Essay
The face of truth
THOUGHT in Europe has yet to recover from the episode, now more than six decades old, of Nazism. The Holocaust continues to be the theme that preoccupies European intellectuals even into this new century. Its horrors surpass the combined capacities of the practitioners of philosophy and aesthetics, literature and the arts, theory and criticism, the social and the human sciences on the Continent to comprehend what happened in the régimes of Hitler and Stalin.1
Are we in India preoccupied with Partition in quite the same manner? Did that passage in our history rupture the Indian psyche in a way that does not permit healing? Have other events transpired since then – the Emergency, the anti-Sikh carnage of 1984, the Bombay riots in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition, Gujarat 2002 – which we as a people cannot and will not get over at any time in the foreseeable future?
It seems not to be so. It is as though the relationship between the experience and the memory of terrible violence is somehow differently configured on the subcontinent. Or perhaps violence is not something that we understand as occurring in our nation in an episodic fashion. It is rather a continuous phenomenon, taking place at all times along the fractures of caste, religion, class, gender, age and region, making it difficult to focus on this or that brutality, this or that genocide. Violence is our very condition of being; it does not allow us to dwell on any given instance of the large-scale loss and destruction of human lives due to political causes.
It is also true that among the oldest and the most recent of systematic reflections on non-violence in the world, those of Jainism and Buddhism and those of Gandhi, are historical artefacts that we in India like to call our own. This is an extraordinary conundrum. The difference between how we live and what we claim to idealize represents the impassable gap between the most unceasing practice of violence and the most sustained theorization of non-violence. When does it become incumbent upon us to begin to acknowledge our unremittingly violent reality and build the conceptual resources that are commensurate with the task of describing it? Or else, can we even begin to realize the ethical and moral ideal of non-violence (ahimsa) that is available to us from within an intellectual history we claim as properly Indian?
At the risk of appearing utterly cynical, it seems fair to suggest that the latter alternative has absolutely no viability, no life-chances in today’s India. We would be far better served in seriously engaging the problem of violence, in placing it front and centre in our consciousness of who we are and what we do as a society at every moment of our collective existence. Whether we want to think through violence – our violence
2 – as an endemic structure or as a series of discrete events, becomes then a concrete analytical problem that we would be obliged to rigorously address.In his piece ‘A Finer Balance – An Essay on the Possibility of Reconciliation’, Dilip Simeon attempts what needs recognition as a genuinely novel meditation on violence in contemporary Indian social science.
3 This essay provokes the question: Can we in India contemplate creating an institution of transitional justice of the order of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Do we envision our society as ever making a transition from a past of hatred to a future of reconciliation via a present-day encounter with the truth?Satyameva jayate is our national motto: ‘Let truth alone triumph’. But where have we shown even the slightest propensity to confront the truth of ubiquitous violence, leave aside effecting justice in response to this violence? And by ‘confront’ I don’t mean passively watch on our television screens or meekly read on the front pages of our newspapers innumerable fragments of the violence that pervade our lived reality.
Rather, I mean to ask whether there is any mechanism by which we have actively undertaken to face, as a national project, the crimes against humanity perpetrated on our land? Have we ever dreamed of making it our national agenda to redress the wrongs done to millions of the poor, women, Dalits, minorities, tribals, children – Indian citizens all – in the decades since Independence, through Partition, wars with neighbours, man-made environmental disasters, communal rioting, state terror and caste strife? When have we made it our collective priority to stand before the irrefutable violence of our post-colonial history, to put ourselves on trial for having failed, time and again, to actualize the constitutional goal of universal justice? Aside from meagre – not to say financially inadequate and ethically questionable – monetary ‘compensation’ doled out on occasion by government authorities to victims of violence, do we have a well-understood notion of ‘reparation’?
4But we’ve never had to live the kinds of truth that warrant facing by our society as a whole, in a single concerted effort to be just – so says the objector (alas, not imaginary). In free India we’ve never had dictatorship, military rule, ethnic cleansing, genocide, revolution, foreign invasion, apartheid, theocracy, pogroms or indeed any of the major causes of mass violence that have afflicted other nations in modern times. If in a country of a billion people, there is much violent conflict, what is the surprise, the shame, and, moreover, the special need to have any sort of hearing, to stand witness, to evaluate the evidence, and, finally, to do justice by all?
Given the disparities in our population, we are on balance pretty peaceful: riven but not rent, tattered but not torn. In fact, by very definition we are a non-violent people. Instead of congratulating ourselves on being the world’s largest functioning democracy, why should we beat ourselves up for things that we Indians, always already supremely civilized, simply don’t do? Let’s leave national guilt to the guilty nations, to Cambodia and Uganda, to Chile and Germany, to Afghanistan and Iraq, to Serbia and Rwanda.
Those who are strong need not call their past into account – let the U.S. and China, Russia and Israel introspect and repent before we begin to worry about the blood on our hands, if any. Ours is the land of the Buddha and the Mahatma, we are not obliged to undertake exercises in self-scrutiny, self-castigation or self-improvement.
The objector, clearly, is not conscientious.
In a work of political history that deserves to be called a tour-de-force, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2002), Samantha Power examines all the major instances of genocide in the 20th century wherein U.S. non-intervention was a matter of deliberate choice, exercised repeatedly with deadly consequences. She demonstrates that the American decision not to intervene was the result, not of a paucity of intelligence, the lack of advance warning, botched diplomacy, or insupportable military costs, but rather of a consistent pursuit of national self-interest, narrowly defined, over and above moral considerations. Her indictment of U.S. policy, more or less consistent before, during and after the Cold War, across Republican and Democratic administrations, through the terms of a range of American presidents, is comprehensive and devastating.
Along with documenting her country’s response to genocides in Ottoman Turkey, Nazi Europe, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Saddam’s Iraq, the Hutu regime in Rwanda, and in Bosnia, Srebrenica, and Kosovo by Serbian forces, Power traces the incredible struggle of one man to identify genocide and have it be recognized as a crime. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, fled to America after the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland and spent his entire life putting genocide on the legal map of the world that emerged from World War II brutalized by Nazism. Lemkin not only coined the word ‘genocide’, he also wrote and lobbied ceaselessly for an acceptance of the law, a version of which was passed by the UN in 1948 as the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’.
Interestingly, India was one of the first signatories of Lemkin’s draft resolution against genocide, adopted by the General Assembly in 1946. The U.S. did not ratify the Convention until forty years after it came into force. Free India became a party to it in 1959. At a time when Indian independence had not even been achieved, India was a pioneer in acknowledging that genocide is a distinct category of crime, and that genocide had indeed been perpetrated by Turkey against the Armenians and by Germany against Jews. Ahead of the U.S. – supposedly a fellow-democratic nation – by nearly half a century, we voted to name and then condemn genocide.
How is it, then, that scarcely six decades later, after Partition, several wars with Pakistan, the blood-soaked creation of Bangladesh, experiencing a massive influx of beleaguered refugees from Afghanistan, Tibet, Burma and Sri Lanka, or when Gujarat was shattered by communal conflict in 2002, we exhibited no trace of this early conscience? What became of our precocious grasp, in the infancy of post-colonial nations, of the undeniable reality as well as the absolute evil of genocide?
Much has been made of the use of the ‘g’-word to characterise what happened in Gujarat. But the question of whether the violence in Gujarat met the criteria for genocide is not unanswerable. Was the violence directed exclusively or predominantly at members of one group (in this case a religious group)? Were large numbers of people exterminated? Was there forcible displacement? Were women raped? Were men, women and children all put to death? Were killings accompanied by hate speech? Was there torture prior to executions? Was sexual violence deliberately employed to denigrate, demoralize and humiliate the target community? Were community leaders and elites treated with extra virulence? Were the murders planned in advance and executed in an organized fashion? Were dead bodies and other remains incinerated and/or buried to destroy evidence of assault and injury? Was there a large-scale looting of property?
Was group identity the basis of the massacre of innocents? Was there both physical and mental harm caused to members of the target community? Did the state government refuse or fail to protect those of its citizens who were in danger? Was the ruling party itself, and/or its political allies, the principal author of the plans, and agent of the acts, of violence? Was the law in a state of exception? Were civil liberties in a state of suspension? Did military and paramilitary forces take the place of the rule of law? Were policemen the perpetrators of violent acts against unarmed citizens whom they were supposed to protect? Unfortunately, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that all these questions must be answered in the affirmative.
5If we are still going to cling – indefensibly, to my mind – to a numerical threshold for genocide, and say that too few Muslims died in Gujarat for it to qualify as genocide, then at least we have to grant that what happened was genocidal. We cannot adhere to the letter of the law to the point of impeding justice: genocide must be interpreted as a degree concept. In Gujarat, the minimum conditions for genocide were, to our eternal shame, met.
With the government having turned against its own citizens, in the aftermath numerous non-governmental and civil society organizations, aid and relief agencies, observers and activists, individuals and groups made it their business to try and heal the hurt. Journalists, jurists, lawyers, doctors, students, filmmakers, rights advocates, artists and intellectuals from all over India went to Gujarat in significant numbers.
6 Some of those who witnessed the destruction and documented the accounts of survivors have now come together to draft The Prevention of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity Act of 2004. This is a welcome development.In ‘A Problem from Hell’, Power discusses the incredulity that accompanies genocide all over the world. In every society, people are unable or refuse to believe not only the extreme violence that takes place before their eyes, but sometimes even that which happens to them. Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi is of course the greatest writer of our times to record the many psychological tools human beings employ to deal with inhuman violence, including self-deluding denial, unreasonable hope, heroic stoicism and amazing grace. Of these many different reactions that arise when human minds and bodies are confronted with unimaginable, unbelievable and incomprehensible violence – reactions that Levi explores in all of their depth and complexity in his wrenching books – Power focuses on incredulity.
It is important we recognize and support the fact that in drafting this Act, both victims and witnesses have overcome their disbelief to write a concrete law against genocide. They have moved the country beyond its pious disavowals, its shock and hysteria, to a clear-eyed appraisal of the evil that lurks in the recently ascendant – and perhaps still to-be-definitively-repudiated – Indian version of fascism. The proposed Prevention of Genocide Act also incorporates economic discrimination against and social boycott of a community as indices of the intent and willingness to commit atrocious violence against it on the part of aggressors. This is a progressive feature of the proposed law, which would ensure that we remain vigilant about the eventual ramifications of everyday gestures of exclusion and segregation. As Gujarat demonstrates, the dehumanization of others begins, quite literally, at home, with neighbours turning into informants and enemies, and villages and towns devouring their own inhabitants.
There are at least four positions slowing down, at its very inception, the process of enacting a law against genocide – and related, a law against hate speech, that precursor to genocide. One, a position resistant to law-making as such, claims that excessive legislation ultimately empowers the state at the expense of its citizens, allowing it to turn upon them the very measures designed to protect them. In this view, laws constraining language and action are in the long run repressive rather than regulative, and any additional security they might provide comes at the cost of freedom – a cost too heavy for an already disempowered public to bear.
Second, a position that is critical of the given Act, claims that the law as being conceived is inadequate, self-contradictory, or fundamentally flawed. Further, that a consensus among the different groups involved in proposing and drafting the law to enable them to jointly achieve a text with any teeth is unlikely.
Third, a position that is pessimistic about the actualization of the law, claims that no matter how weak or strong the formulation, the government will never allow it to get on the statute books because it is just too much of a challenge to state power. And last, a position that purports to learn from the experiences of other countries, claims that trials of dictators and war criminals, truth and reconciliation commissions, and tribunals on genocide, have all been partial or complete failures in various parts of the world, so why even try to initiate these procedures in India?
All these arguments have some merit, but I would contend that there is no real alternative than to seek, and struggle to achieve, through legal instruments, deterrence against, as well as punishment (to perpetrators) and reparations (to victims) in the event of genocide. Ultimately genocide is about human suffering on a scale and in a manner that no system of justice or morality, no matter what its cultural specificity, can t olerate. If it is unfashionably universalistic or humanistic to make such a contention, so be it. Genocide is intolerable. The Constitution of India must carry an acknowledgment of this normative truth in no uncertain terms, and not merely as an interpretative extension of existing laws dealing with rights, crime or both.
What happened in our country to Sikhs in Delhi, to Pandits in Kashmir, to Muslims in Gujarat, can neither be allowed to pass into history nor repeated in the future because we dither in a fog of what Power condemns as ‘rationalizations, institutional constraints, and a lack of imagination’ (A Problem from Hell: p. 516). A law against genocide may be hard to fashion, difficult to push through Parliament, liable to misuse by a perverse dispensation, and lacking in good precedents or analogies from other countries. Nevertheless, a law against genocide we must have, if we are at all serious in our commitment, as a nation, to maintaining our plural composition and guaranteeing the dignity and protection of citizenship equally to all Indians, regardless of their age, sex, caste, region, religion, linguistic background or any other markers of identity. Violence, persecution and extermination on grounds of identity have no place in a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious India, and the law should not provide any shelter to those who think they can violate the person, the rights, the safety or the life of fellow-citizens with impunity.
In a sense the electoral outcome of 2004, with the unexpected defeat of the BJP and rejection of the Sangh Parivar, can also be read as a sign that the nation’s consciousness, or more importantly its conscience, is alert to the political and cultural entailments of Hindutva ideology. But hardly one year before this verdict, in the elections that followed immediately after the genocidal violence, Gujarat had unequivocally chosen to retain Narendra Modi’s government, voting as though it was a state of, for and by Hindus (in the sense of followers of Hindutva) – indeed, as though it were a mini-Hindu Rashtra.
It is a long hard road from claiming that as Indians we are always already non-violent, to giving Hindutva a chance and then, despite genocide, a second chance, to recoiling in horror at what happened in Gujarat, to voting out a murderous government and, finally, drafting laws that help us deal with the actuality of horrible and endemic violence in India. It is no mean feat to have covered some of this distance within the last few years. The task now is to learn from our own experiences as those of other societies, and keep pushing in the direction of fashioning a full array of legal instruments – special courts, communal violence tribunals, anti-hate speech legislation, riot trials, reconciliation commissions, guidelines for reparations and so on – that can help ensure that democratic India never again becomes a theatre of genocide, of any scale whatsoever, no matter which party comes to power.
While working to actualize the family of legal measures that address crimes against humanity, we simultaneously need to push for more pro-citizen laws in two related areas where our rights are most threatened by violence, especially the violence of the state: freedom of expression and national security. With the help of enlightened law, we have to face the truth that, at the very birth of our nation, we declared as transcendentally triumphant.
Ananya Vajpeyi
Footnotes:
1. For the most recent account of this abiding difficulty in comprehending the Holocaust or its aftermath, particularly as reflected in the evasions and pieties of post-War German literature, see W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, 2003.
2. Upendra Baxi has called it ‘our very own evil’ in the immediate aftermath of the Gujarat riots in 2002. See his ‘Notes on Holocaustian Politics’ in Seminar 513, May 2002; www.india-seminar.com
3. Dilip Simeon, ‘A Finer Balance – An Essay on the Possibility of Reconciliation’. Presented at the Documenta Symposium on Truth, Justice and Reconciliation, New Delhi, 9 May 2001. Published in Experiments with Truth: Documenta 11, Platform 2. Okwui Enwezor et al eds. Germany: Harje Cantz, 2002.
4. See Upendra Baxi, ‘The Second Gujarat Catastrophe’: ‘India, unsurprisingly, lags woefully behind Southern experiments at redressing such political productions [Baxi is talking about emergent ‘rape culture’ in Indian communal riots – AV]. Unlike South societies and nations that resolutely confront issues of "transitional justice"…and despite urging… India has yet to produce its own variant of effective national truth and reconciliation, following models of El Salvador, Chile and South Africa. We have not (outside the realm of judicial activism) reproduced any wholesome discourse on reparation, restitution, and rehabilitation. The classic, and in so many ways inaugural, model of Indian constitutionalism stands thus severely denied of any sensible forms of mitigating fallouts of planned political catastrophes. http://conconflicts.ssrc.org/gujarat
5. The documentary film ‘Final Solution’ by Rakesh Sharma (218 minutes) records each and every one of these egregious circumstances in Gujarat between February 2002 and July 2003. Sharma’s journey through the state during more than a year of violence is excruciating to watch. It is hard to say what is more horrific: the urban and rural landscape of burned and broken buildings, the interior landscapes of the minds of people who are either engulfed in unspeakable memories or consumed by irrational and implacable hatred, the virulent language and imagery of political propaganda and election speeches, the mass graves, the testimony of children who witnessed brutalities they have no way of comprehending and of women who were mercilessly raped, the ruined and abandoned homes, businesses and villages of Muslims, agricultural fields that were the sites for the most heinous crimes upon defenseless people, the crass media spectacle… No one who watches this film can fail to be thoroughly disturbed and alarmed by the pass to which things have come in Gandhi’s state. Gopal Menon’s documentary ‘Hey Ram! Genocide in the Land of Gandhi’ (2002) was also difficult to stomach, but it lacked the temporal depth or the rigorous analytic frame that makes Sharma’s film so utterly shocking.
6. Important documents to have come out of this spontaneous self-scrutiny undertaken by some citizens on behalf of the Indian public are: Siddharth Varadarajan (ed.) Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy. Penguin, 2002; Teesta Setlavad and Javed Anand (eds.) Special issue of Communalism Combat, titled Genocide: Gujarat 2002 (Mar-April 2002); and a compilation of various reports by the Indian Social Institute, titled The Gujarat Pogrom: Indian Democracy in Danger. New Delhi: ISI, 2002.
