New Delhi, Aug 20 | EKHON: The death of Niketu Iralu marks not merely the passing of an individual but the closure of a particular moral and intellectual epoch in Naga public life. His passing therefore invites neither uncomplicated hagiography nor ritual mourning. It demands something considerably more difficult, an interrogation of what his generation represented, what it failed to resolve, and what remains intellectually and politically unfinished.
The title A Passing Era and the Questions That Remain should be read neither as an obituary nor as an indictment of Iralu. It is a proposition about political temporality. Iralu belonged to a historical generation shaped by the memory of colonialism, the violence of Indian state formation, Naga nationalism, Christian ethics, armed conflict, factionalism and the search for reconciliation. That historical conjuncture produced a distinctive kind of public intellectual: morally authoritative, historically conscious, spiritually grounded and suspicious of both state power and the destructive absolutism of insurgent politics. His generation is passing. However, the contradictions it inherited have not.
Iralu’s significance lies precisely here. He was not principally a theorist of sovereignty in the conventional academic sense. Nor was he merely a chronicler of Naga political history. His intellectual intervention operated in the interstitial space between history and ethics, memory and reconciliation, nationalism and peace. His politics was fundamentally a politics of conscience. He repeatedly attempted to transform the Naga political question from an exclusive contest over territory and sovereignty into a broader question of how a wounded society might recover its moral capacity to live with itself. This was both his strength and his limitation.
Iralu’s public interventions were deeply influenced by the conviction that political conflicts cannot ultimately be resolved through institutional arrangements alone. The wounds of Naga society required moral and social reconstruction. His work in reconciliation, including his involvement in attempts to address intra-Naga violence and his later establishment of the “Listening House,” reflected this conviction. Accounts of his reconciliation work describe his efforts to heal divisions within Khonoma and subsequently to facilitate dialogue among antagonistic constituencies.
This is perhaps the most enduring element of Iralu’s legacy, the displacement of the question from Who is right? to What has happened to us?
That apparently modest shift is intellectually radical. Nationalist politics tends to organise historical memory around victimhood, sacrifice and legitimacy. Iralu instead attempted to introduce the category of responsibility into Naga political discourse. The question was not simply what India had done to the Nagas, but what Nagas had done to one another. Not merely what the state had destroyed, but what internal factionalism, violence, greed and political absolutism had destroyed.
Yet this moral turn also carries an unresolved problem. When a profoundly political conflict is translated into an ethical vocabulary of forgiveness, reconciliation and individual responsibility, there is a danger of depoliticisation. Structural questions can become personalised. Historical injustice can be reduced to interpersonal wounds. Colonial and postcolonial relations of power may disappear behind the language of healing.
The Naga crisis, however, is not simply a crisis of broken relationships. It is also a crisis of political structure, sovereignty, territoriality, constitutionalism and competing historical claims. Iralu’s great question was therefore simultaneously his unresolved problem: Can a society heal without resolving the political conditions that produced its wounds?
Iralu’s political imagination was formed within the historical universe of Naga nationalism. Iralu’s trajectory was not a simple continuation of nationalist maximalism. Instead, it represented a movement from sovereignty toward reconciliation. This transition is crucial for understanding his intellectual significance. The earlier Naga political imagination was structured around the grammar of nationhood: peoplehood, territory, sovereignty and historical rights. Iralu increasingly introduced another grammar: healing, listening, humility, responsibility and coexistence. The political subject was thereby transformed. The Naga was no longer only the claimant of a national right but also the bearer of an ethical responsibility toward other Nagas and neighbouring peoples.
That transformation deserves serious recognition. Yet it also raises a difficult question: Did reconciliation become a substitute for political resolution? The Indo-Naga peace process illustrates the dilemma. The 1997 ceasefire inaugurated an extraordinary period of negotiation, but decades of dialogue have not produced a final settlement. Iralu himself expressed hope that the negotiations would eventually produce an honourable settlement, while simultaneously insisting that Naga society would have to heal its accumulated wounds.
There is an uncomfortable paradox here. Reconciliation flourished precisely because political settlement remained elusive. Peacebuilding became a permanent condition rather than a transitional phase. The danger is that protracted negotiation can produce what might be called institutionalised liminality: a political society becomes permanently suspended between war and peace, sovereignty and accommodation, historical aspiration and constitutional reality. Iralu’s generation learned how to inhabit this liminality. The younger generation may increasingly ask why it should inherit it.
Iralu’s authority derived substantially from his status as an elder. He represented a form of public legitimacy that was neither electoral nor bureaucratic. It was accumulated through experience, suffering, personal integrity and proximity to the history of the Naga struggle. Such authority can be extraordinarily valuable in a fragmented society. But it can also become epistemologically conservative.
The danger of the “elder” as a political category is that experience can acquire an almost monopolistic claim to truth. Younger generations may be expected to inherit the moral vocabulary of their predecessors even when their material circumstances have changed radically. This is where the phrase “his time has passed” becomes analytically important.
It does not mean that Iralu’s ideas have become irrelevant. It means that the historical subject for whom those ideas were formulated is disappearing. The Naga youth of the twenty-first century is not politically constituted in the same way as the generation that directly experienced the armed struggle. Its relationship to India is mediated by universities, digital networks, migration, employment, constitutional institutions, global indigenous politics and an increasingly complex political economy. The old binary of “Naga versus India” is consequently inadequate for explaining contemporary Naga political consciousness.
The new question is not simply whether Nagas belong to India. It is how Naga identity, territoriality, indigeneity and political autonomy can be negotiated within a dramatically transformed geopolitical and economic environment. This is the point at which Iralu’s questions become more valuable than his answers.
Iralu’s historical consciousness was one of his defining characteristics. His insistence upon remembering Naga political history was an antidote to historical amnesia. But memory is never politically innocent. Memory selects, organises and legitimises. It can preserve dignity, but it can also reproduce grievance. It can resist domination, but it can also fossilise identities.
The contemporary Naga challenge therefore requires moving from memory as inheritance to memory as critical interrogation. This is perhaps where Iralu’s legacy needs to be radicalised rather than merely preserved. His insistence on listening should be extended beyond listening to political factions. It should become an epistemology of listening to marginalised experiences within Naga society itself.
Iralu’s political thought ultimately returns us to agency. Who has the authority to speak for the Nagas? This question has become increasingly complicated. The Naga political landscape contains armed organisations, elected governments, tribal bodies, civil society organisations, churches, intellectuals, women’s organisations, student organisations and an increasingly assertive younger generation. No single institution can plausibly claim uncontested representational authority.
This fragmentation is not merely institutional. It reflects competing conceptions of the Naga political subject. The Naga question has therefore moved from a struggle over external sovereignty toward an increasingly complex struggle over internal representation. Who defines the Naga interest? Who decides what constitutes an acceptable settlement? Who determines the meaning of sovereignty? Who speaks for Naga-inhabited territories outside Nagaland?
And perhaps most importantly: Can political legitimacy be inherited, or must every generation renegotiate it? Iralu’s generation often operated through moral authority accumulated over historical experience. The emerging generation is more likely to demand procedural legitimacy, transparency, accountability and institutional participation. That transition may be uncomfortable, but it is inevitable.
Iralu’s death therefore should not become an occasion for turning him into an untouchable icon. Canonisation can be another form of forgetting. To preserve his legacy by removing it from critical examination would be precisely to betray the questioning spirit that characterised much of his public life.
His most important legacy may not be any particular political position. It may be the insistence that political struggle without moral self-examination becomes destructive; that reconciliation requires courage; that historical memory carries responsibility; and that peace is not merely the absence of armed violence.
Yet the contemporary Naga condition demands questions beyond the framework available to Iralu’s generation. Can reconciliation coexist with unresolved sovereignty? Can historical rights be translated into contemporary political institutions? Can Naga nationalism become democratic without becoming majoritarian? Can territorial aspiration coexist with the rights and anxieties of neighbouring peoples?
Can Naga society move beyond factional nationalism without surrendering its historical political claims? Can a new generation inherit the memory of struggle without becoming imprisoned by it? And can the Naga political imagination move from the language of settlement to the language of political transformation? These questions are more urgent now than ever.
Iralu’s time has indeed passed, not because his ideas have become obsolete, but because history has moved beyond the conditions that gave rise to his particular mode of intervention. His generation carried the burden of memory. The next generation must carry the burden of institutional imagination.
The temptation will be to remember Niketu Iralu as a saint of peace, an elder of reconciliation, or a moral voice of a troubled people. Such remembrance is understandable. But it is insufficient. It is whether subsequent generations discover that his questions were larger than his time. Uncle Iralu’s time has passed. His questions have not.
