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Civic Virtue and Social Hurt: Why Emotions Matter for the Politics of the Oppressed?

Ganesh Gaigouria

 

“In Hathras, cops barricade a raped woman’s home,

hijack her corpse, set it afire on a murderous night,

deaf to her mother’s howling pain. In a land where

Dalits cannot rule; they cannot rage or even mourn.

This has happened before; this will happen again.”

                                         - Meena Kandasamy


The violence and atrocities towards marginalised communities have been growing at large, and the suffering and pain are apparent in our everyday newsrooms in contemporary India. The recent heartbreaking violence, rapes, and killing of the Kuki women in Manipur brought the debates of racism and gender into the limelight. The response of the state to the atrocities in Manipur were too little, too late.  But the question arises: to what extent does the basic human civility of society and civic virtue of our republic remain moral and sustained when such horrific crimes play out on social media in the 21st century? The crimes against women in public before and after Manipur show the unending battle for self-respect and dignity for women and other oppressed groups — be it the Nuh Haryana or Hathras rape and murder cases or other everyday crimes and rape against women and Dalits. These painful events have become the everydayness that is visible as the normality of oppression towards women and other oppressed communities. These incidents showcase citizens’ hopelessness towards the modern nation-state and its legal structure in a way that they can no longer attach their belonging to the republic, which was the core idea of forming the nation-state.  The idea of a republic represents the feelings of we-ness despite the diversity of class, caste, religion, region, and language. This republican idea of collectiveness facilitates the consolidation of the nation-state among the many subnational identities based on diversified cultures.  Therefore, Yogendra Yadav called India a “state-nation” which consolidate many sub-national identities into a nation through the democratic idea of a republic.


Despite the heterogeneity of the Indian ‘nation’, the notion of belonging was the core emotional attachment among the people of India in which the nation-state attempted to constitute an imagined community.  However, such horrible events of racism, linguicism, sexism, or fanaticism reflect the contrasting of diversity for the ethics of belonging and compel us to think about the politics of belonging. The current political regime has instituted a project of changing the notion of belonging from being centred around the nation-state to the Hindu nation-state. The real sense of our nation started with the word “we, the people of India,” because of the diversity of language, region, culture, race and ethnicity. But the constant slogan of Hindu Rashtra echoes the exclusive agenda of the formation of the racist nation-state with the idea of Akhand Bharat or Aryabart. This exclusive belonging based on a particular race/religion is fatal for a diversified nation like India. Neera Yuval Davis tells us: “the politics of belonging comprise specific political projects aimed at constructing belonging to particular collectivity/ies which are themselves being constructed in these projects in very specific ways and very specific boundaries.” (p10)


The complete proscription of violence and atrocity over Dalits, Adivasis, and women are far away in the form of dreams and hope alone. The particular group's exclusive imagination of the Hindu Rasthra and the non-responsive attitude of the state and its institution compel the marginalised communities to rethink their autonomous agency for seeking justice and rights. The independent Indian elite imagined the nation-state as the principle of civic virtue in a new republic amidst the diversity of the nation.  But after looking at this increasing lawlessness and atrocious events, it seems that the accommodative nature of our nation has been paralysed, and social hurt onset as a catastrophe for the republic. 


The Collapse of Civic Virtue is the Onset of Social Hurt


The independent Indian Constitution endeavours to establish a shared relationship among the people of India across caste, gender, religion, and regional lines based on the rule of law. To maintain the rule of law, it is necessary to adhere to and propel civic virtue in the republic. Civic virtue implies that different communities respect each other’s cultural practices and adhere to the principles of mutual recognition in the purview of law and institutions. It implies harmony and participation in the process of governance and society, as well as individual qualities associated with the effective operation of civil and political order or preservation of its values and principles.  However, the majoritarian culture and racism always create a communal contestation among the people of India. Despite having the legal institution and police system for the protection of the marginalised and the special legislation enshrined to prevent crimes and the provision of punishment, wrongdoers are not brought to justice for perpetrating atrocities and being involved in brutal violence. As per the NCRB report, 2022 crimes against women, children, senior citizens, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes show a steep increase, 468 people took their lives every day in 2022 and cyber crimes went up by nearly 25 per cent.” The surprising fact is that those who are very powerful and have officiated, positioned, and are aware of the law and legal provisions are either involved in this heinous criminality or protect these criminal activities.


Therefore, the question arises whether the rule of law and legal institutions are unable to provide justice for the weaker/oppressed section of society or whether it is just in the official documents, sociologically invisible, ignorant on the ground, or pretentiously working for the dominant section of people who know how to escape from the law. If so, where does the oppressed community go for justice, and what is the meaning and essence of establishing the institutions of law or legal structure? Anupama Rao claims that the law could be self-defeating by stressing that “laws to protect Dalit victims could impart a spurious legitimacy to treating stigmatised existence as the status quo.” (p 223) The belongingness of marginalised communities towards the state is no longer obvious due to the state’s incapacity to prevent the persistent injustice, everyday torture, and violence against them, and the violation of their natural human rights.


The contention among the state, dominant sections, and marginalised communities began to cause trouble in society and its political culture, leading to a collapse of civic virtue. The oppressed community are experiencing hopelessness and living in a room of anxiety and fear, which translates into the onset of social hurt. Social hurt is the painful event and experience of actual or potential psychological distance from other people or social groups.  Here, social hurt configures the everyday crimes against the marginalised communities, which are even reluctant to be acknowledged by the so-called civilised people or even the agents of the state. This lack of acknowledgement of everyday crimes has fractured the sociability of belonging and resulted in social hurt. 


When the civic virtue of a republic collapses, social hurt spreads like a volcano and translates into the form of solidarity and fight for the protection for the rights, dignity and self-respect of the oppressed community in the form of emotions like anger, hope and desire. So, the social hurt recovers and repatriates through protests and marches outside the purview of the republic and its institutions. In the context of India, it is visible around the street protests as well as the body of masses assembling voluntarily for the resistance against atrocity and oppression. The demonstration includes the different Dalit groups assembled against the Hathras’ rape and murder case, Rohit Vemula’s suicide case, and the Una Uprising, and ethnic groups protesting against the Manipur rape and murder case. This voluntary and sporadic protest occurred due to the affective turn of people, which came out of emotions of pain, anger, and desire for change in the social and political structure. Philosopher Michel Hardt configures the current protest and demonstration as no longer dependent upon a representative or leader-centric in democratic politics; it has become leaderless, spontaneous and sporadic. These sporadic and spontaneous protests against the authority have been made possible through the affective (emotional) mode of politics.


Emotions and the Politics of the Oppressed 


When the legal institutions and their mechanisms are unable to reach or find a way out of the problem of marginalised communities, emotional belonging strongly arises and becomes visible as a road map for justice. This is not visible as an idea of the imagined nation but rather as the collective emotion of the community.  Here, specific communities share their fellow feelings, resist, and struggle for their dignity and self-respect with the community’s shared values. In an interview, Binalakshmi Nepram echoes sobbingly, “We, the women of Manipur, are crying; this is not the India that we dreamed up, the country with the largest democracy.” This vociferous outrage of a woman questions the true meaning of the republican idea of nation and “we the people of India” enshrined in our Constitution. This hopelessness, pain, anguish, courage to speak, and desire for a change display anger, and the anger is the only way left for their resistance and survival. This voice of a woman not only represents the harm of the dignity and self-respect of one person but simultaneously represents the harm of the community as a whole, rendering the social hurt. Here, the community as a whole is humiliated.


Likewise, the Hathras rape and murder or Rohit Vemula’s institutional murder happened due to their belonging to a certain caste.  These two incidents, too, hurt not only the individual as a self but also the Dalit as a group. Both the victims sobbed with pain, sadness, helplessness, fear, and anxiety. Anybody who belongs to this community can feel the trauma and suffering of the incident. This piece argues that oppressed communities no longer rely on institutions but embody emotions like anger and pain to help them fight against everyday atrocities and psychological trauma, thus bolstering their protest and resistance for dignity and self-respect. 


The emotional outrage of an individual belonging to an oppressed community encourages them to come together against acts of brutal violence and provides a feeling of we-ness. The emotions create a sense of we-ness in the chaos of ‘I’ and you. Brahma Prakash portrays: “‘we’ is I and you. It is I and you, and you and you and you and you. We is the idea of coming together, in body and words, in alliances of bodies, in promised words that form a collective. But ‘we’ is the problem here. Perhaps it is the most fundamental problem of politics………. But ‘we’ also reminds us of our shared humanity, commonality, our deep emotions that connect our emotional universe despite all the fractures and holes.” (p 27) 


Anger, in particular, has the capacity to fuel courage and confidence amongst the masses for protests and create congruence with a feeling of we-ness. Black rights activist bell hook states, “for across all differences of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion was a shared realm of emotional feelings.” As such, it can play a positive role in redressing its harms. Since the trauma occurred due to belonging to a particular group identity, the cure is only possible through fellow feelings and solidarity. The solidarity comes through protest. To underscore such questions, social movements and protests only have a place for dignity and self-respect and a sense of hope for justice for the oppressed community. German philosopher Jürgen Habermas defined solidarity as: “Solidarity is rooted in the realization that each person must take responsibility for the other because as consociates, all must have an interest in the integrity of their shared life context in the same way.” (p 42) 


The normative Brahminical ideal of emotionlessness often advocates for the morality of calm and peace: if you are hurt, do not retaliate. Emotion is a dangerous stimulus for the moralist for disciplinary social conduct. But when the dominant social order consistently operates and tortures the oppressed section, how long would the oppressed stay in the position of morality and be nonresponsive, rather than respond in the form of anger? In his seminal work Black Skin White Masks, Franz Fanon urges contrasting views on ‘retaliation’ through anger and shows us that anger can be a moral means of resistance for a racially discriminated person.  Fanon writes, “Where should I put myself now on? I can feel the familiar rush of blood surge up from the numerous dispersions of my being. I am about to lose my temper. The fire had died a long time ago, and once again the Negro is trembling.” (p 94) This expression of Fanon has the potential to argue that anger has a moral means of boosting courage among the marginalised. Anger, as an emotion that rises out of pain, intends to construct courage among the marginalised community to express their humiliation and resist against atrocities. In this realm, anger has a moral intensity, unlike revenge, which works for the politics of the oppressed because it has a distinctive linguistic code of protest, ensuring self-respect and dignity without harming others. Cellini Lebouf argues, “Still, anger should not be dismissed altogether: if it can transform the experiences of the oppressed for the better, then there is a place for this emotion in combating injustices.” (p 15)


In 2016, when a massive lynching of Dalits took place in Una (Gujarat), seven Dalits were tortured under the pretext of cow protection in the presence of police. After this torture, Una Dalit Atyachar Ladak Samiti formed to counter this so-called genius and reputed Brahminical hegemony of social and cultural ostracism against Dalits under the leadership of Jigensh Mewani. This pain fueled anger and translated it into mass protest and resistance to fight against injustice and democratic politics across India. Another example of the implication of anger is Rohit Vemula’s suicide case. However, the suicide of an individual did not lead to anger, but the aftermath of the suicide led to public outrage. Pushpa Iyer argues:


“Anger did follow Vemula’s death, but it came too late from the masses. It came in the form of political objectives and goals, a struggle, and a fight for justice. But for individuals without affiliation to a political group, like his family, all that remained was sadness. In a sense, it showed that for individual emotions to turn into collective behaviour, there had to be some degree of politicisation of these emotions by those who were in power …… One could understand their helplessness, their sorrow and their frustration at a system that did nothing for them. But, the emotion of anger was often missing in the Dalit community. Anger was an emotion we experienced on their behalf.”  (p 469)

Public Culture and Educating Emotions


Therefore, philosophically, when the state reclines towards reparation for such atrocious events, it can be possible through the cultivation of emotions such as anger, which generates fellow feelings and fraternity in the form of oppressed unity. With the emotions of anger, the oppressed section would have the courage to express their humiliation and discrimination. The performance of anger conveys the pain and humiliation of the marginalised and intends to constitute the unity of the oppressed. Philosopher Amia Srinivasan argues, relying on 20th-century American feminist politics and thinker Audre Lorde, that women’s anger, for example, is not only “a source of energy” for  political ends, liberating them from the helplessness and servility of women in patriarchal societies but also serves as “a source of clarification”, which helps them “better understand their oppression and better see their oppressors.” (p 126)  


Besides, Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s burning of Manusmriti made society refute it and educated the Dalits to re-realise and understand their source of exploitation and the predicament of such text. The burning of Manusmriti became a memory of resistance for not accepting the corollary of such texts in society and cultivating the idea of resistance and reformation. This critical view towards society has a greater imagination of democratic reform, which is necessary for everyday social practices. Therefore, Dr. Ambedkar construes in the Riddles of Hinduism, “There cannot be democratic Government unless the society for which it functions is democratic in its form and structure.” (p 282). These practices will make our public culture vibrant, catapult the social hurt, and launch a fresh idea of civic virtue.


How could these practices resonate in public culture? It is possible through educating the emotions among the oppressed community through the culture of reading autobiographies, watching resistance movements in paintings and cinemas, the opening of the library and the debate culture. It would cultivate sensitivity and consciousness amongst the oppressed and enliven the path to envision the civility of public culture and the sustainability of civic virtue of the Republic of India.  

 


Ganesh Gaigouria is a Visiting Faculty at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, and a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His PhD work is on “Emotions, Politics and Identity: Analysing Anger in Everyday Dalit Resistance.”




Feature Image: Protesters block Delhi-Gurugram Expressway during a nation wide strike called to protest against the dilution of the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act in Gurugram , on April 2, 2018 (IANS).


This post is part of a series on 'Law and Emotion'. Read the other posts here.

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