The Return of Match-Fixing and Pakistan

Over the past week or so, I've been following, with much dismay, the slings and arrows directed at three young Pakistani cricketers, and by implication, the entire Pakistani cricket team and indeed, the entire Pakistani nation. The past few weeks have featured former cricketers, cricket officials, and fans making insinuations of the worst kind not just at the accused trio but at Pakistan as a whole. Michael Atherton opened proceedings by recommending an end to Pakistan's tour of England, and immediate punishment for the accused cricketers. He then went on to prescribe leniency for the 18-year old rookie paceman Mohammed Aamer on the condition that he was put on a rehab program. In other words, he prejudged, like many around the world, the guilt of the accused. Indian cricketers such as Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar sounded more diplomatic when they said that the guilty should be punished, but they seemed to imply that at least some cricketers were guilty of spot-fixing in the Lord's Test. The ICC President Haroon Lorgat made similar remarks when he banned Salman Butt, Mohammad Aamer, and Mohammed Asif from further cricket until they were proven innocent of the charges against them. Apparently, there was adequate evidence to justify such a ban, despite the repeated official statements to the contrary.

What is, after all, the evidence? A sting operation that caught a sports agent caught taking money on camera, and some no-balls balled during a Test match. We, therefore, need to ascertain that (1) the News of the World journalist has not doctored tapes, and (2) there is a watertight argument linking the transaction caught on camera and events on the field. As experts and fans alike will recognize, even if (1) can be somehow proven, (2) is rather difficult to prove with the available evidence. To put it rather bluntly, the evidence is flimsy and the case is weak. I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I'd put my money on the trio playing cricket again pretty soon.

Now back to the allegations. I found them actually more revealing than the video evidence of spot-fixing. When Ian Healy, for instance, talked about the 1994 Rawalpindi Test and how Salim Malik might have been fixing it, he conveniently ignored the fact that his former Aussie teammates Shane Warne, Tim May, and Mark Waugh were co-implicated in that scandal. Moreover, amusingly, it is Healy's missed stumping of Inzamam that attracted the most suspicion on the final day of that Test match. So before one gets sanctimonious about Pakistan's cricketers and its incompetent board, why not take a closer look at the Australian cricket fraternity and its role in protecting Warne, May, and Waugh from scandal? Closer home in India, expectedly, morons are having a field day. Fan comments on cricket websites are a good indicator of the bigotry that blends brilliantly with sanctimonious sentiments. We are told that Indian cricketers are not like that. Yet almost every bookie accused until date has been an Indian; a former captain and many star players ended their careers after Justice Chandrachud found them guilty after extensive investigations; the most expensive tamasha in cricket, the IPL, may well be the most corrupt in the history of the sport. The subcontinent, with its massive market for cricket coverage, is thus, unsurprisingly, the hub of corruption in cricket. In a global age, of course, the corrupt spread their tentacles worldwide, but the creature itself lives and thrives in South Asia. In sum, those pointing a finger of suspicion at Pakistan alone should realize that there are three pointing back towards them.

A final comment must be reserved for the serial Pakistan baiters in public life. Former ICC President Malcolm Speed, whose chief claim to fame is the horribly organized 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean, urged the authorities to oust Pakistan from the cricketing fraternity. Now, Speed has a long history of run-ins with Asian cricketers and officials. But his opinion here resonates nicely with that of many elsewhere. Australian and Indian newspapers are full of similar remarks. The English, though more restrained, are pondering the deeper structural problems in Pakistani society that have caused the current debacle. Some editorial writers have even taken the liberty to connect the latest episode in the match-fixing saga with support for the Taliban, military dictatorship, Punjabi dominance within Pakistan, and Third World poverty in general. Presumably, the argument here is that poor Pakistanis, oppressed by Punjabi elites and military dictators in power, are turning to terrorism and corruption for succor. This is a patently absurd line of reasoning. If true, one would need to explain why the current recession in the North Atlantic world is not causing the poor and unemployed, oppressed by Washington and Wall Street, to turn to terrorism and corruption. But the analogy would be immediately deemed invalid, because Pakistan, in the eyes of the West and its lackeys in India and elsewhere, is in a category of its own. It is a pathology, an anathema to the civilized, and an ode to evil itself. Hence, every accusation and every allegation can be justified without evidence, and individuals are seen invariably as symptoms of a national malaise. Almost everyone and their grandmothers are now self-proclaimed experts on Pakistan, including some ignoramuses in my department. And woe betide the rest of us...

Arundhati Roy, the Maoists, and the India Shining Public

As the dust settles after Arundhati Roy's recent dispatch from Dandakaranya, I want to ask what we have learned from this episode by contextualizing the social drama enacted last week. I do not want to simply determine who gained and who lost in this latest round of political contestation over this imaginary entity named Maoism. There is the larger question of why the various actors in this dramatic contest acted the way they did.

Let's start with Ms. Roy herself who is at the center of the storm, much to her delight, I should add. Her political engagements until now have been more like flings than relationships. Her initial foray into the messy world of everyday politics took place nearly a decade ago even as the ill-fated Narmada Bachao Andolan petered off to its inevitable demise. Her primary contribution to the NBA-led movement happened to be a profoundly moving essay on the debilitating social consequences of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on adivasis displaced by it. The essay made little impact in metropolitan India, except to attract the ire of bourgeois intellectuals such as Ramachandra Guha, but it raised awareness in the North Atlantic world on the dark side of India's development surge. As an undergraduate in far-away Iowa in 2002, some years after the essay appeared, I was questioned by more than one concerned professor about the state of affairs in the Narmada valley. They cited Roy's essay and admired her courage to use her celebrity status to canvass for "good causes." What struck me then was the affective or emotive quality of her writing, her ability to represent subaltern voices without being patronizing in the typical colonial-liberal manner. She was someone who had obviously read her Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe, but more importantly, Edward Said and James Clifford. The challenge of representing accurately yet evocatively seemed insignificant for someone whose Booker-winning novel portrayed poignantly the social and emotional dimensions of her early years in the paradoxically caste-ridden communist milieu of Kerala. Yet her way with words did not obscure her utter inability to comprehend, like most Westernized Indians, the mechanics of power and contestation in contemporary India. When a reactionary, activist judiciary sentenced her, Medha Patkar and their comrades to a brief jail term, she did not follow Patkar's "Gandhian" advice to serve her time in jail, but decided to raise a thousand rupees in the form of one-rupee contributions from her metropolitan supporters. It did not go down well with her comrades, most of whom saw her as hungry for publicity and superficial in her political activism.

For some years thereafter, Roy kept a low profile, restricting herself to her friends and associates in New Delhi. She clearly realized she had burnt her fingers in her first foray into the cauldron of Indian politics. During this time, however, she wrote essays on the state of India and the world, condemning multinational corporations for their ecological impact, the anti-people policies of neoliberal India, Narendra Modi's pogroms in Gujarat, and the new imperialist wars of George W. Bush. A seething rage expressed itself eloquently in these pages even though it seemed little more than an impotent rage against the state of the world at large. An essay in The Guardian on the AFSPA in Kashmir and its impact on subjugated populations in that region of South Asia caused a slight stir among her readership in London and New York though, predictably, it found few takers among the India Shining Public that had been evolving over the past decade or so. Buoyed by her marginal success, she consciously assumed a more public role by taking up, in particular, the proposed acquisition of adivasi lands in the Niyamgiri Hills of southeastern Orissa. Her conspicuous silence on parallel proceedings in neighboring West Bengal ought not to go unnoticed. It seemed messier than Orissa, where MNCs and adivasis could be cast clearly as villains and heroes. And as she visited these areas, she found nodes of subaltern agency that she could have barely imagined. Adivasis were organizing effectively to respond to the twin threats of MNC land-grabs and upper-caste Hindutvaization. Violent and non-violent tactics formed elements in a comprehensive strategy of resistance from below. The uniqueness of the new wave of adivasi resistance lay in its deep understanding of the weak spots of its opponents, the state, the MNCs, and right-wing Hindu groups led by the Bajrang Dal. They employed limited forms of violence to intimidate these opponents and stake claims to particular territories as theirs. Appeals to state-produced memories of adivasi wildness, primitiveness, and autochthony checkmated the state at its own game; a few kidnappings and extortion threats took care of the MNCs; and, a few strategically-targeted assassinations of Hindutva leaders took care of the their followers.

Roy surveyed from above this new wave of adivasi resistance with amazement and approval. Subaltern rhetoric drew on long histories of primitiveness produced by the state to make particular claims against the violence of corporate land-grabs aided and abetted by the state. Subaltern politics did not refer either to actual positivist-type histories of their region or the memories produced over time within their communities. They knew the state well, and hoped to bamboozle it at its own game. Roy simply followed suit. She projected the Niyamgiri bauxite-mining project as a shameless USD 3 trillion land-grab by the neoliberal state-corporate nexus (three times the current value of the Indian GDP), and characterized the local adivasis in the uplands of eastern Orissa in familiar colonial terms as primitive, peace-loving people who worshipped these hills as deities. In doing so, she pitted the cold economic rationality of the state-corporate nexus against a timeless adivasi consciousness rooted in nature. By subtly adapting her own grievances against neoliberal India in the light of the new subaltern rhetoric, Roy began a new engagement with everyday politics, one she hoped would end differently from her NBA involvement. It worked! Pressure grew in the UK, especially from human rights groups and the Church of England, and eventually, Vedanta was compelled to pack up and leave from Orissa. In her new role as champion of adivasi politics, Roy continued to visit Orissa and neighboring Bastar to make herself known in the region. Her typical trip, lasting no more than a couple of days, involves hectic travel and frenetic discussions with a range of social actors. Information gathering and social networking make it possible to write on these regions without always being there. It is a process familiar to academics and journalists, of course, in a postmodern age of global communication systems. How else, after all, could the South Asian academic perched atop his professorial chair position himself as an expert on matters several oceans away?

Next we come to the Maoists, a construct of the metropolitan mind much like thuggee in another era. The idea, then as now, is to criminalize certain sections of society in order to exclude or marginalize them. There are, of course, good reasons for the state to attempt to exclude and marginalize adivasi populations living in eastern Orissa, the Dandakaranya forests, or the Chotanagpur plateau. State formation depends, in the final analysis, on violent appropriation of common natural resources, or "primitive accumulation" in Marx's words; such resources are highly concentrated in these three regions. For this reason, all three regions share a common history of marginalization over the past century and a half, the continuities from the colonial to the postcolonial era being clearer than elsewhere in modern India. These "tribal" regions have been cast rather conveniently as exceptions to the mainstream of Hindu India, a notion spawned and promoted enthusiastically by colonial anthropology and governmental practice alike. Anti-state rebellions, signifying disorder, define these "tribal places" in the official view from above. In the language of the postcolonial state, they are incorrigibly backward, primitive, and thus resistant to modern industry and commerce, though the historical record tells us of the very modern production of tribal places and their impoverishment, immiserization, and marginalization in the subcontinent. The terms of trade and politics have been systematically stacked against them. It is as if someone is gagged by a bunch of goons, who then joke that the victim cannot speak. Yet even those who are gagged can kick, and that is precisely what we see today as before. The current ruling class has certainly outdone its equally exploitative predecessors: it's found a convenient outlet for its Sinophobia in an age where it has been outdone by China on the macroeconomic indicators it so values. Maoism is the new demon that must be exorcised, being as it is a "greater threat than even Pakistan" in Home Minister Chidambaram's words. The specter of the vanguardist Naxalite movement looms large in the metropolitan Indian imagination, conjuring up images of the enemy within and striking fear of total revolution that the "spring thunder" of '68 promised.

But alas, this phantom exists in the minds of metropolitan Indians who constitute the ruling class. Ask them who is a Maoist and they will talk of disillusioned intellectuals in universities and gun-toting soldiers following their bidding. Nothing could be further from the truth. And that is exactly why Arundhati Roy's Outlook essay has ruffled so many feathers. She is one of "us," they say, someone who won the Booker prize and brought recognition to a country starved of heroes. How could she write such anti-establishment essays, biting the very hand that feeds her? And how could she possibly say that Maoists are ordinary men and women with real dreams and ambitions that are being denied to them by those who sit on the high table of metropolitan India? How could she decry "development," their get-rich-quick ideology, to defend these poor, dirty scoundrels in the jungles? And last but not least, how could she possibly attribute agency to these wretched of the earth when they are meant to be mere victims, upon whose carcasses academics and journalists can build dazzling careers? That the pseudo-intellectual chattering classes are asking these questions in response to Roy's essay is telling. Hardly anyone in this milieu has experience of these areas, yet they feel competent to challenge Roy's descriptions. Hardly anyone even knows the histories of these regions, yet they have the temerity to defend the status quo. That they are complicit in producing these areas as backward and marginal to the postcolonial polity is conveniently ignored by these mall-going, IPL-watching classes.

The most disingenuous critics of Roy are, however, located in academia, especially on the Indian Left. These are men and women who claim no affinity with mass politics: how could they anyway, after transforming from Maruti Marxists to Mercedes Marxists over the past generation? After all, these are Leninists and Stalinists who repose their faith in The Party, elitist, corrupt, violent and oppressive though it may be, and woe betide those subalterns who have dared to lead their own movement against the state. These "adventurers," as the Leninists traditionally label such people, are actually somehow against popular interests, which of course only the Left aristocracy in India is privy to. Arundhati Roy is a soft target; the real issue is the failure of the Indian Left to mature into a party that represents anyone but itself, let alone the popular classes. They sit on academic chairs, debating fashionable texts and feigning radicalism, but make no mistake, this is the most reactionary class in South Asia today. In familiar brahminical positions atop the postcolonial social order, they disdain any attempt to disturb that settled order. They know that a handful of intellectuals in JNU and Jadavpur are not masterminding the movement, as the state-media nexus suggests. The various rebel groups labelled "Maoist" do not draw their leadership from the metropolitan elite in India. The PWG in Telengana-Bastar and the MCC in Bihar-Jharkhand have plied their trade for over three decades against the oppression of the state and its landed upper-caste allies in society. Seemingly countless smaller groups with vaguely leftist aims are better seen as Birsaite than Maoist anyway: their politics seeks not a Maoist-style encircling of the capital city, but adivasi control and ownership of jal, jangal, jameen (water, forests, and land) in a neoliberal era of state-sponsored land-grabs and violent repression. These rebellions against the state, say our leftist academics, are meant to fail so that they can be commemorated by later historians seeking to move up the academic hierarchy, preferably in the North Atlantic world. Disappointingly, however, the new wave of adivasi politics seems to be more than holding its own against the state and its allies. For the intellectual cream of metropolitan India, this is the greatest possible challenge to the phony radicalism that allows it to speak for the subaltern classes.

Against this context, we can easily see why Arundhati Roy's essay has met with the disapproval of the Indian Shining public, especially among pseudo-radical academics. Hers is a shameless attempt to repay the state's propaganda against "Maoists" in its own coin. Moreover, by laying open the emotional and affective registers of anti-state violence in Middle India, Roy has put the gauntlet, as it were, on the table, challenging the Indian state's right to rule in these areas. The creation of non-state spaces in eastern and central India are significant victories for popular sovereignty, fragile achievements though they may be. The state no longer has a monopoly in terms of control and sovereignty in these spaces. It exists and acts increasingly through non-governmental organizations, but its favored mining projects in Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Orissa have all failed to materialize. Civil society and the state are in retreat; political society and those operating at the civil-political society interface are on the ascendancy. A plethora of political possibilities are possible. It is not at all clear what the future holds for these regions. What is clear, however, is that state's final bid for primitive accumulation in Middle India has led to a spectacular defeat at the hands of ordinary men and women who may pose with bows and arrows but in fact wield guns and words that can no longer be ignored.

P.S. Since, as many of you know, I am neither Marxist nor Maoist by way of ideological persuasion, I defend the right to rebel in purely liberal terms. We are not, as Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj, obliged to obey a government that consistently acts against our interests. I should add, with much amusement, that the Hobbesian justification for renegotiating the social contract when faced with a despotic sovereign shares considerable similarities with the radical anti-state positions taken by anarchists since time immemorial.

Much Ado About Nothing: The New Tradition Wars in Cricket

As the cricket season winds down in the Southern Hemisphere, two highly-charged issues have made the headlines for all the wrong reasons: umpiring and ball-tampering. The former is a long-running grumble among players and spectators alike, who are apparently torn between preserving "tradition" and getting more accurate umpiring decisions in matches. The latter is also a long-standing grumble, or perhaps a whine, made primarily by batsmen and batsmen-turned-administrators who invariably position themselves against bowling "cheats" as custodians of the game's hallowed traditions and morals. Whereas the indiscretions of umpires such as Mark Benson and Daryl Harper have brought the UDRS under the traditionalists' scanner, Shahid Afridi's recent ball-biting frenzy has outraged the holy cows pasturing on cricket fields or in living rooms. Nevertheless, I want to argue here that both issues are, overtly or covertly, the handiwork of cricket's conservatives, who use "tradition" as a red herring to somehow preserve a dysfunctional set-up that is nonetheless favorable to them.

Let's begin with the butt of many new cricketing jokes, the Umpiring Decision Review System (UDRS), which is supposed to have been available at all Test matches since 1 October 2009. (That this is not the case is basically due to the bullying tactics of the cash-rich Board for Cricket Control in India, who don't care much for the system.) The new system allows batsmen and bowlers to ask umpires to review their decisions if they believe they've gotten a raw deal. In order to prevent abuse and save time, every team is allowed at most two unsuccessful reviews per innings or four per Test match. So far, so good. The empirical argument favoring the new system is pretty clear now: the accuracy of decisions during the trial period in 2008-09 rose from 95-97% earlier to around 99%. What does that mean in real terms? Consider that there are 40 wickets in each Test, so if we reasonably suppose 2.5 appeals per wicket based on past experience, we have roughly 100 appeals per match. What the ICC is saying here is that the new system has reduced the average number of errors per game from 3-5 to 1. This is, I think, a pretty big deal. We are still not error-free, but we are getting closer to that elusive ideal using better and newer technologies as they now become available.

So what's the problem according to the defenders of "tradition"? For starters, some people in bowler hats and tweed suits are lamenting the good ol' days when the umpires, like schoolmasters, commanded real respect. The new generation, they and their colonial cousins say, are just going completely astray. I hardly need to point out that those who make such specious arguments invoking "tradition" are also pretty likely to look back fondly at the good ol' days of empire and white hegemony worldwide. I frankly don't feel the need to listen to such "people" (if that's what they are) seriously. But I do take seriously the argument that the game may lose a source of human touch. This is deceptively true insofar as it invokes Dickie Bird, Dave Shepherd, Venkat, etc, as wonderful characters that graced the game with their presence. But let's be clear here: people don't watch cricket to watch umpires! Let's also not forget that the actions of a "good" umpire named Steve Bucknor set in motion the UDRS trials in the first place. There is, however, a final and cleverer argument, that the UDRS is no more fair than the "traditional" set-up. Ian Chappell has made this argument most forcefully in recent times: unless, he says, there is justice for all under some new system, we should not be satisfied by justice for some. I disagree. Any new arrangement that reduces umpiring errors by 2-4% is a bloody more fair system than anything preceding it. I'm afraid my beloved Chappelli has it wrong here. His is sadly no more than an old-timer's rant against the ravages of time. We ought to listen respectfully from one ear and cast it out quickly from the other. "Tradition" is simply a red herring here for a range of people who, for varied reasons, do not want to accept with Tennyson that "the old order changeth, yielding place to new." Well, tough luck, chums! And goodbye...

Now let's turn to the global hullabaloo over Shahid Afridi's ball-tampering in Australia. The English and Australians are now grinning and saying "we always told you the Pakis are cheats." Indian fans, especially after the unfairness meted out to Pakistani players by Lalit Modi & Co., have found much to cheer with their usual mix of jingoism and sadism. The Pakistani public and media are, on the contrary, profusely apologetic in deference to good colonial custom: "Yes, sahib, we did big wrong. Please punish." Inzamam-ul-Haq was so shocked that he rushed out of the oblivion of his local sweetshop in Multan to denounce Afridi's "disgraceful" behavior, hoping no doubt that his captaincy at The Oval in 2005 will not be associated with the recent Perth incident. as part of a seamless narrative of dubious Pakistani morals. Yet there are the inevitable murmurs going back to Wasim and Waqar in 1993 or even to Imran and Sarfraz in the late '70s. Somehow, those who couch their arguments in terms of "tradition" have now rediscovered their voices to condemn Afridi, and by implication, Pakistani cricket.

Well, here's my honest response: bollocks! The defenders of "tradition" are almost all batsmen or former batsmen, who have been the old aristocracy of this sport since the days of W.G. Grace. The good doctor is rumored to have told an uppity opponent: "They've come to watch me bat, son, not to see you bowl." Bowlers are, not just figuratively, the working class yeomen of the game since the late 19th century. Pacemen like Fred Truman and Alec Bedser actually came from the coal-mining towns in the industrial north of England, so their talents were always offset by class prejudice in English dressing rooms by the snotty Oxbridge batsmen in their striped MCC ties. The class prejudice may have ended formally in English teams, but it lingers on worldwide. The balance between bat and ball has tilted to such an extent that a recent one-day match was called off after nearly half an innings simply because a couple of balls (out of nearly 150) threatened the Sri Lankan sissies at the crease. Pancake-flat pitches are, of course, very much the norm nowadays everywhere, though the complaints are muted because India's winning record abroad has improved in the flat-pitch era. The IPL is a ziggurat-like monument to this very prejudice in favor of the bat: sixes, not wickets, is what the public want to see. Oh really? Did Indian fanatics enjoy the thumping their team received from the bats of Hayden and Ponting in key tournament finals? Do the TRP ratings rise whenever the team batting first had piled up a billion-odd runs? Or do they actually plummet because the contest is effectively killed halfway through the game?

What we're dealing with here is blatant prejudice against bowlers. Declaring ball-tampering as an illegal activity reflects that ancient prejudice in a modern garb. Long before Imran Khan taught his proteges to "make" a ball, county cricketers knew and applied these workaday skills. Yet no one said much; it was simply assumed as part and parcel of the game. A year before he died, the wise Bob Woolmer wrote an earnest plea to bring these "dark arts to light" for two reasons: firstly, there is nothing inherently wrong in using naturally-available materials on a cricket field such as nails, sweat, lozenges, saliva, or even teeth to "work" on the ball; secondly, any activity under the present circumstances that evens out the balance between the bat and ball ought to be welcomed anyway. I quite agree. This is obviously not a "cultural" argument about Pakistani cricket, as Ramiz Raja has foolishly argued today, but a global one. The law ought to apply to everyone or none at all. Yet there is an addendum here about Pakistan. They are the perennial "bad boys" of the game, partly because Big Brother next door envies their cricketing skills and hates their guts, and partly because the former white custodians of the game find them to be easy target for their racism in a politically-correct age. Just like Pakistan has come to be associated with "terrorism" in the North Atlantic world, it has become associated with the sin of "ball-tampering" in the cricketing commonwealth. That this is unfair and discriminatory hardly takes a genius to realize. Yet surprisingly few people state the bleeding obvious (though there seems to be no scarcity of Modi-lovers among the cricketing fraternity or in corporate boardrooms).

To cut a long story short, we find here yet another attempt to re-define "tradition" to suit conservative interests in the game. In one case, it's the no-changers up to no good. In the other, it's the old batting aristocracy at it again! To both sets of conservatives, I offer a one-way discounted trip to Pluto. Until that happens, however, there are some serious wars to be fought over tradition in order to revitalize the radical currents that have always animated the game at its finest. Let's start by asking a couple of tough questions of the conservative defenders of "tradition." Do Lalit Modi's IPL and CL ventures, and the umpteen T20 leagues spawned by these initiatives, constitute "tradition"? Likewise, does the monopoly exercised by the Indian cricket board over the game's finances and administration constitute "tradition"? You can't play the "tradition" card only when it suits you. So next time you hear Ian Healy and his Channel Nine mates poke fun at Afridi and the Pakistan cricket team or lament the good ol' days of umpires, throw them some history books, or better still, some old videos of their own spotless conduct on the field, including respect for umpires. As for the fans, well, they're a bit like New Zealand or an old flaccid penis (both shaped similarly anyway): everyone knows they're down there, but no one gives a damn!

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.

So What's Right About Rights???

In the past couple of days, a number of people have expressed surprise over my opposition to the North Atlantic liberal rhetoric of universal human rights, articulated forcefully in President Obama's recent townhall meeting in China. I regard this kind of rhetoric as typical of the kind of cultural hegemony exercised by North Atlantic liberals over contemporary thought. It unites, curiously enough, both the center and the right in the US. As such, the ideological justification for Obama's statements is identical to that used by his predecessor to invade Iraq and spread liberal democracy in the Middle East. Moreover, much of US political science "scholarship" (if that's the right word here!) seeks to defend precisely that ruling ideology and its hegemonic status in the realm of ideas. This post seeks to advance my own agenda to discredit this false doctrine at every opportunity, and to expose the conceit and stupidity that it cleverly conceals.

At the outset, however, let me put out two disclaimers. First, I don't wish to defend any vague culturalist notion of Asian values or African-ness to criticize the hegemonic discourse of rights. Second, although the moral reasoning and semantics at work in this global discourse are poorly worked out, I readily acknowledge that all proponents of universal human rights need not have sinister motives.

So what's right (or wrong) about rights then? The answer, I believe, lies in probing the origins of contemporary rights discourse in the social contract theories of early modern Europe, most notably those of Hobbes and Locke. These brilliant men, who lived in an age of social ferment and religious violence, sought to produce a secular justification for what has come to be known as the modern state. By doing so, they hoped that differences of opinion regarding religious doctrine, the causa prima of the wars of religion, could be reconciled under the paramountcy of a secular, impartial authority. To achieve this laudable goal, they produced a fictional narrative based on an Edenic state of nature, in which all men and women were endowed by God with perfect liberty or rights, so much so that they could freely impinge on each other's rights. It hardly needs pointing out that this rationalization of the Book of Genesis, particularly the Garden of Eden story, is only superficially secular since anything else couldn't have been acceptance then. At any rate, Hobbes and Locke reasoned that men and women sought to escape the primeval state of nature by giving up certain God-given rights to erect an authority above them and thus preserve security, order, and peace. Doing so entailed a Biblical-style covenant or a "social contract" in which the duties of the sovereign and the rights of subjects were clearly articulated. (To be fair, both Hobbes and Locke argued that, if the contract were ever broken by the sovereign, subjects could rightfully rebel and replace it with a new one after drawing up a new contract.)

As the secularization of Western society produced apace over the next couple of centuries, social contract theories lost their theological moorings and simply became liberal justifications for the status quo. By the early 19th century, one finds the greatest theorist of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, calling for the state to be a benevolent despotism to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. Mill's state was no longer an impartial umpire, but a calculating maximizer of utility in society. There was no longer the theoretical possibility of rebelling and redrawing a contract in the manner suggested by Hobbes and Locke. Most ironically, therefore, the language of liberalism had come to serve the conservative status quo represented by the dominance of the state.

This ironic conservatism is particularly apparent when the language of rights came to be used as an excuse for imperialism, most notably by J.S. Mill himself. Those outside the North Atlantic world were treated as simply inferior on a scale of civilization, and thus, in need of emancipation externally. A number of scholars, most notably Uday Mehta and Jennifer Pitts, have called this phenomenon "imperial liberalism." Undoubtedly, these secularized "liberal" theories found eager takers among collaborators in colonized societies who saw them, for good reason too, as terrific opportunities for personal advancement and upward social mobility. Quite obviously, however, most of the world remained unconvinced about the liberalism of their colonizers who claimed to be defending their rights against Oriental and African despotisms. There is no "cultural" resistance here; globally, people just don't attribute good intentions to their oppressors! The grandiose talk of rights in the ex-colonial world is forever tainted for that reason. A very thin veil indeed to cloak the underlying will to power.

Today, we can justifiably ask whether a secular doctrine of rights makes any sense. Logically, it is "nonsense on stilts," in Bentham's words. How can I claim a priori to possess rights when, in fact, I am campaigning to incorporate those very rights for women, minorities, refugees or whichever oppressed/marginalized group into the law books? It makes no sense. Either I have the rights already or I wish to have them in future. Both cannot be simultaneously true. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this logical confusion in today's rights discourse is due to the loss of its original theological underpinnings. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, "rights exist [a priori] as much as unicorns do."

But that is not all. There is an inherent conservatism in contemporary rights discourse, owing to its tendency to justify power and domination, which seeks to undermine the older, pre-modern sense of fighting for rights. In this sense, rights are things to be won after sustained struggles in a given society, and once they're won and enter the books of law, the state is then obliged to respect them. In other words, rights are always negotiated between the rulers and the ruled. The regime type doesn't matter. The competing pursuits of legitimacy and liberty are to be found universally. The origins of the state are irrelevant. No fictional or Biblical story is needed in the manner of Hobbes and Locke. In the most secular or worldly sense, every ruler, democratic, oligarchic or kingly, must negotiate the terms of his/its legitimate authority with his/its subjects. Constitutions and laws reflect the outcomes of those negotiations, though only the vigilance of subjects to keep the ruler to his/its word.

It follows, therefore, that insofar as there is no world state or global authority with which men and women can negotiate their liberties in exchange for legitimacy, the notion of universal rights is devoid of meaning. Therefore, to say, as Obama did, that the ideals of the American republic are in fact universal is a meaningless speech act whose illocutionary force is nonetheless likely to irk Chinese authorities. Perhaps that is only to be expected in the complicated real politik between the two largest global powers today. The Chinese tell the Americans to raise interest rates and be thrifty; the Americans tell the Chinese to stop fixing their currency exchange rates. The game goes on. And perhaps, so it should. But it should not be obscured by mindless talk about universal human rights and the like. Let's just cut the crap and be a bit clear-sighted, can we?

To sum up, the secularization of rights talk have stripped it of any logical sense today. Likewise, universal human rights, as represented in the UN Charter, are meaningless speech acts. The latent purpose of these pseudo-liberal speech acts is, however, often to produce post-hoc justifications of tyranny domestically or abroad. Modern imperialism essentially depends on such pseudo-liberal talk, and even though the age of empires is formally over, a kind of inertia leads the old mentalities and rhetoric to linger on past their expiry dates. The rhetoric of democratization in US policymaking and academic circles provides the finest example of this inertia. There is, however, a proper way to talk about rights in the past or present. That is, as concessions sought by subjects from the ruler/state in the form of laws. Social movements seeking the emancipation of subjugated or oppressed groups (the poor, women, sexual, cultural and religious minorities, etc) seek to do precisely that. These are quests for dignity that entail much struggle and heartbreak for the protagonists and their allies. To the extent that states or state-like authorities have existed throughout human history and look poised to continue, it is pointless to imagine otherwise. Rights do not, therefore, exist a priori or universally, but in specific contexts in which power is sought to be appropriated by ordinary men and women after protracted struggles, if necessary with the barrel of the gun.