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Current Research Projects
“The Air India Bombing and the Politics of Truth.”
Canadian Sikhs accused of the Air India bombing that killed over three hundred people were acquitted three years ago after the most expensive and longest-running investigation in that nation’s history. Yet the image of Sikhs as terrorists persists beyond court verdicts. I
Interrogate the propagation of the idea of Sikh-as-terrorist and hence as unworthy victim, that gets in the way of Canadians’ openness
to claims of human rights abuses in their Punjab homeland. Today, after decades of attempting to draw attention to this claim, even
after a legal acquittal, Sikh communities in Canada feel silenced as never before. [article]
“Atrocity and the Poetic Imagination”
Sikh experiences of suffering expressed through poetry are examined as a form of moral and historical witness, and Chris Giamo (a former student) and myself question the role of anthropology in arenas of terror. [article]
“Kashmir to Mumbai: Sites of Violence in the World’s Largest Democracy”
Misrecognition of national and international factors in the production of violence may lead India into the wrong strategy for confronting and containing it. The Mumbai attacks, linked to Pakistani jihadis, are a key example of an episode of violence that may have had its origins in domestic grievances, which grow rather than fade when the government sees only the enemy state, and not the discontented citizen, at its source. [article]
Democracy and Bare Life: Silencing Violence in the Garden of India
The world's largest democracy is also a site of substantial unrest, social upheaval, violent insurgency and communal conflict. The state's ability and willingness to abrogate rights in the interests of security can be seen in terms of exceptional time periods (Indira Gandhi's "Emergency" years), exceptional regional demarcation (Punjab, Kashmir, the Northeast), exceptional legislation (TADA, POTA, AFSPA), and exceptional police methods (organized vigilantism, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearance). Thus although the overall national structure of democracy remains vibrant, shifting exceptional arenas where rights are abused with impunity mean that the lived experience of being Indian equates with the cramping sense of fear, alienation and humiliation - more often associated with dictatorships - for many. This ground-level perception among peripheral, minority, and disadvantaged groups in India appears paradoxical given the real democratic structure of the country, but illuminates operationally Giorgio Agamben's notion of the "razor-thin" line between democratic and dictatorial political forms today. The Indian state's response to the Sikh rebellion of the late 20th century, and the near-uniform cultural consent of the non-Sikh population behind that response, is a useful exemplar of a how a sector of citizenry can come to be stripped of civil rights quite within the rule of democratic law. India's response to this first real challenge to its territorial integrity must be examined as we examine the health of the canary in the coal mine, as, indeed, the Punjab model is now being applied elsewhere as a successful means of combating terrorist violence. But the state's own violence in Punjab has yet to be fully accounted for; the history of suffering there is silenced in favor of economic triumphalism in the new Punjab. If the state is portrayed a garden, as Zygmunt Baumann suggests, and disruptive populations as weeds within it, who will protest when leaders create blossoms by poisoning the undergrowth? India blooms, and its internal violence escalates. The United States, Britain and other contemporary states can learn from this South Asian example, which is not anomalous but all too ordinary as power, fear and identity politics jostle up against the commitment to rights upon which our democratic governments were founded. [book] |