When a country faces a traumatic terror attack, its ruling political elite tends to formulate a response along two tracks. These can be classified as security-centric and identity-centric responses. The former deals with the requisite military, intelligence and law-enforcement actions. The latter deals with the political repudiation of the perceived objectives of terrorists through defining, or reaffirming, the core values of the political community.
When Norway faced the Oslo attack in 2011, where a right-wing extremist massacred 76 people in a summer camp, its prime minister declared that the country would “stand firm in defending our values” of an “open, tolerant and inclusive society”. “The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation,” he said. The former prime minister, Manmohan Singh, speaking in Parliament, articulated a similar political response after the 2008 Mumbai attacks. “As far as Mumbai is concerned, it was a very calculated and sinister attack, intended to cause widespread terror and damage to the very image of India. The forces behind these attacks wanted to destabilise our secular polity, create communal discord and undermine our country’s economic and social progress.”
In his first comments on the Pahalgam terrorist attack, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, speaking at a campaign event in Bihar, declared that “the attack was not just on unarmed tourists; the enemies of the nation have dared to attack the soul of Bharat.” But he stopped short of elucidating the core values or attributes that defined the “soul of Bharat” and how one should reaffirm our commitment to those values.
That symbolic work of meaning-making and the mobilisation of sentiments is being performed by the mainstream media, state leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, and right-wing accounts on social media. They set about at once on the task of furiously representing the Pahalgam massacre in a stark communal binary of ‘Hindu victims’ versus ‘Muslim terrorists’. The most salient characteristic of the massacre, echoed through countless headlines and social media posts, has been the terrorists’ modus operandi of killing the tourists after verifying their Hindu identity. In this representation, the terms of the Indian response should take as its point of departure the guiding template set by the terrorists.
“Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes. At the same time, large groups of people remain quiescent under noxiously oppressive conditions and sometimes passionately defend the very social institutions that deprive or degrade them.”
This is the opening passage of the book, The Symbolic Uses of Politics, by the political scientist, Murray Edelman. The rest of the book is devoted towards understanding the reason why authoritarian and violent political mythologies have managed to exert such a vice-like grip over the popular consciousness in so many different places across history. The heart of the answer lies, for Edelman, in the symbolic construction of political cognition. The process through which we come to our political thoughts and values is not in response to the perception of some objective ‘reality’ but in response to a variable and selective representation of events through political symbols. “For most men most of the time politics is a series of pictures in the mind, placed there by television news, newspapers, magazines and discussions.” The ideologues or propagandists of political authoritarianism excel at this symbolic manipulation of all political events into mythic, ritualised conflicts between symbolically-constructed ‘allies’ and ‘enemies’. They manipulate the formulation and the expression of political demands and expectations in service of two political functions. One, the mobilisation of popular support through symbolic identification; and two, the reinforcement of a certain political authority cast in the role of saviour or redeemer.
The broadcasts of news channels have been overlayed with graphic banners announcing, in fiery colours and bold fonts, a series of communally-coded and pro-government slogans. To take the fairly typical case of Times Now, the banners flashed messages such as “Hindu blood shed”, “Bharat will avenge Pahalgam” and “Modi’s message to the world”. Here, the symbol of Bharat is not meant to reference any civilisational ethos or value-system. The only symbolic value Bharat performs here lies in standing for a thinly-veiled and crudely flattened communal code for ‘Hindu India’.
In this carefully-constructed communal script, running on most television channels and newspapers, there is no space for the testimony of the survivors of the attack which speaks of the exemplary help provided by local Kashmiris who escorted them to safety in the absence of rescue efforts by the State. Like the views of the daughter of a slain tourist who was visibly moved by the care extended by her taxi drivers; her “two brothers from Kashmir”. Or the story of the brave pony operator who was martyred as he intervened on behalf of the tourists. Or the voluntary lockdown observed across Kashmir, covering educational institutions and business establishments, in solidarity with the victims and their families. In a telling instance, a flustered news anchor repeatedly sought to shut down the testimony of a survivor who kept detailing the various ways in which locals came forward to assist the tourists after the attack.
Most crucially, the narrative of the mainstream media affords no space for demanding accountability from the political executive (the central role of the media in a democracy) over the massive failure of security and intelligence which allowed the massacre to take place. There is an overarching, hard-to-miss absurdity to the scripted narrative of Pahalgam. A group of mainly foreign terrorists strolled down to a popular tourist spot, shot down dozens of civilians one after another for 15 minutes, and then escaped unscathed. Yet the allocation of responsibility for the attack is being parcelled off at the doors of a rolling series of targets (secularism, constitutional rights, Muslims, Kashmiris, Opposition, Supreme Court) — anyone but the political leadership that was responsible for providing security to the tourists. The tourists had indeed been repeatedly assured by our political regime, along with its co-opted media and pet ‘security experts’, of the serene atmosphere of ‘normalcy’ prevailing in Kashmir.
The function of the communally-coded messaging broadcast on news channels is not to ‘reflect’ the anger of the audience, as they claim. It is to create and sustain an angry, communal subject that identifies with the incendiary scripts and is conditioned to demand revenge on a shady ‘Muslim’ enemy as well as its political supporters. It is to reinforce the authority of the political executive even though it has failed to fulfil the substantive demands of the citizenry, now transformed into a passive Hindu audience with its exogenously- seeded communal demands.
The foundational moment of the present regime can be located in the 2002 Gujarat riots where this political experiment of constructing and exorcising a Muslim enemy had been carried to fruition. That experiment culminated in the re-election of the Modi-led state government over thousands of dead bodies. We have already seen several reports of attacks on Kashmiri students by right-wing vigilantes from different states in the last few days.
In this respect, the Hindu right-wing extremism of the ruling elite and its supporters and the Islamist extremism of Pakistan-sponsored terrorists constitute what the philosopher, René Girard, described as “body doubles”. These two entities, while seemingly opposed, reflect and reinforce each other through their mutual antagonism and their ritualised cycle of hate-fuelled violence. They also operate through a parallel internal logic. For the Pahalgam terrorists, the objective of violence was not just to be the means to an (political) end. The spectacle of terror and the visceral reaction it sparks constitute an end in itself. For the right-wing extremists, the object of communal hatred is also not the means to achieve a political end: the communal polarisation of society constitutes an end in itself.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist