:: Thursday, August 08, 2002 ::

Re: Censorship

Anil Patwardhan is an outstanding documentary filmmaker, known for his wide-ranging films that tackle contentious social issues, concentrating on how the lives of poor and disenfranchised are affected by those of the powerful. The CNN story is informative, yet this is not the first time that Patwardhan has run afoul of the Indian censors, nor more importantly is it the first time that a showing of his films has been stopped even outside India. I will provide a worrying case of the latter happening; but before that it should be noted that Patwardhan’s films are usually passed without cuts as the appeals process overrides the objections of the censorship board. As the latter is under the Information and Broadcasting Ministry (I&B) of the Government of India, it is unsurprising that it reflects less any real criticism of a film than the political message continued therein. The I&B ministry is a key ministry as until the opening up of the tele-media sector in the early 1990’s outside Cinema, almost all broadcasting was under state control and was used by the party in office as a propaganda tool; indeed it was common practice in the run to or just after election time to make sure that the I&B minister was a staunch party loyalist (or in many cases loyal to the party leader) thus ensuring that a key tool of controlling the dissemination/circulation of information would be under close control. Of course with liberalisation the monopoly of state television has reduced, especially in the metropolitan areas which receive satellite broadcasting and the diversity and range of channels and programming on offer has expanded considerably; the censorship board is one of the few coercive tools left in the I&B arsenal.

This is also not the first time that a controversial film has run into trouble – the archetypal case of this was Kissa Ka Kursi (Whose Chair?), criticising the corruption and favouritism that was rampant under Sanjay Gandhi’s machinations during the Emergency period, the film proved to be very popular on initial screenings, with it’s searing attacks on the establishment. When Indira Gandhi’s government was in power the films’ prints were confiscated, pending an investigation by the I&B ministry for censorship reasons. The subsequent Janata victory after the excesses of the Emergency meant that pressure to release and show the film mounted, yet the prints and the film negatives had disappeared and could not be traced. Power when, especially when it has been abused has good reason to fear truth.

A Controversy in America:

In early 2002 the Margaret Mead Festival, an office within the American Museum of Natural History in New York, announced its decision to screen two of Patwardhan’s documentary films to complement an exhibit the museum was then having on Hinduism. The two films were Ram ke Naam and We are not your Monkeys. The ensuing controversy as recorded by one of those involved – Arvind Rajagopal, a scholar on the role of the media in South Asia provides insights in the politics of public institutions and how Hindutva exploits liberal guilt and the rhetoric of multiculturalism that exists within many Western countries, conveniently ignoring its own record within India.

The Margaret Mead exhibit intended to create a favourable atmosphere for the presentation of Hindu faith and worship, depicting the ritual objects and customs, the sacred deities and other items of worship in photographs and videos and through carefully selected artwork. Rajagopal lauds the intention of the exhibit’s organisers – he notes that the hushed environment of the exhibit – rooms bathed in soft lighting, with solemn devotional music filtered in, was a far cry from the pandemonium of most temples. What occurred he argues was a grafting of Hindu images being grafted onto a spatial field whose character was imagined essentially in Protestant Christian terms.

Rajagopal notes that protests from self-styled representatives of Hinduism, led to the AMNH cancelling the screening due to “threats of violence”. Subsequently it was declared postponed, but no further announcement was made for weeks. There was little attempt to engage the community in dialogue or compromise and the unsaid assumption was that a certain section of protestors spoke for the “community” as a whole; he also wryly observes that the museum’s fantasy of peaceful and spiritual Hindus had received a rude shock. This is traced back to the re-created version of Hinduism that the museum was trying to project – most temples in India are situated in bazaars and crowded streets, places of frenetic activity that are sites of intense competitive bargaining and jockeying for power within and between different groups; very different from the ideal of spiritual community united in its quite contemplative devotional pursuits that the museum sought to convey. Rajagopal sarcastically recalls that as a student in college, one of his teachers shouted at the class when they were being particularly noisy – “Be Quiet! Do you think this is a temple?” The temple for the teacher was obviously a place of chaos and clamour.

Shortly after the screening of the Patwardhan film was announced in February Rajagopal remembers, a call went out from hinduworld.com to protest the screening of the “anti-Hindu” film and the summary of charges against the viewing contained in an “executive summary” included:

1) The screening had no relevance to the objectives of the exhibit, which is about Hindu worship.
2) The Museum authorities were leaving “novice minds” with a biased and distorted view of Hinduism.
3) The film portrayed “our community” as a group of religious zealots.
4) The video was created by a group of self-styled leftist activists who are interpreting the Ramayana according to Marxist ideology.
5) Marxists were describing their work as created from a Dalit perspective in order to gain acceptance.
6) It was not fair to screen a biased documentary without giving a chance to the accused groups to present their case.

Many letters of protest were sent to the exhibit’s organisers and they all elaborated on the key concerns raised above. Let us examine some of these claims. Some of the letters betrayed their hidden assumptions in their eagerness to condemn the exhibit – one letter alleged that there was this “Dalit organisation, which is making noise about Hinduism”. This was seen as a problem as it was claimed that Dalit organisations were being funded by Muslim and Christian radicals bent on dividing the Hindus (a spectacularly inaccurate claim since both these religious communities themselves are divided with the latter being more interested in living a peaceful co-existence with the dominant groups and quite willing to sacrifice sections of its own community to do so). This criticism reflected unease with the film We are not your Monkeys, which is a Dalit critique of the Ramayana, and not only shows an unreflective caste-ism amongst those who protested but an ignorance amongst them as the reality of Dalit-adivasi relations conflating two different oppressed communities who have yet to build an effective counter coalition in the caste hierarchy. Another letter writer insinuated that Patwardhan was a fanatic claiming “there are some people who, for want of ‘mainstream acceptance’ will do anything, from spreading rumours down to suicide.”

Interestingly, there was a persistent appeal to multiculturalism, yet the defence of cultural identity was couched in a language that was filled with abuse and unwilling to engage in dialogue. One letter writer wrote that the attempt to screen the films could be described as “ a hilarious claims of ‘protection of free speech’, but then I do know some people in this country approve of a cross dipped in urine as art. I hope your museum has better standards.” Such efforts were calculated to provoke and insist on the respect for religious sensibilities – while showing little for any other. Very few of the letters were actually threatening but the museum management was startled enough to move the screening to the Cantor theatre in New York University. There about 50 of the viewers assembled, half of whom were members/supporters of the VHP branch in the USA. The panel discussion that followed the films had some distinguished Hindu scholars present: MG Prasad (from the Stevens Institute and a member of the Bridgewater Temple Committee), Valentine Daniel (a professor atColumbia University), Raza Mir (from Monmouth Uiniversity) and Rajagopal himself. The audience response according to Rajagopal was quite hostile – on what basis had Patwardhan selected his informants several demanded. How could the sacred Vedas be slighted in this way others asked. Valentine Daniel pointed out that neither belief or knowledge or particular texts was central to Hinduism and that Hinduism was not a religion in the way Semitic faiths are. Hinduism has a wide range of disparate practises and can only be unified, as a political project not a religious one. The VHP members of the audience began to shout down Daniel, echoing as Rajagopal remarks Ambedkar’s observation that the one charge certain to inflame the orthodox Hindus is the accusation that they do not know whose names they invoke. Supporters of the film were also present and reacted to the critics (an on-line petition had collected nearly 500 signatures in favour of the film being shown) but they were badly outnumbered and the NYU campus police intervened as tension and passions mounted.

Power and Truth:

The above incident is recounted in detail not because of any particular importance but because it shows the resistance that can accompany attempts to put forward another version of events or history than to the one already established. Such attempts face censorship not only within India but abroad also; yet I feel that the most important parts of this struggle will take place within India.

Film and television is a vital medium in India, given the illiteracy rates and poor infrastructure the spread of satellite television and the ubiquity of Bollywood cinema provides one of the few direct means of reaching the masses and therefore it is a crucial battleground for diverse interests. Films such as those by Patwardhan’s are an important way of disseminating the more established and grounded critiques of dominant ideologies and beliefs such as Hindutva and communalism beyond the narrow circle of the English speaking elite and to the masses whose imagination and communicative spheres speak in vernacular tongues of India. The visual strength of documentary films such as We are not your Monkeys can prove to be important to overcome these barriers and reach those who are most affected by the issues within the film but who are ironically the least able to receive or understand them.

I have not seen the documentary on the nuclear tests, but it should be noted that as the CNN link story observes, there is no real case for the cuts to be made, as all the footage had already been broadcasted on television in the immediate aftermath of the tests as had footage of celebrating party workers and youths. In the post-test euphoria much taste and common sense was thrown out of the window in a jingoistic celebration of having achieved super-power status or of notions that were peddled about having finally achieved prominence on the global stage and having earned the respect from the West. Those who had argued that respect could be achieved much more solidly and enduringly by providing a decent standard of living for the majority of Indian citizens and that it was a matter of shame that we can have a nuclear weapons programme that gives us access to weapons of mass destruction but cannot ensure that every Indian citizen gets three full meals a day, were decried as unpatriotic at best, Pakistani sympathisers at worst – within Parliament itself all parties from the Congress to the Left thought it difficult politically to come out openly against the tests for fear of looking anti-national (criticism did occur but only after an embarassing hiatus during which there was a sudden switch from a celebratory approach to a combatitive one). It is very revealing that the same interests who were quite happy to show jubilant celebrations of the nuclear tests four years ago are now trying to cover up those very same images up – it is important to note that all the footage has already been screened and shown on Indian television before – indeed many abroad saw such pictures in foreign news reports as well; so there should have been no reason to prevent these pictures from being depicted now as they are already within the public domain. But time adds distance to events, and changes the perspective of the gaze, now that those who celebrated can see events differently. The Nuclear tests, could not prevent a bloody and avoidable conflict in Kargil, they have been unable to solve the insurgency in Kashmir where cross-border terrorism and mass-based unrest make it impossible for 250,000 Indian troops to control the region, the tests have done little to improve the disaster response of the state as it struggle to cope with drought in the Western/Central regions and flooding in the Eastern states and most importantly they have done little to improve the quality of life for the great majority of the people. When confronted with India’s poor performance in the most recent annual Human Development Report of the UN, the Human Resources Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, replied that the report should not only look at material indicators of well-being but also at the quality of life and people’s “spiritual welfare” which could have increased in the absence of material improvement. To this the only reply can be that while mankind may not be able to survive on bread alone – it is impossible to survive without it.

This, also to my mind displays the basic insecurity behind the Hindutva project: combining shows of strength and claims to power with a fear of the enemy both without and within and beset by doubts about the legitimacy and viability of their own programme. In such a mindset, the celebrations of yesterday can very easily become the embarrassing gaffes of today. Moreover, it also demonstrates the limits of using religious fundamentalism to paper of the existence of social antagonism, whether they appear in the guise of caste conflict, ethnic chauvinism, linguistic assertion, regional irredentism, gender inequalities or class struggles. In contrast to the CNN report it is debatable in my opinion how much the Nuclear tests have helped the BJP electorally – it is still unable to come to power at the federal level without the help of electoral allies and regional coalition partners, it has been unable to be re-elected in any of the states where it has held power at a provincial level and the record of most BJP governments has been lacklustre – moreover in large parts of the country more specifically the South and the East it does not exist as a major political force or even a viable political party. This situation has not changed appreciably over the last four years since the Nuclear tests. The only answer to the deadlock between truth and power may be an ethic of citizenship that lends its voice to the former against the latter.


:: Conrad Barwa 6:16 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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India's Worst Drought Since 1987:

An Indian farmer sits in his dried up field in Hanumanganj, 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Allahabad, India Saturday, Aug. 3, 2002. Delayed monsoon rains and blazing heat have caused crop failures and postponed planting across most parts of India. Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee released more funds for drought hit states Sunday, but opposition parties said it was too late. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh).

There are 60 million tonnes of extra grain in India's reserves and yet relief for farmers in drought afflicted areas has remained slow and insufficient. As Conrad has correctly pointed out several times in this forum, there are persistent problems in the distribution of food resources. India needs to get its ducks in a row as agriculture remains the backbone of the economy and a major source of employment and consumer price inflation. Moreover, the plight of farmers whose crops have failed should not be ignored as these farmers, their families, and landless laborers will have little income for several months. The government must take action to counter the coming unemployment wave in drought afflicted areas.

The utter failure of the BJP government to understand and act effectively upon the problems that are growing in the rural areas is shocking and upsetting. The question is: Why is the BJP so hamstrung on a matter of domestic economic policy making? India has the resources necessary to resolve the immediate problems, and India has the experience to manage drought related crises.

The answer may be that there are serious budgetary constraints, about which the government has said little. The current government deficit relative to GDP has remained relatively stable over the last year, but the deficit has increased in absolute terms. At around 10% of GDP, India's deficit is one of the highest in the developing world. Fiscal expenditures have risen due to rising interest payments and subsidies in petroleum and fertilizers. The interest payments point to the real problem, i.e. the very high level of government debt, which may approach roughly 90 percent of GDP (depending on rates of growth). Similarly, there are mounting debt problems at the state level. The debt situation is most likely the source of the government's unwillingness to act swiftly and effectively to couple food relief with a far reaching temporary rural employment program. In the last major drought, the government spent approximately ten times what it has spent so far in counteracting the social effects of the drought. The precarious economic situation must be acting to restrict the flexibility of the current government.

How to Prepare for Future Droughts

Looking over the long-term, India needs to make a radical change in the direction of its economic policy -- it must begin the taxation of the agricultural sector. India relies very heavily upon the industrial sector (relative to its contribution to GDP) and excise duties to support its fiscal activities. The fear of taxing farmers is a populist post-colonial legacy/luxury that India can no longer afford. Moreover, I think it would be good for India to widen its tax base as it would make citizenship more meaningful and make government more accountable to its constituents. It is outrageous that citizens of a democratic country must wait around for relief when buffer stocks of food are overflowing. It is almost as if these farmers were waiting for the largese of US PL480 grain shipments. Of course there are no silver bullets in economic policy making, and India must begin with very low and progressive taxation policies in rural areas and work toward gradual increases over the long haul. Nevertheless, India needs to expand the tax base as further borrowing is not a wise long-term strategy.

The federal government should also accelerate its plan to introduce a value added tax (VAT) at the state level. Jason may have some more extensive thoughts on the current fiscal and debt situation at the state level. Whether the current political scene at the center and state levels will facilitate cooperation on tax issues is difficult to guage. (There have already been charges of bias by some states in the ways in which drought relief has been distributed -- so the prospects look dim).

If India does not get its economic house in order in the near term, not only will India not be able to improve the lives of the forty percent of its population living in absolute poverty, it will not even be able to withstand another drought. The stakes are high and India needs to act.

:: Vikash Yadav 11:58 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Do Bigha Zamin:

After hearing that drought relief (i.e., fodder seeds) for Rajasthani farmers will be distributed by lottery, because of overwhelming demand one farmer commented to New Delhi TV:

"What I have got is much less than what I need. I have been given seeds that are enough to sow two bighas of land but this is very less as I own 10 bighas. They should give much more to help us," says Hanuman Prasad, a farmer in Kanota Village, Jaipur district.

The farmer is correct. Given that India's grain reserves are overflowing, drought relief should be better. However relief has been further complicated by center-state relations as Rajasthani officials are still waiting for funds from the federal government before they can begin distributing drought relief. In the past Rajastan could rely on diverted resources from the Green Revolution states of Punjab and Haryana, but it appears that the drought has afflicted these states as well this year.

:: Vikash Yadav 11:00 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Flames of New York:

The following is an extract of Mike Davis' article that appeared in the Nov/Dec issue of the New Left Review 2001 on the Spetember attack in New York; I though it interesting as it reproduced some of the links that Vikash makes between racism and terrorism in the experience of the Islamic thinker Sayyid Qutb.

In an immediate and inclusive way, suspicion of the Arabs became second nature.
Franz Fanon

Long ago a tourist in New York sent a postcard home. ‘If all the world became America’, wrote the poet Sayyid Qutb, ‘it would undoubtedly be the disaster of humanity.’ Seconded by the Egyptian government to study US educational methods, Qutb disembarked at the 42nd Street Pier in autumn 1948 an admirer of liberal modernity. But he was revulsed by Truman America and underwent a deep religious reconversion. He returned to Cairo two years later a fervent adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood and was soon arrested as its leading propagandist. After eleven years in prison, he was hung in 1966 on trumped-up charges of conspiring to overthrow Nasser. Qutb is universally acclaimed as the major philosopher of radical Islamism, if not literally, as the New York Times alleges, the ‘intellectual grandfather to Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists’. His masterpiece, Milestones (1964), is routinely described as the Islamist version of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?

Why did Qutb become the Anti-Whitman, recoiling in disgust from the legendary excitement of Manhattan? Understanding his hostility to the self-proclaimed ‘capital of the twentieth century’ might shed some light on the genealogy of the Muslim milieux that have applauded the destruction of US capitalism’s most monumental symbol. Pop analysis, of course, fits the person into the prefabricated stereotype. Thus for Robert Worth and Judith Shulevitz (writing separately in the New York Times), the 42-year-old Egyptian literary critic and poet was, like all Muslim fanatics, a prude scandalized by big city ‘decadence’, by the Kinsey Report, by dancing and sexual promiscuity. Indeed Qutb did complain about the ‘pornographic’ content of much American popular culture, just as he criticized the national obsession with tending lawns to the neglect of family life and the crass materialism that smothered charity. But the great scandal of New York—and his reaction was the same as García Lorca’s twenty years before—was ‘ evil and fanatic racial discrimination’. No doubt Qutb, a black man from Upper Egypt, had wounding encounters with Jim Crow.

Qutb’s tourist experiences today might be more traumatic. He might be in solitary confinement, without access to relatives or a lawyer, for the ‘terrorist’ crime of having overstayed his visa or simply having aroused the suspicion of his neighbours. The real burden of the new urban fear—the part that is not hallucinatory or hyperbolized—is borne by those who fit the racial profile of white anxiety: Arab and Muslim Americans, but also anyone with an unusual head-covering, Middle Eastern passport or unpopular beliefs about Israel. For those caught squarely in the middle of this paranoid gestalt—say, a Pakistani cab driver in New York or a Sikh electronics engineer in California—there is the threat of violence, but, even more, the certainty of surveillance by powers ‘vast and cool and unsympathetic’. [30] ‘Otherness’—Arabs, Korans and spores—has become the central obsession of that interminable Pentagon briefing and George W. Bush celebration that passes for American television. Indeed, the ‘Threat to America’ (another network branding) is depicted as essentially extraterrestrial: the Middle East is the Angry Red Planet sending its monsters to live amongst us and murder us.

Tous martiens

Very little of the violent domestic backlash has been reported in the mainstream media. The big city dailies and news networks have shown patriotic concern for the US image abroad by downplaying what otherwise might have been recognized as the good ole boy equivalent of Kristallnacht. Yet even the fragmentary statistics are chilling. In the six weeks after 11 September, civil rights groups estimate that there were at least six murders and one thousand serious assaults committed against people perceived as ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’, including several hundred attacks on Sikhs. The Texas Observer, a progressive weekly that has refused to low-profile domestic terror, reported in early October on the violence that had ‘ricocheted’ through Dallas suburbs in the immediate aftermath of the New York and DC attacks. In addition to the hate murder of an immigrant Pakistani grocery proprietor, three mosques were bombed or shot at, a Romanian jogger was beaten because he looked ‘Middle Eastern’, and two Ethiopians were stabbed while touring the Fort Worth botanical gardens. Local Muslim leaders blamed the news media, particularly the Dallas Morning News, for helping instigate violence with inflammatory headlines like ‘Soldiers of Terror Living Next Door!’

If such incidents recall the ‘Arab hunts’ in metropolitan France during the Algerian War that Franz Fanon denounced (‘even a South American was riddled with bullets because he looked like a North African’), then the Justice Department’s frenzied search for Al-Qaeda ‘sleepers’ stirs memories of that other great ‘terrorist manhunt,’ the notorious Palmer raids of 1919–20 when thousands of immigrant radicals were arrested without warrant or cause, and then hundreds deported, after a series of package-bomb explosions in Washington DC. (The bombing of Wall Street was assumed to have been anarchist revenge for the deportations.) This time the New York Times reports that 11,000-plus have been arrested and detained in the course of the government’s ‘terrorism investigation’. Many of these have disappeared into a secretive federal maze, where they have been denied lawyers, beaten by guards and inmates, blindfolded, subjected to sensory deprivation, and forced to take lie-detector tests. At least one detainee has died and scores, against whom no criminal charges have been filed, are being held under the indefinite detention permitted by immigration law. Only four are rumoured to have any direct connexion to bin Laden. Most simply have overstayed visas or used false IDs: a not uncommon status in a nation where an estimated ten to twelve million undocumented immigrants provide indispensable cheap labour.

Fanon probably would not be surprised that frustrated FBI investigators, like the French Sûreté before them, are lobbying to take recalcitrant suspects down to the scream-proof basement where the batteries and electrodes are kept. For the first time in American history there is a serious public campaign to justify torture in police interrogation. With the op-ed support of leading liberals like Jonathan Alter in Newsweek, the FBI wants access to methods that the Washington Post euphemistically characterized as ‘employed occasionally by Israeli interrogators’. If US courts balk at such rough work, the alternative is to export the task to overseas professionals like the Mossad. ‘Another idea’, the Post explained on 21 October, ‘is extraditing the suspects to allied countries where security services sometimes employ threats to family members or resort to torture.’

Short of electrodes, however, Congress (minus an opposition party) has recently given the Justice Department a cornucopia of vaguely worded and sinister powers. The ‘Proved Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’ (PATRIOT) cages non-citizens, including millions of Latino and Asian immigrants, within ruthless new categories of surveillance, prosecution and liability to deportation. But it is only a cornerstone for the full-fledged Homeland Security State envisioned by the junior Bush administration. At a Halloween press conference, Colin Powell, sounding like he had just finished reading Neuromancer, gloated over plans for a vast centralized data warehouse that would store ‘every derogatory piece of information’ on visitors and would-be immigrants. Federal law enforcement is being restructured so that the FBI can permanently focus on the War against Terrorism—meaning that it will largely become an elite immigration police—while a mysterious new Pentagon entity, the Homeland Defence Command, will presumably adopt the Mexican border as a principal battlefield. Both Mexico and Canada are under tremendous pressure to tighten their immigration policies to Washington’s standards. Indeed, to the delight of nativists and neo-fascists everywhere, the entire OECD bloc seems to be raising drawbridges and bolting doors against the rest of humanity.

The globalization of fear has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Automatically, the Security Council endorsed the blank cheque that Congress issued the White House to ‘rid the world of evil’, leaving American fighter pilots to drop cluster bombs chalked with the names of dead Manhattan firefighters on the ruins of Kabul—a city infinitely more tragic than New York. Terror has become the steroid of empire. However nervously, the established order everywhere has rallied around the Stars and Stripes. As a gloating and still undead Henry Kissinger has pointed out, it is the best thing since Metternich last dined with the Czar.

From Dead Cities , to appear in 2002


:: Conrad Barwa 5:15 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Censorship:

Indian censors have blocked Anand Patwardhan's "War and Peace," an anti-nuclear weapons film that won best film and international jury awards at the Bombay International Film Festival this year. An article is available on CNN.

According to CNN:

Among scenes the board wants cut are those showing leaders of the Hindu nationalist ruling coalition proclaiming at public rallies that the nuclear tests had put India on the world map.

So much for speaking truth to power.


:: Vikash Yadav 11:54 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Contracts & Consent:

Conrad, well it looks like we actually have not gotten a good idea of each other's position. First, I think that I would include implicit agreements within the category of the deferred. Second, I always assume that there is an asymmetry in power relations and bargaining positions. I do not see any contradiction in saying that deferral only prolongs/defers the (re)inscription of hierarchical relations. In fact, I think that power relations are so skewed that it is not possible to give free consent to a particular social act (c'mon my rhetoric is closer to Foucault than Locke/Rousseau). To be honest I am pretty sure that you also do not believe in contractual theories as you were the one who argued about the silenced voices that accompany any proclamation. You seem to agree that the agenda is always manipulated, and that relations are asymmetric. In fact, you go so far as to say that an individual or group is not always the best advocate of their own position. If these characterizations of your position are correct, then it seems to follow that you do not really believe in contractual theories.

I am actually not so interested in the violence of one group (strong) upon another (weak). I am interested in some related issues: (1) how are the categories of violences constructed; (2) how is violence productive of particular social relations; (3) what are the alternatives modes of coercion that stop short of touching the body and yet produce the same or greater effects; (4) when are the strategies of power reversible?

I guess I can see the link between my critique of the ubiquity of violence/silence and its traces and the use of power in Foucault. I believe that Foucault floods the stage with power in order to probelmatize the analysis of power through categories of the subject that are assumed to exist outside of power relationships. I guess I would agree that the ubiquity of power and violence help us to see the ways in which these forces are productive of the subject. Although I would maintain that one still needs to maintain a distinction between physical and psychic violence, whereas I do not accept the need to differentiate typologies of power. I'll think about that position a bit more though.

I don't believe I said that all deferral rests upon self-deception, only that some deferral is facilitated by self-deception. I am sure that Ambdedkar was not deceived by Gandhi or others. Although I think we should be careful to avoid the notion of a group that is consistently conscious of its true interests (i.e., a group that is not subject to false-consciousness). I think even the idea of the "group" (or class, or nation) reflects a degree of self-deception.

I'm afraid I really don't understand your distinction between the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary spheres. But perhaps we can pick all of this up at a later point....

:: Vikash Yadav 11:36 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Re: Violence and the Foundational Moment:

I would just like to add some concluding thoughts on the concept of violence and the foundational moment. I think we have both reached a good understanding of each others’ position though some basic points of difference remain. Some of this can be attributed to the applications involved, as pointed out earlier I am not interested in the foundational moment of Civil Society or the Social in general, but rather with the process of Nation-state formation. Thinking particularly of decolonisation and the emergence of the non-European world in this respect, particularly the former colonies such a process was and has been imbued with violence. Part of the problem also can be traced to my reluctance to use the term ”moment of deferral” this reminds me too much of a liberal-constitutionalist turn of phrase and comes close to gentrifying the experience of the foundational moment – i.e. what was deferred and who did the deferring at such a moment, if we look at these issues closer I think we can see that a lot of the “deferred issues” were not really deferred but rather that a implicit agreement or understanding was reached and that such implicit compromises/contracts were later violated or broken. In any case I think this also ignores the very unequal power positions and bargaining abilities of different groups involved in such a process, such a skewed process embodies a degree of forced coercion that I do not think can be covered by the term deferral.

I should clarify that I do not think that your argument was one that is especially susceptible to the Derridean critique, but just wanted to map put some of the potential pitfalls that many accounts of the foundational moment can lapse into; it is not my intention to say whether you do establish a metaphysics of presence in your argument as I am not a deconstructivist (though I would imagine that someone who was would be able to put forward such a proposition and support it). I concur with your criticisms of the Derridean logic, though I still wish that a more conclusive and stronger refutation of the textual approach could be formulated as I have yet to see one that is really convincing. I don’t want to descend into the familiar spiral of “As there can be no single meta-narrative, even such a claim is putting forward a claim to be a meta-narrative”. This smacks to me of the kind of liberal pluralism advocated by liberals such as Isaiah Berlin, as someone once remarked to me, “His big Idea is that there are no Big Ideas”. As you can see this kind of argument can very quickly become tautological and circular. Your comments on silence and violence intrigue me, though it was not part of my argument that the two are necessarily or always related; as I have remarked before it is part of my understanding of the sphere of citizenship that we sometimes speak for others and in turn are spoken for by others, this can take many forms and such silences do not always involve violence (some of the problem lies in my view that it is not always a case that an individual or group is always necessarily the best advocate of their or his/her own cause/situation; we need to tread a careful line here as there is margin for error in several directions but just as one can say that it is difficult to speak on behalf of others or the Other, what is to say that the Other can necessarily perform such a function better, this may be part of the reason why many on the orthodox left such as traditional Marxists have responded to Postmodernist critiques with accusations of class bias and favouring the status quo; while I think such a response is not wholly accurate, rather than get into a sterile debate combating it I think a better response might be to discern different strands with Postmodernism or distinguish between different approaches that are usually collapsed together such as Postmodernism and Post-structuralism, to my mind certain aspects of the latter especially make it hostile to any established system of power/knowledge; this may be a problem if we lived in a socialist/leftist utopian world but since we don’t, I think a lot of leftist responses are unfair but this is another topic).

I acknowledge your point about how seeing the trace of violence in every action can render conceptual differences irrelevant, invalidating the concept of violence itself. This is a possible danger but it is not my point as I am more interested in the violence amongst groups and how it is practised by one group of people upon another in a recurring fashion. The problem of generalised violence is not one I address and I don’t think it is quite the one that faces us here, as what see is not a random or shifting type of violence but rather a stratified type of violence which has tended to re-occur in a certain fashion, such as that by the socially and economically dominant groups upon those who are neither. What bothers me really in other word is the violence of the strong upon the weak, not of the strong against the strong or the weak against the weak (though I hasten to add that I don’t condone the latter type of violence either, I don’t see it as a social problem for us in the same way nor do I find it quite as repugnant); I agree with you that violence permeates our society (indeed all societies) and cannot be removed or eliminated completely. For example, when one talks of domestic violence in the sense of physical abuse of spouses by their partners, I have no doubt that some of it reflects the abuse by wives of their husbands (there are quite serious cases of this too) but I don’t quite see it as a problem in the way that husbands abuse their wives. This is a serious problem in parts of India, and is one of the main forces behind the prohibition movement backed by women in rural areas of Haryana and Andhra Pradesh, as drunk husbands frequently indulge in physical violence against their wives. Therefore the way violence is articulated and the patterns it forms can still be investigated, and given that I think we are interested only in particular forms of violence I do not think we are in danger of erasing the conceptual boundaries. Another objection to this argument, though one which I have less sympathy with is the fact that a similar charge can be made against the Foucauldian concept of power: just as Foucault sees the traces of power everywhere and in all social relations this lays him open to a similar accusation of erasing conceptual boundaries; of course he can mitigate some of the force of this criticism by elaborating his more subtle and polyvalent understanding of power; it could be argued that one could do the same for the effects and nature of violence, as it is also a potentially productive force. So in response to the invalidating argument about one seeing traces of violence everywhere, one could reply by using violence in a Foucauldian-type system replacing power with violence. In fact the conceptual systems of several thinkers can be seen this way: as for example one of the biggest differences between Foucault and Deleuze is that the former organises his theory around the concept of power while the latter does so with desire.

In regards to the foundational moment, I think I would only really concur completely with (3) namely that such a moment is usually conceived of retroactively – e.g. when can we trace the origins of the Nationalist movement in India: the 1857 Indian Mutiny? The founding of the Congress in 1885? The Non-cooperation movement of the early 1902’s? The first Partition of Bengal in 1905 and the resulting Swadeshi movement? The Quit India Movement of 1942? How many people actually know what Nehru refers to when he spoke of the “tryst with destiny” in his famous midnight address to the nation. I still recall meeting villagers in rural parts of West Bengal who were only vaguely aware of the creation of Pakistan and thought of it more of a subsidiary province of India than a separate and usually hostile country and who were unaware of the existence of Bangladesh as a distinct country – to them obviously the 1947 Partition of Bengal had passed them by, as they still believed that they were living in an undivided province. The reality may not be so different on the ground as the porous border with India-Bangladesh has resulted in huge cross-border migration and little restriction on the exchange of peoples; this is relatively invisible from the point of view of the Central state in New Delhi, in a state like West Bengal where culture compete with religion as a strong unifying factor and which has calm communal relations, it is much more apparent in a state such as Assam where the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious differences between the native Assamese and the Bangladeshi migrants has contributed to the on going violence and unrest in the state.

Where I would disagree with you is on the issue of deferral and self-deception (I will explore some of the grounds of my disagreement using the Indian Nationalist movement as a prime referent). I think that this is a somewhat optimistic and generous reading of the foundational moment; as pointed out earlier it implies a degree of assent and equivalence, which I do not think, exists or existed between groups. For example, the mass movement against the British mobilised by the native elites in colonial India could only have worked under several rubrics, the main one used was that of a Gandhian nationalism which made strong universalist and emancipatory claims (within it must be said a largely Hindu framework); my view is that in many ways most nationalist/anti-colonial movements used universalist and liberatory claims both on which to base their ideologies and as ways of mobilising subaltern groups. This obviously to a great degree ignored the problem of intra-group violence and inequity, subordinating this to the goal of decolonisation; such a deferral as you note was characteristic of most such movements and an important condition of their success yet the same hierarchal and inegalitarian patterns reasserted themselves after formal decolonisation – this is the familiar problem that Fanon pointed out about the national bourgeoisie and the crux of the famous debate over the character of the anti-colonial movements in the colonies, that took place between Lenin and MN Roy in the 1920’s; I won’t recreate these debates here but they capture the essence of some of our divergence on this issue: namely that the foundational moment hides/conceals certain types of violence within the movement that establishes it. This is particular to the movement/group that establishes it as there is very little intra-group violence amongst the group that is replaced or destroyed i.e. the colonisers, this in itself should give some cause for suspicion. In India, the universalist, egalitarian claims made by Congress Nationalism were generally speaking belied very soon after formal independence: the ability of anti-colonial nationalism to speak for all the colonised irrespective of religion was quickly proven mistaken by the calamity of Partition. Yet even within India the supposed victory of the foundational moment betrayed a whole host of subordinate groups such as women, Dalits, the rural poor, non-propertied classes and more recently religious minorities. The Nationalist-Congress position as regards women and Dalits is very instructive I think on this score. As Partha Chatterjee argues in his essay “The Nationalist Resolution of the Woman Question”, the new spaces and opportunities opened up for women by participation in all aspects of the anti-colonial struggle such as the Civil Disobedience campaigns, being arrested and imprisoned, participating in political planning and strategising etc. brought women out of the kitchen and into the mainstream giving them a voice and influence on a scale that had not occurred in such a way before (not that they dominated the movement but their involvement was something till then unheard of on such a level, especially in rural India); and contributed greatly to the success of the movement as well as the enhancement of its image as an emancipatory and dynamic phenomenon. However, the approach to issues such as civil law and anti-discriminatory measures show the reluctance of the Congress once in power to continue or increase such a role for women in society or politically – Geraldine Forbes in her penetrating study of Women in India characterises the nationalist approach to the “Woman Question” as one of the burning house – where if a house (read: nation) is on fire then all members of the family (read: society) should come out and help put out the fire, but once the fire is put out the women should go back into the house. I think this captures the attitude of many (male) members of the nationalist elite very well at the time and it also explains the enormous difficulty the government had in pushing through a relatively moderate piece of legislation regulating personal law – the Hindu Code bill, a point on which the then Law Minister eventually resigned in disgust. This leads on to the role of the Dalits in the Nationalist movement, one could argue (as I think your approach would mean) that the issue of internal social reform such as the discrimination against the Dalits, was deferred until after the foundational moment of independence and was subordinated to the Freedom movement. This interpretation I think hides/conceals several things: firstly that the daily practise of discrimination continued throughout the period and this did include acts of violence both of a physical and sexual nature. Secondly, it conceals the nature that violence played in reaching such an “agreement”, the Poona Pact between Gandhi and Ambedkar relegated the issue, but the tactic of fasting used by Gandhi was a very direct form of blackmail and pressured Ambedkar, who was less concerned for Gandhi’s welfare than he was of the retaliation he knew would take place across village India as a backlash if Gandhi had died, on the Dalit community; fear of such violence and the damage it would do to his community played a large part in Ambedkar’s concession to Gandhi at Poona. Violence here played a key role in “deferring” internal dissent but it was a deferral given very grudgingly and under duress.

As to the point of self-deception, one must ask self-deception by whom and why? I would argue certain sections of the nationalist elite may have “deceived” themselves, though even this can be contested. Certainly Gandhi and Nehru may have convinced themselves that they had successfully arranged the deferral of many key issues in subordination to the anti-colonial movement; though subsequent events proved them wrong in some respects. The rise of the Muslim League and the Pakistan movement was at least partly due to the complacency with which some Nationalists thought they had resolved the problem of religious identities; though the alienation of the important Muslim elite community in the United Provinces by the refusal of the Congress, once in power to share office also contributed to the electoral gains made the separatist Muslims. Also, I doubt that Ambedkar or many in the politically active Dalit community were under any deception about what they had bargained away, the very title of Ambedkar’s tract “What Gandhi and Congress have done to the Untouchables” reflects this awareness. Generally speaking I think that subaltern groups are all too aware of what “deferral” means for them and their acceptance has more to do with the weakness of their structural position and mobilisational capacity than any degree of “self-deception”. Moreover, quite of few within the Nationalist movement were also aware of the actual consequences of “deferral” and had no intention of reversing or allowing the re-emergence of these issues after the foundational moment had passed – Vallabhai Patel in this regard was more representative of many Congressmen than Nehru or Gandhi.

In sum, what I find disturbing is the forced nature of the “deferral” and its repetitive nature – there are certain repetitions-in-rupture that take place and part of the problem as Spivak argues is to avoid them. While I would agree with you that movements that base themselves on universalist claims do by their internal logic mean that some dissent has to be deferred or some ordinal agreement of priorities reached, what has happened all to often is a reassertion of the old status quo in a new guise, as the “deferred issues” tend to be artificially suppressed – I suppose though to be more accurate the foundational moment is then less one of violence than one of betrayal as the implicit or explicit agreements/contracts that are reached are ones that are not intended to be honoured or addressed after the moment has passed.

To conclude, problems still remain in thinking of the foundational moment as one of violence – in the sense that I use the term in referring to Nation-states as opposed to Civil Society or conceptions of the Social, the only way I think it can be defended is by recourse to some notion of Symbolic violence that occurs when there is a change in the political, legal and institutional basis of power. At its most basic I suppose the argument would run in the following manner: foundational moments occur when the basis of power and its legitimacy in the Symbolic sphere of communication, action and discourse changes, (decolonisation, a movement from dictatorship to democracy, extension of universal adult franchise etc. can be subsumed under this categorisation). Such a changes of power and legitimacy can precede or follow changes in Real (social structure, economy etc.) and those in the Imaginary (ideology, attitudes, beliefs, world-views etc.) but such relationships between the three spheres cannot be seen in a simple linear or mechanistic fashion; in particular as direction of change in the three spheres is rarely (if at all) in conjunction or harmonious there will always be a level of dissonance or adjustment as changes in one sphere react or catch-up with changes in another. The foundational moment within the Symbolic sphere encapsulates these the direction and nature of these changes and this is why frequently it is one of violence/struggle, as even when the end or outcome can be foreseen the lack of consensus across different arenas of thought and action prevent a peaceful resolution. As the dynamics of forces within the Imaginary and Real spheres are usually in a constant state of flux and movement, this is why the unfulfilled promise or compromises of any one foundational moment can so frequently become the basis of future conflict/unrest within the Symbolic. Given the nature of power when a conflict occurs, I do not think different forces of power can accept a peaceful solution as it is in the nature of any power/knowledge structure to put up a struggle when confronted by another such structure that is a rival (and more powerful) even if it is doomed to be unsuccessful – no discredited or outdated Symbolic order will simply yield to another without some resistance – though the resistance can be of an extremely token nature in the most mild cases (e.g. the breaking down of the Berlin Wall after 1989 as an act of Symbolic violence). Once the new Symbolic order is in place after the foundational moment (which is really the moment of victory for the new order over the old) this has an effect on the Imaginary and Real spheres where change is felt and arouses in its turn resistance, which leads to a new struggle. The change over in Symbolic orders is one that always involves violence, I feel, so that even when there is actually no violence or very little such as in the anti-colonial movement in Anglophone West African states like Ghana, it is manufactured if not in the present then retroactively. When such changeovers are uncertain or not easily discernible this leads to a reinterpretation of past events in such a way as to posit a violent struggle which results in emancipation; I don’t fully agree with Walter Benjamin’s theory that such a view of history is always the historiography of the dominant classes of an epoch, as such a process of recreation differs across communities within any given time period – i.e. such an understanding of history though drawing on the same sources and using the same concepts and metaphors is not necessarily a synchronic form of communication. Thus for example, Dalits while fully cognisant of the key moments of the anti-colonial struggle can see much of the success as the site of betrayal or compromise rather than the site of emancipation or redemption. This is why recent attacks that seek to discredit figures like Ambedkar – I have Arun Shourie’s diatribe against Ambedkar entitled “Worshipping False Gods:Feet of Clay”, misunderstand the different view of history that a different perspective can engender; one of Shourie’s main criticisms seek to paint Ambedkar as a collaborator with the British colonial regime and discusses at length various instances of co-operation by Ambedkar with the Colonial authorities and government. This of course, overlooks the fact that for many Dalits the real enemy was an internal one – namely the upper castes and particularly the Brahmins as well as the orthodox Hindu Socio-economic order: such a conclusion is not surprising given the real daily experiences of most Dalits the time (not that the situation had improved drastically for the majority), as in Ambedkar’s words the British were the distant enemy, while the orthodox Hindus were the “near enemy”. Concentrating on the issue of formal decolonisation and relegating other social issues to the background became a good way of avoiding dissension over divisive issues and gave a false image of unity to the Nationalist movement. Pure relegation was impossible so cosmetic changes and assurances/rhetoric on more concrete measures once in power were given, yet as the experience of the first administration under Nehru and the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly show the reluctance if not outright hostility for these issues to be addressed once the “distant enemy” had been vanquished.

The Constituent Assembly debates, which examined and vetted the Constitution of India in its modern form, make interesting reading today; they strike me as reminiscent of the 19th debate and quandary that the then Liberals found themselves enmeshed in. Having grounded opposition to monarchy, aristocracy and oligarchy in the language of universal rights and egalitarian conceptions of society, once in power they faced the choice of how to actually implement these measures: in debating how to do so they exposed much of the prejudices of their own socio-economic origins and the typical middle-class “fear of the masses”. Predictably their attempts were piecemeal, gradual and reformist aimed more at maintaining law and order and reassuring propertied interests than in socio-economic reform or progress.

Returning to Shourie’s work, what it betrays more than a distorted understanding of the past and how it relates to current political trends, is a basic incomprehension of how different communities can see the past, this does not even arise as an issue for Shourie and in this he reflects a certain understanding of the foundational moment that is shared by many of the dominant classes in post-colonial Indian history. The gap in understanding is symptomatic of the current order, yet is not rigidly determined – I would argue that Hindutva activists and thinkers were very perceptive and empathetic towards the mainstream secular narrative of history, this is why they were so easily able to subvert it with little significant resistance at the Symbolic level but the inability to cross caste, linguistic and ethnic divides in the same way has frustrated the Hindutva discourses’ attempts to silence these other voices – paradoxically I think this is related to the inability to insert themselves in this alternative narrative view and undermine from within as they did with the secular narrative of the Nationalist movement. This points again Vikash to your observation that any foundational moment opens up spaces just as it closes them and this is a space for future contention.

Wrapping up my thoughts on this topic, I think so much is still left unanswered and my basic dilemma which I had when we started this discussion still remains – namely that while I feel there is a great degree of truth to the assertion that the foundational moment is always one of violence, I struggle to theorise this in a satisfactory manner. I want to avoid a wide conceptualisation that would render differences meaningless and the view that a succession of foundational moments occur with violence, each one spawning a new cycle of unrest-struggle-violence in a circular fashion. It should be possible to impose some sort of pattern and order while still retaining an adequate theory of the nature of foundational moment and the violence that goes with them, this could be something to which we can return to in the future as I am dissatisfied with my own answers to the problem as there as aspects which resist an easy integration into any approach I advocate – an example that comes to mind is the collapse of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe during 1989-90, which with a few exceptions such as the Ceasucescu regime in Romania fell without any large level of overt or implicit violence except that of a purely symbolic nature. The problem remains.

:: Conrad Barwa 10:37 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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