Al Ngullie
Civil disorder does not represent a people lost to lawlessness. It represents people’s
acquired faithlessness in the law. Simply put, belligerent citizenries are a symptom of dormant social-political objections that grew malignant in the absence of redress.
The surge of violent upheavals in the recent past in Nagaland may offer insights about the consequences of failed political administrations. Some of the most notable cases: the emergence of movements such as the ACAUT, the local consumer rights movement, the March 2015 mob action in Dimapur; the December 2013 public assault on an underground camp in Zunheboto; the communal tensions between two communities in Tuensang during 2014-2015; the lynching of an alleged rapist in Meluri under Phek in 2014; the communal violence and tensions this February in Tuensang following the killing of a couple.
Said cases are but merely the visible consequences that poor administrative leaderships and poor governance invite upon the society and the people, be it in Nagaland, be it in Washington and elsewhere where democratic institutions offer a space to dissent and oportunity for reform.
The components of unrest
Whenever do the public decide to raise its fist, there will always be connections to a complex interplay of five factors:
(i) opportunism [engineering an event that dramatizes a cause]
(ii) radical tactics [the use of prohibited, often criminal, tactics to draw maximum attention to a cause]
(iii) a long-neglected cause
(iv) an agency, such as governments or a judicial entity on whom the aggrieved place blame for aggravating the cause, directly or indirectly
(v) Exploitation of all the aforementioned factors as a prism to achieve redress / solution
Two forms of behavioural geographies
According to this author, public violence is primarily a meeting of two progressive forms of fundamentalist human geographies:
• Extremist behaviour rooted in moral agendas, the blame for which is placed on perceived policy failure by administrators / governments. It happens generally when non-political grievances transform into quasi-political movements, and emerges in the form of vigilantism against existing political orders.
The growing number of small-scale riots in Dimapur during times of power outages as the past four years have seen; the ‘March 5’ upheaval in Dimapur; the attack on an NSCN camp in Zunheboto by local community members in 2013; the riots that followed after gunmen killed a couple recently, illustrate the first case.
• Moral movements rooted in socio-political agendas caused directly by administrators / governments / community leaders’ policy failure: This happens when welfare concerns of the citizenry such as corruption or failed judiciary and policies trigger socio-political movements: The emergence of the popular anti-graft movement ACAUT in Nagaland, the AAP in India, or the emergence of the Central Nagaland Tribes Council, the CNSA, or, at a lesser level, the current unrest in Mokokchung district following alleged corruption in the district’s Public Distribution System.
Government institutions and authorities need to appreciate two truths from history that continue to chide modern political communities:
Firstly, public upheavals – be it riots, be it full-scale revolutions – are rarely systematic, predictable or even premeditated. Meaning, there was an underlying cause existing neglected for long. Secondly, there has never been a revolution in any society where its government had taken care of her people.
There is a tendency that systems of control such as governments and statutory authorities would more than often equate lawlessness with a challenge against ordered institutions i.e., enforcement, and public peace.
Hence, in the mindset of governments, even justified, genuine welfare-related grievances become reduced to nothing more than law and order problems.
In that process, instead of injecting corrective measures to identify and resolve the roots that triggered unrest in the people in the first place, the authority merely initiates managerial measures (such as law and order motions, curfews, crowd-control, preliminary arrests etc.). The symptom gets treated but not the disease.
By virtue of having received a people’s welfare mandate, a government’s first concern should be welfare reforms – not political concessions. As with every policing situation, containment measures always become the focus, not the perpetuating issue. Such cases always invariably lead to more dangerous and severer issues because the ailment was not examined; only the symptoms were.
Unfortunately, the bad temper Nagaland has been showing over the past few years indicate that the police measures that the government keeps employing seem to have become dominant over reforms. Even insensate creatures such as Baboons know that to play with the tail of a sleeping lion is to wake their own peril.
Said events in Nagaland–including the recent series of hushed-up killings in Dimapur–speak volumes about how far the trajectory of policy and administrative failure in Nagaland has travelled. No government or political leadership can wash their hands off the moral responsibility of failing to meet the demands of rights, justice and good governance. If so, then, they also do not have the moral right to claim credit for peace, security, and economic growth.
There is a need to understand this truth: A government that fails to recognize its citizens’ welfare is a government that will consider justice a chore, but never a duty.
