Nagaland Bar Association (NBA) has called for protection of Naga social customs and practices conferred under Article 371A.
In a submission before Law Commission of India, the bar association said that while doing legal research on introduction of a uniform civil code in the country, the commission should recommend to the Government of India to protect Naga social customs and practices.
Claiming that in the backdrop of “classless and democratic” society of the Nagas people in Nagaland continued were content, the letter warned that any change to these “deeply-rooted” social customs and practices would destroy the inherent and constitutional rights of the Nagas.
Signed by Nagaland Bar Association president Tali Ao and general secretary V Hukavi Zhimoni, the letter asserted that the agreement of July 1960 between Government of India and Naga People’s Convention was a revered document for the Nagas and that provisions of the constitution’s Thirteenth Amendment emanating from the agreement were sacred to people of the State.
They said the bar is of the view that Constitution of India did not envisage sectarian form of government in view of the fact that the Indian sub-continent did not belong to any homogenous society.
Fearing that a government “democratic in structure but sectarian in spirit” may flog together heterogeneous society into homogenous one by codification of civil code uniform for all, the bar warned that in such an eventuality the basic structures of the constitution will be destroyed.
It asserted that Article 371A, incorporated by the Constitution (Thirteenth Amendment) Act, 1962, which, among other things, safeguarded social customs and practices of the Nagas, is an inalienable and constitutional right. The letter also quoted Rev JJM Nichols Roy during the debate on the draft Sixth Schedule to the Constitution of India in the Constituent Assembly on September 6, 1949.