Last week this column examined the growing demand for the death penalty in the country. This demand seems to be part of a larger movement towards more muscular responses to provocations, in this country and beyond. The reaction to the counterattack on Pakistani prisoner Sanaullah Haq following the murderous assault on Sarabjit is another example; there is an implicit as well explicit approval of the action in many quarters, in line with a larger feeling that ‘something needed to be done’. In theory, it is easy to accept that two wrongs do not make a right, but there is a popular belief that such actions are justified particularly when provocations ‘cross a limit’.
The growing legitimacy of a brutal form of retributive justice has many reasons behind it. The role of media is clearly significant for it serves to frame events in an attempt to create of being surrounded by a web of conspiracies as well as give rescale events to larger-than-life size. High pitched rhetoric and a defensive form of intemperateness becomes the default option. The idea of ‘zero tolerance’ becomes attractive regardless of the fact that it is often located in a misplaced sense of strength. Also it is easy to forget that the flip side of zero-tolerance is infinite intolerance. Every crime that outrages us needs to attract the death penalty and every action from the other side that is deemed provocative merits a pre-emptive strike.
The other reason why we hear the louder baying for blood is that there is a need for clarity and firm direction, qualities that are increasingly striking absent from the performance of this government. We try and make up for its floundering by presenting an exaggerated form of ‘off-with-his-head’ clarity, as if our extremism will compensate for the weakness of our official actions. The deep fear that ‘they are strong and purposeful and we are weak and lack resolve’ translates into an overheated desire to communicate strength by acting decisively and spectacularly.
But there is another factor that drives this return to an almost medieval need for retribution. The rise of terrorism has changed the rules of the game in a way that is fundamental. Terrorism in its modern form bypasses our understanding of crime, violence and self-interest in a way that leaves us helpless. As an event, it lacks the natural rhythm or shape that other crises possess. Unlike a war, which is preceded by much sabre-rattling and visible preparations, a terrorist attack comes out of the blue and often for no discernible reason. In the past terrorist action was linked to a specific cause and sought a specific outcome that served a purpose that could be understood concretely, today’s actions come from a vague sense of disaffection and seek very little in return. The attacks are increasingly delinked from any set expectations one might have about who the targets might be or for what particular reason a specific action or target was selected. Anyone can, in theory be attacked anywhere at any time, without any sense of discrimination.
The fear spread by terrorism is irrational because acts of terrorism themselves operate from outside the framework of conventional rationality. By putting as much at stake as their lives, and wanting nothing specific in return, terrorists make the idea of an appropriate or proportionate response irrelevant. The fear evoked knows no bounds, nor can it grasp at anything concrete. The sense that one is always being targeted but for no specific reason and that too by someone faceless leads to a search for concrete sources of threat, for some sign that terrorism can be tamed into some form of predictability, giving rise to use of indiscriminate labels, profiling of communities(often incorrectly confusing one for another) and a greater tolerance for victimising the innocent in the name of a larger, legitimate cause of protecting oneself. Self-preservation increasingly justifies actions that were till recently seen as inhuman- torture, pre-emptive killings, the elimination of criminals through encounters etc.
Terrorism attacks the very idea of cause and effect, of benefit and cost, of an exchange of mutually beneficial acts of reciprocation. We depend on everyone to act in way that is consonant with their interests; we abhor crime, but understand why it exists for most part. But to try and make sense of someone who blows random people up in the name of a cause at great risk to their selves and without any recompense but that of the act alone is exceedingly difficult. The recent Boston marathon bombings underline the unique kind of anxiety that terrorism evokes- of a faceless enemy with a nameless agenda, someone who makes what seems like a very trivial point with devastating brutality.
The Boston bombings also reveal the power of the word ‘terrorism’ as Michael Cohen of the Guardian pointed out. He argues that ‘Americans seemingly place an inordinate fear on violence that is random and unexplainable and can be blamed on “others” – jihadists, terrorists, evil-doers etc’ while accepting other horrific forms of violence (Gun violence killed 30,000 people last year in the US, while terrorism killed 17, as he points out). But this is not an American reaction alone. The Indian reaction to terrorism follows a similar pattern and is made more complex by a frustrating sense of helplessness at the bumbling efforts to government to anticipate and tackle acts of terror.
The real bomb planted under the seat of civilisation is the idea of terrorism. It forces us to react in inhuman ways in the name of self preservation and legitimises shows of strength that know no boundaries. In our imagination, terrorism is potentially infinite as an idea and hence our reaction to it must travel beyond our imagination of what we are capable of. The acceptance of extra-civilisational methods to curb fear seems to be spilling over into other arenas of life. Modern terrorism has recalibrated our right of right and wrong and of what is civilised and what is not. Perhaps terrorism’s greatest success is that it makes it human to act in an inhuman way.