The state and the ruling Naga People’s Front party is finally trying to turn over a new leaf with the selection of the party President to be the new leader of the House in the 12th Nagaland Legislative Assembly. The turn of events since the elections to the ULBs were announced in December 2016 has no doubt indicated a lack of or rather scarcity of well informed leaders at the helm of affairs in all fronts. All the lawmakers are not expected to be experts in law themselves but nevertheless they were also found direly wanting in even the basic understanding of law.
The Rule of Law is sacrosanct for any civilised society to survive and progress but what transpired in the last 24 days since the first day of the bandh on January 28 will no doubt be a big dent in the democratic principles as mandated by the Constitution of India. However the public are also well aware that the decisions and actions of the lawmakers in the state over the years have demoted even the August House to a mere trading place. It is the same lawmakers who kept quiet when village councils after village councils in their constituencies misinterpreted Article 371(A) to secure absolute support for them from the villages. Their silence obviously also points to their connivance with the person of influence in the village with some form of monetary transactions and other commitments. Thereby many lawmakers instead destroyed that very democratic setup and the privacy of the secret ballot even before being elected which in reality they are bound by law to protect after being elected. What the former British politician Tony Benn said about democracy; that the power was transferred from the wallet to the ballot and from the market place to the polling station is completely the reverse in many polling stations in Nagaland.
In such a scenario, can a population really believe these same bunch of people who although swear by the Constitution and that they are only trying to implement as mandated? In other words how can a population believe those leaders who got elected using means directly in contravention to the Representation of the People Act,1951 who now claim that they are only following the direction of the Constitution to implement Part IXA of the constitution. The Nagaland Bar Association on the other hand clearly stated that the said part of the Constitution is not applicable to the state of Nagaland since it is predominantly a Scheduled Tribe area. When such a debate is out in the open, the Naga population in majority will always take the side of the tribe organisations and unfortunately for the government it was against them. Those government employees whose salaries are not paid; those contractors whose bills are not cleared with high demand of cuts; those students whose scholarships were delayed; those self employed people who felt used by government; those aspiring musicians and entrepreneurs in the music industry who felt they were being dumped after big promises; those Naga nationalist who felt that an outsider’s law was being imposed; those mothers and women who felt that they were being wrongly projected by the government; those local leaders who felt that the government had insulted their tribe; and finally those political opponents who took it as an opportunity to topple the government, all joined the bandwagon against the government. Call it a mob or a movement but the authoritarian manner in which the government conducted itself was the cause. Moreover the intention of each and every group of people might vary but the banner under the tribe organisations is never wrong for the tribes of Nagaland. The majority of the legislators who took part and utilised those platforms created by the village and tribe organisations in their political careers know better.
The government and the ruling party on the other hand were fixated on only two things. Firstly, to conduct the elections come what may. Secondly, all the opposition to the conduct of election was just partisan politics at play initiated by their opponents or in their words “politically motivated”. That was the cause of the current predicament in the state.
The public should now find ways so that such movements that had violence, vandalism and arson are never repeated again. It will be possible only when the coming together of the tribes is taken as a new beginning and start with a change in our electoral system. That should be the foremost agenda hereafter. Every tribe organisation should instead give out strong diktats to its member villages that the modesty and the purity of the secret ballot be maintained hereafter.
