In most Southasian cultures, the act of renunciation marks an individual's transition from being ordinary to being inspirational. In times of political crisis, the individual who renounces power and wealth stands out as the other possible paradigm that exists for a moral and political community. Khodao Yanthan, the vice-president of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN), who died on 1 March in his native village of Lakhuti in Nagaland, can lay claim to greatness. As the news of his death spread from the Naga hills to the world outside, one could almost see the scramble for details about his life among young reporters ordered to 'do a short piece' on the man.
They would be well advised to read a moving portrait that, coincidentally, appeared recently in Nagaland newspapers. The piece, written by the anthropologist and author Abraham Lotha, traces the contours of Yanthan's life, first as a young student with a babysitting job in Wokha; to a quartermaster in the Naga Labour Corps for the Allied Forces in the 1940s; to assisting the legendary Naga leader A Z Phizo in his 1950s plebiscite; to exile and hardship in London from 1960s to 1990s; and to his return to the Naga Hills following the April 2001 ceasefire between the Indian government and the NSCN. Lotha's article can also speak to a new generation of readers who are cynical about politics – about a time not so long ago, when people believed in a better world for their people and were willing to sacrifice all they had for it.
Beyond Lotha's piece, it seems odd that the Southasian media, especially in India, has largely not picked up on Khodao Yanthan's life and contribution. Perhaps this has to do with his reticence about political grandstanding, or the fact that the media has little time to dig out stories about big people who live in small places. Either way, Yanthan's renunciation of power, accrued from political compromises, is an apt reminder about the crossroads that his people and their neighbours find themselves at today. During the last years of his life, he is said to have lived with his cats and close kin, sometimes displaying ill-tempered disdain for nosy reporters and upstarts. Why would someone like him want to live out the last days of a full and eventful political life with just his cats? On second thought, why not?
The people who live in the hills that Yanthan loved so dearly, along with their friends in the valleys below, are today faced with stark, unenviable choices. More than five decades of militarisation have left a brutal mark on the people and landscape of Northeast India. Every community looks across its shoulder surreptitiously to see whether the other is conspiring to steal away its share of wealth. This seems almost farcical in a land whose wealth-producing capacities have been bartered out to the highest bidder. Yet the machines of progress and development roll on without any hindrance. They roll over green paddy fields and cut through verdant hills, bringing in their wake a litany of woes – bickering villages, petulant politicians, heartbroken idealists and resentful citizens. But all this is merely a murmur of what has happened in the last 60 years, where dreams of poetic justice have been subsumed by the crassness of political reality. This story will resonate with Nagas, Assamese, Manipuris and every community that lives in the valley and hills enclosed within the political map of the Northeast: resentment, rebellion, capitulation and compromise, all four aligned in a vicious cycle. Khodao Yanthan wanted to break this cycle, and lay the stones for a more just future based on dialogue among equals.