Neera Chandhoke's book looks at how democracy and violence coexist

Ashutosh Kumar

VIOLENCE is considered anathema to the spirit and substance of democracy. Founded on individualistic and egalitarian values, democracies enable individuals as well as varying social groups to express views and interests through a process of deliberation, and also to realise them through built-in institutional mechanisms and practices. With an open space for dialogue, negotiation and protest, democracies are supposed to render unnecessary the use of violence as a means of politics of resistance.

If that is really the case, why is it that democracy and violence ‘manage to coexist… not very happily, but not uneasily either’ in India? Why do groups ‘pick up weapons, or support those who do so, when they have the democratic right to question injustice and renegotiate justice’? Why has India since its Partition been witness to violence involving individuals, groups and state both in its ‘direct and physical’ (and therefore visible), as well as in ‘institutional/structural’ (mostly invisible) forms? Why a dissonance between democracy’s ideals and reality in India, which has, of late, done well politically/electorally in terms of people’s participation, contestation and representation? Can one argue along with Charles Tilly that democracy may be defined as ‘contention’ and ‘violence as being endemic to it’? Alternately, is it India’s democracy that ‘is deeply flawed’?

While attempting to answer the puzzle that confronts political democracies the world over, Chandhoke, a noted political theorist and comparativist, underlines the complex and mutually embedded nature of interrelationship between democracy and violence. She draws attention to the challenges India has faced in its democratic career like immense diversity, a deeply hierarchical order, persisting regional, class and caste-based inequalities and associated discrimination and marginalities, to name a few. The unacceptable level of human and income poverty even after 75 years of Independence, that mocks at the seductive promise of social and economic democracy, breeds among the marginal groups a deep sense of frustration and anger, which tend to ‘spill over into the streets’. Chandhoke argues that in accentuating the anger of the powerless and instigating them to indulge in violence, self-seeking politicians and also sectarian ideologies play an important role. She also reminds us that the victims and often perpetrators of violence in everyday as well as associational life are mostly ordinary citizens, whether it is a terrorist act, a sectarian riot, a mob lynching, or Naxal violence.

The volume begins with a theoretical exposition of the concept of violence. The next two chapters present an empirical account of ‘maximalist’ physical violence that ravaged India in the name of religion at the time of Partition, and which continues more in the form of targeted attacks on minority community members in recent times. In a separate chapter, she refers to the maximalist/direct and minimalist/structural violence perpetrated against the ‘lower’ castes and tribal communities.

Two chapters focus on the insurgency-prone areas of Kashmir and North-East, where the differentiation between the maximalist and minimalist forms of violence becomes difficult to conceive, though it is the former which is much more pronounced. The next chapter is on the violence in underdeveloped ‘remote’ regions of central and east India, the ‘red corridor’ infested by Maoist forces taking on the might of the state. And who are at the receiving end? The same ordinary people who are reduced to the status of ‘right-less people’.

The most virulent form of violence on evidence, accompanied with widespread violation of rights, has been reserved to counter insurgency movements, which pose a threat to territorial integrity and sovereignty. Ironically, state violence abetted with the help of draconian extraordinary laws has been justified in the name of safeguarding democracy. In the last two chapters, Chandhoke reminds us of the civilisational heritage of this ancient land of Buddha, Mahavira and Ashoka and more recently of Gandhi that affirms that ‘we the people of India’ do not have ‘violence in our bones’.

Reading the chapters, however, also brings us to the stark reality that like most of the ‘new’ democracies of its ilk, India is no exception when it comes to its inability to contain violence.