Need new morals to confront banal violence

Violence is more impersonal, logical, and rationalised. It is not spontaneous but planned, also an act of consumption
Illustration: Soumyadip Sinha
Illustration: Soumyadip Sinha

Recently, I asked a friend of mine, a major consultant in innovation systems: what are the two most innovative domains of Indian life? In a lazy way, I expected him to say IT and biotechnology. His answer caught me by surprise. “Technology is not half as innovative as social systems; corruption and violence are the two most innovative aspects of India. They threaten democracy in a way even technology cannot.” I was surprised and asked him to explain.

He said, “The tragedy is you use the same word for a changing world.” Violence, he explained, is no longer face-to-face. It is not a phenomenon you can explain with a standard sense of good and evil. Its very demonology has changed.

He told me to take the case of a riot. Riots are no longer occasional encounters or outbursts in a neighbourhood, where people go back to normalcy in a week. A riot is systemic and extremist. It seeks to eliminate the other as a population. The Sikh riots of 1984 was the first example. The violence had the scale of a demographic act. There was little remorse after such elimination. People dug up pits and filled them with phosphorus to hasten the elimination of the body. You don’t think of your neighbour in that way.

Violence is more impersonal, logical, and rationalised. It is not spontaneous but is planned. Also, today, violence is an act of consumption. When one rapes a woman, he may take a selfie to replay it. The violence that is replayed is what you call violence. Of course, one adds the excuse that you are rectifying history. Rape is wished away as a rectification of history. The horror is in the logic of the act.

He made the third point. Violence earlier triggered memory. Today, it erases it in the name of state logic. You can displace thousands of people and make them refugees because you treat dams and development as sacred. Opposing development is seen as anti-national, and Modi leads the fray by saying ‘urban Naxals’ are anti-development. All you need is a file to carry out such violence and declare closure by saying the file is closed.

I objected and said those are aberrations. He smiled and said people are dispensable and disposable. Take three examples. Covid-19 showed that the informal economy was disposable. You could chemically spray construction workers as if they were vermin. It was policy. World policy hides more violence than we think. Nuclear leaks are repaired by seasonal workers who are looking for a job. Then they disappear to the village to die a horrible death. All in the name of security.

I started thinking of examples myself. I thought of AFSPA, where soldiers can indulge in rape and murder with impunity. Colin Gonsalves proved it in the case of Manipur, collecting over a thousand cases of women who were raped. Security and development are potent words that can sanitise any form of violence. Bureaucracies add to the logic of violence. I remember reading about vasectomies in the Shah Commission report. A 75-year-old man objects that he is not fit for the procedure, but the clerk replies that the quota has to be filled. Numbers and body count are part of the new litany of violence.

I remembered the literary critic Ganesh Devy telling me, “All you need is a label or a definition to allow for violence. The government of India defined language as a form of life with a script. In one stroke, over 2,000 oral languages were eliminated, all in the name of progress.” Progress is one of the most genocidal words in history. It erases people and memories with equal ease.

Another friend of mine referred to Garrett Hardin’s Promethean Ethics, where Hardin advocates ‘triage’. Triage is a systematic elimination of people who are seen as incompetent, underdeveloped, or defeated. Henry Kissinger advocated the suspension of aid to Africa on the grounds of triage. He felt aid would be wasted on a people who were incompetent to help themselves. The irony is that Kissinger caps his career with a Nobel for peace.

Hardin makes the same critique about Mother Teresa, claiming her work among the old and poor is wasted. Caring and love does not help in the long run, and the poor, he claims, are doomed. Today, triage is a part of medical policy and is the very concept that helps us get used to eliminating people. Elimination sounds logical, even necessary. We see it as a part of the social, Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest.

In fact, genocide today is a systematic part of state policy. Take China. Not only did it keep a million tribals in camps, but it also eliminated a million Tibetans. The Chinese destroyed over 4,000 monasteries to make sure Buddhism would never survive. The sadness is we read all this as a part of the rational logic of policy.

Violence today has become scientific, rational, and bureaucratic. The perpetrator does not feel like she or he is a part of the crime. In fact, she or he often behaves like a well-behaved clerk taking orders and doing duty.

One is reminded of Hannah Arendt’s poignant essay, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She asks how a frail, helpless man with balding hair can be a genocidal expert. She quotes psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who interviewed him. Bettelheim claimed that Eichmann was more normal than the psychologist was after having interviewed him. For Eichmann did not look pitiful. He claimed that he was part of a chain of command. Arendt calls such violence a part of the banality of evil. She wonders how many Eichmanns lurk in our offices contemplating genocide in the name of development and security.

The question lies in how one stands up to it. I think we need more creative ethics and a community of scholars who unravel the logic of such acts rather than seeing them as indispensable logic. At another level, we need new narratives to chronicle the banality of such violence. The very idea of the ‘satyagrahi’ needs to be reinvented to confront such innovative evil. We need a new language of morals and the creative power of literature to confront genocide today. This is a challenge that democracy has to face but lacks the will and the imagination to confront the everydayness of displacement, genocide, triage, and exterminism that haunts us—as we watch helplessly.

Social scientist associated with THE COMPOST HEAP, a group researching alternative imaginations

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