Death, it is often said, has got nothing to do with the dead. Anyone who has had to experience the death of a loved one will most likely agree. The dead is just that – dead. And gone. It is the ones left behind who are consigned with the task of dealing with the absence of their loved ones. Many are told, and many try, to find solace in the fact that they were able to say their goodbyes, and thus mourn the departed. Not all people are fortunate enough to bid final goodbyes to their loved ones. Even today we have read of the body of an army officer being exhumed at Chakhabama in Kohima, twenty -four years after he was killed.
2nd Lt E Thomas Joseph was killed while travelling from Chakhabama to Jessami in Phek district on June 12, 1992. His body, according to a defence release, was buried at a church at Chakhabama because of ‘situational constraints’ back then. His body was exhumed on October 10 last, by his family members, and taken to his hometown Kottayam in Kerala. No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art like the army. Numerous elegies have been written and sung for the dead soldier. Even more so for those soldiers buried under unknown graves in unknown lands.
In England, they have the tomb of ‘The Unknown Warrior.’ Buried in Westminster Abbey, The Unknown Warrior is a memorial to the dead of World War I, particularly those who have no known grave. In 1920, as part of ceremonies in Britain to commemorate the dead of World War I, there was a proposal that the body of an unknown soldier, sailor or airman lying in an unmarked grave abroad be returned to England for burial in Westminster Abbey. This was to symbolise all those who had died for their country, but whose place of death was not known, or whose body remained unidentified. Similarly, the Americans have their ‘Tomb of the Unknowns’. France, Italy, Potugal, Chile, Ukraine – to name but a few – also have their own version of the Unknown Soldier memorial.
On June 25 this year, at a lecture in Dimapur, one of the founding members of the Naga Mothers’ Association was reported as saying that, in the early nineties, they would find a dead body every day in the streets of Dimapur and Kohima. “Sometimes it was two, sometimes it was three,” she was reported as saying, while recollecting those chilling years. She had narrated how the mothers were tasked with the duty to give proper burials to the bodies found in the streets. After covering them with Naga shawls, collected from churches in Kohima, the bodies were buried.
In her words: “We did not know whose son he was or to which faction he belonged. No group ever came to claim the bodies.” But none of the dead, she added, were buried “un-mourned.” Thousands more have fallen victim to the violence that have been associated with our Naga struggle for self-determination. Thousands have died “un-mourned”, and lay buried in unmarked graves across Arunachal, Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and inside Myanmar. We do not know if their remains will ever return home. Most likely, it never will. But like all those that have gone before us, even those in unmarked graves deserves our moment of silence.
