@ Get notified when a new post is published!



24/11/2019 Category: Insights Tagged with: Democracy India Inhuman Morality

Where is Democracy in India? Asking Anthropological Theory to Open Its Doors

Veena Das

A recurring question that haunts theories of democracy is: how has torture become part of routine police procedure in these societies (Rejali, 2007)? It is a question that troubles the novels of J. M. Coetzee, especially Waiting for the Barbarians (1982) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007), and makes for stunning reading in Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi (2015), which gives decisive evidence of the incoherence of justifications for torture: the very lack of evidence against an accused becomes, in the hands of security agencies, a reason for more and more brutal forms of torture.  Most recently (in February 2019) the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) in collaboration with Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) published a damning report on torture as an instrument of control in Jammu and Kashmir, paradoxically, just a few months before the Government of India revoked Article 370 of the Constitution and cut out all communications between Kashmir and the outside world. I strongly believe that if anthropology is to engage the tremendous challenges that the disorders of democracy pose to the theories of state and forms of governance today, it must open its doors to others and pay close attention to work done by journalists, school teachers, lawyers, not only in English but also, and most urgently, in vernacular languages. In this spirit, I attempt to introduce a remarkable book in the genre of prison literature written in Urdu (subsequently translated in Hindi) by Abdul Wahid Shaikh (2017), a school teacher in Mumbai who was one of the accused in the Mumbai serial train blasts of 2006 and penned an acute analysis in his book Begunah Qaidi (The Innocrent Prisoner) of the targeting of Muslims under the notorious terror laws operative in India.

Wahid Shaikh was acquitted of all charges in September 2015 after having spent nearly a decade in prison. The book was written in prison but unlike the texts of famous political prisoners in India, the author wrote it while being subjected to torture, intimidations and threats to his family and repeated attempts by the police to break his spirit and destroy his writing. As some reviews in the Indian press have already noted, the book is neither written to provide a catalogue of horrors nor to ask for sympathy. Its almost dispassionate style manages to tell us something very important about the erosion of democratic rights for minorities and the particular dispositif of the Indian state as it is deployed in prisons. I read this book as showing how the apparatus of anti-terror legislation has very little to do with control of terrorism and everything to do with targeting of the Muslim minority— a testimony to how cruelty hides under the veil of legality and the governance of security. I am sure that as we clutch at straws to console ourselves, we might say that while world renowned scholars in the US (e.g. Paul Rabinow, 2011) and France (Bruno Latour, 2004) might speak of the exhaustion of critique in our discipline, writers such as the author of this book and the network of civil society organizations contesting the state’s optimistic and usually manufactured versions of the Indian polity will not let go of the obligation of critique quite so easily. I sympathize with the impatience and the worry that critique has become simply a name for certain magical words in academic writing to signal one’s own moral superiority; but let us not overlook that the weight and the physiognomy of words through which critique is produced in the vernacular is of a different order. How does the interrogation they offer of their experience in the environment of growing threats to Muslims generate a set of questions regarding both, the constitution of the social, and, what we understand to be human forms of life?

The first striking point in the book Begunah Qaidi is that it addresses a specific kind of reader. Though initially it seems that the reader belongs to a general reading public, there is a slow shift that happens so that in the end it becomes a pedagogy for young Muslim men who might end up being caught in the net of the police under the terror related laws, and land in special courts such as  MCOCA courts under Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act, that replaced the earlier federal  POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) (see Singh, 2007; Lokaneeta, 2014). Here is what Wahid Shaikh writes (2017, 370):

Though innocent, when we were caught by the police in the bomb blast case of 7/11 we could not understand for many days as to what was happening to us. We were thinking that the police had mistakenly arrested us and we will be released soon. But with the passage of time this belief turned out to be false… I began to realize then that if every person in Muslim society was aware of the earlier cases of bomb blasts he would have been helped by knowing these things. I mean he could have moved his hands and feet to protect himself. It was for this reason that I held the thought in my heart that, there was a need to give a detailed account of how we were ensnared in the 7/11 case and it was necessary to make the people (janta) aware so that it must not transpire that if in future the police entrap an innocent person in a bomb blast case, he is unprepared mentally to face the police in court [1].

Even in this opening paragraph there is a shift between a generic public (janta), Muslim society (Muslim samaj), and a future in which the same event may repeat itself with a different Muslim young man who will need not just general awareness that torture is routinely practiced in Indian prisons but also specifics on how the police talk, what enticements they might offer, which forms of torture they will use, and how one should deal with, say, physical beatings, humiliations, narco analysis tests or substances injected into one’s anus to create unbearable burning sensations. From the general to the particular, the idea is not to shock the reader but to give a cool, collected account of how each of these methods comes to be inserted into different moments of a long unfolding of the way police build up a case. It takes a while for these prisoners booked under the terror laws to realize that what they took to be a ‘mistake’ was indicative of a different kind of truth—viz., that they are merely scapegoats in the game in which the police have to produce suspects, and nail the evidence for converting these so-called suspects into the accused and then into convicted criminals to cover up their failures in locating who the real culprits in particular cases are.  Long ago I wrote about my general understanding of these issues based upon my close friendship with a police officer in Amritsar who was an upright police officer working in the anti-terror squad and who educated me on the ways in which the political process in the scenes of militancy and insurgency works through police practices. This was before he was himself shot dead by one of his own subordinates (see Das, 2007). I have also learned much about the way police diaries are produced, the refusals to file First Information Reports in Police stations and the whole scene of briberies, police informers and the connections between local dons and the police on the basis of my present work in urban slums (see Das, 2019). I had not, however, been able to work out how scale comes to matter when cases that exist at the level of poor neighborhoods become resources for police to anchor small events at neighborhood levels to scenes of national catastrophes such as the bomb blasts in cities in order to produce suspects and convert them into high level criminals.

Wahid Shaik’s book is structured by a masterful plot line. Organized in six chapters, each chapter highlights a particular kind of description with a compelling analytical point. We learn of every step in the procedures that are actually followed by the police (not simply prescribed in police manuals)—the way police first prepare the false case. There is an attrition of the everyday life of the suspect as he is not immediately put under arrest but has to report every day to the police station where he might be interrogated repeatedly, sometimes accompanied by beatings and threatened with actual arrest if he were to reveal what is transpiring. In this period, the police also harass his relatives with phone calls, visits, threats and inducements to provide witness against the suspect.

Next, after he is arrested, he is left in complete darkness as to what the charges are; nor are the legal provisions of providing the accused with a lawyer or informing his relatives of his arrest followed.

Through the use of first-degree torture (which will subsequently move into second- and third-degree torture) the suspect is repeatedly compelled toward signing false confessions. By the time he is produced before a magistrate, (anything from fourteen days to a month) he is warned of more severe torture if he dares to complain before the magistrate of any pressure from the police. This analysis is buttressed by short biographies of the twelve accused in the Mumbai Train Blast case followed by the accounts of the witnesses for the defense. A subsequent chapter on torture is openly pedagogic, telling prisoners what to do or not do—for instance, when being beaten one should try to place one’s body in relation to the thrashing belt in a way that maximum bruises are left on the body; to overcome the normal reaction of avoiding the blows; and to then show these bruises in court and ask for medical examination. It is not that this strategy will succeed in court but neither will that of concealing the facts of torture and pressure in courts. The final chapter provides a comparison between different bomb blast cases. The contradictions Shaikh shows in the police accounts are blatant and though courts have released many accused because of the obviously forced confessions and contradictions in the stories of ‘recovery’ of material produced in evidence, the blatant injustice and the blindness of the judiciary to facts of torture in prison during the long duration in which cases are tried, are striking. It is part of the security apparatus developed by the state that there is no jurisprudence on compensation to victims under the terror laws for police brutality and miscarriage of justice. This, in turn, is mainly due to the immunity granted to government officials against prosecution without previous permission of the government.

Bringing Social Theory into the Scene of the Inhuman

Reading a book that takes such a clear-eyed view on cruelty one might be forgiven in thinking that what Wahid Shaikh depicts is the scene of the inhuman; indeed, the very vocabulary in human rights that speaks of ‘cruel and inhuman punishment’ makes us think that there is some kind of fall from the human into a different domain—that of the inhuman.  Recent writing in anthropology abhors the attention given to horror, cruelty and even suffering, on the grounds that it ignores the resources for the ‘good’ that all societies possess. Recently a reviewer commented on my depiction of the legal trajectory in a case in which an eight-year-old child in one of the neighborhoods I work in, was kidnapped and brutally raped and tortured. The reviewer commented that there was nothing to explain in that story, because the case was clearly that of a ‘psychopath’.  I think Wahid Shaikh’s book is a challenge to such a view in the most compelling terms because the evidence of the social in these scenes of torture are everywhere. If the police and army personnel use torture in relation to suspected terror cases or in subjugating the ‘enemy’ it is not because they are psychopaths who have fallen into inhumanity but because such procedures have become part of standard operating procedures and their depictions in film and television serials and secretly recorded videos seep down into the lives of many people. Because Wahid Shaikh’s eye is so focused on what is going on around him (an enormous accomplishment, indeed), we see how forms of talk in the scenes of torture are anchored into everyday understandings of what is an insult and the bruises caused by humor directed at victims in such contexts. I would add that this challenges us to ask: how might we restore the world by giving back an integrity to things so they might learn what is their own nature? I leave the expansion of these points for another occasion but briefly mention how the omens of the importance of these questions are scattered through the text.

First, objects are displaced from their normal functions. One such object is the belt (patta) usually placed on the wheat grinding machines in India, which, when used to thrash someone makes a horrifying sound as it hits on bodies but leaves no visible marks. That this instrument is transformed in the police station is shown in the inscriptions in Hindi with which Wahid Shaikh reports that every patta (see above) in police stations is marked. Examples are, ‘Hear my voice’ (meri aavaz suno), ‘Law is blind’ (andha kanoon), etc. which are references to what is happening or will happen to the current suspect in their custody, but also refer to titles of popular Hindi films. The terrifying humor is produced through the condensation of different registers of the social and the natural, both distorted and stretched out of shape and context. One of the debates within the philosophy of speculative realism is, how does an object know itself? How does fire know that it can burn cotton but not a mountain? Reintroducing the human within speculative realism might pose a new question: how can things overcome the cruelty human beings impose on them such as turning a kitchen utensil or a grinding machine into an instrument of torture?

Second, forms of talk even in the frightening scenario of the police station embody the social in terms of historical traces that cling to particular words. For instance, the main investigating officer in Wahid Shaikh’s case was a man named Raghuvanshi, which literally means, one from the lineage of Raghu, the ancestor of the revered god-king Rama. At one point, as he is offering inducements to Wahid Shaikh, Raghuvanshi says, the torture will stop, all cases against you will be withdrawn, and we will rehabilitate you completely—you know, you can believe me—’I am after all, a Raghuvamshi’. The reference is to the famous couplet in the Ramacharitamanasa, the devotional text in Avadhi written by Tulasidas, the medieval poet, in which Rama says, ‘Raghukul rita sada chali aayi—prana jaaye par vachan na jayi’ [The tradition of the lineage of Raghu is uninterrupted, life might be drained, but the word is not betrayed]. This couplet circulates as a devotional song recorded on popular cassettes, on YouTube, and is the title of a Hindi film. In this context, the statement bristles with violence, for the promise might be fulfilled in many ways. It might very well allude to Muslims being coerced into saying ‘Jaya Sri Rama’, ‘victory to Lord Rama’ by lynching crowds much as religious slogans shouted during riots take on an ominous character.

Finally, here is a passage from the chapter on torture in which a different meaning is sought to be given to the practice of making the prisoner naked and humiliating him by making him see the experience differently.

‘Remember, you have not become naked out of your own will. You have not become naked to commit any dirty or obscene act.  You have been made naked for the only reason that you must agree to the false story being crafted by the police. For the duration in which the police keep you without clothes (belibas) do not curse yourself. …Bear with it. For this Allah will reward you, because you are enduring all this for the sake of truth’ (Shaikh 2017, 370, my translation).

If Wahid Shaikh is able to show some mastery over the experience of torture it is not that he is somehow healed, but that the impulse to not let his experience disappear is simultaneously steeped in a cultural imaginary (say that of Allah watching what is happening to you) and an attempt to convert a form of shaming that comes from the experience of the human (an animal would not be humiliated by lack of clothes) to another register in which the mark of humiliation is to be converted to a sign of not giving up. But torture does not affect individual bodies alone and this is a lesson the police officers know well.

At no point in Wahid Shaikh’s writing does one get a sense that we are dealing with ‘bare life’ as Agamben (1998) will have us think. Indeed, the entire vocabulary, gestures, embedded references to films, songs, sacred texts, kin, neighbors shows the thick sociality within which the criminal justice system actually operates. Think of the fact that it was Wahid Shaiks’s wife’s brother who was coerced into first giving a false testimony that he had harbored Pakistani terrorists in his apartment, against him; and that it was the courage his brother-in-law displayed in court that led to Wahid’s acquittal. But many are beaten down into submission and end up giving testimonies against their own relatives and friends. My great fear is that democracy cannot be sustained if these practices become generalized and the possibility of intimacy in everyday life itself becomes corroded as the excellent work of Verdery (2018) shows for Romania. What the anti-terror law creates is not only individuals broken down and shattered but also families, relatives, communities that are coerced into becoming inadvertent subjects of the law and liars and betrayers of kin, family, lovers, friends. The philosopher Stanley Cavell had memorably written, ‘But only what is human can be inhuman’. (Cavell 1978: 418).  Wahid Shaikh challenges us to come up not with a definition or a boundary of what is human but to chart the routes through which the career of the human and its affinity with the inhuman might be traced in the experiences and the resulting damning critique of Indian democracy he has provided.

Endnotes

[1] All translations from Hindi to English are mine.

References

Agamben G (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press

Cavell S (1979) The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Coetzee JM (1982) Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Penguin.

——— (2007) Diary of a Bad Year. London: Penguin.

Das V (2007) Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— (2019) A Child Disappears: Law in the Courts, Law in the Interstices of Everyday Life. Contributions to Indian Sociology 53 (1): 97-132.

Latour B (2004) Why has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical inquiry 30 (2): 225-248.

Lokaneeta J (2014) Defining an Absence: Torture ‘Debate’ in India. Economic & Political Weekly. XLXI (26 & 27): 69-76.

Rabinow P (2011) The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rejali D (2007) Torture and Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Shaikh AW (2017) Begunah Qaidi: Atankvad ke Jhuthe Mukkadamon mein Phasaye Gaye Muslim Naujavanon ki Dastan [ The Innocent Prisoner: Story of Muslim Youth Trapped in False cases of Terrorism]. New Delhi: Pharos Media.

Singh UK (2007) The State, Democracy and Anti-terror Laws in India. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: SAGE Publications.

Slahi MO (2015) Guantanamo Diary. New York: Little Brown.

Verdery K (2018) My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Durham: Duke University Press.

About the author(s)

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University and holds Honorary Doctorates from University of Chicago (USA), Edinburgh University (UK), Durham University (UK) and the University of Bern (Switzerland). She has recently been elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Her forthcoming books are Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein (Fordham University Press) and an edited book with Didier Fassin, Words and Worlds: Lexicon for a Dark Time (Duke University Press)

Recent Posts