Naga Mindset Today for Tomorrow

When people speak mostly in ‘burrowed-words’, respect God for ‘show’, play ‘patriotic’ to gain ‘popularity’ without sacrifice; follow deceptive democracy to gain ‘power and wealth’ and the government in weak umbilical connection with the mindset of the represented; then, the people of the land the Creator paid for by the price of his ‘only begotten Son’, is in trouble today for tomorrow ecclesiastically and secularly.

It is head-hunting Naga tribe, not the civilised, sui generis, that gave the blessed but nameless country its name ‘NAGA HILLS’; and living in mountain tops for security, the fiercely independent democratic Naga village republic, for the last nineteen centuries of the Christian era, preserved the Naga people group to date; it is interesting proposition to contemplate their identity.

The institution of Angh-ship of the Konyaks with absolute power, secular, political and ecclesiastical in the Angh over its people; to a lesser extent the Sümi Zhümomi chieftainship system, would have laid a difficult dispensation for the radically independent tribes to form a common seamless political Naga people group of republics.

Had the British colonial power not bought a strong common just democratic Law and Order in the Naga Hills and provided initial necessary structural administrative framework for a common ‘Naga Political House’ to build on; there was no common patriarch or institution of the Naga tribes other than the Ahoms common name for the scantily dressed ferocious people called [pronounced] ‘Noga,’ but written “Naaga” in their script, that bound all the Noga tribes into one people’s group.

The British colonial administrative rope that bound the Naga together was indeed a strong rope, but at best foreign and physical. Actually, it was the love of God in the Gospel of Jesus through the self-sacrificing life of the missionaries from America that mentally and spiritually bound the wild tribes into the sense of one people.     

The cross of Jesus follow wherever the national flag goes and had the British colonial flag come to the Naga country a decade late, the universal Christian light would not have found the pagan Naga tribes; and the unconscionable caste system and mythology of Hinduism of man-made worship of false God would have overwhelmed the simple blissfully inward looking Nagas to an unfortunate population of castes, dalits, untouchables and dalit tribes, excluded from the Hindu temples but included in the Hindu system of life for vote banks; the Mongolian Meiteis of Manipur and the Ahom Tais of Assam endeavour hard today to come out from their past historical mistakes.  

‘People live Today for Tomorrow, there is no Tomorrow without Today’; and if the Nagas lose their tribal identity today, they may lose the possession of their future National Identity Tomorrow. 

Thepfulhouvi Solo, IFS [RR-68]