:: Saturday, March 15, 2003 ::

Digging up Trouble: The Ayodhya Excavation:

The short answer to this is yes. Well, we have already discussed the problems of archaeology in South Asia and its politicisation here . More recent work on the excavations at Ayodhya now show that there was a Buddhist temple from the Saka era there and that this in fact was demolished with the constituent parts later used to build part of the Babri mosque; now Jains are also claiming that the pre-existing temple there was a Jain one. This in itself is not surprising as Jains, Buddhists and “Hindus” were mutually antagonistic and competing religions in pre-Islamic India; the different Buddhist and Jaina versions of the Ramayana for example, show that little love was lost between these different religious groups and that Hinduism itself at the this time was more a collection of different discrete communities (panths) and sampradyas than a unified religious tradition. Searching and pushing too far for concrete and symbolic origins may in fact go some way in undermining the post-colonial artificial unity forced on the Hindu religious tradition in India.

Whatever the outcome, it is disappointing to see distinguished archaeologists such as BB Lal endorsing this mythological view of history and explicitly setting out to base excavation digs by drawing on textual epic references. Quite apart from the political ramifications of this in the current atmosphere; the history of these attempts from Schliemann’s ‘discovery’ of Troy has never been a happy one and one should be well advised to steer clear of such attempts to justify a certain view of the past. The past has a mind of its own and is not just plasticine to be moulded as one desire; attempts to force and weld it into something it is not can backfire spectacularly. Not to say the odious way the discourse which shapes the discussion over sites of religious worship is being couched in India: with claims that “mosques” must be returned to the Hindu community. Whatever else this claim may imply, it is not one that can be made in a democratic mentalite, as it deals with ossified communities rather than individual citizens capable of multiple associations and it sees these communities as means to an end (Hindu Rashtra) rather than as ends in themselves. I would argue that a properly democratic mentality and attitude would see fellow citizens and agglomerations of fellow citizens as ends in themselves to be respected and not the vehicle for achieving some sort of grander project of nation-building or societal achievement. Indian nationalism both in its relatively benign Nehruvian form and its more virulent Saffronist incarnations has not really succeeded in this regard.

:: Conrad Barwa 7:42 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Modern Multiculturalism, the role of the Media and the uncertainty of Terrorism: A look at The Siege:

Edward Zwick’s film The Siege opened in November 1998, just a few weeks before President Clinton, on the day before an impeachment vote was scheduled in the House of Representatives, ordered renewed bombing of Iraq as a punishment for its failure to comply with the protocols of UN inspections established after the 1991 Gulf War. Despite the film’s timely subject matter (Muslim Arab terrorists attacking New York City) and its star power (the film starred Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis), the film did not do very well, earning only $41 million in its initial theatre run (compared to $80 million for the Rugrats movie in approximately the same period). When it was released on video however, The Siege topped the rental charts for several weeks (in the USA). Initially subject to a boycott by the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, The Siege actually presented a view of Arabs and Arab Americans that was almost unprecedented in American movies – not because of its plot, which seemed to be a straightforward tale of terrorism-at-home, but because of the way in which it was such a definitively and self-consciously post-Gulf War film. Through its interest in visuality and surveillance, the film redeployed and commented on the type of images that were highlighted in Gulf War coverage. Even more important, its interest in Arab Americans as an immigrant population challenged, though it did not entirely explode, the logic of military assertiveness.

The Siege mobilises the major elements of the action-terrorism genre to construct a distinctly liberal narrative of race and foreign policy. The basic plot elements are simple: an African-American counter-terrorism specialist, Tony Hubbard (Denzel Washington), is faced with an escalating series of terrorist bombings in New York City. His task is to find the terrorists, who are soon revealed to be Islamic fundamentalists. When, despite great bravery he fails to end the attacks, he fails to end the attacks, Congress puts the city under martial law. The military commander (Bruce Willis) invades the city and rounds up the Arab American males, herding them into a makeshift concentration camp in Yankee Stadium. The final part of the film is organised around Hubbard’s two key tasks: stopping the terrorists through legal and proper means, and stopping the abuse of authority represented by Bruce Willis’ army general and exemplified in the concentration camp. As an action film, The Siege is interested in many of the same things that other (more conservative) films in the genre: the workings of technology; the play of gender and sexuality; and of course the thrill of threat and the satisfaction of rescue. Also like many other 1990s and 1980s action movies, The Siege presents, and thus posits, the multiracial makeup of military and police forces. Overall, though, the particular way in which this film situates itself and its audience distinguishes it from apparently similar films. For that reason, its mixed success at the box office is quite interesting, in part because of what it suggests about the promise and the limits of a more liberal version of multiculturalism at the turn of the 21st century.

The Siege tells its story of race, terrorism and desire, through complex layers of representation; images from television news and the surveillance operations of various security forces structures both the form and the content of the film narrative. At key moments, the act of viewing forms a crucial subtext to the surface events of the film’s plot. While the movie is about terrorism in New York, and secondarily about the problem of race and national identity, it is also a movie about television – particularly television news. These levels of narrative reinforce each other, drawing on complex ways that terrorism; race, television and the Middle East had long been linked in US discourse.

The movie opens with an image of a bomb exploding and a building crumbling; the shot looks grainy, in a square frame. We hear a voice-over; Saudi Arabia is mentioned, as is a US military installation. As an audience, we know from the look of the image that we are watching television news; it is likely that many viewers would also remember the bombing of the US marine barracks in Dahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1996. Next, another fictional news broadcast talks about a suspect in the bombing, “Sheik Ahmed Bin Talal.” The character of the “Sheik” suggests the bombing of the New York’s World Trade Centre five years earlier, for which the Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and several other Islamic fundamentalists living in the United States were arrested and ultimately convicted for. That connection is only underlined when a few scenes later, a muezzin is shown offering the Muslim call to prayer from a mosque. Playing on the audience’s assumption that the setting is still the Middle East, the camera slowly zooms out to show the streets of Brooklyn with the Manhattan skyline in the background. The movie will return several times to this reality: Middle Eastern Muslims are no longer only in the Middle East.

What the audience sees in the film is often presented via the technologies of satellite imagery, surveillance equipment, and television. Vision mediated by technology is almost like a character in this movie; television and surveillance equipment appear at key moments in the plot, enabling action and commenting on events. Unlike earlier films like Delta Force, television is no longer the enemy and here represents truth and history. The film opens by soliciting its viewers with news sequences, encouraging them to think intertextually, to remember recent terrorist events through their experience of watching those events on TV. Frequent television and radio news punctuate the rest of the story, narrated by well-known television and radio anchors (several from National Public Radio), they invite the audience to see films as true to life. Of course, use of news accounts within films is hardly unusual, but the sophistication of the “news” sequences and their repeated use throughout the narration gives The Siege a distinctly self-consciousness about information. Knowledge about the techniques of viewing becomes knowledge about the security state – the threat it poses, and the threat it contains.

The security state is represented by two types of institutions. The first is the military, which along with the CIA, is defined by its intrusiveness, its massive resources and its ruthlessness. The other type of institution is represented by the FBI, which, as personified by Denzel Washington’s Agent Hubbard, is defined by its commitment to anti-terrorism, its integrity, and relative lack of resources. In the word of the film, the FBI is both competent and human – negotiators get stuck in traffic, agents lose perpetuators; and the authority of the agency is undermined by the military takeover. The portrayal of the FBI is aided by Washington’s star persona; in the Hollywood of the 1990s, he was known as a gentle, generous person, who usually played sympathetic, if flawed characters in serious films (Washington had also starred as a conscientious military man in the Gulf War film Courage under Fire). The humanity of the FBI is also exemplified by its racial diversity and its relative lack feminist consciousness. Hubbard oversees a team that includes another African American man, an Asian American woman, two white men, and an Arab American man, Frank Haddad (Tony Shalhoub). The FBI is also aided by a tough white female CIA agent (Annette Bening), whose ownership of her own sexuality is paralleled by her tough competence. She manages her Palestinian informer in part through sexual manipulation, just as she manages the FBI team in part by lying about her true identity. The fundamental division between security state agencies is paralleled by another division, that between Arab citizens and Arab terrorists. Although one of the interesting things about The Siege is its relatively sympathetic portrayal of the motivations of the bombers – Sami Bouajila gives a marvellously nuanced performance as the Muslim fundamentalist Samir – the structuring logic of the film requires a sharp distinction between those within and those outside the law. Just as the violence and the authoritarianism of Willis’ conniving general is balanced by the integrity and the reasonableness of Washington’s Agent Hubbard, so the fanaticism of Samir and the terrorists are balanced by the gentleness and humour of the law-abiding figure – that of the Arab American Agent Haddad. Frank, the number two person on the counter-terrorism team, is a practising Muslim, a US citizen born in Lebanon, and a proud family man. He is located within a much larger immigrant community, people who have made the United States their home, and the film explores this community fondly in some detail; the Arab markets and coffee shops in Brooklyn, the streets with signs in Arabic, the mosques and community centres. But somewhere in that world, the terrorists are hiding, waiting to carry out another series of bombings. The terrorists are not immigrants but wayfarers, whose primary identity is with the political struggles involving the United States and Arabs in the Middle East. No one is more anxious than Haddad to catch them.

For Frank, and for the film itself, the roundup and internment of Arab Americans brings a moment of truth. Throughout The Siege, the immigrants in Brooklyn are presented as generally law-abiding citizens; part of the national mosaic, and their roundup is depicted as a horror. The scenes of mass arrests are punctuated with the voice-overs of a call-in radio talk show, in which some people offer racist commentary but others angrily point out the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII and suggest that in the 1990s this could not happen to any other ethnic group in America. At the height of the crisis, Frank’s 13-year-old son is brought to the stadium where the Arab men are being held and Frank desperately searches for him. Hubbard then goes after Frank and find him wandering among the barbed wire, absolutely astounded that after 20 years in the United States, and ten years in the FBI, this could happen to his family. He angrily resigns from the FBI on the spot, insisting to Hubbard that he won’t be their “sand nigger” anymore. Shortly thereafter, Hubbard convinces Frank to rejoin the team; the threat posed by the terrorists is simply too great; the requirements of the nation too compelling. At the end of the film, Frank and Hubbard have found and killed the last of the terrorists and have reasserted civilian control over the city. The system works.

By the time The Siege was released in 1998, its critique of anti-Arab racism had been enabled by nearly three decades of Arab American Activism. That activism had not prevented the outrageous, cartoonish, representations of Arabs in films like, True Lies just four years earlier, but it did allow The Siege to posit Anti-Arab sentiment as a political distortion rather than as a reflection of the nature of Arabs. The film suggested that the threat of terrorism could be managed by distinguishing the “immigrant” from the wayfarer, thus allowing for the reality of Arab immigration in a narrative of liberal embrace. Its focus on the presence of Arab immigrants drew on the logic of the Gulf War scenario but challenged assumptions that the Middle East could be fully externalised and that the “Arabs” or Islam could reliably serve as one half of a moral binary, with “America” on the other side.

The Siege was a post-Gulf War film in another sense, however, in that is served less as a challenge to the discourse of US global reach than as an extension and refinement of it. As much as the film refused some of the racial and nationalist assumptions of the dominant news coverage of the Gulf War, it depended on its audience to understand that issues of terrorism and media were connected to debates about US power in the post-Vietnam world. And in suggesting that the Middle East and its policies profoundly infected and infiltrated the United States, the film knew what is audience knew, that, as a result of the oil crisis, terrorism, Iran, and the Gulf War, the Middle East had become a site of extensive US investment, in every sense of the term. The Siege also shared with the Gulf War coverage some fundamental fascinations: TV and surveillance; the questioning of the United States’ international role after Vietnam; the love and fear of covert power; and the transformations in the role of women in the gendering of the nation-state. Most important, both the film and the news accounts were part of an increasingly self-conscious diversity in images of the nation, and both manifest the assumption (derived in part from their civil rights precursors) that only a genuinely multicultural nation deserves world power.

:: Conrad Barwa 10:35 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Heroes and Martyrs: Symbolism of the Kargil War Funerals - By Max-Jean Zins

In the same way that "a history of political ideas [does not exist] independently of their performance," a history of war cannot be conceived in isolation from its setting. War, a murderous phenomenon par excellence, is indeed a very rich human activity in terms of the shows it puts up: march pasts, gallantry medals, the staging of military gestures on what is aptly called the theatre of operations, etc. This article focuses on one aspect of this ‘show’: the funeral ceremonies organised by the civil and military authorities at New Delhi during the Kargil war between India and Pakistan from April to July, 1999. It will not deal with the causes of this war, nor with the share of responsibility for the war between the two belligerent foes, but will limit itself to a study of the war as a social phenomenon and a generator of norms in a specific domain: namely the funerals of the men who were killed in battle.

Two points are worth noting at the outset. The first relates to the war itself. War takes place in a particular political, strategic and tactical environment. This specific context is what makes the Kargil war unique and without it, the war would not have engendered the effects registered with regard to funerals. These effects were all the more abundant as, all said and done, relatively little blood was shed in the war. Even if the various statistics provided by the Indian Army to date are inadequate for a precise assessment of the number of men killed in battle, the information collected leads one to conclude that the number did not exceed the four hundred mark on the Indian side. Only an analysis of the context can shed some light on the difference between the grandeur of the effects and the relatively small number of those killed. The second point concerns the arena of military funerals specifically, defined here as the space for the expression of the political and social transactions around the soldiers’ deaths. It is on this funeral ground, suddenly crammed with bodies that the Indian government, led by the Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, chose to focus during the 1999 summer. Orchestrating the repatriation of the bodies of the jawans (troops) and officers killed to their families at the end of a long and methodic heroico-morbid choreography, India developed an actual funeral policy whose implications go beyond the framework of the sole instrumentalisation of an armed conflict by a nationalist government for political ends.

The Paradigm of the Hero:

The context of the Kargil war is very special. The topography of the terrain and the political and strategic conditions that determined the nature of the military operations forced the men to fight and die in a manner that favoured the emergence of a particular imagination. The latter focused on the role of the individual fighting the war whose dual dimension – dramatic and tragic – paved the way for the highest glorification. This exaltation constituted the ideological mould of the Kargil war in which the Vajpayee government shaped its funeral policy. Two paradigms were thus forged: the hero and the martyr.In ancient mythology, the hero was a demigod. By extension, he became a legendary figure to whom great courage and super-human feats were attributed. But what constituted this courage and these exploits, if not acts so valorous that they allowed the person who had done them to impact upon his own destiny and that of the world? We may wish to recall that drama in ancient Greek was synonymous with action; the hero was a dramatic actor in the etymological sense of the term, that is to say, a being whose fate was never played out until the curtain fell on the last act of the play in which he was evolving, an act never revealed in advance and that the spectator by definition could not divine as long as the hero continued to play his role. In consequence, there was something profoundly voluntaristic in the hero’s manner of proceeding in the sense that it was fundamentally individual and personal. It is within this frame of reference that India declaimed the different facets of the emblematic figure of the hero through the entire duration of the Kargil war.

The hero is first of all a fighter. He fights against the elements, and the value ascribed to his combat is a measure of the hostile terrain in which he evolves – the more difficult the terrain the more his combat gains in value. The topography of the battlefield constitutes the ground reality of this awesome stage, where life and death come face to face. In this regard, the Kargil sector with its row on row of jagged peaks, some as high as 5000 metres, and an average altitude where the fighting took place around 4000 metres, constitutes an extraordinary backdrop. With the Pakistanis, having taken the heights dominating the sector and secured their positions in solidly constructed bunkers, the Indian infantryman was required to dislodge them under extremely dangerous conditions. These conditions naturally favoured the emergence of a powerful imagination, dramatically depicting the soldier dangling at the end of a rope, eyes fixed on the promontory above that he has to take, one hand on the mountain wall, the other on the trigger, the body exposed to the flying bullets of the enemy holed up in his bunker. It is precisely this image of superhuman progression on the rocky flank of a mountain, which, since May, when the gravity of the stakes represented by the Kargil war began to dawn on the Indian leaders, became the archetype of the popular representation of the war. It was extensively telecast in the news bulletins, while all the newspapers and magazines published photographs and articles. The cardboard cutouts carried on tanks during march-pasts also had the same objective. It was popularised through the innumerable posters and interviews. Political leaders constantly referred to it in their speeches. "Almost all our countrymen have seen on television glimpses of the impossible summits which our heroes overcame and pushed out the enemy… How can we forget such heroes?" recalled the Prime Minister on August 15, 1999, during his traditional Independence Day speech. The Army, on its part, was eager to project the topographical details of the area where its men had died. They laid down their lives, it said on its website, "on a difficult mission on the Jubar ridge", while ascending "a sheer rock-cliff", or clambering on "a narrow, treacherous ridge", or on "a vertical cliff face, snowbound at 16,500 feet", while "climbing the cliff face and fixing the ropes for further assault on the feature", or while "crawling up on a mountain ledge", etc.

Thus Kargil’s heroes also had to become mountaineers in their actions as well as their equipment. The Indian Army reported that some soldiers took the enemy by surprise with the aid of their "cliff assault mountaineering equipment". This aspect reinforced the personal dimension of the heroic act, the mountaineer as the archetype of the sportsman braving nature single-handed. It conferred on the body of the Indian soldier its greatest intelligibility. It allowed the imagination to feed on a multitude of stories, fleshing out the plot of the drama. Heroes of flesh and blood, the Kargil hero became everyman’s hero. "The war acquired a human face, with all the newspapers covering plenty of human interest stories", notes a report published by the New Delhi-based Indian Institute of Mass Communication, which asked if the media had played the role of victim or tool in the way the image of the war was projected in India during the conflict. More than one article out of six on the war focused on the human dimension of the conflict. The popular Press was particularly avid for reports and anecdotes; Hindi language newspapers by themselves had more articles on Kargil than all the English language dailies put together.

Thus from May-June 1999, a Kargil epic was virtually created in India. However, without in any way minimising the courage shown by the combatants, it was partly a myth, for the Kargil victory, according to experts, was to a great extent the result of the intensive artillery strikes, sometimes described as the "unsung heroes of the Kargil war." Supported by the air force and stationed several kilometres away from the battlefield, the importance of the artillery has in fact never been denied. The efficacy of the cannons sold by the Swedish firm Bofors, whose name is linked to a politico-financial corruption scandal in the nineteen eighties, even came in for much praise. However, the individual commitment of the soldiers, clinging to the cliff face attracted much more attention than the actions of the artillery operators themselves. The legend of the Kargil hero, although it corresponded to a particular reality of the fighting, is part of a certain on-the-spot re-writing of history. Above all the Kargil hero is a figure whom everyone can relate to. "When I went to Kargil and met our jawans", declared the Prime Minister on August 15, 1999, "I saw our entire country there: soldiers from Nagaland, from Assam, from Tamil Nadu, from almost every State were fighting for the country. There was not the slightest distance between them on account of caste or region." In fact, the multi-regional composition of the men involved in the Kargil war corroborates these words, although the details may need some further clarification. These details can be taken from the Indian Army’s website, which lists 345 soldiers killed in the war with their names, home addresses as well as the list of medals awarded to them posthumously.

Firstly, the social origin of the Kargil hero is a composite one. The great majority of those killed in battle were infantrymen of rural origin whose parents pursued a range of professions (peasants, artisans, employees), although it is true that some districts, more than others, have for generations been sending their sons to the Army. However, one of the striking features of the war is the relatively high number of officers killed on the battlefield. The Indian Army is traditionally marked by class distinction between officers and conscripts, although for some years now officers are increasingly being recruited from the less affluent social strata. The Indian officer is generally from the country’s urban social elite. In the Kargil war, among the officers killed many were of the rank of captain and major. 21 of the 345 listed on the Indian Army’s website, that is approximately 6 per cent, were officers: 12 were captains, six Army majors and three lieutenants. The number of officers decorated posthumously indicates their physical commitment. Out of the ten officers awarded the highest military honours (the Param Vir Chakra and the Maha Vir Chakra), eight were decorated posthumously. This phenomenon reinforced the idea among the public that death on the battlefield was not reserved for the rank and file. The Indian government in fact officially proclaimed 1999 as "the year of the jawan." This not only increased the respect for the Army as a whole and, therefore, for its myth, but also favoured the process of popular identification with the emblematic figure of the hero, who had laid down his life for the country. For all that, the media did not give identical coverage to officers and soldiers. In the photographs published by the media, the officer was often perceived from the death angle, whereas the soldier was frequently covered from the wounded angle, and was generally shown convalescing in a hospital bed. As if the specific destiny of the former was to die while the latter would have to make do with being wounded. In the split image thus created, the traditional figure of the warrior chief by nature destined to die, contrasts with the portrait of the simple recruit who, although he joins the Army voluntarily and becomes a kshatriya (a member of the warrior caste) in a manner of speaking, despite everything remains a mortal, a little closer to human reality than the officer. This difference in treatment renders the hero somewhat more human so that it is easier for him to find a place in the hearts of the people, whatever their class origin. The Indian Army is of course a professional army, but many felt a close kinship with the Kargil hero. The various types of donations from families that flooded the Army for the duration of the conflict are proof of this. So much so that the High Command felt obliged to put a stop to it especially when the donations took the form of gifts in kind, by reminding them that the Indian Army was a modern institution capable of meeting its needs.

Secondly, the Kargil hero can be considered a pan-Indian hero. In fact, most Indian States lost their share of men, even if the price paid by the States geographically closer to the conflict was definitely higher. From this point of view, it is significant that on August 15, 1999, the Prime Minister chose to illustrate the Indian-ness of the soldiers by citing precisely those States that were the least affected by the war (Nagaland, Assam, Tamil Nadu). It was as though the State-wise break up of soldiers killed did not fit in with the Indian leaders’ idea to project the pan-Indian character of the war. The media coverage of each funeral made it possible to remedy the phenomenon in the eyes of the public. The Kargil hero is also a secular hero, Indian secularism consisting of each State treating all religions on an equal footing on principle. True, it does not seem that the number of Muslims killed on the battlefield exceeded 10 per cent, but in the absence of statistics on the religious composition of the Indian Army – a politically sensitive question – it is impossible to say if this modest ratio corresponds to the percentage of Muslims in the Defence services as a whole. Nevertheless, everywhere in India (even if in Kashmir the patriotic fibre remained partly untouched) the Press and political leaders were careful to stress that death struck everyone, irrespective of their being Hindus or Muslims and that the latter did not play any less a role in the defence of the motherland. Muslim funerals were especially reported by the Press, the Muslim minority’s participation in the war constantly highlighted.

Lastly, the Kargil hero can engender a heroine. True, no woman died on the battlefield. But many women contributed to the war effort. The Press gave them a great deal of publicity. In June, one particular picture gripped India: the wife of an Army major, a captain herself, in full military regalia saluting her husband’s mortal remains, biting back her tears.11 The wives of high-ranking Army officers were very active. By honouring the memory of their husbands, they defended their own status and that of Indian widows. The question is obviously not insignificant in a country where a traditional stigma still clings to widowhood. At a seminar organised in the capital by the Guild of Services (a war widows association) one woman, ex-member of the National Commission for Women, formally proposed that war widows be henceforth called "war heroines". The idea was seconded by the former president of the Commission in the presence of the wife of the Indian Vice-President and the President of the Army Welfare Association, who is none other than the wife of the Chief of Army Staff. "The term widow brings with itself a social stigma", she explained, adding, "‘heroine’ is a dignified and respectful term. This will elevate their social status." The Kargil hero is thus not sexist, he also relates to women.

Thus we can understand the identification process that India maintained with its heroes during the war. Except for very rare exceptions, the interviews of families who had lost a son showed how proud they were of having produced a soldier. "I am proud my son laid down his life for his country", declared a mother. "We shall not disrespect our hero by shedding tears", added a father. "I will not hesitate to send all my three sons to the front and I shall be proud if they die defending the country like their father," wrote the widow of a slain hero in a letter to the Indian Premier. The youth too was filled with military fervour. In normal times, the Indian Army does not constitute a very attractive proposition and when one decides to join, it is often in the hope that one will not be posted to the front. Thus many young officers opt for the relatively less exposed services. But the Kargil conflict sparked off a recruitment mania. In the State of Punjab, it "has rekindled the craze among young men to join the Army." In Gujarat, at the end of June, the number of candidates queuing up at the recruitment centres had increased by 30 per cent as compared to the preceding year and many were from families with no military tradition. So much so that there were times when the crowd got agitated and the police had to use force or as a former general noted, "Kargil has become a personal war for the whole of India."

The Paradigm of the Martyr:

Contrary to the hero, the martyr does not pertain to the register of drama, but to that of tragedy. He is entirely resigned to his fate and feels that there is no point in fighting it. If the hero can extricate himself from an exceptional situation, thanks to his exceptional faculties, the martyr by definition remains implacably resigned to the logic of sacrifice. In this sense, the martyr is the antithesis of the hero. However, in mid-May, the Press simultaneously employed the two images of the hero and the martyr to describe the Kargil fighters, the martyr’s image gradually overtaking the hero’s, but never to the point of erasing it. It is necessary to understand the co-existence of these two antagonistic terms.

In the first place, the martyr is an oblation. The Kargil war offers him two sacrificial altars, government policy and geo strategy. The former scripts the national décor, the second the international. With regard to the latter, it appears that Pakistan caught the Indian government napping. Not only did it not expect the war but had not even envisaged such a scenario. Since the beginning of year 1999, a rapprochement process had been initiated between New Delhi and Islamabad. Friendly symbolic gestures had been made, such as the launching of a bus service between New Delhi and Lahore – with the Indian Prime Minister himself going to Lahore on the inaugural day. This "bus diplomacy" was in keeping with India’s agenda for it emphasised the bilateralism of Indo-Pakistan relations, which was Indian diplomacy’s stock answer to the situation. It signified that the issue was the concern of the two countries alone, and they themselves would resolve their differences over Kashmir. It was in this context, to all appearances accepted by Pakistan, that India was pushing hard for the de facto recognition of the Line of Control (LoC) as the international border dividing Kashmir into Indian Kashmir and Pakistani Kashmir. India felt that Pakistan had been induced to renounce its traditional policy centred on the internationalisation of the Kashmir issue. In 1999, the Indian government, supported in this by all the political forces in the country, was convinced of having taken a decisive step towards peace. It was unthinkable that Pakistan was secretly gearing up for a military operation in Kashmir. However, this is exactly what it did. In fact, at the start of the 1998 winter, Pakistan had already started to position soldiers and terrorists (mujahideens) of various nationalities on the Indian side of Kashmir. In April 1999, when India discovered the scale of the manoeuvre, it was too late to come out of it with just a few skirmishes. The Pakistanis had fortified their position with the intention of staying put long enough to internationalise the war.

It must be admitted that the Indian government’s position vis-à-vis public opinion must have, a priori, been very difficult. Had not the Hindu nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party in power, been affirming urbi et orbi their desire to transform India into a major world power? Did the BJP not have to face the challenge of the next elections scheduled for 1999? What could be more serious for a nationalist party than to be accused of having failed on the vigilance front, thus putting the country’s security into jeopardy? May onwards, the government came in for severe criticism. The Defence Minister’s resignation was demanded. The Army intelligence services were taken to task. There was a bitter public debate between some generals. The military brass obliquely accused the government of having dragged the Army down with it. The Opposition (in vain) asked for the creation of a parliamentary inquiry commission to look into the matter. In short, the risk of a dangerous political climate for the BJP setting in was high.

Under these circumstances, the Prime Minister’s hopes were pinned on soldiers who were quickly dispatched to the battle zone to launch their first strikes against an enemy ready and waiting for them. The men were not properly acclimatised to the high altitude and ill equipped for the terrain. The first ‘heroes’ were destined to fall. But these men in fact represented the sacrifice. The word ‘martyr’ bestowed on them by the Press from mid-May was really in keeping with their mission. It was as if public opinion could portend, in the tense political climate that prevailed at that point, that these men were fated to die because the hazards they had to face were too great, making them sitting ducks, however skilful and brave they might be. This issue could obviously prove dangerous for the government, because it exposed its negligence. In other words, when the conflict started, the government was responsible for the martyrs’ death. It was left to the family of a captain killed on July 5, 1999, to say loud and clear: "Why can’t those who allowed the infiltrators to come so deep into our country be punished?", declared the father of the dead soldier. He further added, "the politicians are responsible for the situation created so far and for all the deaths." The authorities’ motive for wanting the hero theme to continue is therefore quite clear. The government’s answer to the Opposition, who accused it of sacrificing the soldiers, was that the whole country must unite behind its heroes. Each side had its emblematic figure that it instrumentalised for the needs of its cause. Heroes and martyrs co-existed in the empty resonance of words that the popular and collective imagination, as far as it is concerned, began to use without distinction.

On the international front, the Indian government also found itself in a delicate situation. The heights had to be brought under control. But it could not shell Pakistani territory in order to cut off the intruders from their base camp. Should it cross the LoC, the international community led by the United States, concerned by the risk of a major war breaking out between two States (officially nuclear since 1998) would have condemned the Indian attitude. This international concern was perceptible from May 26, 1999, the day India launched its Air Force, losing a MiG-21 with its pilot the next day. India, therefore, could not use all its firepower to come to the aid of its ground forces. Caught in the vice of this geo-strategic logic, the Indian infantryman thus inescapably remained the designated victim of the conflict. But now, he was no longer the sacrifice offered by the Indian government. His martyrdom was the responsibility of Pakistan, whose duplicity constrained Indian soldiers to shed their blood for reasons of international policy; this, the country could understand. Nevertheless, none of the major Indian political parties called for a global front to be opened against Pakistan. From this perspective, the Indian authorities were justified in letting the martyr theme develop in the country. In the Indian Press, from the end of May, Kargil martyrology completely appropriated the discourse on the hero.

In the beginning of June, the return of six mutilated bodies of Indian soldiers contributed greatly to this. The Pakistanis had taken these men alive. A wave of indignation swept the country when it was learnt in what state the bodies had been handed over to the Army. New Delhi lodged a complaint with Islamabad and several Indian human rights associations took up the matter. Pakistan denied the tortures. The Indians invited the military attaches of several diplomatic missions based in New Delhi to examine the bodies. The fact of the tortures was undeniable, but it was not possible to certify the date on which they were carried out, as the autopsy results had not been communicated. Whatever the case, this constituted a turning point in the psychological warfare. The martyrs, the sacrificed victims, had become the martyred martyrs, so to speak. Pakistan’s image was considerably tarnished. But, against all evidence to the contrary, Islamabad continued to deny its Army’s involvement in the conflict; claiming that, at most, it was helping the separatists in their fight for self-determination. Therefore it could not identify the bodies of the men killed. A veritable battle over bodies took place between the two nations. India buried and cremated its own men with pomp and ceremony. Pakistan abandoned its bodies on the battlefield and refused to accept those sent to them by India after identification. So the Indians took it upon themselves to render full military honours and religious rites to the Pakistani soldiers killed in battle on Indian soil. Photographs of coffins draped in the Pakistani flag and placed before a guard-of-honour composed of Indian soldiers were circulated everywhere in India. The image of the Indian martyr, honoured, was compared to the Pakistani martyr, abandoned. Never did India appear more dignified and magnanimous before death, a death stage-managed as never before in its history. The LoC had become, according to the weekly magazine of the extremist faction of the Hindu nationalist movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), "the boundary between civilisation and barbarism."

Beyond their differences, heroes and martyrs had one common characteristic: they remained men whose destiny is to fight for the nation. Their icon was not predicated on a religious mode. Apart from some rare exceptions, the vocation of Kargil’s hero-martyrs was not to liberate or purify the Himalayan peaks, the birthplace of the gods. All the same, the philosophical suppositions of Hindu nationalism do not advocate the Messianic glorification of the martyr or the ‘romanticisation’ of the dead hero. "The martyr [is] great, but not ideal", writes one of the principal ideologues of contemporary Hindu nationalism, M. S. Golwalkar, who feels that Hindus should focus on "worship of the victorious", that is to say those who calmly and calculatedly equip themselves with the means to win in order to attain the designated goal. The word used by the Hindi Press to designate the martyr (shahid) is in fact not of Sanskrit origin but of Arabic-Persian origin and belongs to the religious repertory of the Muslim world. This will not prevent it from being used any less to express the reality of the entire Indian martyrology, whether Hindu or Muslim. Whereas, on the Pakistani side, public opinion is mobilised around the religious concept of jihad, India plays upon the patriotic fibre. Behind the heroes and the martyrs, who the collective imagination does not antagonize, what India sees is simply individual bodies of soldiers, bodies of flesh and bone, repatriated from the site one by one. It is not the heroes or the martyrs who are incarnated as men. It is each man who has become the incarnation of the hero-martyr when his body is brought back from the battlefield. And it is in the context of the process of ‘individuation’ of the heroes and the martyrs that the essence of Kargilian representation lies: the funeral policy dramatised by the Indian government.

Death Eliminated:

In the Hindu Weltanschauung of India, the praxis and rites occupy a central place. Within this context, the funerary ritual plays an important role. In ancient Brahmanic India, "its richness, complexity, and coherence is striking." In modern Hindu India, it is simplified but still retains numerous references from its heritage. If one knowingly reduces "the funerary ideology in brahmanism" to an expression "of a death without a face" (to quote Charles Malamoud again), one could say that the Kargil funeral policy inverts the Brahmanic problematic. For the Kargil war gave a face to the dead, the vision of death in fact formed the very crux of the ritual. In this, the representation of death in India ‘christianised’ or ‘semitised’ itself, that is to say, it borrowed one of their significant aspects from the three major monotheist religions that are Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The least of the paradoxes of the Hindu nationalist government, which claims to look for its political ideology in the sources of tradition, was not to have systematically presented a biblical image of death to the country, or if we prefer, an ‘individuated’ image.

For reasons linked mainly to the notions of sacrifice, impurity and reincarnation, the traditional funerary rites are centred around one imperative: the eviction of the body. The principal function of the funeral is firstly to expel the body outside the house and the village, secondly to remove all trace of it through cremation and disposal of the ashes, preferably in a river. All the ‘physical’ traces, as it were, of the spirit of the deceased are removed from the view of the living. "The physical obliteration of the cadaver is accompanied by rituals aimed at effacing all memory of the dead person" and "the ceremonies do not include any reminiscing or reference to the deceased’s life"; neither his ‘exploits’ nor his ‘virtues’ are invoked. Not much lamenting or display of emotion takes place around the body: "the pathetic has little place in the ceremonies." When a burial mound – an optional rite – is erected above an urn containing the ashes of the deceased, "this monument, far from preserving the memory of the dead person, on the contrary, cannot be erected until he is consigned to oblivion." The essential elements of these characteristics are found in post-Vedic India. True, there exist cenotaphs, especially dedicated to kings, but in general "the physical space allotted to human remains is nil" and "worship is not offered [to departed souls] in order to give them or to enable them to retain a face." It is also true that we cannot under-estimate the influence of the Muslim and Christian minorities with regard to cemeteries and tombstones. But it should be noted that during the British period, the importance of ostentatious funeral rites, which had previously shown a tendency to develop with the addition of numerous customs (increase in the number of offerings, growth of holy cities such as Benares, etc.), now tended to decline under the influence of a certain "re-invention of [Hindu] tradition" using European values as a yardstick. Accused of idolatry in the dominant discourse of the colonists, the Hindu nationalists of the early 20th century, in an effort to purge funeral rites, returned to the source of tradition and "reduced death ritual to a little more than a ceremony of commemoration."

The body of the warrior – if we omit kings and some great chiefs, particularly during the Mughal era from the 16th to the 18th centuries46 – was not given preferential treatment. In a throwback to Vedic ritual, some considered as ‘renouncers’ or sanyâsin were buried with great pomp and provided with a final resting-place. But many were simply left on the battlefield, their violent death likely to be considered a ‘foul death’, an accidental death considered more polluting than a natural death. "Though as a rule death by violence is always bad, over a soldier’s death in battle there is some uncertainty. Most of my informants unhesitatingly rate it as an akal mrityu>; but most would also claim that the spirits of those who have laid down their lives in a just cause do not join the ranks of ordinary ghosts, but become bvis or ‘hero-ghosts’," notes J. P. Parry.48 The ambivalence of death on the battlefield thus does not a priori inform us of the instrumentalisation that it can subsequently motivate for political ends. General S.N. Sharma remembered the first death that he saw on the battlefield in 1946: "five or six men of my unit were looking at the body and discussing its wounds while drinking; they were peasants; they were behaving as if it was very normal; I, on the other hand, wanted to throw up." He evoked a custom in vogue in the Second World War: "if we had time, we rendered the honours due; when one dies, from being a stranger one becomes an unidentified body that however one can identify from a bracelet or a chain. In the Libyan Desert all the bodies were thrown in the same ditch. We turned the Muslims towards Mecca if we had the time. On the chest of the Hindus we burnt three matchsticks, this was as good as a cremation." We could not do it more simply. The contrast with the Kargil war is striking.

Death on Show:

The Kargil funerals provided an excellent opportunity to stage a spectacular extravaganza, a sort of meticulously choreographed national funereal ballet. According to the Indian Army’s website, 259 bodies were retrieved from the battlefield, of which five were returned to Pakistan, which they eventually accepted; 47 seem to have been dealt with on the spot and were accorded only religious rites; 197 had the benefit of a military and religious funeral. It is these 197 bodies that we have considered here, even if it is impossible to confirm whether they were all sent back to their families. Operation ‘back home’ began on the ground. The pattern followed was the same in each case: The bodies of the dead soldiers are brought back from the battlefield and photographs of soldiers carrying their comrades are published in the Press. The cadavers receive initial medical care in the field hospital where they are enveloped and placed in containers. The high altitude keeps the bodies relatively well preserved, making repatriation easier. Some of the more damaged bodies are sent to the morgue of the military hospital where they are patched up and made presentable. The bodies are now laid in the coffins, over, which are, draped the national colours.

The body thus prepared is transported by plane, military or civil, to Delhi or directly to the capital of the soldier’s home State. In Delhi, the coffin is displayed in a special area of the airport or of the Army cantonment, the latter being rapidly transformed into a ‘transit’ zone for most of the bodies. Press and television cameras are present. Top officials as well as political leaders and, when it is in the capital, sometimes even the Prime Minister or the Defence Minister, come to salute and place wreaths on the body or bodies that are lined up. The first military honours are rendered. The images will be presented on television later in the evening, while the national dailies will publish their photos the next day along with the journalist’s report. The regional and local Press will carry photographs on the third day, and the weeklies will carry the story towards the end of the week. At the State level, the ceremonies organised for the reception of the bodies at the airport or in the military zone, follow the same protocol as in Delhi: military honours, Press coverage, presence of political and administrative authorities, publishing of photographs and Press reports in the local papers, this time relayed by the national Press. Members of the deceased’s family are present when it involves officers, the journalists proceed with their first interviews. The soldiers’ families are too poor to go to town. The first outpourings of grief and despair by the close relatives are photographed.

The coffin is then transported to the family home directly or via the district headquarters; processions and parades may accompany the operation, which are also filmed and photographed. Generally, the family is informed of the arrival of the coffin either officially or by word of mouth. On its arrival, it is displayed at a location near the house (in town it could be a park). Hundreds, thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of people come to see it. Military honours are rendered once more. Gun salutes are sounded, with the Army organising its proper protocol. The regional and local political and administrative elite shows up. When they are absent (rare), the families protest. The Press films and reports. The first cheques are handed to the families by the political or military authorities. Politicians come forward with promises and announcements concerning the financial aid that the family will receive and future developmental projects that the soldier’s hometown will benefit from. At last the body crosses the threshold of the house. In the countryside, the shattered family waits outside or in the house, the men come out, the women often stay inside. In some cases, the widow is permitted to bow before the body in public. Generally, the Kargil funerals show the increased participation of widows in the ceremonies taking place both at the time of the funeral as well as during the memorial service. Interested spectators stand with their faces pressed to the windows, in the doorway, and even enter the courtyard of the house. The journalists manage to interview some of the family members. The family has already contacted the priests, who proceed with the religious part of the funeral. The body is taken out of the coffin. Now the outsiders can see it, come close to it. In some cases, including in very modest rural homes, the family has arranged for a camera and the photographs taken will later be displayed in the family album. Then the crowd begins to tire, the family can now get some privacy. Alone at last, it completes the religious rituals followed by the family. This is the brief moment when tradition takes over.

Cremation for the Hindus and burial for the Muslims now remains, and generally takes place the next day. This is the occasion for another public ceremony, unless (rare) the family decides against it. Firstly, the body is carried in a long procession to the cremation ground. The procession can cover several kilometres and last several hours. Then comes the cremation on the pyre erected for the purpose or the interment, mostly in the place normally intended for this type of ceremony, but it can also be at a different site, selected jointly by the family and the village authorities. The officials lay wreaths, the political and administrative who’s who stand elbow to elbow in the front row. The crowd cries out the martyr’s name (‘long live martyr so-and-so). Sometimes the Press notes the presence of Hindu nationalist activists. Cheques may be presented to the family during the cremation. As for the memory of the hero or the martyr, it has to be cultivated. Sometimes, when it is a Hindu, a spot for the erection of a small mausoleum is chosen at the entrance to the village with the name of the deceased engraved on the facade. When it is a Muslim, a fresh grave is dug some distance away from the existing cemetery, sometimes in the centre of the village. The road leading to the village, anonymous so far, will eventually be named after the martyr. A small ceremony will take place the day of the inauguration. An imposing rectangular tombstone in cement bearing the inscription ‘this road is named after martyr so-and-so’ will be put up at the intersection of the highway and the road leading to the village. In town, localities will henceforth bear the name of the hero-martyr. The decisions taken are rapidly implemented. Several Internet sites, of which one is significantly named ‘Memorial’, are created at the initiative of the Army, the government and the families concerned. Some want a memorial in honour of those killed in the war to be constructed. Although India as a country has no tradition of erecting monuments to the dead, a collective image of military death has been created, based on the western model. In this regard, a virtual image, published as a full page illustration in the weekly, Outlook, is significant: India is beautifully depicted in the form of a body lying down, with small tricolour flags stamped all over. Over it stands a huge funerary sculpture, complete with helmet and gun, bearing the inscription ‘Roll of Honour’ followed by a long list of soldiers’ names engraved on the stone.

The traditional problematic of funerals is thus well and truly reversed. The new custom focuses on the body of the deceased. Right from the start, it is primed for its future display. This constitutes the leitmotif of the ritual, which will continue until it ultimately disappears, and even afterwards as the seeds of memory will be systematically sown across the Indian territory. Behind this body, the presence of the dead person is constantly visible. Neither this presence, nor that of his close relatives is unpleasant; on the contrary people crowd around the body. The visual contact is primordial; it is accompanied by a desire for speech with the family on the part of those who feel entitled (officials, friends, journalists). As highlighted in an innocuous article "soon after the body reached the village, residents gathered in large numbers to have a last glimpse of the martyr." This ‘glimpse’ is the principal aim of the ‘funeral policy’ implemented by India from May to July 1999 and of its morbid media-oriented ritual. One of the most massive processions organised in New Delhi is filmed non-stop by a local cable television channel, Siti Cable, from the small hours of the morning. These bodies, shown to millions of people, are at the centre of the ‘process of individuation’ of death for which the Kargil war acted as a catalyst and an agent of instrumentalisation.

The Kargil War: The Catalyst:

No doubt the stage-management of the war represented as much the orchestration of a policy as a response to a societal demand. For some time now, the families of the soldiers had been expressing their wish to have the bodies of their dead returned to them by the authorities. Why? The answer is not so simple. Very few cadavers of Indian soldiers killed during the First and Second World Wars were sent home. The same holds for the conflicts during the initial years of Independence, the 1947-48 Kashmir conflict, the Sino-Indian war, the Indo-Pak conflict of 1965 and the 1971 Bangladesh war. The families of Indian soldiers began to get accustomed to receiving bodies in coffins in the 1980s. The Indian intervention in Sri Lanka (1980-1990) no doubt marked the turning point in this development. Several factors were responsible for this phenomenon: hanks to television, the American model of the Vietnam War had become familiar to the world. A whole generation had been fed media images of GI’s. ‘returning home’ in coffins draped in the stars-and-stripes. The personalisation of death on the battlefield, with which the spectator was confronted each evening while watching the newscast, brought a feeling of greater closeness to the bodies of the dead and their families. The Kargil war constituted the first ‘live’ war in India. In a sense, India had with Kargil the same kind of war show that the West already had with the Iraq war or the Yugoslavia’s campaign. The old American model of ‘individuated’ death was what effectively emerged on this occasion. The terrible drain that border operations represented for India from the late 1970s and early 1980s had accustomed families to seeing bodies returned to them. This was not too difficult to do for the Army as they were bodies of soldiers killed one by one, which meant they could be treated and handled easily. Indian regiments have a solid tradition of collecting their dead bodies on the battlefield and of organising the appropriate rituals. The repatriation of the body constitutes, in a manner of speaking, just a simple supplementary procedure.

The Indian Army had learnt its lesson in Sri Lanka. The Indian Peacekeeping Forces sent to the island had unhappy memories of the quagmire into which they were sent. They were left to bear the responsibility of Indian politics without any recognition of their efforts by the political powers or the country, while the losses incurred were heavy. In particular, the bodies of the Army’s soldiers and officers (a relatively large number of officers were killed) were not repatriated with any great degree of enthusiasm when they were sent back. Neither pomp nor ceremony but rapid oblivion and absence of publicity: such was the motto of successive governments in Delhi during the intervention period. Disgusted, the Army therefore took it upon itself to repatriate some of its men killed in the operation, inventing new procedures to do this. In doing so, it brought solace to the families of the dead, who were becoming accustomed to receiving bodies in this manner, the process now starting to become familiar. Recalling the manner in which the body of his younger brother (the first Indian officer to be given the Param Vir Chakra), killed on the battle field in November 1947, was repatriated, something which at the time was not common, the retired General S. N. Sharma, in 1999, thus summarised fifty-years of repatriation history of bodies in India: "What was done for my brother is now being done in 1999." his was one of the keys to the success of the Indian government’s funeral policy implemented in 1999: the Army, satisfied with this policy which healed the wounds of war, repeated the procedures it had followed in Sri Lanka in Kargil. Whereas it had acted more or less anonymously in the earlier conflict, all that remained now was for it to perfect the methods used for publicising the funerals. This did not signify that all its members were happy with the ostentatious show put on by the civil authorities, as it could make the soldiers appear as mere puppets of government policy.

Death Instrumentalised:

The Kargil dead were instrumentalised for a variety of reasons. Some for purely commercial ends, such as a restaurant owner trying to attract clients by declaring that a part of the money spent on their meal would be donated to a charitable organisation in aid of Army widows – many such charities would come up during the conflict. Some were done for purposes of tourism. Even before the blood of the ‘heroes’ had dried, the Director General of the Department of Tourism introduced tours to the sites of the battles. "Kargil," he declared, "has caught the public imagination due to non-tourism reasons (sic), but we hope to cash on the prevailing sentiments and woo both who are interested in paying homage to the martyrs and adventurers interested in exploring the great heights." Other reasons had to do with publicity: popular film stars also did their bit and visited the fronts before the cameras. Nor was the High Command far behind: "The Kargil campaign is a good tonic for the country and the Army", declared the Kargil victor, General V.P. Malik. This conflict, indeed, was particularly prolific in terms of the medal tally, whereas it was not – quite the opposite in fact – the most costly in terms of human life in the history of independent India. The highest award for gallantry, the Param Vir Chakra, has thus been awarded to four soldiers in for Kargil. This medal has been awarded very sparingly since Independence (1947): three times during the Sino-Indian war of 1962; twice during the Indo-Pak conflict of 1965 during which 2902 soldiers died; none during the Bangladesh war in 1971, when almost as many soldiers were lost as in Kargil (495 on the Western Pakistan border); none during the clashes in Hyderabad in 1948 (66 dead) and Goa in 1961 (22 dead); none during the Indian intervention in Sri Lanka, which resulted in approximately 1000 deaths; none during the insidious war on the terrible Siachen Glacier since 1984. Only the first Kashmir war (1947-48) saw four such medals awarded and it should be noted that it cost India 1,500 soldiers, that is, three or four times more than in Kargil.

Maximum instrumentalisation obviously takes place for political ends. Without the Kargil dead, would the Hindu nationalist government have won the autumn 1999 legislative elections? It is doubtful. Various opinion polls suggested that ‘the Kargil effect’ was clearly felt during the first round of elections in September. True, the Prime Minister took care not to solicit votes on the basis of the war sacrifices during his election campaign. But his party had no qualms about stating that the Opposition did not respect the blood shed for the country when it criticised the government for its war conduct. Above all, the Kargil events bestowed a charismatic dimension on A. B. Vajpayee that enabled him to form a coalition of regional parties relatively easily. This was imperative if the government wanted a comfortable majority in Parliament.

In the strictest sense of the term, the May-July 1999 India-Pakistan confrontation in Kargil was not a war. No formal declaration of war was made and the Indian Parliament did not meet on the occasion. Officially, the Army called it a ‘campaign’ and the Prime Minister a ‘quasi-war’. However, it was called a war by the entire Press, and the public was under the impression that thousands of soldiers had died in the conflict. Some were even convinced that the government had concealed the real figure in order not to alarm the people. In fact it was the opposite. A relatively small number died in the conflict. However the government was not particularly interested in correcting the impression, as the imagined scale of the conflict – once victory was assured and the loss of heroes killed on the battlefield could be attributed to Pakistani duplicity – actually enhanced the image of the coalition. The first direct consequence of the ‘Kargil effect’ was to facilitate the BJP and its allies’ victory in the national elections of September-October 1999. In this context, the funeral policy organised by the Indian authorities constituted a formidable instrumentalisation of military deaths for political ends. During some two months, it choreographed a sort of funereal ballet daily – explicated at a national, regional and local level, amplified and broadcast by all the media. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the quasi-war was seen as a full-scale war and the number of dead was spontaneously exaggerated by public opinion.

This undeniable instrumentalisation does not, however, represent the essential aspect of the Kargil events. After all, India is no exception in this regard: is there any government in the world that will demur from exploiting the deaths of its warriors when this is useful? Much more significant for understanding the present evolution of India’s society seems to be the part of the events that escaped the control of its actors, civil or military. With regard to the former, the most paradoxical phenomenon is that of a Hindu nationalist party that develops a funeral policy transgressing the fundamental practices of Hinduism. From May to July 1999, the BJP and its leaders, although fiercely committed to the defence of what they call Hindutva, ‘christianised’ the representation of death on a scale unprecedented in the history of independent India. In itself, the principle of the approach is not new: in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Hindu current in the nationalist movement had already faced the difficult problem of modifying certain aspects of Hinduism under the influence of European values exported by colonialism. This was done at the cost of a restructuring of Hindu values, supposedly by going back to the source of tradition, but which in fact had been ‘re-invented’ through contact with the coloniser. What is new during Kargil is the apparent suddenness and media build-up of the phenomenon. A new icon of death was created, one that focused on the individual and his personal, thus specific, linkages, connecting him to each member of the different social groups to which he belonged: family, village, region, nation, etc. We have seen, for example, that the personal status of the widow of the deceased soldier was affected, which, moreover, is detached from the traditional conception. One can also take as an example the theme of the "weak territoriality [traditionally] characterising Indian culture." On this issue also, the Kargil funeral policy is a pointer to the evolution of perceptions. The construction of cenotaphs commemorating the dead in the Indian space, or the naming of streets and roads, impacts upon the manner in which India politically represents its geography as a nation-state today. Starting with its external borders, which it will now view in a more ‘sensitive’ manner, once they serve to delimit a country filled with carnal recollections, all the more perceptible now that each one can identify with the individual-hero or individual-martyr whose memorial he comes across. This phenomenon is obviously linked with the manner in which today’s India is no doubt creating a new way of conceiving history for itself. It is indeed true that there is no geography without history and that a monument to those who have died for the country, of the type now being demanded in India or designed on websites, is fundamentally favourable to the creation of a new concept of the nation-state, whose ideological and philosophical foundations are precisely those of the individualistic-universalist thinking that emerged from the Century of Enlightenment. One notes, perforce, that it is a Hindu nationalist party, claiming to be the best defender of Vedic tradition that makes this claim. Ironically enough, its approach is the exact opposite of that of Nepal’s current Maoists, also celebrating the death of their martyrs, whom they also call shahid, who discreetly but systematically present their commemorations in the guise of traditional Hindu practices, which they tend to re-ritualise.

With regard to the military actor, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Kargil funeral policy could be the important role the military institution may play in Indian society. Here too, the phenomenon is not new. Although very professional, for many years this ‘silent partner’ (the Grande Muette as the French say) has been intervening in diverse fields which were not strictly military, such as the repression of labour conflicts, law and order problems at the borders, helping the population during natural catastrophes, the last example being the Gujarat earthquake in February 2001 where its work was particularly appreciated by the people, etc. But what Kargil reveals is that the Army also plays a direct role in societal evolution. It is the Army that worked out the details of the Kargilian funereal ballet. It has been observed that this Army, especially after the Sri Lanka war, was able to precipitate, in the chemical sense of the term, deep-rooted societal evolution by responding to the aspirations of the families who wished to have the bodies of their dead repatriated. One needs to probe deeper and ask if the Indian Army, with its specific modernistic culture, does not play a greater role in national life than one believes generally. For the moment, one can point out that it was probably not mere chance if it was one of the most secular institution of India, which was able to play a meaningful role in the new perception of an ‘individuated’ death orchestrated by a Hindu nationalist government in the twilight of the 20th Century.


:: Conrad Barwa 10:46 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Sociologists on the “Us and Them” Divide:

Norbert Elias, one of the great-unsung thinkers in sociology, presented a comprehensive analysis of his take on prejudice-generating situations in his theory of the established and the outsiders. An influx of outsiders always presents a challenge to the way of life of the established population, however tiny the objective difference between the old inhabitants and the newcomers. Tension arising out of the necessity of making room for the newcomers, and from the outsidsers’ need to find room for themselves, prompts each side to exaggerate its differences. Often minute traits, which under different circumstances could pass unnoticed, are now dwelled upon and represented as obstacles to cohabitation. They become an object of abomination and are used as proof that strict separation is unavoidable, and mixing unthinkable. Anxiety and hostile feelings reach boiling point on both sides, yet the established have, on the whole better resources to act upon their prejudices. They can also invoke the rights they have acquired by sheer length of habitation (this is the land of our forefathers etc): outsiders are not just alien and different, they are also “invaders”, intruders, with no entitlement to be here. The complex relationship between the established and the outsiders goes a long way towards explaining the large variety of conflicts between in-group and out-group and, more generally still, the cases of widespread and intense prejudice.

The birth of modern anti-Semitism in Europe, Zygmunt Bauman argues was at least in part due to the coincidence between the high speed of change in a rapidly industrialising society and the emancipation of the Jews, who emerged from Ghettos or separate Jewish quarters and closed communities to mix with Gentile population of the cities and enter “ordinary” occupations. The masses of craftsmen and shopkeepers who were about to lose their habitual existence because of competition of factories and merchandising companies eagerly accepted the arrival of strangers previously unseen on their streets as a cogent explanation of the earth-shattering calamity of rapid industrialisation. Similarly, the loss of traditional grounds of security that followed the gradual falling apart of the Empire, the destruction of the familiar urban landscape in the course of urban redevelopment in post-war Britain, and the later disappearance of industry to which the skills and life-expectations of many people were geared, generated widespread anxiety which has been focused on the new immigrants from the Caribbean or South Asia; hence the surge of antagonism towards the harbingers of the earthquake – sometimes expressed in overtly racist form, sometimes deceivingly masked as resistance to “alien culture” (for example the protest against ‘halal meat’ on humanitarian grounds). To take one more example: for several decades in the second half of the 19th century, anxiety and frustration of skilled workers, faced with the threat to security of their jobs presented by rapid mechanisation of factories and the consequent “de-skilling” of working operations, was turned against the influx of workers who called themselves “general” but were immediately dubbed “unskilled” by the established trade unions. The unskilled were barred entry into the trade union and refused trade-union protection until such time as they finally succeeded in winning trade union rights against the resistance of the skilled.

Similar processes can be observed in our own time whenever there is change and the opportunities to continue in the old ways are rapidly shrinking. We read of the vehement resistance of one or another group of unionised workers to sharing jobs with members of another union; disputes about the demarcation of job entitlements have been one of the most frequent causes of strikes during the 1980s. Another example is the bitter resistance of established inclinations to construe newcomers as dangerous outsiders is the notorious male resistance to women’s claims of equal rights in employment and in competition for positions of social influence. The entry of women into once secure male preserves puts in question hitherto unchallenged rules, and with that introduces a strongly resented element of unsettling confusion into a previously unambiguous setting. The feminist demand for equal rights evinces feelings of danger, which trigger off angry responses and aggressive postures.

The bitterness of the established – outsiders antagonism, as well as the gravity of its likely consequences are further exacerbated by the fact that the pugnacity of the established elicits a symmetrical response from the group cast in the role of outsiders. American anthro0lpolgiost Gregory Bateson suggests the name Schismogenesis for the chain of actions and reactions, which follows: hostile attitudes, so to speak, supply their own proof through evoking hostile behaviour. As each action calls for a still stronger reaction, both sides willy-nilly drift towards a deep and lasting schism. Whatever control or influence either side might have initially had over mutual relations is now lost. The “logic of the situation” takes over. Bateson distinguished between two types of schimogenesis. In the case of symmetrical schismogenesis, each side reacts to the signs of strength from the adversary. Whenever the adversary shows power and determination, still stronger manifestations of power and resolve are sought. What both sides fear most of all is to be seen as weak or hesitating. Slogans such as “deterrence must be credible” or “the aggressor must be shown that aggression does not pay”; come to mind as examples, some strategists during the Cold War even suggested that the launching of nuclear missiles be automated – in order to convince the enemy that no last-moment pangs of conscience would stop a nuclear retaliation in case of a hostile action. Symmetrical schimogenesis breeds self-assertiveness on both sides of the conflict and virtually destroys the possibility of rational argument and agreement. Complementary schismogenesis develops from exactly opposite assumptions, yet it also leads to a breakdown in interaction. The schismogenetic sequence of actions is complementary when one side strengthens its resolve at the sign of weakness on the other side, while the other side weakens its resistance when confronted with manifestations of growing strength on the opposite side. Typically this is the tendency of any interaction between a domineering and submissive partner. Self-assurance and self-confidence of one partner feed on the timidity and the submissiveness of the other. In turn the latter’s’ meekness grows together with the self-assertiveness and arrogance of the first. A common example of this is the situation between a dominant majority within a nation and a minority: the former may accept the presence of the latter on condition that the latter studiously demonstrates its acceptance of the dominant values and eagerness to live by the dominant rules. The minority would be keen to please and thereby curry the favour of the Dominant majority – only to discover that the volume of concessions the Dominant group demands tends to grow with that group’s confidence that its rules and values have been surrendered to and are unlikely to be contested. The minority learns as well that as a means of earning acceptance as an equal partner, the strategy of effacing one’s own distinctiveness is counterproductive. The minority will be driven either to escape into its own ghetto, or to change its strategy to one modelled on symmetrical schismogenesis. Whatever the choice, the breakdown of the relationship will be the likely outcome.

One could is some sense apply the concept of complementary schimogenesis to negotiations between two sides in a civil conflict: certainly much of the imbroglio in the north-eastern region of India vis-à-vis insurgent movements comes from the demands made by the Central State as the Dominant actor, with the irredentist groups embarking on a succession of compromises that keep on re-curring without any real gain in political terms leading to a breakdown of the peace processes and a resumption of armed conflict. A more controversial application can be the current impasse with Iraq and the Anglo-Atlantic alliance: with the latter demanding more and more concessions regarding WMD disarmament with compliance bringing forth increasing demands as shows of good faith. Each compromise by the weaker side here leads to another set of demands without any accompanying assurances by the stronger side.

:: Conrad Barwa 9:37 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Appeasing the Farm Lobby:

I am appalled by this story this story from the BBC for several reasons. The first is the ridiculous position the NDA manages to get itself in; the BJP, which for years sold itself to the public as a corruption-free and “hard" party that could bring discipline back into Indian politics has proved to be much worse on most counts than the Congress. On the specific issue of fertiliser prices the former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha rescinded price hikes (or more accurately reductions in subsidy) so many times that he was dubbed “rollback Sinha” by the wags in the press and now it seems the his successor Jaswant Singh will continue this pattern. It never fails to surprise me that the supposedly more disciplined BJP and the much touted firmness of the Sangh Parivar, especially the RSS never seems to percolate down to actual policy implementation. In fact, if anything the BJP and its allies have seemed all to eager to fall over themselves in placating one lobby after another. If the lobby happens to have connection to monied influence and is vocal, its supineness increases several-fold. Ah yes, discipline and sternness it seems in the lexicon of the BJP will be reserved only for the Muslims, errant minority communities and “pseudo-secularists”. This just reinforces what many have been saying for some time about the BJP really being a vehicle for social interests and a embattled elite groups rather than a party with any serious programme or implemenatable ideology – at least in the economic sphere. The egregious reference to Brahm is even more galling; economic policy and budget considerations I hope would rest on something firmer than the crypto-spirutual inclinations of the Finance Minsiter (one could go the whole hog and just ask him to consult his astrolgoer).

Secondly and more worryingly, the farm sector is in crisis and is India’s food economy. No real mention is made of the endemic malnutrition or of the problem in ensuring food access to the bottom 30% of the population who suffer from calorific shortfalls in their daily intake. Typically the BJP has sought to concentrate on production issues rather than looking as distribution ones: a stance, which has led to the phenomenon of burgeoning foodstocks in a time of hunger and starvation. The two are interlinked as the fiscal austerity budgets of the post-1991 Structural Adjustment Programme and the ensuing liberalisation has meant that food subsides through the Public Distribution System (PDS) have been cut narrowing the price differential between PDS provided foodgrains and the open market prevailing price. This has reduced the offtake from PDS stocks; yet at the same time in order to offset the rising costs of cultivation and maintain incomes in the farm sector procurement prices have risen consistently to ensure that farmers’ output is bought at remunerative prices leading to disjunction in the supply and demand markets. On top of this to compensate for subsidy cuts and declining public investment in agriculture and rural infrastructure the state has not reduced the subsidy both explicitly and implicit in the provision of fertilisers to the farm sector; this has led to overuse of fertilisers intensively with serious ecological implications (soil erosion, depletion of micro-nutrients, salinity and waterlogging) and well as the extensive spread of fertiliser applications across the sector. In normal times the extensive component of this growth is something to be welcomed as it increases both output and productivity however it has under the current structure of procurement and distribution led to a dual headache for the government. It has increased the supply of foodgrains available without correspondingly increasing the demand for them; leaving the state both to buy up the increasing harvests and then carry the costs of storing and transporting the grain. It has also led to dependence on subsidised inputs which is spreading and deepening: reluctance to institute charges, even just to cover operating costs, for inputs such as water irrigation, electricity and now fertilisers has distorted the production mix leading both to unsustainable application of these inputs and also for a looming fiscal crisis and political dilemma for the government. Successive government from the Narasimha Rao Congress regime to the current NDA coalition led by the BJP have put off dealing with the problem. Of ocurse who is included in the famr lobby and who isn't is also not referred to directly: landless labourers, marginal farmers, arboreal and hill communties are not going to benefit from any increase in the volume of susbsidies to this sector. Meanwhile by far the largest group affected is also the least able to exert influence on policymakers at the Centre: the food-deficient part of the population, especially those in rural areas poorly served by the PDS continue to suffer. While foodgrain stocks continue to mount, India will not solve the problem of how to feed its hungry population anytime soon.

:: Conrad Barwa 7:55 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Sacrificing for the Nation: What Rational Choice Theory Cannot Tell Us: Part Two:

So much for potential fruitful insights that Rational Choice theory could have when considering Nationalism. However, intrinsic to such approaches there is also some key weaknesses that are left unanswered and phenomena that are not accounted for within such an approach:

1) Why do people resist changing their identities even when they can benefit? Rational Choice theory fails to explain people’s unwillingness to adopt the favoured identities of a conquering power. Consider recent events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Despite benefits made available to those who identified with dominant national groups, people passed on and retained their identities stubbornly as Ruthenian, Ossetians and Azeris and so on for generations with little hope of collective gain. In some cases as those of the Turks in Bulgaria and Hungarians in Romania, people held on to their identities in the face of active or acute discrimination. Identity groups and their languages and customs do become extinct as a function of conquest, migration, modernisation, dispersion and genocide, but they are remarkably resistant to such threats, as the histories of Jews and Armenians attest. It might be that a conquered people hold on perversely to a subordinate national identity as a response to the dynamic of threat, being risk averse even for symbolic losses, when the rational self-interested choice would be to switch identifications. But national identities also persist when something can be gained from changing and when the old nationality is not under threat. After emigration, national identities commonly last for generations even though Rational choice theory imply that people who move to another country will change their national identifications as readily as people who move to another city might change their favourite sports teams. Millions of US citizens educate their children in the customs and sometimes the languages of their non-American ancestors, even at considerable expense, in the absence of threats. Such communities of hyphenated-Americans seems to be acting for not tangible benefit, but out of identification – as if their old national identities have an intrinsic value. The phenomenon has emotional overtones and ontological foundations, which it cannot get to grips with.

2) Nationality has a stronger influence than other identities even when the expected benefits of contributing to the nation rather than to another group are highly uncertain or negative. Conflict between identities arises most clearly when a nation-state makes claims on citizens to put national goals ahead of those of class, ethnicity, race, family, or other identity groups. The paradigm case is war mobilisation and the usual example used is the eagerness of many young men to sign and enlist as soldiers in the summer of 1914. During WWII there was considerable debate within the Black Community and in class-conscious labour trade unions in the USA about the benefits to those groups of supporting entry into the war. After the USA entered the war, both fell strongly behind the war effort. Why? The US government did not offer concessions to Blacks or to labour unions in order to get their support. Labour in fact, was called upon to make sacrifices in the trade union movement, by suspending strike action in the interests of the war effort. Members of these groups seem to have reassessed their self-interest with little rational basis for doing so. It is as if the attack shifted their identification at least temporarily from their racial or class groups to the nation, so that it was the nations that provided the identity in whose name people took action. Of course it was in the interest of the state to persuade people to adopt the national identification and accept its demands. The question to be resolved is how these appeals are so successful in wartime – paradoxically proving very successful amongst those groups that have the greatest likelihood of receiving a negative net benefit from war by virtue of receiving most of the dangerous battle assignments and less than an equal or fair share of any benefits that accrue to the state.

3) Leaders trying to mobilise support for national collective action appeal more to emotions that to self-interest. The leaders of states act as if they believe that emotional appeals are more powerful than rational ones, especially in periods of war mobilisation, when rational self-interest calculations are likely to weigh most strongly against contributing to a national goal. The obvious conclusion is that leaders must make emotional appeals precisely to pre-empt or override self-interest calculations that might be unfavourable to national goals.

4) People and groups often miscalculate their interests so as to overestimate the expected benefits to them from nationalist programmes. Some examples illustrate the point, at the outbreak of the Falklands War of 1982, nationalist appeals in both Britain and Argentina generated great outpourings of patriotism and support for the nation-state. Yet Argentina had little to gain and little to lose, except symbolically. How could analyses of self-interest have produced such great surges of support in both countries unless there was systematic miscalculation in at least one? In the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the proliferation of nationalist movements was not always consistent with the rational expectation of gain. Armenian collective self-interest for example, might have been better served by the status of a Russian protectorate than by independence. A strong argument for this position could have been made from 20th century Armenian history, but this argument carried little weigh tin Armenian politics. Similarly, in the USA, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party has long advocated interdependence. When a leftist Puerto Rican academic argued in the 1970s that Puerto Rico might be better off economically in its current status as a protected commonwealth than as an independent nation-state, the response within the party was not to question the author’s self-interest calculations but to question his loyalty. In sum, people motivated by nationalist sentiments and nationalist movement-leaders, tend to distort, ignore, or simply reject available information pertinent to collective self-interest when that information might argue against pursuing nationalist programmes. Such behaviour is not rational, needless to say.

These four phenomenon of resistance to new national identities, nationalism in the face of negative expected benefits, preference for emotional over rational appeals and distortion of information give strong evidence of a component to nationalism that ignores and sometimes even contravenes individual self-interest, and even the collective interest of nationalistic groups. Moreover, rational choice theory makes unrealistic presumptions about human cognitive capacities. Rather than calculating self-interest (or group interest) people who accept national identifications seem to use a much more rapid response mode, and one that sometimes yields different results. Rather than reasoning, they seem to respond emotionally.

Eliciting Nationalist Sentiment: The Tasks of Leadership:

It is only when combining Rational Choice approaches with the two other main schools of thought on Nationalism: Primordialist and Constructivism that a clearer image of how nationalist sentiment is evoked and harnessed during war emerges. Modified Primordialist approaches emphasise the emotional ties of individuals to ethnic groups and smaller blocs of direct interaction such as the family, neighbourhood etc. Some versions focus on a presumed primordial need for shared identity that is fulfilled by culturally defined groupings; others take a more socio-biological tack and argue that ethnicity is an extension of a naturally selected tendency to favour kin. Constructionist approaches emphasise the socially created nature of nationality and of shared interest. Constructivists point out that ethnic or national consciousness tends to arise during periods of crisis, such as rapid modernisation, and tends to be “brokered” by intellectual entrepreneurs who create national histories, traditions, identities, perceived interests, and even languages. Combining these aspects of pre-existing associations together with the constructed nature of nationality points towards the way nationalism is used and shaped by those charged with guiding or making policy in the name of the nation.

In times of war, the problem for national leaders is that the groups they want to mobilise for war are not much like the primary groups in which altruism evolved. In a hunter-gatherer society , for example, emotional ties are limited to one small group, and sacrificing for the group can be enforced by empathy and group norms, as well as being adaptive in terms of inclusive fitness. In complex modern societies, however, people have ties to many groups, each of which at times provides essential services. Mobilising modern citizens for war creates a conflict of altruism between the nation and other groups. When a nation-state asks its people to go to war, it is often demanding a contribution or a sacrifice at the same time that other groups to which the citizens belong are demanding that the contribution of sacrifice not be made. For the national effort to succeed, national identity must overcome group identities. The choice that individuals make between these competing demands depends partly on emotional reactions and social influences; it becomes the task of the leader mobilising the people for war to find ways to manipulate those forces so as to socially construct the nation as an object of “primordial” attachment.

One way is to develop and then exploit direct emotional ties to the nation and its symbols. This strategy requires long-term investments in parades, holidays and other collective events that classically condition positive responses to national symbols like flags and military uniforms. States, certainly make such investments; their survival in the population of nation-states may create a selection pressure to do so. Another effective way to capture emotions is to tie the idea of the nation to the emotionally powerful experiences of individuals. This occurs readily when large numbers of individuals have suffered discrimination or punishment on the grounds of their ethnicity, or in ways that they can readily attribute to ethnicity. Such experiences are common in the genesis of national identities and may be even more common in national historical myths; it is reasonable to expect that such experiences create a powerful sense of group identification, especially when they threaten to repeat themselves. The recent events in Yugoslavia and the conflict between Serbian, Croats and Bosnian Muslims are a good example: nationalists explain current events in terms of remembered experiences such as Serbian-Croatian conflict during WWII and powerful national myths dating as far back as the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.

A national identity can also “win” a contest of competing demands by tying itself symbolically to the groups to which people have the strongest and most primordial ties: family and community. These are the groups, which have deep resonances in history and arouse strong feelings of empathy, and exact the most stringent obligations from members – it is for these groups that people are most likely to sacrifice their lives. The genius of nationalism as a social invention is to equate the nation symbolically with family and community and to use that equation to generate emotions and elicit behaviour that is against self-interest and the interests of other groups with which people identify – including, ironically, families and communities. The symbolic ties of nation to family and community have been frequently noted. National ideologies typically describe the nation and the associated characteristics of members with metaphors of kinship: “mother tongue” ”fatherland”, ”Croatian blood”, ”the sons of Ireland,” ”our German brothers in Sudetenland,” and “our people” are a few phrases that come quickly to mind. Metaphors of community are also common: “defending the homeland”, ”the Jewish community”, ”protecting a neighbouring country,”. A function of such metaphorical equations is that people who come to see their fellow nationals as kin or members of a tight community feel empathy for them and sacrifice for them as they would for real kin or community members, even to giving their lives. This mechanism of metonymical inflation of the nation with social groups to which people have deep emotional ties to; is part of its strength as an ideology for mobilisation.

Yet another way that national identity can appeal over the claims of other identities involved personalising nations. If nations are equated with individuals, international relations are interpersonal relations, and subject to the moral rules that apply to primary social groups. For example, if a personalised nation violates the rule against causing harm to an innocent other nation, third nations that can prevent or redress the harm have a moral obligation to help, in a metaphorical extension of the Schwartz norm-activation model. More to the point, citizens of a third nation who accept such a personalised account feel that their nation is morally obligated to help and feel personally obligated to contribute by advocating intervention and supporting a war effort. A good study is G. Lakoff’s analysis of the roots of the overwhelming US support for the 1991 Gulf War and how it relied on the personalisation of governments. Lakoff argues that a US sponsored international “fairy-tale” that equated Iraq with villain and Kuwait with victim (represented, for example in the image of the “rape” of Kuwait) was effective in convincing US citizens to back their country in taking the role of hero. Lakoff claims that an alternative fairy-tale was tried by the Bush administration, with Iraq as the villain and the US as the victim (“cutting of our oil lifeline”), but was not found convincing to trial groups. The metaphorical equation of nations with fairy-tale characters is rooted in powerful cultural myths and neatly bypasses claims of other identities than the national: in the fairy-tale, when a nation is the villain; only another nation can be the hero, so individuals can act on their sense of moral obligation only through their national identification.

Other personalisations can have similar emotional effects. For example, international events are sometimes portrayed as threats to the national dignity or pride (with the implication that the nation must assert its “manhood” by violence if necessary”. Nations or their leaders are characterised as bullies, outlaws, or madmen, also evoking personalised obligations to act that can only be met by national action. The personalisation mechanism, in which only nation-states can be actors, begins to address one of the major riddles of nationalist mobilisation – why people put aside the interests of real families and communities, in favour of the imagined nation.

:: Conrad Barwa 8:21 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Sacrificing For The Nation: Can Rational Choice Tell Us Anything? Part One:

After discussions following a seminar on possible applications of Rational Choice theory to the concept of Nationalism, some surprising and non-obvious hypotheses were reached by those of us who continued to debate the merits and drawbacks of such a narrow theoretical approach. Though all of us were critical of Rational Choice theory and its applications in the Social Sciences it was nonetheless interesting to see some of the surprising potential themes that could possibly use such an approach in looking at Nationalism as well as the more obvious drawbacks. I think it may of interest to explore these further. The basic theory was relatively simple: it was suggested that autonomous individuals might identify with a national group as a matter of co-ordination. People sometimes stand to gain by identifying with a group that can provide collective benefits, which they can then share. It may not matter which group on chooses to identify with as long as enough people agree to pick the same group. This was illustrated by taking the example of a football club: by being fans people gain a pleasant sense of group feeling, topics of conversation and other such benefits – but only if they share these with those who support the same team. It matters little which team gets the fans’ allegiance. Identification of this sort does seem to be rational in terms of self-interest but only as long as it does not present large costs. However, national or ethnic identification is often costly, for example, when a group is suffering discrimination or oppression at the hands of a more powerful group or when it is facing the likelihood of violent conflict that will threaten some of its members. In those cases, rational choice theory would seem to predict that people will avoid identifying with such a group unless it offers individualised incentives or somehow persuades potential members that they stand to benefit more than they risk losing. So, a rational choice account of national identification seems to require that potential members perceive a gain from identifying.

The Rational Choice narrative suggest two mechanism that might explain why individuals support a nation by helping to provide collective goods, such as national security, from which even non-contributing group members can benefit. First, there might be a net benefit to self from supporting the group on each occasion when it requests support. This condition seems particularly unlikely to obtain when the group requests a serious personal sacrifice such as service in war. Second, people may support a group even when it is not in their self interest because on average, they gain more from following a simple rule of thumb – to support the group – and sometimes suffering, than from calculating self interest on each occasion and always paying the costs of doing the calculation. This mechanism is more plausible but becomes less so when the cost of the required contribution rises. At some point, such as when a young man is asked to serve in a wartime army against a superior foe, the personal threat becomes so obvious that even a cognitively lazy follower of rules of the thumb will notice that supporting the group in not in his self interest. Yet young men often volunteer to serve in armies that are unlikely to suffer heavy casualties. Although Rational Choice seems a less than plausible account for extreme individual self sacrifice, the approach is fruitful in that it makes a number of intriguing predictions about group loyalty and willingness to contribute, some of which seem consistent with historical experience. It is to these that I now turn.

Some Possible Hypothesis from applying Rational Choice Theory to Nationalism:

1) Threat increases identification and willingness to contribute. In case of collective threat, members of a group, or those who would be considered members by others who are threatening the group, stand to lose as individuals if the group loses. They therefore stand to benefit if the group can be defended against the threat, so rational choice theory implies that they will identify and contribute. When the threatened group is a nation-state, the prediction is that a foreign attack or a military threat leads to stronger identification with the nominal nation of the nation-state and increased support for the regime in power. This prediction seems plausible, and even the exception can help to prove the rule. When the USA entered WWII, national solidarity increased with one notable exception – the rejection Japanese-Americans, many of whom felt patriotically American but, were commonly identified by their fellow citizens with the enemy. When the threatened group does not control the state, the results would be slightly different. Discrimination by the dominant nation in a state can strengthen ethnic minority identification or even bring a new national identity into being. This prediction describes a fairly common dynamic, and seems to be supported by the history of Zulu, Tamil and Palestinian nationalisms. By predicting that national identities emerge from oppression, rational choice theory demonstrates its ability to account for identities that are not voluntaristic in the sense of arising from processes within the set of potential group members.

The theory also predicts that discrimination leads oppressed groups to mobilise. Support for this prediction is harder to find. Discrimination seems to be a predisposing factor, but not a sufficient condition for mobilisation. Many downtrodden groups fail to mobilise against an oppressive state so long as they have stable expectations about the regime in power. Revolt seems to depend either on a violation of expectations that worsens a groups’ situations or an increase in the probability that collective action will be successful. Rational Choice theory easily explains why an increased likelihood of success leads to mobilisation, but does not readily explain why an oppressed group that could gain from acting collectively would fail to do so except when its status declines further. For the most part, however, the prediction that threats lead to heightened group identification and increased contributions seems consistent with historical experience. Rational choice theory, despite its radical individualist assumptions, seems capable of predicting the emergence of group consciousness and collective action under some circumstances.

2) Opportunity increases identification and willingness to contribute. The logic of this hypothesis is exactly the same as the logic for common threats. When the opportunity arises for a national group that lacks control of a state to increase its autonomy or power by acting collectively, rational choice theory predicts increased identification and mobilisation. The collapse of the Soviet Union seems to supply dozens of confirming examples. As the central, multinational state weakened, nationalist movements sprang up in all the so-called national republics, and then in nationally identified regions within the national republics. Identification with the multinational state was providing decreasing benefits, and it may have appeared to many that identification with regionally dominant nationalities could offer greater benefits. Willingness to contribute to these national identity groups was evident in the creation of volunteer militias to defend them from the central state and from other national groups. Rational Choice theory implies similar predictions when opportunities arise for a nation-state, but these are not so well supported. It predicts that when a multinational state has a growing economy, or an opportunity for imperial expansion, identification with the nominal nationality should strengthen at the expense of national minority or other group identifications, and people should become more willing to sacrifice for the state. This logic suggests that ethnic conflict declines in multiethnic states as a function of prosperity, and that citizens, including members of ethnic minorities, willingly join in their state’s expansionist manoeuvres. There is some evidence that ethnic conflict in inversely related to economic prosperity, such as the famous negative correlation between the number of lynchings in the American South and the price of cotton, but no evidence that minority groups trade in their identities for those of the majority when times are good. In the case of political opportunity the evidence tends to disconfirm the prediction that people coalesce around a nation-state seeking expansion in the way they do around one facing a threat. The rally-around-the –flag phenomenon, in which US presidents gain a short term boost in popularity after taking military action, is stronger when the action is taken (or presented) as a response to an armed attack than when it is perceived to have other motives. Rational Choice theory could account for a moderate difference between responsiveness to threats vs. opportunities by adopting the utility calculus of prospect theory, in which people are risk-averse for prospective gains but relatively risk-seeking when facing losses. But if economic expansion or the prospect of imperial gains does essentially nothing to promote national solidarity, rational choice theory has a serious problem.

Another problem for Rational Choice theory lies in the apparent asymmetry between nations with and without states. A cursory reading of history suggests that the opportunity fo