Sometimes as you read a newspaper, you stop
to ask yourself: “What is an event? What is the
news that demands reportage and storytelling?”
When you glance at this week’s news, the
Islamic State makes the headlines in France.
The Bihar election and its aftermath claim several
pages of ponderous prose. Barcelona beating
Real Madrid has equal claims to space. Yet
many events receive no mention, not even a
footnote.
Last week in Bangalore, Women in Black, an
international group, held a seminar, creating a
circle of witnesses talking of genocide and
there was almost no news coverage about the
event. Women from 30 countries spoke as witnesses
about what it meant to live through an
act of genocide, holding an audience of college
students spellbound, and yet the city and the
nation were untouched by the event. Story
cascaded on story as the testimonies of pain
and resistance built up but the next day’s news
carried no reference to it, no item of gossip, not
even a footnote. I was amazed at the silence; in
fact the indiference of the city as the storytelling
of the suferers held one spellbound.
Intriguing silence
India’s indiference to genocide requires interrogation.
Our government will wax rhetorical
and behave piously about terror in Pakistan
and Paris but its silence on genocide is intriguing.
This is odd as India, rather the Indian nation
state, was built on the back of two genocidal
events: Partition, which inaugurated the
nation states of India and Pakistan, and the
brutal Bengal famine. Partition and the violence
that followed claimed 1.6 million people
and displaced 23 million people, and the Bengal
famine eliminated an estimated 3 million
people. There was no Nuremberg where the
British stood trial for the mass murder of 3 million;
in fact there is little memory despite the
fact that the famine set the stage for planning
in India. A country which was created by two
genocides should have some monuments or
mnemonics for them and yet India proceeds
indiferently.
I sat in the college auditorium listening to
the women talk. Many were frighteningly
young, some older, all spoke without rancour,
talked of rape, homelessness and violence that
never seems to end. They were women from
Armenia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, women from
Bosnia, Rwanda. Rape was the warp of all the
narratives. Genocide seemed to love the rituals
of rape as its accompaniment.
An Afghan woman spoke of how rape pollutes
the woman. She spoke of how the raped
woman is associated by her family with an act
of shame and is often killed by her family. An
Iraqi scholar spoke of how the United States,
under the pretext of fighting tyranny, is literally
evacuating Iraq and emptying Syria of their
top professionals, their creative middle class
so that resistance to further violence can be
numbed. The rituals of evacuation add a new
methodology to the technologies of genocide.
Witnesses from Kashmir and Nagaland talk
of what years of internal war have done to the
women, of the genocidal efects of the Armed
Forces (Special Powers) Act. They talk of Irom
Sharmila and the mothers of Manipur, of how
women, mothers all over the world, used their
very nakedness and vulnerability as a sign of
protest. A friend talked about how there are
800,000 trauma cases in Kashmir annually and
the listener had to wonder as to what India as a
civilisation actually meant. The women spoke
passionately but reasonably. Their testimony
of pain slowly evolved into a testament of their
courage and resistance.
As one listened to these tales, the names
added on to become an incessant roll-call of
mass murder: Armenia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and
soon I realised that a new history of the body
was being written. The body becomes the centre
of 20th and 21st century history and the destruction
of the collective body politic. The
rape, the mutilation, the torture of the woman’s
body seem to be a constant refrain of genocidal
societies.
Yet these were not just a repetition of stories.
The nuances changed and one could realise
the innovative nature of genocide. In the
1930s, such acts of mass murder were without
a label and Winston Churchill described them
as “crimes without a name.” A Polish Jew, a
one-time student of Philology, coined the term
“genocide.” The term was a legalistic one and
referred to nations that eliminate a people for
being just that. Raphael Lemkin’s idea referred
more to the violence of war and the nation
state, where a nation used its sovereignty to
eliminate populations rather than build
schools and houses.
Today, genocide has gone beyond war and
the nation state because collective violence
and mass elimination go beyond war to other
forms of elimination. Today, certain forms of
development have become a continuation of
war by other means. Development as an antiseptic,
technical project can be as genocidal as
war, and as disruptive of everyday life. India,
which once dreamt the Nehruvian dream of
dams as the temples of modern India, now has
over 40 million refugees from dam displacement.
India ironically has more refugees from
dams than the wars we have fought and yet we
treat development as an immaculate
conception.
Usually genocide is understood in terms of
statistics but as Albert Camus once observed
statistics do not bleed. But concepts are worse.
They look antiseptic but are, in fact, genocidal.
Their indiscriminate use can eliminate populations,
leaving cultures and nature devastated.
In fact, the irony increases when we realise
that riots today are the sudden biggest source
of displacement dislocating over 8 million
people. The genocidal count of violence outside
war is awesome. One has to add the levels
of female foeticide. Today it is estimated at
500,000 annually. The statistical story that
numbers tell is frightening. The body counts
in India turn genocidal without war. One
needs a concept of genocide that goes beyond
war and looks at collective violence in a more
complex way. We have to realise that social science
concepts need a genocidal quotient, an
account of the number of people they can
eliminate. There is no innocence to academic
or policy knowledge and there is no value neutrality
either.
Stark contrast
As one listened to the women speaking
about their experiences, one could not but
contrast the Modis, Obamas, Hollandes with
the story of witnesses. The women spoke of
families, of resistance, and sang songs of solidarity.
They insisted on storytelling and memory.
Our leaders talk of security and order, of
punitive wars. They ofer violence as a response
while the women talk of non-violence.
The contrast is stark. It reminds one of the
great words of the UNESCO charter. If war began
in the minds of men, then the defence of
peace must be constructed in the minds of
men. The women give it a gendered twist suggesting
that if war began in the minds of men,
“the defence of peace must be constructed in
the minds of women.” It is almost as if nations
and security-obsessed leaders do not have
time for the sanity of these voices as France explodes
and Syria disintegrates. They also add
that security and governmental responses to
terror banalise our reactions to genocide turning
it into an everyday, acceptable afair.
Yet the message of these women needs to be
listened to. They are suggesting that the oicial
answer to genocide, the security discourse,
is inadequate. It leaves nations, corporations,
warlords and even the security
discourse untainted. It is ordinary people,
NGOs, women’s groups, spiritual leaders,
trade unions like SEWA, ecology forums
dreaming sustainability that have to lead the
new discourses on peace. Peace is more than
the absence of war and a theory of non-violence
has to produce more innovative sites
than the Silicon Valley.
The day’s proceedings made me realise that
India has talked too much of war, security, development
and terror and has no proactive
theory of peace. It is almost as if the new managerialism
and the machismo of our technical
elites see peace as a passive endeavour. Women
in Black and other peace endeavours seek
to put peace back on the agenda. All they have
is their body, their silence, their voice appealing
to the world to listen to the voices of sanity
and peace. It is time India listened and responded
to them.
(Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at Jindal
School of Government and Public Policy.)
