We have lately had several examples of the thin line between social and political violence being smudged and its spill-over in the social domain. An attack by the Guwahatians on a Santhal tribal rally witnessed five being lynched, several injured and a young girl being dragged, stripped and chased. The tribals retaliated a couple of days later. The Nandigram episode crossed all civilised limits. The social sanction to the dragging of a chain snatcher tied to a cop’s bike in Bhagalpur appeared to have triggered similar incidents of vigilantism elsewhere in Bihar. Earlier this year, an agitation by the Gurjjar community for their inclusion in the ST category met with violent reprisals by the Meena community, leaving dozens dead. Taken together, these various incidents represent an ominous portent of an emerging Hobbesian society in India.

Ironically, despite the principal justification of the state being to protect citizens and secure their lives, the fundamental arm of the state apparatus is force: in the language of Frantz Fanon, ‘the state is violence’. However, constitutionalism, the rule of law, political activism and civil society interventions minimise the state’s violent streak to a large degree. But when the state machinery is used for competing violence by the very actors who are supposed to be buffers between state violence and the society, the very principles and instruments that are protection against violence are used to support aggression. As it is, Indian society inheres a variety of conflicting contestations that could, and do, lead to violent clashes in which the state is supposed to mediate. If the state turns partisan in the hands of political players, using the balance like the monkey adjudicating between two cats clashing over a piece of bread, we have a ready recipe for social and political disaster.

... contd.