[Reader-list] On Terror

[Rakesh Iyer]

Dear all

I read this article in Seminar, and while I must say I didn't completely
understand everything in this essay, what I did understand makes me put this
up here. I think one has to read this to understand whether the current
solutions being proposed to terrorism would be actually working or not .
Please do go through this article.

Regards

Rakesh

Link:  http://www.india-seminar.com/2009/596/596_ashis_nandy.htm
*

Welcome, the age of fear
*

ASHIS NANDY


WHEN the likes of W.H. Auden and Erich Fromm announced the age of anxiety a
few years after World War II, it was obvious that their point of reference
was the modern West, with its full-blown middle-class culture, increasingly
unfettered individualism, and its triumphant vision of an urban-industrial
future for humankind. In such a world there was place for fear, but for only
those fears that were adjuncts to modern society and its anxieties – the
fears of loneliness, anomie, alienation and other such lofty states of mind.
Anxiety, after all, was a modern disease. Even psychoanalytic theory seemed
to endorse that modern connection; it proclaimed that anxiety did not
usually have a fantasy behind it; fear did, particularly if it was
unrealistic.

Hence, many who wrote on such issues knew, but did not take seriously the
less respectable fears that stalked the Southern hemisphere – the fear of
starvation, loss of livelihood and vocation, humiliation, the fears of loss
of self and loss of agency and, above all, insecurity about personal and
collective survival. These were seen as correlates of underdevelopment and,
thus, by-products of an earlier stage of history, anachronistically
surviving in the contemporary world due to the irrationality and cussedness
of ignorant, change-resistant societies at the peripheries of the world.
Implicitly, progress was redefined as the journey from the age of fear to
the age of anxiety.


* *

*I*t took time for small groups of intellectuals to recognize that even in
the modern West, in the interstices of anxiety lurked more primitive fears –
fears of annihilation that some of the great discoveries of science such as
nuclear weaponry and biological warfare threatened, fears of totalitarianism
and machine violence that had outlived Auschwitz but not the Gulags, and the
fear of dissent that made censorship and surveillance a matter of life and
death in a large number of polities that still constituted the other West.
Fears about survival, freedom, self-expression and identity were not the
monopoly of the Southern world. Italian sociologist and futurist Eleonora
Masini’s work, for example, showed that the fear of nuclear annihilation,
banished from the public sphere, *did* enter the psychological world of
European children.

Now, just when some intellectuals have begun to assure us of the end of
history and the idea of democracy has become triumphant enough to force even
recalcitrant police states to claim that they are moving towards
liberal-democratic ideals, just when there seems to be a global consensus on
the beauties of capitalism, mass culture and knowledge society, a new age of
fear has begun to unfold before our unbelieving eyes, this time at the very
centre of the globalizing world. The coming decades may belong to a form of
terror that threatens to change our public life by setting the pace of all
debates on individual and collective security.


 * *

*Y*et, terror was always there, though often invisible and unacknowledged,
in the political cultures of liberal democracy and capitalism; it has always
constituted the underside of western modernity, especially its Jacobin
variations. It is the terror without which, Robespierre believed, virtue was
impotent. Indeed, all ideas of progress that have dominated the world since
the eighteenth century, including the ideas and ideologies that legitimized
the two early attempts at globalization – the Atlantic slave trade and
modern colonialism – have believed in the emancipatory potentials of terror.

The concept of the revolutionary role of vanguards in radical theory and the
use of the idea of revolutionary violence to transubstantiate cruelty and
mass violence, as S.N. Balagangadhara might put it, are merely extensions of
the same tradition. When in the first half of the twentieth century an
effort was made to set up an alternative path to globalization by the
socialist countries, the first thing each one of them did, whatever else
they did or did not, was to set up a terror machine to serve the causes of
‘liberation’ and ‘progress’.

That European belief in the socially creative role of terror has now come
home to roost. There is some poetic justice in the efforts of others, who
have often been at the receiving end of a world system of which the idea of
legitimate terror has been an inalienable part, now trying to dismantle the
system using the same technology. Terror as a means of actualizing values
such as justice, liberty and equality now faces terror that invokes the same
values and defines itself as counter-terror.


 * *

*F*or some reason, anguish, the third constituent of the triad that includes
anxiety and fear, seems to be in short supply today, despite growing belief
that we have to combat anguish the way we fight anxiety and fear. As I grow
old, I notice lesser anguish and decreasing sensitivity to anguish around
me. I also see, in media and in public discourse, consistent and systematic
efforts to marginalize intellectuals and thinkers who think that there are
reasons to be anguished about things such as the environment, the growing
violence acquiring nihilistic tones, threats to life support systems of
smaller cultures and communities at the peripheries of the modern political
economy, the impunity with which genocidal projects are implemented, the way
cruelty and torture have made their way into the reigning culture of
politics, and the pockets of utter destitution within a culture of
consumerism that is obscene in the way it flaunts itself.

Anguish *is* in short supply today. Yet, the anguished are seen as
spoilsports, impractical romantics or doomsday prophets, not in tune with
the contemporary liberal-capitalist vision of a good society. The tacit
assumption is that technology and managerial expertise will take care of
every problem we face today, including the ethical ones.

As a result, the happiness industry is thriving. So are the instant vendors
of bliss – from the *gurus* that India now routinely exports to the agony
aunts in Sunday newspaper columns, from the expanding domain of virtual
reality to the flourishing guidebooks on how to conquer happiness. Happiness
is now something like a medal in an athletic meet, to be won after hard work
under expert guidance. And one of the hurdles you have to learn to cross
while reaching the goal of happiness is anguish.

Anguish is no longer the prerogative of the socially sensitive and the
ontologically alert, confronting the human predicament. It is part of an
unnecessary baggage called unhappiness. The new stage of capitalism we have
entered also has a cultivated festive style. It has proscribed unhappiness
by making it unfashionable. Unhappiness is now seen as an intermediate state
between mental health and ill-health. And like the poor, who are held
responsible for their poverty in the mainstream culture of capitalism, the
unhappy are held culpable for their unhappiness.


 * *

*U*nhappiness is now permissible only in literature, art and cinema. At one
time, in some police states psychiatrists diagnosed the unhappy and the
anguished as mentally ill, for daring to be unhappy in a utopia. Now anguish
has been included in the syndrome of unhappiness. Only its suppression has
become more subtle; anguish on the state of the world is called return to a
bucolic past, for we have now reportedly arrived at the end of history.
Anguish is now defined as a form of self-indulgence and puritanical
self-mortification.

It is sporadically said, with a dramatic flourish, that we have nothing to
fear except fear itself. Does that aphorism admit a concept of courage that
includes the courage to be anguished about the state of the world? Does that
courage acknowledge the despair that lies behind the psychopathic,
nihilistic terror that haunts large part of the world today? Where does fear
end and anguish begin? Towards the end of the *Mahabharata*, after the
ungodly have been defeated in a fratricidal war, and after the five brothers
who fought for justice and virtue have won and the eldest of them has been
crowned king, the new king, Yudhisthira, instead of being elated, is
anguished.

He says, ‘Alas, having defeated the enemy, we ourselves have been defeated…
The defeated have become victorious… This, our victory is twined into
defeat.’ This anguish is not something Oriental, esoteric and defeatist. Nor
is it a by-product of a tragic vision of life. It is an admission that there
is a continuity between the self and its others that is only temporarily
interrupted by the responsibility to confront evil. It is at the same time a
courageous defiance of the conventional idea of victory and defeat as a
zero-sum game.

Elsewhere, I have told the story of how the ominous date 9/11 marks two
beginnings bridged by a strange coincidence. On that day in 2001, the power
and the presence of terror captured the imagination of the ordinary citizens
the world over and initiated a new age of fear. And the Pathans, the main
ethnic community in Afghanistan and North-West Pakistan, soon became
associated with the tragedy as the ultimate symbols of Islamic terror for
having produced the Taliban and hosting Osama bin Laden.


 * *

*H*owever, another 9/11 took place, unheralded and unsung, in 1906 at
Johannesburg in South Africa, at the time a proudly authoritarian, racist,
police state. That day *satyagraha* or militant nonviolence was born. Though
the theory and the strategy was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s, the first
person to proclaim the principle from a public platform at Johannesburg was
Abdul Gani, a Muslim merchant, and their closest associate was Haji Habib,
another Muslim. It has also been said that one source of Gandhi’s
nonviolence was his mother’s religious beliefs. She belonged to a small
Hindu sect, the Pranamis, known for their uncompromising pacifism and the
deep impress of Islam on their religious life.


 * *

*D*o the coincidence of dates and the Islamic connection have something to
tell us? One clue to an answer is that, later on, when satyagraha became a
major movement in colonial India, the Pathans led by Abdul Gaffar Khan
played a stellar role in it. Gandhi himself called them the finest
practitioners of art of militant nonviolence and he traced this to the
valorous, martial past of the Pathans. At the height of their movement,
there were 100, 000 participants in it called *Khudai Khidmatgars,* God’s
servants, and they faced every form of police atrocity from a colonial
regime that had only a few years ago fought three bitter wars in Afghanistan
against the Pathans. But there was not one instance when a Pathan faltered
in his or her commitment to nonviolence.

Does this odd attempt to flout global common sense by blending religion and
politics something to tell us today? One answer is that the two models of
self-sacrificial intervention, one violent and the other nonviolent,
struggle for dominance as traits or potentialities in each Pathan or, for
that matter, each person or community. Global forces outside the control of
a person and the geopolitics of national interests converging on a community
determine which potentiality is unleashed. If Gandhi helped unleash one kind
of potentiality, Soviet occupation, superpower rivalry and Pakistan’s
politically ambitious army released potentialities of another kind.

It is absolutely essential in the latter form of thought engineering to
create large-scale meaninglessness and despondency and, then, offer an
emulsion of a closed mind and a closed ideology as a cure-all. Physicist and
social activist Pervez Hoodbhoy may be correct in his diagnosis of
drone-like killing machines, the suicide bombers produced by fanatics, but
the focus, I insist, must be on the assembly line, not the product. In some
ways the polities of South Asia have failed to capture the imagination of
their youth; sizeable sections of them are in search of a cause and are
willing to be shot for it like mad dogs in at least five of the seven
countries in the region. I shamefully admit being anguished that we have not
seriously explored how the powerful of the world may have helped to set up
their feared private and public ghosts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.


 * *

*T*his essay is not an invitation to anguish. Its goals are mundane and less
than heroic; it reiterates what we mostly know but try hard not to know. It
suggests that the fears now stalking the upper rungs of global politics are
the fears with which large parts of the world, including sections of Indian
society, have lived for decades and, in some cases, centuries. Unable to
take control of their lives, increasingly victimized by forces that they do
not understand and often cannot even identify, if they in their desperation
have flayed their hands and struck out at random, even normal political
pragmatism demands that we scan the sources of their desperation. We must
spot the reasons that have prompted them to sometimes knowingly sacrifice
their lives for causes that give meaning in an otherwise meaningless life.

If realism and self-interest mean more than mere petty profiteering and
bureaucratic quibbling, they should push us to admit that we can survive the
new age of fear only by lifting the siege on communities caught in the
hinges of time for the sake of causes that make little sense to them and
enter their lives as natural calamities – national security, development,
progress, state-building and nation-formation.

I am not trying to complicate a simple act of terror that targets ordinary
citizens living ordinary lives. I know that a growing proportion of the
victims of modern terrorism are children, women and the elderly. But we also
battle terrorism at a time when the continuities between victims and
perpetrators are becoming clearer and all efforts to design neat solutions
to human problems are turning out to be inhuman and self-defeating. To steal
Tarun Tejpal’s evocative metaphor, the untold story of our assassins is
gradually turning out to be a story about us, for their fears and ours are
not so radically different.


 * *

*T*his indivisibility of terror we have learnt to deny. Worse, the more
blatant the indivisibility, the more aggressive and strident our denials
become. We love to talk of *jihadi* terrorism without mentioning Kashmir and
Gujarat 2002, and we love to believe that the militancy in Punjab in the
late 1980s and 1990s had nothing to do with the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in
Delhi. The furious arguments on the menace of Maoist violence in India never
mention the way we have treated our tribal communities, the mainstay of
Indian Maoism today. Nor have official histories and historians documented
our gory record in Nagaland and Manipur. The culture of the Indian state is
what it is today because of our dedicated efforts to ignore its
criminalization. One of the great paradoxes of Indian politics is that the
police, the bureaucrats and the politicians enjoy the least respect and
trust of the citizens according to every opinion poll, but they become more
trustworthy when it comes to terrorism, national security and international
relations.


 * *

*A*t the centre of that process of criminalization is the use of ruthless,
often extra-legal force in the name of counter-insurgency and
counter-terrorism, applauded by much of the media and intelligentsia, backed
by the much-heralded Indian middle class. We fear sections of our citizens
because we know what we have done to them. And we see all of our neighbours
embroiled in a similar exercise. The Sri Lankan state tries hard to
dissociate the problem of Tamil terrorism from its consistent record of
discrimination against the Tamils and the Colombo riots of 1983; Pakistan’s
civil establishment hopes to resist army rule without confronting the army’s
role in the Bangladesh genocide. Bangladesh in turn grudges Chakmas the
rights that it claimed from Pakistan.

Security in any polity is indivisible; unlike wealth, memories are not that
easy to lock up. Terror today is the fear that defines the age of fear and
each day it becomes more anomic. However woolly-headed and impractical I may
sound, I insist that such terror cannot be fought only through an efficient
use of arms. Otherwise, after fighting terror so ruthlessly for more than
six decades, Israel would not have been so insecure. Indeed, known all over
the world for its brutal anti-terrorist measures, the Israeli state itself
has become, in the words of a retired officer of its own army, a gangster
state. If I may revert to my own cliché, you can afford to choose your
friends carelessly but need to be careful when choosing an enemy because, in
the long run, you begin to resemble, perhaps not your enemy, but certainly
as you imagine him to be.