Books
CITIZEN AND SUBJECT: Decentralised Despotism and the Legacy of Late Colonialism by Mahmood Mamdani. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997.
My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan is probably one of the more honest and troubled books to come out of post-colonial South Africa. Malan, an Afrikanner, descendant of the ‘father’ of aparthied as also the first prime minister of ‘independent’ South Africa, explores a dilemma marking the liberal, white South African: How commensurable are the worlds of the white European and the native, indigenous black African? For someone who began as a conscientious objector against aparthied, not just the political arrangements but the philosophical presuppositions, he ends by indicating the near impossibility of the white liberal ever entering into and understanding the world of the black native.
Malan’s experience drew him towards a conclusion akin to the ‘separate but equal’ theory popular in a strand of multiculturalism which stresses that the two worlds are different, constituted by different principles, and that there is no meeting point. Not unexpectedly, the book generated howls of protest from those favouring the language of rights and equal citizenship. Malan was also accused of being ahistorical and romantic.
One route to unpackaging the dilemma exemplified by Malan is provided in Mahmood Mamdani’s scholarly yet engaged tract, Citizen and Subject. Mamdani examines contemporary Africa to argue that, ‘The legacy of late colonialism created a bifurcated world inhabited by subjects on the one hand and citizens on the other, their lives regulated simultaneously by customary and modern law, their beliefs dismissed as pagan but bearing the status of religion; in sum, the world of the "savage" barricaded from the world of the "civilized".’
He traces Africa’s present predicament to two clear tendencies: modernist and communitarian, one liberal and the other seeking a return to the source. For modernists the problem of Africa can be traced to the inadequate development of civil society; for the communitarians it is that the communities (tribes) that comprise the ‘real’ Africa are marginalised from public life. ‘One side calls for a regime that will champion rights; the other stands in defence of culture.’
Mamdani problematises both positions and attempts to locate both the language of rights and of culture in a historical and institutional context by examining how power is organised and how it tends to fragment resistance in contemporary Africa. In the context of South Africa, he begins with Smuts, who while sharing the incipient racism of his race and class, was keen not just to control the natives, but to evolve an institutional mechanism that would not ‘de-Africanize the African and turn him either into a beast of the field or into a psuedo-European.’ If ‘Africa is to be redeemed’ so as to ‘make her own contribution to the world,’ then ‘we will have to proceed on different lines and evolve a policy that will not force her institutions into an alien European mould’ but ‘will preserve her unity with her own past’ and ‘build her future progress and civilization on specifically African foundations.’
Thus began the system of ‘institutional segregation’, different from ‘territorial segregation’. The problem with the latter was that it presumed institutional homogenization. While natives may be territorially separated from whites, their institutions were giving way to an alien institutional mould, most evident in the presence of native immigrants in white society.
The solution was sought in permitting only the male to migrate into white areas as labour, forcing the families to stay behind in ‘native provinces’ marked by communal ownership under tribal self-rule. ‘The way to stabilize racial domination (territorial segregation) was to ground it in a politically enforced system of ethnic pluralism (institutional segregation) so that everyone, victims no less than beneficiaries, may appear as minorities. With migrant labour providing the everyday institutional link between native and white society, native institutions – fashioned as so many tribal composites – may be conserved as separate but would function as subordinate.’
Actual apartheid was far more brutal. For a start only the productive male was permitted to reside and work in white areas, when not as a house-boy, in ‘hostels’ segregated by tribes. Those classified as unproductive were pushed back into native areas, cordoned off and placed under the rule of chieftans, who in turn were bought off or kept quiescent through bribes and non-interference. ‘This doctrine of differentiation aims at the evolution of separate institutions appropriate to African conditions and differing both in spirit and form from those of Europeans.’ The emphasis on differentiation meant the forging of specifically native institutions through which to rule subjects, but the institutions so defined were not racial as much as ethnic, not native as much as tribal. The same story, with minor variations, can be read throughout Africa.
Overall, this book about the structure of power and the shape of resistance in contemporary Africa explains how current institutions were moulded more by the colonial experience than anti-colonial revolt; that the experience of racial domination through ethnically organised local powers worked against the possibility of forging pan-African unity; and that the different anti-colonial (nationalist) struggles were marked by struggles not only against white rule but other ethnicities (tribes). The burden of Mamdani’s thesis is that unless ethnicity is seen as both power and resistance, problem and solution, democratic struggle which does not transcend ethnic differences without denying them can easily slip into a string of ethnic civil wars.
He has sought to establish that aparthied, considered unique to South Africa, is actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa, be it institutional segregation, indirect rule or what the French called association. This is what Mamdani terms decentralized despotism. He stresses the contradictory aspects of ethnicity – emancipatory and authoritarian. He also argues that although the bifurcated state created by colonialism was deracialised after Independence, it was not democratized, such that post-colonial efforts at reform continue to reproduce a part of the colonial legacy, bringing into being their own variants of despotism.
As someone both outside and straddling the worlds of the whites and blacks, and having experienced a variety of African and non-African contexts, Mamdani is uniquely situated to work through the many entanglements that Africa presents. This book has a much wider resonance – for the multiculturalists in the West as much as to those of us in India. Familiarisation with the African experience would help us work through not only our own colonial history of British India and native principalities, but also the challenges that the creation of new states like Jharkhand or more generally the application of the Eighth Schedule throws up. To understand better the tensions between entities seen as similar, separate but equal, or separate and unequal, Mamdani’s book is an essential and delightful read. More so since it unpackages each community entity and traces the relations between the individual and his/her constituent grouping.
Seminarist
SHRINKING SPACES: Minority Rights in South Asia edited by Sumanta Bannerjee. South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR), Kathmandu, 1999.
IT remains a discomfiting fact that despite significant advances in political and constitutional theory or a far more widespread acceptance of human rights norms in crafting relations between individuals, communities and the state, no historical society to date has been able to resolve its minority question(s). Be it the liberal, multi-party democracies of the West, one-party authoritarian states, ‘socialist societies’, or military dictatorships – each is marked to different degrees by troubled and sometimes restive minorities.
In addition to a more enduring, ‘primordialist’ feeling of difference and prejudice influencing inter-group relations, is the difficulty experienced by states in defining a minority. The concept, akin to the ‘floating signifier’ in post-modernist theory, takes on different attributes in different situations. Minorities thus can be defined by race, ethnicity, religion, language, caste, tribe, gender, age – and the list can be expanded. What are configured as minorities in one context and space become majorities in another viz. Sikhs, an all-India minority are a majority in Punjab; Hindus, an all-India majority are a minority in Kashmir.
Nor is the picture of a minority as a persecuted group always valid. Whites were the ruling minority in colonial Africa. So too were the people of Indian origin in the Fiji. The picture gets further complicated if we look at the relative power and influence of minority groups across sectors. Jews as a religious minority in Christian West are often victims of social prejudice; this when, as a group, they are dominant in the economic and financial sectors.
As important is the differential recognition granted to social-historical groupings such as peoples, nations and nationalities. Human rights conventions recognise the ‘right to self-determination of peoples’. Minorities, however, have to be accommodated within frameworks of ‘autonomy’ and federal politics’. Are then minorities entitled to, and if so when and under what conditions, aspire to statehood as a people?
This distinction in international law and thinking between peoples, nationalities, nations on the one hand and minorities on the other has assumed significance because of the inviolability of borders in the international state system. Since much of the boundary-making exercises in the wake of decolonisation resulted in peculiar borders, often dividing communities, we are now confronted with groups who are minorities in one nation while being majorities in the neighbouring country, or are minorities everywhere. Insecure minority politics thus gets a new political colouring given the drive of modern nation states to create a unified and homogenous citizenry, i.e., to try and obliterate public markers of difference to ensure uniform application of law. It is thus no surprise that minority groups feel restive and discriminated against.
Finally, while using the terms minority and majority, to assume that these groupings are homogenous would be an error. Each grid around which a community is defined, gets sub-divided around others in practice. For instance, Muslims as a religious community are deeply divided within on grids of sect, language, caste and region. Who, therefore, is to be treated as a dominant majority and discriminated minority is a reflection of the working out of the political process.
The book under review, an outcome of a meeting organised by SAFHR, presents interesting reflections on the situation of minorities in each of the countries in South Asia. Ably edited by Sumanta Bannerjee, it explicates the difficulties by both the peoples and the regimes in our region in accommodating minority aspirations within an internationally acceptable framework of democratic rights.
It does not make for pleasant reading, for despite significant differences in the legal regimen governing minority rights and entitlements in different countries, the overall tendency is one of either ‘a drift towards supine despair at one end of the spectrum or towards terrorist activism at the other.’ Even more depressing is the realisation that each minority group seeking and demanding democratic rights from the state simultaneously reflects an authoritarian, if not barbaric, streak towards sub-groups within. The only groupings who suffer permanent discrimination are dalits and women.
An implication of this collection, particularly for the Indians, is that despite a more liberal formal framework governing minorities, its practice is not very different from countries trapped in more rigid frameworks. This, at least, should force those interested in ensuring meaningful human rights to all, to look for solutions different from those already tried. Evidently, while better compliance of UN norms regarding national, ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities would help (a recommendation of the symposium), it is time that we revisit the presuppositions behind the construction of communities.
Seminarist
Identities and Rights: Aspects of Liberal Democracy in India by Gurpreet Mahajan. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998.
THIS book is an examination of the specificity of Indian democracy with regard to the space provided by the Constitution and the state for ‘strong community identities and a similar communitarian politics.’ The author is concerned with demonstrating that these ‘apparently non-liberal facets of Indian democracy’ are not a legacy of ‘Indian culture and tradition’. Rather, they are ‘a consequence of the attempt to conform to contemporary ideals and norms of liberal theory’ (13). The emphasis on groups and communities in India does not simply reflect a social given, but arises from the centrality given to the principle of social equality in the Indian Constitution. The author’s argument is that the individual is not the only legitimate subject of democratic discourse, and that almost all welfare democracies recognize communities in policy and law. Their presence in the Indian Constitution, therefore, does not ‘mark a radical departure from liberal democratic practices’ (155-8).
At the same time, however, Mahajan wants to establish the fact that individual rights are a ‘primary instrument of democratization’ (179). The emphasis on cultural diversity has resulted in foregrounding the community within Indian democracy, at the cost of the protection of individual rights. The concern of inter-group equality has hindered the realization of intra-group equality, leading to the subordination of women as a group through the continued existence of unreformed religious personal laws. Under these circumstances, Mahajan argues, ‘the universalizing logic of individual rights retains its democratic potential’ (178). Individual rights may be justifiably curtailed only in pursuit of ‘the essential ideals of democracy: namely, non-discrimination,’ that is, they may be restricted only when the exercise of individual rights continuously and systematically disadvantages a specific group in society (179).
Group rights too, have a space within democracy only to the extent that these are necessary to prevent groups from being excluded or disadvantaged by societal practices. Thus, ‘non-discrimination’ is the key value by which group rights and individual rights may be legitimated in a democracy. Indeed, the author concludes that all other considerations for justifying (and by implication, limiting) rights ‘remain suspect’. This is the criterion too by which the author is critical of demands for the continuation and extension of reservations and other privileges. These were initially meant to ensure non discrimination, but now their extension is demanded on the grounds of ‘adequate representation rather than exclusion’ (154). In a society faced with acute scarcity, ‘the agenda of development and transformation has taken over the concern for non discrimination. As a result, the consensus that prevailed earlier on the issue of reservations and special consideration has been eroded and replaced by social group confrontations’ (8).
This argument is unexceptionable in that non discrimination should certainly be the cornerstone of any democracy. However, I am not sure this category takes us very far in understanding contemporary politics in India. The crucial battles in India’s political arena today are not fought over whether non discrimination is a legitimate value or not, but on two rather different grounds. One, groups make rival claims of being discriminated against – for example, Hindutva arguments produce Hindus as having been discriminated against by the practice of ‘pseudo-secularism’ while anti-Mandal politics produced upper castes as oppressed by reservations. So the mere criterion of non discrimination will not help us in judging between such rival claims.
Two, following from this arises a more crucial problem. Which is the agency that will ensure non discrimination or adjudicate between rival claims is itself in question?
The legitimacy of the state to ensure non discrimination and bring about equality and development is precisely the issue that animates the debates in the women’s movement over the uniform civil code, or the movements against big dams. Mahajan’s way of posing the problem, although it continuously invokes the position of women within communities as a way of counterposing individual and community rights, is innocent of the complex debates within the women’s movement which has led the movement to make such dramatic shifts in position over the last two decades. From an unproblematic assertion of the need for a uniform civil code up to the ’80s, a variety of positions have emerged, all of which engage in different ways with the relationship of community, state and women as citizens, and none of which assume the legitimacy of the state to bring about social transformation.
There is also a problem with Mahajan’s assumption of the ‘Supreme Court’ or ‘judiciary’ being an entity different from ‘the state’. Even within the framework of liberal theory surely the legislature, executive and judiciary are all arms of the state. Thus when she continually makes assertions about how ‘the judiciary’ has restricted the ability of ‘the state’ to regulate and redefine religious practices, thus ‘enhancing the autonomy of religious and cultural communities,’ one is puzzled. Much scholarly and political critique has been precisely about the fact that the practice of secularism in India has been vitiated by the manner in which the state (through judicial intervention) has continually sought to define religious practices, religious identity, and inter-religious relationships. The continual intervention of the judiciary in such legal cases has in fact circumscribed and attempted to legitimise particular religio-cultural practices as legitimate and delegitimise others. How this can enhance the autonomy of communities vis-a-vis the state is difficult to understand.
Finally, one is also intrigued by Mahajan’s manner of defending the Indian Constitution from the assumed charge of being ‘non-liberal’. From her own exposition, it is quite clear that when the Constitution was framed, it was at a moment in history when the liberal framework did not recognize community rights. Thus, at that point, it ‘deviated’ from liberal principles (4). In other words, the Indian Constitution anticipated changes in liberal philosophy and politics. Why then, does Mahajan take such pains to establish that as a result of later changes in liberal perspective, it was the Indian Constitution that returned to the liberal fold? ‘As a result of this change in liberal perception,’ writes a relieved Mahajan, ‘the primary concerns of the Indian Constitution conform with new liberal agendas and perspectives’ (6). One would have imagined that the ‘deviation’ in the first instance should have provoked a very different type of inquiry into the nature of both Indian democracy and liberalism. Instead, the demand that Indian democracy should justify itself in terms of ‘liberalism’ as an a priori value places severe limits on any attempt to understand politics in India.
Nivedita Menon
OVER A BARREL: Light Weapons and Human Rights in the Commonwealth edited by Abdel-Fatau Musah and Niobe Thompson. Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, New Delhi, 1999.
In lay terms, light weapons are military-style conventional arms that can be carried by an individual or by a light vehicle. The United Nations categorises light weapons as heavy machine guns, hand-held under-barrel and mounted grenade launchers, portable anti-aircraft/tank guns, recoilless rifles, portable anti-aircraft missile system launchers and mortars of calibres less than 100 mm.
Small arms constitute a sub-category of light weapons and include revolvers and self-loading pistols, rifles and carbines, sub-machine guns, assault rifles and light machine guns, anti-tank and anti-personnel hand grenades, landmines and explosives.
(Over A Barrel)
THE statistics are chilling. An estimated seven million small arms continue to stoke the embers of the Afghan conflict. After the conclusion of a two-year United Nations disarmament campaign, there are still over 1.5 million automatic rifles among a population of 16 million in Mozambique. In excess of 100,000 rifles and machine guns are in private hands in Karachi. In Jammu and Kashmir, over 20,000 civilians have died during the decade-old Pakistan-sponsored ‘proxy war’; most of the deaths have occurred through the indiscriminate firing of light weapons by Pakistan’s mercenary terrorists. Thousands of innocent civilians die every year in Sri Lanka’s LTTE-driven insurgency. Even in a well-developed country like the United States (population 264 million) there are as many guns as people. Gun violence leads to about 30 deaths a day in South Africa. The daily toll in Central and Sub-Saharan Africa, with several inter-state and intra-state conflicts raging unabated, is much higher.
During the past decade alone, two million children have been killed, six million have been seriously injured and about one million have been orphaned in ongoing small wars and insurgencies in various parts of the world. Women and children, the most vulnerable members of the civilian population of a war-ravaged country, bear a disproportionate impact of the proliferation of small arms. The indiscriminate spread of light weapons makes it easier to raise private armies and inevitably results in children taking up arms. The emergence of child soldiers in the late 20th century is a horrifying new trend. Nothing is more revolting than pictures of pre-teen desperados clutching Kalashnikov assault rifles in their skinny hands. Oscar Arias, a Nobel laureate, has called the burgeoning small arms trade ‘the commerce of death’.
Failed statehood in many parts of the world has led to the rise of local warlords who are the foremost chieftains of violence. Ordinary people are the real victims of ‘warlordism’ and many dysfunctional governments have become incapable of providing any protection to their citizens. The enduring paradox of the end of the Cold War era is that disarmament in the developed North has led to the dumping of surplus small arms in the underdeveloped South that is prone to ethnic and communal antagonisms. The abundance of weapons acts as a catalyst for violence and spawns new conflicts. This downward spiral of burgeoning conflict is leading to history’s worst violations of human rights – rivalling the holocaust of World War II in scope and magnitude.
Over a Barrel: Light Weapons and Human Rights in the Commonwealth, a report by the New Delhi-based Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), ‘explores the complexity of the problems of light weapons in the Commonwealth’ and highlights the ‘Commonwealth’s failure to address the tragic consequences of an unrestricted light weapons trade and huge accumulations of weapons in Commonwealth societies’, despite the commitment to protect human rights enshrined in the Harare Declaration of 1991.
The various authors, mostly academics and human rights activists, examine the complex links between the burgeoning light weapons trade, including clandestine sales, the shady world of light weapons brokering and the siphoning-off of profits by the ruling elites in conflict prone countries; the quality of governance and the spread of conflict; and, the impact of small arms proliferation on fragile democracies. The role of the United Kingdom and South Africa, the Commonwealth’s principal arms-exporting nations, has been analysed and prescriptive approaches to curbing the menace and the long-term threat posed by light weapons have been highlighted.
The chapters on South Asia, in which the violation of human rights is the principal issue discussed, would be of more than passing interest to readers in this region. Peter Chalk describes the Tamil Tiger (LTTE) Insurgency in Sri Lanka. Ayesha Siddiqua provides several new insights in the chapter entitled, Arresting Light Weapons Proliferation in Pakistan: Is There a Way Ahead? However, it is the essay on Small Arms in India and the Human Costs of Lingering Conflict by Niobe Thompson and Devashish Krishnan that political leaders, diplomats, senior security forces commanders, bureaucrats, defence analysts and academic scholars must read as India continues to be wracked by long drawn-out insurgencies and a ‘proxy war’ waged through state-sponsored terrorism by a perfidious neighbour.
The authors begin by recounting the brief histories of civil conflicts in Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and India’s northeastern states, go on to examine the impact of militancy on the democratic institutions of India and conclude that the state security forces have been transformed over the years and that the Indian peacekeeper has been brutalised. They state that, ‘The past two decades have witnessed an escalation not of the causes of unrest in India, but rather of the lethality of militancy, and the costs of such violence increasingly threaten to upset the democratic tradition that has survived in India through the last fifty years.’
In an otherwise fairly balanced report, the authors are severely critical of human rights abuses by Indian security forces. However, they fail to take note of the fact that as a ratio of the number of security forces personnel deployed in the strife-torn areas, the number of reported incidents of alleged human rights violations is a miniscule figure. Impartial international observers have accepted, though rather grudgingly, that what the Indian Army has conducted in J&K can only be termed as a ‘police operation’ with one hand tied behind the back. The principle of the use of ‘minimum force’ has never been violated. There have been no massacres like the one at My Lai during the Vietnam conflict. Allegations of human rights violations are speedily investigated and, on the rare occasion when these are found to be true, the personnel concerned are court martialled and exemplary punishment is awarded. To their credit, the authors do not hesitate to lay the bulk of the blame for human rights violations squarely on the shoulders of mercenary terrorists sent to India by Pakistan’s ISI masquerading as jehadis.
The concluding chapter contains many practical recommendations for dealing with the menace of the proliferation of light weapons. The authors have advised the Commonwealth Heads of Government to expeditiously implement measures to control legal transfers of light weapons, combat illegal ones and work towards creating ‘cultures of peace’. They have been asked to appoint a Commonwealth High Commissioner for Human Rights and to reinvigorate the Commonwealth Action Group. While these are undoubtedly noble intentions, where this report really lacks is in failing to address the problem at its roots. First, the easy availability of light weapons further fuels the demand for them. Second, unless the underlying causes of small wars and insurgencies are eliminated, killings and massacres will continue unabated. Nevertheless, every step forward in the fight against the proliferation of light weapons is a blow for peace. The report, Over a Barrel, is definitely a telling blow.
Gurmeet Kanwal
