Every atrocity from rape to genocide generates a standard etiquette of social response. There is no sense of feeling and little reference to justice. All one needs are the correct words.
The recent Manipur violence brings this hypocrisy out dramatically. Think of Prime Minister Narendra Modi traversing the world for two months, suddenly playing patriarch fighting for the honour of every woman. Congress leader Sonia Gandhi responds in contempt, but has little to say about the Prime Minister equating events in Rajasthan with Manipur. Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal cuts in with the right comment but creates at the most a storm in a Delhi tea-cup.
Our outrage, and our sense of horror seems to have been normalised into a standard behavioural response. Even Pavlov’s lab rats might show more eccentricity. Very soon outrage lapses into indifference or hypocrisy. The responses are finally dictated more by electoral politics than by any sense of understanding or empathy.
Today, responses to violence have been ritualised both as acts of production and consumption. The recent riots reveal that violence today is an act of policy normalised through electoral politics. Violence in fact, is symbolically consumed through a digital repetition that replaces memory. A video footage enacts the second round of violence reproducing the act of rape. There is little sense of outrage, only vicariousness. The very act of replay reproduces a sense of mimicry. History repeats itself, not as a farce but as a video recording.
Politicians are equally empty. Outrage, in fact, becomes an emptying out of responses. The question is, how do we confront such a response. How do we rewrite a constructive narrative which violence and media have been repeating to ensure a point. The predictable sense of outrage lacks new shades of morality. The human being disappears. As sociological categories take over, society reads the marginal and the minority as dispensable. Some want them to be abandoned in any future narrative.
In fact, two models of violence appear clearly in the current era. The first is represented by the crisis in Himachal Pradesh, where development becomes a form of violence for the erasure of organic communities and ecologies. The second, in Manipur where violence is a form of development consolidating existing power structures. Violence becomes a currency of power; violence becomes a language of the hegemonic outlining of who gets what and who does not. Violence underwrites the existing social contract. Violence also delimits your repertoire of rights with Meitei and Naga claiming turf, while the Kuki is caught in the liminality of terrains. Violence becomes both a symbolic and material text legitimising the politics of current discourse.
One must reread violence several times because the standard protests are skin deep. One must read it symbolically, ecologically, and demographically. One needs to outline its script to challenge the logic of current systems. One sees that this is why both Modi and Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh were not really bothered by it and responded to it with cliché. It is here that independent critical analysis of the academe and the civil rights groups becomes crucial.
Language needs to be reinvented. The Prime Minister uses cliché echoing “anguish” as he stands in “the temple of democracy”. Piety in the form of correctness hides distance. Even a quick investigation shows that the FIR for the incident was gathering dust, and the Prime Ministers belated reaction, which was a combination of caution and distance, adds to the suspicion. Words like horror used too often get lost in the stereotypes. One needs a return to storytelling.
One must realise the role of woman in Manipur. One senses this as one recollects the role of the mothers of Manipur in confronting the earlier violence of the Assam Rifles. One finds another resonance when one recollects Irom Sharmila's epic fast for over 15 years. One must grasp that violence, silence, and stereotype blend together to create the symbolic hypocrisy of the regime.
A different sense of civics and governance is crucial. The citizen must emerge in these narratives. One must ask, whether the communities are consulted after such events. A civil rights report needs to retell the story. Truth can hardly be left to current regimes where the body becomes a site of violence and indifference, reinforcing electoral politics.
One needs a different therapy, a new kind of storytelling, a narrative that echoes the truth commissions, in reworking the tacit structures of violence. Today, stereotypes and violence become two sides of an indifference from which Manipur may not recover. The emptiness of democracy is stark.
(Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist and professor, OP Jindal Global University.)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH