<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
When several thousand express solidarity to come together, it is certainly with a strong reason and to make a point against the kind of brutal and cold blooded murder of late Neiphretuo Metsie-o ABI of 5th NAP after he was virtually abducted by two hitch hikers on September 7, 2018. The mass outpouring of anger was also a pent up emotion of the senseless killings that have affected many families who continue to mourn and left without justice. That was also the message on September 19 in Kohima when thousands of people cutting across various sections of society in Nagaland, went to express solidarity with the grieving family including perhaps several hundred other families who suffered similar tragedy. Naga society has seen and witnessed enough of murder and violence since the past decades. How was this possible, that the two accused were able to move freely after committing the murder when the entire state apparatus including outcry from all tribes of Nagaland, should have resulted in plugging of all routes within Nagaland? The other aspect of the crime has also brought up the issue of public perception versus the Indian Penal Code (IPC) with regard to justice. Public emotions run high whenever some heinous crime is committed. The obvious and natural tendency is to demand death penalty to the perpetrators. However, the IPC awards death penalty only under extreme of circumstances when the crime is deemed to be the “rarest of rarest of case”. In practice courts award death sentence if it fell under “rarest of rare” category- such as whether a murder was committed “in an extremely brutal, grotesque, diabolical, revolting or dastardly manner so as to arouse intense and extreme indignation of the community”. Every murderer does not get death penalty but generally, in all cases, it is mostly life imprisonment. The Naga family is made up of various tribes, each having their own customary laws as well allegiance etc. Unfortunately, in such matters, the anger often causes inter-tribe friction. Any incident involving one or few from a tribe with one or few from another tribe, should not escalate into a tribal conflict. In contemporary Naga society, inter-marriage has solidified inter-tribal understanding and fraternity and accommodation. There are however a minority who espouse tribalism. The hohos and church are provided with a challenging opportunity to focus on the issue of tribalism and decide how they could each work on isolating it from the Naga body. Perhaps, as commented earlier in this column- tribe hohos need to seriously consider what they must do to ensure that harmony within the Naga family is maintained through fairness and enforced with boldness. Whenever a crime is committed by a member of a tribe against a member of another tribe having dangerous repercussions, then the hoho of the offender should act decisively by applying the traditional customary law. Any form of killings under whatever pleas should not be condoned as neither the Bible nor tribal laws accept such. It is from here on that respective tribe politicians and leaders of society need to address the realities and apply their wisdom to see the road ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Message for society<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177777\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}