Encounters in the City: Cops, Criminals, and Human Rights in Hindi Film

Abstract

This paper discusses the recurring trope of the “encounter” in popular Hindi cinema and its implications as far as the human rights question is concerned. Encounter, in the legal sense, means a situation in which the police have an exchange of gunfire with certified criminals or suspects. The purpose could be self-defense, defense of citizens, or prevention of the escape of detainees. However, encounter is also a colloquialism used in the public sphere to describe extra-legal killings. Although it can be traced back to the early eighties, the encounter was a practice irresistibly systematized by the Mumbai Police Special Branch since the Bombay blasts of 1993. Its perpetrators like Vijay Salaskar, Praful Bhonsle, and Daya Nayak have since become folk heroes and many films have been made on the theme. This paper analyzes cinematic encounter as a trope of exception within the normative workings of the liberal constitutional state apparatus. The state addresses the danger posed by the other by announcing the other as endemically pathological in being a criminal/terrorist/Muslim. The encounter is thus the outcome of a habit of statist thinking that is a theodicy; that is, it closes the ontological gap between human procedures of judgment and the divine ideal of justice. The state can therefore immediately and violently connect reality to law, bypassing juridical and legislative institutions that should mediate such passages. In doing so, it displays an executive sovereign power outside the ambits of democratic liberalism or even the Foucauldian idea of governmentality; as Hannah Arendt would have put it, the state practices a “secrecy” in open daylight.

Anustup Basu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His essays on film, media, globalization, and political sovereignty have appeared or are forthcoming in boundary 2, Critical Quarterly, Postmodern Culture, Postscript, Mute, and the anthology Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Basu is currently completing a manuscript entitled “The Geo-televisual Aesthetic: Information, Capital, and Religiosity in Popular Hindi Cinema (1991–2004)” and guest editing a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture on new media ecologies. He is also the executive producer of Herbert (Suman Mukhopadhyay 2005), which won the Indian National Award for Best Bengali Feature Film in 2005–2006.

Notes

1. The pithy slogan “War is a continuation of politics by other means” has of course achieved a theorematic status in modern political discourse. It is widely acknowledged to be drawn from the third part of the third volume of the Prussian military historian and theorist Carl von Clausewitz's (1780–1831) celebrated treatise Vom Kriege (On War). While elaborating on this principle in his work The Concept of the Political (2007), Carl Schmitt points out that the legendary statement is almost always incorrectly cited. Quoting from the 1853 German edition of Vom Kriege (Berlin: Ferd. Dűmmlers Verlagsbuchandlung, 1853), Schmitt says that the correct formulation is “War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with a mixture of other means” (2007: 34).

2. The long line of twentieth-century thinkers who have directly or indirectly addressed the idea of “exception” in relation to the modern nation-state include Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and, most recently, Georgio Agamben. Agamben's work—aided perhaps by the renaissance of hard right thinkers like Schmitt and Leo Strauss in a moment of crisis for liberalism—has stimulated an academic industry on this subject. I use the term exception in the general sense originally patented by Schmitt to convey the idea that the state shows its true sovereign form when it suspends the constitution in order to protect the constitution itself; in other words, when the state goes beyond the law in order to emphasize that no one can go beyond the law. As it will become clearer towards the end of the essay, I use “exception” provisionally, noting that in its Eurocentric incarnation, the category takes for granted a historically consolidated [liberal] relationship between the life of the law and that of custom, which may not be true in postcolonial, partly feudal milieus like India.

3. See the Amnesty International Report on this titled “India: A Pattern of Unlawful Killings by the Gujarat Police: Urgent Need for Effective Investigations” (2007).

4. I use the word metropolitan to designate a form of neoliberal urbanization that, in recent decades, has increasingly informed historical milieus in India, with its concomitant structures of finance, governance, and security.

5. For telling snapshots of the very recent scenario of communal conflict and intimidation in India, see Engineer (2007, 2008).

6. See for instance Sampathkumar, “Terror: Rhetoric and Reality” (2008), Swami, “Pakistan and Lashkar's Jihad in India” (2008), B. S. Raghavan, “Blowing Hot Cold on Pakistan” (2009), and a series of columns by G. Parthasarathy, the former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan, that appeared in The Hindu: “Is India Heading for a Diplomatic Quagmire on Mumbai Carnage?” (2009a) “The A. Q. Khan Network” (2009b), and “Pakistan Under Jihadi Threat” (2009c). For conservative responses from the United States, see for instance Gross, “If This Isn't Terrorism, What is?” (2008) in the Wall Street Journal, and Walid Phares, “After Mumbai: Terror Attacks Will be Worse, Here's What Lies Ahead” (2008).

7. See Gopalan (2002: 1–6) for an overview.

8. See chapter nine of Arendt (1973: especially pages 267–292).

9. I am grateful to Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan for this insight.

10. Here of course I have in mind, amongst other things, recent efforts by the French and German governments with the aid of Turkey to foster a moderate European version of Islam that can mediate the historical, racially determined space between the Christian-white mainstream and their populations of Algerian, Turkish, or Kurdish ethnicity.

11. See Purcell's (2002) insightful deconstruction of the Bush administration's emphatic citation of Islam as being nothing, or should be understood as nothing but “peace” affiliated to a neoliberal planetary order.

12. Judy (2000c: 40 and also 2006a, 2006b).

13. Judy, “Democracy or Ideology” 56.

14. It is important to note that the 1990s, apart from stray examples like Sawan Kumar Tak's Sanam Bewafa/The Treacherous Lover (1991) and Salma Pe Dil Aa Gaya/I Love Salma (1997), witnessed almost a total eclipse of the genre of the Muslim Social.

15. See Hannah Arendt's discussion of French anti-Semitism and the Dreyfuss affair in Origins of Totalitarianism (1973: especially 86–87).

16. According to a 2006 report furnished by a governmental committee appointed by the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and chaired by Justice Rajinder Sachar, the condition of Muslims in India was worse than that of the Dalit castes, or the so called untouchables: 52% of Muslim men were unemployed, compared to 47% of Dalit men; 91% of Muslim women were unemployed, compared to 77% of Dalit women; almost half of Muslims over the age of 46 couldn't read or write. While making up 11% of the population, Muslims accounted for 40% of India's prison population. Meanwhile, they held less than 5% of government jobs. See for instance Asra Q. Nomani (2008).

17. The theory of terror as essentially a foreign import has of course suffered a loss of credibility with the rise of home-grown outfits like the Indian Mujahideen, which claimed responsibility for the July, 2008 bombings in the city of Ahmedabad, apart from similar attacks in Jaipur and Delhi. This outfit, along with others like the now-defunct Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), have concentrated primarily on domestic issues, with the former even issuing a warning to the more famous Lashkar-e-Taiba not to claim responsibility for their essentially home-grown endeavors.

18. See Ziyad, “Downplaying Religion in Mumbai” (2009).

19. Olivier Roy (2002) has forwarded the thesis that the conditions of globalization have de-territorialized local, customary spheres of religiosity in the Islamic world, creating a virtual transnational umma that tends to telescope errant, affective energies into an absolutist ethics for a transnational totalitarian community. Judy questions the premises of this assertion by pointing out that Roy treats the traditional Islamic elites—the ulema or the office of the Ayatollah—as formations outside the procedural scope of modernity, when the history of Islamic ways of life have developed over the last two centuries under the glare of capital and imperialism. Roy's point of view would thus be difficult to sustain if subjected to a rigorous historical analysis; when the Muslim, even the good one, is understood as “premodern,” the task of the statist intellectual becomes one of incorporating that figure in the modern without disturbing the latter's core integrity. Judy refers to recent empirical works on terror and suicide bombing by Alberto Abadie and Robert Pape to point out that most often “terrorism” is motivated by the level of political freedom in a given milieu rather than economic factors (which in turn are seen to be solvable only by neoliberal financialization.) More specifically, such phenomena are driven overwhelmingly by desires to compel Western powers to withdraw from a particular region identified by militants as homeland rather than by religion. Between 1995 and 2004, two thirds of Al Qaida's recruits came from countries with significant American military presence instead of strongly Islamicist states like Iran or Sudan. See Judy (2000b, especially 53–59).

20. See Georgio Agamben, “Security and Terror” (2001) and Anustup Basu “State of Security and Warfare of Demons” (2003).

21. See for example Georgio Agamben (2002 b: 18).

22. I have used “affect” in this article in a manner that questions the duality and hierarchy between the mind and the body in Descartian humanism. The figure of the terrorist is seen to be a body of antagonisms at once pathological and infantile precisely because he is considered to be incapable of distinguishing the rational ministrations of the mind from the baser instincts of the body. He is deemed infantile especially because he is unable to demarcate human rationality and its finitudes from an otherworldly cosmology of religion. Once posited “pure affect” can of course be mirrored from the self to the other and back. The state can thereby act on pure affective grounds against an enemy said to be operating on pure affective grounds.