When Leaders Step Back: What a Naga Moment of Regret Can Teach Us About Reconciliation

I agree with both. Words matter, especially when spoken by people in positions of influence.

But a standard means something only when it is applied to everyone. If a Naga elder should not be humiliated or spoken of in unacceptable language, the same must hold when Naga political leaders speak about one another. It must hold for a political worker, a church leader, a young person arguing online. It must hold across tribes, factions, churches, political organisations and generations, and even across the deepest political divisions of our history.

Otherwise we create a culture in which dignity is a privilege given to those we respect, while those we disagree with become legitimate targets. That cannot be the foundation of a democratic Naga political culture.

If the problem is political hegemony, let us debate hegemony

There are real questions in Naga politics. Who speaks for Nagas in the negotiations? How are decisions made, and who is consulted? How much influence should any one organisation hold over the Indo-Naga political process?

These questions should not be suppressed. Nor should they be personalised.

If there is a perception that one negotiating entity has gathered disproportionate authority, the answer is a serious argument about democracy, accountability, representation and legitimacy. Demand greater internal democracy. Demand wider consultation. Demand accountability from political leadership. Demand that the Naga political process remain larger than any single organisation.

Those demands are strongest when they are made without insult. We should be able to challenge hegemony without becoming another form of hegemony. Otherwise we only replace one dominance with another, held by whoever shouts loudest.

A political position should be defeated by a better political position. It should not be defeated by character assassination, by tribal mobilisation, or by reducing a complex disagreement to the moral worth of the person who holds a different view. When we attack the messenger instead of engaging the message, we have already begun to lose the argument.

The Naga political question cannot survive endless internal wounding

There is a point at which people become exhausted. Not because they no longer care, but precisely because they care.

For generations, Nagas have carried an extraordinarily difficult political question. We carry competing histories, claims, organisations and interpretations, and at times competing visions of our collective future. Yet again and again, we wound one another. Front. Back. Centre. Sometimes the wound is political. Sometimes tribal. Sometimes personal. Sometimes theological. Sometimes all four at once.

Each time we do this, we use up some of the trust between our people. People who cannot sit in the same room cannot agree on anything, and no political settlement can hold among people who do not trust one another enough to accept it.

Unprecedented crises demand unprecedented leadership. But unprecedented leadership does not always mean speaking more forcefully. Sometimes it means knowing when to stop. Sometimes it means saying, I went too far. Sometimes it means accepting that preserving a relationship matters more than winning an argument. That is not weakness. It may be the harder form of strength.

The courage to step back

I do not know what went into the decision of Atem and Raising to retract their remarks. Nor should anyone romanticise the episode. The political disagreements that produced the controversy remain. Still, there is something significant in the act itself.

A leader with authority can always continue to defend himself. He can find 10 reasons why the other side deserved the criticism. He can explain the historical context. He can point to the provocations that came before. He can say, I was right.

But there is another possibility. A leader can say: Whatever my reasons, I recognise that my words caused hurt. I am willing to step back. That is humility, and humility in public life is increasingly rare.

Reconciliation is not the photograph at the end

Nagas have spoken about reconciliation for years. The work of the Forum for Naga Reconciliation, the Naga Mothers’ Association, the churches, civil society organisations, community leaders and countless ordinary people has shown how deeply reconciliation has entered our collective imagination.

But we may sometimes have misunderstood what it means. Reconciliation is not merely a meeting. It is not a handshake or a declaration. It is not a photograph of people sitting around a table after years of conflict. It is not an event carefully arranged somewhere away from home, followed by everybody returning to their old positions.

Those things can help. But they are not reconciliation itself. Reconciliation is what happens between those moments.

It happens when I listen even though I disagree. It happens when I refuse to humiliate someone who has humiliated me. It happens when I acknowledge the wound I have caused, and when I forgive without pretending the wound never existed. It happens when I distinguish a person from the political position I oppose, and when I refuse to make an entire community carry the burden of what some of its members say. It happens when we choose relationship over revenge. Reconciliation is not the end of the process. Reconciliation is the process.

No one owns reconciliation

This is also why reconciliation cannot become the preserve of any one institution. We should acknowledge with gratitude the extraordinary work of those who have carried the burden of reconciliation among Nagas. But no organisation can own forgiveness. No institution can monopolise reconciliation. No individual can become its permanent gatekeeper.

Reconciliation belongs to the people. Political leaders can practise it. Churches can nurture it. Civil society can facilitate it. Mothers can embody it. Communities can sustain it. Ultimately, it happens whenever two human beings decide that their relationship is worth more than their wounded pride.

That is why the present moment matters. It brings reconciliation out of institutional language and into personal conduct.

Faith disposition or power disposition?

For me, this is where the deeper Christian question enters.

We often speak about Christian reconciliation while continuing to operate through a power disposition. A power disposition asks: Who is right? Who is wrong? Who has authority? Who must apologise? Who won? Who lost? Who has the larger following? Who controls the negotiating table? Who has the last word?

A faith disposition asks different questions: What must I surrender? What wound have I caused? What can I acknowledge? What can I forgive? What must I do so that the relationship can live?

These are radically different ways of living political life. Power is concerned with position. Faith is concerned with relationship. Power protects the self. Faith is capable of surrendering the self.

And this is not weakness. Jesus did not reconcile humanity through domination. He reconciled through self-giving. The Cross is not only a religious symbol. It shows us what power looks like when it serves a relationship instead of protecting a position.

Power says: I will prevail over you. Faith says: I will give up something of myself so that life between us can continue.

Our Naga political life badly needs to rediscover this distinction.

Can we afford this now?

Some will ask exactly that. Our adversaries are closing in from every side. Is this the time to talk about humility and forgiveness among ourselves? Surely a people under pressure needs to be hard, not gentle.

I understand the question. But a people under pressure is the people that can least afford to be divided. Those who wish to weaken us do not have to defeat us. They only have to wait while we wound one another.

So let me be clear about what a faith disposition asks, and what it does not. It does not ask Nagas to give up their political convictions, or to treat justice as a lesser thing. The retraction we are discussing gave up no political position. It gave up words.

What it asks is that, among ourselves, we put the relationship first. That we make peace before we have settled who was right, because settling that may take a generation, and we may not have a generation to spare. It asks someone to take the first step before the other side has earned it.

I do not offer this as a tactic for winning. Jesus did not go to the Cross as a tactic. But a people who can do this among themselves cannot easily be divided from outside. That is not a guarantee. It is the one thing in this hour that is fully in our own hands.

The real test comes tomorrow

There is a danger here. We could praise this moment today and forget it tomorrow, and that would make it only another episode. Its real significance will be decided by what follows. The real test is not this week. It is the next time a Naga leader is wrong.

Will he be able to say so without feeling smaller?

Will we continue to speak about one another with the same contempt?

Will political disagreement again become tribal disagreement?

Will factions go on behaving as though their own legitimacy requires the delegitimization of everyone else?

Or can this become a precedent? Can we build a political culture where a leader can say I was wrong without losing dignity? Where disagreement is fierce but not dehumanising? Where we challenge hegemony without creating another? Where we protect the dignity of those we disagree with? Where we finally accept that Naga unity has never required uniformity of political opinion, only that we remain a people who can disagree and still stay in the room?

These questions matter far more than the controversy that brought them into view.

The leadership we need

The Naga political story has produced many kinds of leaders: warriors, negotiators, administrators, church leaders, civil society leaders, intellectuals and community leaders.

But the crisis before us may now require another kind: leaders who know how to step back without feeling defeated. Leaders strong enough to listen. Leaders who can tell political courage from political aggression. Leaders who understand that reconciliation does not erase justice, and that forgiveness does not require surrendering political convictions. Leaders who can disagree without turning the other into an enemy. And leaders who understand that no faction, tribe, organisation or individual is greater than the people whose political destiny they claim to serve.

That is what makes this small episode worth remembering. Not that two leaders retracted their words, but that they reminded us, perhaps unintentionally, that authority can bow without becoming smaller. That humility can strengthen leadership rather than diminish it. And that reconciliation can begin not when everybody agrees, but when somebody chooses to take the first step back from the edge.

That is where hope begins. In this difficult hour for the Naga people, hope is not a small thing.

May we find more reasons every day to come closer: to listen to one another with respect, to disagree without hatred, to forgive without humiliation, and to pursue the Naga political question with courage, humility and faith.

For the greatest political act available to us now is not to ask who among us is powerful enough to prevail, but who among us is humble enough to help us become a people again.

James Pochury