[Reader-list] Ashis Nandy on Terrorism

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear All,

I am forwarding below, an essay by Ashis Nandy on Terrorism, which  
appeared in 'The Little Magazine' (issue on 'Security') recently.  
While I think that some of the generalizations contained within it  
may be a little too broad, I do think that there is much that is  
thoughtful and incisive in this essay. I do hope that it can generate  
some reflection, and less loose talk, on a topic as serious as the  
presence of terror in our lives today.

regards

Shuddha
-------------------
Narcissism and Despair: Ashis Nandy on Terrorism
http://www.littlemag.com/security/ashisnandy.html
	
The Little Magazine: 	Security, Vol VII : issue 3&4

Interpretations of the events of 9/11, 2001, and the diverse  
political and intellectual responses to them, have oscillated between  
a concern with the wrath of the disinherited and exploited and the  
elements of self-destruction built into a hegemonic system. In this  
essay, I shall focus on the rage of those who feel they have been let  
down by the present global system and have no future within it. This  
feeling has been acquiring a particularly dangerous edge in recent  
times. For the rage often does not have a specific target but it is  
always looking for one; and regimes and movements that latch on to  
that free-floating anger can go far. Indeed, once in a while, their  
targets too have the same kind of need to search for, and find,  
enemies. The two sides then establish a dyadic bond that binds them  
in lethal mutual hatred.[1]

Six years after the event, it is pretty obvious that this time there  
has been a narrowing of cognitive and emotional range all around. The  
global culture of commonsense has come to the conclusion that it is  
no longer a matter of realpolitik and hard-headed, interest-based use  
of terror of the kind favoured by the mainstream culture of  
international relations and diplomacy — as for instance the repeated  
attempts by the CIA over the last six decades to assassinate  
recalcitrant rulers hostile to the United States — but a terror that  
is based on the defiance of rationality and abrogation of self- 
interest, a terror that is deeply and identifiably cultural.

It also seems to insist, to judge by the responses to 9/11, that  
there are only two ways of looking at this link between terror and  
culture. One way is to emphasise cultural stereotypes and how they  
hamper intercultural and interreligious amity. This emphasis presumes  
that the West with its freedoms — political and sexual — and its  
lifestyle, identified in the popular imagination by consumerism and  
individualism, has come to look like a form of Satanism in many  
millennial movements, particularly in those flourishing in Islamic  
cultures. Multiculturalism and intercultural dialogue are seen as  
natural, if long-term, antidotes to such deadly stereotypes. So is,  
in the short run, ‘firm’ international policing.

The other way is to locate the problem in the worldview and theology  
of specific cultures. What look like stereotypes or essentialisations  
in the former approach are seen as expressions of the natural  
political self of such cultures in the latter. At the moment, Islam  
looks like the prime carrier of such a political self but some other  
cultures are not far behind. The American senator who ridiculed those  
who wore diapers on their heads did not have in mind only the  
Muslims; nor did the American motorist who, when caught while trying  
to run over a woman clad in a sari, declared that he was only doing  
his patriotic duty after 9/11.

The first way — that of multiculturalism and intercultural dialogue —  
is of course seen as a soft option, the second as too harsh. However,  
the second has in the short run looked to many like a viable basis  
for public policy and political action. The reason is obvious. Terror  
has been an instrument of statecraft, diplomacy and political  
advocacy for centuries. To see it as a new entrant in the global  
marketplace of politics is to shut one’s eyes to the deep human  
propensity to hitch terror to organised, ideology-led political  
praxis. Robespierre said — on behalf of all revolutionaries, I guess  
— that without terror, virtue was helpless. Terror, he went on to  
claim, was virtue itself.

This propensity has also enjoyed a certain ‘natural’ legitimacy in  
the dominant global culture of public life when it comes to the  
serious business of international relations. Despite recent  
pretensions, in international politics violence does not have to be  
justified; only non-violence has to be justified. The mainstream  
global culture of statecraft insists that the true antidote to terror  
is counter-terror.

In that respect, the killers who struck at New York on 9/11 and the  
regimes that claim absolute moral superiority over them share some  
common values. Both believe that when it comes to Satanic others, all  
terror is justified as long as it is counter-terror and interpreted  
as retributive justice. Both look like belated products of the  
twentieth century, which in retrospect looks like a century of  
terrorism and its natural accompaniment, collateral damage. Guernica,  
Hamburg, Dresden, Nanking, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are all  
formidable names in the history of terror and counter-terror, used  
systematically as political and strategic weapons. On a smaller  
scale, the same story of attempts to hitch terror to virtue and to  
statecraft has been repeated in a wide range of situations — from  
Jallianwalla Bagh to Lidice and from Sharpeville to Mi Lai. The  
culpable states were sometimes autocratic, sometimes democratic.

Liberal democracy has not often been a good antidote against state  
terror unleashed by its protagonists. Few are now surprised that some  
of the iconic defenders of democracy, such as Winston Churchill, were  
as committed to terror as Robespierre was. Churchill was not only a  
co-discoverer of the concept of area bombing, as opposed to strategic  
bombing, he also did not intercede when supplied with evidence,  
including aerial photographs, of Nazi death camps.

Hence also the widespread tendency to dismiss all talk of fighting  
terror without recourse to counter-terror as romantic hogwash. It is  
a basic tenet of the mainstream global culture of politics that only  
the fear of counter-terror dissuades terrorists from walking their  
chosen path. Hence also the admiration for the terrorism-fighting  
skills of a country like Israel in states like Sri Lanka and India  
and the pathetic attempts of such admirers to use Israeli  
‘expertise’, forgetting that Israel has been fighting terror with  
terror for more than fifty years without success. All that the  
Israeli state can really take credit for is that, in a classic  
instance of identifying with its historic oppressors, it has  
succeeded in turning terrorism into a chronic ailment within the  
boundaries of the Israeli state, in the process brutalising its own  
politics and turning many of its citizens into fanatics and racists.

Into this atmosphere has entered a new genre of terrorists during the  
last few years in Palestine, Sri Lanka, India and now the United  
States. These are terrorists who come in the form of suicide bombers  
and suicide squads. They come prepared to die and, therefore, are  
personally and, one might add, automatically immune to the fear of  
counter-terrorism. Actually, they usually view counter-terrorism —  
and the reaction it unleashes — as a useful device for mobilisation  
and polarisation of opinion.[2] This is one thing that the hedonic,  
death-denying, self-interest-based, individualistic culture of the  
globalised middle classes just cannot handle. It looks like an  
unwanted war declared by the death-defying on the death-denying. What  
kind of person are you if you do not want to keep any options open  
for enjoying or even seeing the future you are fighting for? What  
kind of person are you if you do not care what happens to your  
family, neighbourhood or community in the backlash? To the civilised  
modern citizen, such suicidal activism looks like the negation of  
civilisation and the ultimate instance of savagery, apart from being  
utterly irrational and perhaps even psychotic.

In the nervous, heated discussions about the kamikaze nearly fifty  
years ago, they often appeared like strange, subhuman adventurers and  
carriers of collective pathologies, driven by their feudal  
allegiances and unable to distinguish life from death or good from  
evil. Recent discussions of the suicide bombers of Hamas, Tamil  
Tigers of Sri Lanka and Al Qaeda and Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pakistan and  
Kashmir invoke the same kind of imageries and fantasies. Hence,  
probably, the abortive attempts to rename suicide bombings as  
homicide bombings. They invoke such imageries and fantasies because  
the modern world is always at a loss to figure out how to deter  
somebody who is already determined to die.

For most of us, this kind of passion has no place in normal life; it  
can be only grudgingly accommodated in textbooks of psychiatry as a  
combination of criminal insanity and insane self-destructiveness.  
Outside the modern world too, few call it self-sacrifice. For unlike  
the freedom fighters of India and Ireland who fasted to death during  
the colonial period as an act of protest and defiance of their  
rulers, the self-sacrifice of the suicide bombers also includes the  
sacrifice of unwilling, innocent others, what the civilised world has  
learnt to euphemistically call unavoidable collateral damage.

Yet, the key cultural-psychological feature of today’s suicide  
bombers and suicide squads, despair, is not unknown to the moderns.  
Indeed, the idea of despair has become central to our understanding  
of contemporary subjectivities and we also acknowledge that it has  
shaped some of the greatest creative endeavours in the arts and some  
of the most ambitious forays in social thought in our times. Van Gogh  
cannot be understood without invoking the idea of despair, nor can  
Friedrich Nietzsche. So powerful has been the explanatory power of  
the idea of despair that recently Harsha Dehejia, an Indian art  
historian, has tried to introduce the concept in the Indian classical  
theory of art — by extending Bharata’s theory of rasas itself — as an  
analytic device. Dehejia feels that without recourse to this  
construct, we just cannot fathom contemporary Indian art.[3]

One suspects that the desperation one sees in the self-destruction of  
the new breed of terrorists is the obverse of the same sense of  
despair that underpins so much of contemporary creativity. Only, this  
new despair expresses itself in strange and alien ways because the  
cultures from which it comes are not only defeated but have remained  
mostly invisible and inaudible. Indeed, their sense of desperation  
may have come not so much from defeat or economic deprivation but  
from invisibility and inaudibility.[4]

Of the 18 people identified as members of the suicide squad that  
struck on 9/11, 15 have been identified as Saudis. They come from a  
prosperous society where dissent in any form is not permitted, where  
political conformity and silence are demanded and extracted through  
either state terror or the fear of it. It can be argued that by  
underwriting the Saudi regime, which also presides over Islam’s  
holiest sites and has acquired an undeserved reputation in many  
circles as a prototypical if not exemplary Islamic state, the United  
States has helped identify itself as the major source of the sense of  
desperation that the killers nurtured within them. Violence of the  
kind we saw on 9/11, Johan Galtung and Dietrich Fischer argue,  
presumes “a very high level of dehumanisation of the victims in the  
minds of aggressors.”[5] That dehumanisation does not happen in a  
day, nor can it be conveniently explained away as unprovoked.

Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek and Stephen Schwarz of Spectator have  
drawn attention to the denominational loyalties of the 18 terrorists.  
They were Wahhabis, given to an aggressively puritanical form of  
Islamic revivalist ideology. But all Wahhabis do not turn as  
aggressive as the Saudi, Palestinian, Pakistani and Pashtun Wahhabis  
have sometimes done, and certainly all of them do not become suicide  
bombers. Who does or does not is the question we face.

The answer to that question, we may find out in the coming years,  
lies not in the ethnic origins or religious connections of terrorism  
but in the fear of cultures that encourage us not to acknowledge the  
sense of desperation, if not despair, that is today crystallising  
outside the peripheries of the known world. It is the adhesive in the  
new bonding between terror and culture. This desperation may not  
always be preceded by Nietzschean theocide but it is accompanied by a  
feeling that God may not be dead but he has surely gone deaf and  
blind. The Palestinian situation is only one part of the story. The  
present global political economy has for the first time become almost  
totally oblivious to the fact that the unprecedented prosperity and  
technological optimism in some countries have as their underside the  
utter penury and hopelessness of the many, accompanied by collapse of  
life support systems due to ecological devastation.[6]

Nothing I have come across reveals the nature of this nihilistic,  
suicidal despair in some parts of the globe better than the following  
extract from a journalist’s story.  I request the reader to go  
through it, despite its length:

Aman [Brigadier Amanullah, secretary to Benazir Bhutto and former  
chief of Pakistan’s military intelligence in Sind, bordering India]  
noticed me looking at the painting and followed my gaze. …

“A rocket ship heading to the moon?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “A nuclear warhead heading to India.”

I thought he was making a joke. … I told Aman that I was disturbed by  
the ease with which Pakistanis talk of nuclear war with India.

Aman shook his head. “No,” he said matter-of-factly. “This should  
happen. We should use the bomb.”

“For what purpose?”

He didn’t seem to understand my question.

“In retaliation?” I asked.

“Why not?”

“Or first strike?”

“Why not?”

I looked for a sign of irony. None was visible…

“We should fire at them and take out a few of their cities — Delhi,  
Bombay, Calcutta,” he said. “They should fire back and take Karachi  
and Lahore. Kill off a hundred or two hundred million people… and it  
would all be over. They have acted so badly toward us; they have been  
so mean. We should teach them a lesson. It would teach all of us a  
lesson. There is no future here, and we need to start over. So many  
people think this. Have you been to the villages of Pakistan, the  
interior? There is nothing but dire poverty and pain. The children  
have no education; there is nothing to look forward to. Go into the  
villages, see the poverty. There is no drinking water. Small children  
without shoes walk miles for a drink of water. I go to the villages  
and I want to cry. My children have no future. None of the children  
of Pakistan have a future. We are surrounded by nothing but war and  
suffering…”[7]

In the bonding between terror and culture, a subsidiary role has been  
played by the perception that all strange cultures are potentially  
dangerous and sources of violence, and that multiculturalism is only  
a means of organising or confederating those cultures that  
approximate or are compatible with the global middle-class culture —  
cultures that can be safely consumed in the form of ethnic food,  
arts, museumised artefacts, anthropological subjects or, as is  
happening in the case of Buddhism and Hinduism, packaged ethnic  
theories of salvation. The tacit solipsism of Islamic terrorism and  
its ability to hijack some of Islam’s most sacred symbols is matched  
by the narcissism of America’s policy elite that finds expression in  
an optimism that is almost manic.

At the same time, for a large majority of the world, all rights to  
diverse visions of the future — all utopian thinking and all  
indigenous visions of a good society — are being subverted by the  
globally dominant knowledge systems and a globally accessible media  
as instances of either romantic, other-worldly illusions or as brazen  
exercises in revivalism. The Southern world’s future now, by  
definition, is nothing other than an edited version of the  
contemporary North’s. What Europe and North America are today, the  
folklore of the globalised middle class claims, the rest of the world  
will become tomorrow. Once visions of the future are thus stolen, the  
resulting vacuum has to be filled by available forms of  
millennialism, some of them perfectly compatible with the various  
editions of fundamentalism floating around the global marketplace of  
ideas today. In the liminal world of the marginalised and the muted,  
desperation and millennialism often define violence as a necessary  
means of exorcism.

September 11, Gandhian activist-scholar Rajiv Vora and the  
Swarajpeeth initiative have recently reminded us, was the day  
Satyagraha, militant non-violence, was born in Johannesburg in 1906.  
South Africa at the time was a proudly authoritarian, racist police  
state, not at all like British India, presided over by an allegedly  
benign, liberal colonial regime that, some votaries of political  
realism assure us, ensured the success of Gandhi’s non-violence. Does  
this coincidence have something to tell us?

One way of understanding the recent changes in the global culture of  
protest is to offset the despair-driven, suicidal forms of terror  
against the self-destructive defiance and subversion of authorities,  
as in the case of the Irish hunger-strikers, whom we have already  
mentioned. The other way is to compare the new culture of terror with  
the no less religious, militant nonviolence of a community known all  
over the globe today for its alleged weakness for religion-based  
terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pathans, known for their martial valour and officially declared a  
martial race by British India in the nineteenth century, have  
virtually been turned into official symbols of mindless violence.  
Yet, in India at least, till quite recently they were also the  
symbols of the non-violence of the courageous and the truly martial.  
They had been the finest exponents of the art of Gandhian militant  
non-violence, directed against the British imperial regime in the  
1930s.[9] The Pathans who participated in that struggle were exactly  
the community that has in the last decade produced the Taliban and  
played host to Osama bin Laden and his entourage. Can this  
discrepancy or change be explained away only as a result of the  
efforts of dedicated fundamentalist clerics, the brutalising  
consequence of the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan, or the skill  
and efficiency of Inter Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s version of  
the Central Intelligence Agency? Or does the contradiction exist in  
the human personality and Pashtun culture itself?[10]

The second possibility cannot be dismissed offhand. The behaviour of  
ordinary Afghans after the fall of the Taliban regime — in their  
everyday life and their participation in politics — does not suggest  
that the Taliban enjoyed decisive support of the people they ruled.  
Most Afghans seemed genuinely happy to be rid of the harsh,  
puritanical reign of the Taliban. On the other hand, some of them  
have obviously helped their guest, bin Laden, and the now-unpopular  
ruler, Mullah Mohammed Omar, to successfully escape the clutches of  
the American ground troops.

Who is the real Pathan? The one sympathetic or obedient to the  
Taliban or the one celebrating the Taliban’s fall? The one known for  
his martial values or the one who in the 1930s turned out to be the  
most courageous passive resister, who, according to a number of  
moving accounts of the Non-Cooperation Movement, faced ruthless baton  
charges by the colonial police but never retaliated and never  
flinched? The Pathans evidently brought to their nonviolence the same  
commitment and fervour that the Afghan terrorists are said to have  
brought to their militancy in Afghanistan and in other hotspots of  
the world. Are they as ruthless with themselves now as they were in  
the 1930s, during colonial times?

I shall avoid answering these questions directly and instead venture  
a tentative, open-ended comment to conclude. Most cultures enjoin non- 
violence or at least seek to reduce the area of violence, and these  
efforts often go hand in hand with cultural theories of unavoidable  
violence. Only a few like Sparta and the Third Reich glorify,  
prioritise or celebrate violence more or less unconditionally as the  
prime mover in human affairs or as the preferred mode of intervention  
in the world. In the huge majority of cultures that fall in the first  
category, violence and non-violence both exist in the same persons as  
human potentialities. The life experiences that underscore one of the  
two potentialities are the crucial means of entering the mind of the  
violent and to understand why the violent actualised one of the  
potentialities and not the other.

The experiences that in our times have contributed to the growth of  
massive violence can often — though not always — be traced to the  
collapse of communities and their normative systems. The old is  
moribund and the new has not yet been born, as the tired cliché goes.  
In many cases, the powerful and the rich welcomed this collapse  
because they did not like the norms of other people’s communities.  
But flawed norms, one guesses, are norms all the same.

The resulting flux has psychologically disoriented and sometimes  
devastated a large section of humankind and generated in them a vague  
sense of loss, anxiety and anger. They live with a sense of  
loneliness and a feeling that the work they have to do to earn their  
living, unlike the vocations they previously had, is degrading and  
meaningless. Those who do not clearly perceive the hand of any agency  
in these changes often try to contain their anger through consumerism  
and immersion in the world of total entertainment. But some do  
identify an agency, correctly or incorrectly. The contemporary  
terrorists come from among them.

This also means that only by engaging with these experiences can you  
battle the worldviews or ideologies that organise these experiences  
into a work-plan for terror. If you are unwilling to negotiate these  
life experiences, if you consistently deny their existence and  
legitimacy and the normal human tendency to configure such  
experiences into something ideologically meaningful, you contribute  
to and aggravate the sense of desperation and abandonment for many.  
At least one well-known Palestinian psychiatrist has claimed that in  
West Asia ‘it is no longer a question of determining who amongst the  
Palestinian youth are inclined towards suicide bombing. The question  
is who does not want to be a suicide bomber.’[11]

You then push the desperate and the abandoned towards a small, closed  
world of likeminded people who constitute a ‘pseudo-community’ of  
those whose rage and frustration are sometimes free-floating but  
always seeking expression in nihilistic self-destruction masquerading  
as self-denying martyrdom.

NOTES

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at a symposium on  
‘Edward Said: Speaking Truth to Power,’ organised by the Institute  
for Research and Development in Humanities, Tarbiyat Modaress  
University, Tehran University and Center for Dialogue of  
Civilizations in Tehran, and an expanded version at the Workshop on  
‘The Dialogue of Civilizations: Intellectual and Organizational  
Signposts for the Future’, La Trobe University, Melbourne.

1. Vamik D. Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies (New York:  
Jason Aronson, 1988).

2. This is recognised, though in the language of the mainstream, in  
Michael S. Doran, ‘Somebody Else’s Civil War’, Foreign Affairs,  
January-February 2002, 81(1), pp. 22-42.

3. Harsha Dehejia with Prem Shankar Jha and Ranjit Hoskote, Despair  
and Modernity: Reflections from Modern Indian Paintings (Delhi:  
Motilal Banarsidass, 2000).

4. Partly because American hegemony today is ensured not so much by  
an army and a ready reserve of about 3.9 million men and an annual  
expenditure of about 650 billion dollars as by a near-total control  
over global mass media.

5. Johan Galtung and Dietrich Fischer, ‘The United States, the West  
and the Rest of the World’, unpublished ms.

6. That is why one of the most thoughtful intellectual responses to  
September 11, 2001 remains Wendell Berry, ‘In the Presence of Fear’,  
Resurgence, January-February 2002, (210), pp. 6-8; see also Jonathan  
Power, ‘For the Arrogance of Power America Now Pays a Terrible  
Price’, TFF Press Info 127, Transnational Foundation, September 13,  
2001.

7. Peter Landesman, ‘The Agenda: A Modest Proposal From the  
Brigadier: What one Prominent Pakistani thinks his Country should do  
with its Atomic Weapons’, The Atlantic Monthly, March 2002.

8. Rajiv Vora, ‘11 September: Kaun si aur Kyun’, Unpublished Hindi  
paper circulated by Swarajpeeth and Nonviolent Peaceforce, New Delhi  
2005; and Arshad Qureshi, ‘11 September 1906: Ek Nazar’, unpublished  
paper circulated by Swarajpeeth and Nonviolent Peaceforce, New Delhi  
2005.

9. An ethnographic monograph that nevertheless captures the other  
self of the Pathan in a moving fashion is Mukulika Banerjee, The  
Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier  
(Oxford: James Currey, 2000). For a hint that this is not merely dead  
history but a living memory for many, see Ayesha Khan, ‘Mid-Way to  
Dandi, Meet Red Shirts’, The Indian Express, March 22, 2005.

10. See an insightful, sensitive discussion of the way the same  
cultural resources can be used to legitimise and resist terrorism in  
Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Dialogue with the Terrorists’, in Colonialism,  
Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse  
(Sage, New Delhi, 1989), pp. 139-71.

11. Eyyead Sarraj, quoted in Chandra Muzaffar, ‘Suicide Bombing: Is  
Another Form of Struggle Possible?’, Just: Commentary, June 2002, 2 
(6), p. 1.

------
Ashis Nandy, renowned political psychologist and social theorist, is  
a leading figure in postcolonial studies and arguably India’s best  
known intellectual voice of dissent. He is Director of the Centre for  
the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. His recent awards include  
the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize




Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The Sarai Programme at CSDS
Raqs Media Collective
shuddha at sarai.net
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net