Kids Corner

1984

Violent Nations:
1984 and The Othering of Sikhs -
A Conference Examining India as a Violent Nation

HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK

 

 

 



HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY, LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK, USA
October 31 – November 2, 2014



OUTLINE OF THEMES & BACKGROUND

One could argue history has three narrative voices – those of the oppressors, those of the oppressed, and those voices not yet colonized either by victory or loss.

The latter are the existential voices of silence attuned to what remains unsaid in the sayings from above and from below that reveal the (strategic and unconscious) elisions of dominant narratives (gender, caste, class, language, violence etc.)

Given these three voices, two clear narratives and the undertone of contrapuntal and hetero-lingual silence, it is myopic to read the present by merely engaging with contemporary dominant narratives of oppressor and oppressed (as heard in the current media discourse today that broadcasts "religious violence/terrorism” to be the root cause of today’s troubled times).

Rather, we need to embark on an “ancestry of the present” (Thapar), to uncover non-ideological readings that are neither dominated by the ruling elite, nor scripted by reactionary forces, but are open to the unsaid in both. Through such an approach, attuned to the varied constructions of hegemonic discourse, alternative readings come into view:

1   SPECTACULAR AND SLOW VIOLENCE

Spectacular violence (subjective, visible, direct, agent-driven, event-based) cannot be understood apart from slow violence (objective, invisible, indirect, structural, institutionalized, incremental, symbolic, systemic) (Zizek, Ahmed, Nixon).

There is therefore the need to understand the traumatic effects of both forms of violence as part of a single process: the “shock and awe” of synchronic devastation (1984’s Operation Bluestar) as being inseparable from the legacy of diachronic dehumanization manifest in the assimilating forces of Hindu-majority India (the elision of Sikh interests in the partition of Punjab, the expedient and reductive translation of Sikh demands as “communal”, “separatist”, and “anti-India”; oppression through continued military operations, police encounters, draconian security legislation and extrajudicial killings; conscious alienation of a whole people from their land, rivers and culture - expressed in farmer suicides, alcoholism, and drug addiction).

2   MAJORITY-MINORITY DIALECTICS

The construction of modern identities are caught within and produced by powerful political processes that result in the marginalization of the minority through the nationalization of the majority (Mufti, Chatterjee, Massad). Arguably, the European “Question of the Jew” persists as a key trope or specter of modernity such that it volleys back to the question of the colonized ‘Other’ as it projects forward to minorities caught within and beyond Europe; today it manifests as the ‘Question of the Palestinian’ (Massad), the Muslim (Dabashi), the Kashmiri, the Tribal (Roy), the Sikh, etc.

When national unity is presupposed on the conferral of an inferior status to an entire community, then the mobilization of violent mobs are not far behind.

Given this majority-minority structure, it is not hard to understand why the Indian state (no matter its claim of secular inclusion) treats Muslims, Sikhs and Maoists as anti-national terrorists, but the RSS as “misguided patriots”.

In such asymmetrical rhetoric of the state and its amplifiers (media and academia), it is hard not to hear an echo of the mass violence of European colonizers against indigenous populations. How to end colonial modernity’s pervasive and persistent desire for genocidal extermination, violent control and “full-spectrum dominance” of the (manufactured) other?

3    INDIAN NATION AND VIOLENCE

Though Ayodhya 1992 and Gujarat 2002 reflect a violent Hindu nationalism, Delhi 1984 speaks of a violent Secular nationalism. The violent nation cannot therefore be reduced to (BJP) communalism as (Congress) secularism is equally implicated.

We have to recall the legacy of violent marginalizations of Muslims and Sikhs by both the BJP(NDA) and Congress(UPA) governments “enabled” by the base (passive/active) support of a massive Hindu majority. The nationalization of the
majority into a Hindu (racial) nation is no longer possible to ignore given the recent landslide victory of the BJP-Modi government.

With Modi’s victory, the Hindu “meta-ethnicity” (Gurharpal Singh), as the “essential component of the Indian Nation and state-building”, becomes fully visible. The alignment between the Indian secular, political and corporate power structure with the majority Hindu culture within the post-Nehru era, seems to have proven those right who long ago warned that India was not a secular but “ethnic” democracy (Smooha, Gurharpal Singh).

For example, while it has been easy for “the caste consciousness and communalism of the upper castes” to “masquerade as nationalism”, the resistance of the oppressed, however, was styled as anti-national “casteism” (Simeon).

If the violence of the Indian nation cannot be located solely within the communal / religious sphere but also implicates the secular, then the “Modi phenomenon” is not merely about a person, but the gestation of a long and massive ideological movement whose drumbeat was provided by the fascist RSS. To this beat, we can add the percussive instrumentation of the secular Congress’s colonially-inherited administration with its ideologically divisive vector of a colonial modernity.

And yet there is a third arm of violent dissonance: that of India’s own xenology of (Hindu-Caste) Brahmanism – whose intolerance, assimilation and violence against Dalits, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians should not be forgotten.

These three aspects of the violent nation indicate the necessity of a broader picture – especially given the recent release of declassified British intelligence documents that clearly reveal Thatcher’s collusion with Indira Gandhi in 1984.

That the ex-Colonial Master was asked to help decades after “Independence” reveals a disturbing continuity (i.e., extension and elaboration) of the legacy of colonial surveillance and violent control; India’s independence is secured only upon a dependence upon a global Euro-American led nation-state system.

4    GLOBAL MODERNITY AS GLOBAL COLONIALITY

The Indian nation state, as a violent nation like its Western counterparts, animates and reproduces marginalization through nationalization precisely because it shares in the project of colonial modernity (Mignolo), or global modernity (Dirlik); that is to say, given the colonial legacy of the British that divided the Indian population and the country in terms of religiously identified communities based on their geography, enumeration and production (Cohn, Appadurai), Indian nationalism has always been inseparable from a covert form of Hindu nationalism and as such makes claims to an absolute universal Hindu voice that parallels and continues the Western liberal humanist discourse – in as much as both gain their functional coherence through modes of absorption and
exclusion.

For example, both Hindutva and Indian secularism, as national ideologies, resonate with the project of colonialism not only in continuing to impose Western conceptual frameworks but also by re-animating (rather than inventing) specifically Hindu / Brahmanic pre-colonial hierarchical normative orders.

The misinformed-to-the-malicious representations of Sikhs and their political demands, for example, within Indian and Western media and academia, reveal this hidden nexus between Indian / Hindu and Western hegemonic discourses.

Why, for instance, does the Sikh (Dalit, Kashmiri, Tribal, etc) voice present such a threat to Indian / Hindu nationalism?

Why is it always a threat to memorialize events such as 1984?

Secular modernity seems to be in crisis: what is the nature of this predicament and its anxiety?

5    CONTINUITY OF THE COLONIAL/HISTORICAL DIFFERENCE

Given this broader (not merely national or international but also pre-national and global) comparative context, where modernity cannot be understood as an overcoming of colonialism but actually manifests as its other face, it is hard to avoid the obdurate persistence of the colonial/historical difference (Dussel, Mignolo, Chakrabarty), and its racial (Fanon, Dabashi) and religious (Asad, Mandair) hierarchy of identities.

The secular-religious-racial dialectic of modernity is here then read as a colonizing discourse (Asad, Masuzawa, Mandair, Nandy) in that the secular modern “statistically re-produces” its colonized subjects as religious, racial and backward. The slow (symbolic and systemic, linguistic and institutional) violence of inscribing difference is central to the project of modernity and its violent nations.

Just as modernity cannot fully overcome colonialism, as the free man is only free provided the slave’s labor exists, so the secular cannot overcome the religious, as both are part of the same discourse (and myth) of progress internal to Europe (Asad, Ahmed, Dirlik, Masuzawa, Mandair).

The legacy of the Colonial/Historical Difference within institutional forms of nation-building and state-governance reveals an often-missed continuity of systemic and symbolic violence between colonialism and secular global capitalism (Mufti, Massad, Mignolo, Mandair, Nandy).

*   *   *   *   *

VIOLENT NATION: 1984 AND THE SIKHS, aims to reflect on the past 30 years of violence, impunity, denial and indifference by engaging the themes outlined above, that locate 1984 not only within its Indian, Hindu, national borders, but also, simultaneously, within extra-Indian geographic, diachronic and ideological spaces.

It is hoped that various panels can be organized to reflect the above themes:

1   1984: Spectacular and Slow Violence and their Traumatic Effects

2   1984: Majority-Minority Identity Politics

3   1984: Hindu Nationalism and Ethnic Democracy

4   1984: India and Colonial/Global Modernity

5   1984: Engaging the Continuities of the Colonial/Historical Difference


BACKGROUND

2014 marks the 30th anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s Government’s devastating assault and massacre of innocent Sikhs at the “Golden Temple” complex – the
holiest place for Sikhs, with the promoted aim of “flushing out” so-called “religious terrorists” led by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

This Indian army military action, which included tanks, helicopters, armored vehicles, artillery, and chemical weapons, was called Operation Bluestar and was timed to take place on the anniversary of Guru Arjan’s martyrdom in early June 1984.

Over 70,000 troops were ordered to capture less than 50 men. The military assault occurred under cover of a total media blackout – thousands of innocent civilians were killed over five days.

The storming of the center of Sikh spiritual and temporal authority by Indira Gandhi’s Indian Army provoked a catastrophic spiral of events that led immediately to a mutiny in Sikh units of the Indian Army, and four months later, on October 31st, the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards.

Thereafter, thousands of innocent Sikhs were beaten and burned alive across the length and breadth of the country during the Anti-Sikh Pogroms on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of November. The Police stood by and watched and in some cases actively participated in the attacks.

It is clear that this violence was instigated, authorized and organized by higher government officials – who have subsequently enjoyed promotion (cabinet positions) and 30 years of impunity despite repeated demands for justice.

The organized anti-Sikh mobs in1984 massacred over 8000 innocent Sikhs, 3000 in Delhi alone.

2014 therefore calls us to reflect on this thirtieth anniversary of Operation Bluestar (June 3 - 8, 1984) and the ruthless Anti-Sikh Pogroms that ensued (October 31st - November 3, 1984) and continued in further Government operations (Woodrose, Blackthunder, Night Dominance, Rakshak I & II, and Final Assault – leading to the deaths of 25,000 to 80,000 Sikhs) in the decade that followed.

This conference will explore the Indian state as a violent nation, through the case of the massacre and oppression of the Sikh people.


PROGRAM

FRIDAY 10/31
Introduction: Balbinder Singh Bhogal

Ashis Nandy (CSDS & IPS, Delhi)
- Regimes of Narcissism & Regimes of Despair.
Keynote
5:00 – 8:00


SATURDAY 11/1
Panel 1: Political & Historical Frames
9:30 – 12:30

Giorgio Shani (International Christian University, Tokyo)
- Khalsa Panth or Khalistan? Re-considering the non-territorial dimensions of Sikh Nationalism

Pritam Singh (Oxford Brookes University, Oxford)
- India & the Sikhs since 1984: Mapping the Fault lines

Balbinder Singh Bhogal (Hofstra University, New York)
- 1984’s Slow Violence: Re-animating or Competing with Europe’s Heart of Darkness?


Panel 2: Critical & Theoretical Frames
2:00 – 6:00

Arvind Singh Mandair (University of Michigan)
- Typologies of Violence & the Event-Nature of '1984'

Prabhsharandeep Singh (Oxford University, Oxford)
- Violence & the Creative Act: Language, Space, & Sikh Subjectivity during 1984
Attacks

Prabhsharanbir Singh (University of British Columbia)
- The Obscene Underside of Indian Nationalism: Sikh Bodies & Hindu Desires

Gabriele Schwab Ghostly (University of California, Irvine)
- Transferences: On Memory & Haunting


SUNDAY 11/2
Panel 3: Decolonial & Neoliberal Frames
9:30 – 1:30

Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Rutgers University, New Jersey)
- From Sacrifice to Massacre: The Violent Foundations of the Modern/Colonial World

Simon Springer (University of Victoria, British Columbia)
- The Violence of Neoliberalism

Clayton Crockett (Uni. of Central Arkansas, AR)
- Sketch for a Political Theology of In-debted Nations

Gil Anidjar (Columbia University, New York)
- The Vampire State


Closing Reflections

*   *   *   *   *



[Edited for sikhchic.com]
October 13, 2014


 

Conversation about this article

1: Kaala Singh (Punjab), October 14, 2014, 1:48 PM.

Violent, power-drunk nations like the Indian state should realize that there are limits to military power, like the Americans realized in Vietnam, and again in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the Russians realized in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and mend their ways to avoid unnecessary death and destruction. As far as the Sikhs are concerned, the Indian state used its full military might to wipe out the Sikhs completely but was unable to achieve its objective. They carried out a genocide of Sikhs outside Punjab and then let loose the fourth largest army in the world to crush the Sikhs of Punjab. They did not succeed and ultimately had to come to the negotiating table and signed a peace agreement.

2: Dr Birinder Singh Ahluwalia (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), October 15, 2014, 5:16 AM.

State-sponsored terrorism against its own people is different from invading a country or a foreign land, especially when such horrendous activity is carried out to satisfy certain selfish political objectives. It is akin to domestic violence at its worst. Deleterious after-effects of such activity are carried over and felt for generations to come and pitches one citizen against another for futile, unprincipled political gains. When one country invades another, then the right to defend itself comes into play, whereas genocide activity of a government or nation involving its own people is usually against defenceless people. It is ghastly and unacceptable. However, it is also incumbent upon citizens of a nation to act lawfully and attempt to address their political grievances within the permitted ambit of the law pertaining to their nation ... state-sponsored killing and/or mob-rule by its citizens is absolutely uncivilized.

3: Kaala Singh (Punjab), October 15, 2014, 3:05 PM.

The fact that the help of the ex-colonial master was sought to deal with a domestic situation indicates that India was never really free of British influence. They left India in 1947 due to the severe weakening of their military and naval capabilities during WWII but not before wreaking havoc in this part of the world. The extent of British involvement in the Golden Temple attack goes much beyond the "advisory" role as indicated by the British or Indian governments. They supplied equipment, training and much more, in return for commercial contracts. It must be remembered that India as it sands today is an artificial creation of the British colonial enterprise. The British for their own administrative convenience clubbed together 500 independent states which later became the 'India'. Britain was greatly enriched by the wealth stolen from India and in our times as long as the money keeps flowing, India will have the support of US, UK, Russia, Europe, Israel, et al and there may be more mass-murder and mayhem.

4: Hardev Singh (Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada), October 31, 2014, 3:35 PM.

Kaala Singh ji, your comments are always sharp, thoughtful and insightful and, as always, I delightfully concur with them.

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1984 and The Othering of Sikhs -
A Conference Examining India as a Violent Nation"









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