Democracy’s future in India lies in the politics of protest and resistance
Kangla Uttra Sang at the Kangla fort. By Diamond Oina - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0. No changes made. Via Wikimedia Commons.
We're pleased to present an adapted excerpt from In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast» by Sanjib Baruah.
A curious fact about democracy in India is that the states in the country’s Northeastern borderlands, which officials routinely describe as being troubled by insurgencies, has among the country’s highest voter turnout rates. In 2012 the robust voter turnout numbers of Manipur found their way into an unlikely document: an affidavit filed in support of the government in a public interest litigation lawsuit that charged security forces of hundreds of extrajudicial killings. Convinced that there was some truth to the allegations India’s Supreme Court ordered “a deeper probe.” Since the number of incidents is large–many of them decades old and the resources available to the Supreme Court relatively limited–the progress in the investigations has been slow.
The government affidavit cites Manipur’s high electoral participation rates to make the case that normalcy prevails in the state. Apparently, people carry on with their daily lives despite “an insurgency problem.” Counterinsurgency does not affect the “common man,” and democratic institutions function better than normally. It is hard to think of a more compelling example of representative democracy’s “postcolonial neo-life,” as John and Jean Comaroff once put it. It has been reduced to “a very ‘thin’ distillation of the concept: a minimalist, procedural version that equates freedom with the occasional exercise of choice among competing, often indistinguishable alternatives.”1 The attorney general of an established postcolonial democracy cites evidence of high voter turnout as part of his legal defense of a government accused of hundreds of extrajudicial killings allegedly committed by its security forces. And this is done without any apparent sense of irony or contradiction–as if it could absolve the government from responsibility.
A history of armed conflicts and the discourse of insurgency surrounding it have had a formative role in shaping the way Manipur–and much of Northeast India–is governed. Armed conflicts, small and large, provide both the backdrop and the rationale for the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)–a law that has been in effect in the region for nearly six decades.2 It allows civilian authorities to call on the armed forces to come to the assistance of civil powers. Once a state–or a part of a state–is declared “disturbed” under AFSPA, the armed forces are empowered to make preventive arrests, search premises without warrants, and even shoot and kill civilians. Legal action against an officer for abusing those powers requires the prior approval of the central government–a rule that effectively means de facto immunity from prosecution. A disturbed area proclamation under AFSPA has uncanny similarities with emergencies or states of exception–including martial law and a state of siege.
The legal affidavit spelling out the government’s position can be read as official sociology of Northeast India’s armed conflicts. It portrays the 2.3 million citizens of Manipur as being held in ransom by five thousand militants. The “root cause of militancy,” says the affidavit, is “extortion” by armed groups whose leaders live luxuriously in “foreign countries.” The rationale for AFSPA is the “legal and logistic protection” of Indian security forces: to enable them to operate in a “hostile environment” with “the required thrust and drive.”3 But if armed groups are no more than small cult-like formations–and the average citizen their victims–why would security forces find the environment for fighting them “hostile”? Shouldn’t ordinary civilians welcome the forces of legitimate violence with garlands and open arms?
It is instructive to compare this narrative with that of an essay by the distinguished Manipuri intellectual and theater director Lokendra Arambam, which asks the same question about “the root cause” of the “Manipur insurgencies.” Arambam seeks an answer in a very different realm: the “recovery of identity and dignity.” Key events in Manipuri history such as the Anglo-Manipur War of 1891–the scars left by the trauma of defeat–and the dubious circumstances of the colonial era Princely State’s merger with India in 1949 feature prominently in his account. Following the conquest of the ancient kingdom of Manipur in 1891, he writes, British colonial forces occupied “the sacred capital of Kangla” and destroyed “all symbols of native authority and pride of the vanquished nation.” Even after British colonial rule ended in 1947, the Kangla Palace–a hallowed symbol of Manipuri glory and pride–remained under the occupation of Indian security forces for nearly five decades. Arambam recounts key episodes in the history of Manipur’s “internal awakening” and resistance.4 The stories of struggle, pain, and sacrifice–told and retold in the oral traditions of ballads and folklore and inscribed in popular memory–he believes, are what explain the appeal of the idea of armed resistance to young Manipuris.
The disconnect between this narrative and that of the Indian attorney general’s affidavit–the different geographical imaginations, historical memories, and political sensibilities on which they draw–illustrates the analytical risks of denying or underplaying India’s foundational diversity in any national unity discourse of a “casteless, raceless” India.5 It is a powerful reminder that frontiers and borderlands are productive sites from which to think about the world of territorially circumscribed nation-states in which we live.
The legal affidavit spelling out the government’s position can be read as official sociology of Northeast India’s armed conflicts. It portrays the 2.3 million citizens of Manipur as being held in ransom by five thousand militants.
It is also sobering to compare the affidavit’s take on AFSPA with that of the Manipuri civil disobedience campaigner Irom Sharmila, who in 2000 began a Gandhian-style protest hunger strike against this law. She views AFSPA as tantamount to a declaration of war on normal life. But Indian state authorities refused to recognize her hunger strike as a form of political resistance. They arrested her on the charge of attempting suicide. Detained in police custody, she was kept alive by force-feeding. She was released at the end of each year in order not to exceed the legal temporal limit on detention without trial –but only to be rearrested a few days later. The state authorities also worked hard to silence her and to keep her hunger strike out of public view. After sixteen long years, convinced that no government in New Delhi will repeal AFSPA in the foreseeable future, Sharmila ended her remarkable struggle of “communicative suffering” in 2016.6
If the capacity for excessive violence was built into the very logic of colonial sovereignty, the knowledge and experience that grew out of those habits remain inscribed in the institutional practices of the postcolonial Indian state to this day. AFSPA is only one reminder of that legacy. One cannot break away from the institutions and practices of colonial rule without the political will and the imagination to find ways to re-anchor the institutions of the state in a radically different set of assumptions. The state’s monopoly of legitimate violence in a democracy, as Christian Olsson puts it, is “an ambiguous fiction, or rather it is never as ‘real’ as when it remains a non-actualized potentiality.” It can effectively maintain order "only to the extent that it makes itself both unnecessary and yet somehow present.”7
The ability to imagine a more democratic future for postcolonial India enabled Irom Sharmila to engage in her remarkable act of citizenship.8 Unlike ordinary practices of citizenship such as voting or paying taxes, such acts of citizenship have from time to time expanded the horizons of citizenship the world over.
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Notes
1. John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction,” in Law and Order in the Postcolony, ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3.
2. Two other laws with the same name were enacted later: one in 1983 to apply to Punjab and Chandigarh, the other for Jammu and Kashmir in 1990
3. Quoted in Supreme Court of India, Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families, 8.
4. Lokendra Arambam, “Narratives of Self-Determination Struggles in Manipur,” in Self-Determination Movement in Manipur, ed. Aheibam Koireng Singh, Shukhdeba Sharma Hanjabam, and Homen Thangjam (New Delhi: Concept, 2015), 90–95, 119–23.
5. Purba Das, “Casteless, Raceless India: Constitutive Discourses of National Integration,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6, no. 3 (August 2013): 221–40.
6. Michael Biggs, “When Costs Are Beneficial: Protest as Communicative Suffering,” Sociology Working Papers, no. 2003-04 (Oxford: University of Oxford, Dept. of Sociology, 2003).
7. Christian Olsson, “‘Legitimate Violence’ in the Prose of Counterinsurgency: An Impossible Necessity?” Alternatives 38, no. 2 (May 2013): 158.
8. Engin F. Isin, “Theorizing Acts of Citizenship,” in Acts of Citizenship, ed. Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (London: Zed, 2008), 15-43.
good work, thank you for this working.
Posted by: Merdiven Asansörü | April 22, 2020 at 05:46 AM