Violence in South Asia

Contemporary Perspectives

Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha, Birte Heidemann

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367321321
• eBook ISBN: 9781000733402
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume explores new perspectives on contemporary forms of violence in South Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and case studies, it examines the infiltration of violence at the societal level and affords a comparative regional analysis of its historical, cultural and geopolitical origins in South Asia. Featuring essays from Sri Lanka to Nepal, and from Afghanistan to Burma, it sheds light on issues as wide-ranging as lynching and mob justice, hate speech, caste violence, gender-based violence and the plight of the Rohingyas, among others.

Lucid and engaging, this book will be an invaluable source of reference as well as scholarship to students and researchers of postcolonial studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural geography, minority studies, politics and gender studies.

1

Introduction

Genealogies of violence in South Asia

Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and Birte Heidemann

Violence is endemic to all societies. The “remnants of Auschwitz”, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) has phrased it, cut across all national boundaries. With global terrorism affecting almost every region in the world, along with the daily grind of state-sponsored violence, political uprisings, ethnic tensions, immigrant exodus, hate crimes and socioeconomic precarities, no nation in the world today can claim total immunity from violence. The recent act of terror against Muslims in New Zealand, usually known to be a peaceful country, is a pertinent case in point. As we write, the unfolding political developments in the aftermath of so-called revenge attacks on Christian minorities in Sri Lanka suggest an intricate global network of acts, actors and victims of violence at work. It is therefore futile to ruminate on a particular geography of violence as unique or region-specific; in fact, to characterise a specific region as inherently violent, in our view, is an exercise in re-Orientalism. Our analysis in this volume thus departs from the conventional wisdom of geopolitical strategists, state-sponsored think tanks or security studies specialists who swear by an essentialist cartography of violence, framing some regions – South Asia, Africa and the Middle East – as inherently, if not congenitally, violent (Ludden 2003). This volume moves away from such regionalist penchant in the existing cartographies of violence. The question that naturally arises then is: why earmark South Asia as our empirical frame of reference? As we argue, despite their abuses, regional frames allow for a closer scrutiny of the very constructed nature of neo-Orientalist discourses of violence. Moreover, as Edward Said has taught us in the context of Orientalism’s “synchronic essentialism” (1978, 240), constructed discourses have often an actualising effect on the subjects that are implicated therein. A major concern of the individual contributions featured in this volume is to recast the shared colonial genealogies of violence in the subcontinent from the vantage point of its present iterations, incarnations and transformations. However, unlike select strands of postcolonial literary criticism that preoccupy with counter-discourses to neo-Orientalist representations of migrants, Muslims and religious nationalists (Miller 2014; Kadir 2006), which fulfill a self-serving purpose of exposing the crisis in western representations of terrorism itself, the chapters in this book offer an alternative conceptual vocabulary to terrorism or normative theories of insurgency violence in an attempt to register the modalities of violence in contemporary South Asia.

A number of existing studies (Basu 2005; Das 1990; Riaz, Nasreen, and Zaman 2018; Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018; Mehta and Roy 2018; Nandy 2015; Tripathi and Singh 2016; Hinnells and King 2006) engage with the genealogies of violence in South Asia – tracing its roots to colonial social engineering, histories of state formation, social stratification, ethnic divides, gender injustice and political ideologies. However, a number of these works operate within the discursive axioms of communalism, religious ideologies or the violence emanating from the clash between state and non-state actors. To date, there is no book-length study on what we describe here as forms of contemporary violence in South Asia that cannot be reduced to an easy categorisation, not least because they resist the conventional understanding of states, insurgents and communal elements as the sole agent provocateurs of violence in the subcontinent.

The aim of this volume is thus to document, diagnose and index those modalities of violence that call for a conceptual revision and reorientation in the South Asian context. The very invention of the tukde tukde gangs by right-wing nationalists – in an attempt to discredit their critics as anti-national elements who allegedly wish to cut India into pieces – says as much about the splintered, diffused and even dissimulated nature of contemporary violence in South Asia. This includes, but is not restricted to, the unparalleled brutality of rapes, sodomisation, sexual violence and communal hijacking of law and justice in the name of khap panchayats (clan courts) in India; honour killings in Pakistan and Afghanistan; the continued political deadlock and anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka; the persecution of Rohingya minorities at the Bangla-Burma border; the violent legacy of the Maoist revolution in Nepal; the cow vigilantism and broad-daylight lynching of minorities in India; the Jallikattu protests in Tamil Nadu; the politics of Hindu heritage and the de-naturalisation of Muslims in Assam in the name of National Registrars of Citizens; the attacks on adivasis, Dalits and Muslims across India; the assassination of pro-secularist bloggers, activists and journalists in Bangladesh – and the list goes on, like a horizon of eternal hostilities marked by a vicious orgy of death and destruction (Malreddy and Purakayastha 2017, 5). In the wake of such developments, it becomes abundantly clear that the nation-states in South Asia have failed to consolidate a civic-political framework that could contain the “spillage of violence” (Phillips and Cady 1996, 59) into the social domain. Today, violence continues to be used as well as usurped by both the state and non-state, communal, criminal or private actors as an immediate, if not an indispensable, tool for negotiation – in lieu of conciliation – of one’s political demands as well as civic entitlements. The task of this volume is to register the various modalities of social and political vicissitudes, which are meted out by violent responses from a whole host of actors and stakeholders – states, belligerents, secessionists, ex-insurgents, unpaid revolutionaries, communalists, anti-intellectuals, outcastes, minorities, anti-rationalists, technophobes, rapists, misogynists and micro-fascist elements aided by social media technologies – in the subcontinent.

Each nation-state in South Asia is privy to the legacy of empire (Guneratne and Weiss 2013) as well as its colonial system, which includes common law; constitutional adherents; terrorism and sedition policies; the unresolved Kashmir dispute; accentuated social hierarchies; uneven economic structures and land tenure systems – from zamindari, mahalwari, riotwari to the English-educated Brahminical classes. For better or worse, this colonial heritage has scripted intertwined histories of the self and other, the familiar and foreign, and the commensurable and incommensurable across South Asia, as, for instance, there exist relatively uncontested linguistic states in the region, but also utterly irresolute linguistic nationalisms in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Southern Indian states. Yet, instead of transcending this colonial hauntology, South Asian nations are locked up in a legacy of mimery and mimicry, generating in the process unending battle zones of national, caste, class, linguistic or religious sovereignties. As a result, the postcolonial nation-states in the region did not evolve through generative forces or state-building as in the case of European romantic nationalism but through an emulative model of systemically internalising templates of colonial governance. The occupation of Kashmir by both India and Pakistan or the proactive role played by India in the creation of Bangladesh (1971) are prime examples of such emulative and intertwined histories of (national) belonging and unbelonging in the subcontinent. By the mid-1970s, however, India’s rise to regional dominance further compounded the entangled fates of the nation-states. India’s intervention (1987–1990) in the Sri Lankan civil war, its alleged support for the Balochistan insurgency, its soft corner for the democratic movement in Burma as well as a soft-handed approach to the Burmese junta (Egreteau and Jagan 2013, 320) – all testify to the residual ideologies of internal colonialism. Thus, in a region where V.S. Naipaul’s premonition of a million mutinies meets the ever-elusive tukde tukde gangs of the day, this volume sets out to map the parameters of violence in the interstices of the modern and the pre-modern, the historical and the contemporary, the local and the global, truth and post-truth, governance and its absence. In an attempt to delineate the emerging forms of contemporary violence in South Asia, we identify four preceding epochs of violence in South Asia that merit further attention, namely a) early colonial insurgencies (1770–1857); b) post-1857 discourses of counterinsurgency; c) partition violence; and d) post-independence violence. This epochal reading of violence in South Asia would go a long way in delineating contemporary forms of violence as a distinct phenomenon of our times, which is predicated upon the genealogical continuities between and among discourses such as “peasant uprisings”, “communalism”, “terrorism” and “national sovereignty”.

Early colonial insurgencies (1770–1857)

In early colonial India, violence was privy to, legitimised by and often carried out at the behest of kings, monarchs, colonial agents and tribal chiefs. Insurgencies, as they are today, did not occupy a prominent place in the discourses of political violence, as they were immediately deemed “pre-political”, or even labelled as matters of heresy, espionage and anti-state activities that did not pose a serious threat to state sovereignty. It was not until the mid-ninetieth century that insurgencies, especially their frequent occurrence, affected a change in the way violence was discoursed. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, particularly the decades preceding the 1857 nationalist revolt, the Indian subcontinent bore witness to numerous tribal and peasant revolts. While historians and anthropologists such as Crispin Bates and Alpa Shah (2014), Ranajit Guha (1983) and Kathleen Gough (1974) have documented more than a hundred peasant and tribal uprisings during this period, in the Rampa region of Andhra Pradesh alone “more than a dozen tribal revolts occurred between 1770 and 1924” (Guruswamy 2014). The major grievances of these uprisings were of a territorial, cultural and economic nature rather than ideologically motivated ones, and as such, they could be best described in the words of Hannah Arendt as “political upheavals”, as opposed to revolutions, which arise when “people feel revulsion at affronts to human decency” (Arendt in Hansen 1993, 171). The prominent actors in these uprisings were the deposed monarchs, the disempowered landed class (zamindars), the disenchanted peasantry burdened by the colonial presence as well as their taxation policies, and the tribal populations whose existence and subsistence were threatened by the slow encroachment on forests and natural resources by outsiders (Hardiman 1992).

The Halba uprising (1774–1779) is a case in point, wherein the Dongar tribals of Bastar rebelled against the Marathas and the British armies – an event that influenced the decline of the Calukya dynasty (Gajrani 2004, 18). The Paharia revolt in the preceding years (1772) served as the catalyst for a spate of tribal uprisings that led resistance against foreign aggression. Other subsequent tribal uprisings such as the Tamar revolt in Bihar (1789) and the Munda uprising in Palamau (1819–1820) followed a similar suit. The Santhal uprising (1855–1856), which is often touted as the inspiration behind the current day’s Naxalite movement, was among the most notable tribal revolts led against the dikus (non-tribals and money-lenders), the “outsiders” such as the landlords and the British in the jungles of Jharkhand and West Bengal (Sinha 1993, 36). During the same era, many peasant movements, unrelated to the territorial and culturalist protectionism of the tribal movements, were inspired by the dire agrarian and economic conditions, and the growing burden of taxation and land tenure. As the anthropologist Kathleen Gough informs us, some of the peasant movements that resorted to banditry and armed insurrection against the “fierce plunderings and revenue exactions in the countryside” include the Oudh revolt against local zamindars, the Poligars peasant uprisings in Tinnevelly (1979–1805) and the uprising of Velu Thampi in Travancore and Cochin “with professional army (sic) of 30,000 and even larger numbers of cultivators” in 1808–1809 (Gough 1974, 1396).

While the anti-colonial spirit of these peasant, sovereign and tribal uprisings paved the way for the 1857 nationalist revolt, the landmark event itself resulted in a renewed discourse on violence, or rather the threat of violence as understood by the coloniser. Up until 1857, the British did not view the aforementioned tribal and peasant insurgencies as a threat to colonial sovereignty. At best, they treated most uprisings as the exegesis of “pre-political” and religious modalities of the subcontinent at large, a view that is vehemently contested by Ranajit Guha (1983) and the Subaltern Studies project.

The arrogation of sovereign law: post-1857 discourses of counterinsurgency

The sheer existential threat posed by the scale and magnitude of the 1857 nationalist revolt was reason enough for the British authorities to usher in a paradigm shift in the parlance of violence. In the guise of counterinsurgency, new legal and criminal codes, sedition laws, anthropological surveys, surveillance methods and a whole host of social engineering projects were brought into effect (Bates 1995; Wagner 2017). Post-1857, the hunt for Thugees of North India, who already bore the tag of “hereditary” criminal castes, was intensified, while castes such as the Kuravers, who supposedly displayed occult symbolism and codes, became the targets of pseudo-anthropological surveillance projects (Dirks 1993; Lal 1995). Subsequently, many census reports or ethnological gazettes went on to classify the Maravars and Kallars in Tamil Nadu as hereditary thieves and robbers “with great military prowess and, later on, for [their] considerable ‘criminal’ proclivities” (Dirks 1993, 72).

In conjunction with such a criminalisation of potential threat, the induction of various criminal codes between 1859 and 1871, according to Lal, facilitated “surveillance and monitoring of the habitually criminal classes”, which were further aided by “innovations such as photography and fingerprinting” (1995, xi). In 1904, the Criminal Intelligence Department was established, followed by significant amendments of the Criminal Tribes Act in 1911, under which some 200 tribes were identified as hereditary criminals (Tolen 1991, 110). It is against this very backdrop that famous novels such as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890) appeared, featuring espionage plots of the Great Game, criminal threats and the dangers presented by strangers, half-bred castes or even outcastes to the British Empire (Malreddy 2015, 19). As Moran and Johnson (2010, 7) report, not only did both Kipling and Doyle gain unrestricted access to the classified military and criminal records of the Empire, but also drew heavily from the pseudoscientific ethnographies on dangerous and “innately criminal” castes. Within this context, the Indian Council Act of 1861 served as a pretext to the induction of the Defense of India Act of 1915, which enabled direct rule from Britain and the institution of an “emergency code” for India. As Kalhan et al. inform us, “the Act authorised civil and military authorities to detain individuals or impose other restraints on personal liberty if they had ‘reasonable grounds’ to suspect a person’s conduct was ‘prejudicial to public safety” ’ (2006, 127–28). Subsequently, other criminal acts and laws against sedition in 1870 and the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act (1919) (known as the “Rowlatt Act”) formed the basis for the latter day’s Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act and the Prevention Of Terrorism Act (Kalhan et al. 2006, 127–28).

“Communalism” or nationalism? Partition violence

If the discourses of post-1857 penology were constructed as a response to, or the need for, an active presence of sovereign violence, then the India-Pakistan partition could be best described as the violence that was borne out of the decisive absence of the same. A case in point was the “hands-off” approach of the British military and security officers, who described the religious violence as something beyond their “control” (Kudaisya and Yong 2000, 19), a justification that they surely did not use, say, to “contain” the Jallianwala Bagh (1919) demonstrators or the Sepoy Revolt of Meerut (1857). Instead, the newly divided nations – whose borders were announced some three days after their division – were held responsible for the violence: “the Congress … insisted on dividing Punjab and Bengal, thus triggering disorder and uprooting, and led to the intractable problem of Kashmir” (Kudaisya and Yong 2000, 11). Conceivably, the newfound nations had little in the way of a structural discourse of what Walter Benjamin (1978) calls “mythical violence” that is privy to most modern states, or the apparatus to enforce such violence in order to apprehend the situation. In the absence of the latter, violence fell into the hands of communities, communal subjects and sectarian ideologues. Thus, as Cynthia Talbot argues, “[c]ommunal violence was itself a British construct in some analyses because many other kinds of social strife were labelled as religious due to the Orientalist assumption that religion was the fundamental division in Indian society” (1995, 693). Inversely, the partition violence was responsible for the creation of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: genealogies of violence in South Asia
• Part I Structural violence: ideologies, hierarchies and symbolic acts
• Part II Gendered violence: rape, misogyny and feminist discourse
• Part III Outsourced violence: mobs, insurgents and private armies
• Part IV Cultures of violence: fractured histories, fissured communities
• Index