Good governance with a cross-cultural perspective was the theme of a recent international conference at IIM Calcutta. Indian academics and administrators discussed several issues with professors from the European Union, ranging from problems caused by the multiplicity of national languages; the volatility in markets brought about by the giant size of financial conglomerates; the inadequacy of development projects; the insincerity behind governmental support to panchayati raj bodies; the protection of shareholder rights; the several regulatory measures of company law; and the costs of vast transfer of money from one part of the country to another. One issue at the back of everyone’s mind, but never discussed, was what lessons, if any, could be learnt for good governance from bloody periods of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ as witnessed in Yugoslavia just a few years ago, and now seen with horror in Gujarat.
While Tito, the great Croat partisan leader of the Second World War, ruled in Yugoslavia, his Serb generals were eager to give him their loyalty, and share in his power, his privileges, and the money he received from the United States for being a bastion against the Soviet Union. Visitors were regaled with stories of the people’s cosmopolitan society, inter-marriages between Serb, Croat, and Muslim being held to symbolize a total break from a bloody tribal past that stretched back 1,500 years in time to the break between the Catholic Church to the west, and the Orthodox Church to the east, with heresies sandwiched between. Local heretics to escape persecution converted to Islam a thousand years later. But with the break up of the Soviet Union ended the real-politick need of the United States to prop up anti-Soviet regimes; American money dried up; and the Serb generals carved out satrapies out of the body of their country. To consolidate their power, they employed armed gangs to spread terror through massacres, and dredge up stories from the hoary past to rally their ‘own people,’ and justify ethnic cleansing. Simple greed for power and money led to unimaginable horror. Does this sound familiar to Indian ears?
Sudhir Kaker, India’s best know psychoanalyst, who wrote The Colours of Violence even before the ghastly massacres of Gujarat, in an interview from the Centre for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University, detailed what it takes to create massacre. Simmering communal animosity is inflamed by professional goondas stereotyping the other community as subhuman, and under the pretence of serving their own people, unleashing violence when they are sure of little retribution. Kaker calls for prompt preventive action from the State, which unfortunately was not forthcoming from what we all considered the most progressive State of the Union. Research Professor Abrams de Swaan of the University of Amsterdam, political scientist and psychoanalyst, also told me the key to preventing riots was to make retribution certain to miscreants.
Prem Shankar Jha has warned that the Gujarat riots augur ill for India, for it is towards the higher living standards of Gujarat that the rest of India would wish to move. The terrible danger the BJP has created for the nation by employing the religious card for party political gains once again surfaces as an object lesson, after Indira Gandhi’s ill-fated support of Bhindranwale to trump the Akali Dal in Punjab. The American fostering of Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan ultimately brought down the World Trade Centre towers in New York. Pakistan’s supposed strategic depth offered by the Taliban is now dramatically reduced to inches from its Presidential chair.
But of far greater lasting social consequence to society is the hateful psychopathology of torture and terror spread through hundreds of tragic families by politically created criminals. The Questions that we need to address concerns how some people, mostly young men, are socialized into Evil; and what Psychological, Cultural, Religious, and Value boundaries have to be crossed, or eroded, to enable great numbers to perpetrate atrocities in public.
Robert Lifton’s work comes to mind; his concepts of ‘psychic numbing,’ and the ‘doubling of self,’ or, as Kaker says, the switching on of a ‘community identity.’ Much of Lifton’s work deals with the social process of brutalization under the Nazis, especially of ordinary doctors turned into vulgar killers at death camps. In a way their psychic history is similar to that of other torturers, as noted in the Journal on Torture of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, Denmark. Also their work is more or less ‘secret,’ away from the public view.
The present Gujarat Atrocities are only the latest in a long chain of such events, perpetrated by people of all cultures. Clearly, ordinary human beings have the capacity to commit atrocities, though few are socialized to commit them. Quite apart from the Hindutva political ideology that permitted these events to happen in Gujarat, or the vulgar commercial reasons of looting Muslim shops, something, many things must happen before an assorted crowd of 5000 can rape and kill in public, in the most heinous manner.
Perhaps, the first barrier is crossed in tribal jokes about the other group’s incompetence, jokes about Sikhs, Irish, Arabs. Few these days are not embarrassed by such jokes. Then there is stereotyping: "Dalits are like…, Brahmins are like…, Blacks are like…, Whites are like…." The next barrier is the sullen resentment of people ‘who take away jobs,’ as working-class Germans voiced about professional Jews even in the 19th century, or as the British do about Patels and their corner shops. Business competition is at the bottom of much anti-Muslim hatred. But all this does not yet lead to Atrocity, even if there is government or majority community support, for ordinary people have to live with themselves, go home to families where they must behave in an accepted manner.
Why do all atrocities always involve sexual assault? Are there deep-seated sexual insecurities in perpetrators? Why do they Defile the Womb? Is it akin to what Lifton calls ‘destroying to save?’ Many creation myths feature incest among Gods, and other behaviour forbidden to human beings. Are they destroying the other’s Womb, who in their understanding has already defiled their own purity?
Of course, no atrocity can take place unless the other’s humanity is first conceptually destroyed, leading to torture, killing, and ethnic cleansing. But is it possible to sink to such depths without destroying one’s own humanity, one’s own image of humanity? What boundaries are crossed to make it happen? Lifton says that the American soldier perpetrators of atrocity in Vietnam were also ‘victims’ since they were unwittingly led to do so (like our policemen, perhaps). But the difference is that Americans perpetrated atrocities far away, in strange surroundings, in the non-natural condition of war. The Gujarat atrocity perpetrators did so at home, in their own world, and went home that evening after killing, and raping in clear view of thousands.
Perhaps, we should distinguish between several categories of atrocities:
Professional Atrocities of state-organized torturers, police interrogators, who undergo perhaps ‘psychic numbing;’
Psychopathic atrocities of the sick and the lonely, perhaps, not so socially consequential though much dwelt upon by media;
Political Atrocities; such as the massacre of resisting tribes by Caesar’s armies, the massacre of the Incas by Pissaro, Cromwell’s massacre of the Irish at Drogeda, Nadir Shah’s destruction of Delhi, Genghis Khan’s mountains of skulls, General Dyer’s massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, or the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. All this was done ‘dispassionately,’ to create terror, to safeguard retreat, to achieve political control;
Heroic Atrocities; say, as practiced by Vikings or Amerindian tribes on prisoners. Perhaps this was a form of vindication of manhood, of patriarchal norms, to strengthen oneself – perhaps if captured oneself in the future – through the fearless death of enemies. There are cases where heroic atrocities edge on the sick, like Achilles dragging the body of Hector around the walls of Troy instead of treating his enemy with honour. But Achilles like the Indian Bronze Age Arjuna seemed to glory in being the perfect killing machine, and distanced from women?
India’s problem soon might be the Public Atrocity committed at any moment, by unnamed multitudes, ‘silently’ socialized to evil.
Indians should plan to strengthen Social Boundaries or Barriers Against Inhumanity. The 19th century saw several millions die in famines till the Indian Government established Famine Codes, perhaps, the most successful of governmental interventions in the Third World. It is time we established Atrocity Codes that would monitor the possibilities of communal or caste violence emerging, and prescribe a set of governmental and societal actions to be carried out in step to prevent or at least mitigate the consequences.
