In the early 1990s, women in Nagaland began what was to become one of their most important campaigns — against HIV/AIDS, the widespread prevalence of which was destroying Naga society. When no one would touch HIV-positive people, the Naga mothers, as they were called, met them, provided medicines, ate with them, held their hands, helped with medical aid and more.

Alongside they began another campaign aimed at one of Nagaland’s most intractable problems — the ongoing, seemingly endless conflict. Their campaign, entitled ‘Shed No More Blood’, was visible all over Nagaland and Manipur. Mothers would often march miles to go deep into the jungles and speak to militant factions about peace, they would pick up bodies, give them decent burials, speak about the enormous waste of young lives, and more.

In 2010, it was the Naga mothers who intervened, under the auspices of the Naga Mothers Association, in what could have become an extremely difficult situation. Two young Naga men were killed near Mao at the Manipur border. The families refused to accept the bodies and for eight long days, the corpses remained unattended. Then came the Naga mothers — they collected the decomposed bodies, gave them shrouds, and arranged for burials, thereby bringing closure.

After the ceasefire came into operation in 1997, it was the mothers who helped to work towards peace, often crossing borders to speak to leaders. Indeed it would not be wrong to say that there would have been no ceasefire, no peace, however tentative, had it not been for the women of Nagaland.

That is why it is so surprising that Naga men are now so reluctant, indeed so opposed, to the entry of women into decision-making urban bodies in Nagaland.

If your fellow citizens have taken the initiative and found ways of addressing some of your most difficult problems, how can you make the argument that they are not capable of dealing with power?

Of course things are not always what they seem and this issue is complicated by many things. Nagas have long been engaged in a conflict with the Indian Union — a conflict that pits what the Nagas see as an autocratic State against a beleaguered community. The State, with all its might, is attempting, in Naga perception, to impose modes of governance on Nagas that are ‘foreign’ to their culture, that are, to use a word Naga men often use, not ‘organic’.

This is why it becomes important to assert community identity, to hold on to something that allows for a sense of self, and this involves both men and women. If men are caught in this web of identity, so are the women. The community, tradition, identity, all of these are equally important for them.

But Naga women are also courageous, and it is this courage that has led them to demand their democratic rights, to fight against their men and to question why they are denying the women access to legitimate power and why the Indian Union was so willing to barter away the rights of women in the interest of protecting communitarian vote banks.

It’s the women who have asked difficult questions of their own community. Why is it that Naga men, the elite, have been all too willing to sell away even commonly held land to corporate interests? Where did the Naga tradition of living in harmony with nature go when men were selling their forests, their rivers, their hillsides?

This cannot have been easy for them. ‘Tradition’ holds a place in the heart of many Naga people, their particular ways of living, where stories are woven into the very fabric of their lives. And for women to have raised questions from within, for the Naga Mothers Association to have gone to court to secure women’s democratic right to stand for elections, is truly an act of courage.

It’s also one for which they have had to pay a price. Shocked that ‘their’ women can do this, Naga men have resorted to calling them ‘outsiders’, i.e. those who live ‘outside’ of Nagaland, and whose minds have been ‘polluted’ by white men.

White men is another word for Christian missionaries, who have in a way retrospectively become evil. This despite the fact that Christianity in Nagaland is deeply interwoven with animism and local beliefs.

The women are also accused of being elite (although it does not seem to matter that many of the men who make up Naga tribal bodies like the Hoho are also elite), and worse, of being feminists, clearly a term of abuse.

Yet, how can women, who understand the meaning of peace, and who worked hard to build it, despite the fact that they are denied virtually every right, be dismissed as elite or incapable of learning to deal with power?

At the heart of this battle lies another question: what would happen if Naga men let go of tradition? Surely the world will not fall apart, so why not be like the women, take your courage in your hands, and try it out?

Urvashi Butalia is an editor, publisher and director of Zubaan

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