Limhachan Kikon
Dimapur
Some things get buried in the glare of confidence and certainty. Political power creates its own atmosphere—the feeling that things will remain as they are. But certainty has limits. Sooner or later, politics is judged not by how confidently power presents itself, but by what reality makes of it.
The recent Gen Z victory at Jantar Mantar is worth noticing without treating it as the end of anything. The Modi–Shah combination should not be underestimated, but neither should a political setback be brushed aside. Political fortunes rise and fall. Political experiments have limits. Systems absorb what they can, and eventually deal with what they cannot. The denouement may not yet be in sight. But reality has a way of asserting itself.
Perhaps the more useful question is what happens when we turn that same attention on ourselves. If we can look seriously at an event unfolding in the present and ask what it says about power, can we look back at an incident from our own recent history with the same honesty? What did we see? What did we not see? What were we willing to hold, and what did we push away?
Oting gives us a point of entry.
In December 2021, thirteen Konyak civilians were killed in the security operation and subsequent violence. Three months later, S. Phangnon Konyak, an Oting resident and BJP leader, was elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha. A profound wound existed alongside an act of political recognition.
The wound occurred. The elevation happened.
But they are not morally equivalent. Political recognition does not cleanse an injury. Political elevation cannot become a substitute for justice. Justice for the wrongs at Oting should not be brushed aside, and power must not be allowed to make the powerful appear excused.
The point is not to settle that episode here. It is to notice what happens when reality does not fit neatly into the moral categories we have learned to inhabit. One thing can be true without making another thing untrue. We can hold the wound firmly and still look at everything else.
When we allow ourselves to see more than one thing at once, we have to sit with the contradiction and the discomfiture. Reality does not always give us the comfort of a neat story.
In a society marked by prolonged conflict, not everything that enters our consciousness is consciously chosen. Traumatic memories can remain active beneath ordinary life. Grievances can be inherited. Moral certainty can make a cause feel untouchable. Fear of betrayal can make questioning feel like disloyalty. Some things may be repressed without our knowing it; others consciously pushed aside because they are too costly to face. Over time, these become mixed with identity.
We inherit; we do not choose.
We inherit histories, wounds, loyalties, silences, unfinished struggles, dignity and contradictions. Something once necessary for survival can become something we simply keep repeating. But inheritance is not destiny. What we inherit is given; what we carry forward is a choice.
Again, innocence can become an adaptation to grievance. When a people genuinely suffered, there is a natural desire for moral clarity: we were wronged, therefore our innocence must be protected; we suffered, therefore our cause must remain righteous. But suffering has limits. It can explain where we came from; it cannot have permanent authority over where we go.
Beyond a point, suffering can acquire a mythology of its own—a source of identity, moral standing, even a claim on the future because our ancestors suffered.
Innocence can become a burden.
Our history did not begin with the modern political conflict in the last century. Our pre-Christian societies were neither peaceful utopias nor societies defined only by violence. It is beyond controversy that there was warfare, raiding, feuding and headhunting, alongside courage, hospitality, reciprocity, communal responsibility and solidarity. To acknowledge the whole is not to condemn our ancestors or accept a colonial caricature. It is to allow them to be human.
Oting remains a profound wound in Konyak and wider Naga memory. The suffering must be remembered. Justice must be pursued. But justice should not have to carry the burden of proving our innocence either.
One layer of our history cannot become the whole of our consciousness. We have to hold Oting alongside everything else we have inherited—the good, the bad and the ugly. Not because the wrongs become less wrong, but because one truth does not require another truth to disappear.
These truths do not cancel one another. They enlarge the truth.
This is where curated narratives become burdensome. Once innocence, righteousness, loyalty or betrayal become the categories through which everything is read, consciousness contracts. Some things are elevated, others pushed down. Some memories are permitted to exist; others become too dangerous to hold.
No cherry-picking. No calendars.
The good, the bad and the ugly belong to the same inheritance. Courage existed alongside violence; hospitality alongside raiding; solidarity alongside conflict; dignity alongside fear. Our suffering is real. So are our contradictions. Not everything needs to be approved. Everything needs to be allowed to be known.
Oversimplification is tempting because moral binaries are easy: innocent or guilty, victim or aggressor, loyal or traitor, righteous or compromised. Once identity is organised around such binaries, self-examination can feel like betrayal.
Can we look at ourselves without needing to become innocent first?
There is something similar in how we see people. Reductionism is a mindset in motion. It takes one part of a person and turns it into the whole. A behaviour becomes a character. A mistake becomes a reputation. A difficult opinion becomes an identity. Labelling rarely comes alone; it brings its own abuses.
People are more than what they have said or done. I don't have to agree with what someone does, or even how they think, to recognise that they are more than those things. What they did is part of them; it is never all of them. We can judge an act without pretending our judgement tells us everything about the person.
The same applies to our history. If we reduce ourselves to what was done to us, suffering becomes identity. If we reduce our history to its noblest moments, innocence becomes identity. In each case, one part is made to stand for the whole.
That is too heavy a burden for any one virtue to carry.
Perhaps the real work is to become large enough to inhabit our inheritance without being imprisoned by any one part of it.
Self-examination is part of political and cultural maturity. The political struggle has its history. The talks have happened. Frameworks have been agreed. The agreed position is spelled out. Whatever remains to be negotiated or implemented, we still have a present to build. We have to decide what that history asks of us now.
Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is a time for everything—a time to mourn and a time to heal, a time to keep and a time to let go, a time for war and a time for peace.
What time is it now?
The point is not to lower our expectations of ourselves or of our people. It is to free ambition and aspiration from inherited grievance. We can remember our political claims and still want better schools, better roads, productive farms, businesses that grow, young people who can leave and return because they have real choices, families not permanently organised around struggle. We do not have to choose between dignity and development, memory and ambition, political consciousness and ordinary happiness.
When we remain psychologically stuck in time, determinism and fatalism become easy. What happened begins to feel like what must happen. What shaped us begins to look like what defines us.
The past becomes not merely an explanation, but a verdict.
Waiting can become an identity of its own. So can grievance. So can righteousness.
Agency begins when we distinguish between what happened, what it made of us, and what we choose to make of it now.
“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2).
Renewal is not betrayal.
We cannot live on crumbs of consciousness. We have to aspire to live from the whole of what we have inherited—the good, the bad and the ugly, the wound and the joy, the anger, the dignity and the contradiction.
The yearning, finally, is for the ordinary.
Not an escape from history. Not forgetfulness. Not surrender. And certainly not an abandonment of justice. The ordinary needs the grounding of a fully inhabited consciousness.
To love. To work. To build. To make a family. To laugh, fail, succeed, grow old, enjoy a morning. To feel alive without wondering whether ordinary happiness diminishes the suffering that came before us.
That is not retreat from history. It is what becomes possible when history no longer has to occupy the whole of our lives.
Consciousness is the means. The yearning is for the ordinary. The task is to live according to what we have come to know.
We do not need to become innocent. We need to become conscious enough to inhabit the whole of what we have inherited, and free enough to live an ordinary life without guilt.
That is not defeatism. It is liberation without amnesia.
