“Were I to claim that I am not a Naga, what will be the criteria to decide my identity?” I once asked this question to a fellow Naga friend who was then working on Naga nationalism for her university degree.

Her immediate reaction was “How can you say that you are not a Naga?” She was politically right in her retort though my hypothetical question was not dismissed there and then. It did pick up some discussion, but only to put us and also our audience into a very unsettling and disturbing situation. I was grappling with the issue of my Naga Identity then. Not that I doubted my Naga identity but that I was struggling to find some grounds on the basis of which various Naga tribal groups have come together to assert our unique identity and our rights to freedom of self-determination. Read the rest of this entry »