Reacting to the militaristic and fascist tendencies prevalent during the interwar years, American political scientist Harold Lasswell wrote in 1941: “We are moving toward a world of ‘garrison states’ — a world in which the specialists on violence are the most powerful group in society.” Fortunately for us, we do not inhabit a world of “garrison states” today. However, tendencies associated with the garrison state have cropped up in several societies from time to time in various measures, and when unchallenged, they have weakened the democratic ethos of free societies. Some of the recent developments in our country should prompt us to ask whether we are moving towards a society where the specialists on violence (that is, military) and the associated narratives would occupy a disconcerting central place in our political imagination.

The war on dissent

Statements made by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokespersons and senior Union Ministers in the wake of the so-called ‘surgical strikes’ seem to suggest that questioning the Army or its actions, such as demanding evidence corroborating these strikes, are anti-national acts. Union Minister Uma Bharti argued that those seeking evidence of the strike should accept Pakistani citizenship, a euphemism for “you are a Pakistani agent”. Indeed, today asking critical questions about national security issues, be it the Kashmir uprising or Naxal insurgency, is seen as both abhorrent and anti-national. Open dissent against national security policies is worse — it’s sedition.

What is even more troubling is that many among the professed guardians of the open society — the media — are buying into this narrative for their own selfish reasons, even as the country’s liberal elite is slowly caving in. While some sections of the media argue that when the Director General of Military Operations said so, there is no need for any evidence because we have complete faith in our Army, others insist that politicians should not take credit because it was an Army action. Both have got it wrong. Citizens of a modern democracy can, and should, question all instruments of the state. The Army is merely an instrument of the state and the government of the day utilises it to meet its policy objectives: there is no ‘Army action’, it is the government of the day that acts. It’s a different matter whether the government should be advertising it the way it has been for electoral gains. Curiously, however, the same government that takes credit for the ‘Army action’ chooses to hide behind the Army’s morale to deflect allegations of human rights violations committed by the very same Army.

We are witnessing the rapid emergence of a militarised political environment in which political discourse is easily cast in a militarised language. Our popular culture is increasingly reflecting it, and some TV channels have even set up ‘war rooms’ in their studios besides mimicking the military jargon!

Socialisation of danger 

There is an ever-strengthening claim made by our leaders that the nation is under threat from multiple sources, internal and external. Shrill narratives about danger, enemy and ‘the other’ are the new normal in the nation’s life. And in dangerous times as these, we have a duty to come together to fight our enemies. Even Pakistani artists are a danger to the country: mind you, some of these messages are not coming from government agencies alone. This coincides with a disquieting rise of aggression around us at every level: against dissent, minorities, and anyone with a liberal world view. Gandhi and his non-violence are passé. There is a constant manufacturing, labelling and categorising of the nation’s ‘enemies’ — from those seeking evidence for the surgical strikes to the young dissenters in Jawaharlal Nehru University. True, attacks on our forces in Kashmir have been on the rise, so are the anti-India slogans in the Valley, but we should never ask why since doing so would weaken the morale of our forces ‘who keep us safe while we sleep’. Why is it that we are so easily, and readily, seduced by the rhetoric of war and retribution?

When there is danger all around us, dissent is deviant behaviour, and there is a heightened pressure to fall in line with the mainstream security narratives. Human rights activists are declared as working against the interest of the country and it is indeed an anathema to critique the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act or such ‘special laws’. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar’s habit of running down dissenters is akin to what Lasswell calls “the ceremonialising tendencies of the garrison state”. Moreover, there is growing restriction of civil and political liberties in the name of security, and ‘outlawing’ of dissent by imposing sedition charges or travel restrictions on activists or those questioning ‘the narrative’. “Those questioning the government are soft on terror” sounds worryingly similar to what Joseph McCarthy used to say in the 1950s: “Democrats are soft on Communism”. In today’s India, even senior Congress politicians, who are no bleeding hearts, are accused of being soft on terror and disrespectful of the Army! This is daylight governmentalising of thought.

The ‘specialists on violence’ are the new-age intellectuals of national security — civilians lack of ‘expertise’ in these matters. Retired generals, some of whom unhesitatingly take partisan political positions, are the last word on national security today. Even if we were to ignore that issues of war and peace are too important to be left to the generals, is taking partisan political positions in full public view in keeping with the professionalism and the sensitive positions they once held? There was a time when retired diplomats dominated our national security discourses: today the generals are replacing the diplomats perhaps because the times we live in demand aggression, not diplomacy. This shift is unmistakably reflective of a larger transformation underway in the country to opt for coercion over negotiation.

In a country where we (literally) worship anyone from a film star to a politician, the warrior is the new kid on the block: politicians have long lost credibility and many of our leading stars have ‘dubious origins’. Paradoxically, for our patriotic middle class, military is actually the ‘desirable other’ who we should worship though they won’t be enlisted: why else is there such shortage of officers in the Army! ‘Warrior worshipping’ for us is another way of expressing our allegiance to the nation, and those that don’t will be forced to say ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’, at the least.

Despite being the ‘specialists on violence’, the military is also said to have a very ‘fragile’ morale. Morale is key to the garrison state, and the military is at the centre of this enterprise. The military, therefore, not only should not be criticised, but we should not even bat an eyelid when they err, like all of us do in our respective professions, because they happen to have a fragile morale. Doesn’t morale also come from proper training, equipment, professionalism and adequate monetary compensation? Morale, embellished by the official propaganda machinery through the manipulation of emotions, is often overrated and misunderstood: in a democracy everyone is subject to scrutiny and criticism, and if you don’t like it, that’s too bad. This doctrine of ‘military infallibility’ needs to be challenged for our own good: what we need are more professionally trained soldiers, not infallibility, for military is merely an instrument of the state, not the nation’s soul. Moreover, it is misleading to argue that there is some essential contradiction between sacrifices of soldiers and human rights of civilians: there isn’t.

Meaning of national security 

The most significant indication of a garrison state is the militarisation of national security. For a garrison state, national security defined in militaristic terms would be the ultimate value to be preserved. Thankfully we haven’t gone that far yet, and we will survive the ‘surgical strikes’ though not without the adverse impact of seeking militarised solutions for political and social challenges. The problems with militarising national security are many: national security is far more complex than what military solutions can hope to resolve, and the state could use military tools (tools of violence) to confront non-military challenges. As a nation, we can’t afford to place a militarised response over political ones. We need to forsake our fixation with the ‘Army will fix it’ notion, be it during floods or when hapless children fall into uncovered borewells. Our neighbouring country is still suffering for having made that choice.

Despite its long-term adverse implications, the garrison state narrative comes with undeniable political benefits for the political class. Militaristic narratives undoubtedly help the BJP and its ideological fountainhead, the Sangh Parivar, some of whose leaders have historically entertained such discourses in keeping with their fascination for Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. In more practical terms, the BJP has managed to use the military as a convenient political tool for electoral and publicity purposes, thereby enhancing its political clout. It has learnt the fine art of firing from the soldier’s shoulder: when under fire for its policies, the BJP diverts criticism towards the Army and calls you anti-national for criticising the Army.

In the meantime, of course, the real and genuine problems of the military continue to be ignored. Take, for instance, the demeaning sahayak system in the Army where soldiers are tasked to do household work for officers. What we need to ensure is that the soldiers on the ground, the ones standing on guard duty for 15-16 hours, are well looked after, rather than worshipped. Moreover, once Mr. Parrikar gets some free time from calling out the ‘anti-nationals’, he should concern himself with the much-needed reform of the country’s crumbling higher defence management structures.

Hardly anything that this government has done so far indicates that it is serous about modernising the Indian military or strengthening the country’s defence preparedness. Well, why should it when cheap political dividends can be made by merely massaging the military ego?

Happymon Jacob is Associate Professor of Disarmament Studies, Centre for International Politics, Organization and Disarmament, School of International Studies, JNU. 

When the rich fight the rich, it is the poor who die. — Jean-Paul Sartre, The Devil and the Good Lord.

In 2004, the world saw evidence of one of the most horrific acts of torture and sexual abuse by an army on captured prisoners. The soldiers did not belong to the army of a banana republic or a military dictatorship but to the U.S., a democracy. The prisoners were Iraqi, held at the Abu Ghraib prison.

At present, India is going through a staggering phase of amnesia: that it is a democracy. War clouds have caused a flight of reason. The valorisation of the Indian military after the “surgical strikes” has culminated in a perverse logic amplified by a shrill media: you cannot question the government on matters military as it is equivalent to insulting the army, which itself is beyond scrutiny and reproach.

Nissim Mannathukkaren

Aggressive nationalism 

The question here is not of the veracity of the surgical strikes but whether questions can be asked of the government and the army. The logic that answers in the negative is one that suits a military dictatorship, not a democracy.

If this logic held, we would have never known how the American and British governments led their people to the catastrophic Iraq war over flimsy reasons of national security. The Abu Ghraib expose too would have never seen light. Nor would have our own Kunan Poshpora. That such logic shows a tendency towards the militarisation of society, especially now when an aggressive nationalism gains ground.

Witness the closing of public mind since Uri and the surgical strikes. Actors are facing a public outcry either for “disrespecting” soldiers or for “supporting” Pakistani artistes. Parties are being condemned for demanding “proof”. And farcically, television guests are thrown off studio debates for speaking over martyred soldiers’ fathers. The army, in essence, has become a holy cow.

This is a dangerous tendency, for the militarisation of society and the predominance of militaristic values is opposed to some fundamental tenets of democracy like critical thinking and questioning of hierarchy. Militaristic values are also intrinsically connected to notions of hypermasculinity. Of course, unquestioning obedience is useful in the institutional context of the army and in limited situations of war, but it cannot become a general value of society for all times.

More crucially, militarisation fundamentally obfuscates society’s real problems. Fear becomes the basis of society, and a soldier’s job becomes the most important occupation. People who clean the sewers with no protective equipment, and at great threat to their lives, do not, in this narrative, serve the nation. As the writer Aakar Patel asks, why are sewer cleaners, dying in the hundreds, and sanitation workers not considered martyrs?

The tragedy of a dead soldier is justifiably commemorated by all. But millions die unsung, performing jobs in hazardous conditions. The precariousness of soldiers on the Siachen Glacier is rightly sympathised with, but not the horrors of manual scavengers who have to handle human faeces and die due to diseases.

Shouldn’t there also be outrage over men carrying their dead daughter and wife on their shoulders because hospitals refused ambulances, as was the case in two separate incidents in Odisha? Where is the outrage and TV coverage about the 1.2 million (preventable) child deaths in India last year, the highest in the world? How does this number compare with deaths caused by terrorism? For society’s well-being, should this not be the most important problem exercising discourse?

Ironically, a militarised society despite valorising the soldier does not actually speak for him/her. Warmongering could only lead to the deaths of more soldiers. While Kargil and its 527 war heroes entered India’s military folklore, Operation Parakram and its 798 dead soldiers are little discussed by the public. How is it justifiable to lose nearly 800 soldiers without even fighting a war?

Further, in every violent conflict like Uri, the overwhelming numbers of the dead are sepoys and non-commissioned officers hailing from the most marginalised strata of society. It is a tragedy at many levels.

The uniting factor 

The valorous soldier versus the pusillanimous civilian and the patriotic soldier versus unpatriotic civilian are false binaries on which a militarised society thrives. On the one hand, defence arms procurement, and land and recruitment scams show the involvement of both higher echelons of the military, and civilians (politicians and bureaucrats). On the other, what unites both is that tragic social conditions are disproportionately shared by the soldiers and civilians from the poorest and most oppressed groups, especially the costs of war. After all, the shrieking TV anchors and the elite civilian classes wanting a war are not the ones fighting the war, or are among the 15 lakh people forcibly evacuated from border village homes and living in makeshift camps.

The valorisation of the military in a democracy is ironical. Ultimately, what is the military fighting for? Is it merely Indian territory? The military, while protecting the nation, does not dictate India’s constitutional values. By conflating the two, a fundamental mistake is made. In the eyes of the world, what distinguishes India from Pakistan is not that it has a bigger military, but that it is a settled, even if flawed, democracy. The Indian Army is different from the Pakistani Army because it is, ultimately, under the control of the people.

Every public institution, including the military, has to be subject to public accountability and scrutiny. There is no maxim in a democracy that says you cannot ask questions of its army.

Similarly, striving for non-violent resolutions is not being anti-national. An army veteran writes: “It’s easy to ask for peace when you are a thousand miles away from the Line of Control.” This is why soldiers facing bullets at the border are not the ones in charge of public policy in a democracy. As Onkarnath Dolui, who lost his son in Uri, painfully pleads, “Believe me, I don’t want war as it demands countless of lives, like that of my son, on either side.”

Soldiers and their sacrifices deserve respect in society, but they cannot overwhelm every other aspect of society. Military fables have their place, but they cannot substitute democratic debates. While we mourn the deaths of soldiers, we have to understand that poverty is the biggest killer in India, by a million times over. A militarised society prevents us from seeing that.

Nissim Mannathukkaren is Chair, International Development Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada. Email: nmannathukkaren@dal.ca.

It is the sense of impunity nurtured by caste hierarchy that prepares the social ground for the “shockingly cruel and inhumane” crimes against Dalits called atrocities. It is this impunity that the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (henceforth PoAA) criminalises. And it is the desire to defend the same impunity that motivates recent demands for the dilution or even repeal of the PoAA. To examine the validity of these claims, we must first understand the very different relationships that caste has with the Constitution, society, and state.

Caste and the Constitution

The Constitution is a portrait of the nation as it would like to be rather than as it actually is. Therefore, it is obliged to regard aspirations as achievements, uncertain journeys as assured arrivals. Beginning with the Preamble, where it presumes that “we, the people” are indeed a unified and homogenous collectivity, the Constitution proceeds to treat hoped-for outcomes as though they were established facts. This is not a defect — the Constitution is required to reflect the republic in the best possible light, and is at its most majestic when doing so. However, this also means that the Constitution is unable to directly confront obstinate realities like caste that flout its fundamental tenets, because acknowledging caste amounts to confessing that the republic is more desire than reality.

So, when the Constitution is forced to deal with caste, it does so with an averted face, allowing it only an inferential, shadow-like presence. But it also manages to be obliquely eloquent about what it cannot face. For example, caste makes its first entry in Article 15 rather anonymously, as one among many sources of discrimination. But this is compensated by Sections 2(a) and 2(b) which prohibit discriminatory restriction of access to (respectively) “shops, public restaurants, hotels and places of public entertainment” and “wells, tanks, bathing ghats, roads and places of public resort…”. Why is it necessary to explicitly prohibit discrimination in access to both modern and traditional facilities already declared to be for the public? Or take Article 17, which abruptly announces that “Untouchability” is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. What does this capitalised word stand for and why must it be quarantined in quotes? The answer, of course, is caste, which is an absent presence in the Constitution, addressed only as an exceptional or special circumstance.

Discrimination as dominance

The PoAA, 1989, and its older sibling, the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, are “special laws” located at the strategic sites where the Constitution’s default setting of caste-blind formal equality must be changed to address the reality of substantive inequality. All citizens are not equally at risk of being subjected to the acts specified in the sub-sections of Section 3(1) of the PoAA, such as being forced to “drink or eat any inedible or obnoxious substance” (i); have “excreta, waste matter, carcasses or any other obnoxious substance” dumped in their premises or neighbourhood (ii); or being paraded “naked or with painted face or body” (iii), and so on. If there exist specific groups of citizens who have repeatedly suffered such gross violations of the fundamental right to dignity, then surely the republic owes them the protection of special laws like the PoAA.

But why do such groups exist in the first place? They exist because of the social relations promoted by caste. The atrocities that invite interventions such as the PoAA are made possible by caste society’s ability to sustain specific types of relationships, or mutually oriented attitudes and conditions. On the one hand, Dalit castes are forcibly invested with an enduring social vulnerability vis-à-vis castes higher up in the hierarchy, especially those dominant within a region. On the other hand, dominant castes are allowed to acquire, and to eventually take for granted, a socially sanctioned sense of impunity with respect to Dalit castes. When the dominant caste feels it has little prospect of economic and social mobility, its self-esteem and identity become increasingly dependent on the unequal relationships it maintains with subordinated castes. In such situations, the Dalit-dominant caste relationship turns into a zero-sum game where any real or imagined improvement in the lives of Dalits is seen as a reduction in the social distance separating the two groups, thereby implying a decline in the status of the dominant castes.

The caste-state relationship

The state is simultaneously the child of law and society as well as the mediating link between the two. Because of its idealistic orientation, the Constitution — mother of all laws — is external to society and has a largely exhortatory relationship to it. The state depends on the Constitution for its legitimacy, but the Constitution also depends on the state for the actualisation of its ideals. Since it is regulated by politics which in turn is rooted in society, and since its personnel are themselves members of society who embody the prevalent social prejudices, the state is strongly influenced by society. But because it is institutionally bound to obey the Constitution, the state cannot always be guided by the dominant social prejudices of the day; rather, it must at least occasionally rise above these prejudices to perform its constitutional duty. In sum, the caste-state relationship is necessarily ambiguous because the state is itself a differentiated and plural (rather than homogenous or monolithic) entity, capable of acting in a wide variety of ways with respect to caste.

Returning now to the demands for restraining or removing the PoAA, we can begin to decipher what is happening. Both in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, the two States where it has been voiced, the demand is coming from political parties representing regionally dominant castes. Both States have seen the emergence (or re-emergence) of Dalit assertion following some upward mobility. This has enraged the dominant castes, leading them to argue that the PoAA is being “misused”. The misuse argument is so popular that it can be called a syndrome, or “a characteristic combination of opinions, emotions or behaviour”. It has been used against every special scheme or law intended to empower vulnerable groups, including reservations, laws against dowry, sexual harassment and rape, and even the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). In each case, it is alleged that the “genuinely deserving” never benefit and that the “vast majority” of cases are fake.

Underdogs and predators 

Since any law can be “misused”, it is not the potential for misuse but its actual occurrence and frequency that matter, and this needs to be established through credible evidence. No such evidence-based claims have been made as yet. On the contrary, reports from activist groups show that it is hard for ordinary Dalits to get cases registered, and extremely difficult to get them placed under the PoAA. But to be fair, the misuse argument is not always meant to be taken literally; it also acts as proxy for the more general perception that Dalits are no longer underdogs and may be turning into predators. This impression is confirmed when we recall that the Pattali Makkal Katchi leader, Dr. S. Ramadoss, reinforced his demand for dilution of the PoAA with the allegation that Dalit boys were luring non-Dalit girls by wearing “jeans, T-shirts and fancy sunglasses” (The Hindu, December 3, 2012). In Maharashtra, recent calls for reviewing the PoAA issued by the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party have intensified after the rape-murder of July 13 in Kopardi (Ahmednagar district) in which the victim is dominant caste and the accused are Dalits.

While there is no reason to doubt that Dalits, like any other caste group, could become efficient oppressors if given the chance, the obvious question is if they are in fact getting the chance. Going by the nationwide evidence on the frequency of atrocities on Dalits, the shoe still seems to be firmly on the other foot. Ahmednagar district alone has witnessed three atrocities on Dalits in the past three years (Sonai, Kharda and Javkheda). Meanwhile, as the first anniversary of the Dadri lynching approaches, let us also spare a thought for vulnerable groups who do not have, and will probably never have, the constitutional protection of special laws.

Data | Crimes against Dalits rising in UP, Rajasthan

Satish Deshpande teaches sociology at Delhi University.