Let the Past No Longer Haunt the Present

LET US BEGIN with an honest reckoning: history is not a battlefield to be weaponised, but a mirror that reflects both our glories and our grievous errors. When we twist it into a bludgeon, we fracture the very foundation upon which we seek to build our nation. For decades, history has been mishandled not as shared memory, but as contested ammunition: a tragic betrayal of its sacred purpose.

If Naga political groups are truly committed to reclaiming a unified future, then one of the most radical and necessary steps is to erase the toxic misuse of Naga history as a weapon of division. We stand at a civilizational crossroads, haunted houses of memory and hallowed ground for rebirth.

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Declare the endless cycle of blame null and void. Who betrayed whom. Who broke rank. Who signed which accord. Who splintered which group. Who aligned with the adversary. Who assassinated whom. Who was a traitor. Who is right and who was wrong. These blame games hang like cobwebs in an abandoned longhouse, choking the living with ghosts of dead conflicts.

This catechism of grievance has become the liturgy of a fractured people, repeated with such precision that even our children learn to name the accused traitors before they learn to name the acclaimed heroes. We have trapped ourselves in a courtroom of ghosts, forever replaying trials that yield no justice, only inherited shame.

These are not constructive debates. They are rituals of mutual damnation. They deepen wounds, entrench suspicion, and paralyze our movement. Most importantly, they have never advanced our cause by even a single step. They are obsolete and unfit for the path ahead. Beware, the Ashanti proverb warns: “The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people.”

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As long as we remain hostage to this ritual of blame, the future remains inaccessible. A people forever preoccupied with who lost the war cannot prepare to win the next battle. These debates have ossified into sacred taboos, protecting not truth, but tribal ego. And progress, like truth, suffocates in the presence of unquestioned dogma.

We must recognize these narratives for what they are: venom injected by our true adversaries. The seeds of division, the sparks of fratricidal conflict, and the manipulation of tribal insecurities were carefully cultivated by external powers who feared Naga unity.

Their oldest tactic, divide and rule, was executed through deception, infiltration, proxy violence, and psychological warfare. They used Naga hands to break Naga spirit. Our ancestors’ bones whisper from unquiet graves: “They severed our sinews with our own hands.”

Place the blame where it belongs. It was not our inherent failure, but a hostile design. Our tragic history is not evidence of tribal weakness alone, but proof of successful sabotage. Let us see clearly. The true enemy has always been the hand that pitied our divisions while thriving on them.

Yet, acknowledging external manipulation is merely the first step, not absolution. Does this shared understanding absolve the 26 or so factional leaderships, ensnared in their rhetorical trench warfare, from their complicity in perpetuating the fracture?

Does it free the Naga civil organizations, the senior citizens, the elders – voices meant to be sanctuaries of wisdom – from the responsibility of speaking uncomfortable truths to power? Where is the collective roar demanding an end to this ideological cannibalism that consumes our very future?

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Each faction clings to its shard of the broken mirror, claiming it reflects the whole truth, while the genuine image of Naga sovereignty lies shattered at their feet. How long will we allow these shards to cut the hands that seek to piece them together?

We are not living in the past. We live today, for the sake of tomorrow. Let this shared understanding of betrayal become our new rallying cry. Use history only to expose the architect of our fragmentation, never to fuel new conflict. If we must remember, let it be to resist together. For as Chief Seattle cautioned: “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”

Let us make history our compass, not our cage. We must lift its lessons like a torch to illuminate the path ahead, not brandish it like a blade to reopen wounds that must now be allowed to heal. This pivot demands more than tactics; it requires spiritual surgery on our collective soul.

This is the hour for strategic clarity. We must stand together, across all factions, across all wounds. Convert every grievance into fuel for collective purpose. Stop haemorrhaging energy on internal disputes, and redirect it toward the common struggle for dignity, self-determination, and sovereignty.

The soul of our people cannot afford another decade wasted on fratricidal politics. Every unresolved quarrel is a deferred betrayal of the unborn. We must abandon the politics of pride and rediscover the politics of purpose. A people who worship fragments will never see their God’s true face.

This demand for collective focus strikes at the heart of our prevailing apathy. Where is the visceral urgency in the Naga soul? Is this our ancestral legacy? Warriors who napped at the watchtower while wolves scaled the walls?

How many more generations must recite tales of struggle while living lives of quiet resignation – eating, sleeping, tending daily chores – as if our political reality is mere background noise? The mundane has become our morphine, numbing us to existential peril.

This pervasive numbness, this zero sense of responsibility, belongingness, seriousness, is a cancer eating at our cause from within. Are we not all stakeholders? The youth inheriting this mess, the mothers weeping for sons lost to fratricidal suspicion, the elders witnessing history repeat its most cruel chapters – each bears a stake and a share of the blame for tolerating the intolerable.

The weight of this numbness is not the absence of feeling, but the absence of fire. And without fire, no people can forge liberation. Sovereignty isn’t seized by a people asleep at the wheel of their own destiny. When will the alarm bell shatter our complacency? Complicity wears many faces: the leader’s cowardice, the elder’s silence, the youth’s distraction.

Resolve now. The Naga dream must no longer be chained to the bitterness of yesterday. We relinquish the poisoned inheritance of blame not out of forgetfulness, but out of responsibility. Insight must replace inertia. Unity must replace ego. Our pain must become purpose. Let anguish alchemize into armour. Let memory forge, not shackles, but swords.

The brother across the table is not the enemy. The true enemy is the hand that taught us to turn on each other. Only by rejecting this pattern completely can we reclaim the future that is rightfully ours. In this reckoning, we find redemption: the betrayer and betrayed bound by blood, not blades.

What we fail to reconcile today, we risk passing down as generational ruin. Let us not be remembered as the generation that knew what was broken, but refused to mend it. History’s most stern judgment awaits those who saw the cliff and marched blindly onward.

The path to mending demands more than passive hope; it demands active, uncomfortable participation from every stratum. Can the elders truly be elders if they whisper caution only in private chambers, not roar for unity in the public square? Grey hairs crown the head, but only courage crowns the elder.

Can mothers and women, the bedrock of Naga society, mobilize their profound moral authority to shame the factions into silence and demand reconciliation at any cost? When mothers withdraw their consent, empires of arrogance crumble.

Will the youth, brimming with potential yet often sidelined or manipulated, rise not as foot soldiers for old divisions, but as architects of a new, unified consciousness? Let them build bridges from the rubble of our watchtowers.

And crucially, will the factional leaders find within themselves the radical humility to step beyond their fortified ideological compounds? Can they look beyond the next rhetorical skirmish and see the generational ruin their intransigence guarantees? True chieftains know: a title carved from unity outshines a throne built on bones.

Leadership is measured not by the fierceness of one’s grip on power within a faction, but by the courage to relinquish it for the sake of the whole. The question echoes: Are they captives of the past, or custodians of the future? In the words of Kenyatta: “Our children may learn about heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves architects of the future.”

This is not merely a political imperative. It is a moral one. The reclaiming of dignity begins not with treaties signed elsewhere, but with honesty forged in one’s homeland. We must confront the mirror: our greatest adversary may yet be the reflection staring back – our tolerance for division, our acceptance of lethargy, our normalization of the absurd.

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The Gospel of Mark 3:25 (King James Version) says: “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” Yet we have built not just divisions, but entire fortresses – walls of hatred and distrust – within our own house. What began as cracks of disagreement have hardened into barriers of estrangement. And so, to reclaim sovereignty, we must first reclaim our collective will, our shared responsibility, and our burning urgency. Only by dismantling these internal strongholds can we rise as one people, bound not by tribe or faction, but by a common purpose.

The hour demands we ask ourselves: What future are we crafting with our silence, our inaction, our fractured loyalties? What will our grandchildren inherit, a sovereign legacy, or the ashes of our unresolved past? The answer is written daily in our choices. Every dawn writes its verdict: architects or undertakers of destiny.

Let us rise from the ruins of our estrangement and build a reconciled home. Not because it is easy, but because it is sacred for every child yet to be born, for every elder who still believes, and for the dream that has refused to die.

This Naga generation and future generations do not deserve to inherit the legacy of yesterday’s disagreements. They deserve a horizon unclouded by inherited blame, and a homeland healed of its old fractures.

May history no longer haunt us, but harden our resolve to stand as one.

The author is an advocate of peace and unity, and can be reached at ‘[email protected]’

(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ukhrul Times. Ukhrul Times values and encourages diverse perspectives.)