Abstract
In the face of mounting militarism in south Asia, this essay turns to anti-state, ‘liberatory’ movements in the region that employ violence to achieve their political aims. It explores some of the ethical quandaries that arise from the embrace of such violence, particularly for feminists for whom political violence and militarism is today a moot point. Feminist responses towards resistant political violence have, however, been less straightforward than towards the violence of the state, suggesting a more ambivalent ethical position towards the former than the latter. The nature of this ambivalence can be located in a postcolonial feminist ethics that is conceptually committed to the use of political violence in certain, albeit exceptional circumstances on the basis of the ethical ends that this violence (as opposed to other oppressive violence) serves. In opening up this ethical ambivalence – or the ethics of ambiguity, as Simone de Beauvoir says – to interrogation and reflection, I underscore the difficulties involved in ethically discriminating between forms of violence, especially when we consider the manner in which such distinctions rely on and reproduce gendered modes of power. This raises particular problems for current feminist appraisals of resistant political violence as an expression of women's empowerment and ‘agency’.
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Notes
A complex and contradictory formation, the ‘far left’ in India includes mostly underground Maoist (or Naxalites as they are locally known) groups that draw on variations of Marxism-Leninism and Maoism, united perhaps only in their commitment to the rallying cry of ‘people's war’ or the armed overthrow of state power. While not constituting a serious challenge to the authority of the state or even the hegemony of the organized left, the political might of the far left cannot be underestimated either, given the significant degree of national presence it commands today. It also has effective international links, such as with the Nepalese Maoists who, after nine years of insurgency and underground operations, have recently formed a coalition government with their leader as the new prime minister.
The increased participation of women in armed movements is not limited to south Asian countries; recent studies offer the basis for a good comparative approach to a transnational feminist ethics of political violence. See, for instance, Hasso (2005) and Hamilton (2007).
Titles such as ‘Women as Agents of Political Violence’, ‘Women, War and Peace: Beyond Victimhood to agency’, ‘Women and the Maobaadi: Ideology and Agency in Nepal's Maoist Movement’, ‘Ambivalent Empowerment: The Tragedy of Tamil Women in the Conflict’, and ‘Victors, Perpetrators or Actors: Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence’ speak of the wider impetus to affirm women's agency in violence. Outside of the immediate context of South Asia, there has also been an emphasis on moving beyond blanket and gender differentiated categories of ‘victims’ and ‘agents’ to recognize women's agency in violent conflict (cf. Giles, 2001; Moser and Clark, 2001; Hamilton, 2007; Coulter, 2008).
See, however, Sen's (2007) recent study of the women's wing of the Hindu rightwing party, the Shiv Sena in western India, which, she argues, provides women a degree of power and agency as well as a way of coping with a life of poverty and uncertainty.
It is also because we cannot know in advance the outcomes or consequences of the use of violence that violence (unlike power), according to Arendt (1970), can never be legitimate, but calls for specific justification in particular instances. Like Simone de Beauvoir, Arendt is critical of new left violence on the basis of the impossibility of knowing in advance the outcomes or consequences of the use of violence for political ends. For both, means cannot be clearly distinguishable from the ends they serve. In the context of political struggles, means also tend to overtake ends such that violence becomes an end in itself.
The Naxalbari movement began as a peasant uprising in northern West Bengal in 1967 led by a dissident group of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) who later formed the first of many Maoist parties in India. Popularly known as ‘naxalites’, they declared a ‘people's war’ against the Indian state structured on the Maoist model of protracted armed struggle. Middle-class students, who left homes to ‘integrate’ with the peasantry in the villages, emerged as an unlikely support base of the movement. The politics of violence that the movement professed cost it the initial popular support it enjoyed besides precipitating a brutal onslaught by the state that it could not withstand.
To take one recent example, Manchanda (2001a, 2001b: 81–82) mentions cases of rape and abduction in the context of the armed militant movement in Kashmir. Rape, she says, is a common way to coerce marriage or to punish state informers. Although she roots these atrocities against women in the steady ‘corruption’ of the militancy, there is less of a sense that such oppression is internal to the logic of militarist political cultures, and not merely an accidental product of their perverse forms. Such a distinction between a ‘true’ militancy and a ‘corrupted’ version (which mirrors the larger distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ violence) might also explain her more positive evaluation of the Maoist movement in Nepal.
Politicized motherhood is, of course, central to the revolutionary imaginary world over, from religio-political struggles to ethno-nationalist ones to secular left-led class struggles. In these varied contexts, the use of motherhood tends to underline the retraditionalization of women within the public domain. See in the context of south Asia, de Alwis (1998); de Mel (2001); and Haq (2007).
Young (2003, 2007) has recently unpacked the ‘logic of masculine protection’ in US security discourse in which a feminized ‘protectee’ is to be protected by the good violence of a masculine ‘protector’ against the bad violence of an aggressor. The rhetoric of protection also resonates with just war thinking in which women are ‘beautiful souls’ that need to be protected by ‘just warriors’. For a recent feminist appraisal of just war thinking, see Sjoberg (2008), and for an older critique of the language of protection particularly in relation to the state, see Sunder Rajan and Pathak (1992).
In a recent piece, Sarbani Bandyopadhyay (2008) observes how contemporary Naxalite-led movements in central India fail to question and thus uphold the patriarchal ideology of feminine modesty in discourses of community honour even when considering the sexual abuse of women. Such unquestioned patriarchal assumptions blunt the edge of their radical politics. While this article is exceptionally scathing of the patriarchal ideology of the Naxalites, it fails to unpack the patriarchal assumptions on which their defence and use of violence relies. As with most feminist critiques, the question of violence remains separate from that of women's emancipation.
On the limitations of binary thinking especially around power-as-exclusion and power-as-inclusion in Indian feminist thought, see Gedalof (1999).
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Acknowledgements
An early version of this paper was presented at the Silver Jubilee of the Indian Association for Women's Studies, Lucknow, 2008. I am grateful to those present for providing me with feedback and support, in particular, Disha Mullick. My thanks to Rafael Winkler for his perceptive reading of the piece at various stages. Without the intellectual generosity and editorial patience of Amal Treacher, however, the ideas in this article would not have come to fruition.
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Roy, S. the ethical ambivalence of resistant violence: notes from postcolonial south Asia. Fem Rev 91, 135–153 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2008.53
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2008.53