Habits of Thought in the Time of Terrorism and War

For a lot of social and political phenomena, we often want to find the root cause. This is at times even appreciated, as it is seen as a mark of how sincere one is at addressing or understanding the problem at hand.

But going to the root cause is not permitted with this thing called terrorism in India and Pakistan.

Not that there is a formal prohibition or ban at work, but just that it does not seem right in most of society today. One might also end up on the receiving end – and then you soon start feeling sorry for yourself.

We want to stay on the surface partly out of prudence, then. But not just that.

Glistening surface

We want to remain on the surface also because the surface is everything.

Gruesome killings, killing of innocents, of civilians, women and children — these are acts that we want to recognise just as they are. These are not only gruesome and horrific, but also designed and orchestrated to make everyone notice them as that. A horrified audience is what they must spontaneously generate, with no let-up in cruelty.

The terrorists have arduously ensured that others must experience their terror as impervious and utterly dense. The barbarity of terror is supposed to jolt and shock society. The act is totalising, consuming anything sub-textual or layered. A pure glistening surface meant to blind us all is what we are allowed to skim. Depthless, this surface conveys so much, perhaps more than any root cause.

It follows from this that we must react and respond to terror at the level of action and counter-action, true to the topology of this bright and glistening hot surface. Chase and hunt down the killers, immediately and without reprieve. Before we realise, we all land up in the space and time for Operations, something surgical, clinical as the society and polity goes under an anesthesia. The speakable is now unspeakable. The one and only task of the democratic republic is striving to establish some kind of a retributive equivalence, albeit one supposedly befitting a democracy.

The glistening surface is reinforced in no small measure by the abstract equivalence sought between Kashmir and Balochistan. Also note how the India-Pakistan war loses its own determinations as it becomes a testing ground for the real war use of advanced weaponry of the Chinese and the West: Chinese J-10C versus Rafale.

Totalising act

From the terror in the meadows of the Baisaran Valley, to the dogfights in the air above: this shift in the theatre of action is unstoppable, inevitable, predestined. Drone attacks and the destruction of each other’s air defence radars, air fields and the downing of prized fighter jets.

Clearly, it must seem no less than a crime to insist on not taking this reflex-like automatic line of action, a crime of trying to think and unpack “backwards” from Pahalgam. We can only think “forwards”.

We cannot and should not connect the dots, even the most obvious ones. It is as though we have all secretly assumed that the terror is a hand of God, or that of the Devil — which is precisely how the terrorists want us to experience their actions, as a pure explosion from the outside, a cruel infinite judgement. Our complicity is forever obscured.

Further, we are living in a particular kind of democracy which cannot handle such an infinite judgement. It cannot afford to be democratic any more and must respond to totalising acts of terror with equal and hopefully equivalent totalising acts. This is the quandary we are in. This is a democracy which relies on law and constitution that are self-referential, something Franz Kafka captured in his parable called Before the Law.

Merging with the Sovereign

Hence, democracy itself must respond with war, which must itself be a pure and sovereign decision not subject to ratification or sanction. As we know from Carl Schmitt, sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception. We might add: democracy in the time of war is when the People merge with the Sovereign to grant it the right to decide on the state of exception. That is effectively the end of democracy as practiced today.

But because the People have merged with the Sovereign, dissent does not need suppression to annul itself. We witness a willing suspension of dissent. Thus in India (and, I hear, in Pakistan too) any dissent against the war was treated as an impossibility, as radical dissenters handed over a fait accompli to the government (with only a few exceptions). A well-regarded journalist in India glibly commended “us” and “ourselves” for a war with secularist values. War with secular values – that is dissent today. Reminds us of Hillary Clinton’s war with feminist values in Afghanistan.

Indeed, the liberal educated Indians and Pakistanis were pleased to see the highly professional briefings of their respective army chiefs — the perfect English, technical scientific details of mostly aerial defence systems, all while talking to the press. All in all, an atmosphere of liberal rational thinking provided their educated citizens a feeling of undefined ease, but also something self-congratulatory about being so modern.

As we can see, there is such an unstoppable smooth gliding on the homogeneous surface.

Thinking “forwards”, then, is all we are urged to do. The Pahalgam killings cannot be read as calling upon us to look into the mirror, to probe our own failings or “successes”. Any attempt to do so comes into conflict with the automatic reflex of terrorism leading to war. Such thinking already strikes us as twisted, as sophistry, as empty intellectualising. It can come only from the head of someone who, as will be argued, secretly wants to justify terrorism, someone who has no sense of the sanctity of one’s own nation and the right of its people to live with dignity and security.

Common logic

So where do we stand? On the one hand, we are not allowed to go to the root cause by those who want war as the solution to terrorism. On the other, the terrorists must keep indulging in acts that in turn do not allow us to go to the root cause.

We are looking at totalising terrorism and an equally totalising war. Which is the problem, which is the solution? What came first?

Terror and war are opposed in our discourse today, but they share so much in common in terms of their internal logic. They mutually define a common space and yet we are in the midst of a discourse which treats one as distant from the other as, particularly for India, going to war is presented as the only response to terrorism.

War and terrorism are working in great sync. Self-referential loops of thought across the political spectrum sanctify the current cycle of terrorism and war which cannot imagine an outside.

The state and ruling classes of India and Pakistan, then, are able to create this interlocking grid which keeps us on this peculiar surface — such that each of them are able to rally their base and strengthen their grip on power in their respective countries through this interplay of terror and war. Electoral victories seem tied up with those in war. Ajmal Kasab becomes an electoral issue.

In other words, no matter how exogenous and external the shock and awe of terrorism appears, it seems to still be so seamlessly woven into the order of things, legal and extra-legal, constitutional and extra-constitutional. The relationship between terrorism, war and modern democracy is what we must ultimately probe. It is not enough to look for the bad guys, military men or religious fanatics or the right-wing.

Saroj Giri teaches Politics in University of Delhi and is part of the Forum Against Corporatisation and Militarisation (FACAM).

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