BJP only cares for violence and it's dangerous for India
Conspicuous violence is a semiotic act of great brutality where the symbolic power of violence must match the sheer physicality of the event.
A sociologist watching contemporary India is stunned by the variety of violence he confronts. Two things stand out as he examines these phenomena. First is the sheer inventiveness of the violence and the second his own conceptual illiteracy of it. There is a range and complexity to this violence which cannot be reduced to the dominance of technology or the efficiency of the organisation.
Violence in India seems almost anthropologically thoughtful, as it invents new thoughts for consideration. Even among these, one of the most fascinating expressions of violence is what we call conspicuous violence.
Great brutality
Conspicuous violence is a semiotic act of great brutality where the symbolic power of violence must match the sheer physicality of the event. Unlike terror or riots, conspicuous violence need not be conducted on a collective scale. It is not demographic in that sense. As violence it has been singular, exemplary as a spectacle of an excessive order. It has to have an economy of excess which demands constant replay.
Lean on production, it has to be exorbitant on display. As a spectacle, it has to be viewed repetitively and convey a sense of a pedagogic act, a lesson to be taught to the victim who violates the social code. The Afrazul episode, where a Bengali worker was hacked to death to teach a lesson to Muslims allegedly pursuing love jihad, exemplifies this.
There is conceptual quality to the act of violence. Firstly, it is an attempt to rewrite history. In that sense, it combines voyeurism and a cinematic heroism where any Indian becomes a Rana Pratap reversing the defeat at Haldi Ghati. For these Indians, if history is not reversible or rectifiable it is not history. Myth and history blend magically to heal wounds deep in a majoritarian memory.
The act of violence in itself is almost illiterate. A few words mumbled is all that is required. But the symbolic language reworking the discourse must be clear. Conspicuous violence rewrites history on the victims’ body. It involves a populist distortion of democracy and history where the citizen takes law into his own hands and he restores a mythical order to recreate an imaginary.
In fact, the actual forces of law and order become a chorus of lawlessness approving the act of brutality. The crowd salutes the perpetrator and so do the forces of law and order. What our epic heroes and mythical legends could not do, the ordinary citizen does. Such is the power of majoritarian imagination.
The body has no value beyond being a pretext. It is raw material. Afrazul is not a scapegoat. He is randomly picked. He is a dispensable body and with the murder he ceases to be a part of the narrative.
Primordial nature
It is the primordial nature of the violence that is central. It makes all the forces of enlightenment speechless. Secularism has no comparative myth or poetics to offer. Yet, without modern technology, conspicuous violence will not work. One needs technology not in the acts of production but in the rituals of consumption and replay. Conspicuous violence without the selfie and the video would be unthinkable.
Conspicuous consumption works at two levels. It seeks to rework narrative and reorder classification. By creating a pedagogy of punitive behaviour, around dress, body and food, it forges a symbolic panopticon where every majoritarian eye creates systems of surveillance around a minoritarian body.
Here again, civil society pretends to act as an extension of a regime, acquiring a tacit imprimatur for its acts. By reordering the classificatory order, this violence legislates a new civics. Minority is suspect by definition, suspect at the level of nationstate in terms of patriotism and suspect at the level of everyday civics through its addiction to taboo.
The beauty of taboo is that it doesn’t need a law to punish it. Any citizen can take the law into his own hands. One confronts two kinds of memory. There is a historic of majoritarian memory, of an imaginary injustice pestering for century. Conspicuous violence redresses that memory and also erases the current form of violence.
What media forgets today, society erases tomorrow. In fact, there is transfer of memory. The majority forces on the minority the imaginary violence it suffered. Only, there is no imaginary in the violence that the minority confronts.
Ritualistic act
Conspicuous violence as a ritualistic act is very different from other forms of contemporary violence. While riots tend to collective acts of violence, targeting a population, conspicuous violence focuses on the individual treating him as imaginary stereotype of the whole. Conspicuous violence is a ritual pedagogy. Unlike riots today it is not exterminist, but it wants the minority to remain under conditions it lays down.
While terror is random, conspicuous violence is arbitrary. Terror functions on anonymity while conspicuous violence almost patents its violence as an iconic act of citizenship.
Any anthropology of violence has to realise that the BJP does not commit the physical acts of violence, it merely prepares the gestalts, the mindset, the ecologies that makes such violence ordinary and predictable.
The perpetrator enacts the Rorschach in every communalist’s head. The history of BJP has to chronicle such types of violence. Sadly, its inventiveness lies not in technology and institution building but in the acts of violence it has created across society.