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:: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 ::
Battlefields, Ghosts, and Sacred Spaces:Recent events in the temples of Kashmir and Gujarat, coupled with Conrad's excellent posts below on Sacred Geographies and Imagined Landscapes has made me think about the differences between the spaces of battle in the US and India. I thought I would offer some initial thoughts...
Americans have come to fight their wars on empty battlefields. They rarely face their enemies in battle preferring to use technology to preempt a battle. The American military machine seeks to fight its battles before troops even have time to assemble. Stealth bombers and cruise missiles are deployed to wipe out the infrastructures of war and civilization long before American troops move on the ground.
For the "spectators" on the home front, their vision is mediated by the erie greyscale of surveillance cameras mounted behind cockpits. In fact, the American vision of destruction, crime, and terror is often relayed through surveillance camera footage with the feeling of time-lapse photography. In this greyscale reality, a series ghosts from petty shoplifters to highschool gunmen to airplane high-jackers mill about in a looped surreal. The clean anesthetic "reality" that makes up the American imagination of war, crime, and conflict is hauntingly mute. In fact, terrorists and enemies of the American Empire can only succeed in shocking Americans if they can manage to make Americans see in vivid colors and hear the horrors of a populated battlefield like Mogadishu or New York City. Americans prefer their greyscale visions of horror because it gives them the fantasy of participation and the distance from suffering that they desire. The greyscale vision also offers the reassurance of the common, distant, and past.
There are three types of battlefields in South Asia. The old battlefields are the legacy of WWI and European trench warfare where troops have massed along a line of fortified positions in a monotonous stalemate punctuated by artillery fire. The new battlefields are the sacred space of temples, mosques, churches, and gurudwaras, as well as the residential neighborhoods and pre-ghettos.
The new sacred battlefields are populated by the pious and haunted by the Gods; the residential battlefields are populated by the mundane and haunted by the massacres of years past.
From Operation Blue Star and the destruction of the Babri Masjid to the attack on Raghunath Temple in Jammu -- we see that the space of the sacred is also the site of battle. Why is this so? Why would militants choose to fight their battles or seek refuge here? And why is the mob revenge that often follows such attacks targeted toward residential neighborhoods rather than a sacred site demolition quid pro quo?
An obvious answer to the first set of questions is that the conflicts in South Asia are often communal. Militants aim to make their conflicts a telegraphic text that is legible to both sides regardless of education level. Of course there have also been attacks on the financial and political symbols of the state, but often these attacks do not resonate in the same way as attacks on sacred spaces (e.g., there are rarely communal riots following an attack on a financial district or an attack on a state institution). There also have been targeted assassinations of specific leaders and massacres of representative groups, but recent attacks that infuse the spectacle of South Asian politics are spatial rather than bodily. That is to say the site of the attack is foregrounded over the bodies of the victims who generally remain nameless aside from a categorical designation.
In response to militant assaults, revenge mob killings seems to selectively target residential areas. There is a cunning science to way in which riots are coordinated in India. To paraphrase an infamous South Philadelphia mafia slogan -- "No is killed who is isn't supposed to be killed." How is it that the sites of battle move so swiftly from the sacred to the residential? I cannot accept that mobs are simply "insane" or "out of control," after all when was the last time that one saw a mob attack the occupants of a wealthy residential neighborhood? Mobs are the product of skillful manipulation.
I don't really have an answer as to why mobs target residential areas in response to militant assaults other than to posit that perhaps the desecration of the sacred is sometimes matched by a desire (particularly amongst Hindu fundamentalists and their sympathisers) to "cleanse" their surroundings of those ethnicities that they believe to be latently impure. In essence, residential riots are mini-"final solutions." They are attempts to transcend the desecrated sacred space by extending the sacred space across the city and eventually the nation.
:: Vikash Yadav 11:51 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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