Glimpses of Northeast’s rise in Nagaland’s Hornbill festival |
As the year draws to a close, reflection comes as a duty, a ledger of triumphs tallied against the unyielding march of time. My recent immersion in Nagaland, surrounded by the energy of the 26th Hornbill Festival, crystallised the truth I have carried since assuming charge: The blueprint for Viksit Bharat blooms defiantly in the emerald folds of the country’s frontiers, where Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s vision of the Northeast as Bharat’s Ashtalakshmi states becomes real. The region’s wealth of natural reserves, spiritual heritage, sports, skills, ecotourism, food and agriculture, and cultural vibrancy is not rhetoric, rather it is lived every day. If the Northeast is my second home, Nagaland is the warm seat by the fire. It is a connection forged through the raw, unfiltered kinship I feel with its people with their guardianship of 17 vibrant tribes’ legacies, their unbowed resilience amid historical tempests, and their fierce embrace of progress.
Touching down in Kohima, I was enveloped by a spectacle that felt scripted by the gods themselves: The hills ablaze in the fleeting pink of wild cherry blossoms, a rare December bloom against an unyielding azure sky, as if the land itself had unfurled a crimson carpet for the Hornbill’s grand unveiling. My journey began at the Kohima War Cemetery, perched on the very terraces where, in 1944, 10,000 Allied troops (1,420 of whom rest eternally here) halted the Japanese advance in one of World War II’s fiercest sieges. The Battle of Kohima was the forge where our Naga community stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Indian jawans. The epitaph pierced me anew: “When you go home, tell them of us and say, ‘For your tomorrow, we gave our today’.” I also felt history close like a circle: The very Chindits who turned the tide here in 1944 had trained and been headquartered in my ancestral land of Gwalior, at the Grand Hotel built by my great-grandfather Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia, their Sunderland flying boats resting on our lake en route to battle. Alongside these brave Allied commandos, Naga scouts bled the Japanese dry on every ridge; together they saved Kohima, halted the invasion that could have reached........