Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities

Theory in Forms

by Moyukh Chatterjee

In 2002, armed Hindu mobs attacked Muslims in broad daylight in the west Indian state of Gujarat. The pogrom, which was widely seen over television, left more than one thousand dead. In Composing Violence Moyukh Chatterjee examines how highly visible political violence against minorities acts as a catalyst for radical changes in law, public culture, and power. He shows that, far from being quashed through its exposure by activists, media, and politicians, state-sanctioned anti-Muslim violence set the stage for transforming India into a Hindu supremacist state. The state's and civil society’s responses to the violence, Chatterjee contends, reveal the constitutive features of modern democracy in which riots and pogroms are techniques to produce a form of society based on a killable minority and a triumphant majority. Focusing on courtroom procedures, police archives, legal activism, and mainstream media coverage, Chatterjee theorizes violence as a form of governance that creates minority populations. By tracing the composition of anti-Muslim violence and the legal structures that transform that violence into the making of minorities and majorities, Chatterjee demonstrates that violence is intrinsic to liberal democracy.

184 pages, Paperback

Published February 24, 2023

Reviews

[Annie Zaidi]

Do modern democracies inevitably succumb to majoritarian violence? This book seems to argue that it is not a bug and may well be a feature. Efforts to seek judicial redress have largely failed in India and it is true that exposure of the groups and individuals involved in one pogrom does nothing to prevent another. It is worth considering that although states and borders have historically come to being through violence in the shape of territorial conquest, these wars did not necessarily target racial or religious minorities. This is a problem peculiar to electoral democracy, which makes it even more alarming. Should we assume that justice is impossible for minorities in constitutional democracies like ours? Is peace impossible?

Chatterjee does not make that argument. He encourages us to instead track the ‘tentacles of violent events within everyday social life.’ And yet, given the limitations of the exposure model of seeking justice, how far would we get through such tracking? Is there a point to the exercise if impunity is not a breakdown but rather, it is built into the structure of majoritarian democracies (are there any other kinds)?

My full review for The Wire here:
https://thewire.in/books/book-review-...

[Becca w · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic, a model especially in terms of method, excited to draw on it for my work