In his book ‘Identity and violence’, Amartya Sen has argued, I think more or less convincingly, that world over there is a growing retrograde tendency to take a deliberately restricted view of a human being’s obvious and naturally occurring spectrum of associations, loyalties or identities and choose to tag him or her with a particular identity, say a racial or religious or even a so-called civilisational one (a la’ Samuel Huntington). He has also argued that a natural corollary of ‘boxing’ an individual to an exclusive identity, such as belonging to a religious or a racial community, is the potential for communal or racial violence.
The arguments for the first proposition, remaining largely at an abstract schematic level, perhaps sound believable. There appears to be no dearth of empirical evidence from the umpteen carnages in India and the world in the last century (just think of post Babri Masjid riots and especially the 2002 Gujarat pogrom in the recent memory, massacre of Sikhs in 1984, periodic and serial bloodbath in Assam through the last quarters of that century, not to forget the latest one during July this year) that stand testimony to the tremendous persuasive power of the identity politics leading people to violence. Hence his second proposition also seems to acquire an indirect validation.
But whether a solitarist view of the identity by itself should invariably or always presage violence may require careful re-look at the empirical evidence gleaned from more elaborate or detailed analysis of sequence of events as a prelude to several large-scale communal or racial violence in different parts of the world than was possible in this book. This kind of conceptual moorings could possibly be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for much of the violence. The point is that race, religion, ethnicity, language may appeal, sometimes quite strongly, to any or all of us as an abstract idea of identity, but as Sen has argued, we have several other associations or loyalties as well, simultaneously, at any given time. Why and how some of us come to be persuaded to choose to be designated with one of these singular identities, for all practical purposes, in exclusion to any of our other loyalties and in an apparent disregard for the commitments or duties that those other identities might enjoin us to do or not do, may not have a simple causality as Sen’s book might tend to suggest.
At various points within the book Sen happened to mention the savage Hindu-Muslim riot during the first partition of the Indian subcontinent during 1947 and held this event as a sad, perhaps avoidable, example of the fall out of the confusion created among the people belonging to both religions about the primacy of their religious identity. The final chapter of the book (“Freedom to think”) begins with a poignant personal anecdote from Sen’s childhood days where he became exposed to a brutal murder happening under communal passion during the partition riot apparently close to his house in Dhaka where he lived with his father who taught at the Dhaka University. I will have more to say about Sen’s description and comments about this incident in relation to his second proposition. Suffice it to record here that it is in these final pages of the book we notice Sen’s sincere but unsuccessful struggle to find a rationale to the raw communal violence, that he witnessed as a child and which he possibly never could forget, in terms of a virulent brand of identity politics. This was as far as he went in constructing a theory of communal riots – a conceptual basis was provided. But it still begged the question : how was it successfully engineered on such a large scale ?
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