How a Naga woman became BJP’s ‘Rani Ma’ in Manipur

Nungkao is just like any other nondescript back-of-the-beyond village in Tamenglong—one of the most backward districts in Manipur.

In another few months when monsoon sets in, pounding rains will make the mountainous village almost inaccessible as it does not even have proper roads.

The villagers of Nungkao, like most villages in Tamenglong that lack proper roads, have gotten used to trudging through the treacherous, slushy terrain.

The Indian Council for Social Science Research in a recent survey of some villages in the district found that absence of all-weather motorable roads has taken its toll on education and healthcare. As per the 2011 Census, Nungkao has a literacy rate of only 39.6 per cent. The female literacy rate is 14.5 per cent.

However, Nungkao, despite all its backwardness, is no ordinary village—particularly for the proponent of Hindutva cult. For, this is the birthplace of Gaidinliu or ‘Rani’ Gaidinliu as India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru used to address her as.

“Any nation or country would be proud to have such a gifted woman who sacrificed everything for her people and for the cause she believed was good and true. She became a living legend in her own lifetime,” reads an article published last month in the web edition of the Organiser, an affiliated publication of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

However, Gaidinliu–who challenged the mighty British rule and also led a religious movement to espouse Heraka, an indigenous Naga faith, to resist the spread of Christianity among her people–was many things to many people.

For Nehru, she was a freedom fighter and Indian nationalist who even fought against the Naga insurgency spearheaded by AZ Phizo’s Naga National Council after India’s independence.

In 1937, Nehru met her in Shillong jail where she was incarcerated by the British and promised to pursue her release. He ordered her release immediately after becoming the prime minister.

The Congress leaders saw an extension of Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement in Gaidinliu’s call to her tribe not to pay house taxes and render porter services to the British.

Besides Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and PV Narasimha Rao maintained close contacts with her. The Congress governments conferred upon her the ‘Tamrapatra Freedom Fighter Award’ in 1972 and the Padma Bhushan in 1982.

For them the tribal leader, who always dressed impeccably in her traditional attires, and her indigenous Heraka religious movement represented the idea of India in its splendid diversity. Naturally, she was held as a poster girl of Indian nationalism when Naga insurgency was at its peak.

She even waged an armed movement against Phizo’s NNC and went underground in 1960. In Nagaland’s Peren district, one can still find gravestones of NNC members killed while fighting Gaidinliu’s army, popularly called the Rani Party.

The Government of India, in 1966, persuaded her to come out of her hideout to work for her people through peaceful, democratic and nonviolent means.

After coming overground, her activities remained confined among her handful of Heraka followers among Zeme, Liangmai and Rongmei Naga tribes, collectively called Zeliangrong, spread across pockets of Nagaland, Manipur and Assam.

Nagas, particularly those sympathetic to Naga insurgents, viewed her suspiciously. They called her an anti-Naga, black magician and even a puppet of the Sangh Parivar.

Many Naga civil society organisations protested construction of a museum-cum-library at Kohima in her memory in 2015, the year of her birth centenary.

The same year, at her birth centenary celebration at the Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi repeatedly referred to her as ‘Rani Ma’.

Political significance of suffixing ‘Ma’ after the honorific bequeathed on her by Nehru was not lost on Modi’s audience as the BJP leader tried to appropriate the legacy of the freedom fighter from the Congress, with his Hindutva spin.

For the RSS and its Hindu right-wing affiliates, the Naga socio-political leader was one of their very own—a Hindu nationalist, who stood against the church to resist conversion of her Naga tribe into Christianity.

“Rani Gaidinliu was already on the Sangh radar as early as 1969 when she met the second RSS chief MS Golwalkar during the Jorhat Hindu Conference in Assam. Golwalkar presented her with an idol of Lord Shri Krishna..,” writes anthropologist Arkotong Longkumer in his book The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast.

Gaidinliu’s RSS biographer Jagdamba Mall, who has been active in Nagaland for decades, called her the tallest Hindu icon of the Northeast. He, of course, viewed the indigenous tribal religions as an extension of Hinduism despite the two hardly having any similarities.

Given the fact that Gaidinliu was vehemently against the church and even allied with the Sangh to prevent conversion of her people, it should not come as a surprise that the Hindutva brigade was quick to try and co-opt her legacy in the region. Her life was perfectly in sync with the RSS’ anti-church narratives that blame Christian missionaries even for the insurgency in Christian-dominated areas of the region.

Similarly, it claimed the legacy of 17th century Ahom general Lachit Borphukan, who successfully thwarted the Mughal invasion in Assam, projecting him as a Hindu hero who fought Muslim aggressors.

There is, however, a big chink in that claim, because Borphukan’s trusted lieutenant in the battle against the Mughals was Bagh Hazarika, a Muslim, while the Mughal army was led by Ramsingh, a Hindu.

Gaidinliu’s legacy, on the other hand, perfectly fits the Sangh’s narratives. The present BJP governments at the Centre and in Manipur are giving special emphasis to promote her legacy to further push the Hindutva ideology in the region.

Barely three months before Manipur went to polls in February-March this year, Union home minister Amit Shah laid the foundation for the Rani Gaidinliu Tribal Freedom Fighters’ Museum in Tamenglong.

The proposed museum is being set up at an estimated cost of Rs 15 crore by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs to “instill a sense of nationalism in the youths”.

Again last year, the Kaimai railway station—part of the Jiribam-Imphal railway new broad gauge railway line project which is being constructed at an estimated cost of over Rs 14,000 crore—was renamed as the Rani Gaidinliu railway station by the BJP government in the state.

That’s not all. Even in the BJP manifesto for the Assembly polls, one of the promises prominently names Gaidinliu.

According to the poll manifesto, girls from economically weaker and backward sections will be provided with Rs 25,000 each under the ‘Rani Gaidinliu Nupi Maheiroi Singi’ scheme.

RSS veterans like Mall strongly believe that Rani Ma’s legacy should be promoted for another reason.

Speaking to The Federal, Mall says, “This will expose the Naga insurgents and conspiracies of the church and China, both conflicting forces in the international arena.”

However, back home in Manipur, most Nagas are doubtful whether the appropriation of Gaidinliu will expose Naga insurgents or the BJP.

“One can only wonder if she was not okay with the spread of Christainity among her people, would she have approved of the cooption of a distinct tribal faith as part of the larger Hindu family,” says Prof Kavi Maram, a Naga from Manipur’s Senapati district who now teaches at the Rajiv Gandhi University, Arunachal Pradesh.