May  2003 
Year 9    No.87

Cover Story


Death of dissent?

When the crucial premise of Rule of Law and the Constitution itself is sought to be negated, a radical affirmation of our faith in these values becomes imperative

BY KG KANNBIRAN

Since the misuse of laws invites adverse criticisms, other ways of restraining free speech and expression, freedom of assembly and association are being sought. Though they generally do not care for such criticism, this does not solve the problem. Killing silences criticism once and for all. The critic is silenced and his death silences other like–minded persons. Others search for the reasons for the killing not because their conscience is disturbed but, living in a society, they are compelled to find justification for their silence. People feel that the critic was silenced for his confrontational politics.

We are neutral not because of our objective understanding but on account of subjective factors, terror and survival. The government need not resort to the relevant sub–clauses of Article 19 by framing laws or even invoking the drastic Emergency. Governments have now learnt to abandon governance without doing away with the formal framework.

With the onset of the 21st century, mankind has come full circle. We struggled against arbitrariness and insecurity. Through gradual evolution we brought orderliness into our lives. After centuries of struggle, we devised rules to govern ourselves. We fought against dominance in various forms. We also formulated a philosophy to change the world. And this progress was what led to Constitution making, in itself a major step towards transparent governance.

It is in the process of liberating ourselves from domination that we secured our Constitution. Associational freedoms were the first to emerge with the emergence of power and its dominance. It looks as though we have turned a full circle and returned to the Hobbesian state of nature where life was depicted to be "nasty, brutish and short". "Homo homini lupus (Man is wolf of man)," said Hobbes. The progress we have achieved seems to have come to a halt.

Instead of progressing towards an egalitarian society we have been busy completing the task left unfinished by Hitler and Mussolini. We do not even change the signboards. Governments manage the atrocities with the same signboards, democracy and socialism. It does not embarrass governments nor does it lead to angry protests from the people.

The framework of governance arms governments with the necessary illusions to take up cudgels against people for lawlessness when they are actually struggling for social change. One can have a Constitution without working it and by allowing parts of it to fall into desuetude. And that would be a tragedy because if these rights are not available, or if the people are trained not to use these rights, or if people are trained to look at the exercise of these rights as a futile endeavour, at a time when globalisation and market forces fail to enhance the quality of our lives as a human collective, we would have forgotten the art of collective protest. This process already appears to be underway.

This state of affairs can only be described as anomie. In AP, more than four decades of continued brutality employed by the government to put down the CPI–ML movement have led inexorably to the present state of anomie in governance. This anomie in governance is not peculiar to Andhra Pradesh. It has assumed a universal character. In Gujarat, we have recently witnessed the total breakdown of order, with the authorities supervising mayhem and the looting of Muslim shops by middle class families.

This anomie takes various forms and is visible at various stages all over the country. There seems to be a total abandonment of governance. The State has taken the pioneering step of privatising extra–judicial killings of non–parliamentary political dissent, including the defenders of human rights and intellectual supporters of this dissent.

During the recent abduction of three inspectors in AP, quite a few human rights activists and writers received threats to their lives, they were told that they would be killed should something happen to those abducted. There is nothing new in this, this has been the logic of State violence for over three decades. For every killing by an extremist, the State kills a human rights defender. These were extensively reported in the media, electronic as well as print. In fact, the Telugu daily Vartha carried a strong editorial criticising this foul practice.

The release of the abducted did not put an end to the death threats to Varavara Rao, Gadar and N. Venugopal, the last a well–known journalist. This threat to their lives is not something personal to them. How can anyone claim the authority to extinguish the right to life of Varavara Rao or for that matter the right to life of X, Y or Z for their political views? But this keeps happening regularly in Andhra Pradesh and has the potential of cropping up in every other state.

The issue raised here has nothing to do with the life and politics of either Gadar or Varavara Rao, or anyone else placed in a similar situation. The problem arises because of the existing scope of the law in the case of violation of freedoms. The Constitution proceeds on the assumption that the State is likely to be the only violator of our freedoms. But all major assumptions of a liberal State have disappeared. We feel the signals of enormous changes that are likely to occur in the values and assumptions that hitherto underlay our lives.

The State under these circumstances corresponds to some extent with the ‘Exceptional State’ conceptualised by Nicos Poulantzas: Law, to put it briefly, no longer regulates; arbitrariness reigns. What is typical of the Exceptional State is not so much that it violates its rules, as that it does not even lay down rules for functioning. It has no system for one thing, i.e. it lacks the system to predict its own transformations. This is evident with the fascist State.

The rights that are recognised and declared in the Constitution are the rights that inhere in the people. How should one react to the erosion of rights by aberrant sections of civil society? This is the principal question raised by the threat to Varavara Rao, Gadar and persons similarly situated in other states. Does the State have the authority to privatise State violence, ‘sub–contracting’ it to ostensibly autonomous, hireling vigilante groups, to liquidate persons with a view to blocking intellectual support to a political movement which the state has not succeeded in crushing despite three decades of extra–judicial executions?

These are questions which should be pondered by society where governance has refused to adress these very basic issues despite rulings by the NHRC and the courts. The complaint is not about the breach of a particular law and the desire is not to correct an isolated aberration. That stage is long past. We have reached a situation where the entire constitutional and legal system has been rent asunder for personal and political aggrandisement. The people’s Social Contract set out in the Preamble to the Constitution has been wholly breached and put out of action. When the crucial premise of the Rule of Law and the Constitution is sought to be negated, a near revolutionary process affirming our faith in these values is called for.

It is not just the right to life of a few writers, cultural artists and journalists that we are concerned about; at stake is the entire politics of dissent. We should be concerned about the emerging trends in the rise of right-wing populism, whether it attacks left-wing politics (currently confined to extremists among them), or it attacks the minorities and secular values as it parades itself as the only defender of faith. A study of the police system indicates that it is more in harmony with right–wing politics than with liberal and democratic values.

When amorphous, unidentifiable and ostensibly autonomous groups attack our freedoms or our person, how do we retain our freedoms and our right to life? This is the question that we are faced with. I am afraid of the rise in the number of anomic persons "who are spiritually sterile, responsive only to themselves, responsible to no one. The anomic person derides the value of other persons. His only faith is the philosophy of denial. He lives on the thin line of sensation between no future and no past." His sense of social cohesion, the mainspring of his morale is fatally wounded. There is an urgent need to save ourselves from this enveloping anomie. We have to try and reinstate the fast vanishing social cohesion without undermining the plural character of our polity.


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