Violence as a means to a corrupt end
Kanwalpreet
Forms of Collective Violence, Riots, Pogroms and Genocide in Modern India.
by Paul R. Brass. Three Essays Collective.
Pages 184. Rs 250.

Revealing and shocking. The reader feels a sense of disgust towards some elements of the Indian political system as he goes through this slim volume.

Paul Brass is an authority on the political history of India and has many titles to his credit, including Language, Religion and Politics in North India and Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison.

The research and the analysis that he presents underscores his understanding of the subject. This study of riots, pogroms and genocide is detailed. We have grown up hearing about the Holocaust victims, the killing of Palestinians in Israel and nearer home, horrifying tales of massacre of men and women during Partition.

We think about the killings during Partition as gruesome memories of the past but Brass raises us from our slumber. He shakes us to the rude reality that violence is at our doorstep.

A pogrom is organised killing and plunder of a group or a class of people while genocide is the extermination of a race or community by mass murder or making conditions impossible to survive. Pogroms and genocide in India? Unbelievable, but Brass makes his point. He contends that these forms of violence are not spontaneous as usually understood. Rather, they are deliberate productions by organised groups. He labels this phenomenon as, "institutionalised riot system."

The reader can feel the social scientist’s anger at such organised violence where the innocent are murdered. As the writer himself confesses, ‘Those who are familiar with my previous work know that I do not take a detached stance in my writing on the subject of collective violence. I strive for social science objectivity, but I do not hide my passion or anger.’

We usually tend to categorise all mob violence as riots. What the researcher in Brass tries to prove is that each riot is an individual tragedy. We cannot club the riots in two places as one. The looting and plunder may be a common occurrence in riots but the cause usually differs in each. Riots are rehearsed—the study aims to expose this pre-planned violence so that the feelings of revenge and retaliation fizzle out or can be contained in future. In his words, "First we may suggest that reducing the killings to lists of statistics and describing them as links in a chain of retaliation and revenge is dehumanising while individualising them exposes precisely their effects, makes them real, causes revulsion in our hearts and minds that may contribute to the advancement of the cause of human rights."

The second chapter, The Partition of India and Retributive Genocide in the Punjab, sets the tone for the book. It is generally said that violence occurred due to Partition of but Brass believes, like some other political scientists that, violence was a principal mechanism for creating the conditions for Partition.

The concept of institutionalised riot system can be traced back to the Partition. "The police usually has its intention to desert from one side to the other depending on their communal affiliation." He condemns the inhuman behaviour of police personnel towards the Muslim community during the imposition of curfew.

From the author’s account one can feel his sympathy for the largest minority community within the country. "`85where Muslim mothers have emerged from curfew areas during free hours, with their children, in search of milk, and have returned without their children, who were instead burned alive by the police."

He concludes that the Provincial Armed Constabulary in Uttar Pradesh is biased against the Muslim Community and openly abets the miscreants from the other community to kill the former.

Brass comes down heavily on the police, the civil administration and the politicians for helping those who disrupt communal harmony. Similarly he is very stern when he talks about the role of the British authorities, the leaders of the Indian National Congress and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, in their failure to find a rational solution to the problem of Partition.

Indian Secularism in Practice discusses how terms like Indian secularism, composite nationalism, Hindu nationalism are practiced in India. Their usage and their contradiction are highlighted.

The book draws our attention to an area that is less thought of and written about. Not much literature and not many conferences focus on pogroms, pre-planned riots and to the misuse of curfew. Brass’s book is an answer to this lacuna.

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