Faultlines of reason

The Communal Violence Bill has been doing the rounds. This essay is a response to the spirit of the bill.
When the National Advisory Council proposes a bill I see it in one of three ways. It represents the best of what I call civic epistemology. It harvests years of the wisdom of social movements and turns their interpretation into legislation. Secondly, it is an act of social activism telling the government about a certain sense of lack and how to remedy it. Thirdly, I see it as a thought experiment, a legal game asking us to replay it so one understands the logic of rules and its politics better.

Let us begin with the rationale of the bill. It seeks to address a lacuna, which argues that there is an institutional bias in the systems of law, administration and criminal justice when dealing with violence against a non-dominant group in a state. It takes as its evidence the various enquiry reports of violence, which show that there has been not just an abdication of public duty but a situation where justice as a citizen’s entitlement is not available or even accessible.
Two phrases in it jump into notice almost immediately. The first is secular democracy, the other, often hyphenated, is majority-minority. This bill is an effort to create a minoritarian justice. What does it mean?
Firstly, it uses the language of identity and identity politics. When a thought experiment like the bill is conducted, where secularism meets identity politics, the question one asks is whether justice is in the standardised language of secularism, or does it include dialects, voice and theories where local or ethnic ideas of justice are embodied?
This point was made in a different way in a different context. The cultural critic and historian of science Ziauddin Sardar once commented that as a British citizen and a practising Muslim, he had a double set of entitlements to the National Health Service. He claimed that he had a right to health and also a right to his own system of healing, his cultural notion of pain, cure, death and the body. This double entitlement stemmed both from his status as a citizen and his identity as a Muslim.
Why do I emphasise this? In a thought experiment, one expects more from the imagination. In fact, one would make the distinction that Cornelius Castoriadis made between the imagination and the imaginary. The imagination is the extrapolation of current categories around an event, a discourse or a text. For example, sovereignty, territoriality, federalism, boundary would constitute part of the current imagination of a nation state. The imaginary goes beyond the horizon of current possibilities. It goes into the future, it speculates on what can be. Consider an example. The imagination of riots operates almost with the imagination of disasters. It uses the standard model of rescue, relief and rehabilitation, with the usual language of compensation. Unfortunately the Communal Violence Bill still reacts to rehabilitation as if it is detailing an act of plumbing. There is lack of sensitivity here, a missing literacy.
The categories of discourse that the bill employs are still the language of majority-minority. The frame is the language of electoral democracy where minorities are often at a disadvantage. The question one has to ask is, does the language of majority-minority as group or collective categories vitiate the idea of citizenship?
Beyond categories, the operationalisation of the problem takes place in terms of administrative institutions. It is surprising to see people who have made major contributions to civil society opt for gargantuan bureaucratic structures.
There is an attempt to look at the responsibility of public officials both in higher bureaucracy and lower participants. This rings true. In the aftermath of Gujarat riots, which needed official complicity to work, only a sub-inspector has so far been arrested by the Special Investigating Team.
The bill seeks to create relief camps. But its sociology of a relief camp is not adequately clear. Relief camps become minor cities whose temporariness becomes ironic. When camps operate for years, they acquire a permanence where an internally displaced refugee becomes a new resident. Ela Bhatt of Sewa (Self-Employed Women’s Association) talking about violent conditions repeatedly suggests that what the women ask most for is work. But the detailed shopping list of the relief camps never mentions the return to work as a critical part of a return to normalcy.
I think the category of violence included in the bill lists riots, torture and sexual assault but misses out on terror. Terror also hints at the link between communal violence and genocide. Terror is a part of the aftermath of riots where the displaced victim is terrorised so as to prevent him from returning to his original habitat. Thirdly, the situation of riots is seen too often from a family centric picture. What one misses is a sensibility to fragmented groups like orphans, widows, single mother families. These construct the social in a different way and they are often victims of compensation conflicts between surviving segments of the family.
The bill recognises minority-majority relations as the stuff of politics and confronts it. Yet, the relationship is read as a dualism, a polarity, a situation that sees no web of relations between majority and minority. Processes like plurality, hospitality and reciprocity also need to be recognised and woven into the fabric of the social.
It has to locate this search for justice in the categories of a wider discourse. It has to ask: is the bill seen as fair and just by the majority? There is a chain of questions that haunt this bill, and I hope we have the time and patience to examine it critically.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social science nomad