In a Facebook post soon after four young persons set off smoke canisters in the Indian parliament, the political theorist Aditya Nigam wrote, “How state-like our thinking has become that most people – and parties – are only asking why and how parliament security (their VIP security) was breached. Very few are actually asking what these poor subaltern kids, members of Fans of Bhagat Singh (an FB page) were doing, daring to repeat Bhagat Singh’s act, knowing that they will face serious consequences.”
Nigam astutely puts his finger on one of the most troubling aspects of our current political and cultural moment in India – the profoundly anti-democratic phenomenon of statism, a phenomenon broader than Hindutva, but of which Hindutva is a particularly toxic manifestation.
A defining feature of the modern state – arguably the feature that defines its modernity above all else – is its claim to an exclusive right to legitimate violence; understanding violence here in its most limited sense as the infliction of physical hurt. Before the consolidation of the modern state, it was not only legitimate but also legal for many entities to physically hurt others in society – from the violence of caste panchayats to the violence that women and children faced from their patriarchs.
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If things change with the consolidation of the modern nation-state, that is because it claims an increasingly exclusive sovereignty over “its” people and territory. By extension, it claims exclusive provenance over the law, and over the force needed to impose the law. Moreover, what makes this force legitimate, not “mere violence,” is that it is not merely the law, but also a claim to justice. This does not by any means render all other violence unjust or illegitimate, but that violence is now at least in principle illegal; only the just violence of the sovereign state is now legal. At its most basic, this order was what the Indian constitution sought to put in place – for example, by banning discrimination against citizens in public places based on caste, religion, sex, or place of birth.
Sovereign justice and law – we know already, in our commonsense, that these are not the same. But the difference between them is worth teasing out.
We could begin by observing that a democratic state-form is characterised by the empty place of power, as the political theorist Claude Lefort has noted. What this means, to begin with, is that even though a democratic state-form will obviously have a leader and a party in power, they recognise themselves to be only the government, and not the state (I resort to the awkward locution “state-form” to refer to the concrete combination of the two: state and government).
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But what distinguishes a government from a state? Perhaps this: while the government is concerned with the law, the state is concerned with sovereign justice. (We recognise this in our everyday language: somebody is described as a statesman when they are concerned not merely with law or immediate advantage, but with justice from the point of view of sovereignty.) As such, the state provides the legitimating principle for the working of the government. Every government, of course, tries also to modify the legitimating principles in small and large ways, maybe even put new principles in place. But even if new principles were to be put in place, it would possess a democratic state-form only to the extent that it tries to maintain this distinction between government and state.
Matters get even more complicated when we dwell on the question of justice. The state is concerned with justice, yes, but this is so in two ways. First, in principle, a democratic state tries to create a just order through laws that recognise the dignity, equality, liberty and fraternity of all its citizens. Second, even so, such a state does not embody democratic justice; a state is democratic only to the extent that it recognises that justice lies beyond it somewhere, that justice is yet to come, so to speak, and that it will come by democratically reflecting on what dignity, equality, liberty and fraternity involve practically. This yet-to-come aspect of democratic justice is what we designate by many aspirational names: the people, fraternity, communism, socialism, or even liberalism. This yet-to-come aspect means that the democratic state realises that it cannot simply enforce justice; it must be open to recognising the potential inadequacy of the concept of justice involved in its laws.
One of the most striking things about the Indian constitution is the dramatic way that both its Preamble and its Directive Principles work with the force not of law, but of a justice whose form remains yet to come. This justice that is yet to come – perhaps we should call it a democratic tremor rather than a democratic horizon, for unlike a horizon, to which we may have a path, a tremor is something inchoate. And yet, in its inchoateness, in the lack of a path to it, it is faithful to what is most essentially democratic.
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When those four young protestors released harmless coloured gas in the parliament, they were breaking the law in order to demand justice – both the spirit of justice that the state is supposed to embody, and the aspiration for a more radical justice, a justice yet to come, that the Preamble and the Directive Principles embody. Indeed, to the extent that we know at present, their protest took a form that could be described as driven by the spirit of nonviolence (they did not hurt anybody; they protested publicly with full awareness that this would lead to their arrest by a government that they surely knew was draconian – why else were they protesting, after all!; the impact of their protest was not so much causal as symbolic). And yet, they were met with the full force of the state, having nothing less than the UAPA invoked against them.
What is also striking, at least so far, is that, quite apart from the government reaction, “most people—and parties—are only asking why and how parliament security (their VIP security) was breached,” as Nigam notes. And in this response we encounter the dark heart of statism: not only is the difference between government and state disappearing, but so is the difference between the justice the state has already realised in its laws and the justice that is yet to come, and that is the essence of the democratic tremor. Where such statism comes to be prevalent, then dissent is by its very nature criminal, for what needs to be achieved by the state and government is already known, and all that remains at best to be resolved are technical matters of strategy.
Indeed, India is arguably in a political and cultural moment where the stain of statism has metastasized beyond the state; it seems to have lodged itself in our souls. Perhaps the most striking manifestation of this spread is the lynchings especially that have become common. Lynching is a statist act in that here, unlike communal riots (elaborating on what the political theorist Hilal Ahmed has observed), each of the members of the mob individually takes on the work of both police and judge, of both law and justice. Lynching, unlike communal riots, is not one social group attacking another; it is ordinary citizens becoming both the government and the state, and criminalising even the fact of being from another community or caste.
Bhagat Singh, who the rebels who exploded the smoke canisters were apparently drawn to, was sharply hostile to statism, and was committed to the vision of a justice that cannot be reduced to either law and government, or even to the sovereign state. Thus, as Simona Sawhney writes in a thoughtful essay, Bhagat Singh had an “existential approach to the political.” “By an existential approach I do not mean an approach influenced by Western existentialist thinkers, but rather an approach for which the essential mortality of human life and the question of political community were mutually implicated and gave meaning to one another.”
There is much to unpack in this thought. But for now, her remarks can be extended with this observation: an existential approach to the political moves away not only from law but also the justice centred around the state. It seeks instead a justice centred around the reflective communities that we form through conversations with ourselves and others. Which of these conversations – community or self – comes first is a chicken and egg question: neither is possible without the other.
The capacity for such conversations is what is first lost in statism, for statism involves surrendering one’s conscience to a higher good. Yet, such conversation is the essence of conscience. And we cannot – must not – rule out the possibility that those who engaged in the desperate act of exploding the smoke canister – an act that they would have surely known was futile in any instrumental sense of the word – were consciously or unconsciously hoping to spark consciences that have been deadened by statism.
Ajay Skaria teaches history at the University of Minnesota. This essay is part of an irregular series reflecting on contemporary forms of violence and resistance to it, with a focus especially on psychic and epistemic violence.
