From the archives, 14 Aug 1996

THREAT TO INDIAN SOCIETY POSED BY MAN-PORTABLE WEAPONS AND EXPLOSIVES

The essay-topic has to be rephrased if we are to address the intended substance of the issue presented for discussion. At the outset it must be clarified that weapons and explosives pose no inherent threat, it is the use to which they are put, that may constitute a threat. Secondly, the use of these in an instrumental manner, though giving rise to violence, is not necessarily a threat to society. For this to be understood the dichotomy between state and society has to be appreciated. Thus, while a certain manner of use of these weapons may be anti-state, it does not on account of this become anti-society. The third clarification is of the term man-portable. These may include machetes, use of agricultural implements for violence, and small arms. The former are the omnipresent instruments in agricultural societies. Their presense is not in itself threatening but could be so in times of civil war, as during the Partition or in the Rawandan massacres of 1994. The prevalence of small arms in American households has the potential of a threat, highlighted by the recent utilization of these by rightist forces. However, since it serves the purpose of protecting the freedom of the private citizen, it is not a threat per-se.

 

The foregoing compels redefinition of the topic for the purpose of this essay to read -’effect of proliferation of small arms and explosives on society  in India’. This essay shall deal with the subject by examining the concepts of the state and society and their inter-relationship, situating these in the Indian context; highlighting the manner in which small arms proliferation escalates violence levels; discusses the effect on society and the state; analyses the pertinence of external involvement to the issue; and takes a radical look at some answers.

 

Society, as the set of human relationships, exists as a continuity. The organization of power relationships in it gives rise to the political structure. In the hobbesian world this is to tame aggression, while the lockean interpretation is that it is the articulation of a natural social instinct to further security and prosperity. The state as exists, in the westphalian model, has the responsibility to deliver on the rousseauean social contract. Historically, as part of the contract, amongst the obligations of citizenship is loyalty to this political mechanism of society, the state. Collective identification of the populace with the sovereign entity, the state, is sought. Seldom is this forthcoming, given the multiple identities of people, particularly where the state is a recent politico-historic phenomenon. In such post-colonial societies the political space is contested. The state-society dichotomy is deepened by an additional facet. One is the instrumental approach to the state in which the state provides a service to society. The sovereign power resides with the people, in society. The alternative is the hegelian reification of the state in which the state is the embodiment of national spirit. It is seen as the ultimate form of social organization.

 

In the westphalian system, the politico-legal order favors the state. Thus, the post-colonial states are vested with juridical sovereignty ab-initio. It is to engender this with tangible features as undivided loyalty of citizens; monopoly of internal coercive power; and politico-bureaucratic administrative power for extraction, development and legitimation, that the state exerts itself. A problemmatic is that the state is in the image of its imperial predecessor. It remains a top-down imposition on society. The means of control of the state apparatus, as an expression of sovereignty residing with the people, is the democratic process. Owing to westminster style democracy itself being an importation by the political elite, and it being perceived by the practitioners of dynastic politics as a personal trust, the state executive remained immune from balance or control by the legislature and judiciary. The legislature, over time, squandered its credibility and the politics it represents has been described as `criminalised, casteist, communalised, and corrupt’. Only recently has judicial activism redeemed the judiciary’s reputation.

The interventionist propensity of the state, legitimated through the modernist-developmentalist discourse and its socialist credentials, has weakened the traditional social systems. Further, it lends itself to capture by  sectional forces that seek the naturalization of the status-quo so abstained through the dogma of nationalism. The foregoing is to illustrate that the state oblivious to control, may itself constitute a threat to society, particularly when transformed into a national-security state.

 

Two resultants of this state-society interaction are ethno-national arousal and militant emancipatory measures. The former is a reflection of the diversity of the social mosaic that forms India. India, in this understanding, is a politico-geographic entity transcended by the socio-cultural pan-South Asian society. The term `Indian society’ is thus the `imagined community’ of state-sponsored nationalism. Indian society can only be constructed as a patch work of communities merging into each other, vertically and horizontally. An undercurrent in Indian nationalism has been the recently emergent rightist forces. The exclusivist definition of a `mainstream’, of `Indian-ness’, has aroused an ethno-national backlash, particularly in the geographical periphery. Another facet is religious revivalism, a resultant of the impact of modernism (urbanization, industrialism, freedom, atomism) on traditional social structures. The attempt by the majoritarian right to capture the state has fed on and fostered the minority’s complex. Both these aspects have posed an exhibited and latent threat to the attempt at nation-statehood by the Indian state.

 

The second resultant, emancipatory militancy, is also an indication of the success of the state in loosening society’s traditional inhibitory bonds. This coupled with globalisation’s sword arm-the communication-information revolution, has led to an aspiration spiral. Impatience with and suspicious of the administrative structure has led to low-key emancipatory militancy in certain areas. It is possible to include the autonomist (separatist) movements (as against the secessionist movements included in the category dealt with in the last paragraph) in this category.

 

Given these ongoing and potential movements and the arrogance, and therefore non-responsiveness, of a relatively more powerful state, social unrest is a corollary. Such agitationist action is confined to the community effected. The fallout is, however, across the social spectrum in effecting intermeshed communities and the out-of region socio-political agenda. This politicisation of ethnicity may be fostered by its political elite for self-centered purpose. An alternative view point is that the political protagonists only articulate the community’s angst, the manipulation of the cultural markers being only for purposes of mobilisation.

 

The situation often deteriorates on account of the inadequate `software’ and mal-adapted ‘hardware’ of the state of cope. As a result there is a spiral of violence, a self-perpetuating cycle, rendered so also by the vested interests of both agitationist-militants, political mobilisers and the security forces. It is at this juncture that the issue of proliferation and availability of light weapons is pertinent t the issue.

 

The ease of availability of these weapons, an outcome of the regional security environment, has the effect of making inevitable the spiral of violence. This is through making accessible the military option for the agitationists. It empowers the extremists and thereby marginalises the moderates. The state invariably hardens its posture, ruling out negotiations at the point of the gun, thereby, by default, legitimizing the militancy. An infusion of small arms, furnished by an interested neighbor, non-state or trans-national forces, add to deterioration in the internal security situation. The military option is pursued by the state, fearful of the demonstration-effect elsewhere of `weakness’. Thus, the community effected is besieged by the militants and the security forces.This effect on the social fabric can be examined by studying it in its three components-the effected community, the state and pan-Indian society.

 

In the effected community traditional politico-social systems of dominance and regulation, already under threat from an interventionary state, dissolve. Power is usurped by the youth. The extremists determine the agenda. The agenda expands to cover social behavior. Thus the original enterprise of mobilization transforms to one of control and domination. Demonisation of the `other’, in the form of the state, degrades rational decision making. Competing power centers emerge, their power being dependent on the arsenal, leadership and motivation. The machinations of a self-interested neighbour complicate political conflict resolution. The brutalisation of escalating combat levels, a result of increased lethality of the arms used, benumb sensitivity. The human toll is a statistician’s fare.

 

The ‘gun culture’ pervades and is reflected in the breakdown of family authority relationships; the attraction of the youth to the aphrodisiac-the gun; the flaunting of machismo, and the redefinition of values. The effect on women of rape, harassment, widowhood, decline of the values associated with femininity, and absentee males, is magnified owing to the prevalent code in which women are considered the preservers of affinal affiliations.  The wisdom of moderation of the elderly is lost on account of their marginalisation. The children are provided with the new male icon as model, a new game to play, diluted parental attention and periodic freedom from the discipline of school.

 

The youth are prey to ideological indoctrination, amenable to political activism and prone to participation in the militancy. Easily recruited, given the disturbed economic conditions, they are also easily manipulated.  They also carry the long term germ of alienation or of addiction to violence. For the militants, militancy becomes a ‘way of life’. Being unequipped for alternative life styles and employment, deriving their power, self-worth and sustenance through militancy, they prefer continuance of disturbed times.

 

Persistence of such disturbed condition provides the militancy the military with the raison-d’etre for remaining 1.2 million strong, multiplying command opportunities in newly raised infantry-like formations, and their institutionalizing role in internal security. The effect on the state is primarily in the form of such increased political space for its coercive apparatus. The security forces, comprising the military and the paramilitary, see it as their social responsibility, a professional commitment, to defuse the situation. In actuality, their perception, in overpowering the non-military options, worsens the situation.  It is this that helps further their corporate interest in the form of expansion, empire building and an increase in the slice of resource cake. Lack of accountability, easily enduced in the system by the deterioration in credibility of the civil executive, provides the permissive atmosphere for implementation of the authoritarian military option. The complicity of the external arms source and the military’s role expansion into internal security, help legitimize and perpetuate the dominance of the ‘hard option’.

 

A notable sociological phenomenon that occurs is civil militarism in which the civil face of government is also implicated in the continuation of the hard line adopted. The civilian figurehead in disturbed areas is increasingly in the form of retired military men. Such militarism involves bellicosity, military adventurism in other theaters, increased incidence of military symbolism in discourse, support for harsh legislation, larger allocation to defense, and patronage of the scientific-technological-industrial war-instrument making elite.  This is also occasioned by the felt need to regain the initiative form the critical right.  Once the hard line is adopted, flexibility is lost as concession is equated with weakness.

 

The militarism of the state translates into the local equation.  There is increased visibility; power (both legal and manifest) of the lower echelons; and intrusiveness into social and economic life by the security forces.  Upgraded weaponry, task related force raising and arrogance, corrupt the constabulary ethos that alone is appropriate to the situation.  An intriguing technique with strategic implications is the use of pseudo-gangs and covert operations to deflect the people’s (anti-establishment) movement orientation of the militancy.  The criminalisation of the militancy is furthered to alienate the militant from popular support, and thereby expose and decimate him.  The ‘friendly groups’, friendlies’, ‘pro-India groups’, ‘surrendered’ or ‘reformed’ militants are susceptible to criminal instinct, given their legalised possession of guns for self-protection. They complicate the political aftermath of the militancy. In the interim they are parasitic on the community. In short, the strategy of subversion, for intelligence purpose and `divide and rule’, is myopic and in the long term will prove counter productive.

 

Another manner of reducing the potence of the militancy is by propagandistic subversion of an essentially political conflict. For instance, an ethno-national arousal over maladjusted center-periphery relations can be portrayed as a religions revivalism.  Thus, the center’s actions are legitimized as the defense of secularism- while, indeed, the religious undertones of the movement come to overshadow the political agenda. The effect of this is that the original, probably genuine grievance, is lost sight off, by both the state and the militants and remains un-addressed. Thus persists the potential for recurrence of unrest, given replication of the permissive conditions in the future.

 

Lastly, the effect on pan-Indian society needs to be examined. On the political plane, the strengthening of the right is most obvious. There is even the threat from the fringe groups expanding beyond their normal confines in the political periphery. The exploitation by these elements of the agitating `other’ as a socio-political threat is used for mobilization and consolidation. The implicated minority is ghettoized and periodic riots of pogrom dimensions result as an assertion of power. The self-arrogation of the definition of nationalism, and identification of the same with majoritarian features as religion, further their political agenda. It deepens the minority’s fear psychosis and the threat perceived by politically and geographically peripheral people. Self-preservatory reaction is to enable self-defense. This is facilitated by the proliferation and accessibility of weaponry. An instance validating this abstract passage is in the interpretation that the explosions of March 1993 in Bombay were a retaliatory measure and a message in the aftermath of the post-Ayodhya riots. The external linkage, in the provision of the explosives, is notable.

 

The external connection, particularly with a state with which adversarial relations exist, helps transform the nominally tolerant and soft state into a national-security state. Thus, the states responsibility of provision of security is taken as being meant for the state itself. The visibly obvious manner is the proliferation of armed agencies that interpose themselves between the constituent and his representative. The states-symbol equivalent of armed guards may indicate the capture of the decision-maker the authoritarian forces. The ubiquity of private security agencies, often uniformed and  armed; patrolling police gypsies; police with upgraded weaponry;  paramilitary imitative of the army; sealing of roads; barbed wire; the identity-pass syndrome; the checking of bags even in service head quarters of uniformed service officers, are instances of a society barricading itself with its fears.

 

The use of propaganda to demonise the militant, the use of language to chastise his act as ‘terrorist’, contribute to society’s acquiescence with the methods used in quelling the militancy. Desensitization leads to the permissive atmosphere in which excesses go unpunished  in fear of loss of morale of the security forces; `encounters’ are believed to be actual  occurrences; and brutality rationalized under the instrumentalist rubric of greater good for greater number. Thus is society’s  humanity undermined, its spirituality (already under onslaught from consumerism, materialism and individualism) diluted. This mind-set makes social pressures appear as ‘threats’. This cripples state responsiveness and thereby reinforces the ‘threat’. This enable the external forces to commandeer the situation to own advantage.

 

a  word on the external forces is in order here. This operates at two levels- state and non-state. The external involvement in the form of a foreign state’s  interference in internal affairs is part of the realpolitik of a ‘realist’ world order. Realism posits an anarchical state of affairs at inter-state level. Power maximization is the realist’s answer. This involves not only strengthening of own military forces but also reduction of the adversary’s. A form of doing so is to administration the potenteal adversary ‘a death by a thousand cut’s’. This is current parlance is ‘proxy war’ or ‘state sponsored’ militancy and terrorism.

 

In the subcontinental context, the preponderance of India is sought to be balanced by its neighbours in two forms. One is to align with an extra-regional power. This has been eliminated as a possibility with the end of the cold war. The other, practiced by Pakistan and to a lesser extent by Bangladesh, is provision of aid to secessionist forces in India. This aid is in the form of arms, training, organizational support and direction. It is, particularly with respect to the Kashmiri militancy, also moral, diplomatic and political.

 

The second feature i.e. involvement of non-state forces is in two forms. The first is the trans-national nature of religious forces, in particular the islamist threat. The fact that it is widely believed to be a vital and viable threat, is a measure of success of the propaganda of the military-industrial complex of the west in erecting a new threat in fundamentalism on the demise of the familiar one from communism. It is submitted that the islamist threat with respect to India, is in keeping with the ideological offensive of Pakistan, explicable  in traditional realist lines. It can therefore best be combated by reinvigoration of the secular ethos of the Indian state, a pillar under severe threat from Indian nationalists.

 

The other form is in the ‘frankenstein’ nature of the ethno-national force unleashed by India in pursuit of its realist game-plan in the mid-80’s in Sri Lanka. The LTTE has a trans-national network comprising drugs, arms deals, a Tamil diaspora and terrorist strategy in areas outside the traditional Tamil homelands in North and East Sri Lanka. The threat is from the possibility of triumph of secessionist forces and its demonstration effect on the subcontinent (the East Pakistan case being treated as an exception). Besides, the LTTE utilises its help to other groups, as the ULFA and the PWG, as a pressure tool on India to keep off its hinterland on the Tamil Nadu coast.

 

Also of this form is the drug and arms nexus. This emanates from the two unruly tracts on the shoulders of India- in tribal Myanmar and along the Durand line In the latter the after-effects of the Afghanistan conflict in the form of a flooded arms bazaar is a critical issue. There is also the deluge in the international arms market from down-sizing of the militaries of the now defunct Warsaw Pact. In so far as explosives are concerned, the terrorist dimension of the threat is multiplied by reports of pilferage of nuclear material from the degraded nuclear establishments of the CIS. The appearance of apocalyptic cults as the Om-shinrikyo  abroad has implications for India, given the profusion of non-rational groups here. The arms-drop by an intruduer plane in Purulia, reportedly intended for the Anand Margi sect, is a case to point.

 

Clearly, increased lethality and numbers of arms has made a crucial difference in India. While it has given the agitated populace a way to hit  at what it perceives as an unjust order perpetrated by an unresponsive state, an alternate form of dialogue, it has made the state less amenable to respond under the threat and use of violence. The means available to the populace to ventilate grievance are further restricted by the transformation of the state to a proto-national security state. Thus, the weapons, while being an instrument of expression, are also indirectly constitutive of a threat (through the states authoritarian impact on society and also from invigorating the rightist plank).

 

The  answer lies in history as forged by Indian genius. The two traditions of agitation in India have been - militancy and moral agitation. The triumph of satyagraha in the dialectic between  the two methods during the formative period of the freedom movement provides a hint of the solution. The Indian state has been fashioned by native genius. It is possible that it is susceptible to the moral pressure of non-violent agitation. An instance of this is the moral authority of the likes of Amte, Bahuguna, Jaiprakash and Patkar. Confined of thus far to social and environmental activism, it is possible that this is so because the same spiritual power is less viable the political field; This has been attempted in the agitationist run up to most militancies- most notably in Punjab. That the state has been niggardly in response, is evidence of it being an imitation of its colonial forerunner.

 

Therefore, the imperative to soften the Indian state as a solution, it being a contributory source of its problems. The problem manifested by armed anti-state action can only be partially addressed by the numerous  conventional ‘solutions’ as a rejuvenated NSC, a pro-active JIC, fusionism, aggressive policy to neighbours as hot pursuit and like destabilisation etc. It is suggested that these actions address only the symptom, by enhancing conflict management techniques to better preserve the status quo. They, therefore, are yet another instance of authoritarian tendencies overriding democratic discourse. Though enlightened conflict management, through responsive software and credible ‘people-friendly’ hardware, is recommended, it is only to gain time for designing and emplacing long term remedial measures aimed at the cause of arms consuming conflict.

 

In conclusion, only the contours of this scheme can be traced. It envisages a decentralization in political power as an accompaniment of ongoing economic deregulation. It is for empowering local communities, beyond the Panchayati Raj system (that lends itself to capture by feudal interests). It is for recognition of the multi-ethnic (national) nature of India. It is the triumph of the ‘bouquet’ approach to the ‘melting  pot’ approach to cultural plurality, political federalism and for recreation of conciational democracy. It requires the substitution of realism by rationalism, state security by human security, and redefinition of its client by the military from the state to include a professional responsibility to the ultimate sovereign- society (‘We, The People...’).  It implies an internally ‘softer’ India being an externally ‘nicer’ India. This has implications for the subcontinent as Indian perestroika cannot but impact an its neighbours Having lost the handle on India (through interferance) through Indian restructuring, they would be amenable to the band-waggoning effect, not the least because their people would take over the Establishment. In this holistic manner alone can the problem addressed in this paper- the effect of proliferation of man-portable weapons- be negated, diluted and resolved.

 

 SELECT READING

 

Brass, P., Ethnicity and Nationalism, New Delhi, Sage, 1991.

Phadnis, U., Ethnicity and Nation Building in South Asia, Delhi, Sage, 1989.

Puri, B., Towards Insurgency, Tracts for the Times, New Delhi, Orient Longman, 1993.

Samadder, R., Cannons into Ploughshares, New Delhi, Lancers, 1995.

Sen Gupta, B., India : Problems of Governance, Delhi, Konark, 1996.

Sonal, A., Terrorism and Insurgency in India, Delhi, Lancers, 1994.

Waslakar, S., South Asian Drama, New Delhi, Konark, 1995.

Vinaik, A., India in a Changing World, Tracts for the Times, New Delhi, Orient Longman, 1995.

Ayoob, M., ‘Security Problemmatic in the Third World’, World Politics, Jan. 1991. pp. 257-83.

Liphart, A., Indian Democracy, RGICS Paper 18, 1995.

Naulakha, G., Martial Law, Indo-Pakistan Committee on Kashmir, New Delhi, 1996.

Shehadi, K., Ethnic Self-determination and the Break-up of States, Adelphi Paper 292, 1993.

Smith, C., ‘International Trends in Small Arms Proliferation’, Janes Intelligence Review, 7/9, pp. 427-29.

Smith, C., ‘Impact of Light Weapons’, SIPRI 1995, pp. 583-96.

Smith, C., Diffusion of Small Arms and Light Weapons in South Asia, London Defence Studies 20, 1993.