26 The Debris of Democracy in Nagaland J e l l e J . P. W o u t e r s Among Nagas, the winds of democratic politics and elections carry debris—the debris of democratic waste; the afterlives of political competition and divisions that show themselves in damaged relationships, lingering resentments, festering wounds of broken promises, compromised moralities and the corrosion of community. ‘The devastating tentacles of state elections have spread to all aspects of Naga life: individuals, families, villages, churches, tribes, traditional and government institutions. ‘Elections are the biggest force that is eroding the moral foundations as well as the future of the Naga people’, the spiritual and moral authority of the Nagaland Baptist Church Council (NBCC, 2012) warns. The same winds, however, also carry vestiges and signs of past ways of political life still charged in the present. Some pre/anti/extra democratic, non-state political practices and principles are repurposed to operate in the interior of the modern democratic Naga polity, that is, a resurgence of ‘primordial’ forms of village, clan and tribal allegiances, customary law and authority in the adjudicating and allocating of collective votes (Wouters, 2014). What is defied, in this process, is the persuasion of many theorists of modernity that liberal democracy, as the highest expression of political modernity, would overpaint all things premodern, parochial, patriarchal, traditional and customary. Other putatively ancient expressions of ‘the customary’ no doubt lie discarded, dumped in the recesses of traditions now deemed either obsolete or wrecked beyond repair by the onslaught of India’s liberal secular democracy. Then there is the historical affinity, or growing apace, of democracy and violence in Nagaland; the observation that the arrival of formal democratic institutions and elections coincide with the Naga armed and blood-soaked struggle for the right to selfdetermination, the dense militarization of the hills, massive state violence and the suspension of the rule of law. Right from the beginning, the democracy process in Nagaland had to stave off rebellion, subversion and insurgent politics pursued by, first, the Naga National Council (NNC) and later by its ‘successor’ the National Socialist Council of Nagalim THE DEBRIS OF DEMOCRACY IN NAGALAND (NSCN), in its now rivalling factions, which both advocate the political refusal of the Indian state. To that end, they variously orchestrate election boycotts, threats and intimidation, and physical violence to dissuade Nagas from engaging in India’s democracy process (more below). On the other hand, ordinary Naga men and women long wondered, especially in the decades immediately following India’s Independence, about the purpose and meaning of the democracy process when the Indian state, in many cases, reveals itself to them as an oppressor and dispenser of violence, rather than as a benign protector. The Indo-Naga war is in a complex ceasefire since 1997, but, at the time of writing, still sans political settlement. Well over seven decades (and over five decades of Nagaland statehood) of confluence between democracy and insurgency now raises the question how, and at what cost, the democracy process takes root and operates in a society saturated in political conflict, lawlessness and violence. This chapter asks what the winds of liberal democracy, and elections in particular, have done to Naga society? What has it turned Naga society into? But equally: what happens in the meeting between liberal democracy and homegrown Naga political theory and praxis. What hybrids are produced by the collusion of divergent sets of political practices and principles, ethics and mores, ethos and telos? And what, in this process, have Nagas done to Indian democracy by applying their agency and cultural creativity to retailor it to their own uses and life worlds? Further, what transpires in the co-existence, or co-becoming as I shall argue, of ‘national workers’, as cadres of rivalling Naga underground groups are referred to locally, and elected politicians. It is this triple investigation of how democracy changes community, of how community changes democracy and of how the democracy process and protracted armed conflict mix and mingle which leads to a number of insights into the contemporary character of the democratic domain in Nagaland. 439 What follows is a set of reflections; a broad overview of some of the conundrums, complications and convolutions central to the democracy process of the contemporary historical moment in Nagaland. A caveat before proceeding. Constraints of space in conjunction with the large theme at hand—democracy in Nagaland—make this chapter of necessity selective in its approach and scope. I offer a few impressions, some vignettes and large summations, and in doing so I privilege particular (and no doubt debatable) readings of the democracy process locally. I do, however, provide references to places where my arguments are either elaborated with historical and ethnographic detail or complicated by other perspectives. CONTOURS AND CONTEXT Liberal democracy, the way applied here, is the name for a political epoch in which democratic representation, party-based elections, majority votes, individual autonomy and choice, and equal voting rights have become the major forces that determine the form and substance of political life. Its ‘imposition’ among the Naga (and tribal communities more widely) tells of a big transformation: indigenous political arrangements and values that took hundreds of years of adapting and nourishing are to be replaced by the institutions and ideology of liberal democracy, most notably by its hallmark principle of elections as the prime mover of political life. In the contemporary historical moment, liberal democracy in Nagaland, though, confronts both a traditional-cultural sentience that was alternatively democratic (more below) and a state-sanctioned protective and distinctly non-liberal regime of ‘ethno-territoriality’ (Baruah, 2013). The enactment of Nagaland state, in 1963, is an envisaged (but failed) political compromise to the Naga demand for sovereignty. It comes with a constitutional 440 HANDBOOK OF TRIBAL POLITICS IN INDIA amendment, namely Article 371A which grants political autonomy and institutionalizes a regime of ethno-territoriality—a form of governmentality, or ethno-governmentality, and politics that essentialises the ties between Naga ethnic tribal belonging and exclusive territorial rights.1 It promotes variegated citizenship that locally separates those deemed autochthonous from non-local ‘strangers’ (even if they carry the same nationality yet do not belong locally). In Nagaland, thence, autochthony, not Indian citizenship, serves as the basic criterion for entitlements to rights, employment reservation, access to state resources and benefits and, crucially here, eligibility to stand for political office. As it stands, 59 out of 60 electoral seats that make up the Nagaland Assembly are reserved for Scheduled Tribes, which in Nagaland means de facto Nagas. This electoral reservation is divorced from demographic changes and complex political economies that increasingly upset, certainly in Nagaland’s urban areas, any simple conflation between Naga ethnic tribal identity and territory, and thus guarantees the perpetuation of a Naga political class. Critics see in ethno-territoriality (also characteristic, in varying manifestations, of other hill states in Northeast India) an affront to liberal statecraft and universal citizenship. In Nagaland, after all, only those who ‘belong’ enjoy rights. For those who reside there, even if for the longest time, but do not ethnically originate from Nagaland, these are regimes of bio-political neglect and disenfranchisement. Defenders of this constitutional amendment, however, point to the threat of Nagas’ demographic and cultural devouring by much larger populations from neighbouring states. They see in the current existence of exclusive ethnic tribal and territorial rights, and the reservation of nearly all electoral seats, the last line of 1 defence for Naga culture, identity and political autonomy to survive. The reservation of 59 out of 60 seats precludes elections in Nagaland from unfolding along a volatile tribal versus non-tribal fault line. In Nagaland, unmistakably, it is the tribes that rule. What it does not prevent, however, is the democracy process from descending into an intra-Naga and inter-tribal contest. This reveals itself most forcibly in the politics of delimitation. By the time the British Raj withdrew from the (then) Naga Hills District, the structure of Naga society had already become such that there was a power struggle among the tribes (Wouters, 2017). It was during the post-statehood, new democratic era that the political significance of tribal identification and belonging augment further: most constituencies are delimited and divided tribe wise, as are development allocations, government jobs and other state projects. In this process, one tribe is pitched against another in a near permanent struggle over access to, and ownership of, the state as well as, crucially here, in the number of electoral seats assigned to each tribal district. And while post-statehood governance in Nagaland becomes soon mired in narratives of corruption, Naga politicians are simultaneously known, and praised by their constituents, for appropriating, accumulating and redirecting government employment and state resources to their respective clans, villages and tribes, indicating, for one thing, that most in Nagaland maintain a very sectional sighting of the state (Wouters, 2018a). Consequently, a Naga tribe that ‘owns’ a larger number of electoral seats, through their numerical preponderance in multiple constituencies, is anticipated to experience higher levels of material development compared to those Naga tribes with fewer electoral seats within their broad control. Article 371A reads: ‘Notwithstanding anything in this Constitution, no act of parliament in respect of (i) religious or social practices of the Nagas, (ii) Naga customary law and procedure, (iii) administration of civil and criminal justice involving decisions according to Naga customary law, (iv) ownership and transfer of land and its resources, shall apply to the State of Nagaland unless the Legislative Assembly of Nagaland by a resolution so decides’. THE DEBRIS OF DEMOCRACY IN NAGALAND The upshot of this is intra-Naga competition of tribe-wise electoral representation. And this has wide ramifications. Agrawal and Kumar (2018) show convincingly how vastly inflated population censuses in Nagaland, especially the 2001 census, result from Naga tribes deliberately exaggerating their population numbers in view of the impending delimitation exercise, and so in pursuit of either protecting or expanding ‘their’ electoral seats. Taking cognisance of this, and in a legislative order, the Ministry of Law & Justice decreed in 2008 that the scheduled delimitation exercise in Nagaland is ‘likely to arouse the sentiments of the hilly and tribal people’. It explains. ‘The State of Nagaland is inhabited by various tribes, each having their own distinct traditional boundaries, on the basis of which the existing district and assembly constituency boundaries were largely demarcated, thereby making the fresh delimitation exercise involving transfer of assembly seats from some tribal/linguistic to another unacceptable’, as this would disrupt the ‘tribal equilibrium and peace and public order.’ The legislative order concludes by deferring the delimitation exercise in Nagaland ‘until further orders’. In deliberating this decision, the centre also considers ‘the delicate law and order situation in the State and the ongoing cease fire and the peace talks’, and it is to the insurgency–democracy complex that the next section turns. THE DOUBLE LIVES OF NAGA INSURGENCY AND DEMOCRACY What I pose, in this section, is that threads of Naga insurgency sheathe or at least penetrate the democracy process in Nagaland. This penetration is then forced (‘NSCN-IM accused of hindering elections’, the Indian Express (2008) reports), then by connivance (an underground leader ‘called a meeting with Waromung Village Council where he 441 demanded 500 votes from the village for a particular candidate’ (Morung Express, 2013)) and then by consensus, as happened in 1998 when the Naga public by and large abstained from casting their votes in support and solidarity with the NSCN-IM after it entered into a ceasefire with the Indian state. Rather than constituting distinct and antagonistic political domains, Naga insurgency and democratic politics and governance imbricate into each other’s politics, to the point where they nearly everywhere fuse into a single political field. For many Nagas, this is part of the tragedy of the Naga Movement. A struggle that once began with the near collective aim of securing Naga independence has over the past decades not only factionalized (Panwar, 2017) and ‘turned internal’ (McDuie-Ra & Kikon, 2016, p. 3) but lost focus with ‘national workers’ involving themselves with the micro-politics of elections. National workers at different levels do so despite the Naga rebel vanguard formally condemning both assembly and parliamentary elections as ‘Indian elections imposed on Naga soil’ and for waylaying Nagas’ right to self-determination. The NBCC (2012), which presents itself as the spiritual and moral compass of Naga society, publicly disapproves of these ‘unholy’ allegiances: National workers should not be made, to be used as tools or puppets by some selfish politicians as their aspiration and pursuit is different from the constitutional impetus. Their involvement has been very annoying because by using arms, threats with dire consequences etc. they have been stealing the rights of the general public. National workers should oppose any vested politician/s who solicits their support to scare away the public and disrupt the democratic election. In defiance of such (and other) statements, across Nagaland, and so for several decades, the electoral landscape is layered with state and non-state actors coexisting and co-feeding on development resources—a dyadic I have elsewhere captured as ‘the insurgency complex’ and the ‘underground effect’ (Wouters, 2018b). These mutualities shape the electoral 442 AQ161 HANDBOOK OF TRIBAL POLITICS IN INDIA domain where overground/underground linkages are many and varied. They also fluctuate with local allegiances between national workers and politicians changing from one constituency and elections to the next. At the grassroots, the power and influence national workers hold are everywhere tangible (all the more so after the 1997 ceasefire, which enables national workers to change their jungle hide-outs for public lives), to the extent that few, if any, Nagaland politicians can dream of capturing a constituency without engaging them, either directly (with national workers influencing electoral outcomes) or indirectly (with national workers agreeing not to interfere); both these options, in Nagaland, are not the natural condition of democracy and elections but represent hard-worked and hard-bargained political accomplishments. Politicians cultivate relations with national workers allegedly ‘for their own [political] survival and selfish gain’ (Ao, 2013, p. 3). More often than not, these ‘deals’ consist of monetary donations and impunity in exchange for national workers’ support during elections, with the latter exerting ‘muscle power’ to secure particular voting patterns if they must (Dev, 2006). We find, for instance, a particular Naga faction intimidating a non-Naga candidate in the multi-ethnic town of Dimapur in favour of a Naga politician (Kuotsu & Walling, 2018, p. 116) or national workers ordering villagers to not vote for a particular party (Wouters, 2018b, p. 246). At other times, national workers seize the initiative and support of ‘inefficient candidates who often become their puppets and together they siphon off development funds’ (Ezung, 2012: 2). Not, however, always spurred by a politics of pure material interest, overground/underground interlinkages may also be formed by ideological congruity as several Naga politicians are known to harbour sympathy for the Naga struggle or for a particular Naga faction. Affective kinship ties and social bonds of clan, village and tribe too readily cut across any overground/underground divide, so making the Nagaland state, including its democracy process, and Naga insurgency function within a single social network. But regardless of what cements the relationship, all across Nagaland ‘the underground factor’ is an intricate part of ‘election talk’ and ‘reports of insurgent groups having influenced the outcome of electoral politics have dominated popular discourse in the state’ (Amer, 2014, p. 10). The concept of ‘symbiosis’—mutually beneficial political living—aptly captures the recent genealogy and (often murky) character of the democracy process in Nagaland (on the ‘underground factor’ in Nagaland more widely, see Bhaumik, 2009, p. 210; Dev, 2006; Misra, 1987; Ngaithe, 2014; Singh, 2004; Wouters, 2018b, p. 238–276). We now have a picture emerging of a democratic playing that is worked and reworked by both constitutional and ‘un’ or ‘extra’-constitutional forces that variously compete, conflict and connive. Added to this is the notorious Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), that pitch-dark piece of legislation which, following the declaration of an area as ‘disturbed’, by a stroke of the governor’s pen, drives a wedge between the law and justice by reducing selected people from right-bearing citizens into suspicious subjects (see Mamdani, 2008), even to bare life (Agamben, 2005). It assigns military and paramilitary forces with the lethal labour of shooting to kill, not just in an encounter or insurgency operation, but anywhere, anytime and anyone on the mere grounds of suspicion. Further add near absolutely legal impunity for the armed forces and we find ourselves in the dark underbelly of state power and violence. First promulgated in 1958, the AFSPA continues to blanket Nagaland in legal darkness. The AFSPA’s inner logic, Dolly Kikon (2009, p. 272) remarks, aptly, revolves around the categories of ‘disturbed area’ and ‘suspicious people’, categories that are deeply entangled, even mutually constitutive: ‘the area inhabited by suspicious persons will eventually become a disturbed area, and those inhabiting a THE DEBRIS OF DEMOCRACY IN NAGALAND disturbed area fall under suspicion’, thus fuelling a seemingly endless cycle of legal exceptionalism and state violence, but in which democratic institutions nevertheless exist and elections take place. While some see the politics of pain, torture and trauma the AFSPA produces and institutionalizes as an unfortunate yet ‘necessary force to avert the pain that “tortures the nation”‘, a pain caused by the antistate rebellions and ‘terror’ in the region (Ningthouja, 2016, p. 239), critics, of which there are many more, emphasize the law’s deeply undemocratic character. ‘Can democracy function in militarized societies?’, Dolly Kikon (2015, p. 2834) asks as she stresses the ‘extremely undemocratic and militarized conditions under which electoral systems are introduced [in Nagaland]’. Her answer is a resounding ‘no’, which she accompanies by a devastating critique of the Indian state’s inability to engage ethno-national movements and demands within a democratic framework. Besides ardent activism that seeks AFSPA’s removal, this law, or more accurately the suspension of the law, draws substantial and sophisticated scholarship that invites Derrida’s distinction between law and justice, Agamben’s state of exception, Benjamin’s notion of sovereign violence and Foucauldian insights into discussing the peculiar relation between law, democracy and violence the AFSPA creates in Nagaland and in other parts of Northeast India (Farrelley, 2009; Gaikwad, 2009; Kikon, 2009; McDuie-Ra, 2009). What the AFSPA compromises, this body of scholarship agrees, is the very existence of democracy—both in its institutions and spirit—in the region; what, after all, is democracy’s worth, they protest, when lawlessness is legitimized, civil society curtailed and the rule of law suspended and what is left of the popular, if simplistic, equation between the right to vote and freedom when elections ensue within a permanent state of exception in which the law is far removed from justice. 443 To trace and place how this muddled and volatile political morass—both in the symbiosis of electoral and insurgent politics, and in the law’s suspension—we need to account for the origins and evolution of the Naga uprising and the contested creation of Nagaland state in 1963. In the beginning, the fault lines were more clearly drawn. Seeing India as an invading and colonizing force, the NNC, which spearheads the Naga armed uprising from the 1950s onwards, resisted and rebelled Nagas’ enclosure into postcolonial India and in an act of political refusal boycotted India’s first general elections in 1952. Despite the NNC boycott, the Naga historian Horam (1998, 50) recalls: The government went ahead with the election arrangements and the entire election paraphernalia was made ready, electoral rolls were prepared, polling booths were set up, ballot boxes were made and Returning Officers were stationed. Nagas, on the other hand, were indifferent to the goings on and went about their daily work with studied calm and the whole election show proved to be a mockery as a result of an election that never was. The NNC similarly boycotted India’s second general elections in 1957. This time, however, the boycott was less definite. Three aspirant Naga politicians filed their nominations and were subsequently elected unopposed into the Assam assembly. Polling was limited, however. Violence now escalates and turns the Naga highlands into a swathe of death and despair. Despite being outnumbered many times over, the NNC’s Naga army fights Indian military and paramilitary forces to a standstill. India’s central government shifted gear and in 1963 enacted Nagaland state. In creating Nagaland state, the centre empowered an assemblage of the so-called ‘moderate’ or ‘liberal’ Nagas who organized themselves as the Naga People’s Convention and distanced themselves from the NNC-led Naga struggle. They became the first generation of Nagaland politicians within the Indian dispensation (Sema, 1986; Wouters, 2019). 444 HANDBOOK OF TRIBAL POLITICS IN INDIA In modern Naga political history, few events are as controversial and contested as the enactment of Nagaland state. It divides Nagas politically into two—the people of the new state and the people supporting Naga self-determination—although from the beginning, this boundary has many crossings (Wouters, 2018d).2 The NNC, on its part, rejected the new state’s legitimacy to govern: ‘They are traitors. Every one of them’, as A. Z. Phizo, the NNC president, condemned the Naga leaders who bring statehood. Contrary to expectations by the centre, the making of Nagaland state only intensifies Naga insurgency: ‘All those wishfully expecting the collapse of the Underground after the granting of statehood’, Horam (1988, p. 12) writes, ‘found themselves to be wrong… On the contrary there was an ever greater explosion of Naga nationalist sentiment.’ The first election was announced in 1964. The NNC staunchly opposed these and threatened both politicians and prospective voters. Consequently, elections were held under heavy security arrangements, as are all subsequent Nagaland elections. So dense is the militarization of polling booths that Sen (1974) dubs elections in Nagaland as ‘operation election.’ Divergent political positions on Nagaland state and elections reveal themselves not just between ‘overground’ and ‘underground’ Nagas, however. Political parties, too, articulate different perspectives. For the Nagaland Nationalist Organisation, the party that won the 1964 elections, the ‘achievement of Statehood was a triumph of the people’s will’ (cited in Jimomi, 2009, p. 49). Its later political adversary, the United Democratic Front (UDF) took a different view: ‘People of no other state in India have made sacrifices like the Naga, so much so that the state of Nagaland is not considered by the Nagas as a gift, but as a state created for a price dearly paid; a sacrifice of over ten thousands lives’ (cited in Nibedon, 1978, p. 282). The UDF won the 1974 state elections, but was soon dismissed by the centre which imposed presidential rule, accusing the UDF of ‘indirectly encouraging the secessionist activities of the Federal Government of Nagaland [the NNC’s political wing]’ (Horam, 1988, p. 149). As Naga insurgency continuous, complicates and increasingly turns into an inter-factional struggle over historical legitimacy, ideological differences and territorial (and tribal and taxation) domination within Naga lands (as opposed to an earlier collective struggle against the Indian state) (Wouters, 2018b), the dynamics between Nagaland politicians and national workers begin to change. No longer are national workers merely opposing ‘Indian elections.’ Per contra, they increasingly intervene in it. Murry (2007, 138) writes: ‘the political scenario in the state of Nagaland began to change rapidly after 1975 when some more dashing political parties having the support of the underground Nagas emerged and began to take more interest in party politics.’ Pivotal to this process is the fissuring of the Naga Movement into a myriad of factions and parallel governments—often identifying themselves with a confusing, near identical set of abbreviations: NSCN-IM, NSCN-K, NSCN-KK, NSCN-U, NSCN-R, NNC-NA, NNC-A, GPRN, FGN-A, FGN-NA and so on. What follows from this is an ever more 2 The making of Nagaland state divided the Nagas also in other ways as the boundaries of Nagaland were drawn to the exclusion of Naga communities in Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. Naga politicians, underground groups and civil society organizations have long insisted on the political integration of ancestral Naga territories within India. For instance, a resolution unanimously adopted by the Nagaland assembly in 1994 goes: ‘Whereas, by quirk of history, the Naga-inhabited areas have been disintegrated and scattered under different administrative units without the knowledge and consent of the Nagas … Whereas, the Nagas irrespective of territorial barriers have strong desire to come together under one administrative roof … the Assembly, therefore resolves to urge upon the Government of India and all concerned to help the Nagas achieves this desired goal (cited in Chasie, 2005, 61). THE DEBRIS OF DEMOCRACY IN NAGALAND AQ162 complicating political terrain with different parties, politicians and ruling governments cultivating different relations with different underground factions and national workers. To illustrate: during the 2003 state elections, NSCN-IM functionaries demanded Naga electors to ‘vote for the Democratic Alliance of Nagaland (DAN) and oust the Congress from power’. The NSCN insisted that voting the DAN into power would be ‘in the interest of peace and permanent settlement of the Naga problem’, unlike the S. C. Jamir led Congress Party, which is ‘subverting the negotiations’ (Bhaumik, 2009, p. 210). The Congress with S. C. Jamir as its chief minister, meanwhile, had the ‘backing of the other major faction of the NSCN-led by Khaplang’ (India Today, 1998). Thus, the post-statehood democratic arena in Nagaland became complicated by the remapping of Naga factionalism unto it. These overground/underground linkages are well known locally. Ask any Naga voter about the specific underground affiliations of a particular politician or party in his or her constituency and most will offer a detailed account. But even as the ‘underground factor’ becomes a sophisticated part of democracy and elections in Nagaland, it is simultaneously emphasized that Nagas need a political solution, more than they require recurrent elections. In 1998, a year into the ceasefire, this sentiment revealed itself in the popular slogan: ‘No election, but solution’, and a call for the deferment of Nagaland elections. The centre refused to heed and elections progressed regardless, even as all Nagaland parties, except for the Congress party, abstained from filing candidates. ‘We will ignore the state government’, a spokesperson of the Naga People’s Movement for Democracy stated, then continued: ‘We have never really recognised it [Nagaland government]. We are in the process of discussing a solution to the Naga problem with the Centre, and the chances are that if the talks succeed, the government will be dismissed anyway’ (cited in India Today, 445 1998). This sentiment of present-day Nagaland institutions possibly dissolving is widespread. A. Jamir (2002, p. 3) writes: ‘Nagaland state is viewed to be a temporary arrangement, pending a final political settlement’. Needless to say, this sentiment greatly complicates Nagas’ sense of belonging to Nagaland state, and the validity of the democratic process locally. In elections following the 1998 deferment call, similar boycotts were deliberated by Naga tribal and civil society bodies (Assam Tribune, 2013), but none of these came about in definite form, and in most constituencies a complex overground/underground connectivity remained a composite part of elections. ‘SATANIC’ ELECTIONS AND A CHRISTIAN CRITIQUE Can Naga society survive liberal democracy and elections? If this question sounds incongruous (the act of voting, after all, is branded as a liberating, transformative force and democratic institutions are supposedly nurturing individual freedoms), ask anyone in Nagaland about the democracy process, and about elections in particular, and their replies are usually suffused with frustration, anguish, even despair, and not just because of the ‘underground factor’ discussed in the previous section. This frustration with liberal democracy, in its contemporary sense, is expressed at two levels. First, there is the acute self-confession that Nagas—the elected and electors alike— have abused democratic institutions and elections, turning them into a free-for-all contest over power and influence spurred by greed and gluttony. Agonized over, here is the ubiquitous role of money, gifts and favours that are used to secure voters’ exclusive political loyalties; a flourishing, that is, of corruption and clientelism (and its cognates) (see Chasie, 2005; Ezung, 2012; Singh, 2004, p. 162; Tinyi & Nienu, 2018; Wouters, 2018a). The work 446 HANDBOOK OF TRIBAL POLITICS IN INDIA of Arild Ruud (2001) in West Bengal comes to mind here. Ruud tells us how villagers use terms such as ‘dirty’ (nungra), ‘disturbance’ (gandagol) and ‘poison’ (bish) to describe politics and politicians whose actions they evaluate as ‘something unsavoury that morally upright people would not touch’ (2001, p. 116). But it is not just politicians who prove to be crooked, unprincipled and untrustworthy, rural villagers perceive the game itself as dirty: ‘it was inherently so and sullying to those that participated in it’ (Ruud, 2001, p. 117). This experience that politics, in its contemporary democratic sense, is ‘dirty’ is also widespread in Nagaland. This moral evaluation, though, does not prevent many from enthusiastically participating in it. The second frustration is not primarily with the misuse of democratic institutions and principles but whirls around the particularistic moral logic and vision of the liberal democratic system itself. Naga elders, in particular, question the underlying ideas of equal voting rights, individual autonomy and party-based elections, which they see as undermining kinship hierarchies and moral values of consensus building they hold dear (Wouters, 2018c, 2015b). Both these frustrations are accompanied by a local rejoinder in the form of a Christian and culturalist critique, respectively. This section engages the first frustration and the envisaged ‘Christian healing’ of a now wounded electoral process. ‘Our villagers don’t know how to do elections’, a pastor in the Chakhesang Naga village where I carried out prolonged fieldwork and which I call Phugwumi told me. Elucidating his point, the pastor compared the election season to a time of ‘spiritual darkness’. ‘It is hard to explain’, he said, ‘but as soon as elections are announced, most villagers metamorphose into something else, almost magically, and forget all about Christ. In the election season only money speaks’.3 ‘I don’t have small change anymore’, a village shopkeeper had told me the previous day as I tried to break a 500-rupee note at his counter. ‘During election time everyone pays with big notes’, thus substantiating the pastor’s assertion. Were Nagaland elections computed, Misra (1987, p. 2193) analysed in the 1980s, they might well be the nation’s ‘costliest’. Pundits and commentators on Nagaland elections subscribe to this view and routinely accuse Nagaland politicians of abusing democracy into ‘an industry to earn through malpractice’ (Kiewhuo, 2002, p. 61). They equally berate Naga voters for transforming ‘campaign inducements [into] a sort of industry’ (Amer, 2014, p. 4), thus resulting in a politics of reciprocal deceit. ‘Issues are often subdued by money and the dispensation of favours by the candidate during election campaigns’, Amer (2014, p. 19) writes. She concludes: ‘The pervasiveness of these abuses have [sic] created widespread public scepticism about all electoral exercises’. That scepticism is indeed widespread may be deduced from a series of opinion polls the popular Nagaland daily The Morung Express conducts. Just 17 per cent of the respondents, for instance, think ‘yes’ to the question: ‘Do you think the Nagaland electorate is ready to vote for honest, sincere and visionary candidates in the 2018 elections?’. One respondent explained: ‘80 percent can be bought (money and jobs), 5 percent are just ignorant, 5 percent are apathetic, and only 10 percent are conscientious voters’ (Morung Express, 2017a). To the question: ‘Are you convinced by the Chief Minister’s statement that his government is keen on changing the system to check corruption’, 85 percent answer with a resounding ‘no.’ ‘Neither him nor any politician, ruling 3 In the colloquial Nagaland is habitually referred to as a ‘Christian state’ in view of the vast majority of its inhabitants professing the Christian faith. The arrival and spread of Christianity have been extensively documented and theorized (Joshi, 2012; Thomas, 2016). THE DEBRIS OF DEMOCRACY IN NAGALAND or opposition’, one respondent said. Another added: ‘Election round the corner, need more money to buy votes’ (Morung Express, 2017b). And to the question: ‘Do you agree the present legislators are so blinded by political power and vested interests that they have lost the moral authority to lead?’, as many as 92 per cent of the respondents said ‘yes’. One of them told: ‘They have fallen to the lowest pit. Lack of principles, no vision for better Nagaland, greed and thirst for their selfish needs have blinded them all beyond repair’ (Morung Express, 2017c). These are of course perceptions, not necessarily facts, but they do illustrate, with crystal clarity, the widespread disillusionment. ‘Take our church’, a village deacon weighs in the conversation I had with the Phugwumi pastor. ‘The closer to polling day the fewer villagers attend Sunday services. Deep down villagers know that they are engaging in selfish and immoral behaviour. They become afraid to show their face before God’. The deacon’s forecast is correct and as polling day draws closer, church attendance dwindles, and in the service immediately preceding election day, the congregation fits into the first few rows of an otherwise packed church. The exchange of money for votes and election-induced immoralities, or notions that politics is inherently ‘dirty’, are of course not exclusive to Nagaland. This is reported across the country (Hansen, 1998; Ruud, 2001). Where in India are the voters not paid, fed and clothed by aspirant politicians (Piliavsky, 2014), and where are election seasons not accompanied by heightened tension, volatility and sporadic violence? What is different in Nagaland is the existence of a vocal Christian critique against such practices, and the framing, as we will see, of elections as a spiritual issue. An experienced dissonance between Christian teachings and electoral practices is frequently invoked in Phugwumi (and across Nagaland), particularly by church and village elders who question the moral and spiritual 447 standards of particularly younger generations during election seasons. Well into his eighties, Athe (a Chokri classificatory term for grandfather) participated in all Nagaland’s post-statehood elections and, in his judgement, electoral politics has already moved beyond redemption: ‘even if Jesus Christ will descend from Heaven and contest an election in Nagaland, he will not be voted in’. Several other village elders describe elections as ‘Satan’s game’ because, they say, it seduces otherwise upright villagers into sins, falsehoods and immoralities. In a society where Christian teaching, rhetoric, and ritual structure and inundate social life, and where the figure of the devil is frequently invoked as a force of destruction, temptation and evil, this local reading of elections as Satanic in its societal effects demands careful attention. In Taussig’s (1980) classic treatise of the ‘devil pact’, we find plantation-labourers in Colombia bartering their soul in order to increase their productivity and wages. The money they so earn is, however, barren and cannot be used to buy land or to nourish one’s family, for that will bring the devil into one’s intimate orbit. It can, therefore, only be spent immediately and on luxury goods and indulgences. Taussig sees this ‘devil-pact’ as a parable for the transformation of a previous peasant economy based on ‘value’ to a capitalist economy based on ‘exchange value’, and the alienation that results from this. I postulate, suggestively so, that it is not too far a stretch to adapt certain features of Taussig’s ‘devil pact’ to capture how elections cause Naga villagers to become alienated from the village as a reciprocal community with shared concerns and ends, and the resultant local evaluation of election seasons as a period of spiritual eclipse. When village and church elders call elections satanic and devilish, and see them as shrouding the village in temporary darkness, they apprehend as Satan’s influence an experienced transition from an earlier non-state and ‘pre-liberal’ politics of consensus-making, 448 HANDBOOK OF TRIBAL POLITICS IN INDIA virtue and community reciprocity to a contemporary electoral politics based on exaggerated individualism, deceit and competitive self-advancement, which threatens the contours of community and Christian life. It is in this domain, of societal disintegration, that dark and devilish forces not just reveal themselves but are experienced as gaining the upper hand during election seasons, temporarily suspending the desired reign of Christ. And if Taussig’s plantation workers are afraid to spend their wages earned through the ‘devil pact’ on family sustenance, for Naga villagers the devil’s prerogative of individualism, greed and dishonesty become embodied, temporarily altering the quality of a person’s soul and moral substance, and in whose condition they fear to face the divine, as revealed by the deacon’s observation and explanation of dwindling church attendance during election seasons. That Nagaland elections have become a ‘spiritual issue’ is indeed the stance of the NBCC, which professes as its ‘prophetic moral duty’ to ‘fight the ugly face of the election’. It states: ‘It is the responsibility of [Christian] believers to work in building a democratic and ethnically acceptable process of election in Naga society’. In the wake of the 2013 state assembly elections, the NBCC launched a clean election campaign (as it had done during previous elections with varying degrees of success). The campaign began with the publication and distribution of a booklet titled: Engaging the Powers: Elections—a Spiritual Issue for Christians. It reads: For the NBCC, the buying and selling of votes, as well as proxy voting and booth capturing, are not just evidence of a perverse and dissolute democratic politics but, more significantly, constitute an abomination before God. The booklet decries: ‘In the past elections, we have seen that money has been placed at the top, and God at the bottom’. It then continues: We know that the Election Code of Conduct laid down by the Government of India itself is good enough to conduct a clean and fair election. More so, as [a] Christian dominated State, Nagaland could have shown to the world the conduct of election in a much better way based on Biblical principles. The Church has raised this issue during every election in the state but we have gone against God whom we worship. Should we continue to invite the wrath of God? While the NBBC voice is loud, their instructions often fall on deaf ears. The following is a description, more or less taken directly from my fieldnotes, about one such political camp enacted in Phugwumi in the wake of polling day, and which I visit several times. Candidates have used money to woe voters, while on the other hand, voters demand money from the candidates for their votes… Voters should also realise that demanding money for votes is wrong as God desires His people to choose the right leader without resorting to any unfair practices. To achieve clean elections, the NBBC framed a set of guidelines, which pastors and deacons across the state were instructed to impress upon their congregations. In Phugwumi’s church premises, a banner with the following text appears: Clean Election Campaign—Buying Votes, Selling Votes, Booth Capturing, Proxy Voting, Etc, are against the law and against moral and spiritual ethics. Dzieyha ze mu khrü cuha kephouma zo [selling and buying of votes is a sin]. Other NBBC instructions include: Establishment of Camps in colonies, town and villages encourages and often becomes a breeding ground of all kinds of malpractices such as, use of alcohol, drugs, gambling, sexual immoralities, violence, etc. It disturbs the already fragile social fabric of towns and villages, and further endangers the society and the future of the youth. Therefore, the practice of establishing camps should be stopped…. Every evening village youth congregate in the political camp that belongs to [name redacted]. They spend their time gambling and playing THE DEBRIS OF DEMOCRACY IN NAGALAND carom board. They play against money, while drinking beer or rum. Both the liquor and the money they receive from their politician, who also pays them for each evening/night they spend in his camp [as a show of his strength]. The youths call themselves the politician’s ‘back-up force’, just in case something untoward happens and muscle-power is needed. During election seasons bouts of violence are, after all, always a real possibility. Both gambling and liquor are prohibited by the village council (while Nagaland itself is a ‘dry state’), as well as condemned as sinful by the village church. ‘This is election time’, one village youth replies as I carefully inquire into their activities. ‘Usual rules don’t apply’. THE VOICE OF THE ELDERS AND CONSENSUS CANDIDATES Democratic theory of the normative kind has difficulty viewing cultural variations in democratic life worlds as possibly democratic, and something able to be theorized. Rather, modern democracy, especially its liberal variant, is projected as a larger good and a good everyone should treasure and defend. From this vantage, elements of culture that do not contribute to the ‘proper’ functioning of democratic institutions and elections are seen as defective and in need of remodelling. In its extreme version, this argument holds that ‘politics change a culture and save it from itself’ (Daniel Patrick Moynihan, cited in Huntington, 2000, p. xiv). This final section shows for the Naga how such perspectives are ahistorical and unresponsive to genuine differences in political sentience and morality. It does so by invoking the concept and praxis of village and clan consensus candidates, ubiquitous in places across Nagaland. Prior to elections, Along Longkumer writes, a ‘pre-arranged agreement’ is regularly concluded between ‘village elders and political parties to select the consensus-candidate to be supported by the entire village’ (cited in Amer, 2014, p. 10). At other times, it is not the village but the clan that 449 turns into the unit of voting (Wouters, 2014). Either way, individual and autonomous balloting is regularly substituted with consensus making and the selection of a particular candidate, to whom subsequently all votes are cast. But rather than an electoral malpractice, plain and simple, I argue that this practice can also be read as a Naga culturalist critique and adaptation of the liberal democratic framework. Before I proceed any further, I must stress that traditional Naga ‘village republics’ (Wouters, 2017) were diverse in their political systems and sentiments. Prevailing (colonial) descriptions about their form and functioning are one of nobles and commoners (FürerHaimendorf, 1973), bodies of elders (Mills, 1926), autocratic chiefs (Fürer-Haimendorf, 1939), the absence of chiefs (Hutton, 1921) and extreme egalitarianism (Woodthorpe, 1881). On the whole, they represent a continuum with hereditary autocracy, if not near dictatorship, and radical democracy at its opposite ends, with (a section of) the Konyak Naga usually associated with the former and the Angami and Chakhesang Nagas as the most obvious example of the latter. My engagement here pertains to Phugwumi village and the Chakhesang Naga and is, therefore, not necessarily equally applicable to all other Naga tribes. In Phugwumi, the traditional figuration of ‘the political’ was deeply immersed in an archive of social knowledge and beliefs. It functioned within a wider matrix of relatedness based on genealogical and affective networks of clan and territory, and presided over a moral economy that, in principle, guaranteed protection and subsistence to all villagers. Of course, it is easy to romanticize the past, especially as it recedes deeper into the chambers of history. This impulse should be guarded against. Conflicts between clans and villages were frequent and fierce, and episodes of gruesome headhunting are impossible to ignore in the reading and reconstruction of Naga political history. One another level, 450 HANDBOOK OF TRIBAL POLITICS IN INDIA however, Phugwumi, and most Naga villages, were intensely communal in nature. This community ideology was not based on the value of equality, however. It also had many drawers and compartments and does not allow for simple generalizations. Here, I focus on two of its structuring principles, namely differentiation in the sonority of individuals’ political voice and, what I will call, ‘community think’. In Phugwumi, the wisdom and virtue accumulated by the elderly and meritorious were acknowledged and highly valued, and the sonority of their political voice often muffled the viewpoints of the young, the ‘ordinary’ and, alas, women. In this type of power relations, villagers knew when to listen and to conform or to speak and to ‘command’ depending on their status in the kinship and social hierarchy, which of course changed throughout a person’s life. Ultimately, during the non-state epoch, Phugwumi was a sovereign order and the political form, positioning and strategies followed by the villagers were to secure protection and welfare for the village community. To this end, the Phugwumi villagers simply found no rationality in giving all villagers equal say in political affairs as there was ample evidence that some villagers were far more experienced and knowledgeable than others. But before I explain this further, first a few remarks about the marginalization of Naga women in the political domain—both past and present. Village political space was hyper-masculine in nature and disenfranchised women. Such disenfranchisement reproduced itself in the contemporary democratic domain and Nagaland now has a ‘patriarchal democracy’, including the dubious distinction of being the only state in India that never elected a woman into its assembly. One of the most common misconceptions about Naga (and tribal) society, Hausing (2017, p. 245) writes, is their ‘egalitarianism’. Hausing invokes the controversy, which erupted in 2017, over attempts by the Nagaland government to allocate 33 per cent reservation to women in urban local bodies, which is in compliance with the Indian Constitution. What followed was an upsurge of societal protest, led by Naga tribal and civil society bodies, each of them patriarchal in their form and functioning, and each of them insisting that women reservation goes against the grain of Naga traditional and cultural values. While Naga women have long been thought of as ‘emancipated’ compared to their ‘mainland’ counterparts, their exclusion in the political and public domain is now recognized as an urgent concern (on the marginalization of women in the political domain; Amer, 2013; Jamir, 2012; Khiamniungan, 2018; Kikon, 2002; Kuotsu & Walling, 2018). Besides female exclusion, homespun Naga political theory and praxis were also structured by kinship and social hierarchies, and on purpose. Wealth, derived from agriculture, communicated virtue and amplified the sonority of the rich man’s voice, provided, he turns himself into a feast giver and serviced the poor; a ritualized social institution known in anthropological annals as the Naga ‘feast of merit’ (zhotho müza in Chokri). Elsewhere, I argue how contemporary election feasts, invariably and lavishly hosted by Nagaland politicians in villages, are a (contested) remapping of this past moral economy (Wouters, 2015b). Brave warriors, too, were revered. ‘Headhunters’, Venusa Tinyi (2017, p. 126) says, ‘were highly respected and honoured by all… Among the Chakhesang, only a warrior had the privilege of standing on the monolith stone when it was being pulled in honour of the couple performing the Feast of Merit’. Akin to the wealthy and generous, the voices of successful and courageous warriors thus could rely on a respectful audience. But perhaps most importantly, it was the wisdom and acumen associated with ageing that demanded listening ears within the village. Horam (1988, p. 18) writes thus: ‘Age, among the Nagas, has both prestige and power because it is the older people who know and THE DEBRIS OF DEMOCRACY IN NAGALAND pass on to younger persons the ways of society to which they are expected to conform.’ While this never connoted the complete sinking of individual autonomy in collective conformity, traditional Naga politics relied on a generational asymmetry; an asymmetry which linked the prerogative of overseeing political affairs to clan and village elders. Their views, often wrapped in fine speeches and oratorical skills, were respected. Liberal democracy is averse to any such kinship and social hierarchies, and instead glorifies the values of equal say, individual rationality and autonomy. From the vantage of homespun Naga political theory and praxis, this is where the apprehension lies. ‘It is because nowadays the village is ruled by the youth’, Phugwumi elders often explain contemporary problems and predicaments in the village. ‘They lack maturity, foresight, and wisdom that comes with old age, and instead of thinking about what is best for the community they think about what is best for themselves. Phugwumi elders are often explicit about the exaggerated individualism and competitive self-advancement liberal democracy effectuates, and they blame it on its ‘naïve’ principles of individual balloting and equal voting rights. ‘Whereas in the past our youth would whisper, and were eager to listen and learn from elders’, Athe told me, ‘nowadays they shout and will not listen’. As opposed to village youth, whose naiveties and inexperience had to be kept in check, village elders were traditionally ascribed with the necessary acumen and wisdom, accumulated over a lifetime, to transcend both the mundane and their purely personal interests to deliberate the wider community good. In the cultural etiquette of the past, village youth, while never silenced, were expected to show deference by acknowledging, before speaking in public, the incomplete understanding and limited knowledge that came with being young and unmarried, the absence of fields and cattle in one’s possession and their overall still limited 451 experience of the perils and complications of life (Wouters, 2018c). Besides the flattening of kinship and social hierarchies, what is lamented, too, is the open contests and competition elections invariably bring, and which sow division within the community. ‘We never vote’, Phugwumi’s village council chairperson told me. ‘Voting would only lead to more politics, more competition, and more rivalries. And this would not benefit our village’. Phugwumi’s village council, which arbitrates on customary law, functions on the basis of deliberation and consensus making, even if this means council meetings often become lengthy affairs. In instances where consensus building proves impossible, the council declares an issue as unresolved or pending, which is preferred over forcing a decision through the divisive practice of voting (Wouters, 2015b, p. 141). As such, decisions made by the village council today, and in line with Naga political values and practices, represent ‘community think’, rather than through majority votes. In the vernacular lexicography of social and political life in Phugwumi, this principle is known as müthidzü or müthikülü, which translate as ‘the community’s voice’ or ‘the community’s thought’. In the context of the neighbouring Angami Naga, A. Z. Phizo (1951) refers to this principle as mechü medo zotuo, or ‘the binding will of the community’. This tradition of ‘community think’ is now threatened by the advance of liberal democracy, and its elevation of individual autonomy and choice. At the same time, however, Naga villagers are not the passive recipients of liberal democratic doctrines and dogmas. Per contra, they possess the agency, political imagination and cultural creativity to adapt democratic institutions and elections to their own political consciousness and uses. One way in which they adapt liberal democracy is through bypassing the principle of individual and equal vote through the method of selection consensus candidates. In the wake of the 2013 state election, the Phugwumi villagers 452 HANDBOOK OF TRIBAL POLITICS IN INDIA attempted to pre-select a village consensus candidate through public deliberation, and which would then see the substituting of individual voting for a collective village vote on polling day. Alas, the Phugwumi villagers failed to unite; a failure which, in the view of many, only proved that electoral politics has already moved beyond redemption (see Wouters, 2018c). Not a few other Naga villages, however, succeeded in selecting a consensus candidate after a social process of public deliberation presided over by clan and village elders. One village, for instance, declared in a local daily, in the run up to the 2013 election: ‘…in a general meeting… [the village] unanimously resolved to extend full support to the Independent Candidate for the forthcoming legislative assembly election’ (cited in Wouters, 2014, p. 61). ‘Unanimously’, here, does not imply the absence of opposing views, but is communicative of the value of ‘conformity’ and ‘community think’ that results from this. Undoubtedly, there is an instrumental angle to this practice, resembling, as it does, what elsewhere in the country is called ‘votebank politics’. However, this section shows that more than a straightforward assault on democratic values and principles, this social process through which village and clan elders convene, deliberate, build consensus and subsequently select a political candidate can also be interpreted as the reconstitution of a general asymmetry and ‘community think’ unto the new democratic domain. The practice of consensus candidates is increasingly a contentious issue within contemporary Naga society (the NBCC, among others, condemns it). What is clear is that liberal democracy locally leads to the diminishing sonority of the voice of the elderly and wise, and the substitution of ‘community think’ with individual autonomy. For Phugwumi elders, and many others in Nagaland, this is where the structural problem and immoralities of liberal democracy lie. CONCLUDING REMARKS The Christian and culturalist critique of the democracy process in Nagaland combined make not only a few Naga voices, particularly those of village and tribal elders (also several career politicians), but also now publicly advocate the abolishment of elections in Nagaland altogether, insisting that these are detrimental to Naga conceptions of ‘moral society’. Akio Tanabe (2007, p. 560) captures such a ‘moral society’ as a vernacular space ‘in which morally desirable human relationships rather than individual rights of political gains are at issue’. On the floor of the state assembly, a prominent Nagaland minister thus argues that the Indian election system be ‘reformed’ for Nagaland, since it undermines ‘the Naga way of life’ (cited in Ao, 1993, p. 211), which is protected by Article 371A of the Indian Constitution, specifically tailored for Nagaland state. Hokishe Sema (1986), a former chief minister, also suggests that elections be replaced by community consensus making and the selection of representatives at village, regional and state levels. The present chief minister, too, goes on record saying: ‘election is not suited for Nagas’ and that ‘selection of leader[s] would best suit Nagas’ (cited in Solo, 2011, p. 67). The Naga rebel vanguard, on their part, has long been critical of the ways in which the institutional machinations of India’s democracy process create and co-opt a Naga political class tied to Delhi. Their political refusal to participate in ‘Indian elections’, at least when the Naga armed uprising first began, was not only an act of resistance, however. It was also expressive of cultural incongruity and ideological difference and Naga underground leaders, old and new, have long mused about the implications of constitutional democracy on the Naga political and cultural traditions they wish to preserve and perpetuate in the future. ‘There is no political party in Nagaland. We don’t need it’, says A. Z. Phizo (1951). He THE DEBRIS OF DEMOCRACY IN NAGALAND continues: ‘Nagaland need not imitate or adopt foreign institutions in matters of political organisation’. In Phizo’s view, Nagaland was democratic by traditional design: ‘[it] is the very spirit of our country’. Instead, Phizo envisages a multi-tier selection system. ‘We don’t election leaders, we select them’, he elucidates, then explains: AQ163 The selection process goes on for several years beginning from the village level where people know each other thoroughly and only people with virtue of integrity and character are accepted to become leaders. Then on the basis of these observations the leaders of the various villages select the most competent person to be the leader. The same is followed through to the national level. Thus a national leader emerges after so many years. (cited in Mishra, 2004, p. 4) The later NSCN agrees in the rejection of party politics, and its manifesto laments: ‘The damage done to the healthy body politic and the upright characteristics of the Naga people as a whole, through the practice of Indian party system by the traitors [Nagaland overground politicians], is beyond easy description.’ In classic socialist vein, the NSCN advocates a party-less ‘dictatorship of the people… through a single political organisation and the active practice of democracy within the organisation’. This document reads further: ‘In a country like Nagaland, particularly at the present time, party system could never accomplish anything except leading to ruination’ (cited in Horam, 1988, pp. 321–322). That party politics has led to considerable ‘ruination’ locally is a conclusion even staunch opponents of the Naga Movement find difficult to deny. Concludes the Naga Reverend and intellectual V. K. 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