Thepfusalie Theunuo
No wonder the spirit of equality remains a pervasive character of the Indian constitution, and perhaps an important feature for the constitution to create an egalitarian and welfare society by providing socio-economic and political justice to all its citizens irrespective of who is A and who is B. And perhaps with so many provisions laid down, the Indian constitution is recognised to be the longest written constitution in the world.
However, the fact remains that even after such a deliberation on its citizens, the country still struggle with unlimited socio-economic and political injustice. The question of cast/tribe representation and exclusion, communal violence, democratic rights, gender rights are still hotly debated and continue to do so with many ramifications. What has emerged from this plethora is quite out of question to address in this short write-up. However as a matter of fact, reservation policy has significantly changed the landscape of our perception to question the democratic institution in our society.
Reservation politics as such is quite dominant and a sensitive issue in our state and perhaps our state in the 21st century has been trying to address this issue economically and politically. But the outcome was neither fruitful nor acceptable by the larger society, in fact it has created more diversity and inequality of representation within the many existing tribal community in our state. One significant feature of such political blunder was applying the grand theory of reservation policy into our tribal context. As a matter of fact political vote banks played the dominant role of identifying the character of who is advanced and who is backward.
Historically, it is quite true that certain features such as geographical isolation, absence of communication, economic backwardness and absence of modern institutions etc. tends to classify the people within the broad framework of development or so-called civilization. Thus for that matter, all Naga tribal communities were at one point time possessed all such features juxtaposing the caste system of mainland India. It is common and universally accepted norms that categorizing people into certain categories of class are determined by social-cultural, economic and political positions. Thus for example the Dalit’s in India are categories as backward and most ill-represented communities in the country partly because of the above feature, but also largely because they were considered to be out of the caste hierarchical system. Similarly tribal communities were also confusedly viewed on such notion but since tribal communities were characterize by different socio-cultural and political feature no actual definitive concept were ever drawn in Indian constitution, what we have today is a version of political manoeuvres to suite the post-Independence economic policy of exclusion.
Today, the concept of reservation policy in our state is partly the political legacy of the post-Independence India economic policy of exclusion that we have inherited. The notion of who is backward and who is advance in our state is therefore a political version rather than the essence of socio-economic nature. Today if we were to categories on the basis of socio-economic features rather than tribe and political motives we would unrevealed the already inequality of human beings that are persisting in every tribal community that are merely struggling for survival in every corners of the village. The notion of backward and advance category of tribe therefore is simply a myth, and does not even carry any meaningful definition. But rather created for political motives and does not at all address the socio-economic and cultural deprivation of the people, what has resulted from such political creation had tend to splinter into even more narrower category within the tribes who now perceive themselves in the margin within the margin. Naga society is a patrilineal society, as the saying goes that everyone accepts. But why it is there? Is a question that nobody tends to explore. All arguments on the reservation have always looked back into the historic event of the contested -Article 371(A) in the Indian constitution. In fact, it is the only legal ground for the Naga tribal community to legally protest the encroachment of expanding modernity and ever changing Democracy.
It is also a foundation where tradition and the consequence of modernity meet, it also provides all Naga communities of Nagaland a sense of belongingness to a place with a sovereign rights over limited property and resources, within a specific and a limited territorial boundary. Which patriliny had maintained the stability of our limited resources without complication within every village and community. However, apart from patriliny, the concept of patriarchal ( male authority) is an ideology that we have created ourselves in the process. The question is how we can un-think patriarchal? The solution does not come from grand theory of 33% reservation policy but comes from the deeper engagement and human orientations via education and inequality that persist in society.
33% reservation policy in the state is highly a political project of the ruling party and does not deal or engages with inequality of gender in any form. The grand theory of 33% reservation policy (I repeat again) which is applicable to a society which is not only caste based but also historically perceives the gender roles and status position differently from tribal communities like the Nagas, is not at all applicable in our context and only tends to complicates the very essence of Naga culture. The question of gender inequality in which we all tends to engage should also not be carried away with political project and the political apparatus of the ruling party, but rather should engage on the ontological and the epistemological construction of gender and inequality within the specific context of Naga culture. To conclude I quote Charles Taylor, ‘This is an important stage, but we need to go a little farther back to see how this passage came to have a sense it did. What changed to make this kind of talk have sense for us?’.
