[Reader-list] To Zainab - Gujarat and Elsewhere

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Zainab, (and Pratap, Jeebesh and others)

I have been thinking about a lot of the issues raised by you (Zainab, and the 
responses to them) . I am writing this also in order to connect with a whole 
lot of similar issues that faced me in the autumn of 1984, when I saw my city 
(Delhi) go up in flames, and when more violence (in terms of the number of 
people being killed) was unleashed within three days, than has occurred in 
Gujarat over the last two months. 

This is not to belittle the violence in Gujarat, but to try and see it not as 
an exception, but as a part of a larger pattern. Many people have reacted 
indignantly, and rightly so, at George Fernandes's trivialization of the 
violence done to women in Gujarat in the course of the debate in Parliament, 
But in another sense,  what really disturbs me is the fact that he has not 
spoken untruly. (And lets make no mistake about the fact that i detest him 
entirely for his defence of the ruling dispensation and the regime that 
carried out the pogrom in Gujarat). But, in a perverse sense, what he said is 
true. Gujarat is not an exception, the kind of violence that we have seen 
there, happens everyday, in many places. And hardly anyone talks about them.

This does not mean that we should see the suffering of the women in Gujarat 
as "less worthy of attention". Rather, it means that we should seriously 
think about what makes it so normal that these things can happen, and that we 
can pretend that they don't, or ignore them, or be silent and embarassed 
about them. Why does it take a Gujarat to make us sit up and think about the 
complicity of the state and people in police and paramilitary uniforms in 
violence?

I started by talking about the anti-sikh pogrom in 1984, which was 
orchestrated in Delhi by the then ruling secular party, which is spearheading 
the opposition to Narendra Modi today. 

I remember 1984 very clearly. I shaved a young Sikh man who lived for those 
few days in our house with his family, and over the years I have seen him 
become a schrizophrenic, still stuck and lost in 1984. Gujarat will have its 
own toll in the years to come in terms of the number of people who will 
gradually find their sanity succumbing to their nightmares and their 
memories. 

I saw, on my way home from school, mobs burn Sikhs to death with burning 
tyres, and saw policemen protect the mobs, not the victims. I learnt early, ( 
I was sixteen at that time) that no violence of this scale can ever take 
place without the direct connivance of the power of the state, no matter who 
or which party, controls the state. I learnt early, that the feeling of 
insecurity, that violence of this order brings with it, is the most important 
foundation of the consent we give to the power that the state has over us. 
The situation returns to "normalcy" and we say (in relief) that the body 
count could have been higher, and we thank the army for stepping in and 
cleaning up, and life, well, goes on. Until the next time.

But remember, some places in this country have lived through this for decades 
on end.They haven't ever had the luxury of  waiting for the "next time".

Take Kashmir, for example. It made no difference whether you had a Congress, 
NDA or Third Front (JD +/- Left) government in power. The pattern of violence 
in Kashmir by the state has remained the same, and constant, for the last 
thirteen years.

The conservative estimate of non combatant (militant or military) civilian 
casualties (deaths of ordinary people) in Kashmir is said to be 35,000 - 
people since 1989. (this is from a coloumn by Chindu Sreedharan - "The Lost 
Generation" on the impact of violence on Children in Kashmir that appears 
regularly in Rediif.com at  
http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/dec/11childin.htm )

That is roughly 2,692 people each year for the last 13 years. I am taking 
these figures from sources that are not sympathetic to Kashmiri separatists. 
Chindu Shreedharan is a fellow of the National Foundation of India.

Figures given out by human rights organizations working in Kashmir, or by 
Kashmiri separatist groups tend to be much higher and converge generally 
around the apporximately '80, 000 dead since 1989' figure. 

The truth probably lies between the underevaluation of the conservative 
figure and the exaggeration of the human rights actvists and separatists. But 
let us, to err on the side of caution, stick to the conservative estimate.

Now lets turn to missing people. According to the New York-based Human Rights 
Watch, in September 1998, the non-governmental Association of Parents of 
Missing People stated that 2,000 people had disappeared between 1990 and 1998 
alone after being taken into custody in Kashmir, and that there were no legal 
remedies for discovering their fate. That's an average of 250 per year. If 
you multiply that by 13 years you get an estimate of about 3,250 missing 
persons. If you add that figure to the estimate of people dead you get - 
35,000 + 3,250 = 38,250 people. Estimate of people dead and missing each year 
for the last 13 years -  2,942 people.

The civilian casualty figures breakup between January and April this year in 
Kashmir, taken from the  Kashmir Live section of the Indian Express Website 
(www.expressindia.com)  is as follows 
Total Civilians 133
Men  78 
Women 23
Children 32 

Now, compare this to the casualties in Gujarat - official  estimate  - 822 
(including Godhra) dead. Unofficial estimate of the number of people dead - 
2,000.  (source - Communalism Combat - Genocide Gujarat 2002 - March/April 
2002, Year 8, No.77-78)

Let us compare  compare the 'official' estimate in Gujarat, to the 
'conservative' estimate in Kashmir), so as to minimize any possibilty of 
exaggeration in either case. 

If you look at the number of people living as 'internal refugees' as a result 
of violence in India, than you get the figure of some some 350,000 Kashmiris 
(Pandits and Muslims)  and more than 157,000 others in Northeast India. 
Additionally, there are about 17,000 refugees from the Indian held part of 
Kashmir, who are currently living in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir.  (source -  
WorldWide Refugee Information Website - Country reports for India and 
Pakistan, 2000 - http://www.refugees.org/world/countryrpt/scasia/india.htm) 

The number of people living in 'relief and rehabilitation camps' in Gujarat 
at the moment is - 113,697. (source - Communalism Combat - Genocide Gujarat 
2002 - March/April 2002, Year 8, No.77-78)

I have not mentioned 'rape' because numbers are far harder to get, but the 
ground realities suggest that the use of rape as a weapon of aggression has 
been near perfected by the armed forces and paramilitaries of the Indian 
state in Kashmir and the North East. 

Whatever we do, whichever set of numbers we take, we realize that a tragedy - 
 at least of the same proportions, if not higher, as what has happenned in 
Gujarat, in terms of violence, killings, rape, arson and disappearances, has 
been happening over the last thirteen years in Kashmir. 

Arguably, the situation that obtains in Kashmir is similar in many respects 
to that which is true of the north eastern states of India as well. But 
figures are less known. Partly, there is an active Kashmiri diaspora, which 
keeps tabs on what is going on in Kashmir, and Pakistan of course has its own 
axe to grind in the matter, but since there is less of a Naga or a Manipuri 
diaspora, much less news gets out of these places. What we do know is that 
the Indian State did not hesitate to use even its air force in bombings of 
villages in Mizoram even as far back as in 1966. And the military has 
(through the Armed Forces Special Powers Act) virtually had much of the north 
east in the vice like grip of near martial law.

Today, we recognize the violence in Gujarat as the manifestations of Fascism, 
and rightly so. But I think, that many of us, who are not communal, not 
Hindutva-vaadis, are comfortable with making the identification between 
Hindutva and Fascism, which is un-deniable, while at the same time, we are 
not ready or not prepared to make the identification when it comes to the 
agencies of the Indian state in its more secular manifestations. 

Perhaps we should think carefully before assuming that this is the only 
identification (in terms of 'fascism' ) that can be made. The abstract 
machinery of the state in India (regardless of whether Hindutva-vaadis are in 
power or not, acts just as brutally, when it wants to, and hardly anyone in 
the 'secular' camp takes notice of the lethality of its actions). 

This is evident from the history of Kashmir. In both cases, Gujarat, and 
Kashmir, the overwhelming majority of victims of organized violence have 
happenned to be Muslims. (Kashmiri Pandits have sufferred at the hands of the 
fascism of Kashmiri Muslim/seperatists militants, but the scale of their 
suffering - in numerical terms, pales in comparison to the violence unleashed 
by the Indian state's armed forces on the mainly muslim inhabitants of 
Kashmir valley, that is why all numbers I have referred to are only of 
civilain, non-miliant, non-military casualties). Now, it is a matter of fact, 
that barring a few killings of informers, (and in an earlier phase of a few 
prominent Kashmiri Pandits. amarnath pilgrims or other pro-India 
personalities) militants in Kashmir, have a great deal to lose from killing 
civilians because it ends up antagonizing the local population.

There have been instances of civilan "collateral damage" in the instance of 
bomb explosions. But the majority of killings that take place in Kashmir are 
not due to bomb explosions. They are due to armed bodies of men coming into 
neighbourhoods and villages, picking people and using them as 'human shields' 
from behind whom they open fire , or taking them away and shooting them in 
'encounters'. It doesn't make tactical sense for Kashmiri militants to use 
civilans as human shields, or to torch muslim majority villages, because 
these "mass killings" cost them the little support they may have in the 
civilian population. The Indian Army and paramilitary forces do this as a 
matter of routine. The miliants on their part, take large numbers of  
hostages, kill them and extort and inflict many other privations on the same 
civilian population, but these have an incremental effect, and so are 
affordable for the militants, in that the suffering they cause is immediately 
offset by another set of sufferings with greater numbers on its side. Thus 
retaining a perverse and macabre balance of terror between the state (army 
and para-militaries) and the proto-state (militant outfits).  I have 
absolutely no sympathy for Kashmiri nationalism of any variety (Islamist or 
secular), just as I have absolutely no sympathy for the Indian state's claim 
on the people or territory of Kashmir. Both contribute to the body count.

But, it seems to me, that one set of Muslim deaths and testimonies of 
victimhood, are somehow seen as being more central, more traumatic, than 
another. Kashmir, is sufficiently distant, sufficiently "other" for us not to 
bother about. Gujarat isn't. It is India's most industrialized, most 
urbanized, fastest growing state. It is as "mainstream India" as you can get. 
It is impossible to ignore in a way that we have grown accustomed to ignore 
or not care about Kashmir. The only reason why anyone says anything about 
Kashmir is "it is an inalienable part of India". No one, has to say, Gujarat 
is an "inalienable part of India" becase they know it is. It is the anxiety 
about the Indian state's dubious record in Kashmir that makes people say "the 
in-alienable part of India" statement, even as they ignore the mounting body 
count in Kashmir. 

This "weighing" of lives and deaths, this banal decision to give a much 
greater importance to  the suffering of one set of people over another 
(whether deliberately or by ommission) lies at the heart of fascism. In 
telling us that some of us are more important than others, the fascist state 
erects its most important edifice, the confidence that it imparts on a 
section of the population that the state will enact, unleash or patronize a 
violence unto others, unto a "them" whom "We" are never going to be. "We" are 
given to believe that "we" will never have to suffer what people in Kashmir 
suffer, because "we" are part of the Indian "mainstream". Then, when for 
once, violence occurs in the heart of the "mainstream" at a comparable scale 
to what happens outside it, "we" all get disturbed. When 'normalcy' finally 
is restored, let us say if and when the present chief minister of Gujarat is 
removed, the mainstream (secular and communal) of public life will return to 
its hum-drum, "mainstream" pre-occupations. The margins, places like Kashmir, 
will continue to exist as "Gujarat's" , but that is another matter.

When the sangh parivar values the deaths of the Hindus who died at Godhra 
over the deaths of the Muslims who died in Ahmedabad or Baroda, that is one 
kind of everyday fascism.

Similarly, when we value the deaths of people who happen to be Muslims who 
died in Gujarat, (as victims of Hindu Fascism) even as we forget, ignore, are 
indifferent to the equal number of deaths of people who happen to be Muslims 
who die in Kashmir routinely, we may be guilty of another, 
"secular-nationalist" variety of fascism.

Or, forget whether people are Muslims or not, forget the whole arithmetic of 
minority and majority, and think instead of the numbers who die in custody in 
India. At the last count  (year 2000) 1,143 people died in police custody in 
prisons all over India - and the majority of these deaths is likely to have 
been due to torture, and that there are at present close to 60 people 
awaiting the death penalty all over India. (source  - Amnesty International 
Country report 2000). India has yet to ratify the  UN Convention against 
Torture which it signed in October 1997, nor had it invited the UN Special 
Rapporteur on torture to visit the country. This means that there are no 
remedies in International Law for any Indian citizen to appeal against the 
violation of his/her right to be protected from torture, should the state in 
India be the party that executes the act of torture. No political party 
(right wing, left wing, centrists, secular, communal, pro-dalit, regional or 
whatever) has ever made the ratification of the convention against torture, 
or the abolition of the death penalty a public issue - and this silence means 
that the broad spectrum of political parties are unanimous (by ommission or 
commission) in their tacit or active support to the torture and executions 
carried out by the Indian state.

In this country, we all have skeletons in our respective closets, and the 
uncounted dead to account for. In either case, some deaths are seen as more 
deserving of commemoration than others. The truth is, every instance of 
violent death, every disappearance, that takes place, no matter where, is 
just as sad, just as much of a nightmare for those it leaves grieving. 

The resistance to fascism, can begin only when we stop devaluing other 
peoples lives and deaths, no matter who those people are. The resistance to 
fascism must begin with the recognition of the fact that the greatest 
devaluation of the lives of people has occurred, routinely, at the hands of 
the state that we submit to daily, through many acts of obedience.

Who knows what remedies, what forms of association, how many little and 
everyday solidarities we will have to build in the years to come to face this 
fascism. I am not as sanguine as Pratap is about the "Mayawatis" of this 
world, because I am sure that in the assertion of their 'identitiis' and in 
the airing of their victimhood, they will create their own militias, and 
their own neo-Buddhist/Ambedkarite fascism. If we can have Hindu, Sikh  and 
Muslim and Secular Fascism in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and Tamil 
(Hindu and Christian) and Sinhala (Buddhist) Fascism in Sri Lanka, it only 
points to the bewildering array of possible south asian sub-continental 
fascisms that still lie in wait. A neo-Buddhist/Dalit fascism is just as 
likely or unlikely as any other variety. 

The second most important lesson, to my mind, in terms of building a politics 
that can combat fascism, is to give up the illusion that any one is innocent. 
All our 'identities' are complicit in the everyday politics of fascism. Every 
constrcution of "us" and "them" is equally guilty, whether it is made on 
communal, secterian, ethnic, caste or national lines. It is only by moving 
towards an everyday form of politics that has room for sckepticism about the 
claims that "we" make on ourselves, and the claims that are made about us, or 
on our behalf, that we can actually question the hold that 'everyday' fascism 
has over us. 

I look forward to the gradual, corrosion of the certainties of who "we" and 
they are by a sckepticism that is born of the 

This is why, I don't think, unlike Pratap, that the answer to Hindu fascism 
is to create our own "shakhas". We will then have created our 'own' fascism.
If the right has successfully mimicked the left, I don't think that the 
answer to it lies in re-mimicking the right ( or re-re-mimicking the left?).

Rather, I want to think about what we can do to make all 'shakhas', all 
uniforms, all anthems, all 'sangathans' equally unattractive and dull. So 
that we do not  even have to enter the tactical terrain of setting one kind 
of identity as an antidote to another. Of saying "Indians" when we might be 
uncomfortable saying "Hindus". 

This might require us to take the battle on to the register of a playful 
irreverence towards all forms of authority and identity formation,  per se. 
That is one place where the fascists can never get. They have condemned 
themselves to certitude and seriousness, they can never be heretics and 
irreverential. They want to win. We must be prepared to subvert every 
victory, including those of our own. This means that we might have to speak a 
language that seeks to dissolve power rather than to take it  over to make it 
better, that seeks to reject rather than reform the state. 

Those of us who have no icons to defend, no identities to protect, no nations 
to nurture, no faiths to believe in and no birthplaces to build temples for 
might be well placed to initate a wave of non-serious heresy that may well be 
the last (and only) stumbling block in the path of every kind of fascism, be 
it of the riotous right, the lethal left, or of the dead centre.