Form of words:
IIt is difficult to think of any other post-independence period when a cabinet-level officer would ask police officers to go to war against civil society. The only exception would be the period of Emergency rule of Indira Gandhi. It is even more difficult to imagine any other time, including the Emergency, when a four-star general of the disciplined army would welcome the lynching of (possibly crowd-recognized) “terrorists”. Such statements can be made in all seriousness, which is one of the changes in India under the leadership of Narendra Modi.
India has a long history of violence – by invaders and others. It was hidden by the non-violent method that distinguished its freedom struggle, and then exposed by the murders that marked its culmination. There has been violence, both systematic and incidental, against Dalits, and violence has resulted in the mass expulsion of powerless Adivasis from traditional homes. These are accomplished today in a recklessly brutal manner in which the destruction of millions of jobs through damage to the informal sector of the economy is celebrated as a triumph of formality.
As in most societies, violence is invariably committed by the strong against the weak, by people in uniform against poorly dressed, by the majority against some sort of minority. And the state which by definition is considered to have a monopoly on violence is the perpetrator or ally. In a way of speaking you could say that the result is Darwinian. But the old saying in Hindi captures it best: jisky stick, his buffalo (The one who has the stick has the buffalo).
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However, there is a theory for a parallel belief in the existence of the “fittest” – propounded last year by the husband-and-wife team of Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. In Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity, he argues, that Darwinian existence should be viewed with the potential for friendliness and cooperative conduct, as this is what has helped Homo sapiens to progress and prosper compared to our closest evolutionary cousins. This is as true for corporate culture, cricket teams and individuals as it is for societies. Also for animals: Hare and Woods known for earlier book The Genius of Dogs: How Smarter Are Dogs Than You Think, in which he argued that dog friendship is a form of intelligence.
All this is relevant in an India where hate speech flourishes, where laws and street violence can be carried out against a chosen community, people who eat the same kind of food, and who are too weak to protest, or who just disagree. Relevant also because cooperative behavior naturally has a dark side: people can cooperate within a group to attack outcasts – a lesson from the film Mississippi Burning, But such violence often comes up against the day of the reckoning, especially if the institutional or moral collapse that comes with it creates a great social incapacitation. For example, America is not a healthy or safe society because it has the largest number of people in prison relative to its population – with a disproportionate number of non-white people in prison.
Sometimes, what was intended as one-sided violence can explode in unexpected directions. Manmohan Singh termed the Maoist (essentially tribal) insurgency as the biggest internal security problem of the country. The Abdullahs of Kashmir did not expect pre-emptive imprisonment under the draconian law made by them. Nor did Congress anticipate events when it wrote the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act into the law books, the scope of which has expanded as the definition of unlawful activities expands, and the categories of officials who take action. can. Essentially a lawless law.
So it’s quite simple, really. The friendlier an open society is to all its inhabitants, the better the results of such cooperative solidarity when people blur the dividing line between the included and the excluded. And the greater the presence of groups inclined to exclusionary conduct, lynchings or savage warfare, the greater the need for institutional strongholds to ensure the survival of the fittest, not the “fittest”.
By special arrangement with Business Standard
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