Bharat Bhushan: Frontier of warfare? Wrong to securitise civil society discourse
NB: A timely comment on a sinister speech. The NSA is telling us that civil society itself is a war zone. This is not surprising, as the militarisation of civil society is precisely the goal as well as modus operandi of totalitarian politics. This is nothing new. It was evident in the Nazi and Fascist movements in the 1920's and 1930's, of the Stalinist and Maoist regimes (and in Russia and China till this day). It was characteristic of Pol Pot's Kampuchea; of Islamist fundamentalist regimes, of governments led by Duterte, Trump and Bolsanaro. From one end of the spectrum to the other, all these examples of tyranny furthered their interests by making the whole social terrain a place for absolute enmity.
During the 1930's, the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt grounded his theory of politics and jurisprudence upon the idea that politics was defined by 'the friend/enemy distinction.' The Fuhrer's word was law, as he was the embodiment of the Nation; and anyone daring to criticise him was an Enemy.
Absolute enmity was elevated to metaphysical status.
In contemporary India, the frontier as been declared to have imploded inward and we are warned that 'lines of control' are to be found all around us, in residential areas, places of protest, even the very names of our fellow citizens. Let the NSA reflect in private, as to whether his own government has not been suborning institutions such as the police and bureaucracy, dividing and manipulating public opinion and thereby, according his own definition, hurting the national interest? Or is national interest only to be defined as the interests of the Sangh Parivar?
Actually the nature of their politics has been obvious for a very long time. DS
Frontier of warfare? Wrong to securitise civil society discourse
Painting civil society
organisations as anti-national is not new for illiberal regimes. What is new,
is the attempt to raise the confrontation between the State and civil society
to the level of “war” by India’s National Security Advisor (NSA).
In his speech to Indian Police Service probationers at their graduation
parade at the National Police Academy, NSA Ajit
Doval claimed, “The new frontiers of war, what you call the fourth
generation warfare, is civil society.” Wars, he claimed, had become ineffective
instruments of achieving political goals because they were costly and their
outcomes uncertain, but civil society could be “subverted, suborned, divided,
(and) manipulated” to hurt national interest.
If one views civil
society as a network of interactions composed of the intimate and unorganised
sphere, particularly informal networks, voluntary initiatives and associations
and social movements, then the NSA’s speech suggests that this entire sphere of
debate, discussion and public action has become a new war zone. The theory of
“war” he propounds, justifies viewing civil society as a potential enemy of the
State, to be put under surveillance and its activities restricted.
This is a “hard” repackaging of the antagonism that the Narendra Modi regime has shown towards civil society organisations. Suspicion of civil society in itself is not something new. After all, the celebrated case of Binayak Sen arrested under sedition law occurred much before Prime Minister Modi’s election in 2014. However, the 1870 colonial sedition law has been used to an unprecedented extent under the Modi regime.
Sedition charges have been slapped on students
for raising slogans that the government and the ruling party consider
anti-national; on civil liberties activists participating in the Bhima-Koregaon
meeting and allegedly for conspiring to assassinate the prime minister; against
critics of the Citizenship Amendment Act from eminent writer and critic Hiren
Gohain to students and others; against public intellectuals and film stars for
a letter to the prime minister against the mob-lynching of minorities
(subsequently withdrawn) and against 30,000 tribals from Jharkhand who restated
the special rights enjoyed by them under the Constitution on stone plaques
placed outside their villages.
The distance and
distrust between State and civil society has been taken by the NSA to
another level by formalising it as war. Doval’s speech justifying the
securitisation of the discourse about civil society flows from a grand
“historical” narrative of warfare.
Fourth generation
Warfare is a theory developed by William Lind and others in an article written
for the Marine Corps Gazette in 1989. According to them, first generation
warfare was defined by the use of massed manpower; second by firepower; third,
by manoeuvre; and now the fourth generation, by insurgency using political,
economic, and social networks to demoralise the adversary.
Critics of the concept
such as Antulio J. Echevarria II of the Strategic Studies Institute of the US
Army War College, have pointed out that the concept of fourth generation
warfare is bogus with no analytical value. He argues that the several forms of
warfare have always coexisted. For example, insurgency predates second and
third generation warfare (firepower and manoeuvre) suggesting that there is no
evolved fourth generation quality about it.
He argues that
throughout history, terrorists, guerrillas and other insurgents have tried to
erode the opponent’s will to fight through non-military means. The only
difference today is that with access to information and communication
technologies and global travel, terrorists and insurgents can strike wider and
deeper into society.
Terrorist groups
(Hamas, Hezbollah and, to some extent, even Al Qaeda) no
longer use civil society as their Trojan Horse, and have instead integrated
themselves into the fabric of the societies they want to control. Instead of
blowing apart these societies, Hamas and Hezbollah have
turned them into their constituencies by forging social, political and
religious ties with them, Echevarria argues.
This seems to apply to
South Asia a well. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh with its amoebically
growing fronts is the largest civil society network in India. The current
dispensation in India has achieved its ideological hegemony through such ‘civil
society organisations’. But clearly the NSA did
not have them in mind.
Except for Jammu and
Kashmir and parts of the Northeast, most of the violence in India -- beatings
and punishment lynching of minorities, harassing the critics of the government
and even ideological gangs on rampage in university campuses -- is today
located in radical Hindutva ‘civil society’ orgnsations. So it is clearly the
non-Hindutva civil society organisations that the NSA wants to target.
How has this targeting of civil society been operationalised and justified? Initially this happened through what experts call “policy laundering” – where international policies to curb terrorism were extended to cover measures which would normally not get approved by domestic political processes. The initiative of the G-7 countries in 1990 to prevent money laundering and drug trafficking led to creation of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Its guidelines became part of the good governance agenda of the 180-odd countries who joined FATF.
In
2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the development of standards to counter
terror financing was added to the FATF mandate.
Member countries promulgated domestic laws to comply with the FATF guidelines
– India did so in 2010 by bringing in a law to restrict and regulate foreign
funding of civil society organisations. The governments’ restrictions on
funding and curbing the activities of civil society organisations has been thus
“laundered” along with checking terror funding.
With the new laws and
the thinking driving them, the role of civil society in the formation of
values, norms of social behaviour, reaffirmation of collective beliefs and
values can be stifled. ‘War’ can be declared against those who differ with the
dominant identity and values being propagated by the State. In effect, the
public sphere where civil society creates a bulwark against the systemising
efforts of the state and the economic system is sought to be homogenised,
depriving it of autonomy. Creating suspicion about civil society and, equating
it with sedition undermines its robustness and contribution to nation building.
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