The rape of Kuki women in Manipur has added to our sense of horror and disgust. Disgust, as one discovers, is everyday currency, easily disposable and equally forgettable. The question raised is not one of sensitivity and justice alone. The problem is asking how one frames a narrative like Manipur today. Media narrators and headline stories reveal that Manipur is a failure of both storytelling and discourse.
We have to begin with the security discourse, where internal and external security become one unified domain. Thanks to the likes of Amit Shah and Ajit Doval, India has become a national security state, where surveillance and security are the prime tasks of the state. The body is subject to intense scrutiny, and violence and torture become instrumental in policing. Instead of being a porous system with criss-crossing identities, the frontier becomes a unilateral system of surveillance—panopticon. Political philosopher Jeremy Bentham coined this term and designed this system of continuous scrutiny. Every national security state is a national surveillance state.
Democracy in India has created a state of double hybridity: In the surveillance of armed forces, we have the policing of the mobs. Rape becomes a complement to torture in Manipur. This becomes more acute as women’s bodies are used symbolically and literally to express power. Torture and rape become the lingua franca of dominant groups. The body becomes a site where the diktats and facts of power are inscribed. The dominant mob becomes a complement to the official forces, and both use torture as a policing and policy function.
The Indian democracy becomes an empty farce when democracy functions limply. The mob is a double for the army for purposes of internal policing. Moreover, violence acquires a double legitimacy in the acts of consumption and production. The original rape is captured digitally. By consuming this, one mimics and reproduces violence repetitively. Violence becomes normalised, producing little guilt or shame. Even Parliament, when it responds, does so mechanically and rhetorically. Violence, rather than being punished, is now practised as a ritual of impunity.
We have to assemble this array of facts to confront the recent spectacle of violence. One notices first that the mob acted with impunity. The Kuki women, as victims, are confronted with the strength of dominant groups which seek to marginalise them. The FIR was filed several weeks after the video of the gang-rape came out. PM Modi’s protest, despite rhetorical flourishes, signals little guilt. It was more an act of publicity and populism. One senses little shame in the language Modi uses. It sounds too absent-minded. Sadly, the opposition behaves in a similar manner. The rhetoric of dominance is echoed twice—once by the mob and once by the electoral system.
What gets created is a dual language of electoral dominance and national security. At the national level, security facilitates and legitimises the language of rape and torture. It warns of their everydayness within a national security state. Complementing the language of security is the language of governance. Not only does the victim become a law and order problem, but the woman also symbolises and creates various dialects of violence. Victimology is now a part of governance. Women’s bodies are used as sites for inscribing the hierarchy of power. Their bodies carry the imprint of power. Manipur has to be now liberated twice, first as a national security state and second as a body politics where women’s bodies map the facts of marginality and suffering.
The language of governance will not do. There is an attitude of impersonality towards atrocity and body counts, transforming them into the language of policy. One needs a new kind of storytelling where the woman as a victim, the woman as a citizen, and the woman as a woman speaks thrice. Pain needs to be read in the language of being, not through the vocabulary of “body count”. Violence has to be challenged beyond the cost-benefit analysis and seen more through phenomenology. Census data and sociological facts are inadequate. One needs the personal biography of the scream rather than an impersonal census.
There is then the fact of memory. Mere bureaucratic records are not enough. Rape and torture are to be retold orally—recreated as a fable—as a fight between the forces of good and evil. Impersonal descriptions add to violence and erasure. The spectacles of protest remain empty as one needs more than parliamentary language for it. The obscenity of violence needs a counter language, a different poetics that democracy needs to invent. Between inane language and mute silence, democracy becomes empty. What is missing is a moral economy which captures the ethical consequences of political actions. Reading Manipur as a law and order problem alone is inadequate.
One has to indict the media and the current morality of politics. The language of violence points to neither pain nor humiliation. It is seen as a political circus, a spectacle that the majoritarian democracy seems to enjoy.
Manipur is not a micro-problem in a remote corner of India; it is our crisis. It is our way of thinking, our sense of violence and the emptiness of justice that reveals the crisis of conscience. The crisis of Manipur is the crisis of Delhi. It shows the emptiness of democracy and the aridity of bureaucratic fiefdoms.
One needs a new sense of ethics; one needs exemplars to demonstrate a new sense of courage. Ethics, as a new sense of drama and performance, has to determine the way we legislate and the way we think of truth and justice. The way we think of India as a political entity is obvious today. Gandhi would have gone on an immediate fast. Our leaders are too content to follow such an ethic. The sadness of Manipur is the sadness of India.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with THE COMPOST HEAP, a group researching alternative imaginations