Conclusion
Remembering one’s complicity in violence has significant consequences for life in the aftermath, in a post-terror context of silence, fear, and forgetting. Moreover, when the overall moral judgment on the violence perpetrated during the Bheeshanaya is negative, acknowledging responsibility for violence potentially poses challenges to the moral foundation of one’s life and sociality with others after terror.
But it is also important to question whether it is fair to expect former insurgents to acknowledge moral responsibility for violence when they believe themselves to be innocent of any wrongful action, and when they further consider their present self to be different to that of their youthful self that engaged in insurrectionary violence some 20 years earlier.Through their use of “youth” as a narrative strategy, many former insurgents engaged in a form of “retrospective cleansing” of their pasts, which allowed them to continue living with themselves, their pasts, and with others after violence. Perhaps for former insurgents then, remembering themselves in terms of the good and the moral is an effort necessary to continue justifying their right to survive, both to themselves and others. This is particularly important in the face of challenges posed by the stigma attached to the JVP insurgent. In using “youthfulness” as a narrative frame to distance and disassociate themselves from their violent pasts, to deflect blame and avoid moral responsibility for violence, and to project a reworked representation of the self in terms of the “good,” former insurgents were justifying their own survival to themselves and others. This then is part of the memory work they engage in to recreate life and negotiate sociality after terror.