Mimetic sovereignties, precarious citizenship: state effects in a looking-glass world

1 This paper was originally written in November 2008 for a workshop on Rethinking Citizenship at the Max Planck Institute in Halle. I am grateful to the participants in that workshop, my co-fellows at the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, as well as audiences at the University of Cornell, University of Texas-Austin, Fondation Maison Des Science De L'Homme - Paris, University of Pennsylvania, University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Toronto, where I have presented versions of this paper. I am grateful to the three anonymous referees who so painstakingly reviewed this paper, as well as the Editor of JPS, Jun Borras. I am also grateful to Aparna Sundar, Chris Gregory, Amita Baviskar and K. Sivaramakrishnan for their encouragement, and to Delhi University for funding this research.

Abstract

This contribution explores the way in which the Indian state and the incipient Maoist state in central India mimic while repudiating each other. As against theories of sovereignty which see it either as authored from below (contract theory) or scripted from above (domination), or irrelevant to the extent that subject and state are co-constituted by regimes of power (cf. Foucault), I argue that in civil war, the display and practical exercise of statehood and sovereignty is critical. However, this is primarily aimed not at putative citizens but at the enemy. I look at the way in which the Indian state impersonates guerilla tactics in order to fight the Maoists, and the way in which the Maoists mimic state practices of governmentality. Each side identifies its own ‘citizens’ through uniforms and lists of people killed, and inscribes its ‘territory’ with memorials to its martyrs. For the presumed citizens of these mimetic states, however, it is precisely these markers of identity and legibility which make them more vulnerable. Membership of parallel regimes holds out both promise and precarity.

Keywords:

• mimesis
• sovereignty
• state-effects
• citizenship
• Maoist guerillas
• counterinsurgency
• India

Notes

1 This paper was originally written in November 2008 for a workshop on Rethinking Citizenship at the Max Planck Institute in Halle. I am grateful to the participants in that workshop, my co-fellows at the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, as well as audiences at the University of Cornell, University of Texas-Austin, Fondation Maison Des Science De L'Homme - Paris, University of Pennsylvania, University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Toronto, where I have presented versions of this paper. I am grateful to the three anonymous referees who so painstakingly reviewed this paper, as well as the Editor of JPS, Jun Borras. I am also grateful to Aparna Sundar, Chris Gregory, Amita Baviskar and K. Sivaramakrishnan for their encouragement, and to Delhi University for funding this research.

²Bastar district originally covered 39,000  km². It has since been repeatedly divided into smaller districts. Here Bastar refers to the original undivided district, and Dantewada to South Bastar, before it was further carved up.

³I prefer the self-designation ‘adivasi’, rather than the globalized ‘indigenous peoples’, to refer to the 8.6 percent of India's population officially known as ‘scheduled tribes’. They are the poorest and most exploited, by all indicators (see Kannan and Raveendran 2011).

⁴The wider Dandakaranya region of which Bastar is a part has 18 percent of India's iron ore deposits, along with graphite, limestone, diamonds, uranium and other minerals.

⁵Since 2006, the Indian Prime Minister has consistently referred to the Maoists as ‘India's gravest security threat’ (Reuters 2006).

⁶‘Union home minister P. Chidambaram said … civil society activists who have argued against state violence must answer for the slaughter of civilians’ (Times of India 2010).

⁷For example, when asked why a police officer accused of rape was not dismissed, the Chief of Chhattisgarh police replied, ‘This is a well-conceived strategy of Naxals … They are making frivolous allegations’ (Bhardwaj 2012).

⁸Following the killing of 17 villagers in June 2012 while they were celebrating a festival, the Police Chief of Bijapur justified it saying: ‘It is difficult to differentiate between Naxals and villagers … . On regular days, they take part in farming activities and at other times, they help the Naxals. In effect, they are also Naxals’ (quoted in Pandey and Jain 2012).

⁹The government justifies its attacks on the Maoists on the grounds that they do not believe in the Indian Constitution and, indeed, the Maoists have dismissed the Constitution as being as worthless as a roll of toilet paper. On the other hand, the Maoists have done more to enforce the 5th Schedule of the Constitution governing adivasi areas, which restricts transfer of adivasi land to non-adivasis, than the Indian government has, and the Maoists repeatedly ask the Indian government to adhere to the Constitution that it has sworn to uphold (Azad 2010, 56–7).

¹⁰On government dissatisfaction with unruly citizens, see Scott (1998). Maoist language is equally revealing: they note that of 16,200 saplings distributed only 30 percent survived ‘because the people did not take sufficient care’ (CPI Maoist 2000, 19–49).

¹¹For the first phase of the Naxalite movement, see Mohanty (1977), Banerjee (1984), Sinha (1989); for the recent phase, see Jeffrey et al. (2012); Shah and Pettigrew (2011), Venugopal (2013). See also the CPI (Maoist)’s own party history (n.d.) for both phases.

¹²Interview with Lanka Papi Reddy, former Central Committee Member of the CPI (Maoist) and other former Maoists, March and May 2010; see also Shankar (1999).

¹³The parliamentary Communist Party of India (CPI) also gathered support by settling adivasi peasants onto forest land, but has been gradually displaced in its strongholds by the Maoists.

¹⁴Foucault (2003, 35–6) himself provides a far more sophisticated historical analysis of sovereignty, which relates it to different modes of surplus extraction.

¹⁵Describing a rally he attended in 2005, at which some 10,000 people gathered, Shubhranshu Choudhary writes of how secrecy is maintained even from the participants themselves: ‘We met many groups walking like us to the rally. No one knew where the rally actually was. Groups landed at one village, found a local contact who told them to go to another village where the next destination was revealed. Sometimes there are other groups waiting and they joined up’ (Choudhary 2005).

¹⁶Conversations with traders, 2005–2013.

¹⁷The Wikipedia entry is itself a battleground juxtaposing contradictory pro- and anti-Salwa Judum statements.

¹⁸While the two parties are often engaged in slanging matches, they are united on fundamental issues such as neoliberal policies and opposition to the Maoists.

¹⁹ Kartam Joga and ors. (2007), litigation before the Supreme Court of India, provides a partial list of over 500 people killed by the Judum and security forces between 2005 and 2007. A thousand casualties since 2005 is, therefore, an informed guess.

²⁰In India, the paramilitary forces are part of the regular state forces and not vigilantes.

²¹Initially the SPOs were paid Rs 1500 which, though cheap for the state, was substantial by local standards.

²²In 2011, they were renamed Assistant Constables in defiance of a Supreme Court order that they be disbanded, but for the purposes of this essay I will continue to refer to them as SPOs (Justice Sudershan Reddy and Justice SS Nijjar, 2011)

²³Interviews with SPOs, 2005, 2010.

²⁴CBI affidavit, received 6 March 2012, in Sundar and Ors 2007.

²⁵‘Pseudo-operations’ or ‘the use of organized teams which are disguised as guerilla groups for long or short term penetration of insurgent controlled areas’ (Cline 2005, 1) is a common counterinsurgency strategy. See also Guha (1983, 208–9) on the colonial use of ‘decoys’ and ‘perfidy as an instrument of pacification’.

²⁶See annexures in Sundar and Ors, 2007, based on names and figures provided by the Government of Chhattisgarh, and the Ministry of Home Affairs. See also Annexures I & II, in PUCL, PUDR et al. (2006), which reproduce both government and Maoist handouts.

²⁷Despite repeated directions from the Supreme Court, the state compensates victims of Naxalite killings but not those killed by the Salwa Judum or security forces.

²⁸NHRC Annexures, not included in the published NHRC report (NHRC 2008), accessed in the Supreme Court.

²⁹Testimony of SB, village A, 8 July 2008, recorded by the author.

³⁰While the Maoists have an education department which publishes textbooks and runs a few schools, this is no substitute for government schools. See Dasgupta (2010).

³¹As Dule of a forest village told me in 2013: ‘I can only say what is in my heart, I cannot speak for the hearts of others’.

³²The Red Fort in Delhi has been the symbolic seat of India's power from the Mughal period onwards.

³³‘There is a state-system in Miliband's sense: a palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure centred in government and more or less extensive, unified and dominant in any given society … . There is, too, a state-idea, projected, purveyed and variously believed in in different societies at different times’ (Abrams 1988, 82).

Additional information

Nandini Sundar is Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Her publications include Subalterns and sovereigns: an anthropological history of Bastar (2nd ed., 2007). She serves on the boards of several journals including American Anthropologist, the International Journal of Conflict and Violence and the International Review of the Red Cross. In 2010, she was awarded the Infosys Science Foundation prize for social anthropology. Her public writings are available at http://nandinisundar.blogspot.com.