India simmering

The recent surge in anti-minority violence in different parts of India represents a crisis of electoral democracy where the majority sees itself threatened by the rule of law, writes Shiv Visvanathan

 Violence is a deeply social term. It can express itself in new technologies, new forms of organisation, but it still fits into a rough taxonomy. In that sense, even the most violent of individuals is part of a social trend.

Generally, violence in India manifests itself in terms of three sociological possibilities. First is alienation. Here, the group of individuals is marginal and its relation to the means of production is weak. An example of this kind of violence — more widespread than made out to be — is Naxalbari. As the CPM became more criminalised or middle class, it is the Naxals who have sustained some notion of social overthrow through violence. Violence is one thing they are utterly unapologetic about. 

If Naxalbari represents alienation as violence, then rape, incest, and some forms of rioting represent the violence of the anomic. Anomie is a form of social normlessness. It represents social breakdown. Most forms of violence in India today stem from an ‘over-determined’ view of the social. They stem, in fact, from an over-commitment to a partial view of society. It is usually majoritarian in kind.

Thirdly, violence appears most in societies where electoral democracy is the basic form of problem-solving. When a society sees parties and electoralism as core entities, it loses its cultural baggage of syncretism. Communalism, ethnicity, and caste conflict are all over-determined views of society and social membership which cannot tolerate the inclusive demands of the Other. Violence is a crisis of electoral democracy where the majority sees its majoritarianism threatened by the rule of law. Such an over-determined view of society expresses itself through transforming the other into the target or scapegoat. The brutality of such violence is overt, unapologetic. This form of violence is seen as something that maintains boundaries and restores the potency or purity of the group. It can express itself in the following ways:

Nativism or the sons of the soil movement. Here any hardworking outsider is seen as threatening the social. The outsider is a trickster who needs to be kept in place, labelled, and warned. The Shiv Sena is a master of nativist violence as a genre.

Communalism is a virus that virtually began with nationalism and mirrors it on a smaller scale. Earlier, communalism, because of the syncretic nature of society, had its redeeming moments. Neighbour protected neighbour in the general hostility.

Communalism was never zero sum till recent times. In zero-sum violence, you seek to eliminate the opponent, not defeat him. This is what happened in Gujarat in 2002. If riots are basically spontaneous, exterminism is organised and sustained. It is almost as extreme a form of violence as terror. Exterminism as expressed in ethnic cleansing is a kind of collective vigilantism. It is different from a pogrom, which is occasional and attacks a ghettoised site. Ethnic cleanising inaugurates the genocidal act, and what makes it easy is that the perpetrators feel like war heroes within their own group. Violence is open, brutal and often celebratory, as if the burden of history has been lifted.
Terror in a systematic sense is violence that is a response to alienation from the production of meaning. Other groups may use terror tactics, but terror essentially is a response to what is seen as the symbolic death of a way of life. It combines the most impersonal forms of violence with an intrusion into the most intimate. Terror seeks to redefine an alternative to the dominant social form. However, it must be differentiated from state terrorism where a state declares war on its own people as in Punjab or Kashmir. Let us not forget that India has over one million para-military troops outside the army for internal order and control.

Caste atrocity takes place when a lower caste takes democracy and equality for granted. In behaving ‘normally,’ they are seen as threatening or pathological to the system by dominant castes. What characterises a caste atrocity is the asymmetry of the response. The right to drink a glass of water might result in rape or houses being burnt. What makes caste atrocity poignant is that the availability of democracy is so meagre and impotent. If rape and incest form violence at the personal end of the spectrum, ethnic cleansing and the caste atrocity dominate the collective end. Unfortunately, electoral democracy without rule of law perpetuates the latter two.

There is one type of violence which is not usually listed in this taxonomy. This is the violence of development projects which usually results in displacement or obsolescence. Since it is also based on an over-determined view of the social, its violence is more technically impersonal and its ideas of guilt are as empty as that of ethnic cleansing.
These then are the forms of violence in India. To see patterns in terms of conspiracy is paranoid. These are trends which merely express the fact that evil and violence have become the most inventive part of Indian democracy today.

 The writer is a sociologist.