When Violence Is Built Into Logic Of Policy

In social triage, the logic of numbers and idea of efficiency become more dominant in defining progress than death and displacement. We need to reinvent ethics for this age

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

remember teaching a class of post-graduate students, many of whom were potential IAS and IPS officers. My lecture was part of a course on development. I asked them what they thought was the genocidal count of an officer. They were aghast at the question. They saw themselves as a crusading group representing elite values. I asked how many people would they eliminate or displace through their careers: 10,000, 50,000 or a few lakhs. I added that the potential genocidal count of the class—in displacing villagers through dams, urban dwellers from slums and tribals from forests—could easily be 50,000.

The class was aghast at the potential report card of their future careers—that is, till I told them their social science was still innocent. It had no sense of the changing nature of violence. Their sense of violence was still the comic book idea of bully-meets-victim, without a sense that violence today is part of the very ontology of action, normalized to look like table manners.

This point was brought out poignantly by political philosopher Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Watching Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi Holocaust organizer, stand trial like an anonymous clerk made Arendt wonder how he could be responsible for the death of millions. Arendt quotes sociologist Bruno Bettelheim saying that he was less normal than Eichmann after meeting him. Eichmann explained he was merely taking orders as part of a hierarchy following a plan of action.