Seeing the State

This chapter examines how protracted political conflict shapes the ways ordinary Naga men and women ‘see’ the postcolonial state. For most Nagas, long decades of conflict were marked by a dual relation to the state. On the one hand, they experienced the coercive, repressive powers of the state, while, after the enactment of Nagaland in 1963, the state manifested itself as a source of largesse and livelihood, as part of a politically driven policy of ‘seduction’ to tie Nagas to existing state structures and the political status quo. These historical experiences muddled distinctions between the state as a benevolent provider and protector, and that of a dispenser of bodily violence and misery, between the state as a lucrative resource and reservoir of public resentment. The way Naga villagers engage and ‘see’ the state, I argue, is mediated by this historical ambiguity.

Ceasefire as Conflict

This chapter gives voice to ordinary villagers’ experiences, views, and concerns vis-à-vis Naga insurgency, and particularly evaluates the post-ceasefire practices and patterns they speak about. While a ceasefire connotes the cessation of hostilities, political stasis, reconciliation, and peace talks, the author shows ethnographically how the Indo-Naga ceasefire instead manifested itself as a complex and contentious social reality that saw the continuation of conflict by other forms and means. What inflated, after the ceasefire, was an enormous struggle fought out between seven or eight Naga underground groups over historical legitimacy, ideological differences, leadership, and territorial and tribal domination within the broader Indo-Naga conflict. This chapter also probes the boundaries between state and national workers and illustrates the mutually beneficial, if illegal, relations that exist between them, which leads me, among others, to argue toward the critical importance of studying social networks as central to the functioning (and fragmentation) of the Naga Movement.

Clan, Village, Tribe, and Naga Nation

Naga identity, akin to all modern identities, is historically contingent, constructed, and continually debated. This chapter offers an ethnographic view of local processes of identity and identification among Nagas by highlighting the social binds and divides that emerge from the structuring, foundational, and affective realities of clan, village, and tribe. The author shows how Naga clans, villages, and tribes variously connect and disconnect with projections of a unified Naga nation and the nationalistic politics of Naga insurgency. In the upshot, the author argues that the form and functioning of the Naga nation is best approached, not as a single ethnic rubric, but as a ‘tribal confederation’ in which connected yet self-directed tribes fissure and fuse according to the political context and circumstances.

The State as a Resource

The politics of statehood and related demands pervade all nooks and corners of India. This chapter discusses the Frontier Nagaland statehood demand that has emerged within (or against?) the Naga Movement for Independence. Through a set of socio-historical and ethnographic explorations, the author shows how the demand for Frontier Nagaland, while tracing back to divergent colonial trajectories between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Nagaland, implies that the creation of Nagaland state produced new constellations of power, new fault-lines, and new axes of differentiation. Seeing the state first and foremost as a ‘resource’, six eastern Naga tribes today lament, what they experience as, the dominating and exploitative influences of western Naga tribes, whom they see as ‘advanced’ and accuse of preventing eastern Nagas from receiving their development dues.

Performing Democracy in Nagaland

This chapter reveals ethnographically how Naga insurgency, pre-existing political practices and principles, and present-day democratic and electoral politics interrelate in complex and counterintuitive ways. While Naga underground groups formally oppose national elections, in actual practice, national workers intervene and influence election outcomes. More broadly, this chapter explores what ordinary Naga villagers themselves make of modern democracy, and its hallmark of competitive elections, they now have to engage with. To discuss this, the author explores the historical and cultural inferences that guided two crucial episodes that ensued in the run up to Polling Day in Phugwumi. First, the villagers’ (successful) attempt to protect the village electoral list from the deletion of ‘bogus votes’ initiated by the government. Second, the villagers’ (unsuccessful) attempt to agree on a village consensus candidate. The analysis of these events leads the author to critique preconceived definitions of ‘normative democracy’, as Nugent has discussed, and he highlights Naga electors’ agency and imagination to adjust democratic ideals to their own lifeworlds and uses.

Epilogue

This epilogue, in conclusion, reflects on some of the main arguments made in the book and discusses the possibility of Naga society moving beyond the shadows of insurgency. Adopting a historical lens, the author theorises the problematic historical and cultural transitivity of the concept of sovereignty, and advocate a return to indigenous constellations of power, territory, and control. Against the backdrop of a ‘framework agreement’ signed between the NSCN-IM and the Indian government in 2015, and amidst speculation about a final political settlement, the author then discuss several schisms and predicaments that may impede Naga society’s envisaged transformation from a conflict to a post-conflict society.

Corruption and the Moral Economy of State Resources

This chapter uses the vantage of corruption to explore state-society relations in Nagaland. Through focusing on the narrativisation of corrupt practices, the author explores the moral reasoning and perspectives villagers adopt in their dealings with the state, its offices, and development resources and show the ways in which they may self-justify their ‘corrupt’ practices. Against notions that corruption is something pathological, the author’s view is that there exists a distinct and specific relationship between Nagas’ historical experiences and understanding of the postcolonial state and its policies on the one hand, and local subjectivities, moral evaluations, and contested loyalties on the other. The upshot of this is the local emergence of particularistic social and moral field in which corrupt practices must be situated.

Introduction

Starting with a vignette that details a mass protest in Dimapur against excessive ‘rebel’ taxations and the perceived degeneration of the long lingering Naga Movement for Independence, this opening chapter introduces the Naga struggle, its history, political and territorial entanglements, complexities, and, after the 1997 Indo-Naga ceasefire, post-ceasefire practices and patterns. Theoretically, this chapter introduces the idea of ‘insurgency-complex’ to argue that, after long decades of political violence and volatilities, the politics of Naga insurgency, and the Indian state’s response to it, has flooded the shores of political conflict and inundates all areas of social life. This chapter ends with a reflection on the challenges and experiences of carrying out extensive ethnographic research in an area long shaped by violent conflict and political instability.