Frontiers of blame: India's ‘War on Terror’

Abstract

The article interrogates the meaning of terror in India, enacted through the recurring articulation of a particular logic of blame, via a specific focus on the train blasts in Mumbai in July 2006. The conceptual extent of ‘violence as terror’ is examined broadly: as boundaries erected to equal ‘war on terror’ with ‘war on Muslim terror’, as a purifying of the Indian ‘Self’, and as shifting thresholds in state rationalities pertaining to terrorist activities. The Indian state is torn between blaming domestic organisations and ‘cross-border terrorism’ for involvement in acts of terror. The vagueness and ephemeral character of where to lay down the frontiers of blame is placing Muslim citizens in a precarious situation.

Keywords:

• India
• terrorism
• Muslims
• blame
• Hindu Right

Acknowledgements

The author is truly grateful to all who have made valuable contributions to the writing of the article. Any unfortunate errors or misrepresentations are entirely the author's own. An earlier version of the text was presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in San Francisco, CA, USA, 26–29 March 2008.

Notes

1. Following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya – a mosque that the Hindu Right claimed had been erected on the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram – in December 1992, Mumbai became the locale for extensive communal violence not ceasing until 12 March 1993 when thirteen bombs exploded at various locations in the city in the span of two hours. In total, 257 people perished and 713 were injured in the explosions (for details, see Srikrishna Commission 1998).

2. As the term will be used throughout the text, the Hindu Right is equivalent to the conglomerate of organisations affiliated, to various degrees, with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In the liaison between Hindu nationalist organisations, the RSS occupies an intermediate as well as supreme position; the bulk of Hindu Right volunteers and cadre obtain ideological inculcation by partaking in its daily activities and many leading members of Hindu nationalist organisations and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was the dominant party in the coalition government between 1998 and 2004, hail from the RSS. Since the late 1980s, the Hindu Right, with its notion of India as essentially a Hindu nation, has incrementally managed to establish itself as a prominent agent in civil society as well as in the political sphere. Through the extensive reach of its conception of Indian society, often accompanied by considerable violence, it has been able to create significant space for its topography of meanings and practices.

3. Terrorism and the label of terrorism is evidently not novel in the Indian context. It was widely applied by the British during the colonial era (for a laudable analysis, see Samaddar 2006). More recently, the Indian state has suffered from Sikh militancy in the Punjab during the 1980s, fought insurgents in the Kashmir Valley since the early 1990s, for a long time been engaged in curbing separatist movements in the North East, and lost control over considerable parts of its territory to Naxalite outfits.

4. For explorations of India's willingness to support the US-initiated global ‘War on terror’ in the aftermath of 9/11, see P. B. Mehta (2006), Oza (2007a), and Puri (2001).

5. I postulate the latter with some hesitation. The word ‘terror’ is, undeniably, employed also to describe the activities of secular organisations with secession or autonomy on the agenda and of Maoists in the so-called ‘Red corridor’. In these cases, the term is, however, most of the time adjoined with a descriptive word, such as ‘secessionist’, ‘red’, ‘Naxalite’, ‘ULFA’, etc. The general tendency is that the concept, when allowed to stand alone, is infused with the meaning of ‘Muslim terror’.

6. An indication of the state's tendency to concur with the explanatory model provided by the police in the aftermath of bomb blasts is available in a Status Paper on Internal Security Situation (Internal Security Division, Ministry of Home Affairs 2007). In its overview of the internal security situation there is a reference to ‘terrorist incidents’, which reads ‘[t]here have been major terrorist incidents in Varanasi, Nagpur, Mumbai and Malegaon in 2006 and more recently in Samjhauta Express near Panipat caused by externally based and sponsored terrorist outfits with some local help’ (p. 1).

7. Or, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described it in a speech to the National Integration Council on 13 October 2008, ‘[t]he common citizen of this country is not bigoted but generous and compassionate and nurtured in a tradition of tolerance intrinsic to all faiths that nourish our composite cultures’ (Singh 2008a). In his concluding remarks later the same day, he restated the notion that ‘terrorists have no religion’ (Singh 2008b).

8. For an account of how the role of the Indian media reinforced the idea of interconnectedness after 9-11, see Chakravartty and Lankala (2007, pp. 177f.).

9. The Gujarat Chief Minister chose to describe the violent retribution targeting innocent Muslims as a natural development since ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’ (The Times of India 2002). While portraying the tragic event in Godhra as a premeditated intentional act by Muslim extremists, he depicted the atrocities against the state's Muslims as representing a spontaneous yet expected response.

10. For an analysis of how Mumbai has changed from being a cosmopolitan city to a metropolis epitomising provincialism, see Varma (2004).

11. The list of bomb blasts during this period includes explosions in numerous locations around Uttar Pradesh, in Ludhiana, at a Sufi shrine in Ajmer in Rajasthan, in Lumbini Park and Mecca Masjid, respectively, in Hyderabad, in the Samjhauta Express near Panipat in Haryana, in Malegaon, in Mumbai, at the Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi, and in New Delhi during Diwali festivities.

12. Contrary to Rens van Munster's claim in his analysis of ‘United States’ discourses on security’ after the seminal events in September 2001, ‘distinctions such as inside/outside, peace/war, friend/enemy and rule/exception’ are, in our case, not ‘blurred to the point of indistinction’ (Van Munster 2004, p. 142). In the Indian context, the relevance, potency, and presence of these binaries, although in new forms and with altered demarcations, are discernible. In addition, the explored boundary drawing is not principally bearing witness to the taking of life ‘without punishment’ (p. 142). Even if there have been instances of extrajudicial execution, or ‘encounter killings’ as it is often denominated (with the case of Sohrabuddin Sheik in Gujarat being the most conspicuous; Human Rights Watch 2007), these do not, thus far, amount to the generalisation of an exception. It is, in contrast, primarily attesting to the regulation of the proper site and circulation of specific subject positions; such regimentation merely constitutes one element in a trend that precedes the inauguration of the ‘war on terror’. It therefore seems improper to align our analysis directly with the proposition that ‘the figure of homo sacer dwells in everybody’ (Van Munster 2004, p. 52; for an exposition of the concept homo sacer, see Agamben 1998, pp. 81ff.). A divergence between the present case and those most frequently analysed – states and spaces considered to be part of the ‘West’ – is that India is experiencing bomb blasts on a regular, almost cyclical, basis. In other words, explosions do, and are seen to, occur in a time and place (cf. Van Munster 2004, pp. 147f.). Consequently, we ought to be wary not to confine our reasoning to the dissection of fears and anxieties caused by perceived, yet always deferred, perils.

13. The ‘abject’ is here utilised in concurrence with Julia Kristeva's theorising wherein it is defined as an entity out of place, representing the forbidden or contaminated (Kristeva 1982, pp. 2ff.). It should not, however, be understood as an object situated outside the ‘Self’, but rather as that part of the ‘Self’ which is banished or suppressed.

14. A similar development has taken place in Uttar Pradesh where the state's Bar Association has urged lawyers to decline to represent terror suspects (The Telegraph 2007; Tehelka 2008b).

15. What is the potential for a subversion of the totalising subjectivities holding sway; would it amount to a proposition that Muslims should contest marginalisation and ‘guilt’ by refusing to speak as and for ‘Muslims’, or perhaps not to speak at all? As validated by existing efforts to articulate challenge, both appear inadequate. For a potentially effective form of contestation, we might turn to Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat's reading of Foucault and Agamben (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2005). In it, they postulate that the prospect for resistance lies either in ‘a refusal to draw lines [‘between forms of life’]’ (p. 14) or ‘through the assumption of bare life’ (p. 12). How do these dictates translatein our case? Phrased differently, in an Indian context, what does it mean to re-establish ‘politics’ or ‘the political’ if these terms denote ‘the realm of possibilities and power relations’ (p. 9)? To provide a tenable answer, we would have to revisit the closure on the postcolonial nation state that took place in the aftermath of Independence in 1947 – a motion which is beyond the scope of the present text. I tentatively propose however that one way to reinstate ‘Muslims’ in power relations, and with the latter ‘the possibility (and possibilities or potentialities) of politics’ (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2005, p. 9), would be to alter the bases of boundary drawing. A mode of resistance would be to set up a second constituent assembly, which through its deliberations would attenuate religion as an identity marker. Not by silencing or trying to excise it; rather, by bringing it to the fore, and subsequently, rejecting it as a condition for differentiation and recognition. Although it is evident that such an ‘act’, through its reliance on the ‘sovereign’ to rectify, would evade gestures propounded as crucial by Edkins and Pin-Fat (2005, pp. 12ff.), it does seem to, transiently, meet Claudia Aradau's request that ‘[w]hat we need to contest is sovereign practices that are effacing the contingency of their own decisions […]’ and to actuate ‘a polemics around what is’ (Aradau 2007, p. 498).

16. As Shuddhabatra Sengupta aptly notes, it is remarkable that Lal Krishna Advani, Home Minister at the time of the Parliament attack, announced that the persons shot dead by security guards ‘looked like Pakistani terrorists’, thus claiming the rare ability both to distinguish a Pakistani and a terrorist by their mere appearance (Sengupta 2006, p. 37).