[Reader-list] MUBAI ATTACK: Violence, publicity, and sovereignty

[Swadhin Sen]

Swadhin Sen Archaeologist - Assistant Professor   Dept.of Archaeology            Tel:       +88 02 779 10 45-51 Ext. 1326 Jahangirnagar University      Mobile:  +88 0172 019 61 76   Savar,Dhaka. Bangladesh    Fax:      +88 02 779 10 52    swadhin_sen at yahoo.com; swadhinsen at hotmail.com www.juniv.edu

I am sorry, I don't want to engage myself with this type of fascist, vulgar and to some extent, indo-centric comment. I wonder how such comments pass through moderators approval.

I also wonder at the silences of the 'tolerant' Indians on these remarks! 

--- On Fri, 1/9/09, Vidya <joshvidya at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Vidya <joshvidya at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] MUBAI ATTACK: Violence, publicity, and sovereignty
> To: swadhin_sen at yahoo.com
> Date: Friday, January 9, 2009, 7:50 PM
> Insightful my foot! What is new in this? I pity your level
> of intellect if you think you are providing something new to
> the list by forwarding this fucking stale stuff.
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Swadhin Sen"
> <swadhin_sen at yahoo.com>
> To: <reader-list at sarai.net>
> Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 1:59 PM
> Subject: [Reader-list] MUBAI ATTACK: Violence, publicity,
> and sovereignty
> 
> 
> > An insightful piece that could introduce us to the
> comfort of the discomfort...
> > 
> >
> [http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/12/15/violence-publicity-and-sovereignty/]
> > 
> > Mumbai 11/26:
> > 
> > Violence, publicity, and sovereignty
> > posted by Arvind Rajagopal
> > 
> > Mumbai’s Gateway of India was built to greet King
> Edward V of England when he arrived in 1911 for the Delhi
> Durbar, to inaugurate the new capital city. Like the new
> capital, the Gateway in Mumbai symbolized civilizational
> progress for the empire on which the sun never set. However,
> Britain’s empire was established through the fluidity of
> maritime space, and piracy on the high seas was a crucial
> means through which the older imperium of Spain and Portugal
> was challenged in the 16th century. Lawless violence often
> preceded the rule of law. Queen Elizabeth I bestowed
> knighthoods on Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh and other
> “privateers,” all entrepreneurs who advanced state
> power. British sovereignty was thus founded on non-state
> actors, the most famous of which was the East India Company,
> whose lawless incursions provoked the demand for the rule of
> law.
> > 
> > Today we are once more at a time when lawless violence
> proliferates and territorial boundaries are infringed upon,
> when state leaders invoke “non-state actors” and argue
> for the need to respond in kind. Are new political
> formations taking shape in our midst, even as we defend the
> old order?
> > On November 26, 2008, terrorists arrived by sea and
> entered near the Gateway, making an entrance not unlike the
> pirates of yesteryear. The event is described as India’s
> 9/11, with enemy intruders committing murder and mayhem.
> “9/11″ has become a nationalizing mantra across the
> globe, an invocation to remember violence in order to garner
> consent for violent retaliation. In an earlier age non-state
> actors, such as pirates, merged with the state. Today the
> state mimics the behavior of private parties, justifying
> violence as revenge and practicing torture as the just
> desserts of terrorists. War has become the preferred means
> of practicing politics under the guise of opposing
> terrorism, and it is endorsed as a sacred duty.
> > In the rush to affiliate the Mumbai attacks with the
> global war on terror, some point to Pakistan as the root
> cause. Calling these attacks “India’s 9/11″ bolsters
> the demand that the country strike hard and fast, although
> the global nature of terrorism may involve an outsourcing of
> retribution. This speaks to both the long-standing failures
> of the Indian state and to the increasing discrimination in
> civil society and the media against Muslims.
> > 
> > Many have said that the attacks are part of a pattern
> of revenge for repeated anti-Muslim violence in different
> parts of the country that were led by Hindu nationalists,
> most prominently in 1992 and in 2002. None of the guilty
> Hindu parties in either of these situations were brought to
> book. The violent response to the Hindu nationalists’
> carnage in 1992, which left more than one thousand dead, was
> conceived and financed by people in Karachi and Dubai.
> Mumbai, at the time, was the third corner of the economic
> and cultural zone formed by these cities, and thus was a
> logical choice of target. When the attack was initiated by
> Muslims the perpetrators were pursued with abundant vigor,
> and numerous innocents were punished along with some guilty
> men.
> > 
> > The recent events are only the latest of numerous
> attacks in cities across India. In Mumbai alone 209 people
> were killed in bombed suburban trains in 2006, and blasts in
> 1993 killed more than 250. As the Indian state continually
> fails to provide justice, private parties have chosen to
> settle accounts through public violence. The message this
> violence has conveyed is that if the Indian state will not
> protect Muslim citizens, their allies close by will try and
> do so. The culmination of this violent exchange has been
> further mimetic violence, this time by the state. In 2002,
> state authorities in Gujarat aided in the massacre of more
> than two thousand Muslims, in retaliation for sixty Hindus
> killed. Census rolls and municipal records were used to
> strike at Muslim homes and businesses, the sacrificial
> victims in the Gujarat state’s successful electoral
> campaigns. In turn, other cities have been targeted for
> further retaliatory terror attacks.
> > As national boundaries become more fluid and politics
> render nation-states less capable of representing their
> citizens, cities turn into battle zones and urban spaces are
> weaponized. Cities suffer from severe economic and social
> segregation, and the slums of the poor are demolished in the
> name of urban beautification, moved to the city outskirts,
> squeezed by high-rises, and bypassed by flyovers that render
> ghettos invisible to the privileged. Muslim residents in
> India are overwhelmingly concentrated in such areas, and, in
> episodes of Hindu nationalist violence, have been the
> principal victims of assaults.
> > 
> > In Ahmedabad, in many ways a sister city to Mumbai’s
> Gujarati financial elite and professional classes, the
> anti-Muslim violence in 2002 was almost entirely contained
> in the older, eastern half of the city, leaving the more
> affluent western part of the city largely unscathed. Muslims
> in India have, for some time, been treated as internal
> enemies, through a combination of covert and overt
> socio-economic boycotts, state discrimination, episodes of
> intense political violence, and anti-terror legislation
> granting judicial powers to police. Those who participated
> in the November attacks in Mumbai were reportedly shown
> films of the Gujarat killings, as well as others, such as
> the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992, as part of their
> indoctrination during training.
> > 
> > A Muslim school teacher in Naroda Patia, one of the
> worst-affected areas during the Gujarat violence, spoke to
> me indignantly about experiencing one such boycott combined
> with rampant discrimination: “The people who treat us like
> this—I will not say that they are alive. If they simply
> believe what they are told, and treat human beings as if
> they did not exist, where is the spirit of life in them? I
> will say they are dead people.”
> > Violence is not limited to the physical act of
> killing. It can be carried out through forms of interaction
> and through the refusal to acknowledge the humanity of
> others. The restoration of order may not bring peace so much
> as serve to store and delay the release of violent energies,
> in a circuit that brings politics and everyday life into
> intimate contact. Muslims in many parts of the country have
> experienced ostracism amounting to social death, and are
> pushed to the very margins of the economy. In 2006 The
> Justice Sachar Committee reported that the condition of
> Muslims had deteriorated to such a point that they were
> worse off than the untouchable caste, which has
> traditionally occupied the lowest rung of Indian society.
> > 
> > The recent terror strikes may be Pakistani or
> transnational in their financing and implementation, but the
> urban geography in which it unfolded can be recognized from
> previous episodes of a more domestic violence. The
> difference is that this time, as in 1993, rich areas, not
> poor ones, were targeted. In both sets of cases, violence in
> media-dark ghettos has been followed by violence in the most
> public and media-bright parts of the city. The conception
> and execution of terrorism is both a method of violence and
> a method of publicity.
> > 
> > Media Effects
> > 
> > The media has expanded rapidly in India in recent
> years—with nearly two-thirds of the country now watching
> television with some regularity—which has made it into one
> of the principal motors of the economy. This tertiary
> ‘service sector’ industry has become more profitable
> than the primary or secondary sectors.
> > 
> > The attacks this past November are the first terror
> attacks in India to occur under the full glare of media
> spotlights, and, after many years of state-controlled media,
> in an era in which private broadcasters dominate the
> airwaves. Dozens of 24-hour news channels vie for the Indian
> audience, many of them subsidiaries of transnational media
> corporations. Few television markets in developing countries
> have witnessed such competition in news; it represents an
> attempt by businesses to capture the premium audience
> segment (which disproportionately tunes into news programs)
> while the entry costs are still relatively low, and viewer
> preferences are unformed.
> > 
> > In the past, when such violence occurred, the first
> response by the state-controlled media would be a news
> blackout, followed by terse and occasional news bulletins
> aimed at the political management of the situation; public
> safety took second place to the self-preservation of the
> ruling party. Citizens had to rely on rumors for
> information, and of course the source was never certain.
> Although there was often alarm and panic, any citizen
> responses were necessarily more diffuse. The role of an
> organized response was reserved for the state, which
> controlled the instruments of mass communication.
> > 
> > Since private media emerged, bomb blasts have occurred
> and drawn media attention, but these broadcasts always began
> after the explosions were over. The same was true for armed
> assaults, such as the attack on the Parliament buildings in
> New Delhi in December, 2001; news coverage had to diagnose
> dormant scenes of the crime, and thus lacked the capacity to
> retain audiences.
> > 
> > The latest attacks in Mumbai, by comparison, have
> received saturation coverage. There is no doubt that those
> who designed the attacks drew on the idea that the media
> constitutes war by other means; live action news about
> violence is akin to sequenced bomb blasts that can retain
> audiences for a length of time. Executed during the
> Thanksgiving holidays and located in tourist venues and
> heritage monuments, clearly including American and British
> persons in their targets, these attacks stretched over days.
> A global audience was envisaged for these attacks. The
> volume of coverage inevitably magnified the impact of the
> violence, prolonging its duration and escalating its
> rhetoric. The recent events are routinely described as
> India’s worst-ever terror attack, which not only ignores
> the greater toll of the 1993 blasts, but assumes that the
> numerous episodes of violence against Muslims, that claimed
> many hundreds more lives and often took place with the
> covert
> > or overt support of law-enforcement agencies, did not
> constitute “terror.”
> > 
> > The question that has transfixed the media and
> provoked a demand for an answer is: who sponsored the
> killings, and how will they be caught? The question of why
> terror was launched was seldom asked, so habituated and
> dependent are the media to the spectacle of violence. The
> view of the media is akin to that of a policeman—the point
> is to catch the culprit.
> > With terrorism, the news media, and the police—and
> should we add, the judiciary?—seem to have merged
> together. We get information about attacks planned in
> Pakistan, emerging from the interrogation of the one
> attacker caught alive. No one can be under any illusion that
> this information comes from anywhere other than a torture
> chamber, but that vital and complicating bit of news is
> omitted. Also omitted is the possibility of Salafi funding
> from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere for the suspected groups,
> such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad and
> Jamaat-ud-Dawa, whose names keep changing. The tense but
> complicitous relationship between the United States and
> Saudi Arabia, that helps to preserve absolutist rule in that
> country, is far too academic a point to even be mentioned in
> the police drama unfolded by television news.
> > 
> > After many years of protesting state-controlled
> broadcasting, private news media now sets the terms of
> discourse on Indian airwaves, but the result is not what was
> foreseen by free speech advocates. Instead of official
> propaganda, which no one believed, audiences in India now
> get crime news, which sidesteps the tedium of argument and
> party line and spotlights violence instead.
> > 
> > Violence, when it occurs, is ideally meant to confirm
> that the law is being enforced. When violence is in defiance
> of the law and intended as a spectacle, the harm is physical
> as well as symbolic—the ability of the law to control
> public space is challenged. We might say that the intention
> of such terrorism is to drive a wedge between the law and
> its representation, as well as to unsettle our understanding
> of the relationship between violence and visibility. To be
> seen in a public space could be to enter the crosshairs of a
> killer, whereas to remain invisible is safe. Terrorism thus
> inverts our understanding of the meaning of publicity,
> making the visible a site of persistent danger and of
> suspended legality.
> > 
> > While the state invokes non-state actors to authorize
> new forms of political intervention, the media take on
> increasingly state-like characteristics. Despite being
> unelected representatives, their demands have more effect.
> Previous episodes of violence in Mumbai, e.g. in 1993, made
> no difference to the tenure of political leaders at that
> time, although numerous allegations were made against some
> of them. Although the death toll is smaller on this
> occasion, the Union Home Minister and the Chief Minister of
> Maharashtra have had to summarily vacate their offices,
> largely in response to a media-generated furor against them.
> In fact, the actions of the media’s state-like behavior
> focus on results over accountability, on retribution over
> restitution, on drama over the tedium of fact-finding, and,
> most of all, on sympathy for the upwardly mobile middle and
> upper classes over the (often unseen) victims of violence,
> poverty, immiseration and political terror.
> > 
> > What is manifest in this process is elite power; the
> media in India is only nominally public. A majority of the
> population may watch television, but it is the elite who own
> the space and dictate the terms of its discourse. The news
> routines do not even pretend to be egalitarian. In the
> recent attacks hardly any attention was paid to the railway
> station where sixty people were killed. TV crews stayed
> focused on the luxury hotels, where “People Like Us”
> were affected.
> > 
> > In responses to terrorism state power is exercised in
> secrecy, while elite power becomes bolder and claims for
> itself the mantle of the public as a whole. Politicians are
> vilified as a group and their judgment is scorned, as media
> celebrities offer their wisdom on national security.
> Meanwhile, there is little sign of responses being planned
> or conducted by the state; torture and encounter killings do
> not make the news, and counter-insurgency operations occur
> off-camera and through third-party and non-verifiable
> sources.
> > 
> > A Possible Politics
> > 
> > The globalization of media has led to an increased
> overlapping of news angles by Indian and western news
> markets, and the recent attacks reflect this, as the elites
> in Mumbai ask where their Rudy Giuliani is to spearhead
> their charge after the attacks, assuming that they too must
> respond “like America.” We have also witnessed the
> remarkable attempt by some American commentators to locate
> the cause of violence in a civilizational clash between
> Hindus and Muslims, akin to the alleged clash between Islam
> and Christendom. In this improbable interpretation, pagan
> Hindus are on the side of Christendom against Islam,
> although the latter two faiths profess a religion of the
> book, while Hinduism is polytheistic and fissiparous. As a
> waning superpower struggles for political leverage in a
> multipolar world, it is not surprising to see a search for
> the means of making foreign conflicts tractable to the
> existing geopolitical vision of the United States.
> > 
> > If we are to take democracy seriously, however, the
> question is not only what identities people respond to, but
> what we wish them to become. The problem, in other words, is
> not only an anthropological one, of classifying the
> different peoples of the world, but also a political one, of
> indicating what kind of world we would like them to belong
> to. Democratization everywhere effects a transformation in
> identities; people have a right not only to improve their
> lives, but to choose the terms in which they express them.
> Against the democratization of terror we must assert a
> politics of humanity, although the terms in which to do so
> are hardly transparent. We grant humanity to those made
> visible to the law, but new technologies of publicity
> disclose the presence of those denied legality, albeit
> through criminal acts. If outlaws once laid the basis for
> law, today the challenge before the law is to respond not
> only to the terrorist, but as well to the migrant,
> > the slum-dweller, the uprooted peasant and other
> victims of industrial development, and the religious and
> ethnic minority. The growing separation between politics and
> publicity, between those who are visible and subject to the
> law and those who are invisible or who force themselves into
> visibility, requires us to constantly reconsider who has a
> right to politics and who is to be denied it, and on what
> grounds.
> > 
> > 
> > This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008
> at 11:40 am and is filed under Mumbai 11/26. You can follow
> any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You
> can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is
> currently not allowed.
> > 
> > 4 Responses to “Violence, publicity, and
> sovereignty”
> > 
> > Nandan Maluste:
> > December 16th, 2008 at 1:32 am
> > 
> > Excellent insightful piece. Would be enhanced by
> notice of:
> > 1.The Sachar Committee which reported that the mass of
> Muslims in India have been socially, educationally and
> economically excluded.
> > 2.Naxalism which exists in a third of India’s 600+
> districts and dominant in over 70. It could be regarded as a
> violent product of the alienation experienced by the rural
> poor who are rarely high caste Hindus.
> > 3. Six decade old border disputes between India and
> Pakistan. These have spawned three open wars and many covert
> ones.
> > 4. The absurd focus of Indian security forces: the
> Special Protection Group (guarding Sonia Gandhi and some
> five immediate relatives plus the Prime Minister) is
> reported by the Times of India to have a budget exceeding
> that of the National Security Guard which should protect the
> other billion people in India (including, presumably,
> ministers with special protection). Further, the NSG is
> located solely in Delhi!
> > 5. The opportunities to correct the above. These are
> presented by rapid economic growth, embrace of education by
> Muslims and generally by all Indians, Indo-Pak efforts at
> reconciliation brokered by the Bush administration, Right to
> Information Act, the new activism of the middle class, etc.
> > 
> > Somita Sen:
> > 
> > December 16th, 2008 at 6:36 am
> > 
> > An excellent piece—the final formulation—the
> separation of politics from publicity is a very interesting
> one indeed that I will need to think about some more. You
> trouble here the easy assumption that a quest for publicity
> is a form of politics.
> > As far as I can remember, ever since the Jessica Lal
> murder case and the galvanizing role played by media in it,
> private 24 hours news media seems to have emerged, as you
> astutely note, as a police force. The emphasis on force.
> Very intriguing suggestion that the media is behaving here
> like the state insofar as it is attempting to institute the
> rule of law. So all exposes are always about a corrupt,
> incompetent government on the one hand and the frustrated
> but empowered citizen on the other ready to go to battle
> against this corrupt government. All Indian media strikes me
> as being like a Michael Moore movie—bristling with the
> need for answers, justice and so on and hoping to achieve
> this by sticking a mike in front of some pol’s face. To
> take a more Indian example, it is as if all our trusty
> reporters are like that 1980s TV character
> “Rajani”—who rushed headlong where angels feared to
> tread!
> > I am also struck by how little information the news
> channels provide, how stripped down their programing is. The
> same screaming reporters, the smooth anchor, the desi-techno
> theme music and digital effects mad screen design. Repeated
> over and over. Nothing happens. Nothing is ever fleshed out.
> It would seem as though these outfits have like zero
> research departments. Hardly any experts. Just LIVENESS. And
> all the legitimacy seems to flow from the brute fact of this
> LIVENESS. We are there in real time. So it must be real.
> > It was very interesting to see as the attacks unfolded
> how the complete absence of “facts,” was made up for the
> relentless presence of affect. I wonder how the evident
> passion of the journalist—that frantic
> emphasis—ultimately generates, again, the legitimacy of
> the call for justice. To what extent does the promise of
> media affect attract those invisible, forsaken subjects?
> > States are such affectless creatures. At least the
> Indian state has been pretty phlegmatic in its media
> presentations. But this media as state sure knows how to
> feel.
> > 
> > Ambi Parameswaran:
> > December 17th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
> > 
> > A very eloquent piece. Disturbing reading.
> > I think you may be on to something big, especially
> about news television and its many headed Hydraness. The
> issue with television news is the lack of a control on them;
> unlike press which has a Press Council which is a self
> regulatory organization, TV roams free creating its own
> forms of panic.
> > People in the know feel that Mumbai authorities should
> have controlled the media a lot better, but that said, media
> too seemed to have behaved quite irresponsibly, often
> provoking panelist to mouth pseudo-jingoistic thrash.
> > Over the last few months India has been seeing its
> homegrown terrorists causing their own breed of mayhem. The
> IM, Indian Mujahideen, have become a scary part of the
> scene. At least this attack was master minded by overseas
> forces.
> > Your point about muslims getting more and more
> ostracized is well taken. This time around, we could see
> muslim groups openly demonstrating against the terrorists.
> Hopefully the Indian Muslims are doing their bit to avoid
> being painted with the same brush. That danger still
> remains.
> > 
> > Azhar Aslam:
> > December 25th, 2008 at 11:28 am
> > 
> > This is a very frank, insightful and honest opinion. I
> am saddened that pieces like this are not circulating widely
> among subcontinental internet sites and media. It puts the
> picture in perspective and takes the sting out of jingoistic
> anti-Pakistani stance of Indian media and politicians.
> > It is also disturbing that Indian government has tried
> its fullest to take ”advantage” of human misery in its
> own country and of its own people and made this a
> “Pakistan-centric” event. When it should have been
> paying attention to healing its own wounds, India has seen
> it as an opportunity to salt these wounds and create fresh
> ones.
> > As far as certain parts of Indian
> media/intellectuals/politicians triumvirate, who want India
> to respond in an American manner, they need to consider the
> following:
> > A. Is this the way India is going to declare to the
> world that it has turned into a regional or world super
> power? what is this complex about being “Like America”?
> > B. India it seems is following in USSR tradition and
> trying to create an aura of invincibility for its own ego
> satisfaction without considering the hundreds of millions of
> its citizens who are hungry,poor and destitute. This is no
> more than a sign of serious inferiority complex and
> insecurity of its own identity.
> > C. What has the world turned into after the American
> response? Its not as if the world has become a safer or
> better place that this response should be imitated.
> > D. The signs of being super in power are maturity and
> sagacity. It is to reach out and stand against terrorism of
> any kind and take smaller countries in the region with her.
> It is to lead. But has India done any of it? No sir. So
> forget about being super in power. Just set your house in
> order.
> > Swadhin Sen Archaeologist - Assistant Professor
> Dept.of Archaeology Tel: +88 02 779 10 45-51 Ext. 1326
> Jahangirnagar University Mobile: +88 0172 019 61 76
> Savar,Dhaka. Bangladesh Fax: +88 02 779 10 52
> swadhin_sen at yahoo.com; swadhinsen at hotmail.com www.juniv.edu
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
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