Britain has said sorry to the Mau Mau. The rest of the empire is still waiting

British colonial violence was brutal, and systematic. If there is any justice, the Mau Mau's stunning legal victory should be the first of many

• 
• • Caroline Elkins
  • The Guardian, Thursday 6 June 2013 19.46 BST

Kenyans tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion are to receive compensation payments from the British government. Photograph: Dai Kurokawa/EPA

On Thursday nearly 200 elderly Kikuyu people travelled from their rural homesteads and sat before the British high commissioner in Nairobi. Over half a century had passed since many were last in front of a British official. It was a different era then in Kenya. The Mau Mau war was raging, and Britain was implementing coercive policies that left indelible scars on the bodies and minds of countless men and women suspected of subversive activities.

In the 1950s they experienced events in colonial detention camps that few imagined possible. Yesterday they gathered to witness another once unimaginable thing: the much-delayed colonial gesture at reconciliation. The high commissioner read extracts fromWilliam Hague's earlier statement in parliament. Hague acknowledged for the first time that the elderly Kikuyu and other Kenyans had been subjected to torture and other horrific abuses at the hands of the colonial administration during the Mau Mau emergency. On behalf of the British government he expressed "sincere regret" that these abuses had taken place, announced payments of £2,600 to each of 5,200 vetted claimants, and urged that the process of healing for both nations begin.

The faces of the elderly camp survivors betrayed the day's historical significance. Tears rolled down faces lined from years of internalised pain and bitterness. Many sat motionless as the high commissioner read the statement. Others let out audible gasps, and cries of joy. Some burst into song.

By any measure the announcement was stunning. With it, Britain jettisoned its appeal of the Mau Mau reparation case in the high court. Filed in 2009, the case was the first of its kind against the former British empire. Archival documents amassed for my book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag, were submitted in support of the case, together with other historical evidence.

As it dragged on, more evidence emerged, this time from the British government. In early2011 it announced the discovery of some 300 boxes of previously undisclosed files in Hanslope Park. As expert witness I reviewed many of these documents, hundreds of which offered additional evidence of colonial-directed coercion and torture. Facing a mountain of damning facts from imperial yesteryear, the British government chose to settle.

Britain's acknowledgement of colonial era torture has opened as many doors at it has closed. Kenya was scarcely an exception. British colonial repression was systematised and honed in the years following the second world war. First in Palestine, and then Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, Northern Ireland and elsewhere, British coercive counter-insurgency tactics evolved, as did brutal interrogation techniques. The Mau Mau detention camps were but one site in a broader policy of end-of-empire incarceration, torture and cover-up.

In the wake of its announcement, Britain now faces potential claims from across its former empire. From a historical perspective, the government has every reason to be concerned about its legacy. There is unequivocal evidence of colonial brutalities in end-of-empire Malaya, Cyprus and elsewhere. Whether there is enough for successful legal claims is another matter altogether, however.

Lessons from the Mau Mau case in the high court are instructive. History was on trial, as it would be in other cases. As such, the level of historical reconstruction needed was extraordinary, as was the volume of evidence for a successful claim. The case was one that clearly rose and fell on highly detailed levels of historical knowledge and evidence.

The Kikuyu had a team of three historical experts – myself, David Anderson and Huw Bennett. Together, we brought decades of revisionist research to the case, and with it a full range of knowledge necessary for a successful claim. Outside Kenya, no other field has the depth or breadth of revisionist scholarship documenting British colonial violence at the end of empire. In part, this is due to the fact that British colonial authorities destroyed evidence at the time of decolonisation, or withheld other boxes of files for years. Regardless, without revisionist work, other potential cases will be at a disadvantage.

From a historian's perspective, two other factors were also at play. First, the discovery of the Hanslope files added layers of additional evidence crucial to the success of the Mau Mau claims. Some 8,800 files from 36 other colonies were discovered alongside the Kenya documents. However, none of these files, or at least those that the British government has now released to the National Archives, provide the kind of evidence contained in the Kenya documents. Second, the claimants and their historical experts were guided by the sharp legal minds and experience of Leigh Day and the Kenya Human Rights Commission. In effect, this was an exercise where expert, revisionist scholarship and human rights law came together with great effect – another first for the former British empire.

A cynic might say that the British government played its hand as best it could, and with an eye to other cases; that it dragged out proceedings for years so future claimants are now deceased; that its release of potential evidence files at Hanslope has been less than transparent, despite public claims to the contrary. Moreover, the high court's rulings over the past four years have tipped its hand to other potential cases. We now know that the chances of descendants of victims filing successful claims are slim, and the watermark for overcoming the statute of limitations is exceedingly high, as is the amount of historical evidence and expert forensic analysis. None of these factors bodes well for other potential claims.

Ultimately, the Mau Mau case is as symbolic as it is instructive. Regardless of future claims, Britons can no longer hide behind the rhetoric of unequivocal imperial success. Instead, British liberalism in the empire – with its alleged spread of civilisation, progress, liberty and rule of law justifying any coercive actions – has been irreversibly exposed.

Instead of being one-offs, Britain's colonial violence was as systematised as its efforts at cover-up. The British validation of the Mau Mau claims – and its first form of an apology for modern empire – offers its citizens an opportunity to understand more fully the unholy relationship between liberalism and imperialism, and the impacts not only on the elderly Kikuyu, but on themselves.

The Murthys and the Maoists

HARISH KHARE in the hindu

  

Between the relentless demands of corporate leaders and the capacity of the underclass to match the state’s violence, India needs a vision for itself that is morally defensible.

In the first week of 2011, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh allowed himself to be persuaded to accept N.R. Narayana Murthy’s invitation to travel to Mumbai to preside over a function to give away the Infosys Social Science Prizes. The Prime Minister even agreed to attend a dinner that Mr. Murthy wanted to host in his honour after the function at the Taj Mahal Hotel. So far so good. A few days before the event, there was a massive behind-the-scenes dust up between the Prime Minister’s staff and Mr. Murthy. The rub was that Mr. Murthy thought that since he was paying for the dinner, he had a right to dictate not only the guest list but even the seating arrangement. However, there is something called protocol and the dignity of constitutional offices. If the Governor and the Chief Minister of Maharashtra were to be at the dinner, they had to necessarily be seated on either side of the Prime Minister, whereas the host thought he ought to be sitting next to Dr. Singh. Mr. Murthy, however, was not one to be so easily rebuffed. As soon as the first course was served, he sought to convert the evening into a grand intellectual conversation and proceeded to invite his son to open the bowling. And the young son wanted to know from the Prime Minister what the government proposed to do so that young men like him could come back to India.

All this is recalled because the young man is now back in India, as executive assistant to his father, who in turn has allowed himself to be persuaded to take charge of Infosys again. Nepotism, did you say? No; no sir. A private company is free to hire anyone. Fair enough, but not exactly.

Mr. Murthy is not just a private businessman, minding his own business. He has often sought to inject himself into the public domain, telling a thing or two to the political class about how to behave. He has been serenaded as an “iconic” entrepreneur. During the heyday of civil society triumphalism two years ago, there was even a suggestion that Mr. Murthy be made President of India. That was the time when India’s corporate leaders thought they had the ethical credentials to write open letters to the Prime Minister and preach virtues of good governance.

Also read 1. Just how corrupt is Britain
2. Prices, Profits and Markets
3. Dantewada and the Maoists

Like other corporate leaders, the Murthys, father and son, represent an unrepentant ideological approach to the Indian state, its morals, manners and policies and purpose, but they are not the only ones to do so. The Maoists — who once again made their presence felt last month when they massacred the Congress top political leadership in Chhattisgarh — too have a list of ideological claims of their own on the Indian state. Both groups are relentless; both are unforgiving.

The May 25 attack was the boldest ideological challenge that the Maoists have posed to the country’s political leadership. Violence makes a demand on all stakeholders. It was no surprise, then, that as soon as news trickled in of the attack on the Congress convoy in Bastar, the party’s vice-president, Rahul Gandhi, should have taken off for Raipur. It was a commendable journey of political solidarity. It would be interesting to find out if the bloody massacre in Sukma has helped Mr. Gandhi re-set his ideological compass.

Let it be recalled that this is the same Mr. Gandhi who had allowed himself to be persuaded in August 2010 to travel to the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa, where he told the adivasis that he was their “sipahi,” or soldier in Delhi. Only two days before that visit, the Central government had pointedly withdrawn environmental permission to the Vedanta Group to mine the area for bauxite. For good measure, the young Gandhi had proclaimed that development meant that “every voice, including that of the poor and adivasis, should be heard.” It would be nice to know if Mr. Gandhi has resolved his ideological equivocations in the aftermath of the Chhattisgarh violence.

For two decades the Indian political class has gone about believing that “development” and “growth” are innocuous and painless. The prevailing orthodoxy insists that the Indian state has one and only one business: to get out of the businessman’s way. There is an unwillingness to acknowledge the basic nature of power: irrespective of its political arrangement, every society plays host to a ceaseless struggle over who gains what at whose expense. Growth and development invariably produce dislocation and dispossession. Good politics in a democratic idiom can go a long way in ameliorating the alienation and anger.

PRO-POOR INITIATIVES

The UPA’s approach has been to let the corporate marauders run amok while salving its democratic conscience with a slew of pro-poor, aam aadmi-centric initiatives. In the process, for the past nine years, the country has periodically been treated to a mock controversy over whether Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council was usurping the government’s space and prerogatives, or, when this or that NAC member walks out in a huff, whether the government is not being sufficiently pro-poor. The UPA’s approach neither mollifies the corporate buccaneers nor satisfies the poor and the disadvantaged.

The corporates, however, have sized up the divided political leadership across the spectrum. They have finessed their tactics. If a government is slow to give them the policy breaks that they demand, the democratic space and its anarchic habits will be creatively used to unleash civil unrest on this or that pretext. There is always the age old anger against “corruption” to be tapped. And, as it were, one can always rely on an auditor or a judge to step in to divert attention away from corporate misdemeanours of the most serious kind.

PINCER MOVEMENT

No wonder, then, that the Indian state is caught in a pincer movement. From one side, the ideologues and practitioners of “growth” are unrelenting in their insistence that the country’s natural resources and citizens’ savings be made available to them for exploitation; and, from the other direction, the state is confronted by a vast underclass that is unwilling to see any reason to sacrifice its land and forests so that some others can enjoy the benefit of “progress.” Just as the corporates have served sufficient notice that they have no qualms in taking the state on and causing misery to its political functionaries, the underclass, too, is willing to match the state’s capacity for violence, bullet for bullet.

Both the Murthys and the Maoists are forcing the Indian state to take a stand. For too long, the Indian political leadership has refused to confront the Grand Conundrum: for whom does the state exist, whom does the state seek to reward and whom does it strive to protect against whom. The UPA leadership has neither the appetite for a brutal repression of the angry tribal, nor is it likely to be able to lure the Naxalites into a democratic engagement without a demonstrable capacity to stand up to corporate greed. A kind of alternative arrangement is already on the drawing board: the Gujarat model of no dissent, no trade unions, no civil society, no Medha Patkar, no tribal resistance, no protests.

The great sociologist, Edward Shils, once observed that every society needs grandiose visions and austere standards; the political and intellectual leadership is obliged to prod society to its own historical ideals — “elements which must be recurrently realized without even being definitively realizable, once and for all.” Perhaps we should be thankful that both the Murthys and the Maoists are inviting us to find a vision for India that is morally defensible.

Three reasons why a vagina is not like a laptop

Former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross seems to think there are parallels between rape and property theft

• 
• • Sarah Ditum
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 26 May 2013 14.04 BST

‘This is an idea that belongs to the dark ages when women were permitted to own nothing apart from their "honour".' Photograph: LJSphotography / Alamy/Alamy

"Don't have nightmares!" Nick Ross used to say, when he hosted Crimewatch, but little did we guess at the Hellraiser-esque horrors haunting our plucky watcher of crime until this weekend. In an extract from his book, Crime, published in the Mail today, Ross reveals that he has been afflicted with a terrible case of visual agnosia which has left him unable to tell the difference between vaginas and laptops.

He writes: "We have come to acknowledge it is foolish to leave laptops on the back seat of a car […] Our forebears might be astonished at how safe women are today given what throughout history would have been regarded as incitement […] Equally they would be baffled that girls are mostly unescorted, stay out late, often get profoundly drunk and sometimes openly kiss, grope or go to bed with one-night stands."

Obviously, writing a manuscript in a state of perpetual confusion between portable computers and female genitals is a distressing condition – is that a return key or a clitoris? – and Ross is to be applauded for battling through to the end of his wordcount. And so, in a spirit of compassion for the baffled, I would like to offer Ross a brief guide to the ways in which women and their vaginas are not like cars and laptops.

1. Not every car contains a vagina

When you carefully tuck your high-value portable property under the passenger seat (just kidding, smash-and-grabbers! That's definitely not where my iPad is!), it's because you don't want potential thieves to know it's there. But draping your vagina in a floor-length modesty frock is unlikely to persuade anyone that don't have one, and therefore might not be worth violating. This is not a quantum mechanics problem. Schrödinger's fanny is not a thing.

2. A laptop is a portable electronic device, a vagina is a body part

Does it whir? Does it make small clicking sounds? Can it be placed in a briefcase and carried around separately to its owner? That is a laptop. Is it a fibromuscular tubular tract located between a woman's thighs? Vagina. Taking the former from a car would be an act of theft. Penetrating the latter without the woman's consent would be a physical assault – and that's true even if the woman has behaved in a way that makes it obvious that she has a vagina and sometimes uses it for fun! No one says to the victim of a beating: "Well, anyone could see you had teeth. You were just asking to have them broken with all the eating you do."

3. You can't insure a vagina

Having your car broken into and your valuables taken sucks. But, understanding that this is a world where some people might be driven to desperate acts for small rewards, you might make a heavy sigh and sweep up the glass (secretly hoping that the drugs your laptop has paid for turn out to be mostly cornflour), and then go and put in your insurance claim. Being raped is – and I know this is going to surprise you, Nick Ross, so prepare yourself – worse than that. There is no insurance that lets you claim back the state of being not-raped. There's no cloud backup to restore your pre-rape internal data. You've been raped, and that is profoundly horrible.

When Ross compares rape to theft, he presents it as a crime of property, not a crime of violence. It's an idea that belongs to the dark ages when women were permitted to own nothing apart from that abstract quality called "honour". Now – oh, fortunate modern females! – we are understood to have to rights to all sorts of things, including the right to decide who we do or don't want in our own orifices. And that's a right we cannot forfeit. Whatever we've drunk, however we're dressed and whoever we've kissed, a vagina is never a laptop.

Oxford University won't take funding from tobacco companies. But Shell's OK

If scholars don't take an ethical stance against corporate money, where's the moral check on power?

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 14 May 2013

Those in the strongest position to challenge climate change are instead lending it their ‘moral prestige'. Illustration by Daniel Pudles

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published a piercing attack on the intellectuals of his day. They should, he argued in La Trahison des Clercs (the treason of the scholars), act as a check on popular passions. Civilisation, he claimed, is possible only if intellectuals stand in opposition to the demands of political "realism" by upholding universal principles. "Thanks to the scholars," he said, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good." Europe might have been lying in the gutter, but it was looking at the stars.

But those ideals, Benda argued, had been lost. Europe was now lying in the gutter, looking into the gutter. The "immense majority" of intellectuals, artists and clergy had joined "the chorus of hatreds": nationalism, racism, the worship of power and war. In doing so, they justified and magnified political passions. Across Europe, scholars on both the left and the right had become "ready to support in their own countries the most flagrant injustices", to abandon universal principles in favour of national exceptionalism and to proclaim "the supreme morality of violence". He quoted the French anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel, who eulogised "the superb blond beast wandering in search of prey and carnage".

The result of this intellectual support for domination, Benda argued, was that there was now no moral check on the pursuit of self-interest. Rather than forming a bulwark against popular delusions, Europe's thinkers turned them into doctrines. With remarkable foresight, Benda predicted that this would lead inexorably to "the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world". This war would be genocidal in intent, and would not be stopped by any treaties or institutions. In 1927, these were bold claims.

I'm not suggesting an equivalence between those times and these. I'm summarising Benda to highlight a general principle: the need for a disinterested class of intellectuals which acts as a counterweight to prevailing mores. Racism, nationalism and war are only three of the many hazards to which society is exposed if that challenge should fail: if, that is, most scholars side with the soldiers or the sellers.

Today the dominant forces have changed. Now the weak state, not the strong state, is fetishised by those in power, who insist that its functions be devolved to "the market", meaning corporations and the very rich. Economic growth and the forces that drive it, whether they enhance or harm people's lives, are venerated. And too many scholars seem prepared to support the new dispensation.

Two weeks ago I castigated the new chief scientist, Sir Mark Walport, for misinforming the public about risk, making unscientific and emotionally manipulative claims and indulging in scaremongering and wild exaggeration in defence of the government's position. Since then I have seen his first speech in his new role and realised that the problem runs deeper than I thought.

Speaking at the Centre for Science and Policy at Cambridge University, Walport maintained that scientific advisers had five main functions, and the first of these was "ensuring that scientific knowledge translates to economic growth". No statement could more clearly reveal what Benda called the "assimilation" of the intellectual. As if to drive the point home, the press release summarising his speech revealed that the centre is sponsored, among others, by BAE Systems, BP and Lloyd's.

Last week, two days before CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million, Oxford University opened a new geoscience laboratory named after its sponsor, Shell. Among its roles is helping to find and develop new sources of fossil fuel.

This is one of many such collaborations. Last year, for instance, BP announced that it will spend £60m on research at Manchester University partly to help it drill deeper for oil. In the United States and Canada, universities go further: David Lynch, dean of engineering at the University of Alberta, appears in advertisements by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, whose purpose is to justify and normalise tar sands extraction.

As the campaign group People and Planet points out, universities help provide fossil fuel corporations not only with expertise but also with a "social licence to operate". Climate change is one of the great moral issues of our age, but the scholars in the strongest position to challenge the industry responsible are, instead, lending it what Benda calls their "moral prestige". Neoliberal economists, imperialist historians, war-mongering philosophers, pliable chief scientists, compromised energy researchers: all are propelling us into the arms of power.

In 1998, the vice-chancellors of the UK's universities decided that they would no longer take money for cancer research from tobacco firms. Over the past few days I have asked the Shell professor of earth sciences at Oxford, the university itself and the umbrella bodyUniversities UK to explain the ethical difference between taking tobacco money for cancer research and taking fossil fuel money for energy research. None of these great heads, despite my repeated attempts to engage them, were prepared even to attempt an answer.

So perhaps this is where hope lies: unlike Benda's scholars, these people have not yet developed a justifying ideology which permits them to excuse or glorify the compromises they have made with power. Perhaps we have not yet abandoned the redeeming hypocrisy of what Benda called "honouring good".

The sun is at last setting on Britain's imperial myth

The atrocities in Kenya are the tip of a history of violence that reveals the repackaging of empire for the fantasy it is

• 
• • Pankaj Mishra
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 8 May 2013 21.30 BST

'Consider how Niall Ferguson deals with the Kenyan emergency: by suppressing it entirely in favour of a Kenyan idyll of 'our bungalow, our maid, our smattering of Swahili – and our sense of unshakeable security' in his book Empire.' Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

Scuttling away from India in 1947, after plunging the jewel in the crown into a catastrophic partition, "the British", the novelist Paul Scott famously wrote, "came to the end of themselves as they were". The legacy of British rule, and the manner of their departures – civil wars and impoverished nation states locked expensively into antagonism, whether in the Middle East, Africa or the Malay Peninsula – was clearer by the time Scott completed his Raj Quartet in the early 1970s. No more, he believed, could the British allow themselves any soothing illusions about the basis and consequences of their power.

Scott had clearly not anticipated the collective need to forget crimes and disasters. The Guardian reports that the British government is paying compensation to the nearly 10,000 Kenyans detained and tortured during the Mau Mau insurgency in the 1950s. In what has been described by the historian Caroline Elkins as Britain's own "Gulag", Africans resisting white settlers were roasted alive in addition to being hanged to death. Barack Obama's own grandfather had pins pushed into his fingers and his testicles squeezed between metal rods.

The British colonial government destroyed the evidence of its crimes. For a long time the Foreign and Commonwealth Office denied the existence of files pertaining to the abuse of tens of thousands of detainees. "It is an enduring feature of our democracy," the FCO now claims, "that we are willing to learn from our history."

But what kind of history? Consider how Niall Ferguson, the Conservative-led government's favourite historian, deals with the Kenyan "emergency" in his book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World: by suppressing it entirely in favour of a Kenyan idyll of "our bungalow, our maid, our smattering of Swahili – and our sense of unshakeable security."

The British had slaughtered the Kikuyu a few years before. But for Ferguson "it was a magical time, which indelibly impressed on my consciousness the sight of the hunting cheetah, the sound of Kikuyu women singing, the smell of the first rains and the taste of ripe mango".

Clearly awed by this vision of the British empire, the current minister for education asked Ferguson to advise on the history syllabus. Schoolchildren may soon be informed that the British empire, as Dominic Sandbrook wrote in the Daily Mail, "stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law".

Contrast this with the story of Albert Camus, who was ostracised by his intellectual peers when a sentimental attachment to the Algeria of his childhood turned him into a reluctant defender of French imperialism. Humiliated at Dien Bien Phu, and trapped in a vicious counter-insurgency in Algeria, the French couldn't really set themselves up as a beacon of tolerance and decency. Other French thinkers, from Roland Barthes to Michel Foucault, were already working to uncover the self-deceptions of their imperial culture, and recording the provincialism disguised by their mission civilisatrice. Visiting Japan in the late 1960s, Barthes warned that "someday we must write the history of our own obscurity – manifest the density of our narcissism".

Perhaps narcissism and despair about their creeping obscurity, or just plain madness explains why in the early 21st century many Britons, long after losing their empire, thought they had found a new role: as boosters to their rich English-speaking cousins across the Atlantic.

Astonishingly, British imperialism, seen for decades by western scholars and anticolonial leaders alike as a racist, illegitimate and often predatory despotism, came to be repackaged in our own time as a benediction that, in Ferguson's words, "undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour". Andrew Roberts, a leading mid-Atlanticist, also made the British empire seem like an American neocon wet dream in its alleged boosting of "free trade, free mobility of capital … low domestic taxation and spending and 'gentlemanly' capitalism".

Never mind that free trade, introduced to Asia through gunboats, destroyed nascent industry in conquered countries, that "free" capital mostly went to the white settler states of Australia and Canada, that indentured rather than "free" labour replaced slavery, and that laissez faire capitalism, which condemned millions to early death in famines, was anything but gentlemanly.

These fairytales about how Britain made the modern world weren't just aired at some furtive far-right conclave or hedge funders' retreat. The BBC and the broadsheets took the lead in making them seem intellectually respectable to a wide audience. Mainstream politicians as well as broadcasters deferred to their belligerent illogic. Looking for a more authoritative audience, the revanchists then crossed the Atlantic to provide intellectual armature to Americans trying to remake the modern world through military force.

Of course, like Camus – who never gave any speaking parts to Arabs when he deigned to include them in his novels set in Algeria – the new bards of empire almost entirely suppressed Asian and African voices. The omission didn't matter in a world where some crass psychologising about gay men triggers an instant mea culpa (as it did with Ferguson's Keynes apology), but no regret, let alone repentance, is deemed necessary for a counterfeit imperial history and minatory visions of hectically breeding Muslims – both enlisted in large-scale violence against voiceless peoples.

Such retro-style megalomania, however, cannot be sustained in a world where, for better and for worse, cultural as well as economic power is leaking away from the old Anglo-American establishment. An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites. Furthermore, neo-imperialist assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan have served to highlight the actual legacy of British imperialism: tribal, ethnic and religious conflicts that stifled new nation states at birth, or doomed them to endless civil war punctuated by ruthless despotisms.

Defeat and humiliation have been compounded by the revelation that those charged with bringing civilisation from the west to the rest have indulged – yet again – in indiscriminate murder and torture. But then as Randolph Bourne pointed out a century ago: "It is only liberal naivete that is shocked at arbitrary coercion and suppression. Willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it."

This is as true for the Japanese, the self-appointed sentinel of Asia and then its main despoiler during the second world war, as it is for the British. Certainly, imperial power is never peaceably acquired or maintained. The grandson of a Kenyan once tortured by the British knows this too well as: having failed to close down Guantánamo, he resorts to random executions through drone strikes.

The victims of such everyday violence have always seen through its humanitarian disguises. They have long known western nations, as James Baldwin wrote, to be "caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism". They know, too, how the colonialist habits of ideological deceit trickle down and turn into the mendacities of postcolonial regimes, such as in Zimbabwe and Syria, or of terrorists who kill and maim in the cause of anti-imperialism.

Fantasies of moral superiority and exceptionalism are not only a sign of intellectual vapidity and moral torpor, they are politically, economically and diplomatically damaging. Japan's insistence on glossing over its brutal invasions and occupations in the first half of the 20th century has isolated it within Asia and kept toxic nationalisms on the boil all around it. In contrast, Germany's clear-eyed reckoning and decisive break with its history of violence has helped it become Europe's pre-eminent country.

Britain's extended imperial hangover can only elicit cold indifference from the US, which is undergoing epochal demographic shifts, isolation within Europe, and derision from its former Asian and African subjects. The revelations of atrocities in Kenya are just the tip of an emerging global history of violence, dispossession and resistance. They provide a new opportunity for the British ruling class and intelligentsia to break with threadbare imperial myths – to come to the end of themselves as they were, and remake Britain for the modern world.

The rapist in the mirror

PRAVEEN SWAMI

TOPICS

crimesexual assault & rape
social issues (general)discrimination
social conditions
social problems

If we are to combat sexual violence in our cities, it is time to begin discussing the dysfunctions of young urban men

“I remember seeing a documentary about some animal being eaten from behind while its face seemed to register disbelief, fear, and self-hate at its own impotence,” recalls Roy Strang, the rapist at the centre of Irvine Welsh’s supremely disturbing Marabou Stork Nightmares, of one of his victims. “That was what she reminded me of,” says Strang, watching his victim’s eyes, “frozen,” “dead,” through the mirror he forced her to hold up to her face as he raped her.

Last month’s gang rape in New Delhi has focussed nationwide attention on the epidemic proportions of sexual violence against women in India. Long overdue debates on criminal justice and gender have begun — along, predictably, with bizarre calls for schoolgirls’ bodies to be concealed under overcoats and curfews. Yet, there have been only the awkward beginnings of a discussion on the problem itself — men.

It is time, though, to start looking at the rapist in the mirror.

RITUALS OF MASCULINITY

To anyone familiar with young men in India’s cities and towns, Strang’s world is far from alien. For many youth worldwide, violence against women — a spectrum that runs from gang rape to domestic violence and street sexual harassment — is part of the system of masculinity-making rituals, along with sport, drinking and brawling. 58 per cent of men arrested for rape in India in 2010 were aged 18-30; in the United States, 55 per cent are below the age of 30. 53.92 per cent of men held that year for molestation or sexual harassment were also from the same age group.

This is not to suggest that a dysfunctional masculinity is the root of rape; few human behaviours have a single cause. Yet, from the testimonies of women, we know that this cohort of young men have made homes and streets the site of a pervasive gender terrorism.

Rape, though, is something rapists do, not who they are. Precisely why particular individuals find pleasure in inflicting violence on women is a question everyone from evolutionary biologists to cultural theorists have weighed in on; there is no consensus, and may never be. Yet, as Welsh noted, strange behaviour “always has a context.” Five such contexts suggest themselves as possible keys to the production of India’s urban-male dysfunction. Together, these contexts ensure young men are rarely fully weaned; able to lead an adult life characterised by agency and individual choice. The consequence is a deep rage that manifests itself in nihilist behaviours.

India’s transforming urban economy has, firstly, produced a mass of young, prospectless men. The parents of these children, many first-generation migrants to cities, worked on the land or were artisans. Though this generation’s position in the economy may have been inequitable, its agency as workers was not. The young, though, find themselves fighting for space in an economy that offers mainly casual work. This casualisation has come about even as hard-pressed parents are spending ever more on education. Even the pressures on middle-class and lower middle-class men are enormous. Frequently coddled in son-worshipping parents, young men are only rarely able to realise the investment and hopes vested in them.

For a second context to hyper-violent masculinity, we must look at culture. Increasingly, cities have no recreational spaces for young men. Films, long one of the few cultural activities that a working-class audience could participate in, now target élites; movie theatre prices exclude large parts of the youth population. There is diminishing access to theatre, art, music and sport. In its place, the street becomes the stage for acting out adulthood, through substance abuse and violence.

Thirdly, a number of young men, particularly in new urban slums, are being brought up by no-parent families — families that fathers have abandoned or are largely absent from, and where mothers work long hours. Elsewhere in the world, too, this social crisis has been linked to sexual violence. South African researcher Amelia Kleijn, in a 2010 study of child rapists, found most had deprived childhoods marked by “physical and emotional abuse, as well as neglect.”

Fourth, there is a crisis of sexuality. Few men, working class or rich, have access to a sexual culture which allows them sexual freedoms or choices. The crisis is exacerbated by the fact that sections of urban élites participate in a sexual culture which is relatively liberal — a culture that young men can watch on television and in public spaces, but never hope to participate in. For some, the sexually independent woman is thus enemy to be annihilated. In his hit song C**t, the rape-valorising rap star Honey Singh voices his yearning to kick a woman after raping her, to drive out the bhoot of ego from her head. Similarly, Strang sees on the streets a wash of “blonde and auburn wigs, lipstick smeared on those deadly pincer-like insect jaws.”

COMMODITIES

Young men of all classes, finally, see women as status-enhancing commodities — emulating the long-standing gender privileges tradition has vested in élite men.

None of these five contexts is new. Particular stresses linked to the reordering of India’s social fabric, though, are giving new lethality to gender inequity. In a 2008 paper, Jon Wolseth showed how neoliberalism created the conditions for a murderous surge of youth gang violence in the Honduras during the 1980s. Economic policies, he argued, had not just impoverished the poor; they also tore apart community networks, diminished public spaces and closed the door to political participation. Evangelical Christianity and the assault rifle-armed gang emerged as mode of liberation. Elsewhere in Latin America, scholars have observed much the same.

In India, women’s bodies appear to have become the principal terrain on which male rage is venting itself. It isn’t that young Indian men are inherently violent than they were in the past. In 2011, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, 29,937 men between 18 and 30 were arrested for murder. Twenty years earlier, it was 38,961. In 1991, 270,602 men of this age group were arrested for rioting; in 2011, the figure was 72,867. Sexual violence data, though, trends the other way. 8,864 18-30 men were arrested for rape in 1991; 16,528 in 2011. Molestation and sexual harassment arrests from this cohort have also almost doubled, from 23,075 in 1992, the first year for which data is available, to 32,581 in 2011.

Lacking agency isn’t, obviously, the cause of sexual violence: women aren’t responding to their disenfranchisement by attacking men; men with power can, and do, rape. The point here is, rather, that the large-scale disempowerment of urban men is lending intensity to a pre-existing culture of sexual violence.

ILLUSION OF EMPOWERMENT

For many men, then, violence against women works much as drugs do for addicts: it offers at least the illusion of empowerment where none exists, fixing feelings of rage and impotence. This, in turn, points to a wider malaise. Marxist scholar Antonio Gramsci noted that Fascism arose in a society “where mothers educate their infant children by hitting them on the head with clogs.” How men behave — on the streets with women, with other men, with animals — is taught. In our society, violence is not an aberration; it is the tie that binds us.

In 2007, the Ministry of Women and Child Development surveyed 12,477 children to learn of their experience of abuse. 68.99 per cent of children, over half of them boys, reported suffering physical violence. One in 12 children, again a majority boys, reported suffering sexual violence. It is a staggering fact: half of all Indians have encountered abuse before they became adults.

For the overwhelming majority of Indian children, the education in violence begins in the family. The survey found 59 per cent of the 2,245 children who did not go to school located home as a source of violence. In institutions like orphanages, the survey recorded levels of violence very similar to homes. More than 65 per cent of the 3,163 school children surveyed said they received beatings along with classes in maths, science and languages. Employers of child labourers, interestingly, were significantly less cruel than teachers; 58.7 per cent of working children said they experienced beatings at home, at work, or both. In each of these categories, boys were overrepresented.

Maulana Azad Medical College researcher Deepti Pagare discovered, during a survey of boys at New Delhi’s Child Observation Home, that 76.7 per cent reported physical abuse. Half of them actually bore clinical evidence of violence — the perpetrators, in more than half of all cases, their own fathers.

Elsewhere in the world, figures like these would almost certainly have provoked a national scandal — followed by demands of criminal prosecutions. Look through Delhi’s crime statistics, though, and you will find not one father prosecuted for everyday crimes against his son.

India needs a masculinity that does not involve violence. Moral sermons, though, won’t cut it: respect for women can emerge only from a culture that genuinely values rights for all.

Pakistan and Israel are identical twins

India and Israel are often likened to each other, but it is Pakistan that Israel resembles the most

Much is made these days of the apparent likeness between India and Israel. Both are supposed to be modern democracies. Both, it is pointed out, are also fighting Islamic terrorism. But this is a superficial comparison. There is no dearth of modern democracies in the post-Cold War world, and no dearth of nations fighting Islamic terror either, post-9/11. For two nations to be considered alike, they ought to be similar in ways that are more fundamental and, at the same time, that also set them apart from other nations.

It is not India but Pakistan that shares a number of such traits with Israel.

Violent partition

Both Pakistan and Israel were carved out through partitions of historically and culturally unified territories within a year of each other: Pakistan in August 1947 and Israel in May 1948. Pakistan was created by splitting the Indian subcontinent, tearing asunder people who, while belonging to different religions, shared a common cultural heritage and had together fought their war of Independence. It created fissures even within ethnic communities — Punjabis in the west, Bengalis in the east and, a year later, Kashmiris in the north. The same happened when Israel was carved out of historical Palestine, dividing Arabs to the west of the Jordan river for the first time.

Two, neither partition was peaceful. Hundreds of thousands of people had to leave their homes in both instances to become refugees in what, just days earlier, had been their own land. Pakistan’s creation saw more than 10 million people migrate on either side of the border, many driven away by their neighbours. Nearly a million are believed to have died in the pogroms that ensued. While eloquent espousals of nationalism and patriotism poured out of leaders at bully pulpits, the slit throats of citizens spattered blood in the streets.

Israel’s creation was similarly gory. More than 700,000 Palestinians were hounded out of their homes by Zionist militias in what the Arabs have since called the Nakba, or catastrophe. Thousands perished. Many migrated to West Bank, Gaza and the refugee camps of Lebanon, Jordan and the Sinai; many others fled to Europe and the United States — places from where harried Jews had been moving to Palestine in preceding decades to escape persecution. One diaspora replaced another, and Arab became the new Jew of the West. The irony was profound.

Three, neither Pakistan nor Israel has clearly defined its borders since its creation. It’s not just that their neighbours don’t agree with them, but both these nations have themselves stopped short of stating precisely where they want their borders to be. While India categorically specifies the borders it claims in Kashmir, Pakistan’s position is ambiguous at best. It calls the portion it conquered in 1947-48 “Azad Kashmir” (Independent Kashmir), but Pakistan’s army exercises even more control over the lives of Azad Kashmiris than over the average Pakistani. It even has an Azad Kashmir Regiment — headquartered in Punjab.

Israel has also desisted from stating exactly how large or small it intends to be. For more than 20 years, even the Palestinian Authority has recognised the so-called Green Line — which defined Israeli territory until the 1967 war — as the international border subject to a two-state solution (that would create a Palestinian state). Israel itself, however, does not recognise the Green Line anymore. Nor does it say where it would draw its own Line, all the while grabbing more land in the West Bank for Jewish settlements.

Four, both Pakistan and Israel have fought wars of aggression against neighbours. The India-Pakistan conflicts of 1947-48, 1965 and 1999 were the result of Pakistani aggression. It also waged a proxy war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a misadventure from which it is yet to dissociate itself. Israel’s wars are still more numerous. It attacked Egypt in 1956, Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza on numerous occasions. Gaza remains under Israeli siege even today.

Dominated by religion, military

Five, being born in blood and bred in wars, both Pakistan and Israel have developed societies and polities that are dominated by religion and the military. The green uniform has been at the helm of Pakistan’s affairs for nearly half its independent history, and lords over politicians even when not formally in charge. Its hand has been strengthened by the appropriation of Islam as a political ideology, and the nation is effectively run by a nexus of generals and mullahs.

Israel’s military has similarly clawed its way into the heart of the nation’s society and politics in the name of protecting its Jewish character. Making a name for yourself in wars is the surest way to a successful political career, ministerial posts and prime ministership. Just like Pakistan, Israel seems to be run by a league of generals and rabbis.

Six, both Pakistan and Israel nurture exclusivist national identities, concerned more with who does not belong to them than with who does. Created as a homeland for Muslims, Pakistan has always treated Hindus, Sikhs and other non-Muslims as second-class citizens. But that isn’t all.

Various categories of Muslims — migrants from India, Ahmadis, Shias, Baluchis and so on — have also found it difficult to integrate into Pakistani society and are perpetually blamed for all its social and political ills.

Israel was created as a homeland for Jews, and it treats Arabs as second-class citizens. But many Jews too — black Jews, Sephardic Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Russian-origin Jews and so on — face rampant discrimination. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis of Jewish ancestry are simply not considered Jews by law and struggle to be a part of Israeli society.

Benedict Anderson has called nations “imagined communities,” comprising people who share a deep bond of unity even with those they have never met or do not personally know. But Pakistan and Israel exhibit an extraordinary lack of imagination in the construction of their nationhood. Exclusivist identities, religious chauvinism, military dominance and a history of belligerence have rendered them societies that are perpetually at war — with their neighbours and with themselves. Their own uncertainty over their borders betrays this existential insecurity.

That is where India differs from both these nations. Imagined as a country of infinite communities, we have largely remained true to this founding principle. Muslims running away from riots in Gujarat or Assam, Biharis fleeing persecution in Maharashtra and Northeasterners escaping prejudice in South India are still exceptions in a nation that culturally and constitutionally believes in diversity. This belief, more than anything else, is the source of our national identity.

Let us hope that is how, and who, we remain.

(Saif Shahin is a doctoral research scholar in political communication at the University of Texas, Austin, U.S.)