Why no political party talks about putting an end to violence
The right to question is the most important factor in the imagination of the right to speech.
What lies under the brutal facts of life in this country?
Is there any possibility for a public discourse where the affected, the vulnerable, could come together and address the roots of the violence against them today?
It is a huge expectation from a society that is caught in the traps of the neoliberal capitalist agenda, struggling to live life. Families, communities, educational institutions, governments and international forces contribute to the web that binds us.
Violence is the norm now at every corner of this country. It is a common sight that people capture in their mobile phone and further the fear and terror by sharing it on several social media forums.
Violence starts at the family, clearly visible in the machete that killed Pranay, a Dalit Christian, recently slaughtered in broad daylight in Telangana for transgressing caste boundaries; for daring to wear a suit and post a video that celebrated a Sairat-style romance. It continues in the community — communities created by whatsapp that lynch outsiders, accused of ‘child-lifting.’
If violence is in all of us, is this why we remain silent when tribals, including several minors, in Nulkatong in Bastar, are shot dead in their sleep by agents of the state? And then it’s called an ‘encounter’.
Is this why we do nothing when images of older tribal women protesting this massacre and being beaten black and blue —bruises covering their bodies — emerge on social media?
The impunity we give to family and community is now extended to the state. The agencies of the state that we are to take recourse to counter violence are now the perpetrators of violence. They hose and beat and attack protesting farmers in the capital and we do nothing about it.
What does this new acceptability of the universality of violence mean? What could our doing nothing about any of the violence mean? Signs that convey certain sense of hopelessness in our lives? Have we lost our capacities to imagine alternatives? Do we at all counter this dangerous violence? Are we all dominated by what Freud called ‘the death drive’?
These are the preliminary questions that are never raised while we sternly stand in unison at the tune of our national anthem, even at cinema halls where it is played today to promote jingoism. War, for Freud, made him come up with the idea of the death drive. And we love war and are always ready for it.
Violence, at all levels, should be examined, deciphered, and it should be seriously considered as a political, social, cultural and spiritual issue. If violence in the form of rape, lynching, daylight murders, public punishment in the name of caste, encounters, attacks on peaceful protestors, nationalism and authoritarianism of different kinds isn't effective enough or sensational enough for us to come together to raise our voices against the most heinous aspect of life, which according to me, is the common will to violence, what will?
What this demands is a questioning of the violence in ourselves, the violence in our hearts and in our minds that makes us immune to the violence that the state is unleashing on the tribals, on the farmers, on the poor and the disenfranchised. But the state’s violence only mirrors our own violence: on people of another caste, another class, another gender, another sexual orientation.
These crimes will not have any significance in our budget/policy/ and governance imaginations.
A voice against violence will never be the prime political manifesto of the political parties because they thrive on it. Violence in our country, and elsewhere, is rooted in caste, tribe, gender, sexuality. It is rooted inside us. Why do we not dare think and act differently? Do we not have a political conscience? Do we accept that our lives are ruled by the brute fact of violence?
The right to question is the most important factor in the imagination of the right to speech. To beat and jail and murder those who raise questions is bring violence into the logic of the state, to crush the very constitutional agenda of every citizen living a life of dignity. To beat and attack farmers asking for their rights is nothing short of criminal. When the state becomes criminal in its violence, where do we turn?
We turn to ourselves and ask what role violence plays in our lives. We work towards channelling that violence creatively by learning to understand the ‘other’, care about the ‘other’. We put ourselves in the places of those adivasi women in Bastar beaten black and blue for protesting the murder of their sons, their grandsons.
Until we understand our complicity in their predicament, unless we acknowledge the violence in us and turn our own anger and our own violence into protest along with them, we will be caught in the cycles of violence that control our lives.