Dialect Anthropol (2009) 33:271–286 DOI 10.1007/s10624-009-9133-6
In search of certainty in revolutionary India Alpa Shah
Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
Abstract In this article, I focus on the dilemmas of a friend in Jharkhand who might have joined the revolutionary armed squads of the Maoist insurgency in India. I show how the question of why one supports a revolutionary movement, as well as the nature of that support, can change over time. In particular, I stress the importance of the dialectics between epistemological and ontological uncertainty and certainty, which may be central to the making of a revolutionary in a particular phase of a revolutionary movement. These dialectics are not just the result of an ontological uncertainty of ideological commitment to the movement, but are crucially also about the search for epistemological clarity in social relations imagined to be less opaque and hence more trustworthy. Doubt, an uncertainty about what one knows about one’s social relationships is characteristic of the epistemic murk that accompanies the breakdown of the normative order in the revolutionary situation analysed here. In this context, Maoist terror arises from the creation of epistemic clarity—the possibility that on the other side norms and relationships will be more certain. This is a certainty that is carved out of uncertainty and ambivalence, a certainty that denies or projects away uncertainty. Its weapon is paranoia, an ability to make enemies where there would be doubt, betrayal where there would be benefit of the doubt. The potential revolutionary is therefore not only unsure about his/her ideological commitments, but moreover, a crucial component of their predicament might be an uncertainty about the social relations in which they find themselves and the hope that revolutionary engagement might come with more guarantees. Becoming a revolutionary is also about being in search of certainty. Keywords Maoism India Revolution Jharkhand Motivation Certainty Betrayal Doubt Uncertainty Insurgency Terrorism Protection Indigenous A. Shah (&) Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK e-mail:
[email protected]
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What makes a revolutionary? One of the most intriguing questions about the spread of revolutionary insurgency, such as the Maoists in South Asia, is that of who is supporting the movement and why. While in South Asia it is generally acknowledged that the Maoist leadership are educated middle class intellectuals, often urban based and higher caste (Bhatia 2000; Shah 2006), the composition and motivations of the more grassroots support is heavily contested. The political commentary in general splits into two kinds of analyses. On the one hand, there are those who argue that the grassroots support for the movement is dependent on those caught between the fires, are often swept into the movement out of fear, or imply that it is false consciousness that accounts for their participation (Guha 2007; Guha 1999 (1983); Mishra 2007). On the other hand, there are those who are uncomfortable with explanations of this kind, who want to stress the agency of the recruits and who emphasise that the revolutionaries speak to a practical ideology amongst its supporters and nurture Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals’ and forms of class consciousness (Bhatia 2000; Kunnath 2006 and Shneiderman’s article in this volume). These debates are of course nurtured by a long history of discussion on rebel action, which goes back to the analysis of peasant movements as pre-political (Hobsbawm 1959) and to the assertion of rebel consciousness, even if theoretically limited in some cases (Guha 1999 (1983)), or limited to ‘weapons of the weak’ in other cases (Scott 1985). Undoubtedly the answer is not one or the other— motivations are not only likely to be different for different people, in different places and over time, but there are also serious questions to be asked about the concepts of individual autonomy that underwrite idioms of both resistance and subordination (see for instance the implications of the work of Mahmood 2001; Ortner 1995; Willis 1978). In previous writing (Shah 2006), I have explored how my fieldresearch in rural Jharkhand showed that the early (by which I mean the first 5 years when the movement was establishing itself in an area) grassroots supporters of the Maoist movement were neither ‘organic intellectuals’ nor were they acting out of ‘false consciousness’. The early Maoist spread in Jharkhand was in fact dependent on an educated rural elite and through greater control over a market of protection to access the informal economy of state resources. The tacit collaboration of the rural elite with the Maoists was an extension of rural elite activity in a pre-established informal economy of state development resources, for which the Maoists were only the most recent providers of protection. In a revolutionary context such as that of Jharkhand, support, however, can take on various different shades. It is one thing to support the revolutionaries by feeding them in your houses, or providing them with information about the local vicinity, or enabling their access to the informal economy of state resources, but quite another to become a recruit of the armed squads. Ronald Berg (1986) has, for instance, argued of the Shining Path in Peru, that support can vary from sympathy to passive support and active support. As the movement has spread in my field research area, and since I wrote the article published in 2006, Maoist activity has increased from control over the markets of protection of the informal economy of the state to
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recruiting candidates for the armed squads who will be posted in other areas. In this shift, people who were previously mediating between the Maoists and the state now might become potential recruits for the armed squads. In this paper, I focus on the dilemmas of one friend in particular, Chotu Roy, who might very well have joined the armed squads. In doing so, I want to expand the arguments of my early writings to show how the question of why one supports a movement, as well as the nature of that support, can change over time. In particular, I want to stress the importance of the dialectics between certainty and uncertainty, at two different levels of epistemology and ontology, which may be central to the making of a revolutionary. In considering religious subjectivity, recent research has questioned the certainty of values which characterise narratives of religious transformation. Matthew Engelke (2005), for instance, in his analysis of the early days of the transformation of Shoniwa Masedza into Johane Masowe, Africa’s ‘John the Baptist’, has signalled the importance of moments of uncertainty and doubt that are constitutive elements in the production of religious subjectivity. These are moments of ontological uncertainty, a questioning of what is or ought to be. Leaving aside the fascinating analysis of millenarian movements where political mobilisation is often led by a prophet and is directed by religious beliefs (c.f. Adas 1979; Worsley 1957), it is surprising how rarely scholars have explored the parallels between the transformations of religious subjectivity and revolutionary subjectivity, despite the centrality of the transformations in practical action and ideology that take shape in both cases. In this article, I argue that hesitation, doubt and uncertainty might well be constitutive elements of those who end up joining revolutionaries. While these lessons from the considerations of religious subjectivity are important, I want to argue that epistemological uncertainty plays another important role in the formation of revolutionary subjectivity. This is an uncertainty that is generated around what one knows about one’s social relationships and that is particularly characteristic of the epistemic murk of the revolutionary situation analysed here. The argument proposed is that the search for greater epistemological clarity in social relationships can be a central experience of those who seek to go underground as revolutionaries. Here, the parallel analysis from religious subjectivity is limiting, for while a central contribution of that literature has been an analysis of ontological uncertainty, the nature of the social relations which precede and characterise the transformations have surprisingly been rarely analysed. The case of my friend Chotu Roy shows not only the importance of the question of whether Maoist ideology was worthy of his support, but also how the dialectics between the certainty and uncertainty of social relations, which characterise the spread of revolutionary situations, can be central considerations in joining the armed squads. My argument in brief is that the potential revolutionary may be unsure about his/ her ideological commitments in their decision to join the armed squads (why and for what end). And, that a crucial component of their decision may be an uncertainty about the social relations in which they find themselves and the hope that revolutionary engagement will come with more guarantees.
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Into the heart of darkness It was a weekly Thursday market day in January 2007 in the town of Bero. I had just travelled a bumpy one and a half hour journey from Jharkhand’s capital Ranchi to get there. I took a deep breath of the strange but familiar smell of spices and dust in the air. As I closed my eyes, the beeping of the trucks and the buzz of people intensified. Leaving the main road, I walked up the mud track past the house where I had lived in 1999. I was excited. I was anxious. It has been 3 years since I had been back. I was arriving unannounced. This time I had a husband by my side. Old neighbours shouted, ‘Alpa, Alpa! You’re here! Come in! Who is with you?’ I promised I would return. My first stop had to be the house of my old friend Chotu Roy. As we turned into an alley, I expected to see the two brick rooms and the mud kitchen I knew well. But the landscape had changed. Facing us was a new pink twostorey building. A young girl in a yellow dress, who could not have been more than two, was playing with a miniature mud stove and cups and saucers at the bottom of a stairway. Before I could even ask for Chotu, his mother flew down the stairs shouting my name in excitement. News travelled fast in Bero. Behind her was a beautiful fair and slim young woman. Chotu was now also married. I touched the feet of ‘Ma’ and hugged Chotu’s wife. I introduced my husband, Rob. We climbed up the stairs; the ground floor was rented out. As Chotu’s wife lit a new gas stove to make some lemon tea, his mother brought my attention to her wood-fuelled mud stove on the terrace. ‘The chilka roti (rice chapatti) you love just do not taste the same on gas. So tell me, when can I make it for my new son-in-law?’ I laughed, translating for Rob. We were happy, joking and cutting each other’s words in our excited pleasure. There was much to catch up on. ‘Where is Chotu ? How is he?’ Suddenly there was a chilly silence. His wife’s face fell. His mother burst out, ‘You speak to him. You tell him. He will listen to you. He has to leave this town. He has to go away from here.’ My stomach lurched. I suspected the reasons. Had I not been in a similar situation 5 years ago? Did I not remember Shiv coming to me with the same request–to help him get away from the nearby village of Tapu where I lived in 2000–2002? Chotu’s wife and mother wanted Chotu to leave Bero to escape from the situation in which he found himself amidst the spread of the revolution. Over the last few years, this little known part of India, often considered a place where, ‘nobody goes, the wild east, the subcontinent’s heart of darkness’ (The Independent Magazine, 11 March 2006, p. 17), the forested plateau region of Jharkhand, Eastern India, has gained international attention. The media eye has turned to its ‘flaming forests’ housing the country’s poor indigenous or tribal population who are alleged to be harbouring the rural spread of underground armed revolutionaries, commonly called the Maoists or the Naxalites, heirs to the revolutionary ideology of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong. The Naxalite goal was seen as the creation of a liberated territory from Nepal to Andhra Pradesh and, in the late nineties, Jharkhand became a crucial territorial link. By the time Jharkhand separated from Bihar State within the Indian federal Union on 15 November 2000, three major Naxalite organisations–Communist Party
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of India (Marxist Leninist) Party Unity, Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist) Liberation, and the MCC–had made inroads into the area. The received wisdom is that Naxalite support in rural Jharkhand is buttressed by its disenfranchised indigenous or tribal poor. When the MCC, Party Unity and the Andhra Pradesh based Peoples War Group (PWG) combined to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (2004), Jharkhand, with its forest cover, became one of the major guerrilla zones of the Maoist party. Maoism, rather than just Marxism–Leninism, is acclaimed to be the guiding ideological force of the Communist Party of India (Maoist)–protracted armed struggle against class enemies with the objective to seize power not through participation in elections but through revolutionary violent activity to undermine the state. The new party is said to believe in a revolution against imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucratic capitalism in order to fulfil the aspirations of the masses for a stronger revolutionary party, and thus bring in a new democratic society by advancing towards socialism and communism (Communist Party of India (Maoist) 2004). Currently the Maoists are active in 18 out of 22 districts in Jharkhand. The Maoists run parallel governments in many areas in Jharkhand, holding Jan Adalats (People’s Courts) to settle both civil and criminal disputes, imposing penalties that range from simple fines to death. It is widely reported that between 2000–2009, well over a thousand people have been killed in Maoist related violence in Jharkhand alone.
The tensions of the markets of protection In my earlier writing (Shah 2006), I began to explore who was supporting the early spread of the movement as well as the related questions of how and why. Through my experiences of the initial spread of the Maoists in rural Jharkhand, I questioned the received wisdom that the MCC is a poor indigenous people’s movement against the state, showing the MCC’s early spread to be dependent not only on a rural elite (usually higher caste rather than tribal) intimately connected with the state but also that sometimes it was used by and worked in collaboration with state officials. I thus questioned the boundaries between the ‘terrorist’ extreme left wing armed guerrilla Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) and the local state in Jharkhand. I wondered about the extent to which it was in fact, to some extent, in the interest of the Maoists and the state to have rhetorical arguments against each other, whereas what sustained both was intricate interdependencies and intimate collaboration. I also showed that continuities in people are not the only basis for focusing on the links between the MCC and the local state. As representatives of the state had previously done, the MCC sells protection in return for support—itself an ambiguous commodity, sold to access the informal economy of the state, but also to safeguard from the possibilities of its own activities. The abolition of landlords in the early fifties meant that the rural elites, such as Chotu’s family, who faced a gradual impoverishment, increasingly attempted to sustain their lifestyles through state-related resources–whether directly (as in
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through government jobs) or indirectly (for instance through government contracts). They reproduced (in the case of the descendants of the landlords) or created (in the case of the newer elite) their position through extensive links with the state. They were entrepreneurs who maintained their financial position relative to the tribal peasantry in large part because of their ability to be brokers for the implementation of state development schemes, and concomitantly siphoning off money. The expansion of the MCC was linked to the politics of access to this informal economy of state patronage. In return for their co-operation in harbouring and fostering the movement, recruits in areas under MCC control were offered privileged and protected access to state resources. Hence, when the MCC arrived in the village of Tapu, they promised my friend Shiv contracts from the local office of the Ministry of Rural Development, the Block Development Office (Block Office). Most of the Block Office schemes involve construction projects for common use (e.g. roads, dams and community buildings) and required a villager as the contractor. As Shiv had done, when he built the first dirt track to Tapu in 1996, it was assumed that the contractor will siphon off up-to 10% of the total project money at the Block-level. Block Office contracts were, however, few and received much competition. To obtain a contract, a ‘source’ was necessary, a powerful person with leverage over the state officers sanctioning the contracts as well as the ability to threaten competitors and offer protection. While in the past this ‘source’ was usually a Member of the Legislative Assembly (or an aspiring MLA), the MCC started to take over this role when they came to the area. While for some the MCC guaranteed potential contractorship and the possibility to siphon off money, for others, such as Chotu, who operated more widely at the Bero regional level, the MCC also offered the possibility to better manage their systematic access to the informal economy of state resources. The state engineers who were posted to rural development offices in places like Bero were often fearful of what they thought were the surrounding ‘wild’ ‘savage’ tribal village areas in which they had to implement schemes. Expecting a reposting within 3 years, they sat in the safety of their offices while relying on the local expertise of informal engineers such as Chotu who roamed the rural landscape, negotiated with the varied political actors making demands on state officers, and ensured the continued implementation of development projects. In return, the officials gave Chotu a percentage of the illicit cut that they took for themselves from each project. When the MCC arrived in the region they used the threat of violence to demand 5% of all the large projects in the rural areas where they intended to expand. The savviest mediators in the area, men like Chotu, who in any case made it their business to get to know and be on good terms with the new powerful people emerging in the area, negotiated good relations with the MCC commanders. As a result of their ability to buy in MCC protection, they became used by some state officials and aspiring contractors to manage their competitors and pressures for project implementation. The net effect was that some state officers and contractors were asking for protection from the MCC to stave off competition in return for a cut of the project for the MCC. Thus, the MCC expanded into the area, entering a pre-existing market to sell protection and engaging in activities that were already established in the area.
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As a result of these findings, I argued that the MCC grassroots support is neither based on a shared ideology, nor on just the threat of violence, but on having greater control over what can be termed, a market of protection. Violence became deployed in selling protection to bargain for power and material benefits. In selling protection, the MCC competed in a market previously controlled by parts of the local state. Unveiling this market of protection, I argued then, was central in contesting the boundaries between the state and its alleged enemies, the terrorist, in rural Jharkhand. The individuals who mediated these boundaries clearly experienced significant tensions, however. At some point it was likely that the Maoists would call on them for support of a different sort–to either become sustained local informers or to join their red squads. In 2002, I had to help my friend Shiv escape from the village of Tapu where I lived then because he was under pressure to become an MCC informer and had no option but to leave the area if he wanted to avoid them. Shiv was a married man with three children and no longer keen to experiment with the particular models of masculinity, of being feared and fearless, that he had once flirted with as a young road contractor and that he knew was required of MCC recruits. Chotu, on the other hand, at that point an unmarried man, opted to tread the more risky path, and 5 years later was clearly more involved with the MCC. Nevertheless, in 2007, I now found him having similar dilemmas at the regional level to that which Shiv had experienced at the village level: whether to continue his activities, to join the armed squads, or to escape? The question was why and how had he come to be in this situation?
Becoming a suspected murderer It was a cold frosty morning in December 2006. The shopkeepers in the Bero high street were starting to open their shop shutters to expose their wares. Most of them were ex-zamindars (ex-landlords) from the neighbouring villages and had come to live in the market town of Bero in the last 15 years, making its population burst from not more than 1,000 to at least 5,000 now. Aspiring to join the middle classes, they had left the mud huts of the surrounding villages, come to diversify their rural livelihoods and become small-time business-men, upgrading their village mud houses to brick houses supplied with running water and sporadic electricity. Sambath Sahu opened his hardware shop and put his large weight on the chair at the front. ‘Chai’ he ordered. The little boy across the street was attentive to this routine call. He ran into the restaurant nearby and came out a few minutes later with a small glass of milk tea. Waiting for the tea to cool, Sahu took in his surroundings. Opposite to him, the pan-wallah (pan seller) was arranging his little bottles of paste, tobacco and leaves. In the distance, he could see a police car leaving the local police office. As he sipped his tea, a motorbike, flanked by two masked young men, screeched to a stop in front of his shop. Sahu dropped his glass. One of the young men jumped off. He shouted across the street, ‘Let this be a lesson to all who defy Bikram Bhagat,’ pulled out a revolver and shot Sahu in the head. He jumped back onto the bike. The driver revved the engine and sped off.
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Bikram Bhagat was reputed to be the new revolutionary force Area Commander. An internal split in the MCC meant that the Bero faction was now called the Jharkhand Liberation Tigers. Over the last 5 years, the revolutionaries had diversified their activities. While they continued to take a percentage off all state development schemes, in the latter part of 2006, they had begun demanding a hefty levy of between Rs 2–3 lakh (approx £2,380–3,570) from all the Bero shop keepers. Unless one had been actively supporting the revolutionaries, everyone had to pay up. Not even the small pan-wallah or newspaper-wallah was spared. Sambath Sahu had refused to pay. A friend in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand, emailed me in London about the incident in case Sambath Sahu had been an acquaintance. The murder had resulted in the posting of a police Special Task Force in Bero and had drawn her attention to the story in the newspaper. In the old days, it would have been almost impossible for me to verify anything about the murder without visiting Bero. The few phones in the town rarely worked, and letters hardly seemed to reach. However, a year ago, Chotu had acquired a mobile phone. I tried to contact him to find out more about the killing. The phone was answered by someone who refused to give his name, who refused to say whether my call had reached Bero, and who said that he knew nobody by the name of Chotu Roy. This was a strange response in a place where most people knew Chotu and, moreover, where people were usually extremely helpful in trying to locate others. Chotu’s mother’s plea asking me to convince Chotu to leave Bero only made things murkier, but things began to become clearer once I realised that the town of Bero was rife with rumours about who had killed Sambath Sahu, and that the number 1 suspect was Chotu.
Robbing shopkeepers I am neither interested in who killed Sambath Sahu nor in the question of who framed my friend. While it is indeed difficult for anthropologists to ultimately avoid assessments of the ‘truth’, like the contributors to Harry West and Todd Sanders’ (2003, p. 15) collection on ‘Transparency and Conspiracy’, I am not concerned about the veracity of conspiracy claims, but am interested in situating them in a wider sociocultural framework. Specifically, I am interested in asking what we can learn about the contested formation of revolutionary support through an analysis of the dilemmas Chotu faced. Sometime in the summer of 2006. Chotu was ready to go to bed. His phone rang. He recognised the number and wondered what the demand would be this time. He picked it up. Bikram Bhagat was at the other end. ‘I want you to collect Rs 30,000 from Avinash Maheto and Rs 20,000 from Mangal Roy. They are expecting you. Keep Rs 3,000 and Rs 2,000 of each collection for yourself. At 3 pm, Tuesday next week, wait under the mango tree opposite to the Forest Office with the rest of the cash.’ Chotu broke out in an immediate sweat. Until that moment he had been proud to fearlessly mediate relationships between the state and the revolutionaries. With
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some other young men, he had carved out a field for himself amongst the revolutionaries. He had got to know their local leaders, and was even getting enthralled by their talk of a movement against oppression and dispossession. He was one of the first points of call for all the demands that the revolutionaries made on state development schemes. As I have argued elsewhere (Shah 2009), taking money off state development schemes, especially if it was to be recycled for better public use, was generally considered a legitimate activity in the area. But this demand was of a different order. He was being asked to take the money of honest hard working shopkeepers in Bero. This was essentially thievery. For two nights, Chotu’s sleep was wrecked with fevers. How could he rob these men off honestly earned money? What would the rest of the town say? But if he did not demand the money Bhagat would be suspicious of why he ceased to support him. Was this a test of his commitment and loyalty to Bhagat? If he failed, the risk was death. He had no choice. He got the money. His conscience did not allow him to take a commission. He waited under the mango tree by the Forest Office. At 3 pm he received a call. The person at the other end said. ‘In 5 minutes you will see a bicycle driven by a man with a woman wearing a red sari on the back. Give the package to this woman.’ Chotu could not sleep at night. He was tortured by the guilt that seeped through his body—of being party to robbing an honest man. Moreover, he felt that all the townsmen were talking about him and the other men who were collecting levies from the shopkeepers for Bikram Bhagat. He could no longer walk through the town with his head held high. He was deeply affected by the fact that he had been party to this crime. He felt that he had betrayed himself and betrayed those around him.
Betrayal Soon, however, his sense of self-betrayal and his betrayal of fellow townsmen awakened fears that it was actually he who had been betrayed by others. He began to wonder why Bikram Bhagat has asked him, and not the twenty or so others who were also acting as some form of revolutionary agents, to take money from shopkeepers. The recurring question that now began to keep him awake at night was: ‘Who had put forward his name?’ His suspicion turned towards his mother’s brother’s son, cousin Gaurav Chatterjee. Gaurav and Chotu’s family were engaged in a tension over land. In the early part of the twentieth century, the king of the area had granted Chotu’s family some land to look after in Bero. While Chotu’s family considered the land as theirs, after Indian independence Chotu’s father failed to register the land in his name. Meanwhile, according to Chotu, Gaurav’s father acquired the registration certificates by persuading the current descendant of the king to sell the land to him. A few months ago Gaurav sold this land, making a large profit. This resulted in bitterness between Chotu and Gaurav. Chotu believed Gaurav had stolen land that was rightfully theirs. Gaurav was also known to mediate relations between Bikram and the state. Chotu suspected that Guarav had given his name to Bikram as a suitable collector for the
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levy from the shopkeepers. Chotu reconfirmed this suspicions after the murder. He began to think that Gurav and his family spread the rumour that Chotu had killed Sambath Sahu. In Chotu’s mind, Gaurav and his family were conspiring to cripple him. Chotu thought that Gaurav’s ultimate objective was to claim the land on which their two-storey pink house was built, and for which his father had also not quite acquired all the correct registration certificates. Of course Chotu could not know for sure whether or not Gaurav was behind the fix that he found himself in. But in the aftermath of the murder, Chotu did not pay much attention to the fact that there might be several other people involved. His immediate reaction and suspicion was that Gaurav was weaving a web to trap him. Chotu was sick with the realisation that those closest to him, his kin, were conspiring against him. It was a damming thought that the cousin who he had played with on a daily basis as a child, who knew him better than any of his friends, who was one of his closest relations in Bero, had become his worst enemy. However, 3 weeks after my arrival in the Bero area, and 3 weeks after Chotu had shared with me his doubts about Gaurav, another incident took place that made Chotu rework his suspicions about who had put forward his name to contract the Maoist levy and the related question of who had framed him as the murderer of Sambath Sahu.
In search of certainty A Monday in March 2007. I walked back up the mud track past the house where I lived in 1999. Shiv was with me. We were silent. I left Bero that day to return to London. How long would it be before I returned? What would happen in between? Chotu was waiting for us at his home. We sat on Chotu’s bed. Addressing Chotu, Shiv reflected on the situation, ‘It is impossible for you to break free of your past activities and to distance yourself from Bhagat. You have tried. After the murder you stopped all your Block Development Office work in the hope that Bhagat would no longer be able to pressurize you to make monetary demands off state officers and village contractors. You took up land brokerage instead. Like everyone in Bero who has a mobile phone and who is constantly changing their sim cards for security, you changed sim cards seven times. You hope that now none of your old contacts will be able to reach you. But really there is no escape unless you leave the area.’ He reasoned, ‘Perhaps Bombay is a good idea.’ Bombay was a metaphor for the market. In Bombay Shiv imagined Chotu working as a manager in a factory or a small business. Bombay represented a life away from both the state and the shadow state. Chotu looked pensively at Shiv and meditated, ‘Either I go to Bombay, or I go to the Saranda Forest.’ The Saranda Forest was a metaphor for joining the armed squads, for full involvement in the heartland of guerrilla activity. ‘At least there I will know who is who, I will have a clear sense of the command structures, I will know what my role is and I will be able to protect myself using arms. And perhaps, there I might live amongst people who are formulating a better world.’ Apart from being mildly attracted by Maoist rhetoric, he thought that at least in the Saranda Forest, he would have a clear structure of the hierarchy of relations above him, a
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predetermined role cut out for him, and he would no longer have to carve a risky path negotiating between unpredictable relationships. Ironically, Chotu wanted to join the Maoists because he thought they would behave like a Weberian state, with clear lines and responsibilities. Ultimately, of course, the contrast was overdrawn— part of the fear of the Maoists, as I will explain, also develops because people think that the Maoists represent this influential solid structure that they just cannot see. Chotu was in desperate search of certainty. A year later, in 2008, when I returned to the Bero area, Chotu had left. Whether Chotu joined the armed squads of the Saranda forest I did not find out and even if I did know, I would, for obvious reasons, not care to reveal. The point is that he could have. What I want to stress here is that: first, the characteristics of support changes over time–from being a mediator to the Maoists in the area, Chotu was considering joining the armed squads. Second, the reasons for support change over time. And third, that ultimately the dialectics between certainty and uncertainty are likely to be a significant part of the process of becoming a revolutionary. This is not just about whether one wants to join the movement or not (the ontological doubt and uncertainty involved in the transformation of the subject that are part and parcel of conversion (Engelke 2005)) but also about a search for an epistemological certainty, that is the conditions of social relations that are imagined to be less opaque, more predictable and hence more trustworthy. From an initial mediator of relations between the state and the Maoists, a man who facilitated the Maoist control of the market of protection over the informal economy of state resources through which the Maoists established a presence in the area, Chotu now considered supporting the Maoists by joining their armed squads. He was undoubtedly unsure about whether he should commit to their visions of a better world–self-doubt and an ontological uncertainty were central feelings that he experienced. However, significantly, it was also the epistemological uncertainty of social relations, what he knew about his kin and fellow townsmen, their intentions and motivations, an uncertainty exacerbated by the spread of the Maoists and his particular role in that spread that eventually led him to consider joining the Maoists. Witchcraft accusations, which have a long history in this area, also produce similar effects of uncertainty. The long history of anthropological engagement with the theme of witchcraft indicates that witchcraft efficacy is a direct function of the intimacy between witch and victim, and that the vast majority of accusations involve relations between peers and kin (Douglas 1970). Lessons from the analysis of witchcraft should be a central component of the analysis of modern politics, not only in the sense that ideas and practices of witchcraft are a response to modern exigencies in many parts of the world (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Geschiere 1997), but also because the analyses of witchcraft accusations might be tools through which we may better understand particular political processes (Caplan 2006; West and Sanders 2003). Indeed, Chotu’s case shows how the uncertainty in social relations generated by the spread of the revolution can work in similar ways to witchcraft accusations–suspicions of rumours surrounding murder accusations and accusations of revolutionary participation can become interpreted as a vehicle to settle longstanding tensions (in this case over land) amongst relations between kin.
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By mediating such intimate relations, witchcraft accusations have been noted to produce a normative order but they are also produced by and sustain a normative order (Douglas 1970). Arthur Miller, who was inspired to write ‘The Crucible’ because of the parallels between the workings of witchcraft accusations in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and the crackdown on alleged communist supporters that stifled the McCarthy years of the Cold War, for instance argued that he used to think, half seriously, that you could tell when a dictator was about to take power, or had been overthrown in a Latin American country when ‘The Crucible’ was suddenly being produced in that country (Miller 2000). In the context of the transformation of the wider political economy of violence, any notion of what is everyday, what is normal, what is ordinary is, of course, not a neutral category of description, but has to be historically and politically contextualised. What characterised the transformation of the normative order that accompanied revolutionary spread? One common answer is ‘a culture of fear’ or a ‘culture of terror’. Indeed, it is tempting to argue, as Linda Green (1999), so poignantly has done of Guatemala, that the effects of the revolution and state responses has meant that fear is not just a response to danger, is not just a subjective personal experience, but has penetrated the social memory: fear is a way of life. While Green’s descriptions are emotive, the Bero case illuminates that fear is not just the abstract status quo in a violent, revolutionary or post conflict context. As social scientists, it is important for us to analyse the changing historical, social and political contexts through which fear develops. There is a transformation in the normative order, which accompanies the revolutionary spread, and which is characterised by the potential conditions for enhanced uncertainty of social relations. The experience of fear is a product of this uncertainty of social relations. How have the conditions for the enhanced uncertainty of social relations developed? In the shadows of violence, Das et al. (2000) argued, there is often a slow erosion through which loss of trust in one’s known world takes place, through which people’s access to established contexts and trusted categories disappears. The specific meanings of attempts to live ‘ordinary life’ must be placed, as Tobias Kelly (2008) argued in his study of the West Bank, in the context of a wider political economy of violence. In my earlier work, I showed that with the presence of the Maoists, the wider organisation of violence in the Bero area has transformed. I argued that the MCC sold protection to its supporters by spreading the idea of its increasing coercive control of the area. It took over all the private arms in the area and produced a fear of itself by creating an imagination of the MCC as a highly centralised, hierarchical and organised movement, with clandestine operations, opaque secrets and hidden resources. Uncertainty about the size and range of the movement was central to the spread of the movement and was created by both a cloud of secrecy and the breach of secrecy that accompanied its spread–the leak here and there that the MCC had arrived in x village, was planning y case. An idea was generated that the MCC are or could be anywhere and everywhere. In areas of new expansion, it was easy for someone to suspect that anyone could be involved; for this to create the impression that everyone is involved; for that someone to then become involved; for this to result in everyone feeling like that someone; leading to
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everyone being involved. This generated normative uncertainty of knowing who was a Maoist, a villager or a state official, an uncertainty of one’s social relations, was crucial to the spread of the movement. People like Chotu who supported the movement as local mediators, experienced this uncertainty through the specific relationships of ambiguity and opacity that characterise living and working between the state and the shadow state. Whereas before the arrival of the Maoists, Chotu was negotiating relations between the state and the politicians, now he was negotiating relations between the state, the politicians, the revolutionaries, as well as all the interrelations between them that can lead to all three being one and the same thing. This situation created a new degree of opacity of local politics. This was not just a normative uncertainty of roles (who is a state official, who is a revolutionary), but a situation when it was never clear who was connected to whom, how, why and at what point this might change. He was constantly negotiating relations between people but he felt could he no longer build relationships of trust as there was little transparency to social relationships. As a result he did not know whether he might become a pawn to be sacrificed between a set of relations that he could never fully understand. He could not know who had stabbed him in the back, when and why, and who had the potential to do so in the future. He was worried about the way in which ongoing tensions between people flared up in unexpected ways. The fear was that family, neighbours and townsmen might seek to settle old scores with violence through the revolutionaries or in their name. It was not just a fear of people like Bikram Bhagat but was fear of those he know well and how they might be the harbours or potential harbours of violence that might creep through the cracks of their homes, in places least expected. As is also noted by some of the other contributors to this volume (see de Sales and Lecomte-Tilouine), more than the threat of physical violence, the threat to life or death, this fear thrives on ambiguity, disorder, mystery and uncertainty. With the backdrop of this transformed normative order, that is the social ontological breakdown of the norms and relations by which a person has lived, Chotu was forced first to betray himself by having to take the levy off the shopkeepers, breaking his own principles of what he considered moral action. While siphoning off money from state development resources was moral (Shah 2009), taking honestly earned money off a local shopkeeper was not. In a recent book, Turnaturi (2007) argues that it is the relational nature of betrayal that makes it so feared. ‘Always and in all circumstances betrayal involves the rupture of a pact, the negation of the principle of cohesion, and a threat to the possibility of all relations. Whether one betrays another individual or a community of which one is a part, the act implies breaking some social bond. Above all and on the symbolic level, it negates the principle of cohesion on which ties, bonds, and loyalties rest. Precisely because it threatens the survival of the relationship itself or of the group, betrayal is the threat to the social order most to be feared; it is the most significant symbolic break’(p. 28). This moment of betrayal is perhaps equivalent to the moment of conversion. It is the moment when Chotu had to choose to stand against or be subservient to the threat over his life. At this point, he realised that the violence from which he was
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profiting was now also a threat to him. He did not have the necessary means himself to gain sufficient force to secure his physical life. This was then the moment that tested his own moral convictions–the fact that he did not want to rob the shopkeeper–and led to his betraying them. As a result of this low point, the question of whether his moral convictions would be replaced by other moral convictions and political commitments was opened up. Any new moral convictions would prove to be an escape from (not a resolution to) the betrayal of his moral standards and they would disguise, deny or hide the new moral standards rather than replace the old ones. Being unable to sleep because of his actions, Chotu was soon overcome by questions of how he arrived at this point in the first place: who put his name up for taking the levy? And then, after the murder of Sambath Sahu, the question of who framed him as the murderer? Chotu’s betrayal of himself and his fellow townsmen made him question all the relations around him and the norms by which he lived. His own acts of betrayal made him suspicious of others betraying him. Turnaturi (2007) argues that betrayal forces us to ‘erase the image of ourselves that we have constructed together with the other, the image of the other that we have created, and the image of ourselves as part of that shared experience. In this sense, betrayal is a devastating experience because it forces us to redefine ourselves, to raise questions about the other and about ourselves in combination with the other.’ (p. 29). Her implication is that we begin to fear that many of the relationships of which we are a part might collapse. ‘Uncertainty (my emphasis) takes the place of all previous security, and everything seems fragile, precarious and illusory. In this sense, betrayal is a traumatic experience that destabilizes identity, because it throws into crises both interpersonal trust and trust in oneself.’ (p. 28). Chotu drove himself to a situation of suspicion and paranoia because his disbelief of his own deeds made him question the deeds of others. His anxieties transformed into fear, a paralyzing inability to act, and to distrust–he could not live with it. His desperation opened up new moral possibilities for him and forced him into the following dilemma: either to join the armed squads or to escape from the area. His considerations in joining were neither just out of fear of the Maoists nor out of total conviction for a shared ideology, but because of the uncertainty that his involvement with the Maoists has precipitated. This uncertainty was not merely ontological, as scholars of religious subjectivity have argued accompany conversion, but it was especially a product of the epistemological uncertainty and unpredictability that characterise social relations in revolutionary contexts. Chotu’s considerations in becoming a revolutionary were then above all marked by the dialectics between certainty and uncertainty–the tension between the unpredictability of social relations, and his attempts at fixing these relations. In the Colombian Putamayo basin described by Michael Taussig (1987), the rubber planters who ruled by terror created an epistemic murk that was used and kept murky both for healing, shamanism and sorcery, and for superprofitable exploitation out of the organisation of force and threat. By contrast, in the epistemic murk that accompanies the breakdown of the normative order in Jharkhand, Maoist terror arises from the creation of epistemic clarity—the possibility that on the other side norms and relationships will be more certain. This is a certainty carved out of uncertainty and
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ambivalence, a certainty that denies or projects away uncertainty. Its weapon is paranoia, an ability to make enemies where there would be doubt, betrayal where there would be benefit of the doubt. In this context, becoming a revolutionary is also about being in search of certainty. Acknowledgments Denis Rodgers, Tobias Kelly and Stephan Feuchtwang have been particularly thought provoking interlocutors to the arguments presented here. I am also grateful to participants at the British Academy workshop, whose papers and discussions form the basis of this volume, as well as those at the Micro-politics of Armed Group Workshop hosted by the International Relations Department at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Markets for Peace Network hosted by the Danish Institute for International Studies for their discussions of a version of this paper.
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