Feasts of merit, election feasts or no feasts? On the politics of wining and dining in Nagaland, Northeast India

  • Jelle J. P. Wouters

Abstract


One of the small joys the election season offers ordinary villagers in Nagaland is the inevitable feasts hosted by politicians. In the Chakhesang Naga village I shall call Phugwumi,and where I was carrying out research when the 2013 State Legislative Elections ensued, election feasts became twice-daily events from roughly two weeks prior to Polling Day. Meals were partaken in five political camps – usually a part of an open compound cordoned off by wood and bamboo, set around an open fire, and decorated with party posters and flags – presided over by three rivalling politicians who supplied the camp(s) of their followers with a steady inflow of rice, vegetables and meat. Of these ingredients meat was the one crucial, and some days an entire pig or buffalo was walloped towards a camp, then cut, cooked and eaten. Supplied too, albeit less openly, was liquor; cans of beer and cheap, and sometimes not so cheap, rums and whiskies. Less openly because Nagaland is designated a ‘dry state’, the outcome of a persistent lobby by the locally influential Nagaland Baptist Church Council (NBCC), which construes the intake of alcohol as an abomination before God. Politiciansfear being caught contravening law and church endowed morality, and therefore entrust the task of distributing liquor, which is invariably demanded, to one of their aides. This wining and dining was crucial during the election period, and its historical imprints, intricacies, and its contested moralities today, the subject of this article.
Published
19-Apr-2015
How to Cite
Wouters, J. (2015). Feasts of merit, election feasts or no feasts? On the politics of wining and dining in Nagaland, Northeast India. The South Asianist Journal, 3(2). Retrieved from http://www.southasianist.ed.ac.uk/article/view/1258