Ruling Anarchy: The Labs of Boston, Woolwich, Chhattisgarh
by Farzana Versey, CounterPunch, June 1-3
“As we heard the instant matters before us, we could not but help be reminded of the novella, “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad, who perceived darkness at three levels: the darkness of the forest, representing a struggle for life and the sublime; (ii) the darkness of colonial expansion for resources; and finally (iii) the darkness, represented by inhumanity and evil, to which individual human beings are capable of descending, when supreme and unaccounted force is vested, rationalized by a warped world view that parades itself as pragmatic and inevitable, in each individual level of command...Joseph Conrad describes the grisly, and the macabre states of mind and justifications advanced by men, who secure and wield force without reason, sans humanity, and any sense of balance. The main perpetrator in the novella, Kurtz, breathes his last with the words: ‘The horror! The horror!’”
Blood. Death. Hate spreads. I do not know where sympathy
should begin and for whom, anymore. We know the bad guys, with cleavers and
rudimentary weapons, talking, walking with ruthless strides, dancing near
corpses. That they do not look squishy clean like our sanitised toilet bowl
gives us the power to screw up our noses.
The
horror
We have seen the horror in the last few weeks, the
latest being on May 25 in the tribal belt of India. Why is the
quote at the beginning important? It comes from an unlikely source. In its
report on the anti-Naxalite organisation, the Supreme Court of India pulled up
the government and got the Salwa
Judum banned.
The FBI spies on Americans. India sets up a
counter-insurgency group against its citizens. They might call it 'necessary
evil' but if after decades the problems persist, then it may be implied that
the solutions infect the problem, hoping the virus spreads and falls dead. That
is not how it works; it never has.
At 5.30 pm on Saturday at Darbha Ghati in the tribal
area of Bastar in Raipur district of Chhattisgarh, a state carved out of Madhya
Pradesh in central India, Naxalites
rained gunfire at a convoy that was on its way to bring about change
through its ‘Parivartan Yatra’ before the assembly elections. Over 25 people
were shot dead by 200; many were injured. The figures change, but that is not
the point.
The point is that this time it was not about
innocent civilians. Political leaders of
the Congress Party and, more importantly, Mahendra Karma, who started the Salwa
Judum were the targets. Although the Supreme Court disbanded it in 2011, the
very idea that the government backed a terrorist outfit to deal with insurgency
and got away with it reveals a conscientious and devious manoeuvre to obstruct
not only the execution but the very concept of justice.
News channels and papers kept talking about how
Karma was tortured. It was indeed brutal, as though the group was performing a
ritual sacrifice through this purging. However, in 2010 the same government
sent out photographs of a female Maoist’s body carried tied to a pole like an
animal. What was the reason for it? I had written
then that this does not send out a message to the Naxals, who are ready to die
for their cause. And it does not send out any message to civil society. The
last thing people need to believe they are safe from terrorism is to see armed
soldiers enacting a theatre of the absurd.
The
universal
Using a word like terrorism loosely is only giving
more teeth to the establishment to pursue innocents, who might turn out to be
what they are stereotyped to be. What puts the three incidents in diverse countries
on par is that ‘national pride’ was aimed at.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar once wanted
to represent the United States, until something changed. They then planned to strike
on July 4. The pressure cooker bombs were ready. They did a recce of police
stations, looking for officers as possible targets. They could not wait, so on
April 15 they struck at the symbol of hope and aspiration, of breasting the tape.
The Boston Marathon stood for all that is good – adrenalin throbbing in the
muscles of different-coloured bodies, flags fluttering in the background to
convey varied ethnicities. This was the mass congregation version of the
American Sweetheart.
The U.S. was afraid to bury the dead Tamerlan
because it feared the site would become a cult memorial. Something has got to
be wrong if this were to happen. But then, has not the superpower’s Department
of Defense called all protest “low-level terrorism”? This
is how it went about it: “The FBI deemed OWS (Occupy Wall Street) to be a
terrorist organization and went into ‘guilty until proven innocent’ mode. Many
of the FBI descriptions of possible OWS actions or those of affiliated
organizations like Adbusters consistently look to have taken the most
inflammatory snippets and presented them out of context.”
In Woolwich, Michael Adebolajo – a ten-year ‘Islamist’
(he converted in 2003) – was sought by M15, even offered cash. Just the sort of
guy in whose mouth you can stuff some food so that he does not rant against the
system and assists it. He, along with
his accomplice Michael Adebowale, hit at the concept of security in the form of
a young soldier, Lee Rigby. British Prime Minister David Cameron said,
"they are trying to divide us". Hugely ironic, considering it comes
from the masters of divide-and-rule policy. Much has been written about the
brave white woman who tried to reason with the killer. Perhaps, this is what
Cameron meant by ‘they’ and ‘us’.
He has set
up the Tackling Extremism and Radicalisation Task Force (TERFOR) "to
stop extremist clerics using schools, colleges, prisons and mosques to spread
their ‘poison’...It will also urge Muslim ‘whistleblowers’ to report clerics
who act as terrorist apologists to the police". This sort of vigilantism
makes everyone a suspect.
The Guardian quoted
former British soldier Joe Glenton, who served in the war in Afghanistan:
"While nothing can
justify the savage killing in Woolwich yesterday of a man since confirmed to
have been a serving British soldier, it should not be hard to explain why the
murder happened... It should by now be self-evident that by attacking Muslims
overseas, you will occasionally spawn twisted and, as we saw yesterday, even
murderous hatred at home. We need to recognise that, given the continued role
our government has chosen to play in the US imperial project in the Middle
East, we are lucky that these attacks are so few and far between."
How lucky, indeed. And this is heralded as a liberal
point of view, whereas it is just more shit hitting the fan. It adds to the
pan-Islamic prototype, of every darned Muslim being concerned about every
country with a population that follows the faith and could get murderous in
adopted lands.
Strangely, nationalistic fervour is a mirror image
of the Ummah it so detests. In Chhattisgarh, the government is treating the
Naxals as “kufr”, non-believers of poodle democracy.
The
Image-makers
The reason the subject has become an even more
important issue is because it highlights how the government uses subversive tactics
through insidious means. In the major attack on the Central Reserve Police
Force (CRPF) that killed 76 soldiers, the reportage and political drama hinged
on ‘embarrassment’ and ‘blot’. It was the image factory at work. No emotions
for the dead or the very reasons behind such insurgency,
