By Michael Meiphami Shaiza
Confucius declares, “Rebellion is born when rulers forget they are meant to serve.” This is not a slogan of anarchy. It is a diagnosis of political pathology.
The Philosophical Foundation
In Confucian thought, governance is Tianming – a heavenly mandate. The ruler is not owner but steward. Power is not a possession but a trust. The moment a ruler converts stewardship into lordship, service into self-service, and mandate into entitlement, legitimacy collapses. What follows is not rebellion by design, but rebellion by default – the inevitable convulsion of a people who realize they are being ruled, not served.
Biblically, this mirrors the divine rebuke: “Woe to the shepherds who feed themselves and not the flock” – Ezekiel 34:2. The servant-leader model of Christ – “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” – is the same moral architecture Confucius envisioned 500 years before Christ.
The Naga Understanding of Leadership
Naga society historically never knew rulers. We knew servants.
In our village republics, the Awunga, the Hangva, the village council, was not a throne but a hearth. Leadership was earned through service, sacrifice, and wisdom, not imposed. A chief who forgot to serve was deposed by customary law. Accountability was immediate, face-to-face, moral.
The modern tragedy of the Naga people began when this indigenous ethos of servitude-leadership was replaced by a distant, extractive, and unaccountable political class. The Indian state, and at times our own elected representatives, forgot this.
For more than seven decades, the Naga political struggle itself is a testament to Confucius’ warning. Rebellion was born precisely because the British and the rulers in Delhi and Imphal tried to forcefully rule the Naga villages, the Naga people, the Naga fields/ lands/territories instead of respecting and accepting the unique history of the Nagas and their culture and traditions.
The Naga Context
For the Nagas of Manipur, the aphorism cuts with brutal precision today.
For more than two years, Manipur has bled. Villages have burned. The economy of the hills has collapsed. Farmers could not cultivate. Students could not learn. Patients could not reach hospitals. Traders could not move goods. Our people in Ukhrul, Senapati, Tamenglong and Chandel have lived under profound economic hardship, anxiety, and insecurity.
The peace of the Naga areas was maintained not by the State, but by the maturity of our own CSOs, Church leaders, village elders, women and youth. The Government is absent.
This absence has become most painful in recent months. In the ongoing Kuki supremacist aggression/ war and violence against the indigenous Naga community that has engulfed the State, many innocent Naga villagers – the original indigenous citizens of the hills of Manipur – have been brutally killed, their homes and granaries burned, their fields rendered inaccessible, and their livelihoods destroyed by the Kukis. Families that have lived in these ancestral hills from time immemorial now live in fear and displacement. Yet the Central and State Governments, despite their constitutional duty to protect life, livelihood and property, have failed to provide protection, justice, or a sense of security to the Naga indigenous communities. This failure to protect is the ultimate forgetting of servanthood.
This is the forgetting Confucius warned about.
1. Politically: When the BJP led NDA double-engine Governments promise security and deliver silence, when elected NPF MLAs, Ministers, Deputy Chief Minister and Congress Outer Constituency MP are invisible during the deepest crisis in a generation – even as Naga lives are lost and villages suffer – they have forgotten they are meant to serve. Power has become a post, not a purpose.
2. Socially: A ruler who serves visits the bereaved family, sits in the village, listens in the church. A ruler who has forgotten to serve issues statements from the capital. The disconnect between the rulers in Imphal/Kohima/Delhi and the weeping mother in Ukhrul Town during a funeral service for those killed is the birthplace of anger.
3. Economically: The economic hardship of the Tangkhul, Mao, Maram, Maring, Anal, Zeme, Liangmai and all Naga brethren is not accidental. When fields cannot be cultivated because of insecurity, when properties of indigenous Naga citizens are destroyed without protection or compensation, it is the direct consequence of governance that serves itself. Development funds become patronage. Jobs become privilege. The people are left to survive.
4. Morally and Emotionally: The Naga soul is deeply spiritual. We forgive, but we do not forget injustice. When leadership forgets its servanthood and fails to protect the lives of its own indigenous people, the moral legitimacy is lost in the heart of the people. That is when a people begin to ask: whom do our leaders truly serve?
The Aggressive, Assertive Truth
Confucius does not advocate rebellion. He warns rulers that they create it.
Therefore, the question for the Nagas of Manipur today is not whether the people are rebellious. The people are patient. The question is whether our rulers remember.
We assertively state: Any leadership – whether in Imphal, Delhi or within our own Naga political house – that cannot protect the life of a farmer, cannot secure the road of a student, cannot ensure the medicine of a sick mother, and cannot stand with its people in the hour of a funeral, has lost the moral right to claim leadership.
Servant leadership must return. Not as rhetoric. As presence. As accountability. As visible, physical service.
Coda: The Path Forward
The antidote to rebellion is not more force. It is remembrance. The rulers must remember they are servants.
For the Nagas in general, this means a political settlement that honours our identity as a self-governing, servant-led people, not as a population to be administered.
For the Nagas of Manipur in particular, this means we must demand a new standard: elect only those who serve, not those who rule; support only those who dwell among us, not those who visit us during elections; and hold accountable, vehemently and lawfully, those who have become silent and invisible when we bled.
Let Confucius be our judge. If peace is to endure in our hills, rulers must kneel to serve the people. If they forget, history teaches – rebellion, in thought, in vote, in democratic uprising, is inevitable.
The Painful Introspection
And now we must turn the mirror inward, with patriotic anguish and filial love for our nation.
The Naga national movement was born on the purest altar of sacrifice. Our National Workers, our underground organisations and revolutionary organisations that pledged to fight for the sovereignty of the Naga people, began as servants of the highest order – men and women who left hearth and home, who chose jungle over comfort, who chose death over submission.
But Confucius’ warning applies equally, and more painfully, within.
When those who claim to be servants of the Naga nation forget they are meant to serve, a second tragedy is born. For decades, the Naga people have wept not only from the oppression of Delhi and Imphal, but from the corruption, betrayal and deceit that crept into our own national house. Taxation without accountability, luxury without labour, and authority without sacrifice have eroded the moral high ground of the movement.
Tribalism has replaced nationalism. Nepotism has replaced merit. Factionalism has replaced fraternity. When the love of tribe becomes greater than the love of nation, when the love of family and clan becomes greater than the love of people, disunity is inevitable. Brothers who once swore to die together under one flag now point guns at each other. The blood that was meant to be shed against oppression is now tragically shed in fratricidal killings within the Naga nation itself.
This is why the Naga nation suffers. We are not defeated by external force alone; we are wounded by internal forgetting. The underground leader who collects in the name of sovereignty but lives in opulence has forgotten to serve. The faction that kills its own brother Naga for territorial pride has forgotten to serve. The worker who sells the national principle for personal settlement has forgotten to serve.
Patriotically, we must appeal: Return to servanthood. The Naga people still love and respect the Naga national cause, but love cannot survive betrayal forever. A movement cannot live on history alone. It must live on integrity, unity, and incorruptible service. Let all Naga Political Groups remember – you are not rulers of the Nagas. You are servants of the Naga future. If you forget, the rebellion will not be against Delhi, but within the hearts of your own people who will rise, democratically and morally, to demand accountability.
Only when overground and underground leaders alike remember they are meant to serve, will the Naga nation be truly one, truly free, and truly glorious.
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Michael Meiphami Shaiza is the President of Ukhrul-based NGO Ecological Rehabilitators’ Association (ERA).
(Views expressed are writers’ own and do not, in whatsoever manner, reflect that of Ukhrul Now)
