Jallad: Death Squads and State Terror in South Asia

by Tasneem Khalil

As the pillars or the specialists, the soldiers and the policemen are responsible for saving the regime, the state and the ruling elite. This act of saving involves the systematic use of sheer, brutal violence against a civilian population to achieve a political goal: intimidating, controlling and dominating the population to ensure the state’s monopoly on violence. In other words, the state deploys its specialists wherever and whenever its writ is challenged or threatened. This is the logic of state terror – brutal quelling of trouble, disorder, dissent and disobedience through military means.

This legitimisation has two features: dehumanisation through the restriction of human liberty and proclamation of a state of exception.

And those in the disturbed areas who try fighting the structural violence or protest against socio-economic injustices are the first group of targets of state terror. These are the political opponents of the state: dissenting intellectuals/activists and armed rebels/insurgents.

Structural violence in the peripheries is also the root cause of the existence and rise of an underclass in the metropolis – the lumpenproletariat. The lumpenproletariat, Fanon wrote, ‘leave the country districts, where vital statistics are just so many insoluble problems, rush towards the towns, crowd into tin-shack settlements, and try to make their way into the ports and cities founded by colonial domination.’

‘The pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed and the petty criminal,’ then, endanger the security of the new metropolis – Mumbai, Karachi, Dhaka or Colombo. They are the second group of targets of state terror: socio-e...

The lumpenproletariat, however, can also become the foot soldiers of oppression in the metropolis or the periphery. ‘The oppressor,’ Fanon wrote, ‘who never loses a chance of setting the niggers against each other, will be extremely skilful in using that ignorance ...

The skilful oppressors or the specialists on violence are the dominant group in what we call the garrison state, a state where national security is the civil religion – a state where police and military commanders direct state terror campaigns against internal enemies.31 The garrison state – also known as the national security state – is now the predominant form of government in post-colonial countries, not only in South Asia but across the globe.32

[At] the global level there is an international network or system of authoritarian (mostly Third World) states that employ terror as normal procedure, coupled with their (mostly First World) external or international sponsors and support system of governments and multinational corporations, particularly the arms/security industry. At the top of this system, leading by example, are the United States and its allies (particularly the United Kingdom and France), and the terror states they support, followed by other terror states outside their sphere of influence who are supported by other international patrons pursuing their own interests.35