My friend said each has a different grammar to which the regime contributes. Accompanying all these varieties of violence is a theory of erasure, of indifference one sees at several levels. The sequence of violence is suspicion/threat/reification. The displacement at the Narmada dam proceeds blissfully. Terror becomes a way of subjugating insurgencies, minority groups, tribal protests. One is talking not only of the 2002 riots, but also the vanities of violence surfacing today. Second, violence has no storyteller, no testimony or testament of witness. Yet, what is also frightening is the reaction. Lynching is a part of the paranoid art of politics in which one lives in a politics of anxiety, suspicion, and such a social condition needs a scapegoat to stabilise itself. We were talking about the Narendra Modi government and Mr Modi’s trip to the United States, where he claimed that the BJP had a spotless record on corruption. These forms of violence have almost no narratives, discourses, or storytellers who talk of the variety of retrenchments taking place in the IT and media industry.
Any violation of classification leads to violence.A friend of mine, a major writer, in his eighties, loves India in a way few of this generation can. Between the two, they try to wish away the problem. The symbolic panopticons of the BJP are becoming more frightening than the earlier industrial equivalents. One sees the State trying to control the body, bodily behaviour, dissent and even demanding a chorus of agreement on any project of the nation-state. Once again, in the politics of suspicion, a man at a mandi, a family in a train, people in a restaurant become targets. Violence, in fact, eerily adds to the sense of normalcy. The rape and murder carried out by the Army with official immunity is worrying. This is not the rule of law but crowds playing with law and order. Violence and surveillance are a symbolic panopticons in India. Terror China wholesale High Purity Targets produces its own sequence of violence where surveillance leads to scrutiny and then harassment, brutality, rape, humiliation and murder.
The first involves a rectification of history, a change of the syllabus, a range of censorship where voicing anything beyond the official is seen as an act of sedition. The orgy that follows is relentless, the sadness is that the lynchers believe they represent the forces of law and order. Ironically, it is the killer who is seen as restoring the normative order of society. Any label would do — cattle-stealer, child-lifter, spy — which feeds on the paranoia. The State becomes a repository of terror, as the imposition of the Army in Kashmir and Manipur reveals. The older version of the panopticon visualised by Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, was physical. My friend said: “It was a one-sided register because the BJP will be judged by the way it looks at violence”. It is misleading to say that it is primordial when it is contemporary. Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad talked of compensation of Rs 10 lakhs offered to the victim’s family and Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khatter argued that it was a drunken brawl. For him, India is a memory, a history, a sensorium, a civilisation, and he would add that the nation-state as an idea is an arriviste, a latecomer not quite cosmopolitan as the other concepts.
Chuangrun New Materials Co., Ltd.