State Violence and Continuities, 1946-1958

The post-independence state can be seen to be taking shape before the colonial state completed its withdrawal, but in the process it is important to see violence as the driving force behind the compromise between a retreating and increasingly vulnerable colonial state and those elites competing for succession.

The post-independence state thus relied on violence being administered in particular regions and for particular times as states of exception emerged. In the writing of Giorgio Agamben via Carl Schmitt, the state is implicitly, through being able to administer and decide upon the state of exception, a concentration camp.^[132] Historians would insist on a distinction between a philosophical argument about a sovereign rule of exception that turns states into the equivalent of concentration camps, and actually existing states whose use of exceptional powers has not achieved camp-like dimensions. In the newly independent India, the army was deployed to control unruly and recalcitrant populations of the new nation state's peripheries, first in the north-eastern region of Assam, forcibly incorporating a number of ‘tribal' minorities, some of which resisted incorporation into the new state, and over time in Kashmir, similar to Pakistan on the North-West Frontier.

The postcolonial state was faced with the same central questions as its predecessor colonial state: does the monopoly of violence remain legitimate if the frequent use of violence becomes necessary? And does an excessive use of violence, in turn, lead to the loss of that monopoly? The question remains open as to whether the frequent resort to exceptional forms of state violence is indicative of a loss of legitimacy, or if it is merely an indicator of the hegemony of the state. But part of our argument is that state violence is not always explicit. A state built on the premise of a civilising mission or good governance is undermined if it must resort to extreme repression in order to maintain its hegemony. By reading the existence of state violence across a range of modalities - epistemological, implicit, symbolic or structural - we highlight ways in which dominance was maintained in British India. It is important to be sensitive to invisible forms of violence, for their effective operation frequently precludes more overt manifestations, which by the mid twentieth century precipitated a crisis of legitimacy.