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How the State triggers violence

Massive mobs set fire to trains, blocked highways, and multiple incidents of arson, stone-pelting, police firing and mass arrests were reported across India after Agnipath was announced
Last Updated 29 June 2022, 06:54 IST

For the last few weeks, violent protests marked by arson and wilful destruction of railway property have been in the news. What was more shocking was that the protesters, assumed to be keen to join the Indian military services, resorted to violent means in registering their protest against a newly-proposed recruitment process into the very services they seek to serve, the hallmark of which is order and discipline. It was completely ‘unsoldierly’ for the aspirants of a military career to destroy national property, while military ethos demands they restore and preserve them. This argument, however valid, is just one side of the coin.

It is the ad hoc and uncertain nature of the job without pensionary benefits and other social security arrangements that had angered the youth and made them desperate. The government laid the grounds by creating a situation where joining the military services is one of the few available options for employment for the millions of unemployed youth mostly from rural India. Career opportunities and government jobs are so few and far between that there is palpable anxiety among the youth for whom it was not too difficult to call the bluff of the proposed recruitment process and the skulduggery of the government. They could see that the entire point of Agnipath is not job creation, but reducing the government’s swollen defence pension and wage bill (currently 50% of the defence budget).

As massive mobs set fire to trains, blocked highways, and multiple incidents of arson, stone-pelting, police firing and mass arrests were reported across India, fists were clenched and words of retribution filled the air. While the violence that was unleashed was condemned in strident terms with angry calls for punishment, what provoked such violence was not under the scanner.

Mob violence is as risible as State violence, which is commonly justified on grounds of maintaining law and order. But on grounds of the extraordinary need for maintaining unity and integrity of the nation-State, excesses are often committed. Only a State has the capacity to use bulldozers at will against its citizens or set vigilante mobs upon them. Some highly disruptive government moves beginning from demonetisation, GST, abrogation of Article 370, CAA-NRC, four-hour notice to shut down a nation of 1.4 billion, the passage of three farm laws in September 2020 triggering massive protests – subsequently repealed in 2021 – have caused considerable social unrest and loss of lives. And when protests turn violent, the tendency of governments in India – including the current dispensation – has always been to favour penal shortcuts resorting to informal, extra-judicial, violent and collective punishments such as firing on crowds, the exemplary use of bodily sanctions, detention without trial, the imposition of collective fines on the population of a ‘disturbed’ area, incarceration and many other stratagems aided and abetted by laws and institutions that supported them as the ‘coercive network’ of the State.

And how does such State violence proliferate? Let’s take the instance of riots. Paul Brass, a noted scholar, has noted, studying India in the 1980s and 1990s, that the whole political order in North India and its leading as well as local actors were implicated in the persistence of Hindu-Muslim riots, which have had concrete benefits for particular political organisations and larger political uses. Brass spoke of an “institutionalised riot system” (which, according to him, stoked communal flames in Gujarat in 2002), including a wide array of violent specialists who operate under loose control of party leaders playing two-fold roles. While they act as guards and enforcers of various kinds outside of riots, within riots, they serve as coordinators and shock troops. Thus, a large share of the collective violence in the episodes that people call riots, arson, rebellions, or revolutions directly involves governmental agents as purveyors or objects of damage. Without including deaths inflicted or suffered by police and troops, we would have no way of explaining variation in the deadliness of different sorts of collective encounters.

However much we blame the youth for unleashing the violence protest against Agnipath, they are a soft target. Persons or organisations that specialise in the deployment of coercive means undertake a programme of damage to persons and/or objects during war, riot, terrorism, genocide, and politicide – the programmed annihilation of a political category’s members. In the Gujarat pogrom, over 2,000 persons were estimated to be killed, 150,000 people displaced, and property worth over Rs 11,000 crore destroyed. In the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the then MP from New Delhi constituency, rejected the claims of Congress government that only 600 Sikhs were killed and released the list of 2,700 Sikhs massacred in Delhi. West Bengal, according to one study, has one of the highest numbers of political conflicts and related deaths in India.

As an instance of State violence taking the form of disruptive altruism, demonetisation officially accounted for just four deaths – in December 2018, the late Arun Jaitley informed Rajya Sabha that four people had died “during the period of demonetisation”, while the PMO pleaded ignorance as to the number of deaths in the aftermath of demonetisation, which was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 8, 2016. There is no fair account of how many died due to lack of cash, food and medicines. Protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA) and the proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens reportedly took the lives of 25 people, with widespread allegations of police firing and counter-allegations of protesters attacking the police with stones and setting police stations on fire. Farmer leaders maintain that over 700 farmers died – chiefly due to harsh weather, illness contracted from unhygienic conditions, and suicide – while protesting against the contentious farm laws at the Singhu, Tikri and Ghazipur borders for over a year.

The recent protests against Agnipath could easily be the first collective dare against the government’s lackadaisical attitude about unemployment. While any form of violence cannot be condoned, strong words must be reserved for those who triggered such action. As we try to lay bare the processes that produce this violence, we might see that it is often the disruptive, unthinking and, should one say, muddled policymaking on the part of the government that is responsible for the mess. Such violence highlights once more the dangers of the way social divisions are politicised in India.

(The writer is a Kolkata-based
commentator on geopolitical affairs,
development and cultural issues)

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(Published 28 June 2022, 17:53 IST)

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