‘Winning Hearts and Minds’: emotional wars and the construction of difference

Abstract

Exploring an ongoing civil war between Maoist guerrillas and the Indian government, this article looks at how emotions are mobilised, conscripted and engendered by both sides. The focus is, however, on the state's performance of emotion, including outrage, hurt and fear-inducing domination, as part of its battle for legitimacy. Intrinsic to this is the privileging of certain kinds of emotions—fear, anger, grief—and the emotions of certain kinds of people over others. Subject populations are distinguished from citizens by the differential public acknowledgement of their emotional claims.

Notes

1 Nandini Sundar & ors v State of Chhattisgarh, WP (Civil) 250 of 2007; and Kartam Joga and ors v State of Chhattisgarh and Union of India, WP (Cr) 119 of 2007.

2 See www.freebinayaksen.org; and www.binayaksen.net.

3 A Roy, ‘Walking with the comrades’, Outlook, 29 March 2010, at http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264738, accessed 12 November 2011.

4 The actual site of the ambush was in the fields between Mukram and Tadmetla villages, and much closer to Mukram than to Tadmetla. For some reason it has come to be known as the Tadmetla ambush.

5 For example, after a Maoist attack in which four men of the Central Industrial Security Force were killed, the Home Ministry put out a statement asking ‘What is the message that the cpi (Maoist) intends to convey? These are questions that we would like to put not only to the cpi (Maoist) but also to those who speak on their behalf and chastise the government … We think that it is time for all right-thinking citizens who believe in democracy and development to condemn the acts of violence perpetrated by the cpi (Maoist).’ ‘Chidambaram slams Maoist sympathizers’, Times Now, 26 October 2009, at http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009-10-26/india/28067149_1_maoist-sympathisers-cisf-jawans-chhattisgarh, accessed 12 November 2011.

6 S Hall, C Critcher, T Jefferson, J Clarke, B Roberts, Policing the Crises: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, London: Macmillan, 1978; HJ Gans, Deciding What's News, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004.

7 ES Herman & N Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, New York: Pantheon Books, 2002, pp 37–86.

8 An enquiry was immediately ordered into the Tadmetla attack, headed by a former director general of the Border Security Force, EN Rammohan. He found several lapses in the leadership and functioning of the crpf, including their failure to adhere to standard operating procedures. However, the commander responsible for this debacle, DIG Nalin Prabhat, while initially transferred, was given a gallantry medal a year later in 2011. Further, the government itself takes no responsibility for orchestrating this mindless war on its own people.

9 pudr, ‘Death of Jawans in Chhattisgarh—pudr Statement’, 6 April 2010, at http://sanhati.com/articles/2259/, accessed 9 November 2010.

10 S Banerjee, ‘The other side of transactions in a violent system: the Maoist way of suppressing the para-military forces’, at http://sanhati.com/articles/2259/, accessed 9 November 2010.

11 Communist Party of India (Maoist), ‘On Dantewada guerrilla attack’, press statement dated 8 April 2010, People's March, March–April 2010, p 42, emphasis in the original.

12 Front cover of People's March, March–April 2010.

13 Three women were raped, three men were killed, and three old people died of starvation after their houses were burnt.

14 Nandini Sundar & ors, Supreme Court order of 5 July 2011.

15 JH Turner, ‘The stratification of emotions: some preliminary generalisations’, Sociological Inquiry, 80(2), 2010, pp 168–199.

16 J Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, London: Verso, 2009, pp 28–29.

17 Ibid, p 38.

18 Ibid, pp 24–25.

19 AR Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983; and H Flam, ‘Emotions' map: a research agenda’, in H Flam & D King (eds), Emotions and Social Movements, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, pp 19–40.

20 Flam, ‘Emotions’ map’, p 19.

21 Ibid; J Goodwin, JM Jasper & F Polletta (eds), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001; and R Aminzade & D McAdam, ‘Emotions and contentious politics’, Mobilization, Special Issue on ‘Emotions and Contentious Politics’, 7(2), 2002, pp 107–109.

22 R Collins, ‘Social movements and the focus of emotional attention’, in Goodwin et al, Passionate Politics, p 41.

23 Turner, ‘The stratification of emotions’. But equally, Turner argues, emotional distress in one field can lead people to compensate in other fields. The famous British stiff upper lip imposed emotional costs on the elite; on the other hand, since displaying emotion was seen as a mark of lower class vulgarity, the careful concealment of emotion was valorised in status terms. Thus emotions are a complicated case of stratification.

24 See, for instance, among a huge range of anthropological/sociological literature, JL Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970; R Sennet & J Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class, New York: Vintage Books, 1972; and M Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil Family, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990.

25 Flam, ‘Emotions' map’, p 20.

26 A Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001, p 31.

27 D Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993, p 78.

28 Glave, cited in S Lindquist, Exterminate All the Brutes, New York: New Press, 1996, p 21.

29 www.bastar.nic.in.

30 While state mourning for the crpf personnel killed in Tadmetla was instrumental in perpetuating the war, the state is often equally callous to its own when no political advantage is involved. In another incident of necro-management, the bodies of three security personnel who were killed by Maoists were removed in a municipal garbage truck. When there was public protest, the administration claimed that no other vehicle had been available and the truck had been properly scrubbed.

31 N Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992, p 533.

32 Ibid, p 533.

33 E Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

34 S Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p 132.

35 See Hochschild, The Managed Heart, for this phrase.

36 J Huysmans, ‘Security! What do you mean? From concept to thick signifier’, European Journal of International Relations, 4(2), 1998, p 229.

37 Ibid, p 232.

38 N Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.

39 Hindustan Times, 27 November 2011.

40 An August 2010 survey by an academic agency and two media houses (The Week– cnn–ibn–csds)across the ‘red belt’ claimed that 49 per cent support the government, and 60 per cent have faith in the democratic process, although 76 per cent want the political system to be reformed. But, remarkably, in the printed Week version of the survey, responding to questions about who the Naxalites are and what they stand for, on average 50 per cent of people had ‘no opinion’. S Palshikar & Y Yadav, ‘The Week–cnn–ibn–csds poll inside India's war zone’, The Week, 20 August 2010, pp 20–43.

41 pucl, pudr et al, When the State Makes War against its Own People, Delhi: pudr, 2006; and Independent Citizens' Initiative, War in the Heart of India, Delhi, 2006.

42 All testimonies reproduced from Kartam Joga and ors, Vols 1, 2.

43 L Green, ‘Fear as a way of life’, Cultural Anthropology, 9(2), 1994, pp 227–256; and J Pettigrew, ‘Living between the Maoists and the army in rural Nepal’, in M Hutt (ed), Himalayan ‘People's War': Nepal's Maoist Rebellion, London: Hurst and Company, 2004, pp 261–284.

44 E Galeano, Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking Glass World, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000, p 79.

45 A Blom & N Jaoul, ‘Introduction: the moral and affectual dimension of collective action in South Asia’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, Special Issue on ‘“Outraged Communities”: Comparative Perspectives on the Politicization of Emotions in South Asia’, 2, 2008, para 27, at http://samaj.revues.org/document1912.html.

46 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/outrage; and http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/outrage, accessed 7 January 2012.

47 C Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

48 M Albrow, Do Organizations have Feelings?, London: Routledge, 1997.

49 J Oommen to EAS Sarma, 6 October 2010, DO No … 373/CS/2010.

50 S Randeria, ‘The state of globalisation: legal plurality, overlapping sovereignties and ambiguous alliances between civil society and the cunning state in India’, Theory, Culture & Society, 24(1), 2007, p 4.

51 F Loh, Beyond the Tin Mines, Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988, p 161; M Shafer, ‘The unlearned lessons of counterinsurgency’, Political Science Quarterly, 103(1), 1998, pp 57–80; R Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency 1948–1960, Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2004, pp 169–172.

52 The government has imposed restrictions on the movement of rice across state boundaries on the grounds that this will give rice to the Maoists; fair-price shops selling cheap rice have been shut down in Maoist areas and people's grain stocks have been burnt.

53 L Berlant, ‘Slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency)’, Critical Inquiry, 33(4), Summer 2007, p754.