Globalization, Social Movements, and Peacebuilding

3. Laughing at the Enemy: Rethinking Critiques of Communal Political Violence in India

69 3 Laughing at the Enemy Rethinking Critiques of Communal Political Violence in India 1 Dia Da Costa Focusing on discursive representations of the structural forces enabling communal violence (i.e., violence among communities of politicized religion ) in India, this essay critically analyzes the promise of grassroots cultural practices of peacebuilding in order to account for the success and limitations of everyday modes of sustaining just peace. Specifically, this essay focuses on a particular cultural action by citizens of the political Left as a primary means of critiquing violence. I examine three plays on communal violence by Janam—a theater group—that reject both neoliberal and cultural nationalist solutions to capitalist and communal violence in India. Janam’s critique thereby transcends the charge leveled 1. I am indebted to the generosity, intellect, and commitment of members of Janam, in particular Sudhanva Deshpande, Komita Dhanda, Moloyashree Hashmi, and Sarita Sharma. I gratefully acknowledge funding received from the Senate Advisory Research Committee at Queen’s University and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for making this research possible. This paper was first presented at a workshop at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Center for the Study of Social Movements, University of Notre Dame. I am very grateful to Jackie Smith and Ernesto Verdeja for inviting me to participate and for their leadership in this project. Finally, I thank as well Nosheen Ali, Alexandre Da Costa, and Jayant Lele, who offered their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 70  Discourses of Conflict and Movement against new social movements for neglecting analyses of market, capital accumulation, and class (Lynch 1998). As I will show, Janam’s everyday political action counters conventional liberal explanations of violence that routinely misrepresent clashing civilizations as causes, view failed states as bounded spaces, and champion neoliberal institution building as conflict management solutions (Collier et. al 2003; Paris 2004; Huntington 1993). Janam’s analysis joins the chorus of critical scholarship that has shown the ways in which neoliberal institution building exacerbates the global structural conditions of inequality, exploitation, and ethnic violence as norm rather than exception (Harvey 2003; Bernstein, Leys, and Panitch 2009). In line with these broader academic trends, explanations of communal violence between Hindu and Muslim groups in India have wavered between culturalist explanations that imagine communities of essential difference at war with each other and structuralist explanations that recognize the role of state institutions, political party elites, and “elite revolts” in fomenting the conditions and occasions of communal violence (Thapar 1989; Basu and Roy 2007; Corbridge and Harriss 2000). Janam contributes to the structuralist school of thought by situating localized conflicts within broader global forces of persistent inequality, exclusion, and redistribution (Pugh, Cooper, and Turner 2008a; Mamdani 2004). Janam has played an invaluable role in publicly challenging the structural alliances between neoliberal globalization and cultural nationalism. Its contribution to peacebuilding thus takes the form of consciousness-raising based on the belief that making structural forces underlying violence apparent in everyday public thinking will result in thoughtful citizen action against the forces of violent conflict. This essay does not set out to assert a causal relationship between Janam’s political action and outcomes such as solidarity and peace. Rather, it sets out to analyze the promise, significance, and limitations of Janam’s discursive forms of everyday peacebuilding, its truth claims, assumptions, and strengths. Despite its powerful contribution to public political action, I also argue that Janam’s attempt at mobilizing democratic struggle is constrained by a narrow discourse that inadvertently simplifies the problem of communal violence. In part, this is because Laughing at the Enemy  71 Janam (a) laughs at cultural nationalism and presents it as something that “others” engage in for their instrumental purposes, (b) collapses religion and faith, (c) homogenizes working-class communities, and (d) neglects the role of middle classes in producing communal violence. These factors arguably dissuade crosscutting solidaristic ties, but Janam’s weakness must not be viewed mechanically as a result of its affiliations with parties of the political Left. Rather, their weaknesses in mitigating ethnic strife are better explained by an unreflexive imaginary—one that could afflict state and social movement actors alike. Recently, critical analyses have pressed for attention to the agency of actual perpetrators rather than externalizing analyses of violence onto abstract state or “structural forces” alone (Mathur 2008; Shani 2005). A reflexive imaginary combined with a global...