Slum Acts. Veena Das

war, that even those who question the “explanations” of why civil wars are more brutal than wars waged by states, do not ask if the question itself is correctly posed. Thus, for instance, Kalyvas (2006), in his comprehensive study on the logic of violence in civil war, starts his chapter on barbarism with the statement: “Despite a quasi-universal recognition of an association between civil war and atrocity, there is surprising[ly] little in the way of specified links between the two” (p. 52). He recognizes the absurdity of the presumption that killing with machetes is less civilized than killing with bullets or bombs, yet somehow continues to support the notion that European countries were more successful in making a sharp division between combatants and civilians, the widespread use of torture and rape to “pacify” populations in colonial wars notwithstanding. Nor does he question whether the role played by European countries in developing technologies of torture, such as France’s contribution to so-called “clean torture” with electricity, did not indicate pathologies of civilization.²

I argue that the emergence of discussions as to whether an extreme emergency created by international terrorism justifies use of torture in public discussions not only elides the violence perpetrated by Western democracies in their colonial and neocolonial projects, but is also heavily dependent on the use of counterfactuals, scenario building, thought experiments, analogies, and narrative tropes that end up dressing a subjunctive, as-if model or scenario such as the ticking bomb scenario, into the language of actuality. It is not that the empirical is totally lacking in these discussions, but the large data sets gathered on types of conflict, their intensity or duration, reflect essentially statist interests through which such practices as torture can be defended as regrettable, but necessary. Further, modes of surveillance can be extended to cover those segments of the population defined as “vulnerable” to propaganda emerging from extremist projects, and hence potentially dangerous for the security of the nation state. For instance, the discourse of preventing young Muslims from “becoming radicalized” is an important component on policy making in many countries including the UK, but interestingly excludes those who might be radicalized by racist ideologies of white supremacy, and extreme emergencies focus on foreign terrorists but do not include such violence as repeated instances of gun violence against schoolchildren in the US.³

This book confronts these boundary-making discourses between state and non-state actors, rational violence of the state as opposed to the irrational violence of non-state actors (including terrorists) at several levels. First, it tries to dismantle the assumed ground-figure relation that takes for granted that sites for observing the apparatus of state are naturally courts of law, police stations, police patrols, or offices of bureaucrats. Strategies of research based on this ground-figure relation settle on spatial imageries that conceptualize power through location rather than circulation, rendering matters of scale in terms of containment of smaller units into larger ones.

I propose, instead, to think of scale through a dynamic relation between parts and wholes – each might be reconstituted standing in a dynamic relation to each other. After all, we know that from some perspectives a part can be larger than the whole because in taking its place among other parts, any one part is likely to lose some of its distinctive attributes that were manifested when it stood alone. Thus, when I track the manner in which the police posts function in the slums of Delhi or Mumbai, certain aspects of the mechanisms of governance are revealed that are not apparent in such sites as a court of law where a judge is rearranging the facts, in the process of a criminal hearing as lawyers and witnesses are made to recount events in an adversarial setting. In fact, neither objects implicated in a crime, nor subjects remain stable as they move from one place to another, say from a neighborhood in which a fight occurred to the police station or a court of law: nor is the order of recounting an event in everyday life in the slums of the same order as recounting the same event in a court under the pressure of legal definitions of relevance, direct witnessing, hearsay, and cross-examination.⁴ In other words, the story of a crime and of policing that one elicits through ongoing participation in the life of a slum might remain in the confines of this local milieu or it might move along different networks that draw upon NGOs, politicians, policemen, and become grafted onto other events, ending up in a court of law. However, we cannot simply add up the different components of these stories as if these were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that will “naturally” fit into a pattern. Instead, we might think of a fragment as it breaks from one context and attaches itself to another one in ways that its earlier location might be made to disappear or the fragment might disturb the harmony of its new location (see Das 2007, 2020).

      In a recent paper, Kublitz (2021) offers a fine example of marrying scale to perspective as she tracks the killing by the Danish police force of a petty criminal, called Omar, whose Muslim identity leads the police to remake the narrative of his killing by elevating his actions and attributing them to the actions of a “foreign terrorist.” What is interesting in Kublitz’s analysis is that she shows how simultaneously his life within the local-level gang-related violence is engulfed and made to disappear as the narrative of the foreign terrorist takes hold of public imagination and in the strategic reasoning of security forces. We can see that the more global story of Western countries under threat from Islamic terrorism does not so much contain the history of police actions and inactions at the lower level, as make them irrelevant for the more globally recognizable story and subsequent investment of vast resources in the industry of policing projects to combat radicalization of Muslim youth. As we will see in the next chapter, those who are attentive judges in the courts in India set up to investigate terror-related crimes always consider the possibility that the police are trying to solve the problem of gang-related violence by pushing the case as a terror-related case so as to avoid normal legal procedures.

The picture of parts that fit into coherent wholes is precisely what gives power to statist knowledge because the discordance and disharmony that would result from a mereological form of reasoning is made to disappear by the assumption that the whole by definition includes the parts, and that what is true for the encompassing whole (e.g., the state) must be true for each of its constituent parts (e.g., communities, families), since these parts stand in a nested relation where larger parts contain the smaller ones. As we shall see, this kind of formulation makes the specificity of local events disappear as generalizations are generated to tell “the bigger story.” This formulation invites a consideration of the possibility of alternate genealogies of sovereignty than within the statist ideology we located in the boundaries drawn between civilized and barbaric violence.

       Sovereignty: Alternate Genealogies

      The distinguished anthropologist and crusader for peace, Alex de Waal, who has studied the political processes of civil war and failure of international peacemaking pacts in Darfur over more than 25 years, argues that when we shift attention from theories of sovereignty that rest on assumptions of the state’s capacity to enforce order, to the domain of real politics, what we encounter is a marketplace of disorderly transactions at every level of the political system (de Waal 2015, 2021). For some other scholars, the conflation of authority and power on the side of the state signals an erosion of the authority of the people and the subsequent rise of populism and its right-wing manifestations (Bargu 2021). A puzzle remains though, for, as Lemaitre (2021) asks, how do we explain the faith people put in the law to put limits on violence, when decades of experience in the postcolony has shown that much violence actually resides within the law? De Waal writes from his experience of participation in peacemaking efforts and his ethnography of negotiations among high officials; Lemaitre writes as a lawyer and now judge in Colombia who has participated in activist projects with displaced women over a number of years. These experiences have given these scholars an acute sense of the contradictions within the law and a deep distrust of very neat theories of sovereignty.

As with these scholars, my own interest in alternate genealogies of sovereignty does not arise so much from abstract theorizing as from trying to make sense of the grains of experience in which these contradictory impulses toward the whole apparatus of the state were visible and tangible in the lives of people in the slums. I turn to Georges Dumézil, the scholar of Indo-European mythology, and his formulations on sovereignty, not because he provides some kind of master key to understand sovereignty but because the mythological