The problem

Victim:

A person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action.

‘victims of domestic violence’

‘earthquake victims’

 

1.1 A person who is tricked or duped.

‘the victim of a hoax’

 

1.2 A person who has come to feel helpless and passive in the face of misfortune or ill-treatment.

‘I saw myself as a victim’

as modifier ‘a victim mentality’

 

1.3 A living creature killed as a religious sacrifice.

 

Victimhood: the state of being a victim.¹

 

‘We are the worst sufferers here. The worst victims. More than others because we have lost our homes!’ said the old man on the stage. Everyone sitting in the theatre hall clapped and nodded their heads. Once the applause subsided he continued to address the audience, urging them to recognize they were sitting on a ‘volcano’. I sat in that hall watching the audience react to each word he said. This was an event I had covered during my research in 2006 in Jammu, when I explored the lives of Kashmiri Pandits, the Hindu minority of Kashmir, who were displaced from their homes when the current conflict in Kashmir had begun in 1990. At that time, much of my work focused on lives in a camp colony for the Pandits in the city of Jammu.

From time to time I attended events held by various organizations, like the one the old man speaking was a member of, that claimed to advocate on behalf of all displaced Pandits in Jammu. Even though I have covered this event elsewhere, the scene remained with me. It was at this event, called Martyr’s Day in English, Shaheed Divas in Urdu and Balidaan Divas in Hindi, that I encountered phrases like ‘worst sufferers’ and ‘worst victims’.

While I have explored the experience of the displacement of the Pandits in detail elsewhere,² I remain intrigued by the language and sentiment expressed. The displacement of the Pandits in 1990 remains one of the most drastic cases of Internal Displacement in South Asia where within a few short months, most families of a particular community had fled their homes, many of whom have lived in various forms of exile since. What did it mean to claim the label ‘worst victim’? What made them more victimized than others in a region like Jammu and Kashmir where there was no dearth of victims of eventful political violence and of more mundane structural forms? Who is a victim? What does it mean to speak of, or to discuss victimhood? What are the contours of victimhood as a condition, and how has it changed over time? What defines, what Jeffery and Candea call, the ‘politics of victimhood’ in the contemporary?³

Critical to the politics of victimhood are the categories of victim, perpetrator and witness. The victim and the perpetrator operate as analytical and affective categories and are premised on some kind of reaction and recognition. These categories emerge in encounters with institutions such as the state, law, kinship and religion, and formations such as power, class, gender, race, caste and ethnicity. Victimhood speaks to a process of being, as well as making, moral claims of some kind. What makes modern victimhood intriguing is its widespread meaningfulness and the availability of different languages with which one may speak of victimhood.

Consider how discourses and practices that emerged after the Second World War such as the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, or on genocide and war crimes, are part of our everyday vocabulary. There may be disagreements on what constitutes genocide or criticisms of refugee conventions as eurocentric. Yet the terms will evoke recognition of some kind and have become a part of common knowledge. There is no blank space. While most forms of victimhood are seen to be produced in times of extraordinary violence, there is also an awareness of victimhood in relation to structural or everyday violence which emerges out of prevailing socio-economic structures that constitute everyday life. This becomes apparent especially in conditions of poverty or where caste, race and gender based discrimination define everyday life.

Victimhood as a political construct is never static and often speaks to multiple histories.⁴ The framework to understand a situation of victimhood and the experiences of the victim is an important starting point. Hence one of the first themes that emerge in conversations on victimhood is with the category of the victim, and other related categories such as the perpetrator and the witness. Early engagements in the study of violence suggest that the experience of violence was to be understood as a triangular relationship between the victim, the perpetrator and the witness.⁵ But these are not separated categories and studies on conflict between different religious groups in South Asia point to the close relationship between victims and perpetrators before and sometimes even after the violence.⁶ Even when conflicting groups may work on techniques and ideologies of total separation, as seen in conflicts involving Israelis and Palestinians, the presence of one becomes enmeshed in the other.

The interplay of victim and perpetrator across the play of meanings, interactions and fields also necessitates a mapping of the terms of the relationship between different groups. The case of caste in India as a form of structural violence becomes especially interesting as an example. One of the fundamental features of caste is that it is a form of social inequality, that binds groups into relationships, however pathological. Consequently, attempts to be progressive in the context of caste remains contingent. Take for example Gandhi’s approach to caste. While Gandhi condemned discrimination, the caste system itself was never criticized as it was the basis of the social. Even when he and his followers introduced the term ‘harijan’ to speak of Dalit suffering and thereby acknowledging victims of caste, it also led to denial of agency to the Dalits. As Nagaraj points out, Gandhi’s reform was aimed at the purification of the self and not the social structure that produced violence and suffering,⁷ which also retained agency among upper castes and non-Dalits.

The witness also remains important. As Michael Rothberg argues, earlier studies have often forced victim and perpetrator into a fixed binary. Instead he suggests that we need to consider what he calls the ‘implicated subject’. ‘The category of implicated subjects emerges in relation to both historical and contemporary scenarios of violence: that is, it describes the indirect responsibility of subjects situated at temporal or geographic distance from the production of social suffering... implication draws attention to how we are entwined with and folded into ("implicated in") histories and situations that surpass our agency as individual subjects.’⁸

The implicated subject enables the mapping of connections and relationships across situations of violence and suffering. It indicates the ethical difficulties that are involved even if one is not a part of an immediate context of violence. It can be argued that establishing connections enabled the successful policy of sanctions against the apartheid regime that one time governed South Africa. But it also raises ethical dilemmas for different collectives, such as middle class Hindus in India who encounter a news report of a Muslim man lynched to death, who lead lives at a geographical and socio-economic distance from the crime, but in whose name the perpetrators committed murder.

Another theme that emerges in discussions of victimhood is a concern with language and communication. Languages of victimhood are often shaped in encounters with institutions across multiple media and contexts. The state, for example, has been essential to this process. As Veena Das⁹ has shown in the case of communal riots in India, and Valentine Daniel¹⁰ discusses in his classic study of Sri Lankan Tamils surviving war and displacement, victims of violence had to learn how to fit their testimonies into the form of a First Information Report (FIR) that draws on a language of the state in order to be recognized as victims. While Das and Daniel show how this language was quickly learned, they also suggest that those victims who find that language difficult will not receive recognition to the extent or manner expected. In the process those who are victims have to demonstrate some ‘cunning’ in the politics of recognition¹¹ to avoid the denial or recognition of one’s history or even misrecognition.

While the state may set the context of modern and contemporary victimhood in some form, everyday cultural forms and symbols also figure significantly. If we go back to the vignette I began with, the Pandits were organizing an event drawing on a pre-existing vocabulary found among Hindu and Muslim societies. While there is a complex history of shahadat which speaks to victimhood and sacrifice at a political level (which also connects to the martyr as a witness in its roots in Greek),¹² balidaan or the gift of a sacrifice is also a feature of ritual life in popular Hinduism. The point I am trying to make is that there is a marshalling of different languages, varying from stateist to everyday cultural and social life, to speak of suffering. It could vary from Partition refugees who became shaheed or committed balidaan by giving up their homes13 or villagers in central India who saw themselves as sacrificial goats with no control over their lives when the state took over their land to make a factory.¹⁴ What emerges in the simultaneous transaction of different languages is a desire to make an experience of suffering known, recognized and understood.

Another possibility with the spread of vocabularies of violence and victimhood is that the experiences of others can be seen, recognized or misrecognized and incorporated in one’s own life. This is not peculiar to life in the first quarter of the 21st century. Salil Sen’s play Notun Ihudi, or the ‘new Jews’, released in the 1950s, told the story of Partition refugees who came to India and draws on a vocabulary of the Jewish experience. Hence an ongoing concern with languages of victimhood will help us not only to understand how victimhood is framed in different contexts, it will also help map connections over time and space between different contexts thereby renewing and transforming our understandings of victimhood.

Another theme that emerges is the competition of victimhoods. In December 2018, a statement released by the US Holocaust Museum, Edna Friedberg writes: ‘The Holocaust has become shorthand for good vs. evil; it is the epithet to end all epithets. And the current environment of rapid fire online communication and viral memes lends itself particularly well to this sort of sloppy analogizing. Worse, it allows it to spread more widely and quickly.’¹⁵

Friedberg goes on argue that the holocaust was a unique event in human history and any use of its experience or language to speak to any other context would devalue its place in human history. Friedberg was responding to statements made by the American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was accused of appropriating the holocaust when she spoke of immigrant detention camps in the United States as ‘concentration camps’ and for employing the phrase ‘never again’, usually associated with the responses to the holocaust. Friedberg’s statement was in turn critiqued as ahistorical and that pointing to similarities across time and space is indeed essential to engage with current situations of violence.¹⁶ While there is more to be discussed here, this exchange also demonstrates the difficulty of discussing victimhood, especially when there are different experiences of violence that may confront each other.

Most forms of thinking about our social and political worlds begin with some comparisons. Comparisons, either in seeking differences or similarities across different experiences, are expected to establish a trend or a general statement. Thinking in terms of seeing or seeking similarities is a common part of everyday thought and reflection. However, when it comes to thinking about situations that produce victimhood of various kinds, analogical thinking is often very common. Analogical thinking might take place due to the vocabulary at hand. The experience of the holocaust of European Jews provided, for many, the vocabulary and template to think about gross violence and suffering (and injustice) in extreme forms. They travel across space and time and become meaningful in other places. For example, the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war and the actions of the Pakistani Army are also seen in terms of genocide by many Bangladeshis. To see similarities and to use words and images in different contexts also play into a politics of recognition to perhaps evoke empathy, sympathy or any other kind of reaction. Ocasio-Cortez’s employment of particular terms and Friedberg’s dismissal indicates a tension between seeking ‘open ended assemblages’ and the need for careful comparison that considers different experiences and which does not flatten historical experience.¹⁷

The other concern is whether recognition or misrecognition facilitates a competition between victimhoods. In the incident I refer to in the beginning, the old man spoke of the Kashmiri Pandits being the worst victims. While the Kashmiri Pandits are victims of forced migration, the Kashmiri Muslims are the victims of state violence, people from the Pahari regions are victims of violence, communities located on the borders are affected by near daily armed action between Indian and Pakistani forces. The list could go on in a region like Jammu and Kashmir where other groups who inhabit the margins of caste and class experience much hardship, such as the Bakerwals. Who would be the claimant of the worst victim here? How does one empathize with another suffering without denying certain histories? How does one stand steady when assessing claims of victimhood?

What also complicates contemporary victimhood is the wave of populist political movements seen across the world. The rise of conservative politics and white nationalism in the United States and Hungary or Hindu nationalism in India is premised on the alleged victimization and suffering of a moral majority. This might seem to be an appropriation of victimhood at an initial glance, though many conflicts in the past have been embedded in the appropriation of victimhood.

The genocide committed by Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda was premised on the framing of overcontextualized history of marginalization faced by Hutus during colonial rule which privileged the Tutsis, consequently turning victims into killers.¹⁸ National Socialism depended on blaming German suffering on the presence of Jews who had to be cleansed from the population. Most cases of lynching reported in the last few years across India have consisted of Muslim victims at the hands of Hindu lynch mobs, but where the blame is placed on the victim while the perpetrators enjoy impunity. The appropriation of victimhood by perpetrators is thus a feature of modern politics across the world.

There are indeed many Hindus in India, sometimes even middle or upper castes, who find themselves leading insecure lives. Much of the support given to figures like Trump in the United States have been explained as a support from disaffected white majorities who may indeed consist of a mass who lead precarious lives but are unable to engage with any language that addresses notions of justice.

The conditions that may produce these sentiments among a certain mass can be linked to the uncertainties and hardships of life in late capital and reports of increased inequality. However, populist movements have also worked with nationalisms to focus energies on a scapegoat or culprit, often a minority and against discourses of human rights, feminism, affirmative action, immigrants and the presence of minorities of all kinds. While this is not new, the intensity of affect and emotion involved that is witnessed now is perhaps what makes this situation stand out, which also risks a devaluing of victimhood.

While competitive victimhoods reveal the tragic zero-sum nature of the politics of victimhood in many contexts, what of other areas where ambiguity and ambivalence marks experiences of suffering? In Vincent Crapanzano’s moving ethnography, we are introduced to the Harkis, Algerians who served as auxiliaries or soldiers in the French colonial forces.¹⁹ With the end of the Algerian liberation war, the Harkis were caught in a difficult place, being seen as traitors by Algerians. When the Harkis fled Algeria to France, they were treated not as loyal subjects but as any other non-European immigrants subject to racism. As Crapanzano explores in detail, the Harkis feel betrayed by the French who do not recognize them and are seen only as traitors by Algerians, resulting in a persistence of being unrecognized victims.

The Harkis are but one case out of possibly many others, where experiences of current victimhood are met with a certain measure of ambivalence and ambiguity. While victims and perpetrators are often intertwined, and while perpetrators may have their own experiences of suffering which may be acknowledged, the intertwining of histories and experiences also produce situations where one is never sure. Furthermore, if we connect experiences to other formations such as caste and gender, the ambiguity increases. Perhaps it is an awareness of ambiguity and ambivalence in the politics of recognition, without reducing experiences to a discursive game, that will define the contours of victimhood in the early 21st century

While discussions of victimhood often take place in context of events and processes, there have been many writers who have also explored questions of suffering in everyday life, either through frameworks of structural violence, or even to recognize small events that coalesce in everyday life as a kind of violence.²⁰ Forms of suffering from situations of poverty and increasing socio-economic inequality have been an endemic feature of life in parts of the world, whether in the global South, such as countries like India, to countries like the United States in the global North. While structural violence as a framework enables a consideration of forms of suffering due to socio-economic difference as a kind of violence, an identifiable perpetrator is often lacking.

One recent case in India that comes to mind is of Budhni Soren, an Adivasi woman from eastern India who had died of starvation.²¹ What made her experience tragic is that while the official report of her death was attributed to a health condition, she was denied rations as she did not have an aadhaar card, a form of documentation to access rations she would have been entitled to. Budhni Soren’s death emerges out of a field of poverty exacerbated by provisions of the state that fails its most marginalized citizens. Will she be recognized as a victim of the bureaucracy that enables structural violence?²² How do we consider victims of life in late capital where social and economic structures that shape the daily grind cause undue suffering, but to which a clear source of suffering or pain either in the form of a group or person is difficult to fix, considering that most of the world accepts the logic of capital? Perhaps another feature of life in the early 21st century is related to the difficulties in recognising victims when situations are not identified as obviously violent.

ANKUR DATTA

 

* Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Vikash Singh and Divya Vaid for the comments on an earlier draft.

Footnotes:

1. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/victim

2. I still remain shocked by one moment at that event, when a member of a right wing political party who was invited to speak argued that the Pandits could not claim to be ‘shahids’ as they were all still alive. Ankur Datta, On Uncertain Ground: Displaced Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2017, pp. 179-180.

3. Laura Jeffery and Matei Candea, ‘The Politics of Victimhood’, History and Anthropology 17(4), 2006, pp. 287-296.

4. Steffen Jensen and Henrik Ronsbo, ‘Histories of Victimhood: Assemblages, Transactions and Figures’, in Steffen Jensen and Henrik Ronsbo (eds.), Histories of Victimood. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2014, pp. 3-6.

5. David Riches (ed.), The Anthropology of Violence. Blackwell, Oxford, 1986.

6. Veena Das, ‘Our Work to Cry: Your Work to Listen’, in Veena Das (ed.), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1990, pp. 345-398.

7. D.R. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet: A Study of the Dalit Movement in India. South Forum Press, in association with ICRA, Bangalore, p. 18.

8. Michael Rothberg, ‘Trauma Theory, Implicated Subjects, and the Question of Israel/Palestine’, Profession, 2014. https://profession.mla.org/trauma-theory-implicated-subjects-and-the-question-of-israel-palestine/

9. Veena Das, 1990, op. cit., fn. 6.

10. E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropology of Violence. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996.

11. Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., 2002.

12. Ananya Vajpeyi, Prolegomena to Study of Peoples and Places in Violent India. WISCOMP, New Delhi, 2007.

13. Nilanjana Chatterjee, Midnight’s Unwanted Children: East Benagli Refugees and the Politics of Rehabilitation. PhD Dissertation, Brown University, 1992.

14. Jonathan Parry, ‘The Sacrifices of Modernity in a Soviet-Built Steel Town in India’, in Frances Pine and Joao de Pina-Cabral (eds.), On the Margins of Religion. Berghahn Books, New York, 2008, pp. 233-262.

15. Edna Friedberg, ‘Why Holocaust Analogies are Dangerous’. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Press Release, 12 December 2018. ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/why-holocaust-analogies-are-dangerous

16. David Ulin, ‘I’m Jewish and I Don’t Say This Lightly: "Never Again" is right now in America’, LA Times, 26 July 2019. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-07-25/concentration-camps-border-holocaust-alexandria-ocasio-cortez

17. Michael Rothberg, ‘From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory’, Criticism 53(4), 2011, pp. 523-548.

18. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2002.

19. Vincent Crapanzno, Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011.

20. Arthur Kleinman, ‘The Violence of Everyday Life: The Multiple Forms and Dynamics of Social Violence’, in Veena Das, Arthur Klienman, Mamphela Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds (eds.), Violence and Subjectivity. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000, pp. 226-241.

21. Jan Manch News, ‘Woman Dies of "Hunger"; Government Blames Cold’, Jan Manch News, 16 January 2018. https://janmanchnews.com/woman-dies-of-hunger-government-blames-cold.html

22. Akhil Gupta, ‘On Structural Violence’, in Kalpana Kannabiran (ed.), Violence Studies. Oxford University Press. New Delhi, 2016, pp. 339-357.