The Spirit of Guy Fawkes This November

Did the spirit of Guy Fawkes visit us this November? WikiLeaks and the Radia Tapes in India have exposed the hollowness of our rulers and their cronies in the media, in big business, and the army. Some of us distrusted them anyway, but now, the evidence is before everyone. Suddenly, it's not the Maoists or Al-Qaeda or some such phantom in the news. It's the state and its allies.

The emptiness of neoliberal "governance" also now stands exposed. We were told that smaller government would mean a more vibrant civil society. The media appeared to be a symbol of that vibrant civil society. Ordinary people can only express shock and dismay at events well beyond their control. Now alas, the grand strategy of neoliberalism has been exposed now as rotten to its core.

Nearly four hundred years after his public execution, Guy Fawkes remains significant for us. What we call freedom might be simply servitude. What we call rights might be merely legal fictions. What we call civil society might be simply a chicken coop belonging to our masters. John Locke, often considered to be the bourgeois philosopher par excellence, had a simple solution to this problem: dissolve an unresponsive, unaccountable government by exercising one's right to rebel. It is unclear what Locke thought of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, but it is quite apparent that the audacious radicalism of Fawkes' actions reverberated down to Locke's age. The Second Treatise of Government opens with an assault on the divine rights of rulers and ends with the conditions under which governments no longer deserve our allegiance. This is the essence of modern democracy. It is nothing without its radical edge. If we ever needed a reminder, this November has given us two.

Why Poverty and Underdevelopment Cannot Explain Maoism

Every now and then, someone comes up to me and explains why poverty and underdevelopment are the "real" causes of the Maoist rebellions in India today. Usually, I listen patiently, trying hard to contain my annoyance at the crude materialist suggestion, and then pose a simple question to my interlocutor: "Well, what causes poverty and underdevelopment then?" At this point, there is occasionally a reference to development as an onward march to economic and social progress, which implies that some folks are condemned to play catch up in the grand parlor game of modernity. More often, however, there is silence.

Let's start at the beginning though. Assume that poverty and underdevelopment do, in fact, cause agrarian rebellions. It follows then that, in income terms, poorer areas and peoples are more likely to rebel than richer ones. Development data would predict the BIMARU states as the loci of rebellion since 1947. But Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh are not part of the so-called Red Corridor, whereas West Bengal, Chhatisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Orissa are. Now the wily materialist might urge me to look at district-level data to check whether poverty and rebellion are correlated. Again, income falls short as an explanation. The poorest districts are spread far and wide, from Kalahandi in Orissa to Dangs in Gujarat. Most of these districts are not under the Home Ministry's scanner. Of course, we could go even deeper at sub-district or block level or at the village or household levels. Are the poorest blocks, villages, and households the prime movers of anti-state activities? Field research by many, including myself, suggests not. At every level of analysis, therefore, the materialist thesis fails.

Yet materialism is popular among the chatteratti in Delhi and elsewhere. Somehow, in a neoliberal age, everyone seems to have morphed into vulgar Marxists. A number of well-known academics and activists lead the chorus; journalists and their readers follow. Not a single media report has contested a flimsy, even false, argument. Why? I want to suggest a hypothesis here: this is the most convenient apolitical response by so-called civil society in India that effectively denies the link between elite consumption in urban India and the exploitation of resources and peoples located in the Maoist areas. The Delhi chatteratti cannot survive without the ubiquitous adivasi maid from Jharkhand or raise questions regarding the kind of "development" pursued by the modern state in India since 1947. It must come up with an apolitical alternative that protects its narrow interests. Materialism is a convenient myth that puts the blame entirely on the state. Even Chidambaram and his cronies accept it. It's their predecessors who went wrong, they say. Jean Dreze and his accomplices then lend legitimacy to this neoliberal myth, and foolishly sign on to the state's sinister designs to "develop" certain areas. Development here means not freedom from disease, illiteracy, and oppression, as Amatya Sen tells us, but state contracts to multinational corporations to carve out spheres of influence wherever they are resources to be exploited. It's the last great enclosure of the modern age, and there's a fortune to be made for the state and its corporate cronies. Some people, we're told, need to catch up with the times. Or else...

Next, consider the other modern myth, that of the Malevolent Maoist. He is a gun-toting maniac who spews a rotten ideology that preaches revolution and regards 1947 as the start of a second colonial age. They pilfer state development funds and weapons depots, and then lead luxurious lives and rape local women, including those within their cadres. Malevolent Maoists, we are told to believe, spread their tentacles among the poor, who are presumably foolish enough to fall for any trick. They're illiterate, naked, and starving after all. Unlike we who sit in seminar rooms and airconditioned cafes to pronounce judgments on the rest of the planet. We, especially academics and activists, must indulge in state-directed development to redeem these poor, foolish rural folks that are falling prey to the Malevolent Maoist. Although I feel like puking on some of those who tell me such stories, the intellectual in me pushes me towards a calm response. The real problem here is the political impotence of the Indian leftist, whether as academic or as activist. They can no longer pretend to be part of some revolutionary vanguard, representing subaltern struggles in word and action. They are hostage to their professionalism, which necessarily prevents meaningful political engagements with the messy, illiberal world of subaltern politics. History and literature appeals most to our leftist academics: there is simply no need to engage with the present or the real. For our middle-class urban activists, it is usually a simple canned ideology that must be imposed on the hapless sods out there. Doing something is better than nothing, I am often told. But doing something harmful is worse than doing nothing.

And that brings me to how urban academics and activists have been superseded by a class of rural intellectuals who have a deeper understanding of popular grievances and struggles in the Indian countryside and can better represent subaltern claims within a democratic setup. These subaltern leaders speak the languages of their communities as well as the modern state. It is easy to dismiss them as brokers or go-betweens. But they are leaders in their own right. How else can one understand why these so-called Maoist leaders carry out social audits of public works programs such as NREGA or cooperate with honest NGOs? And still, they wield their guns to extract "taxes" from local businesses and to target scoundrels in and outside the state on a case-by-case basis. Violence is selective, a form of subaltern claim-making articulated in ways are justified usually in moral terms. Although active participants in rebel ranks are limited, support for the rebels is widespread. Some people feed and house them; others help organize public meetings to discuss local problems and potential solutions; and yet others build houses for poorer members of a village community or wells and watersheds for the entire village, often with government or NGO assistance. It is hardly surprising that villagers will support young men from their communities who will benefit them materially and politically further their aims.

Is it rebellion at all then? Well, yes, but not a revolutionary one. Scholars and laypersons tend to equate rebellions and revolutions as popular anti-state actions that seek regime change. We do not have a vocabulary or theory to explain rebellions that do not seek to turn the world upside down or overthrow the state. But for better or worse, this is what we must do in the present context. We need to understand how violence, used selectively, can become an effective weapon of the weak under certain conditions to force social change from above. Those conditions refer to a kind of political domination that is not so totalizing that it can be softened up by collective action from below. In other words, these conditions are not found in fascist and other authoritarian regimes. Many electoral democracies, however, do insofar as they are necessarily incomplete democracies and imperfect states. The Zapatista rebellion in Mexico and the '60s race riots spurred on by Black radicals in the US are two obvious examples of violence used effectively as a weapon of the weak to force states to yield to subaltern demands. States and nations, we appreciate, are made from both above and below, and the constant conjunction of domination and resistance is a critical path towards genuine democratization. There is no formula for success, of course, and the path to genuine democracy is crooked.

But it is time to appreciate that non-violence does not always pay. Violence matters under certain conditions where it acquires a moral-cum-strategic relevance. These conditions are not economic, but irreducibly political. They point to essential conflicts of interest such as those between metropolitan Indian elites and rural subalterns. No amount of NREGA social audits and famine inquiry commissions can achieve what the Maoists have since 2004. Jagdalpur and Ranchi now appear clearly in everyone's radar, be it the state or civil society. All sorts of development programs and schemes are being enacted or planned, usually with considerable local input. Livelihoods are becoming more secure and sustainable. Popular mobilization is creating a shared political awareness of the rights of ordinary men and women as citizens of a democratic country, not subjects to be sacrificed at the altar of national development. Women are at the forefront of subaltern struggles to carve out a better future. Ideally, all of this could have occurred in a neat, peaceful way. But ideally, we would all be reasonable people who understood and respected each other. In that case, politics itself would not have existed since everyone would have agreed on everything. Sadly, we live in an imperfect world, so politics is inevitable and violent politics will remain an effective means to secure worthy ends.

Is Violence Always Unethical?

As nation-states struggle to maintain their legitimacy in the eyes of their citizen-subjects, violence brews everywhere today. The old social arrangements supporting states unravel rapidly. In this post-modern world, however, we still retain the old fictions about well-ordered states built on national self-determination and linguistic unity (though these have been more myth than reality in the postcolonial world anyway!). Violence, we believe, is antithetical to socio-political order, the moral fabric of society, and the individual conscience. Are we always right though?

Given my philosophical training in the Western European canon, I could quite easily refer to “just war” theories from Aquinas to Michael Walzer. Or pacifism in the very Christian ways that we recognize from the New Testament via St. Francis of Assisi to Immanuel Kant. But there is nothing new to be said there. So I want to step somewhat out of my comfort zone and make an argument grounded in a certain South Asian tradition that dates to the age of Mahabharata. I am, of course, neither a textualist nor a specialist on ancient India, but rely heavily on past Indological and historical scholarship. I wish, nonetheless, to excavate some general theses on violence in the Mahabharata and its socio-historical context. This agenda seems to me to be quite consistent with the spirit of that epic poem, which says: “Poets have told it before, and are telling it now, and will tell it again. What is here is also found elsewhere, but what is not found here is found nowhere else.”

The Mahabharata, as many of you know, is a story of war and fratricide. Its composition took place over a number of centuries that saw the rise of competing and collaborating mahajanapadas (proto-states or “kingdoms”) in the plains of northern India and the consequent tensions between brahminical (priestly) and kshatriya (warrior) ideals of social order. Because the final form of the Mahabharata took shape in an age of dissent and ferment, best represented by the rise of Buddhist and Jaina sects, the epic can also be read as a debate between the orthodox and the heterodox in which attitudes to violence are central. Indeed, war and violence lie at the heart of the poem. In the opening scene of the Mahabharata, the king Janmejaya avenges the death of his father by a snake-bite by performing a startling sacrifice of snakes. Whereas these slithery creatures of the underworld are generally venerated or appeased, the king decides to undertake the most brutal violence against them as a species. This anti-sacrifice, one not sanctioned by the scriptures or tradition (or even completed actually!), provides the starting point after which the many-sided narrative of the epic unfolds. Violence, darkness and inauspiciousness are thus ever-present in this worldly narrative as they are in our world.

Ahimsa: A Moral Philosophy of Limits?

The Mahabharata, after starting on such a terrifying note of inauspicious violence, repeatedly notes that ahimsa is the greatest moral precept for mankind, its highest dharma. For recent interpreters led by M.K. Gandhi, ahimsa or non-violence is the central theme of the epic. They point to Yuddhishthira’s renunciation of the kingdom he won through war at the end of the epic. War and violence, they say with Yuddhisthira, are ultimately futile, whatever may be its ends and whoever may be its practitioners. While this is a fairly commonplace reading in India today, is it justified?

In the first place, there is ambiguity in the very meaning of the word ahimsa. The verb root han-can mean either “to hit or strike” or “to kill or murder.” But abstaining from hitting or striking is very different from abstaining from killing or murder. Furthermore, ahimsa, at least for the brahminical elite, did not extend to the sacrifice of animals. Among the cruelest forms of violence, the sacrifice of a horse by suffocation/strangling could thus be justified as ritual appeasement or bribery of the gods to buy temporal peace. It is not himsa (murder or killing). Although these animal sacrifices did become key targets for anti-brahminical sects from the 4^th century BC, it is worth noting that animals continued to be eaten, albeit perhaps with lesser intensity. Asoka’s edicts tell his subjects to treat their domestic animals with kindness, but he doesn’t advocate vegetarianism. Male goats, sheep and cattle are specifically cited as animals that can be eaten or sacrificed by householders. The menu in his own royal kitchen prominently noted peacock and deer. And what about humans? Asoka’s declarations of ahimsa in Rock Edict XIII occur only after he had conquered whatever there existed to be conquered, and had effectively attained the Later Vedic ideal of the chakravartin(universal) emperor. He can still threaten the “forest tribes of his empire” by saying that “he has power even in his remorse, and he asks them to repent, lest they be killed.” Any blanket utopian statement against violence is, therefore, undercut by words and deeds alike.

But if complete abstinence from violence is much too utopian for us worldly souls, are the arguments favoring violence persuasive? The natural world, the Arthashatra says nearly two millennia before Hobbes, is all about matsya nyaya (“the law of fishes”), by which smaller fish get swallowed up by bigger fish in the sea. This may be a justification for kingship by danda(punishment), but Arjuna in the Mahabharata recognizes in it, more generally, the inevitability of violence in human affairs: “People honor most the gods who are killers. Rudra is a killer, and so are Skanda, Indra, Agni, Varuna, Yama. I don’t see anyone living in the world with ahimsa. Even ascetics cannot stay alive without killing.” Similarly, Rama, accused of foul-play in killing the monkey Bali, argues in his defence: “Even sages go hunting.” It is even argued against the Buddhist, Jaina and Ajivika sects that ahimsa itself might entail violence against the (bodily )self, most spectacularly in the form of self-sacrifice. Even “rice and barley…scream soundlessly” when they become food for humans. Agriculture, after all, is violence (himsa) because it kills not only plants, but also many animals and insects in the fields. In modern parlance, agriculture is (and has always been since its origin in the Neolithic age) an ecologically-destructive activity. Grains, fruits, and vegetables, remarks the wise meatseller Dharmavyadha to the sage Kaushika, contain life forms, which die when we consume them. He concludes, “I don’t see a single person in this world who lives by ahimsa” for “life preys on life” for survival.

But surely it is not being suggested that violence is desirable because it is inevitable. That seems much too far-fetched. A particularly poignant passage may be found in the opening book, the Adi Parva, describing the burning of the vast Khandava forest by Arjuna, Krishna and Agni: “Creatures by the thousands screamed in terror, and were scorched; some embraced their sons or mothers or fathers, unable to leave them. Everywhere creatures writhed on the ground, with burning wings, eyes, and paws.” The war books in the Mahabharata also offer similar graphic descriptions of gore, mutilation, death, and destruction that certainly do not commend violence. How then can we reconcile the conflicting opinions about violence in human affairs? I suggest considering ahimsa not as a doctrine of non-violence in the utopian sense, but as a moral philosophy of limits. Non-violence is always the ideal for us, but some amount of violence is an inescapable part of the human condition. Or else we couldn’t live at all. For some, this reality may inspire a lifestyle choice such as vegetarianism or membership of a religion such as Jainism, but these are not the only ethically-defensible options available to us. Sometimes, violence may even be necessary, for which reason the Pandavas go to war against their cousins and kinsmen. In sum, violence may not be desirable and complete abstinence from violence may be impossible for living beings, but what is possible is a kind of moral limit to minimize the violence around us. It is, therefore, not so much about whether there can be non-violence, but how much and what kinds ought to be permissible in a decent society.

Violence in Politics and Society

Violence is inherent in politics and society because, as the Arthashatra and Mahabharata argue, the king (or state) rules by danda (force/punishment). That violent state of affairs is deemed a lesser evil in comparison with the greater evil of anarchy or matsya nyaya. By no means did this view go uncontested. The Mahabharata includes these words of a dissident brahmin: “The barley is the people and the deer is the royal power; thus the people are food for the royal power, and so the one who has royal power eats the people.” A bit later, we are treated to a subaltern parody of the ritual copulation between queens and horses in the ashvamedha yagna (horse sacrifice): “‘The little female bird rocks back and forth as he thrusts the penis into the slit.’ Now, that bird is really the people, for the people rock back and forth at the thrust of the royal power, and the slit is the people, and the penis is the royal power, which presses against the people; and so the one who has royal power is hurtful to the people.” The Buddha as political philosopher, too, railed in vain against the encroaching imperial kingdoms and defended republican government as superior by virtue of being more people-friendly and consensus-based. But the unjust violence of the statist status quo nonetheless weighed heavily on the minds and bodies of most of society.

Is this not also true in our own times? Are we also not held ransom by specious arguments against anarchy? Or by brazen justifications of state violence against ordinary folks? Aren’t democracy and freedom just as much elite hocus-pocus in states today as the raja dharma that legitimized monarchies in ancient India? Why do the violence of states and elites appear cloaked in high-minded statements, whereas the naked violence of the subordinated is deemed illegitimate? Why is it deemed acceptable to bomb and murder thousands of men, women, children and animals in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, but the death of a few hundred rich people on 9/11 or 26/11 is instantly condemned as terrorism? Why is the naked plunder of natural resources in the tribal areas of South Asia today regarded as legitimate in the name of “development,” but the defensive violence of tribal communities delegitimized as “Maoist”? Why, in other words, do some forms of particularly brutal violence, namely those in favor of the statist status quo, override the lesser defensive violence of the weak and the wretched?

The primary conclusion I draw here is that we simply don’t live in decent societies in which the majority can live peacefully. In India today, this is most certainly the case. The six decades of neo-colonial loot in Middle India, Kashmir, and the Northeast suggest that these regions, much like the Pandavas, have tried and failed to receive what is rightfully theirs. The Pandavas, dispossessed by their cousins, asked for merely five villages to avoid the horrors of war, but they were refused. The similarities with the situation today are eerie. As violence and insubordination break out all over the subcontinent, might the moral justification for such acts be akin to that for the great war of the Mahabharata? But is the violence of the dispossessed still justified? Should we not feel queasy about defending violence even when the ends seem virtuous? We may not live in decent societies, but will taking up arms against the status quo not taint some forever even if their aims are attained?

These are very difficult questions to answer today as they were in the age of epic poetry. But the Mahabharata provides a “coded” answer to this dilemma. That code is to be found in the story of Ashvathama’s vengeance against the Pandavas for killing his father (their guru) by trickery. Although the actual murderer Drishtadyumna is the primary object of his revenge, Ashvathama deems all the Pandavas to be culpable and complicit, including the near-perfect Yudhishthira for his famous half-truth. His dialogue with Kripacharya before seeking vengeance is rather revealing. Kripa blames Duryodhana’s “greedy and thoughtless” ways for causing the war in the first place. “Always wicked, knowing no patience, he ignored the counsel of friends; and now, when things have turned too bad for him, regrets that he didn’t. We too, following his misdeeds, are now in this grievous trouble.” But Ashvathama is hell-bent on revenge and wishes to attack the Pandava camp in the darkness of the night. This, Kripa reminds him, would violate the kshatriya moral code and be adharma (unrighteous), but it matters little to someone who feels as wronged as Ashwathama. “The Pandavas,” he contends, “had on the battlefield already shattered dharma into a hundred pieces.”

As he approaches the Pandava camp, he is met by a mysteriously large figure against whom he seems powerless. Ashvathama says, “I’m just not able to make out who this mysterious figure really is. It seems certain that it is my own wicked mind that I see before me in that form…The fool who wants to do violence to another, against every safe admonition, does violence to himself by his own hands.” But in a curious twist, he is assisted by the god Shiva, often represented as Time (kaala) in Sanskrit literature, who enters his body and equips him with a divine sword. There appears, therefore, to be divine mandate for Ashvathama’s revenge; Time itself appears to empathize with the young man’s grievances against the Pandavas. One by one, Drishtadyumna and his brothers are slain in cold blood. The Pandavas escape death only because they have camped elsewhere that night. Thereafter, we are told that Ashvathama fired a “destructive weapon” at the “Pandava wombs” to destroy them, an act that is highly suggestive of sexual violence. He is then cursed by the god Krishna: “In all civilized opinion, you are considered a coward; given to evil deeds again and again; a child-murderer. You are cursed. For three thousand years from now, you will drift on the earth, with no one to talk with, and live in places lonely and abandoned. Your body will have the foul smell of flowing pus, wracked with every disease known. You will live in places where no human beings live.”

Although charged with divine energy and weapons and assisted by Time, Ashvathama thus ends up ostracized and banished from society. Despite his just grievance against the Pandavas, there is considerable ambivalence over his violent means: Shiva/Time (Destroyer of Injustice and Wickedness) favors him but Krishna/Vishnu (Preserver of the Three Worlds of Classical Hinduism) curses him. The narrator pronounces no final verdict on Ashvathama: his vengeance is justified to an extent, but he can no longer live like a free citizen in the postwar polity. In this sense, Ashvathama ends up as the mirror-image of the sacrificial animal, who must die but is not deemed to be killed or murdered. If the sacrificial beast is killed but remains within the domain of ahimsa, Ashvathama lives but must reside outside the domain of ahimsa, the foundation of decent society.

It should be noted here that the tale of Ashvathama’s vengeance is not too dissimilar structurally to the Pandavas’ own travails. This is the coded message in the narrative structure. Dispossessed unjustly of their kingdom, the Pandavas are scorned, cheated and exiled. That great adharma, which is similar to that suffered by Ashvathama, is sought to be reversed through the Great War of the Mahabharata. Although their violence is justified, as Krishna argues in the Gita, it is so only in a qualified sense. Killing men, women, children, and animals cannot be regarded by any society as a legitimate activity, whatever the cause or motivation. The crestfallen Yuddhisthira is thus left to lament: “Victorious, we are defeated.” His nagging doubts about the legitimacy of war and violence now take over. He is unable to enjoy the spoils of victory. He cannot become the maryad purushottam (ideal man) Rama as in the older epic poem. Nor can he create a ramarajya for his subjects after a fratricidal war. When the Pandavas leave the palace at Hastinapura for the Himalayas, it is merely the final symbol of their defeat in victory. Like Ashvathama, they too might be seen as exiled or cursed to wander far away from society, outside the domain of ahimsa or the moral philosophy of limits to violence.

This is a handy lesson to be learned in our times. When we recognize the morality of violent social protest against the domination of states, empires, and elites, we should also recognize that such violence can never be moral in an unqualified sense. This is not an ex-nihilo argument, but one that is rooted in everyday reality. Violence against a great evil or a greater violence may well be justified in ethical terms, and it may even lead to the creation of a more just society (as in the Mahabharata). But even these ethically-acceptable forms of violence cannot be within the domain of ahimsa as long as it lacks limits. And the nature of war makes it very difficult indeed to impose limits or restraints on one’s acts of violence. Caught between brutal oppression and limitless violence in vengeance, it is certainly a very difficult predicament. Not to revolt against oppression is to acquiesce in one’s subordination, but revolt also is hardly bereft of blemishes. This predicament can be resolved only if those perpetuating ethically-acceptable violence are removed from the body politic. They may do so voluntarily such as Yudhisthira and his brothers or be cursed like Ashvathama. But they cannot remain as before in any decent society that is to remain free from further violence.

What might it mean though to be “removed from the body politic” in a practical sense? It is useful here to consider my earlier remark that the likes of Ashvathama are the mirror-images of sacrificial animals that die without being killed. A kind of social death is implied here: being killed without being sacrificed. Readers of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer will see a close connection here. The non-sacrificial deaths, social or physical, are the very basis of sovereignty. They preserve and justify the social order, including society’s sense of what is morally right and wrong, decent and indecent. This is, of course, the very principle enshrined in contemporary techniques of suicide bombing. The non-sacrificial deaths of suicide bombers complement the social order they wish to shape for the future. These young men (or women, as the case may be) cannot be reabsorbed into society. Their fate cannot be anything but Promethean, cursed forever to social death far away from society. This is, paradoxically, how the individual conscience and the moral fabric of society are reconciled in theory as well as practice. For any decent society must be governed by a moral philosophy that limits violence, that is, ahimsa. Violence beyond limits may be warranted at times, but the existence of its practitioners within society can never be acceptable.

P.S. I shall be delighted if someone wishes to disagree with me, either in terms of my overall argument or the specifics therein. At the very least, any such initiative should, I think, stimulate greater thought on the growing violence in our world and the ethics of such violence. Nonetheless, I think my argument dispenses adequately enough notions of pacifism that have come to be linked with morality and ethics, especially in the South Asian context.