The Religion of Force
by Dilip Simeon
The
practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most
probable change is a more violent world - Hannah Arendt
After
Nandigram, the most important concern in political debate ought to be
the issue of violence - legitimate, illegitimate, formal and informal.
I doubt whether this debate will take place, because the ground shared
by enemies is embarrassing for everyone and by mutual consent, remains
unspeakable. Still, certain disquieting facts stare us in the face.
Avoiding their implications will take us yet again to the zone where we
focus on “who started it” - an infinite sequential regression that
explains nothing and satisfies no-one.
Political violence is
always ugly, but thus far, the state has held the monopoly on
legitimate force. The more a state relies on outright force, the more
brittle and shaky its hegemony. This is true for empires such as the
British, the Soviet and the American, as well as for national regimes.
A connected issue is the maintenance of ‘irregulars’ or vigilantes.
These political para-militaries (not to be confused with the state’s
paramilitary apparatus) represent the stabilisation of informal
violence; and their deployment is a grave symptom of the decline of
state legitimacy.
The opposition cannot deny that a number of
supporters of the CPI (M) in Nandigram were forced to leave their
villages. It is an abuse of democracy to engage in armed confrontations
and force one’s opponents to vacate their homes. Certain parties
intervened there more with the motive of augmenting their political
standing than to fulfil popular aspirations. However, on the issue of
land-acquisition, democratic norms demanded that the villagers be
consulted prior to making plans for their eviction. With the outbreak
of conflict, the government was bound to maintain peace whilst looking
for a solution. Instead, there were cases of intimidation, leading to
the alienation even of left-wing cadre. The matter was compounded in
March, when the police confronted the opposition with the help of an
informal militia. This use of an extra-constitutional force was
illegal. The government is entitled to use legitimate force to maintain
civic peace. It does not have the right to despatch anonymous armed men
to thrash its opponents. But this is exactly what it did. The second
week of November saw a blatantly partisan administration neutralise the
police and give free rein to vigilante groups. All constituents of the
government bear responsibility for this. Arson and murder have taken
place. Now that rape cases have been registered, the comrades could ask
themselves whether this is a price worth paying for the ‘new sunrise’
in Nandigram. Is rape, too, a coin that needs to circulate?
There
is a long-standing fascination with militarism in Indian politics.
Savarkar’s favourite slogan was ‘Militarise Hindu-dom!’ Freedom
fighters saw themselves as an Army, Netaji Subhas was drawn towards
uniforms and military dictators. The RSS has maintained itself in
para-military format since its inception, and the communist tradition
has tended to glorify ‘People’s War’. Two decades ago the Khalistanis
organised ‘commando forces’, and took titles such as ‘Lt General’.
Islamist guerillas see themselves as warriors of the Almighty. The
North-East is teeming with generalissimos. A more immediate kind of
informal violence has appeared in landlord armies such as the Ranvir
Sena, and groups such as Chhatisgarh’s Salwa Judum. We could call it
‘security outsourcing’ in today’s managerial jargon.
There are
distinctions to be made among paramilitaries. Some are inspired by
Heavenly or Historical goals, others have more prosaic ends. Some are
ideological, others pragmatic. Our upper-caste establishment refers to
Jehadis and Naxalites as ‘terrorists’; but doesn’t see the Bajrang Dal
or Shiv Sena that way. They’re only ‘ultra-nationalists’. It objects to
the violence and lawlessness practiced by the former, but winks at
mass-murder and revenge-attacks by its own vigilantes, as in 1984 and
2002. Often political violence is enacted in the name of the oppressed
- those who espouse it like to appear as the injured party, even when
they are chief ministers. A binary division in the political ethos
takes place, wherein we are moved to tears by the plight of our
preferred victims, but impervious to the suffering inflicted on others
by ‘our’ side. This gives rise to surreal spectacles such as Mr
Advani’s declaration of never having witnessed such barbarity as he saw
in Nandigram. Indeed. The victims of his cohorts in Gujarat still await
the smallest gesture of human sympathy from this statesman, whose trip
to West Bengal was unhampered by the administration, unlike Medha
Patkar’s movements. Some citizens are more equal than others. Yes, we
all make distinctions of one type or another.
But there remain
some things in common between these formations. They all look upon, and
wish to convert civil society into a war-zone. Their emotional universe
is peopled by warriors and martyrs, and history for them is a long
march of dead heroes. War is glorious, and bloodshed brings out the
best in man. I submit that the best is close to the worst. One symptom
of the mental disorder called sociopathy, is the absence of pity. It is
a sad feature of India’s political life that so many sociopaths have
found their way to its commanding heights. And they are no less
diseased who possess the capacity to order brutality from afar, but
never get blood on their own hands..
During the Cold War, it was
a commonplace that democracy and socialism were antithetical to each
other. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, it has become clear that
it is precisely capitalism that cannot co-exist with democracy. And as
one gives way to the other, attacks on democracy will increase. The SEZ
policy is an example of the suspension of constitutional rights,
already battered by religious fanatics and imperialists. Evidently,
capitalism can manipulate every form of social oppression, from gender
inequity to caste and race, as a means of enforcing a congenial
environment for itself. Capitalist development will never terminate
social injustice, rather, it will feed upon and perpetuate it in hybrid
forms. Extra-economic coercion is the social capital of modernity.
Meanwhile,
instead of defending what freedoms we have, the so-called people’s
warriors abet the above process by attacking democracy in the name of a
unilateral claim to represent peoples interests. May one expect the
freedom of speech in their liberated areas? This October, the Maoist
party murdered 18 persons in Jharkhand. Did their victims have the
opportunity to plead for mercy? It verges on the surreal when
executioners demand democratic rights. Theirs is another kind of
suspension of politics and of socialist ethics. Ironically their
programme calls for yet more capitalism, on the argument that the
capitalism we already have is not the genuine variety. In a certain
mental universe, all we may look forward to is one or other brand of
communist-administered capitalism. Maybe more people will turn to God
for assistance.
Democracy can only survive if democratic
freedoms are valued and extended to the home and workplace. This cannot
be done via the culture of militarism and violence. As Gandhi said in
1909, what is obtained through fear can be retained only as long as the
fear lasts. The comrades who wrought the new sunrise in Nandigram have
lots of work ahead.