
As the protestors marched on, the sharp pain of water from a fire hose hit them. Some fell, others were thrown into a chill. As they held on to each other, they continued to sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ in cycles that would torment the State forever, and change the course of history.
This may sound like the November 1 water bombing of protesting teachers in Kohima, but 53 years ago, as Nagaland State was being carved out of the erstwhile Assam, the United States of America (USA) was undergoing a dramatic transformation as scenes like these played out numerous times over.
In 1963, the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. had gathered momentum in the “most (racially) segregated” city of Birmingham in Alabama State, USA—people of colour could not eat at ‘white’ restaurants or drink from ‘white’ water fountains; injustice and discrimination ruled as people of colour were not even allowed to vote. Having designed a direct action campaign based on the tenets of nonviolence, several leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had been jailed by May 1963. This led them to mobilise children to carry the protest marches forward for the cause of civil rights and liberties.
Words spelled out by Martin Luther King Jr. greatly encouraged the children. “A man can’t ride your back unless it is bent,” he had said. Unjust laws had definitely bent the backs of the coloured people living in North America, and it was time that they refused to let it continue. Children poured out in thousands into the streets of Birmingham city—and they were punished just as much.
One of the most powerful and distressing images to emerge from the children’s march was of them being shot at with water cannons and dogs let loose on them by the local administration. Many children were seen continuing to hold hands, singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ The children’s march, and the subsequent images, changed the tide of the civil rights movement—in 1964, the Civil Rights Act was enacted by the United States Congress that outlawed discrimination and brought in a platform for equal opportunities.
On November 1, 2016, we saw teachers of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) in Nagaland resorting to protests in Kohima for six months’ worth of unpaid salaries. As they came from several districts of Nagaland State, some with infants in hand, they were rudely shocked by water cannons unleashed on them by the Government of Nagaland. Footage emerging from the site of protest showed that as jets of water from fire trucks ran through rows of protesting teachers, they remained nonviolent, continuing to sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’
The State Government is answerable for this unjust behaviour. Teachers are in the profession of building blocks for a stable society of the present and the future—that they have to resort to street protests to demand their dues, shows how serious the Government is about the future of the State. Further, the Government has resorted to violence after failing to perform its duties towards the people; it has fallen to the ranks of criminality to uphold its falling legitimacy.
When a State loses its sense of responsibility, it should either rethink its direction or stand to lose power. If the current Government does not want the latter, it is time for it to come up with imaginative solutions to the problem of salaries that has continued to plague teachers and doctors of Nagaland State—it will not be long before nonviolent direct action becomes the norm, as the people overcome the injustices of their times.
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