When the law and its legitimate keepers go absent, anybody with a gun becomes the law. This could not have been said better, and hilariously, than by the Hollywood movie icon of the 1970s Terrence Hill in one of his widely popular Trinity film serial.
In a particular scene, Trinity is innocently trying to explain the illegality of a certain action by a bandit leader who confronts him. The latter cuts him short, tauntingly pronouncing that the law is in his hands, casually brandishing a handgun. Trinity expresses startled surprise. Then with his lightening reflex, snatches the gun and throws it into the river beside them. With his characteristic impish grin, he tells the confounded bandit: “Now the law is in the river”. What followed is entertaining slapstick movie comedy.
Certainly not a comedy, but what Manipur is going through today is a classic case of an absence of the law and the vacuum being filled by gun wielders of all hues. If insanity can be defined as the unpredictability of a person’s or a society’s response to any given situation, Manipur fits that description perfectly at this moment. Everything is in lofty hyperboles, be it justifications for aggressions or pretension of victimhood. Often incomprehensibly so.
Which sane society would expect bandhs called for any issue big or small, indefinite blockades on highways, and so on. This is a place where the parameters of individual freedom have become unrecognizably skewed and everybody has come to resign to this madness as destiny. Nobody today knows where the next massacre would happen, or are certain who is killing who.
The situation is reminiscent of Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland where the Queen of Hearts makes laws on the spot, coldly pronouncing in fits and starts, and for no logically tangible reason: “off with his head.”
The law here has ceased to be evolutionary, driven by intense discourses between necessities of lived experiences and universal axioms of rectitude. Instead, it has been reduced to rectilinear whips defined by the logic: “You are either with us or against us,” made famous, or infamous, by former US president, George W. Bush. Rights and wrongs are no longer consensual norms or judgments of conscience, but matters of fiats and decrees.
On the abstract plane, explanation of this absence is even more sinister. Georgio Agamben’s book State of Exception argues that extraordinary laws, even if made in supposedly extraordinary circumstances, by suspending laws that guarantee civil rights is not law, but precisely an absence of law, and this exception has the nasty habit of becoming the rule. Manipur is witnessing this too.
If an extraordinary law, such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958, AFSPA, which gives extraordinary power and impunity to the military in handling civil unrests are a state of exception, therefore in effect a withdrawal from law, why is it still in vogue in India even after close to 80 years of decolonisation and independence?
However, curiously and ironically, in the midst of the current Manipur ethnic mayhem, even those who have been vociferously opposed to the use of military in containing civil unrests, are now left to ask why the state continues to be in complete lawlessness in spite of the presence of close to three divisions of Army and central paramilitary forces.
The answer obviously is, there cannot be a blanket rejection of a state of exception. This is in recognition that societies, just as everything else in the universe, are prone to disorder and atrophy if there are no external forces restraining it from becoming so. But the caution is, when a state of exception is allowed to continue for 80 years, it cannot be a state of exception anymore, but loud testimony of a failure in building a cohesive national community.
In many ways, the Manipur situation is a reiteration that the most fundamental attribute of a successful nation-state is the state’s ability to hold monopoly over legitimate used of coercive force, in Max Weber’s words. Any other agency self-assuming this power is illegitimate. A temporary state of exception, therefore temporary use of extraordinary laws, when complete anarchy descends on any society, cannot be dismissed summarily as illegitimate.
This article was first published The New Indian Express. The original can be read HERE.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
