It is ironical that religion-related
violence, which is endemic to certain parts
of India, is studied in such a way hat it actually
helps in the production and reproduction of
violence, perpetrated mainly on religious minorities
by Hindu nationalist forces, rather than prevent
it. By attempting to precisely classify and
label incidents of collective violence, researchers
often become part of the diversionary tactics
of the producers of violence to displace blame
from themselves to others, says Paul R. Brass,
Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science and
International Studies at the University of Washington,
Seattle.
In an essay titled, "On
the Study of Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide",
part of his new book, "Forms of Collective
Violence: Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide in Modern
India" (published by Three Essays Collective,
September 2006, Rs.250 in India, $10 elsewhere),
Brass exposes a lacuna in the study of collective
violence saying that social scientists study
the phenomena of violence "to display their
theoretical skills" rather than expose
the dynamic processes that produce those phenomena.
"Our work then becomes
entangled - even through the very theories we
articulate - in the diversionary tactics that
are essential to the production and reproduction
of violence," says the acclaimed political
scientist, whose research in India spans more
than 45 years.
To make his point, Brass explains
that the violence that is often misnamed as
a riot and is mainly perpetrated on members
of the Muslim and Christian minorities in India
is produced in three phases: "preparation
or rehearsal", "activation or enactment"
and "explanation or interpretation".
In the sites where rioting
is endemic, producers of violence continuously
work to create an atmosphere of religious animosity
as part of their preparation and rehearsal process,
he says.
About the activation or enactment
of a large-scale riot, he says it takes place
"under particular circumstances, often
in a context of intense political mobilization
or electoral competition in which riots are
precipitated as a device to consolidate the
support of ethnic, religious, or other culturally
marked groups, by emphasizing the need for solidarity
in face of the rival communal group." It
is criminals and the poorest elements in society
who are recruited and rewarded for enacting
the violence, he adds.
The third phase - of explanation
and interpretation - follows the violence "in
a broader struggle to control the explanation
or interpretation of the causes of the violence".
In the third phase, says Brass, even journalists,
politicians, social scientists, and public opinion
generally also become involved.
He says the third phase is
marked by a "process of blame displacement,
in which social scientists themselves become
implicated, a process that fails to isolate
effectively those most responsible for the production
of violence, and instead diffuses blame widely,
blurring responsibility, and thereby contributing
to the perpetuation of violent productions in
future, as well as the order that sustains them."
According to Brass, the principal
beneficiaries of this process of blame displacement
are the government and its political leaders,
"under whose watch such violence occurs".
He says politicians and the vernacular media,
during the violence, and in its aftermath, draw
attention away from the perpetrators of the
violence by attributing it to the actions of
an inflamed mass public.
Ignorant of the diversionary
tactics, researchers think they must know what
they are studying or label an incident of violence
before they can make the necessary generalizations.
But, "the producers of violence are themselves
engaged in the same process and they continually
outpace and outwit us, producing new and varied
forms of collective violence that lead us into
the game itself rather than providing us a site
for a distant gaze," he observes.
The producers of pogroms "insist
that the violence that has just occurred is
nothing more than a riot". They label genocidal
acts "as merely spontaneous revenge and
retaliation by justly and excusably outraged
members of a group, acting spontaneously against
an 'other' group whose members have misbehaved."
He says his research has shown
that what are labeled Hindu-Muslim riots have,
more often than not, been turned into pogroms
and massacres of Muslims, in which few Hindus
are killed. "In fact, in sites of endemic
rioting, there exists what I have called 'institutionalized
riot systems', in which the organizations of
militant Hindu nationalism are deeply implicated."
In the following essays, he uses case studies
of incidents of violence during the partition
of India-Pakistan in 1946-47 and the riots in
Meerut city in Uttar Pradesh state in 1961 and
1982 to validate his theory.
Brass concludes that the main
job of researchers should not be to classify
and label precisely such violence, as "no
hard and fast distinction can be made between
these supposedly distinct forms of violence,
since pogroms masquerade as riots and many,
if not most, large-scale riots display features
supposedly special to pogroms". There are
other forms of genocide than the likes of the
Holocaust and which are "particularly of
the mutual and retributive type (which seem
like riots between two communities), a form
of violence that develops in stages that constitute
clear danger signals".
The researchers, he suggests, should rather
"observe" the assignment of blame
as part of the process of production of violence
and seek "to expose to view the dynamics
of violence and the ways in which each new large
event of collective violence is, in fact, different
from all others that have preceded it because
of the very fact that its producers know very
well what it is that they do, what has happened
before, how to displace blame from themselves
to others."
