New era of prejudice taking shape in India

Do you think of India as a violent country or a nonviolent one? Sometimes I come down on one side of the question, sometimes on the other. But, if pressed to state my view in one sentence, I’d say that I think of my country as a site of many kinds of violence that is drifting slowly — few things change swiftly in India — toward nonviolence and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

True, on most of the common indicators of violence in a country — murders, domestic violence and rapes — India features prominently among the nations of the world. And that’s before we even get to the more depersonalized, structural violence; the sort that millions of Indians experience on a daily basis because they happen to be a woman, or from a lower caste, or from a minority religion. Or even just poor. Gender-based violence is a particularly deep flaw of Indian life.

However, some of the most creative and insightful thinking about nonviolence across the span of history has also come from India, perhaps because India has been such a violent society. Historically, many Indian religious traditions abjured violence or splintered into reformist sects — Buddhism, Jainism, Sufism, and Sikhism, for example — when the social order became too hierarchical or complacent.

Modernity and its forms of violence, such as colonialism, new technologies of war, and nationalism, spawned new thinking about nonviolence in India. The entire edifice of Gandhian thought can be seen as a set of interlocking frameworks for how to live nonviolently within oneself, with the other, with political adversaries, with nature, with other countries, and even with the consumption of food and material goods.

Then, when India won independence, the ideals of political liberty, democracy and a secular constitutional order of the new Indian state could all be seen as attempts to uproot the dehumanizing realities of religious violence, caste hierarchies and prejudices, and economic servitude so deeply instilled in Indian life over the millennia.

Seven decades later and the average Indian thinks more self-consciously and more acutely about violence than he or she would have in the past. He or she has an enhanced awareness of the long sweep of violence in Indian history, and tries in small or large ways to turn the rudder of history in a more peaceable direction. In the long struggle between violence and nonviolence in Indian history, the latter — it could be said until fairly recently — has been steadily making progress.

But not any longer. Although few forces can disrupt the long-term currents of history, one of them, unfortunately, is the state. Some special characteristics of the state make this possible. For one, state authority derives in part from its monopoly over violence. Even if society slowly sheds its propensity toward various kinds of violence, the state retains the right to use it to maintain law and order.

And, secondly, when a particular political ideology seizes power in a democracy and takes over the all-encompassing responsibilities of the state, it may be able to infect society with its own propensity for violence. This is what has happened in India since 2014 — and especially over the last year, since Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a second term in power.

Alongside the violence of commission, the ruling party has also very cynically exercised the violence of omission

Chandrahas Choudhury

In fact, the BJP’s political ideology, which holds that India’s Hindu majority has been denied its legitimate rights as a result of conceding too much space to the country’s minorities, is in itself a recipe for violence. When given control over governance and policy, such an ideology is incapable of keeping the peace. Rather, it compulsively seeks unrest and conflict.

For much of the last six years, the Modi government has behaved as if it was completely oblivious of the long, cautionary history of violence in India. In doing so, it has ended up recklessly inaugurating a new chapter in that history — one in which violence in India has resumed the casual, amoral, arbitrary, callous character that it exhibited in the past.

In the last four months, the party has passed into law its controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, which threatens the citizenship status of India’s Muslims — a deliberate form of legislative violence. When hundreds of thousands of Indians of all faiths took to the streets to protest, largely peacefully, several BJP-ruled states found an excuse for the exercise of actual violence, using the police to crack down on the protesters.

Alongside the violence of commission, the ruling party has also very cynically exercised the violence of omission; refusing to arrest or restrain mobs sympathetic to its ideology. Only last month, more than 50 people in New Delhi were killed in riots in which the hand — and, in some instances, the apathy — of the state was all too apparent. Hundreds of others have lost their livelihoods, and probably their faith in society.

Violence is a very powerful virus. It is a natural enemy of introspection and self-restraint. And it is addictive. When unchecked, it gives its perpetrators a giddy sense of power. It is hard not to look at India today and think that it has broken its implicit compact with nonviolence — that a new era of hate, bloodshed and prejudice is taking shape to undo all the moral progress of the past century.

Strange though it may sound, the coronavirus pandemic that has convulsed the entire world these last few weeks has managed to unite Indians around a common cause, and distracted the authorities from the compulsive aggression of the past months by handing it a challenging administrative task that has no explicitly religious or political element.

Coronavirus has just claimed its first victims in India. But, for a few weeks or months at least, it promises to bring India some relief from state-sponsored violence.