This is in reference to the letter by Hiren Gohain (EPW, 21 August) to my article (“Justice Denied to Tribals in the Hill Districts of Manipur”, 31 July). I am grateful to the author for drawing my attention to certain details which he feels any proposal of resolution to the Naga question should take account of. The author begins each point with the emphatic – “Does Bhatia know…?.” As I reached the bottom, I realized that perhaps the underlying premise was that had I known what was being pointed, I would not have said what I did. But this is where he is wrong. Despite considering all the points, some of which were indeed new to me and the simple answer to them would be “no, I did not know,” yet, I can only say that I would still stand by what I have said since that is based on what I do know.
I do know that at the dawn of India’s independence our government chose to retain the British occupation of Naga territories. I believe that an occupation has no place in a democracy; that this is “wrong” and “dangerous” for the future of democracy (as the continuing turmoil in the northeast since has borne out). India had no locus standi as far as the Naga people are concerned. Who were we to grant or not grant them independence? The only reason why we were in this exalted position is because they were/are small and we big and their ‘homeland’ happened to be adjacent to ours. India could have chosen to respect the desire for independence of other people, to strengthen and not subjugate the small, but it chose not to. This is not my idea of India.
I do know that the struggle that the Nagas have waged has a basis. Not for nothing would they have lost more than 100,000 persons if it was but for a mythical “homeland” the boundaries of which, according to Gohain, were notional and hazy. One must recall the long years of nonviolent negotiation with the British and with India, the plebiscite of 1951, and subsequent to the arrival and excesses of the Assam police the birth of insurgency, in which initially the insurgents called themselves “safeguards”, then “homeguards”, and subsequently Naga Nationalist Council. So clearly there was a certain “home” that they were guarding. Even today if you talk to 80 year-olds in Nagaland, as I did this summer, who were subject to the repression of the late 1950s (in the ‘Groupings’, for example) you can feel the injustice of their circumstances. Despite all the tribulations, if there is one word that the Indian State has not been able to erase from the hearts of the ordinary Naga, it is ‘sovereignty’ – why?
Just as it is only right to point at the anomalies of an organization that represents the people (besides “miscreants” who may do what they do for assorted reasons) one has no difficulty in accepting that any resolution would need to contend with the complexities on the ground that get created in the interim when conflicts are not resolved in a suitable timeframe, and I have certainly not suggested otherwise. However, it becomes problematic when such considerations obviate attention from the root of the conflict, not least because more often than not these new developments work towards the disadvantage of the original claimants and what would have been their due if ‘justice’ had been granted sooner than later.
Even as Gohain accepts that the Nagas should get what is ‘legitimate’ (besides what is “realistic”) it is not clear what would that be in his perception. He has raised questions about territorial claims of the Nagas on several grounds: that Nagas as a consequence of being conquered or won over were subjects of the Ahom kings; that likewise Meitei (Manipuri) kingdom had conquered Naga territory, that while records are available of the territories of the kings none exists for the Nagas.
I am left a little bemused. Since when has territory conquered also become legitimate? Historiography has already made strides in a certain direction – the view of history from below, from the point of the subjects rather than the rulers. Besides, Nagas are not alone as far as absence of written records regarding ownership rights over land and forests are concerned. Most tribals in the northeast as well as mainland India who hitherto had followed the oral tradition do not have written records. In fact most of them - until the threat from the non-tribal outsider or an unfamiliar ‘government’ - looked at writing in general and written records in particular with suspicion. But this is not to say that they did not or do not know what their family or community owns. Without any records whatsoever they will show you the relevant boundaries, not only their own but also that of the landlords’, where they exist, as I was to discover in one instance in Bihar. In this village it was important to know the land ownership of the landlord, notorious for his exploitative and oppressive ways, but it was difficult to get access to the land records because of the nexus between the revenue officials and the landed gentry. Interestingly, it was the labourers who could accurately calculate how much he owned since they were the ones who had laboured in his fields for generations. To suggest therefore that the Nagas did not have a reliable understanding of what was theirs during the better part of the last century is difficult to accept. The hegemony of the written over the oral has been contested and oral history has been acknowledged as a valid tool in furthering historical knowledge. Recently, a counter-factual view of history has also gained credence in order to better understand a particular case. We could ask, for instance, what would the boundaries of the Naga homeland be if the British had never annexed Naga territories or if the Naga declaration of independence on 14 August 1947 had been respected?
Gohain has also drawn our attention to the unity of the Naga nation being a recent phenomenon, that “...for a long time in history the Naga nation did not have a territorial state and neighbouring peoples with territorial states had expanded long ago into areas where Nagas were resident.” The author does not rue such expansions but objects to the Naga attempt at recovering such lost territories in the now. Whether such territories can be claimed back or should be treated as water under the bridge is an issue for future negotiation, but that the Nagas may desire such areas to revert back to them is understandable. Unification of Naga territories, inhabited or otherwise, into a Naga nation becomes all the more justifiable in the light of such past incursions.
Even as the author attempts to make a case of viewing reality “beyond the Naga perspective” may I take the liberty to ask if he would deny that his own reading of history is also selective and from a particular – Assamese – perspective? It would be perhaps worth our while to accept that there are multiple readings of the historical and contemporary contexts of the ongoing conflict/s in the region. That one may not necessarily be doing injustice to the other if one were to attempt to understand - at least to begin with - from a particular perspective. As one long time observer of the scene pointed out to me, what is more important is to bring the debate out in the open in a people to people dialogue which is perhaps the only way to overcome not only the physical but mental borders that exist between the peoples of this beleaguered region.
Unravelling the tangle is long overdue and can be done if there is a will.
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