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| National Questions: Trajectories & Predicaments |
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Amartya Sen on Identity and Violence
Contemporary dynamics of violence is deeply linked with the issues of identity. Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny is an academic exercise of laying bare the identity issues at stake, unravel related dynamics of violence and win the future of mankind—a future more of freedom and less of violence. The present essay is an attempt to enter into a dialogue with Sen on issues of common human concern. |
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| MONOCHROMATIC SINGULAR IDENTITY VS PLURAL IDENTITIES: We may now proceed to Sen’s central thesis on monochromatic singular identity vs plural identities. The thesis itself is a logical corollary of his other thesis that individual identity is predominantly a matter of choice. Sen’s thesis, which may also be called the pluralistic theory of identity, is that an individual has not one identity, but many identities. When a unique, singular monochrome identity specially based on religion is hoisted on an individual, he becomes either a victim or an active agent, of communitarian violence. There is a deep-seated link between contemporary violence and pigeonholing human beings to monochrome group identities. The dynamics of violence associated with monochromic or singular identity may be counterbalanced by a recognition of competing affiliation, a creative interplay of plural identities. ‘Identities are robustly plural; the importance of one need not obliterate the importance of others. Of the many identities that one may have, the relative importance attached to each identity is a matter of choice.’¹ When an individual makes social and economic choice, his identity, his belongingness to a group has a role to play. To identify the tenor of Sen’s argument the following points are to be noted. To identify the tenor of Sen’s argument the following points are to be noted. 1. Denying the importance of belonging to a group identity and its dynamics in the making of social and economic choice by an individual by abstracting him to the ‘economic rational’ man is identity disregard.(2) 2. To maintain that a person predominantly belongs to one identity is committing the fallacy of singular affiliation.(3) 3. An individual has plural affiliations, belongingness to different identities and groups. He decides what the relative identities are and weighs the relative importance of the different identities. Hence, choice and reasoning play an important role in identity dynamics.(4) 4. There is no naturally pre-eminent collectivity for an individual. There are only multiple choices of multiple groups.(5) 5. External influences have a role in the variation of relative role of identities. External influences may restrict or restrain the choice one can make.(6) 6. Some identities are fleeting and highly contingent, some more permanent. Classification and easy categorisation is cheap, identity is not.(7) We begin with the last point to enter into a dialogue with Sen’s thesis, on the ontology of group and individual identity, to be precise. Without entering into further foundational arguments, we will just assume that an individual has identity by virtue of his membership in a group. The simple question is what has identity to do with the necessity or contingency of this membership? Individual membership of a group may be a given, a facticity which he or she cannot change by an exercise of choice. Biological reproduction confers a primary and necessary group membership to an individual. ‘Primary’ because it is the foundation of all other group membership of an individual that are to follow and necessary because it cannot be changed by an exercise of choice. A person’s relation to his tradition may at first present itself as a given, a facticity. But a person may change his or her relation to the tradition. One may disown or escape from one’s tradition only to force land in some other tradition, as no man is an island. He who has the genius and creativity participate in transforming the tradition, thereby changing the relation between the tradition and the individual in the process. Tradition does change; the possibilities and frontiers of change are encoded in every tradition. Generation after generation, individuals renew the tradition through their acts of creation, decoding what is encoded, at the same time encoding new possibilities. Individuals live in tradition and tradition lives through the individual. The identity that a tradition confers on the individual is of a unique and complex kind—a process of identity formation that extends beyond the cradle and the grave. Group membership and identity conferment by virtue of one’s belongingness to a tradition has a kind of permanency and durability, which is not found in other forms of group membership. As individual identity formation never occurs in a vacuum, the decision to move out of one’s tradition ultimately turns out to be a choice to discover one’s tradition in yet another tradition. Even if individual belongingness to group identity gives a monochromatic character to individual identity, it need not come into conflict with an individual’s other group memberships. Nor is there any need for such monochromatic identity to be counteracted or counterbalanced by plural identities arising out of multiple membership of multiple groups. Traditions keep on changing, so shall individual identity derived from membership of a tradition. Hopes for human unity perhaps lies at that omega point of development where the dynamics of change in tradition leads to the emergence of one great human tradition from which the creative individual derives his or her nourishment as a free citizen of the world. Next comes the ontology of group identity. Living individuals give rise to tradition, which confers group identity to the individuals. But once it is created, a tradition has a life of its own, transmigrating itself continuously in the lives and works of the individuals, generation after generation. Tradition and group identity associated with it therefore exists in its own right. To reduce tradition and group identity to a summation of lives and identities of the individuals, therefore, is again a reductionist fallacy. A tradition and a group identity cannot and does not change into another tradition and group identity by an act of choice. It is only the internal dynamics that drives it to a series of transformation. Realising the commonality of humankind is not a matter of a tradition and collectivity transforming itself into the other, but rather each one running its own course. If at all human creativity and freedom is the source wherefrom tradition takes its nourishment, and tradition a process of decoding and encoding, then the dynamics of self-transcendence inherent in every tradition will lead in the end to a great human tradition. The monochromatic character of the group identity associated with one’s tradition need not really worry us. The dynamics of violence that makes a pretext of group identity is to be identified and located. In all probability, the root cause lies in the unjust world order, the relation of the oppressor and the oppressed that has been glossed over, doubts about one’s survival under the dispensation of the high and mighty. Huntington’s clash in reality is not a clash of civilisations but clash engineered by America to keep American democracy safe at home by terrorising countries and peoples, and theoretical legitimisation of seeing international relation in terms of clash an oblique legitimisation of American hegemony. Chomsky has so convincingly proved this point that we need not labour on it anymore.(8) |
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| DEMOCRACY, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: THE GLOBAL ROOTS: Sen very forcefully points out the global roots of democracy, science and technology. Democracy is governance through dialogue, debate, public reasoning and consensus. As such, democracy is founded on the capacity to reason and the disposition of reasonableness inherent in the human mind universally. As the domain of public debates on issues of human concern expands, on the one hand, and the character of the power exercised over people changes, on the other, democracy is also a process of the evolution of the free political being. Sen with his erudite scholarship traces the germ of democracy present in other non-Western tradition as well. It is true that European Enlightenment contributed a lot to the foundational philosophy and institutional development of democracy. Central to the doctrine of classical liberal democracy is the concept of individual freedom. This concept of individual freedom, as Chomsky has rightly pointed out, comes into conflict with capitalism in its modern form of corporate capitalism. Classical liberal ideals of individual freedom are more in consonance with libertarian socialism as advocated by Russell and Chomsky. Flowering of global science and technology is not an exclusively Western phenomenon, as Sen rightly points out. Non-Western societies—Chinese, Arab, Iranian, Indian and others—influenced the science, mathematics and philosophy that played a major part in the European Renaissance, and later, the Enlightenment. Knowledge travelled from the East to the West just as it did from the West to the East. |
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| RELIGIOUS AFFILIATIONS AND TERRORISM’: The West led by America is worried about the Islamic bomb, real and/or imagined. We all know how and why the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attributed to Iraq vanished in the thin air. In all probability, Iran is going to be next victim of American war against terror. The Western strategy, as Sen rightly points out, is to give the dog a bad name (monochromatic identity—a menace?) and kill it. Driven to the wall, the cornered dog fights back under the same name and tag. The fault lies not in the name, but the pretext for the name. The social, political and economic forces that go into the making of the pretext is important in understanding the dynamics of violence associated with the name. After Iraq, America’s pretext is wearing thin. As for terrorism, in spite of my best efforts I have not been able to find a definition or a paradigm that can help me in identifying a terrorist. Till the day of the final judgement, who terrorises whom will ever remain a mystery. In the war against terrorism, what matters ultimately is the politics of definition coupled with the will and the power to shape the world/reality according to one’s definition.(10) |
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| WESTERN AND ANTI-WESTERN: THE DIALECTICS OF THE COLONISED MIND: Colonialism wounds the psyche of the colonised people. The wounded psyche gives rise to negative response to whatever values associated with the colonial masters. The colonised people, no less than the colonial masters, need to fight against the sense of wound deeply embedded in their psyche. This, in brief, is Sen’s candid argument for self-transcendence by the colonised people. Many of the Asian responses to the West reflect this dialectics of the colonised mind. Needless hostility to many global concerns, including threats to democracy and personal liberty, the growth of religious fundamentalism and international terrorism are some of the examples of reactive self-perception consequent upon the operation of this dialectics. Sen rightly observes that a colonised people defining itself reactively in terms of the other, making identity thoroughly foreign dependent, is a kind of bondage. Within the logic of this reactive self-perception and self-definition ‘the colonial masters of yesterday continue to exert an enormous influence on the post colonial mind to-day.’¹¹ The West is allowed a free hand to appropriate global ideas, many of which are not necessarily of western origin. |
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| GLOBALIZATION: Sen’s basic thesis on globalization is: globalization is neither new nor necessarily Western nor a curse. In the globalization of knowledge, knowledge travelled from the East to the West as much as the other way round. For instance, the three pillars of civilisations—printing, gunpowder and the magnet—came from China. Indian and Arabic contribution to mathematics is quite substantial. The West did not resist knowledge when the flow came from the East. If the East is to resist now when the flow comes from the West, it will be plainly suicidal. Economic globalization has, according to Sen, great advantages that can benefit the poor. For the developing countries, it opens up access to modern technology, markets in the richer countries for a wide variety of commodities, and a higher say in the affairs of the world. The challenge here is, how to make use of economic globalization in a way that pays adequate attention to the interests of the deprived and the underdog. The counterpoint from the anti-globalization critics is that in globalization the relation between the rich and the poor is not fair. Sen’s views on the fairness issues and our counterpoints may be presented as follows: ‘The poor suffer from expulsion, finding it hard to enter global economy at all.’ Here Sen’s remedial measures are radical departures in domestic economic policies (e.g., basic education, health care, micro credit at home etc.) among the developing countries and liberal market access in the developed countries for commodities (agricultural and industrial goods) exports from the developing world. Our counterpoint is: ‘Admitting the soundness of the remedial measures, the existing balance of forces in the world will see to it that they are not implemented.’ The world hegemony of advanced countries led by America will see, through the financial institutions like IMF and WB, and also economic sanctions that there are no poor friendly radical departures in domestic economic policies.(12) This is the meaning of American pressure for economic reform, resulting in the suicide of farmers every year in India. The fairness issue in Sen’s view is also linked with distributive justice in respect of the gains of economic globalisation. Critiques of globalization deny that distributive justice and benefits of a global market economy can go together. The logic is that there is such a thing as ‘market outcome’ no matter what non-market factors are combined with the existence of markets. Sen’s counterpoint to this is that the market can be made public or poor friendly by social, political and institutional interventions, both at the national and international level. The so-called market outcome can be monitored to a great extent by creating various enabling social conditions. While Sen’s viewpoint is valid, it also raises the classic problem of who will bell the cat. For the decision to socially and institutionally intervene to influence the market outcome is, in the ultimate analysis, a political decision. The political will to take a political decision can be created in the governments if and only if the poor can rise as one man, nationally as well as internationally. No govern-ment on its own will intervene on behalf of the poor. For, the trademark of civilised government is to be on the payroll of the rich. And the rich will have no love lost for the poor except for reasons of business. Sen, of course, recognises the need for protest and hits the nail on the head when he says that the voices of global protest are part of the newly developing ethics of globalisation.(13) There is a world to be won on behalf of humanity and global voices can help us to achieve this. One can see here an affinity between Sen’s social and economic theories and Chomsky’s political theory of social activitism.(14) |
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| MULTICULTURALISM, PLURAL MONOCULTURALISM & FREEDOM: When different cultures meet at the distant shores of an adopted country (Great Britain or USA, for example), how do they say ‘hello’ to each other and to the native culture. Will they exist in isolation? One alternative is: cultures remain what they are, pass each other like ships in the night, without one ever meeting the other.(15) This is plural monoculturalism, in Sen’s terminology. The other alternative is for cultures to say hello to each other, probe and then interfuse whenever and wherever possible. In the process, the native culture as well as the immigrant culture may mutually change and perhaps all for the best. Individuals are to be in cultures, not by virtue of the contingent fact of inheritance, but by choice. Capability enhancement through education, on the one hand, and the secular democratic framework of the nation-state, on the other, would function as congenial conditions for the individual exercise of free choice. This is Sen’s meaning of multiculturalism (in contrast to plural monoculturalism) of which the necessary condition is cultural freedom: the freedom to belong to a culture by choice, not by inheritance. One’s belongingness to the civic society of an adopted country (especially if it is a democratic and secular one) need not be through its native culture nor the inherited culture of the immigrants. Confining individuals to their inherited cultures by training and education (like imparting education through the faith schools in Great Britain) in the name of cultural conservatism and multi-culturalism negates cultural freedom on which multiculturalism itself is founded.(16) Sen’s paradigm of multiculturalism is within the framework of a democratic and secular nation-state, Great Britain being an example of success story. While democracy and secularism are on their way to be enshrined as universal values; an inalienable part of any framework of Sen’s proposed multiculturalism, the fate of nation-state, is uncertain. The nation-state is a latecomer in the history of mankind. It may not, and also need not stay for all time to come. The material and moral development of mankind, the increasing need for human unity for the sheer reason of survival will be exerting pressure on the theory and practice of politics to evolve more universal and humane institutions. The need for justice and non-hegemonic world had never been felt so acutely as it is now. Suppose the nation-state is replaced by a World State or a World Organiza-tion in future. Sen himself recognises this possibility in the concluding part of the book. This will certainly necessitate a paradigm shift in our approaches to the issues of multiculturalism. When cultures are brought to encounter one another on a global scale, cultural conservatism may acquire an altogether new significance. The contextual meaning of individual choice of forms of culture may change, as cultural conservatism may now constitute an inalienable compo-nent of culture choice. The numerically aggressive culture may overwhelm the numerically defensive just by the inertia of conformism. An overwhelmed culture never allows its members to have a genuine choice, as one is condemned to choose other than one’s own culture, either this way or that way. This leads to the aesthetic dimension of culture. Culture is a form of life and as such, it is always wedded to a form of beauty, which lives through life of the individuals who are its members. To inherit a culture and be part of it, therefore, is an aesthetic commitment to carry on a form of beauty. Whenever a form of beauty disappears, because a form of life wedded to it disappears, mankind’s tragedy is re-enacted again. |
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| SEN AND NORTHEAST INDIA: Sen’s humanistic concerns started when ‘as an eleven year-old boy I could not do much for Kader Mia as he lay bleeding with his head on my lap.’(17) His concerns, subsequently developed through a broad spectrum, have profound implications for the unique human predicament that Northeast India is. The whole of Northeast India at the moment is on the throes of identity crisis. I have given elsewhere an analysis of this crisis.(18) Here I will just apply the Sen scanner to the problem of identity and violence in the Northeast India. Assam has been flooded with illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Former Union Home Minister L.K. Advani recently declared in a public meeting in Guwahati that the next chief minister of Assam may be an illegal immigrant. The silent demographic invasion by illegal immigrants has this implication—that, by playing the game of number, the immigrants capture state power, use this power to marginalise the indigenous people and ultimately rendering them strangers in their own land. The immigrants have one and only one identity, that which they carried along with them from their country of origin. But the moment they command majority, they seek to impose their collective identity upon the indigenous people. The latter in reality has no other alternative except to fight back for their own identity. Plural identities are a non-choice for individuals within the group, since they think that it is the group identity that will ensure their survival. It is this threat perception to ones’s survival under conditions of pathetic underdevelopment that generates so much tension and violence centering on identity-related issues. Manipur whose recorded history of kingship started from AD 33 (which marked the coronation of Pakhangba) was a sovereign country.(19) She was merged into the Indian Union as part ‘C’ State on 15 October 1949. Now insurgent organizations have launched armed struggles to press their demand for Manipur’s right to self-determination. Their demand is for a political umbrella to protect and further develop their collective (or what they call national) identity, holding it to be the foundation of an individual’s plural identities. On their part, a dialogue with Sen’s theory will bring forth a broad spectrum of points and counterpoints beneficial for all the parties in the dialogue. Northeast India also presents a mosaic of ethnic communities at different stages of development, each believing that assertion of ethnic identity is a necessary and sufficient condition of ensuring survival. Violence and tension revolve around the social mathematics of permutation and combination of ethnic identities. This renders violence and tensions related with identity issues all the more sinister and blind. In particular, some organizations are working with the theory that ethnic identity grows out of the barrels of the gun (poor Mao!). They are foisting a projected collective identity on the smaller and weaker ethnic groups at gun point. Sen’s theory will be an eye opener for them. At the same time, the theory will have to take into account the ongoing practices, the peculiar character of the deep-seated relation between violence and identity-related issues in Northeast India. |
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NOTES & REFERENCES: 4. Ibid. pp. 29–32. 5. Ibid. pp. 32–5. 6. Ibid. pp. 23–5. 7. Ibid. p. 26. 8. Noam Chomsky, Understand Power, (New Delhi: Penguin Books), 2003. 9. Noam Chomsky, Understand Power, (New Delhi: Penguin Books), 2003. 10. Soyam Lokendrajit, ‘Defining a Terrorist’, World Affairs, Volume 6, Number 4, October–December 2002, pp. 16–30. 11. Sen, op. cit., p. 92. 12. Sen succinctly takes note of these points in his Identity and Violence, pp. 136–46. 13.Ibid., p. 148. 14. Chomsky, Understanding Power, op.cit. 15. Sen, op. cit., p. 156. 16. Ibid., pp. 185–6. 17. Soyam Lokendrajit, ‘Identity and Crisis of Identity: A Case Study of Manipur’, in Naorem Sanajaoba (ed.), Manipur: Past and Present, Vol. 1, (New Delhi: Mittal Publications), 1988, pp. 223–44. 18. M. Rahman, B.B. Yadav, R.C. Dikshit, & T. Henry Raj (eds.), India 2004, (Government of India: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting), 2004, p. 798. 19. M. Rahman, B.B. Yadav, R.C. Dikshit, & T. Henry Raj (eds.), India 2004, (Government of India: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting), 2004, p. 798. |
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