Imlisanen Jamir
The Nagaland State Disaster Management Authority has produced, in the space of a single press release, a small masterclass in answering every question except the one that was asked, and answering it so thoroughly that a reader could be forgiven for forgetting the original complaint altogether. The Diphupar Village Council wanted to know three things: who received the money, what had been built with it, and why the ground itself showed no sign of either.
The authority’s response addresses these by explaining, at some length and with evident satisfaction, that flood mitigation and river erosion control are conceptually distinct disciplines, a fact of genuine engineering interest and of no relevance whatsoever to a Gaonbura standing on unaltered ground.
The statement’s real news, that the works were executed departmentally and never awarded to any contractor, is also the single fact capable of resolving the dispute, and rather than resolving it, it deepens it. A contractor leaves behind a paper trail that exists outside the government’s own filing cabinets: a tender, a firm, a name that can be visited and confronted. Departmental execution removes that inconvenience entirely and replaces it with the department’s word about the department’s own work, checked by no one but the department, a closed loop dressed up in the release’s favourite word, transparency.
Then there is the matter of what the statement asks of everyone else. Journalists and the public are urged to verify facts before publishing, a fine sentiment issued by the one party holding every relevant document and declining to produce a single one of them, rather like a man under investigation for the vanishing petty cash insisting the auditors check their sums while the receipts stay locked in his own desk. The Gaonbura who reported nothing changed on the ground goes entirely unmentioned, which is its own kind of answer. And the riverbank erosion that has worried residents since at least 2017 is dispatched with genuine bureaucratic elegance, acknowledged as real, declared outside the scope of this particular scheme, and rerouted to a Post Disaster Needs Assessment proposal awaiting the Ministry of Home Affairs’ attention, an arrangement that allows the state to sound concerned about a problem it has just finished explaining is someone else’s to fix.
What the release never manages, in all its careful management of categories, is the one thing that would have ended the matter in an afternoon: a measurement book, a site photograph, an invitation to the Village Council to walk the disputed ground with a tape measure. None of this requires assuming the worst. Departmental engineers may well have built exactly what they say they built, and simply never thought to document it for an audience they did not expect to be asking. But an institution that describes itself as committed to accountability while offering only its own account, to a community that has already threatened to close a national highway rather than accept it, has confused the sound of reassurance with the substance of it, and seems mildly surprised that Diphupar noticed the difference.
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