Absence of violence is not the absence of fear, says Devesh Kapur

Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur have co-edited a new book called Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State. DEVESH KAPUR discusses the trajectories of violence and order in India in an interview with Aditi Phadnis. Kapur is the Starr Foundation South Asia Studies Professor and Asia Programs Director at the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC. Ahuja teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Edited excerpts:

Tell us about your new book.
 

Amit and I have jointly edited this book, which is partly based on an examination of decades of official records — from riots to election violence, from caste to religious and ethnic violence, from insurgencies to terrorism, and from political assassinations to hijackings.

We find that violence in India has declined on many of these indicators — in some cases, substantially — compared to the peak quarter century from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. This seems very contrary to the general impression one has. We thought we would look at the matter more systematically.

Internal security has so many aspects. We thought this needed examination by people from many different vantage points. We got together political scientists, anthropologists, economists, lawyers, members of civil society, and practitioners from the field to cover various aspects.

We recognise that there is hardly any serious analysis about some aspects, like the ‘deep state’, about which you will find very little, not just in our country but across the world. But this is an intellectually capacious book that tries to look at this very complex issue.

Building order is integrally related to state building because the state is defined as the authority with the legitimate use of violence. To build that legitimacy, it has to make all other actors in violence illegitimate.

We try to show how different types of violence and order have fared in India. There is interpersonal violence, for which we use homicide data. Then there is violence and order related to society (like student protests, strikes, and lockouts). The third is inter-group violence — communal, caste, and ethnic violence. And then there is violence directed at the state — terrorism, insurgencies, etc.

In all four, there has been a decline. Homicide rates are 40 per cent lower than in 1990. Riots have come down to historic lows, lower than in the mid-1950s when normalised by population. Protests, however, have grown, at least over the past few decades. While gender violence is ubiquitous, since much of it occurs in private spaces (within households), it’s hard to get a sense of long-term trends since there just isn’t any reliable data.

All of this is based on official government data. We know there are limitations to this data. But there are no alternative countrywide sources for most of this data. In the few cases where academics have undertaken a similar exercise, official data is higher, not lower.

Law and order is a state subject, and most of the data is generated by state governments. The Centre largely collates it. We also know that in states, there are all sorts of parties, first information reports (FIRs) are not allowed to be filed, and all of that.

But what we are talking about are trends rather than levels. The levels are very likely to have risen over the years. But the trends, if you map them over time, show a decline.

Why have trends declined?
 

We don’t have a simple answer. But we do have plausible explanations.

First, enhanced state capacity reduces incentives for violence, though in some cases it increases it: mining, land grabs, etc. But it also gives states more fiscal resources if they have better-equipped police forces, much larger Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF), etc.

The second is related to societal factors. Inter-caste violence in particular has declined. Much of inter-caste violence in India was basically upper-caste landlords unleashing violence on Dalits. This is no longer possible, at least compared to the past. Today, Dalits will fight back. They will go and file an FIR, protest, etc. Even if the upper-caste perpetrator does not go to jail, he is caught in the vortex of a long-drawn legal battle. That is a big change in the direction of empowerment. There is now the realisation that it is not going to be as one-sided as it used to be.

The peak periods of communal violence were the 1980s and 1990s. After 2002, there were ups and downs but no discernible trends in terms of fatalities in line with official data. You do, of course, see a rise in phenomena like lynchings. But lynching is like terrorism, in that it doesn’t cause as many casualties as, for example, the Mumbai bomb blasts or the Gujarat riots. Lynching is more like terrorism because the intention is strategic: to sow fear.

However, it is important to emphasise that the absence of violence is not the absence of fear. A decline in violence does not mean a decline in fear. In China, there is much less violence. But there is much more fear. But it is hard to get convincing data on fear. The best we can say is that it is very likely that there is greater fear than before among minority communities.

All the data shows us that there is a persistent shortage in state capacity to impose order and control violence — police recruitment, courts, etc. Is this true?
 

Yes and no. The states have chronically underinvested when it comes to police and the lower courts. But because the states have underinvested, gradually you see a federalisation of law and order.

In the late 1960s, CAPF (like the Border Security Force and Central Reserve Police Force) was around 60,000. By 1990, it was half a million. Today, it is about 1 million. When police fail, like during the Jat agitation or election violence in West Bengal, they are deployed.

We’ve invested in certain aspects of capacity, such as communication and transportation equipment.

But the most basic administrative reform — limiting political interference in the police — has been wilfully neglected, as chronicled in a new book by Prakash Singh, The Struggle for Police Reforms in India: Ruler’s Police to People’s Police.

Could one reason for declining physical confrontation be that wars are happening on social media and people are tired after pouring their energies on Twitter and WhatsApp?
 

It is possible. But that is a fairly recent phenomenon. And it could equally stoke violence as well.