MONDAY, JUNE 16, 2025
The Sacred Whisper: A Compass of Conscience- in Homage to Uncle Niketu Iralu’s Quiet Light
Niketu Iralu is former director of Asia Plateau and recipient of the Bhupen Hazarika Integration Award.
Published on Jun 13, 2025
By EMN
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- Amid the whirlwind of division, a sentinel of the Naga hills stands as our quiet anchor, steadying our storm.
- Like an ancient banyan, with deep roots in ancestral soil, offering shelter when the winds of division howl.
- In the hush that followed the unfolding of my reflections in “Declaration of Naga General Amnesty: A Missed Golden Opportunity for Unification,” a solitary missive gleamed before my eyes, and like incense, its breath ignited a quiet storm of awakening deep within the sanctum of my mind.
Naga statesman and peace activist Niketu Iralu (Photo used with permission)
- No subject line, only the luminous name, Niketu Iralu. Ninety years of shouldering our people’s sorrows and hopes; former director of Asia Plateau; recipient of the Bhupen Hazarika Integration Award; revered by Assamese scholars as “the weaver of impossible harmonies.”He had chosen to speak.
- What followed was not critique, but a sacred stirring of conscience, raw reflections shared as “points that trouble me.” Though he called them unpolished, they radiated the hard-earned clarity of one who has walked the length and breadth of our wounded history. With reverence and his gracious blessing, I present his luminous words to the Naga people.
- Each phrase trembles with ancestral songs yet strikes like a midnight temple bell. He began with a truth echoing through millennia, now piercing our present:
- “What you are doing is vitally important because, if I may say so, the sense I receive from your writing is completely in keeping with ‘A life not examined is not worth living.’ When a life goes unexamined, it loses its Creator’s meaning and purpose and, as a matter of course, becomes self-destructive. The same dynamic afflicts the struggles of peoples and nations, only on a far larger, more catastrophic scale, because so many human beings are involved.”
- Socrates’ imperative, rekindled by Uncle Niketu, offered a lifeline to a people teetering on the brink of self-forgetting. Having witnessed the Naga ancestral homeland’s journey from fierce sovereignty to shadowed complexities, he saw how that Arc bends toward despair when hearts grow numb. The creeping erosion of communal bonds spoke of poison blooming in neglected shrines. He understood the mortal peril of unexamined wounds: the self-destruction of one soul writ large unravels nations.
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- He then mapped the posture for such examination:
- “You have examined yourself, our struggle, our history, and the histories of our neighbours and the wider world. You remain humble. Because of your openness, transparency, and steadfast commitment to what you believe is right, you inspire trust. Deep down, human beings hunger for truth, the very bread and water of life.”
- Here lies his antidote: radical humility, crystalline openness, unwavering commitment. Not mere virtues, but sustenance for a people starved of authenticity. In landscapes poisoned by hidden agendas, transparency becomes a defiant beacon. Trust, born of integrity, is the only bedrock for rebuilding. Like soil turned before seeds take root, society must be cultivated with openness before reconciliation can bloom.
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- To frame our journey, he invoked history’s lens:
- “All of history can be written in two small words: Challenge and Response. Each society progresses only to the extent it meets its challenges.”
- Summoning the spirit of Toynbee’s panorama, he reminded us that history is not passive drift but active engagement defined by our responses to adversity. Progress demands courage and clarity forged in the fire of struggle. This unsparing lens forces us to scrutinize our passage through 150 years of tumult, a call to refuse the luxury of complacency.
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- Applying this lens, he diagnosed our affliction:
- “The quality of our response to challenges, those that began with the arrival of British imperialists and missionaries over the last 150 years, reveals the elephantine problem inside the morung of our crisis, a problem we have not yet grasped for the monstrous threat it truly is. For many Nagas in my area, until very recently, anything beyond Dimapur was not considered our problem or important, perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but not entirely false. Our response and resilience are understandably inadequate, since our ‘modern’ history began so recently, a fact true of many emerging ethnic and tribal communities around the world.”
- His assessment was stark. Colonialism’s seismic rupture exposed an elephantine crisis in the communal heart, symbolised by the morung meant to nurture us. That cradle of tradition now sheltered unnamed shadows. He named our myopia, “dangerous vision confined to immediate horizons,” leaving history’s echoes unexplored. Like patients ignoring a spreading illness, we blinded ourselves to survival’s threats. Our vertiginous thrust into modernity birthed fragility still obscured by an inward gaze.
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- He pierced our discord with surgical grace:
- “I believe that, driven by unacknowledged personal ambitions among our leaders, we have underestimated what we have already achieved together in the fierce struggle waged by our fighters to defend our identity, as understood by us based on our historical facts. Instead, we have blamed and undermined one another for what we have not yet achieved, sovereignty and so forth. We must learn the meaning and importance of resilience.”
- He exposed division’s engine: unacknowledged ambitions. This poison blinded us to hard-won victories forged in the defense of identity. Collective amnesia breeds destruction, blaming kin for absent sovereignty. Like siblings forgetting shared lineage, we feuded over legacies instead of honoring blood. His call transcends endurance, demanding celebration of the resilience we already possess, building on solid ground rather than cursing rubble.
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- From critique blossomed hope:
- “We should thank and appreciate one another, thank God for our beautiful land, so perilously located in one of the most difficult parts of the world, and thank God for our utterly fascinating peoples. We must build on what we have achieved together. We are not more than what we are already; but, equally, we are not less than what we have become together. With this shared clarity, confidence, and joy, we can face the world.”
- Resurrection forged in gratitude and realism, a hymn of sacred defiance. He summoned appreciation for kin, for perilous homelands, for our tapestry of peoples. Like potters shaping clay, we mold destiny from what we hold. His declaration, “We are not more than what we are already; but, equally, we are not less than what we have become together,” became revolutionary self-acceptance. Embracing this wholeness, infused with clarity and joy, set our footing to engage the world.
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- He distilled this into an unyielding ethic:
- “We must put people before profit and power, because ultimately people are more important than things and power, though things and power are also necessary for life on earth. This is one of those fearfully and wonderfully delicate truths from our souls and conscience: ‘If your motive is truth, you will be fit for power. If your motive is power, you will distort the truth.’ (Kim Beazley, Australian MP and Minister for Education, ‘Father of the Parliament.’)”
- He anchored us in human dignity’s primacy. Material needs matter, but legitimacy flows only from service to people. A tree bears fruit only if its roots nourish the earth. Beazley’s fearfully and wonderfully delicate truth served as our litmus test: truth qualifies for power; the pursuit of power corrupts truth. Stray from this, and rot consumes leadership’s heartwood.
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- He affirmed our shared burden:
- “The chickens of the crisis in our just struggle have come home to roost. All of us have contributed our share in producing the crisis we face today.”
- The proverb landed with inescapable weight. Consequences of collective choices now stand before us. No faction is absolved. Like a tapestry unwinding, every thread contributed to its unraveling. Not condemnation, but a sober reckoning at dawn.
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- Facing this, he revealed the path:
- “We have an incredibly complicated, sensitive crisis to resolve together. To do so, we must recognise that we cannot ignore the cry of our conscience and soul. We must realise that brain and mind, heart, conscience and soul form an indivisible unity, like an egg.”
- Resolution demanded listening to the soul’s cry. His image of wholeness, intellect, consciousness, emotion, moralcompass, essentialbeing, became an unbreakable egg. Fracture this unity, and humanity shatters. A call to honor every dimension of being, refusing cold calculation that drowns compassion.
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- His closing humility resonated deepest:
- “Because I find it difficult to express these thoughts in a fully polished article, I am passing them on as points that trouble me. Keep up your vital work.”
- Disarming, yet these were diamond truths, facets cut by ninety years of witness: ceasefires shattered, betrayals endured, reconciliations fragile as mist. After a lifetime extending “We are in the same boat, brother!” across hostile divides, he offered piercing insights as “points that trouble me.” Humility of a man weaving conscience into his being’s fabric, guiding every step on rain-slicked paths.
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- The Deeper Amnesty
- His message transcended my article. It unveiled a profound amnesty, not legal forgiveness, but a people’s soul awakening. It compels fleeing questions: What distortion did we become when hearing ceased? What did we do to ancestors’ dreams whispered into our soil? What future, worthy of sacrifice, can we forge from fragments? Like a mirror cracked across generations, we must piece our gaze whole.
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- His call demands everything:
- · Dismantle grievance’s machinery, honor the quiet dignity of farmers, weavers, mothers
- · Let conscience interrogate every choice: Does this serve truth or hunger for power?
- · Guard humanity’s indivisible egg, let no ambition sunder its sacred whole
- · True forgiveness: acknowledging wounds and worth equally.
- “With shared clarity, confidence, and joy, we can face the world.”
- A vision of earned strength, dawn’s light breaking through tangled branches, dependent on our courage to pierce darkness with honesty.
- As dawn spills, I see him. Not on a stage, but on a rain-glistened roadside, cloth bag in hand, waiting for the village-bound bus. He carries unwavering belief in our wholeness, even as our faith falters. His conviction is no nostalgia, but a living seed, scattered in Dzukou’s valleys, embedded in Khonoma’s stones, waiting for hearts brave enough to undertake the sacred work: examining self, community, and path.
- “Keep up your vital work,” he signed off.
- So must we carry his compass of conscience, forged in humility’s fire, calibrated by truth’s stars, oriented to spirit’s wholeness.
- Inheriting a legacy not of ease, but of examined purpose.
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- Markson V Luikham
Nagaland Districts
