'States failing to give meaning to reforms for indigenous people'

Our Reporter
Dimapur, Aug. 9 (EMN): The General Secretary of Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) Gam A Shimray on Monday asserted that agreements and reforms were being made at the international level for indigenous people and human rights standards have been improving, but “this agreement seem to be made for the sake of making agreements as far as the state is concerned”.

He was speaking at the 22nd Morung dialogue held virtually on the theme ‘Indigenous people and the call for a new social contract’, commemorating International Day of World’s Indigenous Peoples, 2021, organised by Naga Peoples’ Movement for Human Rights (NPMHR).

Shimray stated that states were not giving meaning to the agreement and therefore ‘there is nothing good about this agreement’.

‘The states are not taking the responsibility to translate this into action in their own home ground’, he said.

“When we are calling for a new social contract, it is for the uncovering and recovery of this meaning that we must understand, and also enhancing them as per the experience of how we are changing and growing," he stated, adding that this meaningful agreement also applies to us.

In the struggle for self-determination, it has to be a process of meaning making and peace-making”, he added.

Sharing his opinion on the border issue, he stated that the border was a concept that is essential and fundamental to human civilisation. He cited that borders ‘give meaning to our lives, conception to our political ideas and how we govern and therefore this territory in the indigenous also was very clear’.

‘As human beings, there must also be a conception where borders are penetrating and you can transcend’, he said.

Roderick Wijunamai, lecturer at Royal Thimpu College, Bhutan, also speaking on the theme, said that ‘we have for decades been fighting for sovereignty and resisting many form of intrusion but while we have been resisting the entrance of the human outsiders, we have sidelined the other form of intrusion; which is in the form of the ideological entry but also in the some form of the non local or non-indigenous species that has come to us”.

He further opined that in reconsidering, rearticulating and reimagining social contract from the indigenous perspective, ‘we have to really go back to our roots and we have to broaden our understanding of community.’

“We have to reimagine our understanding of what is social as our fight is not just against the state for sidelining us, but our fight is also against certain foreign ideologies and capitalist ideology, the ideology that reduces our life ways to a culture”.

Raile Rocky Ziipao, assistant professor of Sociology, IIT Bombay, opined that land is the key to understanding ‘our reality’ and new social contract between state and indigenous people.

‘The socio-political economic issues in tribes of Nagas across the border are too complex for the existing dominant social theories to adequately address the issue of situation as well as explaining the reality, hence it is imperative to approach from a different perspective, drawing on the experience from indigenous studies across the globe,’ he shared.

He concluded by questioning if we can think of a development with justice that takes into account the historical justices meted to the indigenous and tribal people across the globe.