Audience in Chui Village during a public meeting, Nagaland. Photo: Dolly Kikon The Indo-Naga armed conflict is recognized as the longest insurgency in South Asia. It started as a movement for the right to self-determination in the Naga Hills during the transfer of power from the British colonial administration to the government of India around 1947. In 1997, the government of India and the Naga armed opposition groups signed a cease-fire agreement. The post 1997 ceasefire period came to be known as the era of peace process. However, during this period, violence against women escalated. When I was carrying out fieldwork on women’s testimonies of sexual violence in Nagaland two year ago, Naga women activists and advocacy groups emphasized that survivors of sexual violence must not ‘suffer quietly’. Yet, the social stigma attached to sexual violence was glaring. The tendency of blaming women for the violence they experienced contributed to the culture of impunity.
During my fieldwork, a woman in Dimapur observed, “The girls are not completely blameless. They are partly responsible for it. Men can smell the sexual signals that girls give out. They attract men and get raped.” I came across such comments regularly. I realised how children were socialised and taught about morality and chastity on the basis of such world views. The male and the female reproductive organs were described as calculators that performed the arithmetic and values of profit and loss. The logic went like this, “Once a man touches a woman (sexual intercourse), if he does not marry her, the girl’s life is destroyed”. Yet, the logic of moral chastity was detached from social realities like the structural violence and the militarisation of Naga society as a consequence of the Indo-Naga armed conflict since India’s independence in 1947.
