Circles of Violence Self and Other in Politics of Kerala

Abstract

The prolonged political violence in Kannur, situated in Malabar region of Kerala, points out an imporatnt fact; it coexists with democracy and it facilitated and supported by the political parties to various communities in this region. Consequently, political violence holds a unique role among the Left and Right-Wing parties, shaping the distribution, transfer, and maintenance of power within the communities. By framing political violence as closely associated with the political structure and inherent in forming the individuals or collectives in India, this study places its particular relevance to the Kannur’s political violence. Socio-political-economical circumstances, marked by violent conflicts and traumas, prompt a narrative process of radicalization within the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI(M), while for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh –Bharatiya Janata Party (RSS-BJP), the narrative are constructed through the nationalism and religion. These types of narratives contribute to the making of new cognitive self, and to adopt internally meaningful sense of the self. This process has the potential to instigate an identity formation in the individuals. This transformation legitimises violence through active socialisation within the group, leading to a shift in the individual’s value and belief systems to those rooted in the practices of “othering.” The CPI(M) and RSS-BJP have successfully developed their communities at red or saffron places in the Kannur district through violence for more than four decades. I have used three variables to bring out the nature of the violence (i.e., inside and outside) that constitutes the community in the Kannur context. They are the collective self, othering (self and other relation), and tormented self. The ethnographic method used in the study is unique in that it focusses on the people who are continuously engaged with violence and tries to produce an account of two polarised viewpoints. Further, the ethnographer faces a multiplicity of complex conceptual power structures and superimpositions knotted into one another, which are often irregular, strange, and inexplicit. Co-existing of violence, parties, and democracy in party villages led to adopting and sustaining antagonism, othering, and intolerance. Further, the self envisages higher than the ‘other self’ and eagerly wishes to eradicate the ‘other’ from their space. To an extent, both parties won in influencing the political and social consciousness of the people of their villages. As a result, even the pain of the ‘other’ is easily neglected and counted as victorious of the self. However, the internal and external clashes within the party and with individuals mostly led to the self-inflected casualities. Consequently, it undermines the collective of the parties, leading to the breaks and fragmentations within.