Truth, justice and reconciliation
TRIDIP SUHRUD
IN our times Reconciliation has come to acquire a salience, which in large measure is due to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established in South Africa under the Promotion of the National Unity Act (1995). And yet it is an ancient idea, a virtue.
Reconciliation is in essence a process that seeks restoration of relations between the wronged and the wrongdoers, be they individuals or communities. The emphasis on restoration places this idea and process within the social and political realm while retaining its roots in the personal, moral universe of an individual. It is this interweaving of the personal and the social, the private and the political that place the idea both within the realm of virtue and ethics. Reconciliation as an attempt at restoration needs to be distinguished from the virtues of forgiveness and mercy and the ethics of justice.
Within the moral universe imbued with Christian theology, forgiveness is seen as a primary virtue. It is also a fundamental revealed characteristic of God. God is He who forgives the sins of his creatures. Therefore, it becomes a primary personal virtue. In this tradition, the emphasis is on the purity of heart, on overcoming resentment and anger, on purging the self of all negative emotions towards the wrongdoer. Forgiveness is a deeply personal act. It is rooted in the heart of the wronged person. It does not require a necessary participation of the wrongdoer. It is possible to conceive of forgiveness as an entirely unilateral act of which the wrongdoer may be completely unaware and, even if aware, remain untouched by it. Forgiveness in this sense is not dialogic and hence not social, albeit it may have societal dimensions.
It is possible to argue, however, that an act of forgiveness is aided by attendant virtuous acts by the wrongdoer – those of confession, propitiation and atonement. But just as it is possible to forgive without the explicit knowledge and involvement of the wrongdoer, it is possible to atone without the participation of the wronged. Hence, an act of atonement may not necessarily result in forgiveness. Though both these acts share a moral ground it is possible to think of them as distinct.
This distance was captured in recent times by a poignant appeal by J.S. Bandukwala to the Muslims of Gujarat that they should forgive the perpetrators of violence even in – and perhaps because of – the absence of any sign of atonement. But forgiveness need not be conflated with forgetting. Forgiveness is not about amnesia, an erasure of painful and unnerving memory that haunts. Forgiveness as atonement is also an act of memory. As memory it guards against action driven by anger and resentment and also a guard against future wrongdoing. While amnesia might allow for healing through forgetting, forgiveness as an act of memory creates the possibility of future moral life. The act of forgiveness does not involve juridical justice, as both judgement and punishment are placed outside the human realm and are considered prerogatives of the divine.
Reconciliation is also distinct from mercy. Mercy is a plea by the wronged for an award of punishment that is less harsh than what the wrongdoer deserves as per law. Mercy as different from forgiveness does not entail complete absolution from legal process and punishment. Mercy thus encapsulates both the personal and the social-political aspect as it is an intervention in the juridical process. Since the granting of mercy resides within the juridical, the wronged person can only make a plea without any imperative obligation on part of the authority to act on the basis of the plea. Thus, while it may emanate from the ethical universe of a person, its resolution lies within the framework of justice.
Mercy in this way is separate from forgiveness and atonement which rest entirely within the personal moral realm. Mercy has to be understood separately from pardon. Pardon is a plea of leniency that the wrongdoer makes. Pardon may by granted even without a plea of mercy by the wronged. The authority to grant pardon is a sovereign power, which may be exercised on a plea of leniency that the wrongdoer may make. But pardon may be initiated even in the absence of such a plea.
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lthough, we have hitherto considered forgiveness and mercy as distinct, the Indic notion of karuna – best exemplified in the life of the Buddha and his teachings – captures both the ideas of forgiveness and mercy. It is a capacity and aspiration to act with limitless compassion and sympathy towards all.Reconciliation as a restorative process involves forgiveness, atonement and justice. It is this need for justice that places reconciliation in the realm of the social and the political. Justice is not an outcome of a trial where the consequence might be punishment or absolution. Justice in a process of reconciliation is an act of bearing witness; witness to Truth. It involves juridical confession; of bearing witness to one’s own act and claiming responsibility for an act not witnessed by any other save the perpetrator and the victim. Unlike the confessional, a reconciliatory process requires the perpetrator to come face to face with the victim or those who constitute the affective community for the victim. In this process atonement and forgiveness rest within either parties but the matter of amnesty rests with the authority arbitrating the process.
Truth and Reconciliation processes in South Africa and elsewhere have come under question on this aspect of amnesty, as this was seen by many as a precondition for the process. It was argued that in the absence of punishment no real reparation could take place. Despite this, reconciliation as a process is seen as the most efficacious mode available for societies torn asunder by historic injustice, civic strife or authoritarian regimes to make a transition to just, equitable or democratic societies. This is because reconciliation as a process is both an acknowledgement of past injustice as also a commitment to future conduct. In this sense both the perpetrator and the victim make a substantive moral commitment; one by atonement and the other through forgiveness. The state acts both as a witness and a guarantor to this commitment. Even if seen as a process of governance, reconciliation offers the best and perhaps the only chance to societies that seek to emerge from a deeply unjust past.
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hat about India? We, with our deep-rooted caste prejudices, with both structural and individuated forms of abuse, surrounded by modern forms of communal violence, state abetted and sponsored violence, with development refugees, with tribes ready to secede, with our inability to provide substantive guarantees to people of Jammu and Kashmir and the North East that the state is not an instrument of terror, and our general amnesia regarding poverty should have had the moral innovativeness and courage to establish multiple processes of truth and reconciliation.
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hat we have not done so is an indicator that as a society we have come to believe that the moral has no essential place in the political. That, we should think so is not just disappointing but puzzling. We do accept, with varying degree of accentuation, that the freedom movement and before that the movements for social and religious reforms were movements in moral innovation. Despite sharp differences in vision and methods, nation and citizenship were thought of as moral categories where we sought to prepare ourselves for the rights that we demanded, where performance of duty was seen as obligatory for swaraj. The Constitution that we gave ourselves was not just a procedural document; it was simultaneously political, social and ethical.The debates of the Constituent Assembly bear the preparedness of the young country to acknowledge the deep inequities in our society and a commitment to go beyond them. And yet the trajectory of post-independence India suggests that we are in some fundamental ways not willing or able to grasp the opportunities that the freedom movement and the constitution provided us with. One possible reason for this is an emphasis on the political, where the real-politic is seen not only as a primary mode of negotiating social relations, but as a sufficient mode that contains and exhausts all other possibilities. It is one thing to concede that economic, cultural and social relations are constitutive of relations of power in a society, but it is quite another to seek their resolution exclusively in the domain of electoral politics. Our approach to debates on caste oppression is a case in point.
In some ways the Gandhi-Ambedkar dialogue – one must insist on it being a dialogic encounter – was a defining moment in our understanding of what ‘untouchability’ meant and the possibilities and limits that caste as a principle of political cohesion entailed. There can be no disagreement about the fact that Ambedkar was deeply disappointed to the point of disillusionment with Gandhi’s inability and unwillingness to seek annihilation of caste. It is also necessary to concede that many dalit movements share this disappointment and that Gandhi’s efforts might have been directed more at a ‘change of heart’ among those who perpetrated and sustained the practice. And while sharing this disappointment one must recognise that this debate allowed Gandhi to extend his moral and political universe. It was this encounter that made ‘untouchability’ a morally abhorrent practice for large sections of the ‘upper castes’ and placed the onus of transformation on them.
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hen something comes to be regarded as morally repugnant, that does not automatically lead to its cessation but it does shrink the ground from which it emanates and so makes its advocacy equally repulsive. Even those who feel a deep sense of unease with dalit assertion cannot make a moral argument for caste discrimination. That we hold the practice of ‘untouchability’ unconstitutional and criminal is in no small measure due to this debate. But despite it we have failed to build upon the possibilities that this dialogue opened up for us as a society. We have come to see caste as a primary form of political organisation, with its attendant ‘competing inequalities’ and the need to forge temporary caste alliances oriented towards electoral politics.This, for instance, may allow for a movement from ‘bahujan’ to ‘sarvajan’, but it in no way leads to annihilation of caste or its practices. It may, in a diabolic way, push us into seeing caste violence either as an economic conflict or a battle for political supremacy, thus making the ethical question untenable. This erasure of the ethical allows an ‘upper caste’ discursive practice where the moral responsibility of self-transformation is negated; instead, it becomes a debate on capabilities, entitlements, resource allocation and purely pragmatic and temporary alliances. Both democratic practices and market forces have led to a transformation of the internal workings of castes and the way they relate to each other. But this in no way has allowed us to transform ourselves in a way that the Gandhi-Ambedkar dialogue did for both of them.
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he second reason for our lack of moral innovativeness is our reliance on the juridical process as a mode of resolving non-juridical and in some ways non-justiciable issues. Our judiciary has shown juridical innovativeness and made attempts to carve an autonomous space for itself. But at the same time it has allowed itself to be incorporated as a means of govern-mentality. Its participation and at times active seeking of commissions of inquiry is a case in point. Commissions of inquiry have become in our country an instrumentality of governance, notwithstanding a Justice Bhaktavar Lentin. Be it corruption, anti-Sikh riots, violation of human rights by the security forces, communal violence, criminal conspiracy or consequence of a political agitation, our preferred mode of responding to the consequences of these events has been to constitute a commission of inquiry.A commission of inquiry actually works as a part of many parallel processes. Take for example the criminal investigation and consequent legal proceedings in courts of law. The commissions are expected to provide insights that lie outside the criminal investigation process – as in cases of communal violence – and are not intended to provide justice to the victims or award punishment to perpetrators. These, in fact, lie outside the purview and authority of the commissions which are more in the nature of fact finding, something that we do not trust our routine investigative procedures to accomplish. We forget that judges are often ill-suited for this task. But increasingly we have come to rely upon these commissions as a mode of governance. They help create a veneer of impartiality, allow other societal or political processes to go on unhampered and provide a feeble hope that truth will be laid bare.
The various commissions appointed to examine the anti-Sikh riots, the commission appointed to examine the events that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the ongoing commission of inquiry into the Gujarat riots illustrate this point. These efforts are marked by a deep moral vacuum wherein the procedural takes precedence over the ethical. Commissions in fact aid the perpetrators by delaying both legal and moral accountability. They provide no succour to the victims. Worse, in the absence of truth and justice no reconciliation can take place. We in fact rely upon non-governmental processes to provide relief, succour, healing and rehabilitation.
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o the degree that the civil society institutions and increasingly community organisations are able to perform these functions absolves the state of its responsibility. It is in fact no longer an expectation from the state apparatus and processes of governance as increasingly they are seen to play a partisan role, if not one of an active participant in violence. These processes have allowed the state and political organisations to absolve themselves of any ethical dimension. The ethical requires progressive restriction and removal of injustice and enhancement of justice, neither of which are substantially secured by a commission of inquiry or any similar quasi-judicial process.
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he third process is marked by a deep suspicion of the religious idiom in certain sections of our polity, civil society, intellectuals and public culture. We would like a strict separation between the realm of the religious and the modes of governmentality. Yet, this was not always so. Soon after independence, the new nation state took several measures which could be regarded as ‘interference’ in the personal religious domain. The abolition of ‘untouchability’ and various social legislations under the Hindu Code Bill are instances of this. The fact that they were contentious measures does not take away from the fact that we accepted the right of the state to intervene in the religious domain and seek to ‘reform’ it.The suspicion of the religious is a phenomenon of the political discourse of the last three decades. This suspicion and unease is not unfounded, especially in a subcontinent that was partitioned as a result of the politics of religious identity, where the most brutal violence is perpetrated in the name and the cause of religion, where religious idiom provides for suppression of caste groups and where patriarchy seeks and finds legitimacy and our polity is divided on the nature of the secular. But this suspicion has also not allowed us to engage with the question of faith.
It is a difficult question; the question of faith. The secular mode views the faithful with suspicion if not as potential bigot; where the public domain is sought to be purged of the expression of faith. Equally, those who advocate a fundamentalist reading of religious practices and those who seek a politics of the religious find the faithful subversive. Yet, India continues to be a society where faith and belief play a pivotal role in the defining sense of what constitutes our selfhood as individuals and as members of communities. It is a source of values, both personal and societal. Much of the moral personal discourse is imbued with the religious idiom. Many of our exemplars, including the modern ones, are either men or women of religion or those who have a deep and remarkable engagement with the religious. This allowed them to draw the idiom of religion in the political and social realm.
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he remarkable engagement with the Gita during the national movement is a case in point. Nevertheless, while advocating a place for faith one must recognise that it would be viewed with deep distrust so long as faith also motivates and legitimises killing. This disavowal of the religious also makes the moral and ethical realms liminal in our political discourse. This leads to a non-recognition of moral acts as moral; they become barely perceptible. Various post-independence struggles – for rights, against displacement, for access to resources, for human dignity – have largely been seen either as social movements, as non-party political processes or as alternative politics. Rarely is any recognition given to them for their moral, ethical edge, even though many of these involved deep self-suffering, sacrifice, self- abnegation and included modes of protest reminiscent of satyagraha.Both in our response and consequently in how we assess them, we have chosen to view them as essentially political, which they are. As a result, the innovations in terms of modes of protest, of mobilisation of people and sensitisation of the civil and political society have come to be viewed as a strategy or technique. The suffering of the tribals in the Narmada valley was in no way spiritually inferior to the suffering of satyagrahis. But when a fast is viewed as a purely coercive mechanism it allows a counter fast a la Modi; these are then judged in terms of their efficacy to attain immediate political aims. The ethical is reduced to pure instrumentality, subsumed under the political. This has made it increasingly difficult for us to separate the ethical from the religious, the moral from the political.
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ny dialogue on truth and justice that seeks to go beyond the immediacy of the political imperative and establish a covenanted community – we have to recognise that even the strictly secular is also a mode of belief and belonging – will have to take some recourse to the moral and ethical as distinct from a language exclusively of rights, entitlements, capabilities and victim-hood. We have to recognise that the moral and ethical are not denominational – and for a secular polity we even need to rescue them from the denominational – because the secular is not only ethical, it is also a matter of faith.We cannot expect the Indian state to establish something akin to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the state and the political parties will be in the place of the wrongdoer. The state has no capacity for expatiation. We, the people of India, will have to bear the onus of initiating a process of reconciliation, where each one of us will simultaneously be both the wrongdoer and the wronged. It will essentially be a dialogue between and within us. It will be our purgatory. Only then can we emerge stronger, tolerant, resilient and morally superior.