indignousnagaland #19 - Separating The Wheat From The Chaff

Bruce Lee (atheist) and C. S. Lewis (atheist-turned-theist), an odd combination, often appeared in the mind, whenever one tries to find individuals who're known to have embarked on a journey to make themselves a better version of themselves. Bruce Lee once remarked in a televised interview that it's very difficult to be honest to oneself. His level of honesty — I'm inclined to believe — exists on the same plateau as C. S. Lewis, who said:

"No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it not by lying down. A man who gives into the temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it; and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation really means - the only complete realist." — Mere Christianity, Macmillian 1952 version.

Mahatma Gandhi, the author of MY EXPERIMENT WITH TRUTH, was another individual, whose legacy tells the tale of striving towards a better version of oneself. Including Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. They don't claim of flawless perfection — they claimed of the identification, followed by an honest attempt at removal, of flaws of a kind or another at the level of their souls. Their guts brought them glory.

Today, any given list of scholars and academicians seemed blissfully unaware of the fatal and easily identifiable flaws in their own content creation. They pretend to be all-knowing. Thanks to Google. They don't want hardwork; CLICK CLICK CLICK — then their research is over in seconds. To add one more to our cautionary-tales, recently, the world gets to see the British interview (Britain’s Channel 4 with TV journalist Cathy Newman) of the Canadian professor (clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson), which didn't go well and Journalist Douglas Murray described it as “catastrophic for the interviewer”. First, Newman seemed hostile towards Peterson. Second, she seemed unable to engage with his arguments, instead misrepresenting them. At one point, she was rendered speechless.

Back to the scene in India with the best of intentions, one has to say, things aren't less appalling. Nandita Haksar, a supreme court lawyer, visited Manipur and described of what happened:

"The first time I went to Ukhrul was in 1982 as a part of a women’s team to investigate into the human rights violations by the Indian armed forces during a counter- insurgency operation. The team was headed by Pramila Dandavate. In her first speech in Ukhrul she began by saying she was happy to be in the land of Arjun and Chitrangada. The people looked a little disturbed but politely translated the speech. She, like most of our team, was totally unaware that that one statement had many political connotations.

First of all, it was not until the eighteenth century that the kingdom was called by its present Sanskritised name of Manipur. Till then the kingdom was known as Meitrabak or Kangleipak. It was after the conversion of the Meitei King, Garib Niwaz, into Hinduism under the influence of one Shanti Das, a Brahman from Sylhet, that the culture underwent a process of Hinduisation. The traditional religious books were burnt, temples to the old Sanamahi God were destroyed, and the Bengali script was imposed. This was done despite the strong opposition by the traditional priests and courtiers. The Meitei Kings started claiming they were descendants of Arjun’s son and they got integrated with the great traditions.

It was perhaps from this time that the cultural distance between the Hill people and the Valley people began to grow. A similar process can be seen in the relations between the Ahoms and the Nagas (and other tribal communities) after the Ahoms took to Hinduism. One of the most negative-aspects of Hinduism was the caste system, which denied the Nagas the right to equality and dignity. Added to the negative influence of Hinduism was the conversion of the Nagas to Christianity during the colonial-rule." (Constitutional Crisis In Manipur, Nandita Haksar, June 19, 2010)

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, or so goes the saying. Nandita Haksar's finger on the Hindu Caste System, in naming the culprit, was precise and accurate, while she's wrong:

1. To impute a negative role to the Christians. Or to draw a parallel between the Naga conversion to Christianity and the Hindu Caste System — because the former hadn't denied others of the right to equality and dignity which the latter had.

2. To not demarcate the hills as a region outside of traditional Manipur. When we say, traditional Manipur, it means the valley. The highlanders (who're fabricated inside Manipur by the British cartography) had never been part of the Manipur kingdom.

3. To not demarcate between the different moral plateaus, of the Lowlanders and the Highlanders. The Meitei Kings started claiming they were descendants of Arjun’s son, which is as good as claiming to be descendants of Bigfoot. The Highlanders had never been guilty of any similar untruthful claim. So to not properly demarcate between the two peoples, is to not tell the truth properly.

Don't get me wrong — I don't doubt the good intentions of Nandita Haksar. She's one of the few truth-tellers in India.

At Scroll.in, I recently read the headline:

"To understand the Naga demand for separation from India, visit the small village of Benreu"

with its subtitle:

"Journalist and filmmaker Sanjoy Hazarika draws upon decades of work in India’s North-East for a new book on the region".

The word "separation" at the headline itself is problematic, because the Indian and Naga nations have never been joined, whereas the word "separation" denotes coming apart from what has been joined. The author substituted the word "resistance" with "separation" without any academic justification. I don't like his sleight of hand: pay attention and you'll see that the author has offered no basis for his use of the word "separation" in place of "resistance".

Laced with errors of anachronistic orientation, Sanjoy Hazarika writes:

"They [Nagas] were brutally oppressed by Siu-Ka-Pha, the first Ahom king, who mercilessly tortured his captives as a lesson to other Nagas when he crossed the Patkai and ran into resistance. That treatment silenced them, historians say, for over 150 years although they began raids afterwards. They held ownership and control of the salt mines near Namrup, which they traded with the Ahoms. There was a time when various Ahom monarchs, irked by the harassment, led punitive expeditions against the hill groups but to little avail, for their adversaries vanished, as did the ones at Benreu and elsewhere in the twentieth century, into the forests. Atanu Buragohain, the premier of one Ahom king, counselled the ruler against such campaigns, comparing the effort to that of an “elephant entering a rat hole”. So the Ahoms settled for a patchy peace with the hill tribes, giving them a pusa or tax to keep away from their territories".

Besides his anachronistic terms, the author made omissions and commissions here and there. His audience was made to believe that the Ahom community, as a body of people, had fought the body of the Naga community, which didn't occur in history. This is like playing tennis without the net. Between the first nations (Nagas) and the Ahom intruders, the first nations were presented as the offending party deserving of the intruder's "punitive expeditions" - a term of colonial coinage for the justification of their savagery.

"...the Ahoms settled for a patchy peace with the hill tribes, giving them a pusa or tax to keep away from their territories". But taxes are levied by the land owner upon someone who's not the land owner; in a territorial dispute between the first nations and the intruders, the intruders were magically presented as the generous and peace-abiding souls. This is magic.

“Elephant entering a rat hole”. Elephant i.e. intruders:

1. They sliced off the nose, ears and hands within their system or court of justice,
2. They engaged in slave trade,
3. They have no political and social equality,
4. They have no democratic freedoms,
5. They have inferior ethics as comparaed to the superior ethics of the first nations which the British authors (e.g. James Jonestone) described as "worthy of imitation".

Rat hole i.e. first nations:

1. They have restorative justice in their court of justice (no death penalty; banishment is the maximal punishment),
2. They have no slave trade (it's beneath their ethics),
3. They have political and social equality,
4. They have democratic freedoms,
5. They have superior ethics which is relevant and compatible with the ethics of modern nation-states.

Now, what may be asked of the author are:

1. Within what moral framework was/is the Ahom people (intruder) good or great?
2. Within what moral framework were/are the first nations evil (or lesser than the intruders/Ahoms)?

With a sense of empiricism, we have to ask questions and separate the wheat from the chaff before consumption; I'm not questioning someone's intention here — I'm questioning the validity of their arithmetics.

REPRESENTATIONAL IMAGES

THE RESISTANCE CONTINUES

References

To understand the Naga demand for separation from India, visit the small village of Benreu
C.S. Lewis Quotes
Constitutional Crisis In Manipur

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India's State-sponsored Terrorism
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