Ranabir Samaddar
[Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, CRG. He can be reached at ranabir@mcrg.ac.in]
When
we speak of human security we first of all recognise the need and the practice
of a juridical structure of security that acknowledges various special claims
for security, but reconciles at the same time the differential claims for
security in its structure. Such a structure becomes overall by
displaying three features – by being legal, by acknowledging special claims,
and by reconciling differing claims for security. In case of India, the
constitution has recognised the presence and certain rights of the indigenous
people, has made room for specific provisions for those rights, has provided
for special security arrangements in an area such as the North east, has tried
to settle legally the international borders and boundaries as much as possible,
and has done away with old hierarchies in terms of political-administrative
units of the Union, and has made all units equal as states. Yet, as India’s
post-Independence history indicates, the emphasis on country’s overall security
has reinforced molecular insecurity. Assam is a telling case, where its
international boundary, inter-state boundaries, and internal boundaries – all
have combined to make each fragment of the state of Assam insecure. In that
region, probably like many others, no one can provide security at the
grassroots – the rebels, the army, the ethnic home guards, the civil society,
frankly no one. The special provisions only display their own inadequacy; the
reconciliation mechanisms prove to be mere governmental exercises of rule; the
army and the paramilitary forces prove oppressive; and the international
boundaries become the negotiating space for kin groups, kin political
formations, the immigrant army of labour, and people fleeing from torture,
threats of persecution, and fear. The overall security is reinforced by an
“overall” political economy of the region, some of whose features produce
insecurity. Such a security framework cannot acknowledge fully the figure of
the immigrant except in the sense of denying or ousting the immigrant from the political
universe. Unable to provide enough economic resources and development, or to
put matter correctly, unable to de-link development and the influx of migrant
labour, and unable to cleanse the nation of aliens, the only way remains for
the indigene then to ensure molecular security is to claim homeland. The fly in
the ointment is that, this path of overall security leading to molecular
security is also the path to molecular insecurity. It is like a place degree
zero, where constitution has stopped bearing relevance, only pragmatism
rules, and daily negotiations order the day. It is a hard case, harder than all
juridical security arrangements, harder than constitutional provisions; it is a
terra incognita where history rather than law has the capacity to play the
grand jury. In fact history calls law into question here, and whatever may be
the outcome of the security/property question in the present juncture, we must
recognise the hardness of the case, if we are to claim that we are making
serious intellectual effort towards revising our notion of security, if the
phrase “non-traditional security” suggests some such need.
In
different parts of the world, imperial nations are trying to readjust their
border security regimes in the wake of various free trade agreements, the crash
of 2008, and the global discourse of terrorism. One effect of this has been
trying to secure neighbouring countries’ consent in tightening the borders,
also “flexibilising” border management in a way so that immigrant labour can come
only a legally sanctioned way, suspected terrorists cannot come, and illegal
immigrant labour cannot sneak in. In this dawning regime of “flexible security”
system, immigrant labour is the hardest element to be persuaded to fall in
line.
The
reason is simple - they upset the private property system, in whatever form it
exists – group property, nations’ property, individual property, or a cartel’s
property. This is so because, while private property requires as its political
security a citizenry based on universal suffrage, a participatory system to a
lesser or greater extent, a transactional mode of politics, and some sort of
preferential arrangements in politics and (at times) economy based on positive
discrimination, immigration breaks this framework, makes the contradiction
between economics and politics acute, pitches conflict at the most fundamental
levels of society, making liberal rule very, very difficult by provoking
collective claims, violence, and politics to an ungovernable extent. To all these,
the response of the regime of private property is to make “security” a flexible
issue, which means security too has become today a theme of governmentality
– a field of politics, negotiation, government, and rule.
Governing
population groups calls for stabilising these groups, and regulating and
controlling their flows. This is how security becomes one of the essential
aspects of population management. I have tried to show elsewhere the threefold
component of security in relation to population management, namely: the
overarching sovereignty of the State (which calls for a centralised authority
guarding the borders and frontiers, and maintaining police, army,
administration, and laws to rule the population), the disciplinary powers at
all levels (which decide friend/foe distinction, make possible an economy of
society, implement rules and customs, and orients mentalities), and the
governmental power (which regulates and controls population groups physically)
that make up the triangle of security architecture – a triangle that has in the
words of Michel Foucault “as its primary target the population and as its
essential mechanism the apparatus of security”. Indeed, what needs to be added
is that it is the concern for security that binds its three aspects, namely,
sovereignty, disciplinary powers, and governmental functions, and brings upon
the people a fearsome force of classification, pacification, and domestication.
In
such a situation how can we displace the discourse of security? This is a vast
exercise. But re-orienting our ways and attitudes would mean at least at an
intellectual level finding out the fault lines in that architecture,
understanding the complexities in the phenomena of population flows, and trying
to discover the broad contours of the practices of negotiating with others –
practices perched on those fault lines, whose traces I made a feeble attempt to
describe in The Marginal Nation. Some significant historical studies
have shown how different population groups have created for themselves what can
be called as “borderland existence”, how borders have produced borderless and
borderland people, how the mainstream perception of an immigrant may not
necessarily be the same held by the groups being called immigrants but who do
not necessarily think of themselves as so, and how we need to develop for all
these new geographies of knowing. Clearly contemporary law, administrative
practices, and mainstream economy, are against such borderland existence. Their
flux is a threat to security, which is built around the idea of stable
population groups. To inquire into those borderland existences means also
avoiding the stereotypes of the binaries of exchange, which we easily associate
with those negotiations - the creditor and the debtor, gratitude and resentment,
killing and pity, respect and mercy – and investigating instead the histories
of “living together but separately”, and “trusting but not getting intimate”
with the neighbour, not to copy these histories but to see what political
history precedes today’s various alternative notions of security that try to
avoid acute hostility and rupture. A political history of friendship between
communities, of the way in which communities choose to welcome or expel the
newcomers, or who they perceive to be stranger communities, will also show the
moral standards that inform at a particular moment the decision of a community
to welcome or to expel or kill. That morality, which we can take to be an
ensemble of moral standards, exists in three concentric domains. The central
core contains those judgements of right or wrong that people hold reasonably
everywhere – thus, even with all the existing discriminations, a community may
hold the judgement that it is wrong to kill or expel simply on the ground that
it does not like the group to which its members do not belong. Beyond this are
the judgements of right or wrong, or, acceptance or rejection, made under
specific social conditions, on the basis of values the members of a community
share internally, and political choice. Thus communities in the pursuit of
national legitimacy may accept killing and expulsion of others, and
participate. Judgements in the third domain differ from the preceding two in a
significant way, since these judgements are based on the idea of what we owe to
others. It seems plausible therefore, there is a plurality of values within the
range of morality, and these values may support mutually incompatible standards
of conduct. It is important to remember in the context of the varying moral
practices that a community may have internal cleavages and what seems to be a
community’s moral choice is simply the choice of the powerful few within the
group, later on accepted by the rest with persuasion and under duress. A
history of these varying moral practices will throw light on the way security
perceptions evolve, the way in which our “traditional” security choices are
made, and the significant measure to which the moral practices influence these
security choices. More than a disagreement about right or wrong, and
traditional and non-traditional, it is a matter of understanding through deep
historical studies the varying, discriminating, and differential world of
friendship and enmity. Such historical studies will also bring out the basis,
or the varying bases, on which reconciling of claims is achieved, and thereby
communities live together. The basis, as indicated already, may be on moral
grounds, on ideas of friendship, on practices of accommodation, on accepting as
“normal” the borderland existences in societies and polities, and finally on
the rules of what I have called elsewhere minimal justice.
Minimal
justice is minimal because it accepts the idea of historical limits, it accepts
that there can be other ideas of justice, that there are greater possible extents
to which justice ought to be fought for; but against all these and without
denying all these, the idea of minimal justice stresses the idea of the
minimum, of the necessity and the reality of a consensus on what is just, and
enunciates the rules that govern the standard of justice based on rights and
the quality of reconciling of claims. In this case, (a) recognition of past
injustices towards immigrant communities, (b) compensating the victims of
xenophobia, (c) the supervision of accommodating arrangements, (d) joint
custodianship of common resources and legally ensuring that common resources is
not treated as private property of a group, and finally (e) instituting
mechanisms that encourage improvements of our politics towards accommodating
non-national existences – these five principles seem to be the rules of minimal
justice in this case. These rules do not deny the historic basis of conflicts,
but they stress the historic basis of the possibilities of reconciliation.
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