How People Respond to Violence: Everyday Peace and the Maoist Conflict in India 3031113411, 9783031113413

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RETHINKING PEACE AND CONFLICT STUDIES SERIES EDITORS: OLIVER P. RICHMOND · ANNIKA BJÖRKDAHL · GËZIM VISOKA

How People Respond to Violence Everyday Peace and the Maoist Conflict in India

Monica Carrer

Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies

Series Editors Oliver P. Richmond, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Annika Björkdahl, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden Gëzim Visoka, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

This agenda-setting series of research monographs, now more than a decade old, provides an interdisciplinary forum aimed at advancing innovative new agendas for peace and conflict studies in International Relations. Many of the critical volumes the series has so far hosted have contributed to new avenues of analysis directly or indirectly related to the search for positive, emancipatory, and hybrid forms of peace. Constructive critiques of liberal peace, hybrid peace, everyday contributions to peace, the role of civil society and social movements, international actors and networks, as well as a range of different dimensions of peace (from peacebuilding, statebuilding, youth contributions, photography, and many case studies) have been explored so far. The series raises important political questions about what peace is, whose peace and peace for whom, as well as where peace takes place. In doing so, it offers new and interdisciplinary perspectives on the development of the international peace architecture, peace processes, UN peacebuilding, peacekeeping and mediation, statebuilding, and localised peace formation in practice and in theory. It examines their implications for the development of local peace agency and the connection between emancipatory forms of peace and global justice, which remain crucial in different conflict-affected regions around the world. This series’ contributions offer both theoretical and empirical insights into many of the world’s most intractable conflicts, also investigating increasingly significant evidence about blockages to peace. This series is indexed by Scopus.

Monica Carrer

How People Respond to Violence Everyday Peace and the Maoist Conflict in India

Monica Carrer The Everyday Peace Initiative Townsville, QLD, Australia

ISSN 1759-3735 ISSN 2752-857X (electronic) Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies ISBN 978-3-031-11341-3 ISBN 978-3-031-11342-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11342-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design: © MC Richmond This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The last day of my fieldwork, as I was waiting for the train at Jhargram station, Devi hugged me tightly. Both our faces were covered in tears. It was an emotional goodbye after those intense weeks together. She told me that I was like a daughter to her. I looked at her puzzled; she was only three years older than me. She smiled and said that once I will become a mother myself, I would understand. I thought a lot about her words, as my doctoral journey soon became a journey of motherhood. Becoming a mother made my Ph.D. path much longer and harder, a struggle full of obstacles that forced me to stop every time I felt that I was finally making some progress, and so did the publishing journey afterwards. Yet, it was the greatest learning experience of my life. The joys and challenges of raising my children had a strong impact on my academic thinking, and it gave a strong boost to my research. Motherhood helped me, in particular, to connect with the voices of parents and families in the context of my research. I am really grateful to the children in my life, Rishi, Raghav, and all my nephews and nieces, for all they taught me about peace and conflict in these years. I can never say how much the unconditional love of these little ones was of support during the hardest days of this long journey, since the first day I moved to Dunedin to start my Ph.D. In turn, the help and support of my own mother has been crucial for completing my doctoral thesis. She was the one who came to rescue me thrice at the other side of the world, leaving everything behind. She v

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came for my fieldwork, too. Without her help as an interpreter, cultural mediator, and mother, my fieldwork would not have been so successful, and perhaps not even possible. There is a long list of people, in addition to my mother, who helped me immensely during my fieldwork. Though I will not mention all their names, I am forever indebted to them. Some of them have dedicated days and weeks to my project, with much passion and enthusiasm. I am grateful to our wonderful driver for driving us around very skilfully through such difficult roads. I am thankful to all the people who trusted me and shared their views, stories, and emotions with me; to all those who took care of me, welcomed me into their homes, offered sweets and meals, and invited me to come again. The help I received in Kolkata was also very precious, especially during the first phase of my fieldwork, as I was there alone and fell ill. Friends and relatives like Raj Kumar Gupta, Purnima, and my uncle and cousin, were of great support when I was hospitalised and helped me going back soon to my research. Special thanks to the staff of the guest house who took me to the hospital in the middle of the night, even though I was a stranger to them. Many thanks also to sister Mahadevi who welcomed us to stay at her place for the duration of the fieldwork. I would also like to acknowledge the institutions who contributed to make this fieldwork possible: the New Zealand India Institute for the funding; the local authorities of Jhargram, Binpur, and Belpahari for allowing me to conduct this research and for their cooperation; and the National Library of Kolkata for the assistance with the collection of documents. Besides my fieldwork in India, I have been very fortunate to have pursued this doctoral journey at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago. I found this to be a unique environment, full of people truly devoted to peace and social change. I loved being part of the Centre since the first day I joined, and I was never disappointed. I feel especially lucky to have Richard Jackson and Katerina Standish as my supervisors. They have been wonderful and impeccable throughout the ups and downs of this long journey. I am also grateful to all my doctoral examiners and I was very honoured by the positive feedback and suggestions which contributed to this book. I was able to submit my doctoral thesis just in time before giving birth to my second baby. I spend the following years looking for ways of implementing ‘everyday peace’ through my own experience as an immigrant mother, and I co-founded the Everyday Peace Initiative. I am very grateful to co-founder, colleague, and dear friend Sylvia Frain, for being

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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the one person who always believed in me, encouraged me, and supported me through these years until the publication of this book, and I have no words to describe how meaningful it has been. I also would like to thank my dear friend Alice Martini for our long talks and motivating me to publish this book. I feel like I have grown into a much more confident academic thanks to the support of all these people, and I am looking forward to what comes next. There is one more person I wish I could have acknowledged: my maternal grandmother, dida. I grew up very far from her, and we never had much chance to spend time together. Yet, I always felt so close to her. I hoped that the fieldwork for this research would have been a chance to be with her again, but I lost her too soon. I never got to tell her goodbye. Now she can never read this book, but I want to dedicate it to her, to my dida. Her name was Shantii—peace.

Contents

1

A Puzzle from the Field People’s Agency and Violent Conflict Research The Lalgarh Movement in Junglemahal Theoretical and Methodological Approach An Everyday Approach to Violent Conflict and Peace Methods of Data Collection and Analysis Key Insights and Contributions Content of the Book

1 4 6 11 12 12 13 15

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Local People in the Civil Wars Literature Introduction Poverty and Violent Conflict Revolutions New Wars The Problem of Measuring Greed and Grievance The Security-Development Nexus Violent Conflict and the Everyday Violent Conflict, Meaning, and Social Context Micro-Level Conflict The Everyday Everyday Peace and Everyday Resistance Conclusion

17 17 19 21 23 26 29 31 32 35 37 42 46

ix

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Maoism in India The Myth of Naxalbari Naxalism in Bihar Maoism Today: The ‘Biggest Threat to India’s Internal Security’ The Construction of Marginalised Groups in the Literature Conclusion

49 50 55

An Everyday Approach to Conflict and Peace Conflict, Peace, and the Everyday A Cup of Tea The Everyday Discourse, Narratives, and the Everyday An Ontology of Violent Conflict Structures and Agency Discourse, Power, and Conflict Power, Violence, and Resistance Subalternity and Representation Poverty Seen from the West Experiencing the Field Fieldwork Encounters Relationships and Veracity Fieldwork as a Gendered Experience Conducting Fieldwork in a Post-Conflict Environment: Risks, Challenges, and Ethics Conclusions

71 72 72 75 76 79 80 83 83 85 88 90 91 94 97

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The Lalgarh Movement in Junglemahal: Comparing the Narratives The Origins of the Lalgarh Movement Constructing the ‘Tribal’ Uprising Land, Forests, Minerals and Violence Politics, State Violence, and the Maoists From the Movement to Violent Conflict The Formation of the PCPA: Whose Movement? Narratives of Peaceful Resistance and Narratives of Violence Peak and Decline of Violence Conclusion

59 65 69

98 101 103 105 107 114 118 122 122 124 128 132

CONTENTS

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Experiencing Conflict Introduction Injured Bodies and Discourse Local people’s Understanding of Violence Everyday Embodied Experiences Emotions Fear Grievance Emotions and Social Relationships Anger The Impact of Conflict on Local people’s Socio-Economic Conditions Gendered Experiences Conclusion

135 135 136 140 145 147 149 150 152 154

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Responding to Conflict Introduction Exit Participation Fighting for the Maoists Ordinary people’s Participation Everyday Peace and Community Solidarity Voice Forms of Voice and Resistance Local people’s Explanations of Resistance Conclusion

165 165 167 169 171 177 186 191 192 199 201

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Perspectives on Peace, Change, and Development Introduction Peace and Development in the Discourse of the State Paternalism and Development Grievance in Local People’s Discourses The Narrative of Extreme Poverty and Starvation The Narrative of Corruption Power Relationships and Everyday Violence Peace in Local people’s Discourses Peace as Culture Peace as Experience Peace as Change Conclusion

203 203 204 208 211 212 214 219 224 225 228 230 234

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156 160 164

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Conclusion: The Extraordinary of the Ordinary in Times of Violence Introduction Integrating Everyday Conflict, Everyday Peace, and Everyday Resistance: Emerging Areas in Peace and Conflict Studies The Social Construction of Grievance The Role of Local People’s Action in Conflict, Peace, and Resistance The Social Capital for Everyday Peace The Role of the Family and Inter-Generation Relationships Discursive Resistance to Violent Structures of Power Limits of the Research and Future Research Agendas Making an Impact with Peace Research Concluding Remarks: The Everyday and Social Capital for Peace

239 239

240 241 242 244 246 247 248 250 252

Bibliography

255

Index

273

Abbreviations and Key Terms

Adivasi CDA

CPI (Maoist)

CPM

Gram Panchayat Harmad Bahini/Harmads Junglemahal

Lodha

Mahato

Majhi

Indigenous people of India, also known as Scheduled Tribes Critical Discourse Analysis. Theoretical and methodological approach based on the concept of discourse as social practice Communist Party of India (Maoist). Political party and armed group that aims at achieving a Maoist revolution through armed struggle. It is officially banned as a terrorist organisation in India Communist Party of India (Marxist). Historically one of the main parties in West Bengal. Ruled the state in the Left Front coalition between 1977 and 2011 Village-level unit of governance Informal militia associated with the CPM party Area covering the districts of Jhargram, West Midnapore, Purulia, and Bankura in the Indian state of West Bengal One of the tribal groups in Junglemahal, officially listed as Scheduled Tribe. Previously listed as Criminal Tribe during colonial times One of the main ethnic groups in Junglemahal, officially listed as Other Scheduled Caste; claims the status of Scheduled Tribe Village leader in the Santhali traditional social system xiii

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OBC PCPA

Santhal SC SEZ ST

TMC Tribal

Other Backward Caste. Caste officially regarded by the government of India as disadvantaged People’s Committee against Police Atrocities. Social organisation formed during the Lalgarh movement, allegedly a front organisation of the CPI (Maoist) One of the main tribal groups in Junglemahal, officially listed as a Scheduled Tribe Scheduled Caste. Caste officially regarded by the government of India as most disadvantaged Special Economic Zone. Area where special laws and regulations apply Scheduled Tribes. Groups officially regarded by the government of India as disadvantaged; they are considered the indigenous people of India Trinamool Congress Party. Ruling party in West Bengal since 2011 Person belonging to a Scheduled Tribe

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 8.1

Junglemahal map Construction site (Source Photo by Monica Carrer)

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CHAPTER 1

A Puzzle from the Field

I first read about Lalgarh at the beginning of my PhD journey in July 2012, soon after moving to New Zealand. I saw pictures and videos of crowds of villagers protesting police violence, and of the battles between Maoists and State forces that followed. The conflict was very recent, and at that time, it was still settling down. There was hardly any literature published on the topic. It was perfect for my doctoral research project. I had already decided to study the Maoist conflict in India because I was interested in the relationship between grievance and conflict, the classic question of ‘why men rebel’.1 More specifically, I was interested in understanding how experiences of grievance led people to fight. At first sight, Lalgarh had all the elements that I was looking for: poverty, social marginalisation, a repressive state, a popular uprising, a rebel group, and relatively high levels of violence. The fact that it was a conflict limited to a regional area also fit well with my research plans, because I had decided to look at the local dimension of violent conflict. A year later, I was travelling to a remote area in India near the border between the states of West Bengal and Jharkhand to conduct some interviews. We drove slowly through bumpy, unpaved roads. The roads were so uneven that I had to squeeze all my muscles and hold on to a handle in the car to avoid hitting my head. It was hot, but we kept the windows 1 Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Carrer, How People Respond to Violence, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11342-0_1

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sealed to keep the red soil from filling the vehicle. Finally, we stopped as we reached a school. Our guide explained that here, during the conflict, a teacher had been dragged out of a full classroom and executed by the Maoists in front of the children. But it was all empty and quiet now, no signs of the blood that was once spilled. Near the school, we met a woman who was pumping water from a manual pump, and we started talking. She explained that life was a struggle here. This pump had been installed after the conflict, but until then, the local families had to walk for miles to collect water, which was very hard in the absence of proper roads. She explained that the villagers did not have much confidence in the state and politicians who hardly ever did anything to address these urgent problems. She felt the same about the Maoists. Hence, when they came and tried to coerce them to join them, all the families of the village refused. The Maoists retaliated by beating them and starving them for days, and publicly killing the teacher. Despite all this, the villagers refused to join. When I admired the courage in resisting the Maoists, the woman shook her head. ‘We haven’t lost that much’, she said. ‘Those who went with them lost more’. They did not feel like victims nor heroes. They simply wanted to stay out of a conflict that meant nothing but destruction to them. I was puzzled. There were possibly all the reasons for grievance here. I wondered what it was like to walk every day for miles on rocks to get enough water for a family to drink, cook, and bathe in this hot weather. I was reminded of the condition of the road by my body, which was still aching from travelling in the back seat of a car. In addition, the sense of grievance in the woman’s narrative was very political. She emphasised the indifference of politicians right from the beginning of the conversation. Violent conflict, however, was not the answer for her and her fellow villagers. They did not fight in the war, nor did they accept to be victimised or coerced by any of the warring parties. They made their own independent choice, and it was nothing extraordinary. I soon realised, through many encounters like this, that the question of ‘why men rebel’ was too reductive. Fighting was not the only way through which the local people responded to direct and structural violence, nor was it the dominant one. Some people did take up arms, and many participated in the resistance movement, but the majority of the people I met did not engage in violent actions. Yet, most of them found ways to express their agency to influence the outcomes of the conflict. Some, for example, experimented with nonviolent activism in the space

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created by the movement and the collapse of the state; others followed the orders of both of the military groups, but boycotted them at the first occasion and later engaged in resistance actions against them; groups of local individuals created informal networks to support one another and resist pressure from the armed groups; and much more. Local peoples’ actions during the time of the conflict were as diverse and dynamic as their experiences and perspectives on what was happening and what a sustainable peace should look like. I realised, therefore, that the question of local peoples’ agency needed to focus not just on violence and mobilisation, but also include resistance and peace. Through the case of Junglemahal, this book addresses the broader question of how we can approach peace and conflict research from an everyday perspective. What happens if we bring people’s perspectives to the core of the analysis of peace and conflict analysis? What does this add or transform to core debates in this field? Of course, findings from micro-level research such as this are highly context-specific. However, this research offers great opportunities to gather in-depth insights into issues that have been raised in civil war research, from example the role of greed and grievance, the relationship with armed groups, inequalities, structural violence, the extraction of resources, the role of indigenous groups, and much more. Importantly, here it is not only about questioning the validity of arguments from an academic perspective, but also to reverse the question, and explore how meaningful and useful academic notions are for local people on the ground. Local people are crucial actors during violent conflict, as the evidence from micro-level studies on violent conflict increasingly demonstrates.2 Looking at the dynamics of violent conflict from the perspective of human experience shows all its complexity. We can find in that experience many dimensions that civil war research has covered, but also other dimensions that we may not have thought of. We find that people constantly make choices, but their strategies during war may not be limited to binary choices between participating or not in the violence. Exploring local people’s action sheds light on other kinds of activities that the local people may engage in to resist more powerful actors and influence the outcomes 2 Roger Mac Ginty and Andrew Williams, Conflict and Development (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); Nils B. Weidmann, “Micro-Level Studies,” in Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars, ed. Edward Newman and Karl DeRouen (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2014).

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of the conflict, actions that may represent efforts to build a better future and ‘everyday peace’,3 rather than just participating in violence. Investigating violent conflict from the perspective of the local people reveals that there is more to conflict than violence. Violent conflict is also about economic exchanges, social relationships, culture, emotions, gender, families, children: in short, it is about human beings. Mac Ginty points out that people are usually written out of conflict.4 The question, then, is how would writing people back in change our understanding of violent conflict? This is a core question that this book seeks to answer. Examining local people’s experiences brings new reflections to questions such as what is peace? What kind of change matters? If earlier conceptualisations of peace focused on the absence of violent conflict, we have been adding dimensions such as ‘positive peace’ and ‘human security’, as we know that there is more to peace than the lack of violent hostilities. Rather than a definition of peace imposed from the outside, here we explore what peace would be meaningful to the people who are supposed to benefit from it. What do people want for themselves, for their communities? Ultimately, researching the everyday is about power. The everyday is not just another dimension of analysis, and not merely a spatial dimension. It is deeply embedded in power relationships, which define every aspect of social life, including who gets to define what is ‘peace’ and what is ‘violence’. Power relationships are also part of the way in which we conduct peace research, write about it, and what we do about it. In many ways, this book is a journey exploring where we, as peace researchers, stand in relation to the everyday.

People’s Agency and Violent Conflict Research Some aspects related to local people’s preferences in violent conflict are widely discussed in the civil wars literature, such as, for example, the problem of civilian mobilisation and support for armed groups.5 In these 3 Roger Mac Ginty, “Everyday Peace: Bottom-Up and Local Agency in ConflictAffected Societies,” Security Dialogue 45, no. 6 (2014). 4 Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development, 72. 5 See, for example: Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy M. Weinstein, “Who Fights?

The Determinants of Participation in Civil War,” American Journal of Political Science 52, no. 2 (2008); Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War

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studies, the focus is not necessarily on the local-level dimension, or on people’s agency as such. The lack of research on local people’s agency entails not only that we know little of how a potentially very important actor—the people—might shape the dynamics of conflict, but also that we know little about how they contribute to constructing peace on the ground. As the everyday is about the ordinary, in a way it could be argued that everything is everyday. The point is, however, that we often forget to look at the ordinary. And when the everyday is omitted, thousands of stories and perspectives are silenced and lost. Along with those stories are also lost all the agents that played significant roles in them. In these ‘unwritten epics’, stories of violence and stories of peace are often mixed together. In recent years, however, both the local dimension of violent conflict and civilians’ agency are gaining more attention in the literature. A growing amount of micro-level studies address research questions such as the micro-level patterns of violence,6 the micro-level socio-economic causes of conflict,7 and wartime institutions.8 These studies touch upon questions related to local people’s agency, but these are usually subordinated to their relationship with the armed groups. Some scholars have explored further dimensions of local people’s agency, and looked more broadly at what choices civilians make during violent conflict,9 or at how local individuals and communities find ways to resist the coercive pressure from the armed groups and stay out of conflict.10 Another stream in the literature investigates how local people in El Salvador (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Wanton and Senseless?,” Rationality and Society 11, no. 3 (1999). 6 N. Kalyvas Stathis, “Micro-Level Studies of Violence in Civil War: Refining and Extending the Control-Collaboration Model,” Terrorism & Political Violence 24, no. 4 (2012); Kalyvas, “Wanton and Senseless?” 7 Patricia Justino, “Poverty and Violent Conflict: A Micro-Level Perspective on the Causes and Duration of Warfare,” Journal of Peace Research 46, no. 3 (2009). 8 Ana Arjona, “Wartime Institutions,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 58, no. 8 (2014). 9 See, for example: Shane Barter, Civilian Strategy in Civil War: Insights from Indonesia,

Thailand, and the Philippines (Springer, 2016); David Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 10 Mary B. Anderson and Marshall Wallace, Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013); Juan Masullo J., The Power of Staying Put. Nonviolent Resistance Against Armed Groups in Colombia (Washington: International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, 2015); Oliver Ross Kaplan, Resisting War: How

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construct peace in their everyday lives through the concept of everyday peace.11 This literature shifts the focus of analysis from the warring parties and logics of violence, to less violent, people-centric aspects of violent conflict. Moreover, the growing literature on embodied experiences of conflict explores the meaning of war from its impact of violence on ordinary people’s everyday lives.12 All these studies highlight important dimensions that are changing our understanding of violent conflict. However, many of these aspects are treated separately and hardly interact. In particular, the problem of violent conflict is usually treated separately from peace, and so are the realms of experience and action. What is missing is an integrated approach that looks at what local people do in times of violent conflict, as actors that actively seek to influence the dynamics of violence as well as peace and positive change. Exploring how local people’s actions of war, resistance, and peace are related to how they make sense of local-level socio-political dynamics through their experience, system of values, and knowledge, is the main purpose of this research project. Importantly, by focusing on the local, the aim is also to question power relations, and explore whether subaltern discourses undermine dominant discourses that legitimise direct and structural violence. This focus on power is a key innovation of this book, as it aims to bring a reflection on power and resistance into Peace and Conflict Studies.

The Lalgarh Movement in Junglemahal The Lalgarh movement started on 4th November 2008 in the Midnapore District of West Bengal, India. Mass protests were sparked after the police severely injured a group of adivasi women during a raid on their village under the pretext of searching for Maoist militants.13 The protest

Communities Protect Themselves (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 11 Rosie McGee, “Invisible Power and Visible Everyday Resistance in the Violent

Colombian Pacific,” Peacebuilding 5, no. 2 (2017); Helen Berents, “An Embodied Everyday Peace in the Midst of Violence,” Peacebuilding (2015); Mac Ginty, “Everyday Peace: Bottom-Up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies.” 12 Christine Sylvester, War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis (Milton Park and New York: Routledge, 2013). 13 Sanhati, “Lalgarh Movement—Mass Uprising of Adivasis in West Bengal,” Sanhati.

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Fig. 1.1 Junglemahal map

movement led to the formation of an organisation called the ‘People’s Committee against Police Atrocities’ (PCPA) which organised a resistance programme based on non-cooperation that quickly spread widely across the districts of Purulia, Bankura, and West Midnapore.14 These three rural districts are also known as Junglemahal. The map below shows roughly the area of Junglemahal which was affected by the movement (Fig. 1.1).

14 Amit Bhattacharyya, Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram, ed. Visthapan Virodhi Jan Vikas Andolan (Ranchi, 2009).

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In June 2009, a series of violent incidents and demonstrations took place, and the CPM (Maoist) officially claimed the leadership of the movement.15 As a result, central state forces were sent to the area to crush the movement, and the conflict escalated to high levels of violence.16 The situation started settling down two years later, after the change of government that brought the Trinamool Congress Party (TMC) to power in 2011. During this time, most of the Maoist leaders in Junglemahal surrendered to the police, or they were killed or arrested.17 After the killing of the Maoist leader Kishenjii, in particular, the Maoists have no longer been active in the area, and no Maoist-related casualties have been reported since 2013. The leader of the PCPA, Chhatradhar Mahato, was in jail until 2020, and joined the TMC after his release. At first sight, Junglemahal shares many similarities with other areas across India where the Maoists have been engaging in the attempt of achieving a ‘New Democratic Revolution’ through armed struggle,18 for example, in the states of Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, and others. Similarly to most of the territory in the so-called ‘Red Corridor’,19 Junglemahal is characterised by the presence of dense forests rich in minerals, and a population with a high percentage of Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes, groups that are officially considered marginalised in the Constitution of India.20 Junglemahal shares its border with the states of Jharkhand and Odisha, two of the states where the Maoists are most active.

15 CPI (Maoist), “Our Aim is to Break CPM Shackles. Interview Given by the Zonal Committee Secretary of Communist Party of India (Maoist) for West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia Districts, Comrade Bikash to The Hindustan Times,” in www.bannedthough t.net (2009). Partho Sarathi Ray to, 2010. 16 Amit Bhattacharyya, Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram—Update 1 (Ranchi: Visthapan Virodhi Jan Vikas Andolon, 2009). 17 Biswajit Roy, ed., War & Peace in Junglemahal: People, State and Maoists (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2012). 18 CPI (Maoist), “Party Programme” (2004); ibid. 19 Jonathan Kennedy, “The Socioeconomic Determinants of Natural Resource Conflict:

Minerals and Maoist Insurgency in India,” Society & Natural Resources 28, no. 2 (2015). 20 See articles 341 and 342 of the Constitution of India. The lists of ST are available in the Constitution of India (Scheduled Tribes) Orders: Government of India, “Constitution of India,” ed. Ministry of Law and Justice.

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Many scholars have argued that marginalised groups’ grievances are the main cause of the Maoist conflict in India,21 and since 2006, the government itself officially recognised the link between underdevelopment and the spread of Maoism.22 Consequently, the state adopted a new strategy for dealing with the Maoist insurgency which included the implementation of development programmes in the regions affected alongside repressive counterinsurgency measures. For their part, the Maoists also represented themselves as champions of the ‘oppressed masses’ against the exploitation by upper classes and the state.23 In short, all sides contributed to the creation of a discourse that considers the grievances of marginalised groups as the main cause behind the Maoist conflict. The fact that the case of Lalgarh, at first sight, fits so well in this dominant explanation of conflict, is one of the main reasons why I selected it. My purpose, in fact, is to question those dominant assumptions from the perspective of the local people. The case of Lalgarh is ideal to investigate the perspectives of the local people because it was a conflict that involved significant levels of violence, but it was confined to a relatively limited area and period of time. Furthermore, research on Maoism has been conducted primarily in other states, while the case of Lalgarh has hardly been investigated. Although images of the Lalgarh struggle have become worldwide symbols of popular resistance, which, for example, have been used for the cover of the Journal of Resistance Studies in 2015,24 there are no international publications on Lalgarh to the best of my knowledge, and not much is known about it. There are a few possible reasons why this case is not so visible internationally. One is that it can be considered as a small war, as it did not even affect the whole Indian state of West Bengal. The number of casualties is very difficult to estimate, as during the conflict the people were reluctant to report crimes to the police, and many bodies

21 See, for example: B. Chakrabarty and R.K. Kujur, Maoism in India: Reincarnation of Ultra-Left Wing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2010); Kristian Hoelscher, Jason Miklian, and Krishna Chaitanya Vadlamannati, “Hearts and Mines: A District-Level Analysis of the Maoist Conflict in India,” International Area Studies Review 15, no. 2 (2012); Maitreesh Ghatak and Oliver Vanden Eynde, “Economic Determinants of the Maoist Conflict in India,” Economic & Political Weekly 52.39, no. 69 (2017). 22 Manmohan Singh, “PM’s Speech at the Chief Minister’s Meet on Naxalism” (2006). 23 CPI (Maoist), “Party Programme.” 24 See Journal of Resistance Studies 1, no. 2 (2015).

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were buried in the forest. At the time of my fieldwork in 2013, local police officers explained that they were still digging up skeletons from the forest, and a large number of missing people still remained unaccounted for. Furthermore, the region of Junglemahal, being a rural and forested area in the ‘global South’ is almost invisible in the international discourse. After all, most of the towns and villages I visited did not even appear on Google Maps by 2018. It was very difficult for me too, to plan and organise fieldwork there, due to the lack of information available. Despite being a peripheral area, however, it should be noted that the population of Junglemahal is more than 13 million people, more than thrice the entire population of New Zealand.25 Thus, it was a conflict that mattered to a significant number of people, and they experienced it as a conflict that involved high levels of violence. To add to the low visibility of the conflict in the international academic community, is perhaps the fact that international agencies did not play a significant role in conflict transformation, peacebuilding, or peacekeeping processes. On the contrary, these processes were mostly managed internally by the government, and, to the best of my knowledge, discussions on the Lalgarh conflict did not take place in the context of international organisations or major international NGOs. As a result, Lalgarh remained largely an internal issue in the discourse, which did not draw much attention internationally. The problem of accessibility is also likely to have contributed to limit the research on Lalgarh. Access to Maoist-affected areas, in fact, is restricted by the state. Conducting research in violent conflict or postconflict affected areas can also be risky and challenging for researchers, particularly if they lack established relationships with local individual and actors. I was myself uncertain of whether or not I would be able to conduct my fieldwork in this context, until I was there. Despite the lack of visibility, the case of Lalgarh presents some interesting features for the study of civil war, resistance, and peace. The fact, for example, that the movement initially adopted mostly nonviolent strategies of resistance based on non-cooperation makes this case an interesting opportunity to explore people’s participation in nonviolent action, and its relationship with violence. The fact that through these 25 The population data was taken from the Census of India 2011 available online at http://www.census2011.co.in/. In 2017, the district of West Midnapore was divided and Jhargram has become a separate district.

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non-cooperation strategies the movement successfully managed to keep the state and the police out of a wide area for months, and experimented with alternative forms of governance, is also worth noticing. Overall, this case provides a unique opportunity to explore not only political violence, but also nonviolent action, resistance, self-administration, and everyday peace.

Theoretical and Methodological Approach There are two key terms that appear often in this book. The first one is discourse. In fact, the theoretical and methodological approach for this research is rooted in the concept of discourse. The conceptualisation of the social processes that I investigate—including violence, dynamics of violent conflict, peace, and resistance—draw from my definition of discourse. Discourse is essentially about the meanings that we constantly use to communicate and make sense of the world around us. I define discourse as the process of the creation of systems of meaning through social action. Therefore, it does not refer only to language. As social actors, we always deal with meanings whenever we interact with the social world. We need to interpret meanings in order to make sense of the social, and we construct meanings to take part in it. Thus, discourse is always implicit in social action or interaction. Meaning is constructed through language, but also through social actions, symbols, and practices. The other key concept is narrative. I conceive of narrative as a specific form of discourse. A narrative is essentially a story. Individuals and groups construct narratives to talk and make sense of their social reality. A key characteristic of a narrative is causal emplotment: in a story, sequences of events are meaningful because of how they causally relate to one another.26 Collective narratives can be particularly meaningful in times of violent conflict, as they can provide shared understandings of the conflict itself, and of the roles played in it by different social actors.27

26 M. Patterson and K.R. Monroe, “Narrative in Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science 1, no. 1 (1998). 27 Daniel Bar-Tal, “Sociopsychological Foundations of Intractable Conflicts,” American Behavioral Scientist 50, no. 11 (2007).

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An Everyday Approach to Violent Conflict and Peace The everyday approach to violent conflict and peace adopted in this book focuses on its micro-level dimension. It explores what happens on the ground, in the local communities for whom violent conflict becomes part of the everyday life for the people and actors involved. More specifically, I look at the agency of local ordinary people, in particular, of groups whose discourse is often marginalised or excluded by dominant actors. Therefore, the everyday is not just a spatial dimension, but it is about power and questioning power relationships. This approach explores ordinary people’s perspectives and knowledge through their discourses and highlights their everyday embodied experiences. All these dimensions— actions, perspectives, and experiences—are discourse, according to the definition above. Therefore, I understand everyday peace/conflict as the discourse constructed by the local people in a context of violence. For the purposes of this research, it is local people’s discourse itself that defines what constitutes violence, and what constitutes peace. Methods of Data Collection and Analysis This book is based on fieldwork that I conducted in India between September 2013 and January 2014. I started my fieldwork journey based in the city of Kolkata, where I interviewed activists and scholars, and built contacts with villagers living in Junglemahal. In a second phase, I was based in the rural town of Jhargram, where I lived as a guest in the house of a vegetable seller and his family. From here, I travelled daily to different villages to conduct interviews. I used a fieldwork journal and photographs to capture non-linguistic aspects of discourse, describe the social context in which the interactions took place, and reflect on my experience. At the time of my fieldwork, it had not been long since the violence had settled down, and there was still and atmosphere of fear and grief. Many wounds and traumas had yet to heal for the people I encountered. Conducting fieldwork in such an environment involved many challenges and concerns regarding the safety and well-being of all the people involved, including myself. It was fundamental to take steps to protect, as much as possible, people’s safety and confidentiality, and to always keep in mind that the priority was the people, rather than collecting information. It was also very important to build trust whenever possible,

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in a situation where trusting could be a question of life and death, and my approach was to be as open as possible and to be the first to trust. In total, I conducted 90 interviews, in which more than 130 people actively participated. I interviewed ordinary local residents, civil society activists, former Maoists, and local state representatives. The interviews were conceived as flexible conversations. I sought to allow the interviewees to express themselves freely as much as possible, so that I could gather their narratives and the themes that they considered most meaningful. After the fieldwork, I applied Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyse the transcripts of the interviews. The analysis looked at different layers of meaning, including the social context in which the discourse was constructed, emotions, moral judgement, predicative expressions associated with the local people or indigenous groups, and a thematic coding of the content. Furthermore, I broke up the narratives into sequences of events, actions, and responses. Through this method, I was able to collect very rich data, find consistent patterns in it, and at the same time, highlight overall meanings and arguments emphasised by individual speakers. The analysis opened new dimensions of understanding that I did not anticipate from my literaturebased knowledge, in particular, in regard to the scope of local people’s agency and their sophisticated political explanations of the local dynamics. Key Insights and Contributions The findings of this analysis show that many local people sought to influence the local political dynamics and the outcomes of the conflict by engaging in a wide range of actions, including cooperating with the armed groups, resisting them, organising community support networks, and more. Local people’s actions and strategies were as diverse as their experiences of direct and structural violence, and their views of what kind of peace ought to be constructed. Concepts of peace and change emerged as key drivers of social engagement and action in local people’s narratives. Local people’s discourses highlighted how violence was inherent in social norms and power structures that affected everyday life before, during, and after the violent conflict. While the discourses of the local people pointed to the idea that a sustainable peace could only be constructed by changing those violent norms and power structures, the findings of this book show that, in contrast, the discourse of the state

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legitimised those violent norms, structures, and practices in the name of peace and development. Local people’s discourses on peace and change, therefore, revealed and undermined dominant discourses that legitimised violence, even under the label of peace. While these findings are related to the specific context of Junglemahal, they are also important lessons for our understanding of peace and violent conflict more broadly. Many of these have to do with how, from an everyday perspective, we can grasp better the complexity of social reality, so rather than isolating variables and factors, this helps going beyond simplified categories and factors and highlighting the interconnections between them. For example, I have found that, from an everyday perspective, the distinctions between different kinds of violence—structural, political, criminal, domestic—are blurred, and so are the boundaries between conflict and peace. Similarly, distinctions between categories such as combatants, civilians, and activists fade, as people played different roles at different times. People’s agency was fluid rather than the result of a single decision, and it was influenced by their experiences over time, and their changing understanding of what was happening. Concepts such as ‘loyalty’ or affiliation with armed groups and political entities were also dynamic, as people’s attitudes were dynamic and changed over time. The boundaries between violence and nonviolence were blurred too. Since the findings show how the everyday dimension is an expression of power relationships, the concepts of peace and resistance are also deeply intertwined. When people experience violence in different forms as related to power structures, peace can hardly be achieved without transforming those relationships of power. This, however, does not mean that resistance is to be conceptualised as something destabilising or necessarily violent, but rather, it could be frequently overlapped with peace. On the other hand, top-down conceptualisations of ‘peace’ may be experienced as violence from an everyday perspective. The findings in this book also show that from an everyday approach, we can look at grievance and its relationship with conflict as socially constructed. In this sense, grievance is not necessarily about socioeconomic proxies, but dimensions that are meaningful to the people through their emotions, relations, experiences, and cultural values. Moreover, grievance may not necessarily trigger just violence, but a wide range of actions including everyday peace and resistance.

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Content of the Book Through this analysis of the case of Lalgarh, this book will go through different dimensions of violent conflict and peace: everyday experiences, the question of grievance, dynamics of violence, people’s decisions and responses, participation, the relationship with armed groups and political parties, resistance to power, and much more. This book is written for researchers and students interested in violent conflict and peace, but its purpose is not just to present the findings, it is about reflecting on our journey as researchers and our impact. Essentially, this book is about power—and what we do about it. Researching topics such as violence, subjugated knowledge, and the role of people, is something very sensitive and it involves many questions, questions that have an impact on how we in turn understand and talk about these topics, and possibly have an impact on the ground. What is our relationship with the people that we talk about? How do we represent them? What could be the repercussions of our research process and publications? How do we conduct research in a post-conflict environment? I believe that these questions are part of the process of how we construct and share knowledge about violent conflict. Therefore, I have included in the book not only the findings of the research, but also reflections on the whole research journey, which could be useful for readers who might be learning or researching peace and conflict, or for your own journey into peace and resistance. Perhaps you have never heard about Lalgarh, nor have you lived in a situation of violent conflict, so this may all seem far away. But even reading and learning are political acts and involve engaging in relationships of power. Therefore, the questions in this book are not about a faraway exotic world, they are about engaging in resistance right here and right now. The book starts with an analysis of the literature on civil wars in Chapter 2 to explore how people and their agency have been portrayed in the academic discourse. Similarly, Chapter 3 analyses more specifically how the discourse and literature on Maoism in India depicts local people in these areas, areas which are mostly populated by groups that are considered as disadvantaged, such as Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes. Chapter 4, drawing from everyday stories collected during fieldwork, outlines some key concepts in the theoretical framework, such as discourse and power. It then reflects on questions of power, positionality, and voice in regard to the research process itself. There is also an account of my journey and experience conducting fieldwork in a post-conflict environment and how I have addressed these critical questions.

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Chapter 5 compares the narratives of conflict constructed by different actors, and, at the same time, provides a contextual background on the Lalgarh movement. This chapter is essentially a narrative of the Lalgarh movement from its inception, the escalation of the violence, and the decline, and it is told by putting together and comparing the narratives of different actors. There were many stories within this story, many versions of it, and they were all meaningful to understand the complexity of experiences, relationships, and dynamics of conflict. In this chapter, through these different versions of the story of the conflict in Lalgarh, I explore what different actors perceived as meaningful. This narrative comparison offers a different perspective on themes that are very prevalent in academic explanations of violent conflict and of the Maoist conflict in particular, such as the role of indigenous people, land, forest management, extraction of resources, and state violence. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are an analysis of people’s discourses, focusing on three core dimensions of discourse: experience, action, and meaning. These analytical dimensions are all deeply intertwined and provide an in-depth picture of how people’s direct experiences of violent conflict shape their actions, but also of how experiences and actions are related to the way in which people make sense of the dynamics of conflict, as well as to their values, cultures, and views on peace and social change. This analysis aims at grasping the complexity of people’s agency—and therefore dynamics of conflict and peace—and how it is embedded in and transforms power relationships and discourse. Each chapter focuses on one of these dimensions. Chapter 6 looks at local people’s everyday experiences of violent conflict. This chapter describes different dimensions of experience, but also shows that through personal narratives, the interviewees made sense of the dynamics of conflict and expressed political arguments. Chapter 7 explores how people actively responded to conflict through a wide range of actions. Chapter 8 discusses how concepts of peace, change, and development are constructed in the discourses of the local people, and compares it with the discourse of the state. Chapter 9 is the concluding chapter. It outlines the contributions of the research to the civil wars literature and makes suggestions for the implementation of peace at the local level. It also discusses the role of peace research and peace researchers in supporting everyday action. At the end, a retrospective look at the limits of the research leads to a reflection on what I have learnt from this research process, and opens new questions for possible future research and engagement with everyday peace.

CHAPTER 2

Local People in the Civil Wars Literature

Introduction Although we might think of violent conflict as a macro phenomenon that has to do with states, socio-economic structures, and political processes, conflict is also something that people experience and perform in their lives through their bodies. What do we know about how people understand, experience, and respond to violent conflict at the local level? At present, there is a growing interest in the local dimension of violent conflict, which comes hand in hand with a recognition that local people play significant roles in times of violent conflict.1 This, however, was not always the case, despite the fact that even when the civil war literature does not address directly questions about people’s agency, it often makes assumptions about their roles and behaviour. The academic discourse, the way we talk about local people and specific groups, may then have implications on the ground that have an impact on the lives of people, whether or not they are included in the analysis. In order to understand how questions about the roles and perspectives of local people have been included or excluded in research agendas about

1 Tilman Brück, Patricia Justino, and Charles Patrick Martin-Shields, “Conflict and Development. Recent Research and Future Agendas,” WIDER Working Paper 2017/178 (2017), https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/Publications/Workingpaper/wp2017-178.pdf.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Carrer, How People Respond to Violence, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11342-0_2

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violent conflict and political violence, this chapter pays particular attention to the problematisation and world views on which such research is rooted. In the social sciences, the particular way in which a certain social phenomenon is problematised has a strong impact on the outcome of the research, and on the construction of academic discourse. As Campbell points out: A problematization is something that has made it possible to think in terms of problems and solutions […]. In seeking to show how different solutions to a problem have been constructed and made possible by the way the problem is posed in the first place, it demonstrated how different solutions result from a specific form of problematization.2

The use of a certain label to describe a certain kind of political violence itself contributes to lead the research in a certain direction. For example, the expression ‘ethnic conflict’ suggests that ethnic affiliation is somehow relevant to the nature of violent conflict. Hence, research on ethnic conflict often seeks to understand how groups belonging to the same country come to see each other as enemies and fight.3 The concept of identity is frequently emphasised in these studies. Campbell’s work shows how ethnicisation was the dominant problematisation of the Bosnian war, and that this has had real consequences on the ground. Differently, terms such as ‘rebellion’ or ‘insurgency’ suggest that groups within a state are engaged in political violence against their sovereign government. As a consequence, scholars have attempted to find out what brings citizens to take up arms against their own country.4 2 David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), x. 3 See, for example: Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic

War (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001); Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (University of California Press, 1985); Grigorian Arman and J. Kaufman Stuart, “Hate Narratives and Ethnic Conflict,” International Security 31, no. 4 (2007); Tom Gallegher, “My Neighbour, My Enemy: The Manipulation of Ethnic Identity and the Origins and Conduct of War in Yugoslavia,” in War and Ethnicity: Global Connections and Local Violence, ed. David Turton (San Francisco: Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress. Boydell Press, 2002). 4 See, for example: Gurr, Why Men Rebel; Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Barrington Moore Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (New York: White Plains, 1978).

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These terms and problems in the literature also often reflect more in general trends in the dominant discourse in a certain historical contexts and circumstances, answer to prevalent debates, and are rooted in specific world views and ontological assumptions. In the civil wars literature, some of these world views and assumptions are about the role of local people. For Hanlon, one of the main contrasts in the explanations of civil war is that some of them stress the role of ‘big bad men’, while for others violent conflict is driven by people under pressure.5 As we will see, however, even explanations of violent conflict that focus on the people, often do not consider them as agents or take into account their perspectives. Table 2.1 summarises some core trends. This is by no means an exhaustive categorisation, nor are the categories completely separated. On the contrary, research trends in the literature stimulate and influence one another through debates and discussions, which usually lead to the formulation of new research questions. Thus, there is always some continuity. Each of the ‘core explanations’ in the table has been highly contested by scholars and there are alternative, contrasting propositions to it. The purpose here is simply to highlight some of the core trends in the literature and to visualise how the role of the people is problematised in them. The analysis is divided into two main parts. The first part focuses on theories of violent conflict that stress the link between poverty and violent conflict. The second explores the growing research on the micro-level of conflict, the everyday, and the social construction of violent conflict.

Poverty and Violent Conflict The question ‘what causes war?’ is a central one in the civil wars research. In the attempt of identifying the structural causes behind the onset of violent conflict within a state, theories of violent conflict have debated the relevance of a wide range of social, political, and economic variables. Among these, the idea that poverty is causally linked to war has been

5 Joseph Hanlon, “Roots of Civil War: Tick ‘All of the Above’,” in Civil War, Civil Peace, ed. Helen Yanacopulos and Joseph Hanlon (Milton Keynes, UK: The Open University, 2006), 76.

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Table 2.1 Trends in the civil wars literature Revolutions

New wars

Ethnic conflicts

Key research questions

Why do groups rebel against the state?

Why do individuals join armed groups?

Core explanations

Socio-economic causes of violence

Greed as incentive to mobilisation

People vs. big bad men

People’s grievance causes violence

Both leaders and poor people make rational cost-opportunity choices to maximise personal profit

Why do people commit violence against their ‘neighbours’? Inter-group rivalry, identity, exclusionary discourses Leaders or ‘conflict entrepreneurs’ manipulate group identity

particularly influential, especially to explain wars characterised as ‘revolutions’ or ‘rebellions’.6 Understanding the links between poverty and violent conflict is of particular importance for this case study. In fact, at first sight, poverty and marginalisation appear to be key issues, because the Maoist movement has had particular success in the poorest rural areas of India, and Junglemahal is no exception. As I will discuss in more detail in the following chapters, the dominant framing of the Maoist conflict as a development issue had significant practical implications on the ground. If we look at the evolution of theories and debates in regard to poverty and violent conflict, we will find that, despite the differences, there is a widespread consensus in the literature over the idea that poverty is causally related to violent conflict. The centrality of the poor, however, is not translated into a focus on their agency and perspectives. A question that has heavy implications for policies and practices related to this is whether development, then, is an answer to violent conflict, and what its relationship with the local is.

6 Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis, Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2005); Edward Newman and Karl DeRouen, “Introduction,” in Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars, ed. Edward Newman and Karl DeRouen (Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2014).

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Revolutions In the context of the Cold War, debates on internal violent conflict often focused on the concept of revolution.7 During this time, thanks to the influence of Marxist philosophy, research on violent conflict shifted from a focus on individual behaviour to more structural explanations.8 Dependency theories raised the awareness on global inequalities arguing that rich countries contributed to the poverty in world South.9 In this context, Galtung articulated the concept of structural violence, which suggested that structural forms of exploitations, too, are forms of violence.10 In following studies, he sought to empirically measure both direct and structural violence.11 From a Marxist perspective, revolutionary violence is functional to ending injustice and structural exploitation. Thus, during the Cold War, revolution was seen as a form of social change, and it was not necessarily considered as negative or merely destructive.12 According to Marxist theory, the exploitation of the working class will necessarily lead the latter to rebel. From this perspective, the inequality between social classes as a result of development is the cause of violent conflict.13 In a way, Marxist philosophy anticipated the idea that the frustration arising from social inequality is a drive to violent collective action.14 Gurr articulated the frustration-aggression paradigm into the theory of relative deprivation,

7 Peter Wallensteen, “Theoretical Developments in Understanding the Origins of Civil War,” in Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars, ed. Edward Newman and Karl DeRouen (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 8 Tim Jacoby, Understanding Conflict and Violence: Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Approaches (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). 34. 9 I. Roxborough, Theories of Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1979); Jacoby, Understanding Conflict and Violence: Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Approaches. 10 Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969). 11 Johan Galtung and Tord Höivik, “Structural and Direct Violence: A Note on Operationalization,” Journal of Peace Research 8, no. 1 (1971); J. Galtung et al., “Measuring World Development,” Alternatives 1, no. 1 (1975). 12 Wallensteen, “Theoretical Developments in Understanding the Origins of Civil War”; Hanlon, “Roots of Civil War: Tick ‘All of the Above’.” 13 Roxborough, Theories of Underdevelopment. 14 Jacoby, Understanding Conflict and Violence: Theoretical and Interdisciplinary

Approaches.

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according to which violent conflict is the result of a paradigm of perceived deprivation, frustration, and aggression.15 In this view, the perception of deprivation by a group and the discontent arising from this perception can be politicised and lead to different forms of violent conflict.16 Gurr’s theory draws from earlier theories in psychology and sociology that first developed the frustration-aggression hypothesis.17 The sociopsychology element is still central in Gurr’s theory: grievance results from changed perceptions and expectations rather than from objective economic conditions per se. Nonetheless, the causal link between socioeconomic grievance and violent conflict, as suggested by this theory, has influenced a large literature that operationalised ‘grievance’ mostly in terms of macro-level socio-economic structural variables that could be measured and compared. Many quantitative studies attempted to test theories of socio-economic causes of violent conflict, but as the conceptualisation of variables and selection of indices varied, so did the conclusions reached by these studies. For instance, Gurr’s analysis using data from 114 polities confirms his theory of relative deprivation.18 The study by Nafziger and Auvinen also shows that humanitarian emergencies are more likely to take place in countries suffering from economic stagnation, decline of GDP, and highincome inequality.19 According to Fearon and Laitin’s study, inequality, ethnic diversity, and other political variables are not good predictors of violent conflict. Instead, they found a strong relationship between those they identify as conditions that favour insurgency, such as state weakness, poverty and instability, and the outbreak of violent conflict.20 Collier and Hoeffler used a quantitative model to test whether violent conflict is a

15 Gurr, Why Men Rebel. 16 Ibid. 17 Jacoby, Understanding Conflict and Violence: Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Approaches; Eleanor O’Gorman, Conflict and Development (London and New York: Zed Books, 2011). 18 Ted Gurr, “A Causal Model of Civil Strife: A Comparative Analysis Using New Indices,” The American Political Science Review 62, no. 4 (1968). 19 E. Wayne Nafziger and Juha Auvinen, “Economic Development, Inequality, War, and State Violence,” World Development 30, no. 2 (2002). 20 James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” The American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003).

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product of grievance or opportunity, and initially found that the latter is much more related to the outbreak of violence than the former.21 In summary, the grievance and conflict proposition entails that the poor are the central drive to violent conflict. The research, however, has focused on macro-level socio-economic indicators rather than on people’s perspectives. The reason is that people are assumed to answer with aggression to certain socio-economic circumstances. Therefore, while this research investigated and explored what circumstances make violent collective action more likely, the idea that the poor would answer to grievance with violence is not really questioned. In this way, poor people are not really seen as agents in this paradigm; they do not make choices. They seem to be helpless and bound to respond with violence. Starting from Gurr, some models of grievance and conflict propose a complex mix of social, economic, and political variables, and argue that poverty does not mechanistically cause violent conflict.22 Nonetheless, as these models focus on the ‘why’ question, they do not take into account people’s own perspectives which could help achieve a deeper understanding of how they come to fight, how people feel about their grievances—if any—and violence, and whether they find other ways to respond to it. By leaving people out of the equation, these models fail to grasp what grievance means to them. New Wars In the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, the attitude of the international community towards internal violent conflict changed, and international institutions became increasingly involved in civil wars.23 Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace is very indicative of this changed perception. Boutros-Ghali, in fact, points out that ‘the new breed of intrastate conflicts’ has new characteristics: they are fought by irregular

21 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 56, no. 4 (2004); Collier and Sambanis, Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis. 22 Gurr, Why Men Rebel; Gurr, “A Causal Model of Civil Strife: A Comparative Analysis Using New Indices”; Wayne Nafziger and Auvinen, “Economic Development, Inequality, War, and State Violence.” 23 Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development; Wallensteen, “Theoretical Developments in Understanding the Origins of Civil War.”

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armies with little discipline, there are no clear conflict lines, civilians are the main victims, and they constitute humanitarian emergencies.24 In these ‘new’ conflicts, law and order collapse, while chaos and banditry rule. In academia, the thesis of ‘new wars’ was articulated by Kaldor25 and was highly debated in the civil wars literature.26 In sharp contrast with the Marxist-influence idea of revolution, civil war was now no longer considered as a potential factor of social change. On the contrary, it was considered a negative and destructive problem, which needed to be fixed. In this context, there was a growing interest in explaining the causes of civil war, and policy-oriented studies were conducted to advise institutions on how to deal with violent conflict.27 A very influential example was the Collier-Hoeffler study, a model that aimed at explaining the correlation between economic variables and the onset of civil war.28 The World Bank sponsored this project, as it sought to design economic policy interventions to reduce its occurrence, effects and duration.29 In his first model, Collier selected and statistically tested a number of proxies to see whether greed or grievance factors were more likely to cause violent conflict. His initial conclusions were in favour of the former.30 The polarised greed or grievance debate later cooled down, as a general consensus was reached among civil war scholars, including Collier himself, on the idea that greed and grievance together caused violent conflict.31 Both greed and grievance explanations supported the basic argument that poverty is causally related to violent conflict, but they interpreted it differently. In Collier, the emphasis on ‘greed’ is implicit in the economic problematisation of civil war. In the neoclassical economic tradition, individuals are assumed to make rational cost-opportunity choices to

24 Boutros Boutros Ghali, An Agenda for Peace (New York: United Nations, 1992). 25 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge,

UK: Polity Press, 1999); O’Gorman, Conflict and Development. 26 O’Gorman, Conflict and Development. 27 Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development; O’Gorman, Conflict and

Development. 28 Paul Collier, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy (World Bank Publications, 2003). 29 Collier and Sambanis, Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis. 30 Collier, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy. 31 Collier and Sambanis, Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis.

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maximise profit.32 In fact, Collier defines rebellion as ‘an industry that generates profits from looting’.33 Thus, Collier’s definition of proxies and understanding of their meaning is influenced by this world view and assumptions regarding people’s behaviour. Once again, as a result of this world view, research tended to exclude from the analysis people’s perspectives and motives. In this view, both leaders and poor people are assumed to be driven by a desire to optimise utility, and the researcher attempts to predict people’s choices by modelling the costs and opportunities available to them. In this discourse, insurgents are seen as no different from bandits or criminals,34 who cause destruction and suffering for personal profit. This discourse was very influential in the civil wars literature, and stimulated a rich literature on the economic causes and functions of violent conflict. Many of these studies highlighted important dimensions of violent conflict, such as the economic functions of violence,35 the relationship between natural resources and violent conflict,36 and the role of weak state institutions.37 Beyond statistical correlation, many of these 32 Christopher Cramer, “Greed Versus Grievance: Conjoined Twins or Discrete Drivers of Violent Conflict,” in Civil War, Civil Peace, ed. Joseph Hanlon and Helen Yanacopulos (Milton Keynes, UK: The Open University, 2006); Jacoby, Understanding Conflict and Violence: Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Approaches. 33 Collier and Sambanis, Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis, 3. 34 Ibid. 35 See, for example: David Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars

(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998); Mats Berdal and David Keen, “Violence and Economic Agendas in Civil Wars: Some Policy Implications,” Millennium—Journal of International Studies 26, no. 3 (1997); David Keen, Complex emergencies (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); Karen Ballentine, Jake Sherman, and Academy International Peace, The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003). 36 See, for example: Karen Ballentine and Heiko Nitzschke, Profiting from Peace: Managing the Resource Dimension of Civil War (Boulder: L. Rienner, 2005); Philippe Le Billon and International Institute for Strategic Studies, Fuelling War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflict, vol. no. 373. (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2005); Michael L. Ross, “How Do Natural Resources Influence Civil War? Evidence from Thirteen Cases,” International Organization 58, no. 1 (2004). 37 See, for example: Jennifer Milliken and Krause Keith, “State Failure, State Collapse, and State Reconstruction: Concepts, Lessons and Strategies,” in State Failure, Collapse and Reconstruction, ed. Jennifer Milliken (Malden; Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003);

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studies look at single case studies and are very insightful for understanding how important socio-economic factors are for the outbreak and continuation of civil wars. Nonetheless, a narrow economic problematisation of violent conflict tends to contribute to construct an idea of societies in ‘underdeveloped countries’ as helpless violent and in the need to be saved and fixed by the West.38 As we have seen, international institutions such as the UN and the World Bank played an important role in constructing this discourse, and in turn, this discourse was reflected in intervention policies. The Problem of Measuring Greed and Grievance Greed and grievance theories have been very influential in the civil wars literature, but they have also been the object of many critiques. In particular, critics have pointed out that though these theories seek to empirically test the causes of violent conflict, they are very difficult to prove empirically, particularly through quantitative models.39 For example, one of the critiques is that economic models mistake correlation for causation. Mac Ginty argues that though there might be a significant correlation between economic variables and violent conflict, it does not mean that economic factors are the primary cause of violent conflict.40 Furthermore, there are significant obstacles in the definition and operationalisation of key concepts. Conclusions from quantitative studies differ depending on the data set used. In turn, differences in data sets arise from the different definitions and parameters adopted, which define what data needs to be included or excluded.41 In addition, as concepts such as greed and grievance cannot be tested directly, they need to Louise Andersen, Bjørn Møller, and Finn Stepputat, Fragile States and Insecure People? Violence, Security, and Statehood in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007); William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998). 38 Oliver P. Richmond, Failed Statebuilding: Intervention and the Dynamics of Peace Formation, Failed State-Building (Yale University Press, 2014). 39 Hanlon, “Roots of Civil War: Tick ‘All of the Above’”; Jacoby, Understanding Conflict and Violence: Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Approaches; Wallensteen, “Theoretical Developments in Understanding the Origins of Civil War.” 40 Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development, 32. 41 Cramer, “Greed Versus Grievance: Conjoined Twins or Discrete Drivers of Violent

Conflict.”

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be investigated through proxies defined by the researcher.42 The selection of proxies is often controversial, as measurable proxies inevitably fail to grasp complex and fluid concepts such as relative deprivation, grievance, or greed. For example, the concept of relative deprivation is not just about economic structures, but also emotions, social relations, and cultural issues. Therefore, economic proxies cannot accurately capture how perceptions of relative deprivation are created or how ‘value expectations’ are constructed. In this regard, Canache argues that perceptions of relative deprivation cannot be derived from aggregate data such as national indicators of economic performance or indicators of social inequality.43 According to Canache, the main problem with research based on the relative deprivation theory is the difficulty to operationalise the theory’s central concepts, in particular, because the contextual effect is not taken into account. Canache proposes to study relative deprivation in the context of the local community, the immediate reality where individuals engage in social interactions, and to compare their own conditions with that of others.44 Similarly, Cramer discusses how research based on economic measures of inequality fails to consistently demonstrate the existence of a clear causal relation between civil war and inequality.45 This author argues that the social relations within which economic inequality is embedded, particularly at the local level, might be more significant than inequality itself.46 Social constructivist and post-modern approaches could contribute to overcome some of these problems, as they would help achieve a deeper understanding of how groups perceive their social conditions and how they come to consider political violence as an answer. As I discuss in the next section, although there is a growing literature that applies postpositivist approaches to the study of violent conflict, these studies rarely 42 Ibid.; Collier and Sambanis, Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis; Wallensteen, “Theoretical Developments in Understanding the Origins of Civil War”; Jacoby, Understanding Conflict and Violence: Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Approaches. 43 Damarys Canache, “Looking out My Back Door: The Neighborhood Context and Perceptions of Relative Deprivation,” Political Research Quarterly 49, no. 3 (1996). 44 Ibid. 45 Christopher Cramer, “Does Inequality Cause Conflict?,” Journal of International

Development 15, no. 4 (2003). 46 Ibid.

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deal with conflicts where socio-economic issues appear to be the main ‘causes’ of the violence. An exception is the study by Aspinall on the case of the separatist conflict in Aceh, which is often described as a ‘natural resource conflict’.47 This author points out that: we need to view grievances in natural resources conflicts not as readily observable and measurable facts, as it is sometimes implied in recent literature. It is inadvisable to isolate grievances about natural resources from the wider systems of socially constructed meaning through which the use of those resources is understood.48

Similarly, while researching the linkages between natural resources and violent conflict, Le Billon also pointed out that the meaning of natural resources is socially constructed. These studies show that looking at the social meaning of socio-economic structures would also provide a much better understanding of their relationship with the outbreak of violent conflicts. In summary, the core problem is that greed and grievance are not material issues, but they are problematised and investigated as if they were. As Mac Ginty points out, economic models do not reveal much of the human character of civil war economics.49 Furthermore, as Krieger points out, the direct voices of peasants—or local people who experience violent conflict—are absent from both structuralist and human agency studies because of the premises on which they are rooted. For Richards, we need to question the meaning of assessing the causes of conflict and behaviour through quantitative indicators that pay more attention to what people do than to what they say: ‘no quantitative assessment ‘computes’ until we first clarify why it makes sense to suppose that (material) ‘greed’ and (ideological) ‘grievance’ are commensurable’.50

47 Edward Aspinall, “The Construction of Grievance: Natural Resources and Identity in a Separatist Conflict,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no. 6 (2007). 48 Ibid., 953. 49 Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development, 34. 50 Paul Richards, “Anthropological and Ethnographic Approaches,” in Routledge Hand-

book of Civil Wars, ed. Edward Newman and Karl DeRouen (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 43.

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The Security-Development Nexus Despite the criticisms and differences, the greed and grievance debate was very influential in putting forward the idea that poverty is causally related to violent conflict. As a result, development was seen as the answer to mitigate the destruction of internal conflict and construct peace. As we have seen, this discourse came along with the growing engagement of the international community in internal conflicts, particularly through aid and humanitarian interventions.51 The academic discourse on the security-development nexus thus reflected, and perhaps influenced, the trend of development policies implemented in so-called developing countries. The concept of human security embraced by the United Nations also stressed the nexus between security (freedom from fear) and development (freedom from want).52 While mapping the narratives on the security-development nexus, Stern and Öjendal found that, though the dominant discourse claims that there is an empirically real nexus, there is no agreement on what it means.53 Dominant discourses on security and development, in fact, have been questioned, critiqued, and redefined. Not all scholars, for example, agree that development always leads to peace. On the contrary, attention has been brought to the fact that security and development policies might have contradictory and destabilising effects.54 Orjuela’s study, for example, points out that security and development measures implemented to protect citizens, might end up jeopardising the safety of people at the

51 Helen Yanacopulos and Joseph Hanlon, Civil War, Civil Peace (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University, 2006); ibid.; O’Gorman, Conflict and Development; Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development. 52 UNDP, “Human Development Report 1994,” ed. UNDP (1994). 53 Maria Stern and Joakim Öjendal, “Exploring the Security-Development Nexus,” in

The Security-Development Nexus, ed. Joakim Öjendal, Ramses Amer, and Ashok Swain (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2012). 54 See, for example: James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

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margins and compromise their ability to earn a living.55 The arising question then, for many critical scholars, is: who are security, development, and peace for?56 Through questions such as these, many critical scholars question dominant discourses on security and development from the point of view of power. For Duffield, these discourses draw a divide between the developed and underdeveloped, the ‘insured’ and ‘uninsured’. In this view, the latter are perceived as threats to the security of the West, and therefore need to be securitised and developed.57 Similarly, drawing from a local-level perspective, Orjuela points out that people at the margins are often considered as threats to security and development.58 Many similar critiques are addressed to the ‘liberal peace’, which, according to its critics, is the dominant form of internationally sponsored peacebuilding through strategies like humanitarian interventions, aid, development, and so on. Heredia argues that peacebuilding is a process that establishes the distribution of power and material resources, and as such, importantly, it is a process that is resisted.59 One of the main critiques of the liberal peace is that local people are usually excluded from its processes.60 For Richmond, one of the reasons for this exclusion is the romanticisation of the local in different ways: local people might be seen by Western interveners as exotic and unknowable; helpless and incapable of liberal civility; devious; or the repository of indigenous capacity that international agents may co-opt.61 These 55 Camilla Orjuela, “The Bullet in the Living Room: Linking Security and Development in a Colombo Neighbourhood,” Security Dialogue 41, no. 1 (2010). 56 See, for example: ibid.; Oliver P. Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace (Milton Park and New York: Routledge, 2011); Robin Luckham, “Whose Violence, Whose Security? Can Violence Reduction and Security Work for Poor, Excluded and Vulnerable People?,” Peacebuilding 5, no. 2 (2017). 57 Mark Duffield, “Getting Savages to Fight Barbarians: Development, Security and the Colonial Present,” Conflict, Security & Development 5, no. 2 (2005); Mark Duffield, “Global Civil War: The Non-insured, International Containment and Post-interventionary Society,” Journal of Refugee Studies 21, no. 2 (2008). 58 Orjuela, “The Bullet in the Living Room: Linking Security and Development in a Colombo Neighbourhood.” 59 Marta Iñiguez De Heredia, Everyday Resistance, Peacebuilding and State-Making: Insights from ‘Africa’s World War’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 60 Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development. 61 Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace, 59.

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assumptions justify top-down approaches, conditionality, and coercion. As Richmond points out: ‘what is missing from debates on intervention, peacebuilding and state building is an understanding of how people and communities act to make peace themselves’.62 These are really important critiques, because they question how peacebuilding discourses and practices may end up removing agency from the local people they claim to protect. As we will see, peacebuilding and development discourses that exclude local voices, can not only have negative repercussions, but also be used to justify violent practices and power structures that silence them further. Although these critiques call for a better focus on local actor’s agency, they tend to be expressed in the context of their relationship between international and local institutions. What about people’s agency per se? Beyond institutionalised processes that we recognise and understand as ‘peacebuilding’, there would be many cases like that of Lalgarh, often invisible ones, where people live in situations of violent conflict, and take everyday action. How are people’s experiences and agency during violent conflict related to their understanding of peace? How do local people attempt to build peace during the time of the conflict itself? In order to address these questions, the next section explores the advancements in research that investigate people’s perspectives during conflict.

Violent Conflict and the Everyday The explanations of internal conflict discussed above highlight important material and structural conditions that favour the onset of civil wars. However, they do not explain what role people’s actions play, not even how they come to fight. As I have discussed, even rational choice theories tend to focus more on structures than on agency in their analysis, because the assumptions in the theory already define the preferences of the individual and predict their behaviour. As a result, these theories do not offer much insight into how people understand their social reality and how they come to take decisions in times of violent conflict. Other civil war scholars have addressed some of these questions by looking at different dimensions that tell us more about people’s perspectives and/or agency in times of violent conflict. These dimensions include 62 Richmond, Failed Statebuilding: Intervention and the Dynamics of Peace Formation,

6.

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the social construction of meaning; the micro-level dynamics of conflict; embodied experiences of conflict; and everyday resistance. Violent Conflict, Meaning, and Social Context Research that aims at explaining the violent behaviour of individuals or groups has been conducted in different disciplines, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, and related sub-disciplines. In an attempt to understand how individuals and groups come to participate in violent actions, some of these studies have highlighted the importance of emotions, social relations, and meaningful narratives. For example, Della Porta’s review of the literature on social movements and political violence shows that the research on social movements has recognised that ‘political violence is mainly symbolic’,63 and that it has often explored the role of cultural and emotional aspects.64 In particular, social movement scholars have analysed how social movements construct ‘cultural frames’ and narratives to mobilise support and legitimise violence.65 It appears that as scholars seek to make sense of political violence from the perspective of the agent, the dimension of meaning and its relation with culture on the one hand, and emotion on the other, emerges. In particular, the social interactive processes through which meaning is constructed seem to demand particular attention. The research recently conducted by anthropologists on political violence has proved very insightful in highlighting the role of experience, meaning, and socio-cultural processes in specific contexts marked by political violence and violent conflict.66 Although conducted in a variety of contexts, this research explores what it means to engage in violence from the perspective of militants. Mahmood at this regard points out that:

63 Donatella Della Porta, “Research on Social Movements and Political Violence,” Qualitative Sociology 31, no. 3 (2008): 226. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 See, for example: J. A. Sluka, Hearts and Minds, Water and Fish: Support for the IRA

and INLA in a Northern Irish Ghetto (Greenwitch: Jai Press, 1989); C. K. Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); J. Zulaika, Basque Violence: Metaphor and Sacrament (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000); Hank Johnston, “Ritual, Strategy, and Deep Culture in the Chechen National Movement,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 3 (2008).

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The question of why violence occurs in the broad sense raises with it, then, the insistent question of how individuals engaged in violence experience that engagement. […] The brave new world not of armies but of peoples, of low-intensity, non-state guerrilla struggles defined less in terms of massed battles than of individual encounters, however, invites more of this kind of ethnography of violence that draws on real people’s experiences of what it feels like to face the fusillade or pull that trigger.67

Ethnographies of violence also investigate how violence is understood and performed in the society.68 For example, Zulaika and Johnston analyse social actions as a performance for an audience, a ritual.69 Hence, these studies highlight that making sense of violence entails understanding what acts of violence mean in a certain society and culture. Social-psychology approaches to civil war also look at how collective narratives contribute to violent conflict.70 For example, for Bar-Tal, narratives are part of a socio-psychological infrastructure developed by societies during an intractable conflict in order to cope with specific psychological challenges created by the protracted conflict.71 Bar-Tal argues that this socio-psychological repertoire becomes institutionalised through different channels, and that certain mechanisms make sure that this repertoire does not change or is challenged.72 The role of discourse and narratives constructed in a specific social context is central in critical scholars’ understanding of violent conflict, who look at how discourse makes violence possible. In fact, critical scholars argue that violent conflict is a social institution and violence becomes possible through the construction of discourses that legitimise

67 Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants, 18. 68 Zulaika, Basque Violence: Metaphor and Sacrament. 69 Johnston, “Ritual, Strategy, and Deep Culture in the Chechen National Movement”; Zulaika, Basque Violence: Metaphor and Sacrament. 70 Daniel Bar-Tal, Intergroup Conflicts and Their Resolution: A Social Psychological Perspective (London: Taylor and Francis, 2011). 71 Bar-Tal, “Sociopsychological Foundations of Intractable Conflicts.” 72 Bar-Tal, Intergroup Conflicts and Their Resolution: A Social Psychological Perspective.

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violence.73 As Wilmer points out, wars are fought by people.74 As leaders need to mobilise people to fight, they promote the construction of exclusionary identities by boosting perceptions of grievance and injustice.75 Critical scholars argue that this discursive approach to understanding violent conflict bridges the polarisation between structure and agency in explanations of conflict, and that this approach can be applied to any kind of conflict or organised political violence.76 However, so far, they have tended to focus only on certain kinds of violent conflict, namely, those where the identity issue is more visible. Many of the studies on discourse and violent conflict focus on former Yugoslavia, and some look at those identified as ethnic conflicts in Africa.77 There is also a solid literature on discourses of terrorism and how they justify counter-terrorism measures, including war, torture, and a limitation of political rights.78 However, there is less literature on the role of the construction of discourse in cases of violent conflicts where socio-economic issues are more visible than group cleavages. Yet, the idea that discourse makes violent conflict possible through the construction of violent norms might be useful to investigate greed and grievance conflicts, too. More research could help us understand how discourse influences other types of violent conflicts, too. 73 See, for example: Vivienne Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered (New York: Manchester University Press, 1996); Richard Jackson and Helen Dexter, “The Social Construction of Organised Political Violence: An Analytical Framework,” Civil Wars 16, no. 1 (2014). 74 F. Wilmer, The Social Construction of Man, the State, and War: Identity, Conflict, and Violence in Former Yugoslavia (Psychology Press, 2002). 75 Ibid. 76 Jackson and Dexter, “The Social Construction of Organised Political Violence: An

Analytical Framework”; Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered; ibid.; Jolle Demmers, Theories of Violent Conflict: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2012). 77 See, for example: René Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnocide as Discourse and Practice (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1994); Wilmer, The Social Construction of Man, the State, and War: Identity, Conflict, and Violence in Former Yugoslavia; Glenn Bowman, “Xenophobia, Fantasy and the Nation: The Logic of Ethnic Violence in Former Yugoslavia,” in Anthropology of Europe: Identity and Boundaries in Conflict, ed. Victoria Goddard, Josep Llobera, and Cris Shore (Oxford and Providence: Berg, 1994). 78 See, for example: Adam Hodges and Chad Nilep, Discourse, War and Terrorism, vol. 24 (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007); ibid.; Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1996).

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What do these studies tell us about local people’s agency? Do people have their own discourses? So far, critical studies on violent conflict have tended to focus on the construction of dominant discourse and its negative impact on conflict at the macro-level, but not so much on the local level and everyday discourses. This reflects the theoretical emphasis on leaders as conflict entrepreneurs. Some critical scholars seek to overcome the polarisation between elites and masses by focusing on the narratives as shared stories.79 Yet, focusing on the story does not clarify the problem. Whose stories are they? Are they internalised by the people? Are there any alternative stories? The understanding of power is important for critical research. The ontological conceptualisation of the relationship between power and discourse is related to how the relationship between leaders and masses are problematised. The idea is that leaders are able to construct hegemonic discourses because of power asymmetry. For Jackson and Dexter, conflict entrepreneurs can create new collective norms, memories, and histories by mobilising multiple powerful discursive sites.80 Furthermore, conflict entrepreneurs silence alternative oppositional voices.81 For Jabri, people do have agency and construct counter-discourses of peace.82 Therefore, theoretically, these approaches recognise that people do construct alternative counter-discourses, but they are subjugated by dominant actors. Hence, there is a tension between the power of dominant actors who can construct hegemonic discourses, and the agency of the local. This question needs to be investigated further from a bottom-up perspective in order to understand whether subjugated discourses can challenge hegemonic ones and influence the dynamics of violent conflict. Micro-Level Conflict Research on the micro-level dimension of violent conflict is growing fast in the civil wars literature.83 Micro-level analysis allows the researcher

79 Demmers, Theories of Violent Conflict: An Introduction, 118. 80 Jackson and Dexter, “The Social Construction of Organised Political Violence: An

Analytical Framework,” 14. 81 Ibid., 12–13. 82 Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered. 83 Weidmann, “Micro-Level Studies.”

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to collect much more detailed information about how complex social processes happen, examine the interplay between many different factors, the relationships among actors, and variations within countries. A local perspective also allows us to understand in more depth both structures and agents, and how they interact within a specific socio-cultural context. For example, Justino’s research on household economic and violent conflict revisits the link between poverty and conflict by taking a closer look at the socio-economic conditions of families in contexts of violent conflict, and at how they respond to it.84 While addressing different questions—for example mobilisation and support for armed groups,85 patterns of violence against civilians,86 household economics,87 and wartime institutions88 —much of this literature has focused on the relationship between armed groups and local people. As a result, these studies increasingly found evidence that local people are crucial agents who are able to make independent choices and influence the dynamics of conflict.89 Armed groups’ reliance on people’s support, loyalty, resources, and information, influences their tactics, including the use of selective or indiscriminate violence against

84 Justino, “Poverty and Violent Conflict: A Micro-Level Perspective on the Causes and Duration of Warfare.” 85 See, for example: Stathis, “Micro-Level Studies of Violence in Civil War: Refining and Extending the Control-Collaboration Model”; Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. 86 See, for example: Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Stathis N. Kalyvas, “The Ontology of “Political Violence”: Action and Identity in Civil Wars,” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 3 (2003). 87 Justino, “Poverty and Violent Conflict: A Micro-Level Perspective on the Causes and Duration of Warfare.” 88 See, for example: Arjona, “Wartime Institutions”; Paul Staniland, “States, Insurgents, and Wartime Political Orders,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 2 (2012). 89 Brück, Justino, and Martin-Shields, “Conflict and Development. Recent Research and Future Agendas”; Weidmann, “Micro-Level Studies.”

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civilians themselves.90 Some of these studies look at people’s participation in violent conflict from below, revealing how participation was often not synonymous with support for the armed group. Local level studies are also showing that people’s agency is not simply functional to the agendas of armed groups. Surprisingly, studies have been finding evidence that local communities have been able to resist the coercive pressure from armed groups, nudge their behaviour, stay out of the conflict, and find ways to pursue their own priorities and fulfil everyday needs.91 More recently, there is also a growing interest in civilian agency during violent conflict.92 These studies also show that there is more than violence in times of violent conflict, and that local people’s agency can challenge dominant violent norms and structures. The Everyday At the local level, social processes, such as conflict, political violence, and peace, are part of ordinary people’s everyday life. According to Sylvester, researching people’s experiences is essential to understanding war, because ‘a key characteristic of war in practice is that it engages and acts on bodies’.93 She argues that war is essentially about injuring bodies, and, as a consequence, the human body is central to it.94 For Sylvester, a research agenda based on experience can provide less abstract explanations of war than IR theories.95 Similarly, Parashar stresses the importance of ordinary people’s knowledge about war:

90 Weidmann, “Micro-Level Studies”; Stathis, “Micro-Level Studies of Violence in Civil War: Refining and Extending the Control-Collaboration Model”; Kaplan Oliver, “Nudging Armed Groups: How Civilians Transmit Norms of Protection,” Stability: International Journal of Security and Development 2, no. 3 (2013). 91 Kaplan, Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves; Anderson and Wallace, Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict; J. Masullo, The Power of Staying Put. Nonviolent Resistance Against Armed Groups in Colombia. 92 Jana Krause, Resilient Communities: Non-violence and Civilian Agency in Communal War. Barter, Civilian Strategy in Civil War: Insights from Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. 93 Christine Sylvester, Experiencing War (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2010). 9. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 50.

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IR wants to know why wars happen and how they end. It is the period between these two moments that IR war studies has not seriously engaged with. People who fight/suffer/live inside wars know the answers or know where to look for answers.96

Although critical security studies scholars like Sylvester and Parashar, and critical peace scholars such as Richmond and Mac Ginty point out that the everyday dimension of war has not been given much attention in IR,97 other fields have a stronger tradition of engaging in the study of the everyday and violence. The study of the ordinary is an important analytical category in anthropological studies, for instance.98 Anthropologists such as Nordstrom, Walker, and Das investigate how people conduct their everyday lives in violent conflict or post-conflict environments.99 The everyday reality of life, Nordstrom argues, is the most profound, yet most silenced aspect of war.100 For Walker, looking at the everyday beyond violence will ‘reveal not only how people suffer and survive but also how the vitality of the everyday allows people to live around, through, and beyond violence’.101 Walker’s work highlights people’s agency and resilience through their everyday experiences of violent conflict, including the less violent or dramatic parts.102 South Asian scholars have contributed significantly to developing analysis of violence through the lenses of the everyday. For instance, Veena Das eloquently stresses the importance of looking at ordinary objects 96 Swati Parashar, “What Wars and ‘War Bodies’ Know About International Relations,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26, no. 4 (2013): 617. 97 Roger Mac Ginty, “Indicators+: A Proposal for Everyday Peace Indicators,” Evaluation and Program Planning 36, no. 1 (2013); Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace; Christine Sylvester, “Experiencing War: A Challenge for International Relations,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26, no. 4 (2013); Parashar, “What Wars and ‘War Bodies’ Know About International Relations.” 98 Rebecca Walker, “Violence, the Everyday and the Question of the Ordinary,” Contemporary South Asia 18, no. 1 (2010). 99 Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Walker, “Violence, the Everyday and the Question of the Ordinary”; Veena Das, Life and Words. Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 100 Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story, 7. 101 Walker, “Violence, the Everyday and the Question of the Ordinary,” 11. 102 Ibid.

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and events even though ‘our theoretical impulse is often to think of agency in terms of escaping the ordinary rather than as a descent into it’.103 Nandy and Butalia, in the context of Partition, highlight the silent everyday history of the people who experienced violence, the ‘underside’ of history.104 Significant contributions to theorizing war as experience comes from feminist scholars, as Sylvester’s review of the literature on this topic in the volume in Experiencing War shows.105 Feminist scholars including Baaz and Stern, Wibben, Nordstrom, Özkaleli and Yilmaz, Alison, and MacKenzie looked at women’s everyday experiences of conflict and violence.106 These studies highlight different dimension of women’s experiences of conflict, such as gender-based violence, their participation in the violence as combatants, and their everyday domestic life in times of violent conflict. Looking at the everyday allows the researcher to focus on the perspective of social groups whose voices and narratives are often marginalissed and overlooked. Feminist research, by looking at the narratives of women as combatants, mothers, widows, revolutionaries, targets of violence, and the like, challenges dominant narratives on war and enhances the understanding of it. Similarly, research on the everyday has

103 Das, Life and Words. Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, 17. 104 Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India

(London: Hurst, 2000); Ashis Nandy, An Ambiguous Journey to the City the Village and Other Odd Ruins of the Self in the Indian Imagination (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 105 Sylvester, Experiencing War. 106 See: Miranda Alison, “Cogs in the Wheel? Women in the Liberation Tigers of

Tamil Eelam,” Civil Wars 6, no. 4 (2003); Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, “Fearless Fighters and Submissive Wives,” Armed Forces & Society 39, no. 4 (2013); Annick T. R. Wibben, Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (London and New York: Routledge, 2010); Keally D. McBride and Annick T. R. Wibben, “The Gendering of Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3, no. 2 (2012); Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond (London, New York, and Uppsala: Zed Books, Nordic Africa Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, “Whores, Men, and Other Misfits: Undoing ‘Feminization’ in the Armed Forces in the DRC,” African Affairs 110, no. 441 (2011); Miranda H. Alison, Women and Political Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno-National Conflict (London; New York: Routledge, 2009); Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story; Umut Özkaleli and Ömür Yilmaz, “‘What Was My War Like?’,” International Feminist Journal of Politics (2013).

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the potential to highlight the perspective and agency of other marginalised groups in a certain society, or groups within groups. For example, peace education scholar, Helen Berents, used the concept of everyday peace in her research on young people’s agency in the context of the conflict in Colombia.107 She argues that although young people are frequently marginalised and excluded, they are particularly affected by conflict, and at the same time, they build peace through everyday practices.108 Berents develops the concept of everyday peace from Richmond’s critique of the liberal peace.109 For Richmond, the liberal peace fails to engage with local actors and understand their perspectives.110 He points out that an emancipatory peace: might be thought of as an everyday form of peace, offering care, respecting but also mediating culture and identity, institutions, and customs, providing for needs and assisting the most marginalized in their local, state, regional and international contexts.111

Mac Ginty’s conceptualisation of everyday peace also stems from a critique of the liberal peace. One of his critiques of the liberal peace and academia is that their construction of top-down narratives through the categorisation and analysis of violent conflict is ‘another way of stripping agency from those experiencing conflict on the ground’.112 In the Everyday Peace Indicators project, he explores people’s narratives and encourages local communities to develop their own indicators of peace.113 Mac Ginty also looks at different types of social practices that constitute everyday peace. Here, his definition of everyday peace and his typology of everyday peace practices apply mostly to the context of deeply divided societies:

107 Berents, “An Embodied Everyday Peace in the Midst of Violence.” 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. 110 Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace. 111 Ibid., 3–4. 112 Mac Ginty and Firchow, “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Narratives of Peace and Conflict,” 6. 113 Ibid.

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Everyday peace refers to the practices and norms deployed by individuals and groups in deeply divided societies to avoid and minimize conflict and awkward situations at both inter- and intra- group levels.114

The concept of everyday peace, however, can be useful for understanding people’s agency, not only in deeply divided societies, but also in any context of conflict and violence. Berents’ work in Colombia, for example, explores the ways in which ordinary people, through their everyday practices, respond to institutional marginalisation and violence.115 Berents develops the concept of everyday peace further by bringing attention to people’s embodied experiences, similarly to how scholars such as Sylvester and Parashar did for the study of war.116 Berents argues that: embodied everyday peace amidst violence is then the ways in which people engage with ongoing difficulties and challenges of building and sustaining routines in the face of institutionalized marginalization and disregard and which has the potential for small (but potentially radical) change while perpetuating the everyday rhythms of relationships, practices and roles.117

Thus, Berents’ conceptualisation of everyday peace partially bridges the literature on everyday conflict and everyday peace. In fact, most scholars focus on only one or the other—either war or peace. However, many of them recognise that, as Berents points out, ‘conflict and peace “co-exist” in people’s everyday experiences’.118 War is rarely total, as Mac Ginty states, as there are usually zones of collaboration and negotiation,119 and, as Walker points out, there are nonviolent parts of daily life even 114 Mac Ginty, “Everyday Peace: Bottom-Up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies,” 553. 115 Berents, “An Embodied Everyday Peace in the Midst of Violence.” 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid., 195. 118 Ibid., 188. Das, Life and Words. Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary; Urmi-

tapa Dutta, Andrea Kashimana Andzenge, and Kayla Walkling, “The Everyday Peace Project: An Innovative Approach to Peace Pedagogy,” Journal of Peace Education 13, no. 1 (2016). Parashar, “What Wars and ‘War Bodies’ Know About International Relations,” 618. 119 Mac Ginty, “Everyday Peace: Bottom-Up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies,” 551.

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in contexts of violence.120 I argue that this intersection between everyday conflict and peace needs to be stressed further in order to understand both violence and peace. Looking at people’s embodied experiences of violent conflict will help understand how they respond to them. Thus, the Western conceptualisation of ‘everyday peace’ in peace and conflict studies would benefit from merging with notions of the everyday as experience developed scholars from other fields and backgrounds, including by feminists, anthropologists, and non-Western scholars as I have mentioned above. Everyday Peace and Everyday Resistance A possible objection to everyday peace is that it might be seen as limited. For Mac Ginty, everyday peace is, in a way, a limited form of peace, because it ‘accepts the bases of conflict and seeks to minimize the impact of conflict through toleration and coexistence, rather than through measures that are directed at the underlying causes of conflict’.121 In other words, certain conceptualisations of everyday peace may consider it as a way of coping or reducing the impact of violence. As everyday peace is highly context-specific and it could be very different from one place to another, this might be the case in certain environments. However, the limit may be due to the way the concept of everyday peace is problematised. For example, we may be looking only at certain forms of ‘peace’ actions, or only at actions that take place in the aftermath of a violent conflict, or just at actions that involve neutrality, because these are actions that we, as researchers, define as ‘peace’. My approach is to look at people’s action broadly while gathering people’s perspectives, including in the analysis actions that could be interpreted as escalating or containing the conflict, and actions that aim at resisting structures of power perceived as forms of structural violence. This brings on another important critique to the concept of everyday peace, which is that, as Marijan points out, not all people’s everyday actions are oriented towards peace.122 Indeed, local people’s agency is 120 Walker, “Violence, the Everyday and the Question of the Ordinary,” 14. 121 Mac Ginty, “Everyday Peace: Bottom-Up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected

Societies,” 557. 122 Branka Marijan, “The Politics of Everyday Peace in Bosnia Herzegovina and Northern Ireland,” Peacebuilding 5, no. 1 (2017).

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constitutive of conflict dynamics as well as peace processes. Local individuals may respond to violent contexts in many ways, including supporting or resisting the armed groups involved in the violence. There can be many reasons why they choose to act in ways that could be seen as violent or destabilising. They could be dictated by concerns about security, emotions, personal profit, and other reasons, but also by their ideas of what a sustainable peace should look like at the local level. For example, if local people thought that a sustainable peace could only be achieved by changing the relationships of power and subjugation, their action to achieve that peace may involve resisting everyday forms of subjugation, violence, and repression. This point is well illustrated through Heredia’s work on everyday resistance. In this case, the author looks at people’s agency in terms of resistance to peacebuilding and state-making processes. The practices of everyday resistance highlighted range from creative self-help survival strategies to militia tactics.123 Some of these actions could be interpreted as acts that escalate the conflict rather than contain it. Hence, in people’s discourses, academic categories of conflict, peace, and resistance themselves could have different meanings. Though ‘everyday resistance’ and ‘everyday peace’ are conceptualised differently and highlight different aspects of people’s action, in a way they might converge as they both aim at understanding what local people do to change local structures of power and everyday violence. Perhaps, from an everyday perspective, the tension between peace and social justice fades, because if people experience power structures as violence, peace cannot be simply the absence of war. Until it is those in power who decide what is peace and what is violence, people’s peace, or everyday peace, is likely to be conceptualised as something subversive. Vice versa, dominant conceptualisations of peace, including academic ones, may not be so meaningful from a people’s perspective. While the prevalent idea in peace and conflict studies is that people’s action is something subversive and destabilising, the resistance perspective shifts the focus back to how people create change by resisting violence and power structures. The concept of everyday resistance has been used in relation to the struggle of subaltern classes who resist structures of domination. In fact, Scott shows that, especially when open rebellions are 123 Iñiguez De Heredia, Everyday Resistance, Peacebuilding and State-Making: Insights from ‘Africa’s World War’.

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not possible, resistance may take the form of everyday, invisible acts that he calls ‘hidden transcripts’.124 More recent conceptualisations of resistance have highlighted a more complex interplay between intersectional power and resistance. In this view, power relations are plural, complex, contextual, and situational, and so is everyday resistance.125 The idea of resistance can be very useful to understand contexts of violent conflicts, too, as it can help us look at subjugated discourses and take into account power dynamics. But the challenge is to be open to listen to how people’s complex experiences of power may redefine what violence is, and what could peace and security look like from their perspectives, and at the same time, ‘everyday resistance’ may not fit into the agenda of ‘revolution’ in the way organised parties, intellectuals, and academics mean it. In fact, Johansson and Vinthagen argue that: If we create a category of action according to the political awareness or orientation of the actor, we risk excluding not-yet political awareness, or differently motivated resistance. It is of paramount importance to avoid making resistance into a category for the politically educated that excludes lower classes.126

If we look at studies on everyday peace and everyday resistance, they tend to highlight different repertoires of actions. Everyday resistance is potentially much broader, as it focuses on how people resist power, not just in times of violent conflict. Repertoires of everyday resistance have been looking at patterns of actions and practices that counter specific configurations of power.127 On the other hand, everyday peace has usually been applied to study of violent conflicts, especially conflicts in divided societies, and has highlighted dimensions such as sociality, reciprocity, and

124 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 125 Anna Johansson and Stellan Vinthagen, “Dimensions of Everyday Resistance: An Analytical Framework,” Critical Sociology 42, no. 3 (2016). 126 Anna Johansson and Stellan Vinthagen, Conceptualizing ‘Everyday Resistance’. A Transdisciplinary Approach (New York and London: Routledge, 2020). 127 Ibid.

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solidarity.128 Therefore, everyday peace has been given a special attention to practices that bring people together. Despite this, the two concepts have much in common, and it would be useful to combine them to understand everyday action in times of violent conflict. Everyday resistance also draws from the literature on nonviolence and constructive resistance, so it includes insights on how everyday actors resist violence. The lessons of everyday peace in regard to the importance of people’s relationships, solidarity, and emotional intelligence is certainly helpful for everyday resistance, too, as this can be a crucial way of disrupting power structures and discourses. On the other hand, if we think about the relationship between violence and power, violence conflict is not something as narrow as war and combat. From an everyday perspective, violence is an expression of complex power structures, and that power is manifested in people’s lives in different violent forms. Therefore, we should also expand our understanding of everyday peace and include a conceptualisation of power and discourses and practices that counter power in more complex ways. Recent work on both everyday peace and everyday resistance has addressed the question of how much impact can everyday action have. Does it remain limited to the ‘hyperlocal’, or could it transform broader structures and dynamics of violence? Mac Ginty and Lee have come out with concepts such as ‘circuitry’129 and ‘connectivity’,130 respectively, to explain the connections between the local level and broader levels, and how everyday peace action may have an impact beyond the local. These can be useful concepts to understand how everyday action can potentially transform conflicts and power structures, as we will see through this research. Another way of looking at the relationship between the local and broader structures, as I suggest in this research, is to draw from a conceptualisation of power and to look at how power—and resistance— discourses are expressed in people’s everyday lives, and how, vice versa, everyday action influences broader structures and may transform dynamics of violence.

128 Mac Ginty, Everyday Peace. How So Called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict. 129 Ibid. 130 SungYong Lee, “Understanding Everyday Peace in Cambodia: Plurality, subtlety,

and Connectivity,” Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 16, no. 1 (2021): 24–38.

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Conclusion Research on violent conflict has traditionally been making different kinds of assumptions in regard to local people’s behaviour and preferences during violent conflict. As a result, the local people have often been written out of academic discourses on violent conflict, as we have seen in the case of greed and grievance theories. The emphasis on the role of leaders and armed groups rather than on the people has also had to do with how power relationships were understood in the theory, as for example, in the case of theories focusing on the social construction of exclusionary identity.131 In recent times, a growing amount of evidence on the significance of people’s action and knowledge has attracted more attention to the question of people’s agency, experiences, and perspectives in the literature. These findings challenge earlier dominant assumptions regarding people’s agency and behaviour during violent conflict and show that local people’s agency is important to understand civil war. Different streams in the literature have highlighted aspects that shed light on local people’s perspectives, such as: the role of people’s grievances; the meaning of violence in specific social contexts; the relationship between local people and armed groups; local communities’ independent action during civil war; people’s embodied experiences of conflict; everyday peace practices; and everyday resistance. All these dimensions increase our understanding of people’s role during violent conflict, though they are mostly discussed separately. In summary, the everyday is not a new concept, and there are scholars who have been looking at violent conflict from people-centric approaches. What we are looking for, is an integrated approach that looks broadly at what people do during a violent conflict, both as agents of violence and peace, and could be applied to ‘rebellion’ kinds of conflict, but at the same time, take into account meanings, the social contexts, the relevance of social relationships, experience, and power. Addressing these questions is important because the problematisation of violent conflict is not neutral and can have significant practical implications on the ground.

131 See, for example: Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered; Demmers, Theories of Violent Conflict: An Introduction; Jackson and Dexter, “The Social Construction of Organised Political Violence: An Analytical Framework.”

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The question of who we identify as agents of peace, and who are the agents that we identify as violent groups can have very significant implications, as peace and security processes may involve allocation of power and resources that benefit certain actors, often the ones who are already in power and have also the power of constructing hegemonic discourses of ‘peace’. Looking at bottom-up perspectives and agency, on the other hand, questions these power relationships and opens the question of how research can reach out to and support people’s action for peace and change.

CHAPTER 3

Maoism in India

Since I was a Master’s student, I was very fascinated by the phenomenon of Maoism in India. The Maoists, formerly also known as ‘Naxalites’, are organised groups inspired by the Maoist Revolution in China, and in India they are most active in the poorest areas of India, where they fight to end exploitation, following the Chinese model. It seemed to be the perfect case of a socio-economic conflict for a greed versus grievance debate. The movement evolved over time, and in many ways, many of the peace and conflict studies themes discussed in the previous chapter, could be applied here. As the movement evolved, so did the discourse around it. Together with the discourse changed the policies, strategies, interventions, and relationships. As we look at a specific case such as this, we can see more closely the implications of discourses around it on real people and communities. Because the Maoists claim to fight for the oppressed groups such as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in rural areas, the perceptions and attitudes towards these groups have significant repercussion on the decisions that all the parties take, and they shape dynamics of violence, resistance, and peace. We have already seen how perception of people’s role in revolutions and violent conflicts changed over time, and this reflected the international culture and political interests. If we focus more specifically on the case of Maoism in India, we can see that the same

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Carrer, How People Respond to Violence, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11342-0_3

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trends are reflected not only in the academic literature, but also in local policies and relationships. Scholars use different terms in the literature in relation to ordinary people and disadvantaged groups. In India, two terms that we find often in writings on the Maoists and other agrarian insurgencies are ‘tribal’ and ‘peasant’. The term ‘peasant’ was frequently used during the Cold War, when there was an interest in rural struggles, particularly in developing countries. Hence, the use of this term is not limited to the Indian context, and it emphasises the dimension of class in the agrarian context. In contrast, the term ‘tribal’ in the Indian context is used in relation to groups that are officially listed as ‘Scheduled Tribes’ and are regarded as the indigenous people of India. As I discuss further in the next chapter, at the local level, the people do not necessarily identify with these categories. In this chapter, we will explore the evolution of Maoism in India, with special attention to how people and marginalised groups in particular have been problematised, and how this influenced the action of the different parties involved. If we look at the history of Maoism in India, we can identify three main phases: the first phase of the Naxalite movement; the agrarian struggles in the state of Bihar; and the contemporary phase of the Maoist movement. The movement, in fact, is considered to have started in 1967 with the uprising in the village of Naxalbari, in West Bengal, for which the movement is also known as ‘Naxalism’. The Naxalite movement seemed to have been crushed in the mid-Seventies. However, it eventually resurfaced after a period of relative silence of about thirty years. In the last decade, Maoist parties have spread over a significant portion of the Indian territory. While since the Emergency in the 1970s the movement had faded in many parts of India and remained more or less quiet till the late 1990s, agrarian turmoil linked to various leftist extremist groups continued to inflame the state of Bihar throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This categorisation of the literature does not simply account for different historical periods, but serves the purpose of highlighting a shift in the approach of the discourse and strategy of the movement itself.

The Myth of Naxalbari Much of what has been written on Maoism in India focuses on the first phase of the movement, even though in the present phase it has assumed a much bigger proportion. The special attention given to the events that

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took place between 1967 and 1972 shows that these are assumed to be of particular relevance in relation to the meaning they evoke in the discourse. What was so special about Naxalbari? Soon after the left-wing United Front government assumed office in 1967 in the state of West Bengal, a group of poor peasants started raiding landowners’ property and forcibly taking the harvest from their paddy fields away. This was certainly not the first time a movement of this kind, in connection with a left-wing organisation, had started in the Indian countryside. However, the incidents in Naxalbari had a tremendous impact on the collective imaginary, as they created the general impression that an armed revolution had started. Two main factors contributed to create this impression. First, the top Naxalite leaders, Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal, stressed the fact that Naxalbari was not a simple agitation for land or limited economic demands, but a peasant armed struggle for power. In his ‘Report on the peasant movement in the Terai region’, Kanu Sanyal stated that: The struggle of the Terai peasants acted as a midwife in the revolutionary situation prevailing in India. That is why a single spark of the Naxalbari struggle is kindling widespread forest-fire everywhere.1

Furthermore, he said: The struggle of Terai peasants is an armed struggle—not for land but for state power.2

Second, the Communist Party of China also played an important role in depicting Naxalbari as the beginning of a revolutionary struggle based on the model of the Chinese one. In July 1967, an editorial in the Peking People’s Daily said: A peal of spring thunder has crashed over the land of India. Revolutionary peasants in the Darjeeling area have risen in rebellion. Under the leadership

1 Sanyal Kanu, “Report on the Peasant Movement in the Terai Region,” in Naxalbari and After. A Frontier Anthology, ed. S. Sen, D. Panda, and A. Lahiri (Calcutta: Kathashilpa, 1968), 207. 2 Ibid., 213.

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of a revolutionary group of the Indian Communist Party, a red area of rural revolutionary armed struggle has been established in India.3

Hence, the myth of Naxalbari was born. Among both sympathisers and opponents, the mainstream idea was that Naxalbari was not just another rural uprising focusing on certain economic demands, but an extraordinary event: a prelude to a widespread communist revolution that would shake the whole country. The special significance of this uprising was read not in its dimensions or achievements, but in its character. This uprising, they said, was different because it was led by Maoist revolutionaries who were starting a revolution. This way of thinking influenced deeply the literature on Naxalism as well during this time. In fact, its main objective in this phase was explaining the causes of the rise and failure of the Naxalite movement by looking at party leadership, ideology, organisation, and dynamics. Although many studies provided a description of the structural problems in the countryside, the main focus was on the leadership and party politics. Beyond academic research, this emphasis on elite leadership reflected a broader perception of those events during this time in the dominant discourse. In fact, Naxalbari was given special attention because it was seen as a Maoist revolution, not just another peasant uprising, and the assumption was that its driving force had necessarily to be the party. The authors of the studies written between the 1970s and the 1990s were especially concerned with the reasons for the failure of the Naxalite movement. In the mid-1970s, the fact that the movement appeared to be completely crushed contradicted the expectation that a major revolution had started. What went wrong? Frequently, scholars looked for answers in the analysis of party dynamics and leadership issues.4

3 “Spring Thunder over India. People’s Daily Editorial,” in Naxalbari and After. A Frontier Anthology, ed. S. Sen, D. Panda, and A. Lahiri (Calcutta: Kathashilpa, 1967), 188. 4 See, for example: S. Ghosh, The Naxalite Movement: A Maoist Experiment (Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1974); Prakash Singh, The Naxalite Movement in India (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006); B. Dasgupta, The Naxalite Movement (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1974); Johnston, “Ritual, Strategy, and Deep Culture in the Chechen National Movement.”

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Many of these authors, including Ray and Dasgupta, focused on elites because they were convinced that the Naxalite movement drew essentially from the urban middle class of Kolkata.5 Although the importance of the involvement of this social group is undeniable, especially when dealing with the urban events in Kolkata, the relationship between the party elites, the urban phenomenon, and the uprisings in the countryside is unclear. Ray points out that the literature treats as unproblematic the paradox of an agrarian revolution involved in urban terrorism. But it is also the paradox of an agrarian ‘revolution’ which appears from the existing literature to have its roots in urban and elitist problems. Research gathered considerable knowledge in regard to the party dynamics that led a section of the CPI(M) to play a leadership role in the Naxalite movement, about the ideology, organisational weaknesses, and the motivations of the Bengali urban middle class, especially students, to join the fight. But if the motivations behind the reason d’etre of the movement related mainly to urban and upper- or middle-classes issues—as it appears from the literature—how could these explain the uprisings in the countryside? There were only superficial descriptions of the grievances of the poor to address this question. The reasoning was that poor people can be easily convinced by intellectuals and party elites to fight: what counted were the motives of the elites, their ideology and actions. It was assumed that grieving people would automatically follow them. According to the Maoist doctrine, exploited people are expected to rise against their oppressors; hence, it is not surprising that the Maoist discourse focused on party dynamics and ideology and assumed that people were waiting for the revolution. However, this idea became the dominant attitude to Naxalism well beyond the circles of the party members and sympathisers, just as the claim that peasants were struggling for political power and a Maoist revolution had started caused so much commotion in the whole country. Therefore, this Maoist-influenced discourse influenced the dominant perception of rural masses, and this also reflects more broadly the international interest in revolution during the Cold War as I discussed in the last chapter. More recent writings on the first phase of the Naxalite movement questioned the movement from post-colonial and subaltern perspectives.6 This 5 Dasgupta, The Naxalite Movement; Ray, The Naxalites and Their Ideology. 6 See, for example: Pradip Basu, Discourses on Naxalite Movement, 1967–2009: Insights

into Radical Left Politics, Naxalite movement, 1967–2009 (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani,

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significantly expanded the debates on Naxalism, for example by including discussions on meaning and representation.7 Feminist and anthropological research also introduced important studies on the dimensions of gender and sexuality.8 The question of the relationships between urban activists and peasants, however, remains largely unaddressed. The few scholars who address this question still tend to discuss it mostly from the perspective of the urban activists.9 One of the problems that Conisbee Baer highlights is that we cannot know how tribals understood the meanings of those relationships and actions.10 In other words, the research gap on the perspective of tribal people is a difficult one to fill. Despite the contradiction of the Naxalite movement as a rural uprising rooted in the city—or perhaps because of it—some authors argue that a legacy of the Naxalite movement is that it stimulated a scholarly interest for the subaltern, which was expressed in the Subaltern Studies group.11 Nonetheless, in regard to the Naxalite struggle, the perspective of the subaltern remains marginal as a research question in the first place. In fact, even among post-colonial and subaltern circles, the phenomenon of Naxalism remains more associated with its urban dimension.

2010); ibid.; Pradip Basu, ed. Naxalite Politics. Post-structuralist, Postcolonial and Subaltern Perspectives (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2017). 7 See also on the representation of Naxalism in Cinema and media: Pradip Basu, Red on Silver: Naxalites in Cinema, 1st ed. (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2012). Robin Jeffrey, “Media and Maoism,” in More Than Maoism. Politics, Policies and Insurgencies in South Asia, ed. Robin Jeffrey, Ronojoy Sen, and Pratima Singh (New Delhi: Manohar, 2012). 8 See, for example: Mallarika Sinha Roy, Gender and Radical Politics in India: Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967–1975) (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2010); Srila Roy, “Revolutionary Marriage: On the Politics of Sexual Stories in Naxalbari,” Feminist Review 83, no. 83 (2006); Swati Parashar and Janet Andrew Shah, “(En)Gendering the Maoist Insurgency in India: Between Rhetoric and Reality,” Postcolonial Studies 19, no. 4 (2016); Henrike Donner, “Radical Masculinity: Morality, Sociality and Relationships through Recollections of Naxalite Activists,” Dialectical Anthropology 33, no. 3 (2009). 9 See, for example: Ben Consisbee Baer, “Forest Interface: The Naxalites Between Vanguard and Subaltern,” in Discourses on Naxalite movement 1967–2009, ed. Pradip Basu (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2010); Sanjay Seth, “From Maoism to Postcolonialism? The Indian ‘Sixties’, and Beyond,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, no. 4 (2006). 10 Consisbee Baer, “Forest Interface: The Naxalites Between Vanguard and Subaltern.” 11 Seth, “From Maoism to Postcolonialism? The Indian ‘Sixties’, and Beyond”; Sumanta

Banerjee, “Mapping a Rugged Terrain: Naxalite Politics and Bengali Culture in the 1970s,” in Discourses on Naxalite Movement 1967–2009, ed. Pradip Basu (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2010).

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Naxalism in Bihar After the Naxalite movement was largely crashed during the Emergency in the 1970s, the movement had faded in many parts of India and remained more or less quiet till the late 1990s, however, agrarian turmoil linked to various leftist extremist groups continued to inflame the state of Bihar throughout the 1980s and 1990s. During this phase, there was a sharp break with the narratives that placed elites at the centre, and there was a new attention dedicated to understanding the reasons for discontent among the poor in rural Bihar. During this time, in academic circles, the grievances of the poor villagers in the countryside were considered the main cause behind the long tradition of agrarian struggles in the State, of which Naxalism is part. At this time, the explanation of the Naxalite conflict as due to the grievances of marginalised sections of the society, such as tribals and poor peasants, was a new narrative that become dominant beyond academic circles. This also reflected the broader interest, even internationally, for socio-economic structures as causes of internal conflicts, as I discussed in the last chapter. While earlier the discourse on Naxalbari was based on the idea that the struggle was aimed at the seizure of political power and not at mere shortterm economic demands, the literature on Bihar emphasises the struggles for the change of immediate socio-economic conditions of the rural poor. As a consequence, there was now more attention to an analysis of the conditions of the masses, and attention was given to the socio-economic structure of this region,12 the ‘plight of the rural poor’, their ‘struggle against the oppressor’,13 and even to the perspective of the people who constitute the mass base of the Naxalite movement at village level.14 While seeking to describe the structural problems of rural Bihar, scholars exposed many important issues of great value for understanding the spread of Naxalism in the state. This research provides quite a coherent picture of the socio-economic structures in the state. The state

12 P. Louis, People Power: The Naxalite Movement in Central Bihar (Delhi: Wordsmiths, 2002). 13 Arun Sinha, Against the Few: Struggles of India’s Rural Poor (London: Zed Books, 1991). 14 B. Bhatia, “The Naxalite Movement in Central Bihar,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 15 (2005).

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of Bihar was consistently described as one of the most ‘backward’ states of India, where all attempts at reforming the socio-economic conditions in the countryside were made fruitless thanks to rampant corruption. Further, Bihar was characterised as one of the most caste-ridden states, where caste shaped the whole agrarian structure and socio-economic relations.15 Hence, caste was seen as the most important cause of struggle in rural Bihar. The most distinctive feature of Bihar was that here the struggle in the countryside took the form of a prolonged clash between social groups, mainly based on caste, which stretched over decades. Here, the conflict did not involve just armed clashes between Maoist armed squads and the police; the upper caste militias were responsible for large-scale massacres and violence throughout the decades. On the other hand, Maoist activities were not limited to armed violence. Rather, their non-violent struggles achieved great visibility. For all these reasons, a discourse portraying the Naxalites as mere terrorists had less success here. The categories were more blurred in this case: the Maoists were not the only armed group, and they were not engaged only in violence. Although many scholars condemn their use of violence, they accepted the idea that the Naxalites worked for the people. Hence, their investigation focused more on structural causes of grievance, rather than on party elites. Nonetheless, the interest in the political environment and its role in rural struggles were not abandoned. In fact, along with the analysis of the socio-economic environment, scholars also sought to trace the history of the various parties and movements who played a role in the agrarian struggles in Bihar. This time, the historical accounts went back in time well beyond the rise of Naxalism. This is again another difference between the Naxalite discourse in the first phase and the Naxalite movement in Bihar in the next stage. While the literature on the first phase of the movement emphasised the fact that Naxalbari was something extraordinary and not just another peasant struggle, the literature on Bihar placed the Naxalite movement within the long tradition of peasant struggles in the state and highlighted its continuity.

15 Sinha, Against the Few: Struggles of India’s Rural Poor.

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For instance, in the analysis of Mukherjee and Yadav16 and in Sinha,17 the early causes of tensions are traced back to the British time. In this way, Naxalism in Bihar is seen by the literature as an integral part of the history of agrarian struggles that took place since the colonial time, during the liberation struggle, and after independence. This trend reflected a broader international interest on agrarian struggles and social change during this time.18 This research is concerned with understanding how the socioeconomic system and power relationships in the countryside, and the changes that occurred in it throughout the history, are responsible for the frequent uprisings that broke out in different parts of the country since the colonial time. The studies on post-independence agrarian struggles in India often included an analysis of the Naxal struggle as well, incorporated in the broader history of agrarian struggles. For example, the edited volumes Agrarian Struggle in India After Independence 19 and Agrarian Movements in India: Studies on 20th Century Bihar,20 provide an overview of different peasant movements from the early twentieth century onwards, showing how the situation evolved throughout the decades, and include not just socio-economic structures, but also the perspective of people as subjects of social change. In a fascinating historical analysis, Guha investigated common features of peasant insurgencies during the colonial times from the point of view of the peasants themselves, in order to study their

16 K. Mukherjee and R. S. Yadav, Bhojpur: Naxalism in the Plains of Bihar (R¯ adh¯a Krishna, 1980). 17 Sinha, Against the Few: Struggles of India’s Rural Poor. 18 See, for example: James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion

and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, vol. 268 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); R. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Duke University Press, 1999); Norma J. Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 19 Akshayakumar Ramanlal Desai, ed. Agrarian Struggles in India After Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 20 A. N. Das, ed. Agrarian Movements in India: Studies on 20th Century Bihar (Taylor & Francis, 1982), 1–2.

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consciousness.21 Through his work, Guha sought to challenge the narratives of a history written mainly by British rulers and overcome dominant assumptions regarding poor peasants. During this phase, several authors exposed the construction of the peasant as passive and resistant to change. Das, for instance, found that ‘established myths about peasant passivity, rural apathy and idiocy and resistance to change, etc. have been ideologically reinforced’.22 In the attempt at refuting such myths, the new narratives tended to emphasise the militant nature of tribal and poor peasants. In this way, this literature contributed to an alternative construction of the peasant stressing their militant nature and tendency to fight violently against the oppressor. This narrative reflected the Maoist rhetoric of that time and became part of the dominant discourse. Despite this change in the perception of rural people and their role in revolution, it is important to take note of some considerations. First, in the attempt of challenging the social construction of peasant passivity, the literature started associating the peasant with violent attributes. This emphasis on the violent nature of the peasant did not necessarily increase the understanding of their political agency, nor did it represent the diversity of peasant voices and perspectives. Second, the shift in discourse and academic research was the result of a change in the approach of the Maoist parties themselves. While earlier the Maoist effort focused on class annihilations and organising secret militant squads rather than on building a mass base, after the failure of Naxalbari, the Naxalite leaders in Bihar changed strategy and started working among the masses. With this shift, it was not only the Maoists who were helping the people, but they also needed the support of the people. Hence, the people become an important actor, so much so that the Maoist cadres had to shape their strategy, and hence, the face of the conflict itself to ensure the support of the people. While assuming that tribal and poor people blindly followed the Maoists, scholars did not investigate how the local people influenced the actions of Maoist cadres and the impact they had in shaping the dynamics of the conflict; nor did they explore whether local actors engaged in other kinds of actions, for instance resisting the armed groups or constructing forms of peace at the local level.

21 Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. 22 Das, Agrarian Movements in India: Studies on 20th Century Bihar, 2.

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Maoism Today: The ‘Biggest Threat to India’s Internal Security’ In the contemporary phase, the topic of Maoism in India is often introduced in many articles, volumes, and other media start in similar ways: they emphasise how Maoism is growing in the country, both qualitatively and quantitatively, often by quoting the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who, in 2006, described the Maoist movement as ‘the single biggest internal security challenge that India has ever faced’.23 The failure of the state to respond to the basic needs of the poor is generally considered at the root of the problem, both by authors who strongly condemn the Maoists and those who are more sympathetic towards them. Nevertheless, the spread of Maoism in India, even if motivated by genuine grievances, is often seen as a threat that needs to be tackled.24 According to Srivastava, for example, the Naxalites claim to represent the oppressed in a context where the government has failed to implement adequate policies, but they have now become terrorists and are a growing threat.25 Together with this emphasis on the ‘security threat’, there is new attention being paid to the organisational and military aspects of Maoist groups and counterinsurgency measures.26 Once again, the literature turns to 23 Singh, “PM’s Speech at the Chief Minister’s Meet on Naxalism.” See, for example: T. Mishra, Barrel of the Gun: The Maoist Challenges and Indian Democracy (New Delhi: Sheriden Book Company, 2007); Ghatak and Eynde, “Economic Determinants of the Maoist Conflict in India”; Giridhari Nayak, Neo-Naxal Challenge: Issues & Options (New Delhi: Pentagon Security International, 2011); Vora Priyanka and Buxy Siddhant, “Marginalization and Violence: The Story of Naxalism in India,” International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences 6, no. 1/2 (2011); P. V. Ramana and Observer Research Foundation, eds., The Naxal Challenge: Causes, Linkages, and Policy Options (New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2008); Sohan Raj Tater, Naxalism: Myth and Reality (New Delhi, India: Regal Publications, 2012); M. Srivastava, Naxalism (Shakti Publishers and Distributors, 2011). 24 See, for example: D¯ as´arathi Bhuyan and Amita Kum¯ara Singh, eds., Naxalism: Issues and Concerns (New Delhi: Discovery Pub. House, 2010); Prem Mahadevan, “The Maoist Insurgency in India: Between Crime and Revolution,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, no. 2 (2012); Pratul Ahuja and Rajat Ganguly, “The Fire Within: Naxalite Insurgency Violence in India,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 18, no. 2 (2007). 25 Srivastava, Naxalism. 26 See, for example: Nayak, Neo-Naxal Challenge: Issues & Options; Chakrabarty and

Kujur, Maoism in India: Reincarnation of Ultra-Left Wing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century; Ahuja and Ganguly, “The Fire Within: Naxalite Insurgency Violence in India”;

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focus on elites, both the Maoists leadership and the government. This trend reflects the dominant discourse which on the one hand treats the Maoist phenomena as ‘a threat to national security’, and on the other hand recognises that it is not only a ‘law and order problem’ but is rooted in the grievances of marginalised groups.27 The debate over the possible solutions for the Maoist problem is a central topic in the contemporary phase of the Maoist movement in India. Similarly with the central government statements, for the literature the counterinsurgency strategies should include not only police and military action, but also development plans to ‘win hearts and minds’. Once again, these discourses also reflect an international trend, where scholars and policymakers debate what exactly represents the main structural socioeconomic cause of conflict in order to find solutions to it. The question of whether agrarian relationships related to land ownership and modes of production are grievance factors that increase the influence of the Maoists is still debated. Scholars who explored the relevance of agrarian structures in the contemporary phase, motivated their research angle by pointing out that the agrarian question is still central in the discourse of the Maoists and it informs their revolutionary strategy.28 Hence, these studies assess the Maoist characterisation of the Indian political economy as a semi-colonial and semi-feudal system through quantitative and qualitative studies. Some of these studies look at how these relationships developed over time, and at the role of colonial institutions.29 The results are inconclusive: while some authors argue that the contemporary Maoist conflict has its roots in the agrarian relationships

Robin Jeffrey, Ronojoy Sen, and Pratima Singh, More than Maoism: Politics, Policies and Insurgencies in South Asia (Singapore and New Delhi: ISAS, Institute of South Asian Studies; Manohar, 2012). 27 Singh, “Pe’s Speech at the Chief Minister’s Meet on Naxalism.” 28 Deepankar Basu and Debarshi Das, “The Maoist Movement in India: Some Political

Economy Considerations,” Journal of Agrarian Change 13, no. 3 (2013); Alpa Shah, “The Agrarian Question in a Maoist Guerrilla Zone: Land, Labour and Capital in the Forests and Hills of Jharkhand, India,” Journal of Agrarian Change 13, no. 3 (2013). 29 Shah, “The Agrarian Question in a Maoist Guerrilla Zone: Land, Labour and Capital

in the Forests and Hills of Jharkhand, India”; Ghatak and Eynde, “Economic Determinants of the Maoist Conflict in India”; Shivaji Mukherjee, “Colonial Origins of Maoist Insurgency in India: Historical Institutions and Civil War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (2017); Ajay Verghese and Emmanuel Teitelbaum, “Colonialism and Armed Conflict in the Indian Countryside” (2014).

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established through colonial institutions,30 others did not find evidence for such argument.31 Local-level studies show that rural relationships were very different in different contexts, which is probably the reason why it is difficult to quantitatively define what structural factors make Maoism activity more likely at an all-India level.32 In recent literature, scholars who investigate which socio-economic factors are the best predictors of Maoist violence have been paying particular attention to the role of forests, minerals, and the tribal population.33 Many of these are quantitative studies, and again, the findings differ depending on the data sets used, pointing to the importance of the specific local-level context. These scholars propose different hypothesis regarding the relationship between forests, minerals, the tribal population, and Maoist violence, supporting both greed and grievance arguments. Greed and opportunity arguments emphasise the fact that the forests provide important cover for the Maoists, and at the same time, they can profit from the manipulation of the extraction and market of resources as minerals and tendu leaves.34 Interestingly, the greed argument links mining activity to violent conflict not only from the side of the Maoists, but also from the state itself. In fact, some authors argue that counterinsurgency efforts against the Maoists aim at clearing the land to favour mining activity.35 In this way, the Maoists would have inadvertently brought the state closer to the 30 Verghese and Teitelbaum, “Colonialism and Armed Conflict in the Indian Countryside”; Mukherjee, “Colonial Origins of Maoist Insurgency in India: Historical Institutions and Civil War.” 31 Shah, “The Agrarian Question in a Maoist Guerrilla Zone: Land, Labour and Capital in the Forests and Hills of Jharkhand, India.” 32 See, for example: ibid. 33 See, for example: Ghatak and Eynde, “Economic Determinants of the Maoist Conflict

in India”; Kennedy, “The Socioeconomic Determinants of Natural Resource Conflict: Minerals and Maoist Insurgency in India”; Hoelscher, Miklian, and Vadlamannati, “Hearts and Mines: A District-Level Analysis of the Maoist Conflict in India”; Jason Miklian, “The Political Ecology of War in Maoist India,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 13, no. 4 (2012). 34 Ghatak and Eynde, “Economic Determinants of the Maoist Conflict in India”; Ajit Kumar Singh and Sachin Bansidhar Diwan, “Red Money-Tracing India’s Maoist Money Trail,” Eurasia Review News and Analysis (2010); Mahadevan, “The Maoist Insurgency in India: Between Crime and Revolution.” 35 Jean-Paul Azam and Kartika Bhatia, “Provoking Insurgency in a Federal State: Theory and Application to India,” Public Choice 170, no. 3 (2017); Oliver Vanden Eynde, “Targets of Violence: Evidence from India’s Naxalite Conflict,” The Economic

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people.36 This is then related to the grievance argument that is used to explain the relationship between mineral extraction, the presence of tribal population, and violent conflict. According to this view, as a result of the state policy of facilitating mining activities, tribal groups’ access to forests and forest resources is being restricted. This is considered as a factor of grievance for the indigenous population, because it is assumed to have stronger ties with nature.37 As the purpose of this literature is often to assess whether underdevelopment is a cause of violent conflict, some scholars investigated the impact of different development policies. The authors who identified land as the crucial issue behind the spread of Maoism looked at whether the implementation of efficient land reforms would be the solution to Maoism. For example, Agrav¯ala analysed the implementation of land reforms in various states of India and made recommendations to improve them.38 Others looked at the implementation of the NREGA scheme for rural employment.39 Though some scholars pointed out that the NREGA scheme did mitigate violence, others found that it boosted it. These studies point to the problem of how development schemes are implemented, and to the way it affects local-level relationships between local people, state institutions, and Maoists. In recent years, anthropological research in Maoist-affected areas has also highlighted the variety of local-level relationships and contexts across

Journal (2016); Nandini Sundar, The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar (New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2016). 36 Shah, “The Agrarian Question in a Maoist Guerrilla Zone: Land, Labour and Capital in the Forests and Hills of Jharkhand, India.” 37 Kennedy, “The Socioeconomic Determinants of Natural Resource Conflict: Minerals and Maoist Insurgency in India”; Hoelscher, Miklian, and Vadlamannati, “Hearts and Mines: A District-Level Analysis of the Maoist Conflict in India.” 38 P. K. Agrav¯ ala, Naxalism: Causes and Cure (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2010). 39 Hoelscher, Miklian, and Vadlamannati, “Hearts and Mines: A District-Level Analysis

of the Maoist Conflict in India”; Ghatak and Eynde, “Economic Determinants of the Maoist Conflict in India”; Gaurav Khanna and Laura Zimmermann, “Guns and Butter? Fighting Violence with the Promise of Development,” Journal of Development Economics 124 (2017); Thiemo Fetzer, “Can Workfare Programs Moderate Violence? Evidence from India,” IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc (2014); Aditya Dasgupta, Kishore Gawande, and Devesh Kapur, “(When) Do Antipoverty Programs Reduce Violence? India’s Rural Employment Guarantee and Maoist Conflict,” International Organization 71, no. 3 (2017).

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the ‘Red Corridor’. Rather than seeking to identify the causal relationship between socio-economic structures and violent conflict, these studies offer glimpses into the reality of conflict in different places and at different stages. The works of Shah, Sundar, Desai, Miklina on Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, and Maharashtra, in addition to studies on Bihar by Kunnath, Singh, and Bhatia, among others, explore the everyday reality of conflict.40 These studies allow the comparison of different environments, highlighting similarities but also differences.41 While the dominant discourse paints the Maoist movement in India as a single homogeneous phenomenon, these studies show that in different places and times, the communities involved have had different attitudes, concerns, and demands. Through the ethnographic approach, scholars sought to provide a ‘thick description’ of the experience of the local people, and highlighted dimensions that are often missing in the greed and grievance literature on Maoism in India. For instance, Shah found that in Jharkhand, at least in the initial stages, an important factor through which Maoist cadres expanded their influence in the villages was the market of protection.42 Individuals became involved with them not so much out of ideology or discontent, but for personal benefit—thus contradicting the assumptions of the grievance argument. In a later study, Shah discussed the role of the uncertainty of relationships in the decision of individuals to join Maoist cadres. Kunnath, in a context where the support for the Maoists was declining, found that the main factor behind the demobilisation of dalits43 was their perception that the Maoists failed to represent their interests.44 This shows that local groups do not just blindly follow the 40 G. J. Kunnath, “Becoming a Naxalite in Rural Bihar: Class Struggle and Its Contradictions,” Journal of Peasant Studies 33, no. 1 (2006); George J. Kunnath, “Smouldering Dalit Fires in Bihar, India,” Dialectical Anthropology 33, no. 3/4 (2009); Shashi Bhushan Singh, “Limits to Power: Naxalism and Caste Relations in a South Bihar Village,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 29 (2005); Bhatia, “The Naxalite Movement in Central Bihar.” 41 Alpa Shah and Judith Pettigrew, eds., Windows into a Revolution: Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2012). 42 Alpa Shah, “Markets of Protection: The ‘Terrorist’ Maoist Movement and the State in Jharkhand, India,” Critique of Anthropology 26, no. 3 (2006). 43 The term dalits refers to people belonging to the lowest castes, also known as Scheduled Castes (SC) or, formerly, ‘untouchables’. 44 Kunnath, “Smouldering Dalit Fires in Bihar, India.”

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Maoists as generally believed, but they have their own motives, perceptions, and ideas. Desai in Maharashtra found that the Maoist presence had succeeded in bringing the police closer to the people in the villages, even too close. As the police thought that the ‘backwardness’ of the adivasis45 was the reason why they supported the Maoists, they tried to ‘modernise’ them, and attacked certain ‘superstitious’ practices. As a result, the adivasis started supporting extremist right-wing Hindu groups.46 Sundar and Shah’s studies on the relationship between marginalised groups and the state looked at these groups from a new perspective, challenging the dominant discourse that sees them simply as oppressed and ‘primitive’.47 All these studies, while offering important new insights, also raise new questions that need to be researched further. Mostly, they show that socalled ‘marginalised groups’ are more than simply oppressed people who blindly follow Maoist intellectuals or the state. Similarly to what I argued in the last chapter in relation to the civil wars literature, local-level studies tend to highlight the fact that local people’s understandings and agency in times of violent conflict might be different from those of the armed groups.48 Local people have their own motivations and attitudes, their own stance in the conflict. Hence, the understanding of concepts such as grievance, participation, and support need to be redefined. Furthermore, micro-level studies show that the picture of conflict emerging from the dominant discourse and in the literature is too simplistic, and the realities at the local level are so diverse and complex that the local dimension cannot be overlooked. These works on the local reality of conflict are very insightful, though they can only concentrate on small areas. So far, they have focused on the regions of Bihar, Odisha, Chattisgarh, and Jharkhand. There has been no other research on the conflict that sparked in Junglemahal after the

45 The term means indigenous people, also referred to as ‘Scheduled Tribes’ by the Indian government. 46 Amit Desai, “‘Anti-Witchcraft’ and the Maoist Insurgency in Rural Maharashtra, India,” Dialectical Anthropology 33, no. 3 (2009). 47 Alpa Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); N. Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854–2006 (Delhi, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 48 See, for example: Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala; Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices.

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Lalgarh movement in West Bengal. The only volume on this topic is War and Peace in Junglemahal. People, State and Maoists, a collection of articles and essays focusing on the peace talks that followed the Lalgarh movement. As the editor of this volume himself states, the full story of the involvement of people in this revolt against atrocities, their collective memories, and the impact on politics, is yet to be assessed and told.49 In summary, discourses on the role of people and the Maoist movement in India have evolved over time. In the first phase, the accent was on party elites, the analysis of the relationship between these and the masses in the countryside, and the role of the local groups, while the relationship between the situation in urban Kolkata and the movement in the countryside has been overlooked. After the failure of the first phase, when struggles continued to go on in Bihar, a new discourse emphasising the grievance of the rural poor as the main cause of the conflict brought more attention to the study of the contradictions in the agrarian structures and the role of peasants. In the contemporary phase, the discourse on the grievance of marginalised groups as the root of the conflict has been linked to the construction of the movement as a security threat.

The Construction of Marginalised Groups in the Literature As we have seen, there is a general consensus around the idea that the grievances of ‘marginalised groups’ are at the core of the spread of the Maoist movement. There is a debate among those who think that Maoism represents the struggle for the rights of these groups, and that their grievances are the direct cause of the conflict, and those who think that the Maoists are nothing but a ‘terrorist outfit’ who exploit their grievances. Both however, recognise that the conditions of these groups are central to the Maoist problem. Yet, as this survey of the literature shows, although so-called marginalised groups are so important in the Maoist movement and conflict, they have not always been so central in the research. There is still much to know about how these groups actively influence the movement and the conflict itself, and about their perspective, motivations, and attitudes. This gap of information about tribal and poor peasants is filled by

49 Roy, War & Peace in Junglemahal: People, State and Maoists, 8.

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assumptions regarding their nature and behaviour. Through a discourse analysis of the literature, I have examined the ways in which marginalised groups are portrayed, and I have found two characterisations that are especially recurring: one is their militant nature, and the second their being ‘simple minded’ and hence easily brainwashed. For instance, Singh, when describing the Naxalite movement in Debra and Gopiballavpur in the first phase, states that: The district has a sizeable population of tribal Santhals, Lodhas and Oraons, the majority of them are landless labourers. It was easy for the communists to work up the hunger of these simple people, also because they were used to bows and arrows.50

Scholars like Samanta who sought to understand the actual mobilisation of rural groups and argued that Maoist parties did not really succeed on that front, asserted that ‘tribal peasants are more prone to violent revolt’.51 As we have seen, some scholars emphasised militancy traditions in order to refute the previous dominant depiction of tribals and poor peasants since the colonial time as passive and resistant to change, so it was a way of bringing back their agency. Banerjee argues that Indian bourgeois leaders constructed the image of rural India as passively accepting every form of injustice and oppression.52 In his view, Congress leaders such as Gandhi, Nehru, and Indira Gandhi minimised peasant militancy and contributed to the construction of this image of peaceful and passive peasants. According to Banerjee, the truth, in contrast, is that ‘throughout the recent history of India, the peasant remained a tormented soul. Whenever he got a chance, he broke out into rebellion, either against foreign usurpers or against native oppressors’.53 This emphasis on militant traditions of tribals and peasants, and the rejection of the idea that these groups are apathetic and resistant to change, was part of the Naxalite rhetoric itself. Sumanta Banerjee was an activist and was likely strongly influenced by it. Duyker, whose research focused on the perspective of the Santhal tribe in the first phase of the 50 Singh, The Naxalite Movement in India. 51 Samanta, Left Extremist Movement in West Bengal: An Experiment in Armed

Agrarian Struggle. 52 Banerjee, India’s Simmering Revolution: the Naxalite Uprising. 53 Ibid., 14.

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Naxalbari uprising, found that Maoist propaganda emphasised the legacy of Santhal struggles and characterised the leaders of those struggles as national heroes.54 This new appreciation of the militant traditions of tribals and peasants in the aftermath of Naxalbari became widespread and replaced the social construction of the passivity of peasants in the dominant discourse, too. In the literature, especially the one concerned with Naxalism, similar arguments often appear. Ram, for instance, points out that ‘the passivity and the nonviolent nature of the Indian peasant is a myth. He has risen in revolt again and again without any political direction’.55 In this way, the discourse on Naxalism broke with narratives on tribals and peasants dating back to colonial times and constructed a new myth. Banerjee himself, in a recent article, recognised that the Maoists’ romanticised image of the peasantry was biased. He argued that the Maoists stereotyped the peasantry as a revolutionary class prone to violence because of the history of bloody rebellions during British rule. However, Banerjee, in his own experience, saw that mere poverty was not enough to make a revolutionary ready to suffer for the cause, and that peasants have their own opinions and sometimes prefer peaceful solutions.56 Although so much effort was put into challenging the perception of the peasantry as apathetic and passive, both the Maoist discourse and the academic literature continued to perpetrate the colonial image of these groups as ‘simple minded’ people who need to be guided by others, and could be easily convinced. According to Pandey, ‘being uneducated and poor, the tribals depended on communists to lead their struggles against their exploiters’.57 From the Maoist point of view, thinking that tribals and peasants were so uneducated and simple-minded justified the need for leadership and guidance from Maoist parties, who often were from an urban middle-class background and alien to the rural environment. Despite the Maoist ideology emphasises peasant agency and the need to be guided by the peasant masses, the leadership of the movement remained mostly 54 Duyker, Tribal Guerrillas: The Santals of West Bengal and the Naxalite Movement. 55 Ram, Maoism in India. 56 Sumanta Banerjee, “Reflections of a One-Time Maoist Activist,” Dialectical anthropology 33, no. 3 (2009). 57 S. Pandey, Naxal Violence: A Socio-Political Study (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1985). 56.

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in the hands of middle-class activists. From the point of view of those who condemn the Maoists, marginalised groups are vulnerable targets of the Maoist propaganda. For example, for Johari, the extremists charmed ‘innocent’ peasants through misleading propaganda and promises.58 Rao stated that ‘tribals did not ask for help: they didn’t reach that level and stage of political organisation. […] Tribals have not fully understood their choice, they are dazed not knowing where they are’.59 When these two narratives are combined, they create the image of violent ‘simple minded people’ who with some effort by the Maoists can rise in rebellion against the state: Tribals and the dalits, the most exploited and harassed sections of the rural population, became ardent supporters and activists of the movement. These illiterate and simple people were basically motivated by their desire for land, better share of crop from landlords, better wages […] they were ready to follow any leader who promised these awards. […] They derived their inspiration not from Lenin or Mao, but from Sidhu, Kanu and Birsa, who had led the tribal uprisings against the landlords and moneylenders in the past. As they were used to hard life, the rigours of a guerrilla campaign did not deter them. They were accustomed to the use of bows, arrows and the axe. Violence did not hold any abhorrence to them. They had been at its receiving for ears. They had no hesitation in handing it out to their tormentors in full measure.60

The result of these two narratives on tribal and peasants—their being simple-minded and prone to violence—is the nexus between the grievances of marginalised groups and the inevitability of violent conflict. Many scholars see Naxalism as a natural outcome of the socio-economic issues affecting the rural poor. As Gupta asserted: it may be safely anticipated that Naxalism or Maoism would continue to remain an attractive proposition to tens of millions of our impoverished and oppressed masses so long as the unfinished businesses of agrarian reforms

58 Johari, Naxalite Politics in India, 6. 59 G. Rao, “Naxalism: Emerging Issues,” in Naxalism: A Distortion of Democratic

Development, ed. Rajaji International Institute of Public Affairs and Administration (1991). 60 Mishra, Barrel of the Gun: The Maoist Challenges and Indian Democracy.

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and solutions to elementary livelihood remain incomplete in various parts of India.61

No doubt, many of these scholars are sympathetic to the conditions of the poor and seek to make the public more aware of their conditions, perhaps hoping that something will be done to address the problems. Nevertheless, especially with the new emphasis on the security threat represented by Naxalism, these narratives risk contributing to the construction of the grievances of marginalised groups as a threat to the nation. A threat for justifiable reasons perhaps, but still a threat: the priority is to suppress it. Marginalised groups are seen as a serious threat to the nation, but at the same time, thanks to these assumptions in the discourse, there is no interest in hearing their voices. For the State, these groups do not qualify as political interlocutors. As Sundar pointed out, tribal people are not even seen as proper citizens by the State. Giving them food and clothes is enough, there is no question of undertaking a dialogue with them.62

Conclusion The Maoist movement in India has been predominantly problematised as a violent conflict related to the grievance of groups identified as marginalised. We have seen that research has explored a variety of socioeconomic factors, so that both ‘greed’ and ‘grievance’ thesis have some relevance in this case. While on a nationwide scale it was difficult to reach a conclusion on what factors ‘caused’ the conflict, micro-level studies contributed richer insights into how those socio-economic issues influenced relationships and conflict dynamics on the ground, also showing that there are differences in local circumstances. More research of this kind would be needed to understand further the role and perspectives of local people. Unfortunately, it should be appreciated that research in this field encounters huge difficulties, not least the risks of working in a violence-ridden environment. In any case, the lack of research has resulted, as has been discussed, in the tendency to rely on assumptions regarding the attitudes and behaviour of the local people. 61 T. K. Gupta, “Maoism in India: Ideology, Programme and Armed Struggle,” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 29 (2006): 3175. 62 N. Sundar, “The Path to a Conflict-Free State,” in War & Peace in Junglemahal. People, State and Maoists, ed. Biswajit Roy (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2012).

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We have seen that marginalised groups have been widely depicted as ‘simple minded’ and prone to violence, and therefore, they are not considered as agents or political interlocutors. Because of this, they are treated as a potential threat by the state, and on the other hand, targeted for recruitment by the Maoists. The research that I have conducted in Lalgarh will show more in detail what this meant for the people of Junglemahal. In this chapter, I have focused on the depiction of marginalised groups because they are considered by most the very cause of the conflict— but not necessarily seen as agents. I do not deny that issues relating to the grievances of marginalised groups are relevant in understanding their support for the conflict, nor that these groups took part in uprisings. The point is that these narratives provide an oversimplified explanation of the conflict. When an oversimplification such as this occurs in the discourse, many voices are excluded from it and fade away, and at the same time, they are seen as a problem that should be ‘solved’ by others. If we look beyond the Maoist agenda and strategies to achieve the revolution, there is much more to know about what people do in these challenging situations. The question is not just whether or not they join the Maoists, but also, how do they experience power, violence, and socioeconomic issues? What do they do to cope, to transform these violent dynamics? If we see only the Maoists as actors, we miss out on understanding everything else that people may be doing. Much effort has been dedicated in the literature to discussing how to uproot the Maoist ‘problem’, and at this regard, development initiatives have also been included in the strategy of ‘winning hearts and minds’ of the people. Yet, no analysis has looked at how local actors experience those socioeconomic issues, how they affect them, and what they do or how they want to address the issues they face. Excluding people’s voices means leaving out the questions of power, and how power structures are responsible for those very violent socio-economic issues and conflict that people experience. If people are excluded from ‘peace’ and ‘development’, will these initiatives address existing violent power structures, or reinforce them? Denying people’s discourses, their agency and labelling them as Maoists is a way of silencing them and not questioning power relationships. What if, behind what the government labels of ‘Maoist violence’ was a popular discourse looking for ways to resist the violence of the state, that perhaps had nothing to do with Maoism or violence whatsoever?

CHAPTER 4

An Everyday Approach to Conflict and Peace

Conflict, peace, and the everyday are very sensitive topics to research. The fact is that there can always be a gap between how the academia and the people on the ground understand conflict. Therefore, it is very difficult to theorise on the nature of conflict and peace in a way that fully grasps the meaning of violence and peace that people experience. Is it possible to fully understand what experiencing conflict and peace meant to them? How can a researcher value and take into account local people’s knowledge without further silencing their voices? How can we relate to people as human beings and not just as research subjects? These are very complex questions and, perhaps, claiming to have found the right or true answer to them is not even desirable. The act of research is a relational one. For me, it is a fluid process, it does not claim to establish a fixed truth. Rather than proposing solutions, this chapter outlines an approach to conflict and peace from an everyday perspective by making explicit the core ontological and epistemological premises on which this research is rooted. This theoretical framework draws from the ‘critical’ perspective in the social sciences. For Jackson, the term ‘critical’ can be conceived in two ways. It might narrowly refer to the Critical Theory school of thought, and disciplinary approaches such as constructivism, post-structuralism,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Carrer, How People Respond to Violence, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11342-0_4

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post-modernism, feminism, and post-colonialism.1 Or, in a broader sense, it might be conceived as: an intellectual orientation or attitude that attempts to stand apart from the existing order (while at the same acknowledging that one can never fully escape one’s own situatedness or biases), which questions widely accepted ‘common sense’ and dominant forms of knowledge, and which asks probing questions about how existing social and epistemic orders come into existence and how they are sustained.2

Both these conceptions of the term ‘critical’ are relevant for this research. In fact, many of the core concepts in this theoretical framework draw from Critical Theory, constructivism, post-modernism, and post-structuralism. These disciplinary approaches have strongly influenced my way of thinking and of problematising the questions in this book. Nonetheless, I do not strictly identify myself with any of these approaches. Therefore, I prefer to conceive ‘critical’ in the second, broad way. Perhaps, this reluctance to align with a specific approach is due to my critical diffidence for fixed categories. But I also avoid it because, as much as we like to think of the ‘critical’ field as a sharp break and alternative to orthodox thinking, the boundaries may not be so defined. As scholars, we always seek to discover something new that challenges what was said before. Furthermore, existing intellectual debates, whether they are orthodox or critical, inform our knowledge and way of thinking. For me, ‘critical’ means to constantly engage in the process of questioning the meanings and social orders that constitute our discourse. This process starts from the self. While constructing knowledge, we need to question how, as researchers, we engage and learn about social reality, and what is the meaning of the knowledge claims that we make.

Conflict, Peace, and the Everyday A Cup of Tea I met Devi in Kolkata for the first time, at a gathering of our spiritual group. Her husband Raju invited us to stay at their place in the rural

1 Jackson, “Critical Perspectives,” 79–80. 2 Ibid.

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town of Jhargram for the duration of my fieldwork.3 A few days later, we reached their house in Jhargram late at night. Devi was very welcoming from that very first moment. The house was very simple. It was a small brick building with two rooms and a veranda. There was also a basic toilet, but no running water or a kitchen. The morning after, as I woke up, I saw Devi, my mother, and another elderly woman, sitting outside and chatting. My mother, who was there as my interpreter, explained that the guest was a neighbour, a woman who worked as a housemaid in richer people’s homes, earning a very modest wage. She suffered from health issues, and Devi had made an herbal infusion to soothe her. She was visibly very grateful to Devi for looking after her with a care and respect that she was not used to. Devi was a poor woman herself and regretted her low level of education. However, we soon realised that she was highly respected by a lot of people, starting from her family. Her husband Raju was a vegetable seller and counted on her advice to run the small business. We all got ready, ate the food made by Devi, and then our driver came to take us to the first villages to conduct the interviews. I was surprised when Devi also sat in the car with us. As we reached the first village, she talked to a group of people and organised the interview. Many villagers gathered around us, and some of them intervened in the discussion. Devi also spontaneously intervened with many comments. Later that evening, we discussed my research project and she came out with relevant positive and negative feedbacks. Devi was very direct. She was not afraid to tell what she had to say. She did not hide her curiosity and asked a lot of questions about the life in our countries and our husbands. From that day, we spent hours every day talking. She talked about what it meant to be a woman in a village. She knew a lot about local women’s problems and tried to learn knowledge and tips that could help them. We talked about sanitary pads, contraception, family life, hygiene, and raising children. She wanted to share this information with as many women as possible. We also talked about the socio-political situation and about the conflict. Initially, I tried to figure out whether she leaned towards a side, but she wasn’t really a blind supporter of any political party. She talked about the good and the flaws of the different political actors. 3 Devi and Raju are fictitious names. The names have been changed to protect their anonymity.

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She described with many practical examples how corruption affected the everyday lives of local people, and about how men and women could take advantage of it. She thought that the Lalgarh movement had raised important issues for the local people, made them aware of their rights and pushed them to achieve them. But this had come with a price and inflicted great suffering to the people. She talked about what it was like: the everyday fear and struggles, incidents of violence that she or others close to her witnessed. She learnt through experience that pushed by those extreme circumstances, people found ways to do the impossible and survive. She told us many such stories, including her own experience of jumping over a very high wall to escape from the Maoists. Devi often emphasised the role of women in her narratives, adding details that are missing in mainstream accounts. For instance, she argued that the Maoist attack at Silda, in which 24 police personnel were killed, had been so successful because of a group of women who entered the camp first, diverted the police attention by dancing, and then started shooting from the inside. She also explained that it was two women who managed to defeat the Maoists: the Trinamool leader, Mamata Banerjee, and a Maoist leader. Both women were able to take advantage of the circumstance and come out as winners. Devi explained that a lot of the details she described did not come out in the television or newspapers, but, in the villages, these things were known through word of mouth. Although I could not verify details on how the Maoist leaders were captured and killed, much of her political analysis was accurate and insightful, and demonstrated a high degree of political awareness. Devi learned a lot through her social relationships. I understood this first from an incident that she told me. Devi used to take local women to the hospital and visit them there. She continued doing so during the violent phase of the conflict. One day, when she was there to see a patient, a top political leader saw her and asked to look at same patients and bodies to identify them. ‘They are from your village’, he said, ‘at least you can look under the cloth, see their faces, and give them a name’. They were people who had been brutally beaten by the police. ‘I have seen it with my own eyes’, Devi said several times. She saw people with their limbs broken, their noses cut, and the nails peeled from the fingers. Devi talked several times about this experience, as it affected her perception of what was happening. At the same time, she had the chance to do something meaningful for her people, care for them, identify then and find their relatives. She had this chance in the first place because of

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her informal social work, and because the political figure who was dealing with the case knew her, too. Devi was, in fact, very popular, as I realised day by day when I was living in her house. Many people used to visit or just stop by to talk to her. She knew everyone, from poor neighbours to influential politicians, and in turn, they knew her. Women from the neighbourhood came to visit her to discuss different matters and concerns. She listened to them, offered her advice, and gave practical support. She made things happen by making people put together their resources and abilities. For example, she learnt to sew in exchange for free labour to a tailor. Then, she taught sewing to young girls, and asked one of them to teach her daughters instead of paying money she could not afford. She also organised a group of local women so that they could benefit from a micro-credit scheme run by the government. During the conflict, Devi also supported a lot of people, particularly women, both in her neighbourhood and in the village where her in-laws lived, which was in a hot area near the Salboni forest where Maoists, police and Harmads had fought for days. As people had to constantly run, fear for their lives, and look for family members who might have been killed, it was vital to have someone to trust. Devi said several times that, during those times of fear, the people were closer than ever. They counted on each other to escape the violence and survive through the hard times. I chose Devi’s story because it is an ordinary story of an ordinary woman, just like many others. At the local level, processes of conflict and peace are thousands of stories like this, stories of everyday lives that go on before, during, and after the formal duration of a violent conflict. Hence, researching everyday conflict and peace entails engaging with these everyday stories and making sense of them. I draw from Devi’s story to outline an everyday approach to conflict and peace, and address ontological questions about the ontology of conflict, structures and agency. The Everyday Devi was a housewife, and she was not affiliated with any organisation or institution. She worked informally to assist other local women and families before, during and after the violent conflict. Through this informal work, she developed a deep local knowledge: she knew the people, their resources, skills, and needs. She used this knowledge to help her family and others increase their benefits from sharing their limited resources

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and fulfil their needs. The knowledge she acquired through this informal network was also political. From their side, local political actors knew Devi, too, and they frequently approached her and sought her support. There are five key elements about the everyday that can be identified from the example of Devi’s experience. First, the everyday is about microlevel social processes, situated in a specific local context. For example, most of Devi’s story was meaningful in the context of her neighbourhood, and in some other villages where she had ties with relatives and friends. Nonetheless, broader structures were reflected in people’s everyday lives at the local level. Devi often explained the practical implications of politics, corruption, socio-economic problems, institutions, and policies opportunities on the lives of local people in the village. Therefore, structures are also part of the everyday. The local dimension is therefore a spatial dimension of analysis, and it does not necessarily refer only to poverty or to a specific social group. On the contrary, at the local level complex relationships of power shape everyday interactions among local people. Third, though a woman like Devi can be considered marginalised because of her gender, socio-economic status, and ethnic group (she belonged to an Other Backward Caste, OBC), she was an actor who influenced local social processes. Therefore, an everyday approach needs to focus on ordinary people’s agency, and on the agency of individuals and groups who are often marginalised and excluded by dominant discourses. An everyday approach explores what people do in a context of violence, conflict, and post-conflict, including how they influence change and construct forms of peace. Fourth, Devi’s narrative of conflict and peace was about experiences that she or someone close to her experienced through their bodies and emotions, and it affected their day-to-day lives. Fifth, much of Devi’s narrative was about how she learned, made sense, and understood the social dynamics of conflict and peace. These five dimensions—micro-level context, structures, agency, embodied experiences, and knowledge— summarise that key concepts brought up by the literature on embodied experiences of conflict, as I discussed in Chapter 1. Discourse, Narratives, and the Everyday The five dimensions of the everyday are all intertwined, and they could be summarised through one single concept: discourse. Discourse is primarily

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about meaning, a coherent way of making sense of the world.4 Devi’s story was about how she made sense of the social reality around her. Her everyday experiences informed her knowledge and understanding of micro-level social processes, but also of broader structures. Her perspective influenced her actions, and in turn, her actions were socially meaningful. I define discourse as the process of creation of systems of meaning through social action. Discourse plays a crucial role in the social construction of reality. As Milliken argues, discourse is reproductive of the things it defines.5 In fact, discourses make intelligible some ways of being in, and acting towards, the world, and of operationalizing a particular ‘regime of truth’ while excluding other possible modes of identity and action.6

In this sense, discourse is constitutive of social reality, and it has tangible consequences in actions and practises that affect the real lives of individuals and groups. The narrative as a form of discourse is particularly helpful to make sense of the everyday in multi-dimensional stories of conflict and peace, such as Devi’s one. A narrative, essentially, is a story, as Patterson and Monroe point out.7 Individuals and groups talk about themselves, and the social reality they live in, through narratives.8 Telling ‘stories’ about our social world is a very important part of the cognitive process through which we make sense of it.9 For a social science point of view, narratives contain important information because embedded in them is the speaker’s perception of the self and of social reality. As such, narratives are usually normative. In fact, narratives tell not only how the world is, but also how it ought to be.10 4 Terry Locke, Critical Discourse Analysis (New York and London: Continuum, 2004),

5. 5 Milliken, “The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods.” 6 Ibid., 229. 7 Patterson and Monroe, “Narrative in Political Science,” 315. 8 Patterson and Monroe. 9 Patterson and Monroe. 10 Ibid.

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The narration is screened by the speaker’s own moral norms and contains their moral judgement. Moreover, narratives also tell us what to do. By providing a certain understanding of social reality, they suggest how to react to it. Wibben argues that narratives also tell us something about power relations, as narrative allows the speaker to express someone else’s vision.11 Narratives help not only individuals, but also groups and societies to make sense of social reality. In fact, narratives provide shared understandings and interpretations. Patterson and Monroe argue that narratives provide an important sense of purpose and place, both to individuals and to communities.12 Similarly, according to Funk and Said, ‘narratives bind individuals together within an active and adaptive community and change in response to traumatic events and emergent challenges’.13 This conceptualisation of narrative is consistent with Bar-Tal’s notion of socio-psychological infrastructure discussed in chapter two. According to this framework, narratives are particularly important in times of violent conflict, as they provide an understanding of the conflict itself. Devi, for example, included in her narrative of conflict events that were meaningful to explain the roles and agendas of different parties, also from an ethical point of view. The information about these narratives drew much from informal conversations with other local people, as Devi herself explained, hence more people collectively contributed to construct those narratives. Bar-Tal use the expression ‘collective memory’ to define shared narratives of the history of conflict.14 Furthermore, for Bar-Tal groups also develop a narrative about the present, which he terms the ‘ethos of conflict’.15 According to this author, this narrative repertoire has a strong impact on the community and contributes to the development of collective emotional orientations.16

11 Annick T. R. Wibben, “Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan,” in Researching War. Feminist Methods, Ethics and Politics, ed. Annick T. R. Wibben (London: Routledge, 2016). 12 Patterson and Monroe, “Narrative in Political Science.” 13 Nathan C Funk and Abdul Aziz Said, “Islam and the West: Narratives of Conflict

and Conflict Transformation,” International Journal of Peace Studies 9, no. 1 (2004): 2. 14 Bar-Tal, “Sociopsychological Foundations of Intractable Conflicts.” 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid.

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An Ontology of Violent Conflict Theoretical approaches that seek to explain the nature of violent conflict tend to focus on violence.17 Jabri argues that ‘conflict, and especially violent conflict, implies a breakdown of some rules and the generation of others’.18 The focus, here, is on those norms that make violence an acceptable mode of behaviour, and allow a change from peacetime to conflict time. Exploring local people’s own discourses might broaden the understanding of violent conflict beyond this emphasis on violent behaviour in two ways. First, it may shed light on what violent norms are normal in peacetime, and what norms change during violent conflict. Though Jabri does mention that there is continuity and that peacetime rules allow the acceptance of violent conflict, there is still an assumption that violent behaviour is the core characteristic of violent conflict, and a break from peacetime.19 However, violence and conflict might be understood and perceived differently, and there might not always be such as sharp break from violent norms before and after the onset of conflict. Second, violence is only one dimension of conflict. Looking at local level discourses may highlight other everyday discursive processes that constitute conflict, including processes that enable resistance and peace. For example, violence was part of Devi’s narrative of conflict, but there was also much more. For Devi, conflict was dead bodies under a tree, long miles walked in the night, unfinished meals, the sound of gunshots, jumps over walls, and whispered information about political parties and armed groups. Conflict was tears, hugs, and love. It was the hope for a change, an end to everyday abuses and humiliation, but also scepticism and uncertainty about what was to come. For Sylverster, everyday stories need to be at the core of the way we think about war. She points out that ‘war is a set of experiences that everyday people and elites have physically, emotionally, and social ethically’.20 In this view, the human body is central to war, as it constitutes its main agent and target. Hence, this ontological understanding of war shifts its focus from political dynamics to the human being. 17 See, for example: Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered. Demmers, Theories of Violent Conflict: An Introduction. 18 Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered, 71. 19 Ibid., 71–72. 20 Sylvester, Experiencing War, 65.

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This sets the stage for exploring how the human being experiences war and, as Parashar frames it, what ‘war bodies know’ about war.21 Thus, people’s knowledge, experiences and actions bring back to the concept of discourse: everyday conflict and peace are the discourses of the local people in a context of violence. People’s discourse itself defines what constitutes violence, and what constitutes peace. In a context of violent conflict, different actors construct their discourses. As they interact with one another, they interpret the meaning of the discourse constructed by other actors and respond to it. Hence, the dynamics of conflict are a process given by the interaction between the discourses of the actors involved. An analysis of violent conflict dynamics, in this perspective, involves understanding how these systems of meaning are created, interact, generate more meaning, and inform relationships between social actors. Structures and Agency Discursive approaches to violent conflict are often of the view that structures and agency are mutually constituted through discourse, and that they are both together implicated in the production of violent conflict.22 The terms ‘structures’ and ‘agency’ have come up frequently in these first four chapters, including in relation to Devi’s story. In fact, I have pointed out that structural issues are often emphasised in a context like Lalgarh, where poverty and social exclusion are very visible. Socio-economic structures can be seen as limits to the agency of the poor. Furthermore, in contexts of violent conflict, the agency of the local people is often seen as limited even further by the coercion and violence of the armed groups. The question of the relationship between structures and agency, therefore, is central to the ontology of everyday conflict.

21 Parashar, “What Wars and ‘War Bodies’ Know about International Relations.” 22 Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered; Demmers, Theories of

Violent Conflict: An Introduction; Jackson and Dexter, “The Social Construction of Organised Political Violence: An Analytical Framework.”

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In discursive approaches, agents are seen as purposive actors, but their agency is seen as enabled or constrained by structures.23 The purposiveness or intentionality of actors might be interpreted in different ways, particularly in relation to violent conflict. Who are the actors? And what actions do they perform? What kinds of actions constitute violent conflict? After discussing structuralist and rationalist approaches, Jabri argues that ‘while individual decision-makers may be considered purposive actors, they are also role occupants of acting within a framework of institutions which enable and constrain, as well as legitimate decisions depending upon the dynamics of the situation’.24 The idea of individuals as decisionmakers, which draws from rationalist approaches, is then reflected in her discussion regarding whether and how individuals are able to take decisions that lead to violent conflict. In explanations of violent conflict, decision-making is often associated with leaders’ choices and strategies, or the decision of individuals to join the armed groups. From an everyday perspective, individuals, too, make choices and take decisions, which are certainly a very relevant part of their agency. But the concept of discourse might help understanding agency beyond individuals and decisions. Agency, in fact, is implicit in my definition of discourse as the construction of meaning through social action. Agency, therefore, is constructing discourse itself. Discourse is constructed individually and collectively at the same time. Meanings are shared, and, at the same time, they are always interpreted differently. It is in this divergence of meanings that lies the seed for agency and social change. Discourse always involves an agent to construct and interpret meaning. Structures, too, are a necessary element of discourse—and agency. I share the proposition that structures and agency are mutually constitutive: discourse takes place in a structured context that shapes meaning, and in turn, structures are an expression of discourse and created through social action.25 Discursive structures are often defined as norms or rules that

23 Jackson and Dexter, “The Social Construction of Organised Political Violence: An Analytical Framework”; Demmers, Theories of Violent Conflict: An Introduction; Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered. 24 Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered, 70. 25 Demmers, Theories of Violent Conflict: An Introduction.

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regulate social life, and as such, enable or limit agency.26 Van Leeuwen, for example, defines social practices as ‘regulated ways of doing things’;27 hence in this definition both structure and agency come together. This conceptualisation of the relationship between structures and agency can be applied to the everyday. For example, Devi’s agency was limited by structures expressed in her limited access to resources and services, the social norms that regulated gender roles and interactions, the social norms that regulated the relationships between people of different background, and more. Most of all, Devi perceived her poor education as a main limit. Everyday interactions and relationships, which were also regulated by those norms, were also the main source of Devi’s knowledge and enabled her agency. Even norms that determined social barriers created other possibilities for agency. Poverty, social marginalisation and gender roles contributed to construct norms of solidarity, cooperation, and exchange among local women, and in this context, Devi expressed her agency. At the same time, Devi’s actions defied everyday norms, and as such they constituted a seed for everyday resistance and change. For example, Devi often spoke very freely and directly even in the presence of men and people belonging to higher social status, which was at odds with dominant social norms. Her divergent everyday practices became part of everyday social reality and slowly contributed to construct alternative norms. Furthermore, everyday interactions were an occasion for Devi and other local people to discuss the political situation and share information outside the realm of formal political parties. Devi’s story shows that the everyday is a collective site for the construction of alternative political discourses that possibly differ and challenged dominant ones. Thus, for an everyday approach to conflict and peace, the question of agency is always related to that of power. How can people construct discourses that challenge hegemonic ones? The issue is not just what is the relationship between individual agency and structures, or the individual and the society. Rather, the core question is the relationship between the agency of elites who have the power to construct hegemonic discourses or regimes or truth, and less powerful actors. I 26 Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered; Demmers, Theories of Violent Conflict: An Introduction. 27 Theo Van Leeuwen, Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6.

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argue that this question should not be answered a priori through deterministic assumptions. In fact, the answer may be different from case to case, depending on the social context, its discursive structures and power relationships. A more advisable route would be to explore how people themselves construct their discourses. Similarly, the relevance of structural factors and their relationship with agency should also be understood by exploring local people’s discourses. Socio-economic structural factors can be investigated in relation to the construction of their meaning in the local community. In this research, the concept of grievance is also conceived as a socially constructed one. Considering grievance as a social construction does not imply that there are no ‘real’ or ‘objective’ grievances. Rather, the constructivist approach will be adopted to grasp the relevance of those grievances within a specific socio-cultural context.

Discourse, Power, and Conflict From an everyday perspective, the question of agency is related to that of power. Thus, power is another ontological concept that needs to be defined in relation to conflict and the everyday, by exploring its ontological meaning and relationship with concepts such knowledge, discourse, violence, and resistance. Power relationships also need to be discussed in the context of research in regard to the relationship between the researcher and the researched, especially when we are researching ‘subjugated discourses’. Power, Violence, and Resistance In the last section, I argued that power informs the relationship between structures and agency. It is not possible to study the ‘everyday’ without looking at how power shapes it. Power has been conceptualised in different ways. ‘Visible power’ is expressed in the ability of actors to mobilise structures—for example through institutions, formal procedures, material resources, and formal positions of authority—and exercise coercion and control.28 Violence can be understood as an expression of visible 28 McGee, “Invisible Power and Visible Everyday Resistance in the Violent Colombian Pacific”; Steven Lukes, Power A Radical View, 2ed (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2004).

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power, as it can be a very direct way to coerce people and society and maintain control over them. Scholars have pointed out that power also works in less visible ways which influence people and make them accept domination even though they may not be aware of it. This invisible power has been referred to with different terms, such as ‘third-dimensional power’, ‘habitus’, and concepts such as ‘hegemony’, ‘false consciousness’, and more.29 The idea of invisible power is also similar to Foucault’s conceptualisation of power and discourse. In fact, the link between discourse and power is central in Foucault’s writings. Power can create and sustain what he calls ‘regimes of truth’: discourses that are accepted as true by the society.30 The analysis of dominant discourses, and in particular of its ‘truths’, is important because these discourses are translated into policies, actions, and practises, including the legitimisation of violence. Discourse, when linked to authority, shapes social norms, relations, institutions, and practises. It defines what is moral, socially acceptable, and legitimate. Drawing from an analysis of everyday experiences, McGee argued that violence is expressed not only through visible, but also invisible power.31 Violence is part of the everyday through meaningful cultural and social norms—or discourse. This author also found that people actively engage in resistance to challenge violence as invisible power.32 Therefore, resistance, too, can be understood in terms of discourse. I define resistance as the discursive practice of undermining existing social norms and power relations. Whatever the form resistance takes, it constructs a discourse that is in contrast with the dominant one. Power and resistance are not dichotomous; in fact, power is part of resistance too. As Foucault points out, power comes from below.33 Resistance seeks to re-appropriate power to renegotiate a change in the 29 See: McGee, “Invisible Power and Visible Everyday Resistance in the Violent Colombian Pacific”; Lukes, Power A Radical View, 2ed; Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni dal Carcere, Einaudi Editore (Torino 1975). 30 Stuart Hall, “Foucault: Power, Knowledge and Discourse,” Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader 72 (2001). 31 McGee, “Invisible Power and Visible Everyday Resistance in the Violent Colombian Pacific.” 32 Ibid. 33 Michel Foucault, “Method,” in The global resistance reader, ed. Louise Amoore

(London and New York: Routledge, 2005).

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existing social structures. People may mobilise this power from below through organised movement and protests, either violent or nonviolent, or through everyday action.34 For example, Scott’s work on peasant resistance shows how rural communities engage in the attempt to bring a change to power relations even when open resistance is not a viable option for them.35 His concept of ‘hidden transcripts’ illustrates patterns of invisible and undeclared forms of resistance of the poor against material structures of domination, for instance, through acts like arson, boycotts, disguised strikes, and theft.36 An important critique to Scott’s conceptualisation of everyday resistance is that everyday resistance is often not hidden, disguised, or non-collective.37 Everyday discursive resistance to violent norms, for example, can be explicit, risky, and involves some degree of coordination.38 Lilja et al. suggest that there is often continuity between everyday and organised forms of resistance, because resistance encourages or creates resistance.39 In other words, acts of resistance, in different forms, construct alternative discourses that challenge regimes of truth and plant a seed for social change. Subalternity and Representation As power is distributed unequally in society, different terms are used to refer to groups most excluded from it: subaltern, marginalised, subjugated, vulnerable, and so on. I prefer to avoid these terms because they may contribute to construct a social category associated with attributes 34 Mona Lilja et al., “How Resistance Encourages Resistance: Theorizing the Nexus Between Power, ‘Organised Resistance’ and ‘Everyday Resistance’,” Journal Of Political Power 10, no. 1 (2017). 35 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. 36 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 37 Lilja et al., “How Resistance Encourages Resistance: Theorizing the Nexus between Power, ‘Organised Resistance’ and ‘Everyday Resistance’”; McGee, “Invisible Power and Visible Everyday Resistance in the Violent Colombian Pacific”; Asef Bayat, “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the ‘Informal People’,” Third World Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1997). 38 McGee, “Invisible Power and Visible Everyday Resistance in the Violent Colombian Pacific.” 39 Lilja et al., “How Resistance Encourages Resistance: Theorizing the Nexus Between Power, ‘Organised Resistance’ and ‘Everyday Resistance’.”

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such as helplessness and lack of agency. For this reason, I prefer to use expressions such as ‘local people’ or ‘ordinary people’. Nonetheless, it is also important to critique the unbalanced structures of power, and these terms are useful to this purpose. Terms such as ‘local’ or ‘ordinary people’ are very general and do not refer to any specific social group. A local or ordinary person could be more or less wealthy or powerful. At the local level, social relationships are very uneven, as I discuss further in chapter eight, therefore a local, ordinary individual might be at the same time oppressed and oppressor. Certain terms are associated with specific theoretical traditions. For example, the term ‘subalterni’ was first used by the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci. In his writings, Gramsci, used the term subalterni with different meanings. 40 He used the term referring to a broad variety of marginalised groups with different degrees of subalternity, which could range from the poor rural peasantry in the South of Italy to advanced working classes in urban centres.41 Furthermore, he also used the term subalterni in relation to individuals and their social and cultural conditions. Gramsci was interested in the politics of subaltern classes and how they can challenge the hegemony of dominant classes.42 The concept of subalternity was particularly influential among Indian academics. The Subaltern Studies school was founded with the purpose of deconstructing the elitist discourse of the Indian nationalism historiography and re-including the subjugated history of the subaltern classes and their politics.43 The work of the Subaltern Studies group challenges the hegemonic discourse and its accepted truths by recovering another history, that of the subalterns. An important debate discussed in this academic circle sparked from a question formulated by Spivak: can the subaltern speak? This question addresses the problem of the representation of subaltern voices in

40 Gramsci, Quaderni dal Carcere. 41 Guido Liguori, “Tre Accezioni di ‘Subalterno’ in Gramsci,” Critica Marxista: Analisi

e Contributi per Ripensare la Sinistra, no. 6 (2011). 42 Ibid. 43 Ranajit Guha, “Introduction,” in A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986–1995, ed. Ranajit

Guha (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

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academic discourses. According to Spivak, the answer is negative.44 She argues that any research effort to represent the ‘Other’ will inevitably contribute once more to the silencing process.45 Similarly, feminist scholars also stress the need to uncover silences in dominant discourses, but at the same time point out that ‘every act of knowledge production is simultaneously also an act of concealment’.46 This problem of representation is a great dilemma concerning this book, too. In fact, one of the main aims of this research is to explore the subjugated discourses of the subaltern that are excluded from dominant accounts of violent conflict. This includes the structural barriers that exist within the academic world and make it difficult for people from different backgrounds to have their voices hard internationally. Despite my best efforts, the subaltern will not be speaking here directly. I certainly cannot claim this book represents their voices, nor it is my intention to speak for them. Nonetheless, subaltern people do have a voice and construct their own discourse, even though it is subjugated by more powerful actors. The fact that a researcher cannot speak for them does not mean that she should not speak with them. My attempt, through this research, is to learn from them. This is why, as I mentioned earlier, research is a relational process. This research was a process of exchange, and I believe that it should be up to the people to decide whether or not they can and want to speak in a given situation. Deciding a priori that they cannot speak would mean to once again take a decision for them. Prior to conducting my fieldwork, I was not sure how people would respond. I wanted my research to be an opportunity to empower the people by giving them the chance of stating their views, and I did not know whether they would see it in the same way. Looking back to it, I acknowledge that there was still some paternalism in that assumption, and it is something that I think about and question every day.

44 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Inter-

pretation of Culture, ed. C Nelson and Grossberg L (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 45 Ibid. 46 Richter-Montpetit, “Militarized Masculinities, Women Torturers: Abu Ghraib,” in

Researching War. Feminist Methods, Ethics and Politics, ed. Annick T. R. Wibben (London: Routledge, 2016).

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However, in general, the reaction and responses to my research were very positive and enthusiastic. People did question me, asking often who this research was truly for. They understood that I will be the one who will benefit most from it, and that I will be speaking through my voice and my own understanding of things. Few of them did not trust me. But most of them wanted to speak, and they wanted their voice to be heard. I have interviewed more than a 100 people from different villages, and I found that people had much to say about what they experienced, their understanding of what happened, and their attitudes and hopes and expectations for the future. Importantly, the subalterns are not a homogenous group that speaks with one voice. Rather, the term subaltern refers to a broad spectrum of different groups with different identities, social, political, and cultural conditions. Subalternity is not a fixed label to be assigned to a certain group, but it is rather conceived here as a critique of unbalanced power relations within a given society. Poverty Seen from the West Before my fieldwork, I visited a relative in Mumbai. She lived in a beautiful modern apartment on the top floor of a newly built tall skyscraper. As I was taking a picture of the view on the slums below, my relative asked why foreigners are so fascinated by the poor. Later in the evening, as we went out to see the beach, a couple of street children approached us. My relative explained that she did try several times to offer food to street children and talk to them, but she concluded that they only wanted to get money and take advantage of people. There were two contrasting views of the poor that emerged from these conversations. On the one hand, there was the image of the poor as criminal, violent, and dirty, seeking to take advantage of ‘normal’ people. On the other hand, the image of the poor as pure, detached from the evils of greed. The good poor is expected to be begging only out of desperate need, and to be very grateful when offered the most basic item out of generosity. If they want more, however, we realise that they are greedy, evil, not so genuinely desperate, and switch to the other view. Both these images of poverty justify unequal relationships and structures of power between the ‘developed’ and the ‘underdeveloped’. In both cases, we assume that we are better than them and we can fix them. Thinking of the needy, good poor makes it very easy and gratifying to do ‘charity’, as long as the recipient is grateful, well behaved, and accepts

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what we impose to ‘modernise’ or ‘educate’ them. Being disappointed by the lack of gratitude of the poor speaks more about our expectation of what their moral behaviour should be, than about their morality per se. I also often found that, as my relative commented, westerners are very fascinated by the poor, and I must say, I was no exception. When I was a teenager growing up in Italy, I felt that what I wanted the most was to help the poor in India. I hoped that, if I escaped there, I would find a social culture that put less pressure on appearance and greed, perhaps one where I wished I could feel a sense of belonging. So I left home and moved to Kolkata when I was nineteen, and I learnt about paternalism the hard way: the reality was that I had nothing to teach, but rather, I was the one who needed to be looked after. I also realised that my view of the poor as a sort of heaven was just another patronising way of judging from the outside. Why would we expect poor people not to attempt to use their opportunities, maximise their benefits, and improve their social status, just like we do? Why should they just accept inequality in its everyday forms, and be content with it? Discourses on topics such as poverty and violence often contribute to paternalistic constructions of the poor, as they are either seen as good and naïve, or prone to violence. While writing about peace and conflict, which may be associated with moral categories of good and evil, it is easy to transfer those moral attributions to groups and actors, particularly if we perceive them as ‘Others’. Perhaps, we can never completely detach ourselves from Oriental perceptions of ‘the Other’, and a possible critique to this book could be that here, too, the poor is romanticised. This is indeed a possibility. My emphasis on people’s agency and knowledge is not only a result of my findings, but it is also implicit in my ontology and problematisation of the research question. However, I would like to clarify that the emphasis on the local people in this book has nothing to do with their moral character. Rather, I stress the need to explore local people’s perspective because it is an often overlooked point of view, and an important one, despite the fact that local people are the most directly affected. Nonetheless, the issue of paternalism and romanticisation brings back to the need to be explicit about the worldviews and normative commitments underlying the discourse constructed, which I discuss in more details in the next section.

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Experiencing the Field The voyage cannot be erased, and neither can the framing, the fading, the restoration work. To erase the author is to erase potentially important insights: it leaves us with less knowledge rather than more.47

Between September 2013 and January 2014, I was in India to conduct my fieldwork. During this time, I was able to collect much more data than I could expect before leaving, and it was largely due to the relationships built on the ground and the very positive way in which people generally accepted my presence and research. While in my role as a researcher, I was not a neutral, external observer. My interaction with the people had an impact on the social world that I wished to observe for my research, and those interactions had an impact on my research and my findings. Many scholars from different approaches have discussed and recognised the role of the self in the research process.48 Along with these scholars, I share the idea that the values, worldviews, and identity of a researcher always inform his or her writing and research. The experiences of a whole lifetime have an impact on the research and are reflected on all the phases of the research process, from the formulation of the research question, the framing of the theoretical framework and research design, the data collection, analysis, and writing up. However, in this chapter I would like to focus a special attention to the role of the self in the fieldwork phase. For me, this phase involved a direct confrontation with the social reality under investigation. It was a phase during which I experienced ‘the field’ physically and emotionally, and it deeply changed the way I looked at something that was no longer just a research topic.

47 Brigg and Bleiker, “Autoethnographic International Relations: Exploring the Self as a Source of Knowledge,” 780. 48 Oded Löwenheim, “The ‘I’ in IR: An Autoethnographic Account,” Review of International Studies 36, no. 4 (2010); Morgan Brigg and Roland Bleiker, “Autoethnographic International Relations: Exploring the Self as a Source of Knowledge,” Review of International Studies 36, no. 3 (2010).

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Fieldwork Encounters One of the first things I wrote about in my fieldwork journal was the feeling of becoming part of the stories of the people I encountered there for the purposes of my research. The feeling that I was becoming part of their world grew stronger in the following months: The time in which the things I read so much about in books as abstractions become real around me has come. Categories, concepts, and far away anecdotes become faces of real people who sit there in front of me. The places I tried to picture in my mind become smells, drops of sweat on my forehead, stones under my feet, insect bites on my skin. Names written on paper are given a face, a personality, a story. And I have become part of their story too. They know me, they worry about me, they try to help. They offer me mango milkshakes, meals and sweets. They ask about my research, my family, my own story. [Fieldwork journal, 10th October 2013]

The direct experiences in the field changed deeply my understanding of it. It was very different for me to read about certain issues in books from my office in New Zealand and experiencing them on my own skin. For example, the literature mentioned the lack of road infrastructures in rural villages as a factor of grievance.49 However, I truly grasped its significance only when I experienced how travelling from a village to another was a huge problem and even just sitting on the back car seat was incredibly energy draining and time consuming. Similarly, the experience of falling sick and being hospitalised at the beginning of my fieldwork made me reflect on what it meant to have no access to health care, and I started thinking that the lack of health care could be used as a form of torture. Experiencing and dealing with material and social issues affected me directly, and it was very challenging. However, I cannot claim to have experienced what it means to live the life of the locals. Although I wanted as much as possible to ‘live like them’, I was different, an outsider. I lived in a simple hut with them, but I always received a special treatment. I did not have to go and fill buckets of cold water for taking shower and carry them home, someone else did it for me. Every morning, they started a fire in the small hole in the mud outside their house, boiled the water and brought it to the bathroom for me. They cooked my meals sitting patiently by those little outdoor fires on the ground. They provided 49 See, for example: Roy, War & Peace in Junglemahal: People, State and Maoists.

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for my special necessities, like drinking boiled water and using toilets. For travelling, I had the luxury of rental cars, which always drew great attention and curiosity. Despite my best attempts to dress, look, and behave like them, I could not escape receiving a VIP treatment everywhere I went. Although people were surprised by my Bengali looks which made me look like a local, I was always treated with utmost respect, because I spoke English, lived in a foreign country and belonged to a Western academic institution. There was a strong perception of unequal status and power which I could not avoid. The people I met did not imagine that, despite this perception of power in this context, in a way in my family roots there were also stories of hardships and war, which I grew up listening to from my grandmother. My father, in fact, comes from an Italian rural family that experienced poverty and the legacy of war until my generation and after I was born. From my mother’s side, my family comes from East Bengal (currently Bangladesh). My mother grew up in a refugee family in Kolkata, but despite what could be assumed, she had more comfort, privilege, and access to education than my father did in Italy. Her lifestyle changed once she followed him to Italy after their marriage, though it improved over the years. Nonetheless, I had all I really needed in my life. I was lucky enough to grow up in a time and place where I had access to quality education, health care, and social services. There was no one to look down on my family and make us feel like we were worthless. As a child, I was not even that aware of the socio-economic gap. And, as some of the interviewees remarked, I lived in a place where I could feel safe. Unlike many of the people I met during my fieldwork, I was free to choose my own future and become who I wanted to be. It was a previous experience in India that made me realise how important this was, and I promised myself to never take that privilege for granted again. Many of the achievements of my research may not have been possible without this perceived status of power and privilege. Because of this perception of power, people were usually ready to talk to me. Also, the attitude of the local authorities was cooperative rather than obstructive. Most of the scholars I met in Kolkata warned me that the authorities may not have allowed me to pursue this research, and pointed out that many academics, activists, and intellectuals had been threatened, harassed with

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false cases and even arrested for investigating issues related to Maoism.50 Though I had to inform and ask permission to the local authorities for conducting this research—also because other people were involved in the research— the response was not negative. On the contrary, they seemed keen on helping me and sharing their side of the story. On the other hand, I often felt that this perception of power also resulted in an initial intimidation and suspicion. Some of the people I met probably felt that they could not refuse talking to me, so they accepted to participate and gave their consent, but they were looking very tensed and distressed. In most of the cases, this initial suspicion was soon overcome, and mostly people seemed to welcome me very positively. In particular, they seemed to appreciate how we tried to treat them with respect and give importance to hearing their voices and points of view. After the initial suspicion, most of the people I met opened up and responded with enthusiasm to my visit. After the interviews, I was often invited to meet more people, to share a meal or sweets with them, and asked to visit them again. Even people I had just met showed a lot of love and care. In those circumstances, I realised that people often did not talk to me so much out of the interest for my research, but rather because they wanted to talk to me as a person. Perhaps this was because the feeling was mutual, and they could sense it. They did not trust the ethical approval form, which is supposed to protect the participants to the research. They trusted me. There was often a feeling of intimacy and closeness when I visited their homes, and perhaps they could feel that I cared about their stories. Perhaps it was because, as Jackson points out, the act of sharing stories, particularly stories of violence, is a process of re-empowerment. Once it is shared, the story is no longer just about the individual. In this

50 Some of the scholars I interviewed in Kolkata told me that they had been harassed and had to hide for months, or decided not to work on the current phase of the Maoist movement because of threats and risks to be framed as Maoists. Some scholars wrote about experiences of being harassed for working in Maoist-affected areas. For example, Biswas writes about her experience of being arrested for visiting Lalgarh: Nisha Biswas, “Medinipur Jail Diary,” in War and Peace in Junglemahal. People, State and Maoists, ed. Biswajit Roy (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2012).; Sundar was harassed by the police because of her activist and academic work in Chhatisgarh, as she describes in her blog: Nandini Sundar to Nandini Sundar, 2016, http://nandinisundar.blogspot.co.nz/2016/ 05/a-continuous-history-of-harassment-by.html; scholar and activist Bhatia was attacked and threatened at home in Bastar: https://thewire.in/102194/bela-bhatia-attack-bastarchhattisgarh/ Accessed 15 November 2017.

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view, sharing one’s story plays a crucial role in helping people cope with violence.51 The process of fieldwork required establishing relationships, and particularly in a place where trust was so difficult, these relationships were not possible without human involvement. People told me their stories of pain, humiliation and love, and I often found myself crying together with them, holding their hands, and being surprised by unexpected hugs. Despite my interpretivist approach, when I asked where I stood, I usually tried to portray myself as an impartial and neutral academic who would listen to all sides and avoid expressing judgments. However, in a way there was no space for impartiality. Sometimes impartiality was seen as a threat, others as an unethical lack of empathy. After a few days in the villages, I started asking myself if it was even right to be neutral. I had decided to hear all sides, but there were times after hearing about the pain that people had been through when I felt that I did not want to meet their perpetrators and talk to them with a smile. Would it be right to be friendly towards someone who had inflicted that pain, or would it be like accepting what they had done and forgetting about their victims? Listening to those stories, I felt pain and anger. And I also felt shame, because I knew that I could never really even imagine the pain people were telling me about. Yet, I am the one writing about it, claiming to have an expertise over it. I admit that the emotional involvement of the researcher may be a source of bias. In my case, the empathy and care for some people at times drives me to struggle with my objectivity, as there may be things that deep inside I want or do not want to believe. As I mentioned, feelings of anger and grief affected me in the course of my research too. However, in the end I did listen to all the sides and I think that this gives a reasonable balance to my research, and helps me understand the different perspectives, even from an emotional point of view. Relationships and Veracity Acknowledging the role of the relationship between the researcher and the social reality under examination helps recognising its impact on the outcomes of the research, both positive and negatives ones. As Dauphinee

51 Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling. Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity.

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points out, one aspect that researchers often tend to ignore about the data they use for their research is the question of veracity: It is also prudent to remember that we rely on the veracity of the articles and books we read, and on the accounts of those we encounter in the fieldwork interviews. This requires us to rely on elements of human interaction that IR (among other social sciences) has no mechanism to judge. The most basic of these elements is trust. We trust, as researchers, that our informants are telling us the truth when we interview them. But informants may lie.52

There could be several reasons why the interviewees may choose not to be truthful. For example, while participating in an interview, people may seek to provide a certain version of the events which portrays a party, group, or institution in a good light. They might attempt, through the interview, to influence a wider audience, beyond the interaction with the researcher. This might be the case particularly for interviewees who were involved in different parties, organisations, or institutions. Furthermore, particularly in a post-conflict environment, there was the problem of trust. This issue, and the related problem of veracity of the data collected, was one of the first difficulties I encountered in the course of my fieldwork. In that context, people had recently experienced and witnessed large-scale violence against those suspected of being informants. Therefore, understandably they were reluctant to talk. In the second village I went, the interviewees accepted the invitation to talk, but they said that nothing had happened there and that they knew nothing, although according to other interviewees that was not the case. The same thing happened for other interviews as well. Hence, it was very clear that some of the interviewees had not been entirely truthful. I started questioning myself about how I could earn the trust of people in that context, and how I could decide which interviews were reliable and which ones were not. Of course, there cannot be any criteria to know for sure what was true and what was not. Sometimes it might be very obvious, others very subtle. Moreover, there might be different subjective versions of ‘truth’, and I feel that a researcher should not be the judge of them.

52 Elizabeth Dauphinee, “The Ethics of Autoethnography,” Review of International Studies 36, no. 3 (2010): 810.

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My approach to deal with this was to improve as much as possible the trust between researcher and interviewees. The issue of trust is a reciprocal one: it was difficult for them to trust me, but also for me to trust them. I found that the best way to earn people’s trust was to trust them first and be open. People usually answered very positively. When someone seemed uneasy or worried about participating in the interviews, I explained that it was ok not to participate in the interview, or that we could talk only about the topics that they wanted to discuss. In some interviews, I only talked about things that people really wanted to talk about, for example their current problems and worries, rather than the Maoists and the conflict. The deeper the relationship grew, the more people were open, and I got more reasonably convinced of the veracity of their interviews. Of course, I had the chance to deepen the relationship only with a few people, but I have learnt the most from those. My mother, who was there with me as my interpreter, contributed a lot to constructing relationships of trust with the local people. In fact, she is a Bengali Indian and she works as a cultural mediator in Venice. Her role is not only to translate the language, but also to help people from different cultures understand one another. Thanks to her knowledge of the local culture and professional skills, we were able to connect well with the local people and show them respect according to local cultural norms. It could be argued that having a family member with me during my fieldwork might have interfered with my objectivity. No doubt she was always a mother first, even when in her professional role of interpreter. Again, we decided to be open about it and embrace what it meant for our encounters. I was not only a researcher, but also a daughter. If this mother–daughter relationship might have looked less professional, at the same time, perhaps, it made us appear more human. We were a mother and a daughter, just like so many of the women we met. In any case, I do not treat the information collected as objective truths. Rather, the point of the analysis was to understand subjective perspectives and look at how people construct their narratives and discourse. In other words, the aim was not to collect objective pieces of evidence about the dynamics of the conflict, but to explore how people talked about those events. Thus, the analysis also took into account the context and circumstances under which the interview has taken place. The interviews with individuals belonging to a certain party, group, organisation or institution provided an occasion to investigate patterns in the discourse of that group.

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Fieldwork as a Gendered Experience Identity and gender were factors of great importance for my fieldwork. I had to face specific challenges for being there as a foreign woman, although an Indian looking one, and this marked every single day of fieldwork. At the same time, being a woman also contributed positively to the achievements of my fieldwork. I had been in West Bengal before, and I always struggled with gender relations. I struggled with the limits imposed by my relatives, who thought that it was not safe for a young woman to travel in the city alone. I also struggled because I did go through negative experiences, constant sexism, and unwanted male attentions. I did not know what was worse— the reclusion and loss of independence, or the never-ending feeling of humiliation, shame, and guilt. It went better this time, at least initially, perhaps because I presented myself as an Indian married woman. I chose to wear only traditional clothes like salwar kameez, kurtas, or sarees. Though I am a woman of mixed origins—half Bengali, half Italian, during my weeks in Kolkata, nobody seemed to believe that I was a foreigner, despite my poor Bengali language skills. Even when I explained that I was not from there, people tended to think that I was a Bengali woman. However, it was different in the villages. In rural Bengal, my fairer skin was always noticed and gave people an expectation that I belonged to a higher social class background. Skin colour was therefore another factor that contributed to the perception of unequal power status. Also, often women treated me as a young girl when they came to know that I did not have children yet. This was particularly the case in the villages, where most of the women I met had been married since they were teenagers and had become mothers very early. At the age of 30, they considered themselves as old. Hence, although many of the women I met were of similar age as me, they seemed to think that I was very different from them, and this created some distance. The difficulties in communicating directly with them also did not help. The problem of sexism constituted the biggest challenge that I had to face. I experienced sexism mainly from men who enjoyed a powerful position in the society or came from high social backgrounds. I never felt threatened by men belonging to disadvantaged groups in the villages. On the contrary, they were very respectful and would rather avoid eye contact or talking directly to me. Instead, I was threatened and harassed by men

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who helped in my research—and later displayed other intentions—and could threaten my personal security and that of others close to me. Gender relations had a lot of impact on the data I was able to collect. On the one hand, I received much help and cooperation, both from men and from women, because I was not perceived as a threat. This high level of cooperation was reflected in the quantity and quality of the data collected. In fact, I was able to have access to many people and hear different perspectives. Furthermore, as I was not seen as a threat and people trusted me relatively easily, the interviewees opened up more in their interviews. For cultural reasons, it was particularly difficult to talk to the women in the villages, as I found that most of them are very reluctant to talk when men are present. As both my interpreter and I were women, we however managed to have some important conversations with some of the local women. On the other hand, being a woman, I was very vulnerable and I had to go through difficulties that affected me deeply. In order to safeguard my personal security, I had to take into account a lot of limits and obstacles that I probably wouldn’t have had if I were a man. Despite all my efforts to be reasonably safe, I still had to take some risks in order to conduct the research, and I did find myself in unpleasant and painful situations. In the end, all the data collected in this research, like the places I visited, the people I talked to, the way people responded, were a result of gendered relations. Conducting Fieldwork in a Post-Conflict Environment: Risks, Challenges, and Ethics In addition to the everyday challenges of being a woman, conducting research in a post-conflict environment is likely to involve specific challenges, and expose both the researcher and other people to some risks. In order to be allowed to go to India and conduct the research, I had to go through a lengthy process to convince the ethical committee of my university that the fieldwork in West Bengal would have been reasonably safe. However, despite all the precautions and information available from the outside, there can never be a certainty regarding how safe or unsafe a place will be. From my experience, I found that the main factor that could have been a source of danger in a situation like this was fear itself and lack of trust. Trust was a crucial issue for my fieldwork experience not only for the

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outcome of the research as I have discussed above, but also for a matter of security. I was in a place where, till very recently, people had witnessed large-scale violence because of suspicion. Trusting the right person was a matter of life or death. I was scared, too, particularly in certain situations, because I felt vulnerable, and I did not know if I could trust the people that I met. It was a vicious circle, because if I feared someone and they perceived that I did not trust them, it was more difficult for them also to trust me in turn. The solution that I adopted was the same that I mentioned above in regards to trust: being the first to trust, and being open and honest, even if that made me feel more vulnerable. I remembered the advice of anthropologists of conflict such as Mahmood and Sluka who said that, particularly when talking to people who might have been involved in violence, the researcher should not be scared, and that it was best to be open and explain to the people why I was there.53 In my experience, I found that this to be a most precious advice. I was open in telling who I was, where I came from, and what I was doing. The only information that I was not ready to share regarded the people who had been helping me or had participated in the research, as I did not want them to be implicated in any problem because of this research. I took several measures to protect their identities. I think that the best approach is to not know information that could be dangerous for me or others in the first place. Therefore, I avoided asking their names and contact details, and I did not write them anywhere. I also did not ask the names of the villages and locations that I visited. It was my duty, as a researcher, to keep in mind that the priority was the people, and not the outcome of the research. This is particularly important when dealing with such a sensitive issue and context, as it is a fact that the research could potentially harm the people who got involved in it, despite all my precautions. Furthermore, apart from the risks of physical violence and harassment, participating in this research could harm because talking about sensitive issues could be very stressful psychologically, and cause more trauma than help. I certainly did see a lot of pain and fear. Sometimes there was no need to start a conversation to understand that it would be too painful. 53 Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants; Sluka, Hearts and Minds, Water and Fish: Support for the IRA and INLA in a Northern Irish Ghetto.

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In those cases, I did not push for it. I simply reassured the person that it was ok not to talk about it and left respectfully. I was not prepared to deal with so much pain. What we do as researchers when we go to a place is not just ‘observing’ and recording something that is out there and we can rightfully take for free. We go and take something that may be very precious and costly for those who give it us. Many of the people I encountered pointed this out by questioning me. They said, so many people have come and asked us questions, and then they go and forget about us. What have they done to help? Is this research for you or for us? In my fieldwork journal I wrote: I met the mothers and fathers of leaders who have been killed or tortured and arrested and they did not need to speak to let out their grief. The air was filled by it, every single time. The first one looked at me in the eyes and studying me she asked ‘What does anybody care about our pain?’ I did not know what to say. I was silenced and wanted to run away and cry. And the day after, when she hugged me and asked me to come back, my eyes were full of tears. I couldn’t help it. [Fieldwork journal, 27 February 2014]

I struggled every time to answer these questions because I felt that they were right. I explained to them that I was doing this research hoping that it would be of help to them, mainly because I found that their voices were not heard enough and I wanted to listen to them. They seemed very happy with this answer, and they demonstrated their faith in me through their precious help, without which this research would not have been possible. I have not yet found an answer that fully convinced myself. I am still reflecting on Dauphinee’s words about building our career on the losses and pain of others.54 I started this research journey thinking that it will make some change, and it will help. But I also have to recognise that through this research I have earned a PhD, claim an expertise, that the publication of this book will advance my research, and capitalist institutions will earn from it, while most of the people I talked to will still be there coping with difficult situations.

54 Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile (Routledge, 2013); Dauphinee, “The Ethics of Autoethnography.”

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I continued my research and decided to complete it because this is what the people there expected from me. They helped me and participated in the research so that I could do so. They chose to help me consciously, and I respect their decision. As Dauphinee points out, ‘even silence is a potential form of violence’.55 The reflection on who the research is for, and how can it be meaningful particularly for the local people and others in similar contexts, is an important issue driving my research.

Conclusions The research journey is a relational one, a journey through wish we seek to gather knowledge. Academia is socially recognised as an institution that creates knowledge that establishes ‘truths’, or ‘laws’. For me, research is a process of learning. It certainly was for me. As a peace scholar, I thought that this research could contribute to positive change. But to be honest, I think that most of all, this research journey changed me. Researching the everyday necessarily involves questioning our own everyday and our own power relationships through which we produce ‘knowledge’. Though there might always be unintended consequences, it is important to reflect on how the discourse I am constructing might be interpreted, and on how the research process may put individuals at risk. Despite the possible negative outcomes, the reason why I decided to engage in this research was a belief in the potential to contribute to positive change. When I undertook this research project, I thought that exploring people’s subjugated discourses might challenge dominant ones, particularly those that justified violent norms and oppression. This is how I wanted to contribute to positive change. While discovering the importance of everyday agency, I never stopped asking myself how could research contribute to positive change and support everyday peace agents. I realised that it is not enough to hope that academic publications alone would make a difference. It takes a conscious effort to build outputs that are available and accessible to specific agents, so that they can use the findings for their action, including discursive action. This can only happen by investing much more on those relationships and listening and understanding to people’s existing knowledge and what they need.

55 Dauphinee, “The Ethics of Autoethnography,” 11.

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I would bring ‘normativity’ for peace research a step forward, for those, like me, who want to commit to make an impact through peace research, and that would mean to include action in the research journey. I would invite to think about including resistance in peace research, but also to think about the fact that research does not end with our publications. Power relationships do not end there, how can we stop once our work is published? We could, instead, continue working through the relationships, deliver knowledge and support action, continue gathering more relevant knowledge, and make resistance part of our everyday, too.

CHAPTER 5

The Lalgarh Movement in Junglemahal: Comparing the Narratives

During my fieldwork interviews, I collected people’s stories about Lalgarh and the conflict that followed. I did not collect those stories to provide a history of the movement and decide which one would be the ‘true’ story, but rather to look at how different local actors talked about those events in their narratives. While describing the story of Lalgarh, the people I have interviewed—local residents, local and urban activists, Maoist cadres and sympathisers, policemen, administration officers, local politicians, members of tribal groups, and others—also included or excluded in their narratives events that they considered meaningful. The ‘characters’ in their stories also played different roles. In this chapter, through these different versions of the story of the conflict in Lalgarh, I explore what different actors perceived as meaningful. In the field of social psychology, in order to understand protracted conflicts, scholars have looked at histories of conflict as part of the collective memory or culture shared by the members of a group. For Bar-Tal, the social construction of conflict narratives is usually biased and distorted because it is a process that has the function of accommodating the psychological needs of the group.1 As such, these narratives tend to portray a black and white picture of the events, where the group of belonging is 1 Daniel Bar-Tal, “Introduction: Conflict and Social Psychology,” in Intergroup Conflict and Their Resolution: A Social Psychological Perspective, ed. Daniel Bar-Tal (London: Taylor & Francis, 2011).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Carrer, How People Respond to Violence, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11342-0_5

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presented in a positive light and as a victim of the opponent. Furthermore, for Bar-Tal these narratives are widely shared and, in protracted conflicts, bring to the development of rigid hegemonic cultures of conflict.2 Although the context of Lalgarh does not fit in Bar-Tal’s categorisation of protracted intergroup, the concept of shared collective memory of conflict can still be useful to understand the meaning of conflict narratives. In the case of Lalgarh, the organisation that was formed to lead the movement, the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities (PCPA), had widespread influence at the local level during that time, and it spoke for the side of ‘the local people’ in the conflict. In this chapter, I discuss how the discourse of the PCPA reflects some of the elements in Bar-Tal’s sociopsychological infrastructure of protracted intergroup conflicts model. For this reason, I focus on the discourse of the PCPA as a dominant discourse, rather than on the discourses of the state or mass media, and I compare it with the discourse of local inhabitants. I will discuss the discourse of the state in Chapter 8, but here the focus on the PCPA, as this was often considered as a discourse of ‘the people’. I take the question of hegemony of discourse further by looking at how power dynamics and institutionalisation processes influenced the construction of discourse by the PCPA. The Foucauldian idea of the nexus between power and discourse3 is therefore a key analytical concept here. As I compare the PCPA discourse with ordinary people’s narratives, I highlight the fact that there are many different subjugated discourses within the group, that differ from the hegemonic discourse constructed by the PCPA. These subjugated discourses provide diverse alternative insights that tend to construct less static, less black and white, and less simplistic explanations of the social events narrated. In this chapter, I also essentially create a narrative of the Lalgarh movement by comparing these different narratives. I present broadly different perspectives regarding the background and origins of the movement, how it started, escalated and declined, in a chronological order.

2 Ibid. 3 Hall, “Foucault: Power, Knowledge and Discourse.”

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The Origins of the Lalgarh Movement The narratives of the Lalgarh movement often start from the incidents of police violence on local Santhali women that took place on the night of 4 November 2008, in a remote village called Chotopelia.4 Interviewees from all the sides in the conflict agreed on the significance of the events in Chotopelia: activists, ordinary local people, and even state representative, including the police. The activists interviewed consistently described the chain of events that led to these incidents and to the start of the movement. These events were put into motion by the landmine attack in Salboni against the convoy of the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Bhuddhadev Bhattacharya a couple of days earlier. After the blast, according to the activists’ accounts, the police started raiding the villages, beating and arresting people. On the night of 4 November 2008, the police arrested three teenage boys who were returning from a cultural programme and a teacher, all with the charge of being Maoists.5 The same night, the police came to Chotopelia and took a man, again accusing him of being a Maoist, but the women of the village protested: This person started crying, saying the police is taking me away. The women took this person and they said to the police that they couldn’t take him, because they go to work with this foreign man. So they held him and they did not want the police to take him away, and the police started beating them. That is how the movement started.

The women of Chotopelia, in a group interview, described how they snatched the man from the police and held him tight to protect him. In the violence that followed, several women were badly injured after being beaten by the police. A woman called Chittamoni Murmu lost her eye, and another woman who was pregnant was kicked in her stomach and lost her baby.

4 See, for example: Roy, War & Peace in Junglemahal: People, State and Maoists; Bhattacharyya, “Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram”; Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India’s Maoist Movement (Harper Collins Publishers India, 2016). 5 Bhattacharya, Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India’s Maoist Movement; Bhattacharyya, Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram—Update 1.

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The news of the violence in Chotopelia quickly spread to many villages and aroused of sense of indignation against injustice. People from different villages referred to the injured women of Chotopelia in their narratives. According to Jasper, the collective mobilisation that leads to the onset of social movement is often triggered by events that spark a strong sense of outrage, or a moral shock, similarly as in the case of Chotopelia.6 For Halperin et al., the subjective appraisal of a certain event or information, by individuals or groups, influences their responses to it7 : in this view, the events in Chotopelia seemed to be widely appraised as a very meaningful event that necessitated action. Although for activists, scholars, and state representatives alike, the incidents in Chotopelia represent a significant point that sparked the movement, the interpretations of what these incidents meant, and how they represented deeper issues identified as causes of the conflict, were different. For the Maoists, for example, the events in Chotopelia represented an ‘issue’ to mobilise the masses, as a former Maoist commander explained in an interview: To unite people in a place for a movement you need an issue. These issues came in different ways in different places. In Lalgarh, this started in a village called Chotopelia, it started from there.

In local people’s narratives, the injured women of Chotopelia were usually mentioned as symbols of state oppression, something that could not be tolerated, a breaking point. However, they were usually not linked in the narratives to past events. On the contrary, urban activists and state representatives of the new government emphasised the fact that the events in Chotopelia were not something new. In the interviews and writings of activists and academics, the events in Chotopelia were related to three main issues: tribal identity, the history of indiscriminate police violence, and the alienation of land and forest resources. Importantly, these three issues recall the broader discourse on the Maoist conflict in India. As I mentioned earlier, the Maoist conflict 6 James M Jasper, “The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions in and Around Social Movements,” Sociological Forum 13, no. 3 (1998). 7 Eran Halperin, Keren Sharvit, and Gross James J., “Perceptions in Conflict,” in Intergroup Conflicts and Their Resolution: A Social Psychological Perspective, ed. Daniel Bar-Tal (London: Taylor and Francis, 2011).

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is widely understood as a security problem due to the grievances of marginalised groups. As we will see, the narrative of Lalgarh, in the discourse of activists and scholars, is strongly influenced by these macrolevel structural explanations of the Maoist conflict. Constructing the ‘Tribal’ Uprising In the literature, the Maoist conflict in India is often linked to the presence in those areas of a high percentage of population belonging to groups that are considered marginalised.8 Hoelscher et al., for example, argued that ‘the presence of scheduled caste and tribal communities is the best predictor of violence’.9 The Lalgarh movement, too, is often described as a ‘tribal’ uprising. Since the colonial times, the state identified lists of disadvantaged groups that were categorised first as ‘Depressed Classes’ and later as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. People from these groups were also known as ‘untouchables’, although the caste system and the untouchability were officially abolished. Today, the categories of SC and ST are still very important for the state institutions at all levels in India, as the Constitution of India institutes a system of positive discrimination in favour of people belonging to these groups, for example through the allocation of reserved quotas.10 Alpa Shah argues that there was a significant difference between the treatment of SC and ST in the Constitution: in the case of SCs, the low ritual status in the Hindu religion was identified as the main obstacle to the economic deprivation, and therefore the aim was simply to remove the difference; differently, the STs

8 See, for example: Hoelscher, Miklian, and Vadlamannati, “Hearts and Mines: A District-Level Analysis of the Maoist Conflict in India.” Kennedy, “The Socioeconomic Determinants of Natural Resource Conflict: Minerals and Maoist Insurgency in India”; ibid.; Sumit Ganguly and Jennifer Oetken, “Tribal Participation in India’s Maoist Insurgency: Examining the Role of Economic Development Policies,” in Development Strategies, Identities, and Conflict in Asia, ed. William Ascher and Natalia Mirovitskaya (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 9 Hoelscher, Miklian, and Vadlamannati, “Hearts and Mines: A District-Level Analysis of the Maoist Conflict in India,” 141. 10 See articles 341 and 342 of the Constitution of India. The lists of ST are available in the Constitution of India (Scheduled Tribes) Orders. Government of India, “Constitution of India.”

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were considered as a separate category requiring long-term protection measures to protect their rights over land and forest resources.11 The definition of what constitutes a ‘tribe’ in the Indian context, and why it should be a separate category, is highly contested. For the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, the established criterion to specify a Scheduled Tribe is that ‘scheduled tribes are indications of primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the community at large, and backwardness’.12 This definition emphasises the idea of the tribal people as a distinct ethnic group, which has a culture different from the mainstream society and is physically separated from it. They are also seen as primitive, backward, and isolated. The people belonging to a Scheduled Tribe are also known as adivasis, which literally means ‘original inhabitants’.13 As the term itself suggests, another key element associated with the adivasi is their relationship with the land. In fact, these groups are often referred to as the indigenous people of India, the people who originally inhabited these lands, as opposed to the exploitive classes that came more recently from outside, an argument that was often made by scholars and activists interviewed. Some anthropologists share the official idea that the adivasis have their own culture, language, religious beliefs, and social structure, and are the original inhabitants of their land. For example, Mahato argues that the adivasis have been resisting a process of systematic cultural invasion and cultural violence which he refers to as Nirbakization, or culture of silence.14 Through this culturally violent process, Mahato explains, the adivasis have been forced to assimilate into the dominant Sanskrit culture.15 Nonetheless, even when sharing to some extent the definition around the term tribal, the status of specific groups is often disputed. In the specific context of Junglemahal where I have conducted my fieldwork, 11 Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. 12 Ministry of Tribal Affairs, “Scheduled Tribes—Definition,” http://tribal.nic.in/Con tent/DefinitionpRrofiles.aspx. 13 AICFAIP, “Voices of the Adivasis/ Indigenous People of India,” ed. All India Coordinating Forum by the Adivasis/ Indigenous People (New Delhi: AICFAIP, 2001). 14 Pashupati Prasad Mahato, Sanskritization vs Nirbakization (Kolkata: Purbalok, 2012). 15 Ibid.

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the Bengalis were the dominant group, and the main groups officially identified as ST were the Santhalis, the Lodhas, and the Mundas. The Santhalis that I met, in particular, often emphasised their distinct culture, language, religion, and social system. Another important local group, the Mahatos, were considered as one of the communities of original inhabitants, but were listed by the state as an ‘Other Backward Caste’, rather than a ST. However, local anthropologists and historians argue that the Mahatos shared the characters of pre-Aryan tribal people and earlier used to be regarded as Scheduled Tribes.16 Later on, during the British time, they were transformed into a Hindu caste. Despite a process of assimilation or ‘Sanskritization’, the Mahatos still maintain their distinctive culture and social structures and have strong ties with other local tribes.17 Although the Mahatos interviewed often identified themselves as Bengalis as well as Mahato Kurmis and spoke Bengali, the issue of whether or not they were officially recognised as a Scheduled Tribe had important practical consequences for their families, especially in terms of access to education and employment opportunities. The demand to be recognised as a Scheduled Tribe also gave origin to a social movement, and this protest broke out into violent clashes with the police.18 State policies and practices, therefore, play a significant role in constructing and reinforcing social categories such as tribes and castes. For example, the reservation system encourages people to continue promoting endogamous marriage so that the family can continue claiming those privileges. 19 The same can be said in regard to groups belonging to STs. Alpa Shah argues that the whole idea of primitive, culturally different tribal is socially constructed. In her book, In the Shadows of the State, she traces the historical roots of this process of invention of the tribal in the Indian context through policies and practices that started during

16 Ibid., Vishnu Charan Mahato, The History of Tribal Kurmis of Chotanagpur (Ranchi: Gyaneshwar Singh [Retd], 2013). 17 Mahato, Sanskritization vs Nirbakization, 44. 18 http://indianexpress.com/article/india/sdpo-injured-as-kurmi-samaj-activists-threw-

stones-4510640/ Accessed 21 August 2017. 19 A.M. Shah, “Mirage of a Caste-Less Society in India,” Economic & Political Weekly 52, no. 9 (2017).

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the colonial time,20 when British anthropologists first classified India’s ‘primitive’ tribes. In the 1990s, processes of expansions of state control, resistance from the adivasi communities, and the adoption of measures and policies to protect their rights over land and resources, all encouraged the construction and institutionalisation of the tribal.21 Importantly, Shah stresses the role of indigenous rights activism in constructing the indigenous. In the realm of politics, she argues, this category of indigeneity has become a powerful rhetorical device. From her research in Jharkhand, Shah found that that local people’s points of view may be different from those of the activists, and that ‘the representations and arguments of the activists may inadvertently further marginalise the poorer rural people they are trying to help’.22 Shah’s considerations on the construction of the adivasis are very insightful to understand the specific case of Lalgarh, and also to place the questions arising from it to the broader problem of what are, at the local level, the political and practical implications of constructing a social category like that of indigeneity through activism, but also through our academic writing. In the written accounts of the Lalgarh movement, the movement is referred to with expressions such as ‘a mass uprising of adivasis’,23 ‘the great Lalgarh rebellion’,24 a ‘hool ’,25 and ‘the biggest adivasi rebellion ever in the state, and the second Santhali rebellion’. Since the beginning of the movement, when the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities was formed, the new organisation emphasised its adivasi character in its discourse. This was evident from the first public document it produced, a charter of demands.26 One of the first demands, in fact, was a public apology from the police for the violence committed in Chotopelia according to the traditional adivasi custom: the Superintendent of Police was to publicly hold his ears with his hands, and the policeman were

20 Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 32. 23 http://sanhati.com/excerpted/1083/ Accessed 29 January 2016. 24 http://www.bannedthought.net/India/Lalgarh/ Accessed 29 January 2016. 25 Hool is a term that indicated a tribal rebellion; https://vimeo.com/9386641. 26 For the full charter of demands see: Bhattacharya, Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India’s Maoist Movement, 14–15.

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asked to crawl by rubbing their noses on the ground. Moreover, elements of adivasi culture were very visible during all the events of PCPA such as processions, meetings, and demonstrations, in forms such as music, songs, dance, and carrying traditional weapons and symbols. This adivasi character of the movement was much emphasised in the narratives of the activists interviewed as well as in the literature,27 and it was seen as a proof that the movement was a spontaneous expression of adivasi resistance. For example, an urban activist who witnessed the early days of the movement said: They all were under a tree, in the open space, with hundreds of tribals playing their drums and everything, carrying their bows and arrows, as well as children in their arms. They all landed out from remote villages, they gathered, they debated, they shouted, and then eventually from there they decided to form the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities.

According to the narratives of the PCPA and activists close to it, the tribal organisation Bharat Jakat Majhi Madwa was present when the movement started, but had no control over it, and was ‘discredited’ by the people.28 The majhis are the traditional community leaders of the main tribal group, the Santhals, and these majhis are reunited in the Bharat Jakat Majhi Madwa. By discrediting the majhi organisation, the newly formed PCPA represented itself as the organisation that legitimately represented the local adivasi. For Bhattacharyya, the unfitness of the traditional Santhali organisation to lead the movement was the reason why the PCPA was created: As Chhatradhar Mahato, one of the main spokespersons of the PSBJC told me in course of an interview held in Kolkata on 12 February 2009, this committee was formed on 8th November 2008 at Dalilpur Chowk in Lalgarh with representations from 95 villages. It was formed because it was not possible for the existing social organisation led by the elders, Bharat Jakat Majhi Marwa to stand up to the needs of the time. As one

27 See: Sanhati, “Lalgarh Movement—Mass Uprising of Adivasis in West Bengal”; Roy, War & Peace in Junglemahal: People, State and Maoists. 28 Sanhati, ed. Letters from Lalgarh (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2013); Sanhati, “Lalgarh Movement—Mass Uprising of Adivasis in West Bengal”; Bhattacharyya, “Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram.”

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daily reported, villagers accused it of “betraying the tribal cause” (The Telegraph, 15 November 2008).29

The local people interviewed, however, never characterised the PCPA as an adivasi organisation, nor understood the movement as linked to tribal identity or other specific tribal issues. When I directly asked the question, they often looked puzzled and explained that all different groups, adivasis and nonadivasis, participated in it. The views of the adivasis were very diverse, ranging from individuals who actively participated in it, to people who actively opposed it. None of the adivasis interviewed, however, described the movement as a tribal one. In contrast with the PCPA narrative that insisted that the majhi organisation was discredited by the people, all the local Santhali that I interviewed explained to me that the figure of the majhi was very important to them. The majhis of the village were highly respected by the members of the community, and villagers went to them to resolve disputes of different nature and maintain peace and cohesion in the community: Our social system is based on these 5 majhis. If I have a problem, I inform the majhi. Then he sends a call to gather everyone to have a meeting. Then we sit all together and talking all together we solve the issue. In the reunion, majhi is the president and we speak with his permission. In our culture, these five people are the most respected. We live like this.

From some of the interviews with both Santhalis and nontribal local people, it appears that the Santhali leaders, the majhis, played a role in rallying people in the first place, at the very beginning of the movement: Majhi called and mobilized the adivasis; the adivasis unite very quickly. We Bengalis cannot unite like this. That’s how it started. But it was a different thing from the Maoists. The adivasis do not kill, they are peaceful.

Although the Lalgarh movement is often described as a tribal uprising, the adivasis and their organisations had diverse attitudes towards the movement right from this initial stage. The leader of the main Santhali organisation, the Bharat Jakat Majhi Madwa, Nityananda Hembron, was involved in the first negotiations between the demonstrators and the 29 Bhattacharyya, “Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram,” 14.

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government. On 19 November 2009, he called for a withdrawal of the movement from all areas except from Lalgarh. Some of the Santhali individuals that I have interviewed explained that their traditional leaders opposed the movement because they felt that the traditional adivasi culture and traditions were not respected in it. Hence, they followed their leader’s advice of not taking part in it: The Santhali leader of this area, Nityananda Hembron, said that we should not go in that movement. Near Lalgarh some people went, but here the leader said not to participate in this movement.

The theme of adivasi opposition to the movement to defend their culture is completely absent in writings on the Lalagrh movement, and clashes with the PCPA discourse and the representation of the movement as a tribal uprising. This is not to say that the adivasis did not support the movement or did not participate in it. On the contrary, many did, as my interviews confirmed. While some prominent adivasi leaders opposed the newly formed PCPA and organised resistance committees against it, others took part in it, even in leading positions. Also, I am not arguing that the activists in the movement did not genuinely intend to improve the conditions of the local people through their actions. From what appears in their narratives, many activists, including PCPA leaders, seemed to strongly believe that this struggle was for the local people, including for the adivasi. Many sacrificed their lives for this cause. However, this analysis highlights the fact that the activists’ discourse constructed the movement as a tribal uprising, while the local people interviewed did not. Importantly, the interviews with the local people also show that there was a deliberate effort to make adivasi symbols visible to construct this discourse. Many of the local people said that they were encouraged or even forced to carry traditional weapons and musical instruments, and in some instances coerced to perform traditional music or dances. This shows that, as Shah points out, the discourse of indigeneity is a powerful rhetorical tool, that is sometimes appropriated by actors that indigenous groups may not feel represented by. In the context of Lalgarh, during the process through which the PCPA sought to construct itself as the legitimate representative of the adivasi, it alienated other actors and silenced voices that potentially contradicted its claims.

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Land, Forests, Minerals and Violence As I have discussed earlier, the Maoist conflict in India is often explained in relation to the alienation of land and forest resources from the local people in rural areas, particularly from the adivasis.30 In different parts of India, these structural issues are related to the neo-liberal reforms undertaken by the state since the 1990s, which resulted in a trend of expropriation of land for extracting mineral resources or establishing industrial plants.31 In the Indian territory, many of the forest areas inhabited by a high population of STs are rich in minerals that attract the interest of mining companies.32 The area of Junglemahal shares these geographical characteristics with much of the areas in the ‘Red Corridor’ in the Indian Union territory where the Maoists are most influential. The discourse associating land alienation and violent conflict was very dominant in the narratives of scholars, activists, and Maoists in relation to the case of Lalgarh as well. Another theme related to this and frequently emphasised by scholars while describing the roots of the conflict was the alienation of forest resources from the adivasis, which, according to them, was an important factor of grievance given the symbiotic relationship between adivasis and forests. The issue of land and forest, therefore, is once again related to the social construction of the adivasis in the discourse. Alpa Shah found that both in India and globally, indigenous people are constructed as ‘ecosavages’ who live in harmony and protect nature, and who are rooted in their land.33 Her research in Jharkhand, close to the Bengal side of Junglemahal, shows that not only is the relationship between adivasis and

30 See: Agrav¯ ala, Naxalism: Causes and Cure; R. Rupavath, Tribal Land Alienation and Political Movements: Socio-Economic Patterns from South India (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009); Chakrabarty and Kujur, Maoism in India: Reincarnation of Ultra-Left Wing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century. 31 Chakrabarty and Kujur, Maoism in India: Reincarnation of Ultra-Left Wing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century. 32 Hoelscher, Miklian, and Vadlamannati, “Hearts and Mines: A District-Level Analysis of the Maoist Conflict in India.”; Kennedy, “The Socioeconomic Determinants of Natural Resource Conflict: Minerals and Maoist Insurgency in India.”; Ghatak and Eynde, “Economic Determinants of the Maoist Conflict in India.” 33 Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India.

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the environment much more sophisticated and complex, but this stereotyped construction of the indigenous has significant consequences in their lives; for example, they are being ‘eco-incarcerated’ in their land.34 Nonetheless, the idea of the symbiotic relationships between adivasis and their forests is often reproduced in the literature on Maoism in India.35 In some cases, arguments explaining the nature and causes of the conflict draw from this assumption. For example, Kennedy proposes that: We would expect that because tribal communities tend to have stronger material and symbolic attachment to the natural world, mining activities will be more destructive to their livelihoods, and therefore more likely to lead to violent resistance and insurgency.36

In the case of Lalgarh, the theme of alienation of land and forest as a root cause of grievance leading to the conflict was very dominant in the narratives of scholars and activists. The accounts of the Lalgarh movement written by urban-based activists and scholars usually start from the inauguration of a steel plant in Salboni, a locality at about thirty kilometres from Lalgarh, in November 2008. Professor Amit Bhattacharya, in his pamphlet, Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram, explained that the Jindal group acquired 5000 acres of land for this steel plant: most of it was vested land that was supposed to be distributed to tribal people, and the rest was purchased from the farmers.37 The area was declared a Special Economic Zone where the economic laws of the country did not apply. The acquisition of land for industrial purposes in Salboni was often associated with the incidents of Singur and Nandigram, where displaced people protested the expropriation of their land, and the state responded

34 Ibid. 35 See, for example: Ganguly and Oetken, “Tribal Participation in India’s Maoist

Insurgency: Examining the Role of Economic Development Policies,” 101. Kennedy, “The Socioeconomic Determinants of Natural Resource Conflict: Minerals and Maoist Insurgency in India.” 36 Kennedy, “The Socioeconomic Determinants of Natural Resource Conflict: Minerals and Maoist Insurgency in India,” 154. 37 Bhattacharyya, “Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram,” 142.

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by suppressing them with violence.38 According to some of the activists, the land-grab in Salboni was a factor of grievance for the local people, just as it had been in the cases of Singur and Nandigram: Since 2006, an almost unprecedented popular upsurge against the government’s pro-corporate land-grab policy swept West Bengal, starting with Singur and Nandigram. Realising that their life and occupation were threatened in the name of ‘development’, the downtrodden stood up and organized massive protest movements.39 The government was, and is, not bothered about the setting up of a SEZ having a polluting steel plant in the middle of a forested area, dispossessing tribals from their land and endangering their means of survival. Understandably, there were major grievances amongst the tribals against this, although the mainstream media had constantly portrayed a very rosy picture of the entire project.40

The Maoists, for their part, openly opposed the Jindal project, and responded to it with a landmine attack against the convoy of the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Bhuddhadev Bhattacharya, when, on 2 November 2008, he was returning from the inauguration of the steel plant. After the blast, the Maoists claimed responsibility for the attack and said that they triggered it with the cooperation of the people, and that state policies such as these were very harmful to the farmers.41 In an open letter to the people of Lalgarh, the CPI (Maoist) reiterated the rights of the people over the land: It is known to all that there was resentment of the people against the handing over of 4,000 acres of forest land to the Jindal plant, on which

38 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Fresh-violence-in-Singur/articl eshow/3174043.cms Accessed 3 August 2016; http://www.telegraphindia.com/107 0315/asp/frontpage/story_7519166.asp Accessed 3 August 2016. 39 Dipankar Chakrabarty, “Mamata, Maoists and ‘Peace’ Brokers,” in War and Peace in Junglemahal, ed. Biswajit Roy (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2012), 41. 40 Sanhati, “Lalgarh Movement—Mass Uprising of Adivasis in West Bengal.” 41 http://www.ibnlive.com/news/india/maoists-own-responsibility-for-attack-on-bud

dhadeb-301300.html Routray Bibhu Prasad, “West Bengal: State Myopia, Maoist Consolidation,” in South Asia Intelligence Review (South Asia Terrorism Portal, 2008).

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it is you and you alone that have the rights. It is you, the villagers of the area, who alone have the rights over this land, and not the government.42

The theme of alienation of forested land from the tribal, in these discourses, is constructed as a cause of grievance that in turn would explain the conflict that followed. However, while the activists that I interviewed referred frequently to the expropriation of land in Salboni in order to explain how the Lalgarh movement started, the local villagers never mentioned it. The only time a villager talked about the steel project in Salboni, he said that he hoped the new industrial land would bring employment opportunities to the area, and was afraid that the Maoists would oppose it. A few villagers raised the issue of landlessness to explain the need for alternative employment opportunities. Interestingly, many of the local people seemed to be in favour of the prospective development projects because they hoped that it would produce job opportunities for the locals. In fact, unemployment, and the exploitation around it, was one of the core issues that the locals talked about. This sharply contradicts the discourse of the activists and the Maoists. The local villagers did not talk about alienation of land and resources as a meaningful factor of grievance, mobilisation, or conflict. Although it did not come up in the interviews, I do not exclude the possibility that there might have been some popular opposition to the Jindal plant. After all, local people’s views are not homogenous, and unfortunately, I did not have the chance to interview villagers who were directly affected by the land expropriation project. I have been to villages neighbouring Salboni, however, and the villagers living there did not bring up the land grabbing issue in their interviews. This does not mean that the local people supported the project or that it is not a contradictory issue, however, it did not come up in the interviews as a reason for mobilisation during the Lalgarh movement specifically, and definitely it was never mentioned as a reason of grievance due to which people decided to join in violent activities. In summary, while the inauguration of the Jindal steel plant was not included as a meaningful event in local people’s narratives of conflict, the landmine attack in Salboni that followed, a Maoist action taken in name of people’s grievances, was described as the trigger of indiscriminate police violence that culminated in the incidents of Chotopelia. Once again, there 42 CPI (Maoist), “CPI (Maoist) Message to the People of Lalgarh,” (2009).

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was significant discrepancy between the discourse of activists and local people. In this case, the discourse of people’s grievance was used by both the Maoists and the state to justify violent actions. Politics, State Violence, and the Maoists Another theme frequently identified as a root cause of the Lalgarh movement by the activists was that of a history of indiscriminate state violence against innocent villagers. The incident of Chotopelia was seen as the apex of this violence, and the name itself of the PCPA indicated that the raison d’être of the movement was to resist police violence against the people. In an introduction to the Lalgarh movement, Sanhati editors wrote: ‘it is not that police repression was new to the people of the area and was a result of the land mine blast; they have borne the brunt of police terror for a decade or more’.43 In the interviews, accounts of violence did emerge, but they were always related to the political dynamics between mainstream parties that fought to establish their influence over the territory through violence. In fact, mainstream parties armed themselves by establishing their own militias or allying themselves with the Maoists. The clash in Keshpur, a locality in the district of West Midnapore, at the end of the 1990s, was mentioned by both an activist and a few local villagers as an event that escalated the violence in Junglemahal long before the movement in Lalgarh. At that time, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was in power in West Bengal, in the Left Front coalition. The Trinamool Congress Party (TMC) was formed in 1998, and sought to challenge the control of the CPM over the Keshpur area. The battle for political power was fought by the mercenary militias hired by the two parties and it resulted in a bloodbath: more than a hundred people were killed, thousands of houses were looted and burnt down.44 The CPM, according to these interviewees, turned to the Maoists for help

43 Sanhati, Letters from Lalgarh, 2. 44 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Keshpur-Memories-smoulder-in-kil

ling-fields/articleshow/4465783.cms Accessed 29 July 2016. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Fresh-violence-in-Keshpur/articleshow/230 99252.cms Accessed 29 July 2016.

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in the fight. After having re-established its control, however, the political alliances changed again, and the ruling party started repressing the Maoists.45 A Kolkata-based activist pointed out that, in order to chase the Maoists, the police started entering the forests, randomly arresting and beating up villagers with the excuse of being Maoists. In his interview, he traced this violence as the root of the Lalgarh movement. Most of the interviews with local villagers did not support this point. In most of the villages, including in Lalgarh and its surroundings, people said that they did not experience police violence before the movement in 2009. However, I gathered accounts of indiscriminate police violence against the local villages in some specific pockets, which could be what the activist referred to. One of these areas was a remote place near the border with Jharkhand, where the villagers had experienced the presence of the Maoists since the 1980s, although at that time they did not carry weapons and were perceived as human rights’ defenders. An adivasi from this place belonging to the Munda tribe explained in his interview that locally the violence had started escalating since the 1990s around the time of the clashes in Keshpur: After 1992 they brought weapons, and ordinary people saw weapons for the first time. They showed how to use them, and said we need to fight a war against the police.

As the war escalated in this area, according to the narrative of this villager, the police unleashed terror against the people, to the point that many villagers had to escape and were displaced: People escaped to the forest, where they had no food. Fearing the police, people could not come back home and died in the forest.

The village of Amlasole became famous for starvation deaths. The death of five people in 2004 from starvation was reported by the media nationwide, and civil society criticised the government for the failure in

45 On the Maoists’ role in political clashes between CPM and TMC also see: Bhattacharya, Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India’s Maoist Movement, 9–11. Swati Sengupta, Out of War: Voices of Surrendered Maoists (Speaking Tiger, 2016), 116–118.

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developing the region and called for more action in the area.46 The dominant discourse, unlike the narratives from local villagers, did not link the deaths in the area to police violence. However, in their interviews, the local villagers described how they experienced the state through indiscriminate violence, and this exacerbated the socio-economic problems at the local level, leading to displacement and death. Elsewhere, some of the people I interviewed experienced harassment by the police or the ruling party militia (the Harmad Bahini) if they were affiliated with an opposition party, such as the Jharkhand Party, or the TMC. Therefore, this violence was directed towards discouraging any political activity outside of the ruling party. The issue of political oppression came up frequently in the interviews with the local people. Many of them reported in their interviews that they were arrested arbitrarily, beaten up, tortured, and framed for false cases. Framing false cases was a serious issue for poor people, because even if the verdict of the Court ended up in their favour, attending the trials was too costly for them. Furthermore, in many cases, people were arrested or beaten with the excuse of being Maoists when they were suspected of supporting an opposition party: I used to have some friends with whom I used to hang out, they were with the Jharkhand Party, so it is a party opposed to the Communists. In 2008 they sent me to jail for this reason, that I was not a sympathizer of the Communists. I was with the Jharkhand Party faction of Noren Hazda since 1984. I was persecuted, arrested six times. I was a Panchayat member in 2008.

The experiences of state repression prior to the Lalgarh movement that emerged from the interviews with the villagers were therefore different from what the urban-based activists described in their narratives. Random indiscriminate police violence in the villages, as described by the activists, did happen according to the local people interviewed, but only in restricted areas far away from Lalgarh. State violence before the movement was indeed perceived as an important issue that affected the lives of many local people. However, in the narratives of the villagers, this violence was always understood as related 46 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Five-starvation-deaths-in-Bengaltown/articleshow/771249.cms Accessed 25 January 2016.

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to political dynamics. In fact, some of the local interviewees traced the roots of the escalation of violence in the area with the growth of the TMC and the relationship between the TMC and the Maoists. For example, one of the interviewees said: Initially, when the Maoists came, it was a small thing. They were looking for someone at the opposition. They found the TMC. The TMC, too, was looking for someone at the opposition to defeat the Communists. So when they created these Committees, it assumed a much bigger dimension.

The Maoists and PCPA all strongly critiqued the violent politics of the state, and the Maoists characterised the Lalgarh movement as a political struggle for political rights47 ; nonetheless, the depiction in the accounts of the activists of the local adivasis as innocent victims of indiscriminate police attacks depoliticises the views and political action of the local people. Several of the local people interviewed had sophisticated understanding of the relationship between politics and violence at the local level, and in the analysis, they discussed the roles played by all the main political actors in escalating the violence, rather than just one side. This finding is similar to Mac Ginty and Firchow in their Everyday Peace Indicators project, although they comment that the transcripts were apolitical.48 In fact, these authors point out that these bottomup narratives were political in the sense that they connected with issues of power and inequality, but also apolitical in the sense that they were largely nonpartisan, they did not reflect the narratives of parties of political lines.49 In Lalgarh, though many of the interviewees did actively support a party, in their interviews they tended to be critical of all the different sides, rather than constructing black and white narratives. The issue of state violence was indeed a significant in people’s narratives, and people talked about it to explain the complex dynamics of violent politics that involved different actors and led to a situation where people were not allowed to vote or participate in politics without risking their freedom and safety.

47 CPI (Maoist), “CPI (Maoist) Message to the People of Lalgarh.” 48 Mac Ginty and Firchow, “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Narratives of Peace and

Conflict.” 49 Ibid.

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From the Movement to Violent Conflict The Formation of the PCPA: Whose Movement? After the events in Chotopelia, the movement started. According to the reports from media and activists, in the following days the local villagers cut trees and blockaded the roads at crucial points in order to stop the police from entering the villages, and for days, they continued gathering in big numbers at a place called Dalilpur Chowk.50 As I mentioned earlier, initially the Santhali leaders used their traditional system to spread the news about Chotopelia and call the people to unite. On 8 November, however, a new organisation, the Pulish Santrash Birodhi Janasadharaner Committee, (People’s Committee against Police Atrocities, PCPA) was formed, while the traditional tribal organisation was ‘discredited’.51 New leaders were selected: Chhatradhar Mahato was chosen as the spokesperson of the new organisation, Lalmohan Tudu as president, and Sidhu Soren as the secretary. The spokesperson of the PCPA, Chattradhar Mahato, declared that the new organisation was open to everyone, to people from all political groups but political banners were not allowed. In an interview, he stated: This is an apolitical organisation, because representatives of all the political parties active in this area were in this Committee. This Committee was formed by everyone. Of all the 13 demands brought up by the committee, none of them was political.

Thus, the PCPA emphasised the apolitical character of the movement in its discourse. The activists interviewed also stressed the fact that in the PCPA there were members of a variety of political parties such as the Trinamool Congress, various factions of the Jharkhand Party, the Congress, the ruling CPM, Maoist activists, tribal leaders, and intellectuals from metropolitan areas. The new organisation, therefore, represented itself as an inclusive people’s movement, open to everyone. This argument was used to answer questions about the relationship between the PCPA and the Maoists. Most of the urban-based activists addressed this question in their interviews. Some of them argued that the movement started spontaneously as a people’s movement, and only later 50 Sanhati, “Lalgarh Movement—Mass Uprising of Adivasis in West Bengal.” 51 Bhattacharyya, “Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram.”

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the Maoists took its leadership and diverted it. They also stressed the fact that, in the initial stages, the movement was peaceful, and no violence had taken place. On the contrary, others argued that a movement like this could not have started without the leadership of the Maoists, and that the PCPA was their frontal organisation. Some activists from Kolkata told me that the different opinions on this question had created tensions between urban-based pro-Lalgarh activists: So that way, in the Lalgarh Mancha there were tensions between groups or individuals. Ok fine, what if the Maoists were behind the movement? For us, fine, they can be behind the PCPA, but they should not dictate the PCPA. That was the main difference, I felt at that time.

The dilemma, for some of them, was what their stance should be if there was a possibility that the Maoists were behind the movement. This question was so meaningful for the activists because, to them, on this depended the construction of the movement as a legitimate people’s organisation driven by genuine grievances, or the expression of a violent organisation with a political agenda. The answer, for them, was a yes or no; it could not lie somewhere in the middle. The idea that the Maoists were dictating the movement seemed to undermine the possibility of people’s agency altogether. This question is related to a broader debate in the literature on the nature of poor people and peasant’s consciousness, agency, and leadership. In the literature on peasant’s movements, the peasantry is often considered as a ‘pre-political’ society that does not yet develop a mature political consciousness, and therefore has no ideology, programme, and organisation.52 Some of the interviewees who participated in the initial gatherings of the movement told me that they did see Maoist leaders among the facilitators of the initial meetings. Even then, the people who participated in it had different perceptions about the movement. In fact, from what emerged in the interviews with the local people, many of them were not aware of the presence of the Maoists initially, and they thought that it was a movement for change. For example, a local Santhali explained that initially the people did not know that the movement was led by the Maoists; they were told that it was a movement for their rights, therefore they supported it: 52 Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India.

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At that time, people didn’t know that they were Maoists, so they all said yes. They didn’t tell so to the people. They said it was a movement for the people, especially for low-class people, meaning people from low economic classes, because these are the people who suffered the most. In this way, when they decided to do the movement, they did not call it a Maoist movement; they called it a people’s movement.

What mattered for the people was what they knew and experienced at that particular time. Whether or not the Maoists were behind the movement did not change the reality of people’s experience and agency. In fact, many of the interviewees talked about their own role in the movement; thus, to them, it was their movement. Different subjective versions of truth, therefore, coexisted. Furthermore, for many of the interviewees, the knowledge and perception of the movement was not fixed and changed over time. Narratives of Peaceful Resistance and Narratives of Violence After its formation, the PCPA organised a series of resistance strategies and actions that responded to three discursive functions. First, the PCPA sought to define and regulate its relationship with the people it wanted to lead and represent through a process of institutionalisation. Institutions can influence people’s formation of preferences, beliefs, and decision-making,53 which mattered to an organisation such as the PCPA. The newly formed organisation also sought to construct a code of principles and values. The construction of a shared set of societal beliefs helps to define goals and requirements, strengthen the legitimacy of the social system, and justify the action of leaders.54 Finally, in order to pursue its aims, the PCPA was involved in a process of negotiation with the state. A negotiation process involves an exchange of communication through the construction of meaning—or discourse. Through its resistance actions, the PCPA constructed discursive statements targeting specifically the state. The wider public outside Junglemahal was also an important audience, as it could support the PCPA in different ways by strengthening its discourse and influence the state.

53 Arjona, “Wartime Institutions.” 54 Bar-Tal, “Introduction: Conflict and Social Psychology.”

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The first step taken by the PCPA, the drafting of a charter of demands, addressed all these functions.55 The charter defined specific requests to the state, a starting point for beginning negotiations with it. At the same time, the chart was a statement of what the movement was about, its agenda and justification. The demands focused on ensuring justice for the violence committed by the police, by ending episodes of police violence and harassment, providing reparation for the victims, both symbolic and monetary, and limiting the presence of the police in the villages. Through these demands, the PCPA represented itself as a promoter of people’s justice against the violent oppression of the state. In fact, the emphasis on the demand for justice for the victims in Chotopelia was very powerful, as they represented symbols of oppression and evoked strong emotions. One of the principles constructed in the charter was, as I discussed above, the promotion of adivasi culture. Furthermore, several activists argued in their interviews that the charter demonstrated that the movement was nonviolent, as it did not demand violent punishment for the police. The leaders of the PCPA, in this initial stage, often pointed out that they had been enforcing only nonviolent strategies of resistance, and they had been able to ensure peace, as opposed to the violence perpetrated and attempted by the state. The argument about nonviolence was often used by activists arguing that the PCPA was different from the Maoists: The PCPA came, the Janogoner committee:56 PCPA was also people’s committee, and it was mostly people’s movement without any firearms. In that procession the tribal people were with their traditional arms, but there were no firearms used, mostly it was a peaceful movement, there was no murder case, there was no burning case, people just demanded the police officer should be punished. This is the first time the Maoist came with arms and they showed it.

The resistance strategies implemented at this stage, in fact, were based on noncooperation with the police and administration, recalling the Satyagraha model. In order to keep the police out of the villages, the

55 For the full charter of demands, see: Bhattacharya, Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India’s Maoist Movement, 14–15. 56 The PCPA was also commonly known as Janogoner Committee, which means people’s committee. The interviewee refers to the incident of the burning of the Pandey’s house as the first violent incident led by the Maoists, as I discuss below.

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roads were cut and blockaded with trees at strategic points. The villagers were instructed to boycott the police and the administration, for example, by refusing to sell them food, water, and other goods.57 Through these strategies, the local villagers managed to keep the police out of their villages. On some occasions, the crowds chased the police away.58 The PCPA also continued organising processions, rallies, and bandhs (strikes). Through this model, the PCPA also promoted an idea of people’s autonomy and self-rule. In January, the PCPA decided to form villagelevel committees, which were to be formed by ten local villagers, five men and five women, with the aim of addressing local issues.59 The activists frequently described the formation of these committees as an innovative model of grassroots direct democracy and gender equality.60 The discourse of gender equality was emphasised since the beginning of the movement. The PCPA organised women-only rallies, and pictures of adivasi women carrying traditional weapons have been used in the media as icons of the Lalgarh movement.61 A commitment to gender equality is also emphasised in the contemporary discourse of the Maoists, as Parashar and Shah point out.62 After its first draft of the charter of demands, the PCPA included the discourse of development as part of both its demands and plans. In fact, the PCPA also started implementing some development initiatives such as running health centres, building wells to provide drinking water, digging canals, and building roads.63 During this stage, the PCPA was increasingly acting as an alternative administration, but at the same time, it engaged with negotiations with the state. Although the narratives of the activists tended to emphasise the resistance side of the PCPA’s action, under the

57 Sanhati, “Lalgarh Movement—Mass Uprising of Adivasis in West Bengal”; Bhattacharyya, “Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram.” 58 Sanhati, “Lalgarh Movement—Mass Uprising of Adivasis in West Bengal.” 59 Bhattacharyya, “Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram,” 26. 60 Ibid. 61 See, for example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8127869.stm Accessed

19 November 2017; https://southasiarev.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/india-a-detailedreport-from-lalgarh/ Accessed 19 November 2017. 62 Parashar and Shah, “(En)Gendering the Maoist Insurgency in India: Between Rhetoric and Reality.” 63 Bhattacharyya, “Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram.”

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leadership of Chhatradhar Mahato some compromises were successfully reached.64 Although in the narratives this phase often being depicted as a time of peaceful resistance, sporadic violent incidents from both sides started happening from December 2009, and escalated in the following months. A sharp change happened when, on 15 June 2009, the palatial house of a CPM leader, Anuj Pandey, was attacked and destroyed.65 Some of the activists told me in their interviews that this was a turning point for Lalgarh, because the media broadcasted this incident, and on this occasion, the Maoist leader Bikash told the press that the Maoists were leading the movement. Hence, they argued, from this point, the Lalgarh movement started being officially considered by the state as a Maoist struggle.66 The journalist Bhattacharya explained how the Maoist leader, Kishenjii, from this time, experimented with a propaganda war, during which he kept an open channel with the media and engaged in daily calls and conversations with journalists, activists, politicians, and prominent individuals.67 Hence, the Maoists sought very actively to influence the public discourse. In their discourse, the Maoists described the Lalgarh movement as ‘a truly armed mass movement that drew into it the entire masses of the area’.68 As the dominant discourses started seeing Lalgarh as a Maoist insurgency, the change in the discourse was reflected in the actions that followed. In the following days, the state launched Operation Lalgarh. Central forces were sent to Junglemahal to join the West Bengal police 64 For example, a compromise was reached on the issue of elections. See Sanhati, “Lalgarh Movement—Mass Uprising of Adivasis in West Bengal.” Bhattacharya, Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India’s Maoist Movement. 65 Sanhati, “Lalgarh Movement—Mass Uprising of Adivasis in West Bengal”; CPI (Maoist), “Our Aim is to Break CPM Shackles. Interview Given by the Zonal Committee Secretary of Communist Party of India (Maoist) for West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia Districts, Comrade Bikash to The Hindustan Times..”; Ray Title of Weblog. Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay, “Lalgarh Battle,” Frontline—India’s National Magazine 26, no. 14 (2009). 66 See also: Bhattacharya, Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India’s Maoist Movement, 23–28. 67 Ibid. 68 CPI (Maoist), “CPI (Maoist) Message to the People of Lalgarh,” in www.banned

thought.net (2009).

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in the effort against the Maoists.69 Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code was declared to prohibit the assembly of people, and in June 2009, the CPI-Maoist was banned in India as a terrorist organisation.70 Although the PCPA was not formally banned, many of its leaders and supporters were arrested or killed in the months that followed, and the organisation went underground. The spokesperson, Chhatradhar Mahato, was arrested in September 2009, and the President, Lalmohan Tudu, killed in February 2010.71 Things changed according to the narratives of the people, too. The role of the Maoists became more evident as they resisted the military operation by the state forces through violent means. As most of the local people described in their interviews, armed clashes, killings, and violent attacks happened daily during this time.

Peak and Decline of Violence In 2010 and early 2011, the conflict in Junglemahal escalated to its peak. The narratives from the different parties involved in the conflict become increasingly different from one another. Some include in their stories of the conflict meaningful events that are absent from the narratives of other actors, or they tell contrasting versions of the same events. These discrepancies in the narratives suggest that the discourse of these actors was acquiring more and more the characteristics of collective memory of conflict outlined by Bar-Tal, such as being more biased, selective, and distorted. Bar-Tal’s framework helps in our understanding of how these narratives are constructed in ways that meet the psychological needs of the group, such as justifying its actions, presenting its own group in a positive light and as victim of the opponent, and providing black and white pictures.72

69 Bhattacharyya, Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram—Update 1. 70 http://www.oneindia.com/2009/06/22/centre-bans-cpi-maoists-left-front-disagr

ees.html Accessed 17 October 2016. http://zeenews.india.com/news/nation/centre-dec lares-maoists-as-terrorists-cpm-differs_541260.html Accessed 17 October 2016. 71 Sanhati, “Lalgarh Movement—Mass Uprising of Adivasis in West Bengal.” 72 Bar-Tal, “Intergroup Conflicts and Their Resolution: A Social Psychological Perspec-

tive.”

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The Letters from Lalgarh written by the PCPA from March to September 2010 are a good example of the construction of conflict narratives in these terms. During this time, the access to the conflict areas was restricted, and therefore, the accounts of conflict available to the public were mostly those provided by the administration.73 The Letters challenged the official narratives on many specific incidents and provided alternative versions of the events, for example, in regards to the killings of civilians officially described as death of Maoists during ‘encounters’.74 The Letters bring to light many abuses from the state against the villagers, such as the violence committed during cordon and search operations, the disappearance and killing of people, the support provided by the police to informal militias, and the policy of sponsoring the arming of civilians against one another. 75 The PCPA actions, on the other hand, are always portrayed in a positive light, and framed as if they were completely supported by the local people. Although the PCPA repeatedly denied being a front organisation of the Maoists and stressed its own autonomy, there is no criticism against the CPI-Maoist in the Letters. All these issues raised in the Letters did emerge in the interviews with local villagers. However, the local people talked about how they suffered violence and coercion from both sides. For example, in a description of the conflict, a local villager said: We were living in terror. Sometimes the Harmads came, sometimes the Maobadi.76 So we were living in terror. I had to leave my home, too.

During this time, there was also increased resistance against the Maoists and the PCPA from the local people. This increased the divergence between the narratives of the people and the PCPA. For the PCPA leaders, the rumour that people were coming together to resist them was a conspiracy led by the CPM.77 The village of Radhanagar, close to the town of Jhargram, was the first to start resisting the Maoists openly, and the resistance then spread to other villages. In the interviews, some of

73 Sanhati, Letters from Lalgarh. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 In the villages, people referred to the Maoists as ‘Maobadi’. 77 Sanhati, Letters from Lalgarh, 127.

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the local people referred to Radhanagar as the place where the resistance against the Maoists started. They explained that the success in chasing the Maoists away gave people more confidence in resisting them in other villages too: The village next to Jhargram is Radhanagar. There the people protested, it was a big protest. […] From that place they started stopping the movement. Then slowly it stopped on all sides.

At the same time, both the PCPA narratives and the people’s narratives highlighted the intensification of the Harmads’ violence during this time. An event that was described as very meaningful by several of the interviewees, both activists and locals, was the massacre of unarmed civilians in the village of Netai at the hands of the Harmad Bahini in January 2011. This was described as an event that marked the peak of the CPM violence, but also the beginning of its end. The theme of Harmads’ violence became more visible in the dominant discourse as the Trinamool Congress became more involved in the fight. Its leader Mamata Banerjee openly declared the formation of an ‘anti-terror movement’ against the ‘CPM and its goons’.78 The Harmads, therefore, were now labelled as terrorists in the discourse of mainstream opposition parties. After the TMC was elected to power, it sought to erase this chapter from its narrative, and the leader Mamata Banerjee denied having had ties with the PCPA and the Maoists. Nonetheless, the relationship between the TMC and the Maoist has often been stressed in the interviews of the local people. Several of them explained that noticing the ties between the TMC and the Maoist significantly changed their perception of the conflict: At that time, people wanted change. To change this Communist government, the people made this Committee become strong. Mamata Banerjee had a meeting with Chhatradhar Mahato. In that moment I understood that Chhatradhar Mahato and Mamata Banerjee were together. I didn’t understand this before. She was the leader of the opposition. We understood that People’s Committee and Trinamool are together. Then they pushed the PCPA out and it became the Maoists’ Committee.

78 Ibid.; http://zeenews.india.com/news/west-bengal/mamata-announces-monthlong-anti-terror-movement_652516.html Accessed 20 October 2016.

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The majority of the interviewees, from all the different backgrounds, agreed that the election of the TMC and the appointment of Mamata Banerjee as the new Chief Minister of West Bengal in 2011 was a significant event that led to the end of the movement in Junglemahal. However, the views on how the TMC leader achieved a defeat of the Maoists in the area, and on the kind of ‘peace’ that emerged from this process, are diverse. In the edited volume, War and Peace in Junglemahal. People, State and the Maoists, scholars and activists focused on the failure of the peace process between the new state administration and the Maoists.79 Once elected, the new government led by Mamata Banerjee appointed a team of interlocutors to mediate peace talks with the Maoists and the PCPA.80 However, the talks reached a point of no return when the Maoist leader Kishenjii was killed by the police.81 After that, the team of interlocutors appointed by the government to mediate the peace talks resigned.82 While scholars and activists devoted much attention to the peace talks and discussed whether or not peace was achieved through them, the local villagers did not mention them at all in their narratives. Perhaps, this is not surprising since the local people had not been involved or considered as relevant interlocutors for these talks. Instead, the local people frequently mentioned two government policies that they identified as crucial steps through which Mamata ended the conflict in Junglemahal: the arrest and killing of many Maoist leaders including Kishenjii, and the surrender package. Some of the interviewees explained that the second was a successful move because the frustration of the local unemployed youth was a major cause of the degeneration of the conflict into a violent one, and offering jobs to the local youth as a part of the package was seen as an effective way to contain them: So she understood that she had to suppress these Maoists. She thought, if I give work to these young people, then the Maoists will no longer be able to find youth to recruit. So the movement stopped. 79 Biswajit Roy, “Editor’s Note,” in War and Peace in Junglemahal, ed. Biswajit Roy (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2012), 5. 80 Amit Bhadhuri, “Peace That Is More Dangerous Than War,” in War and Peace in Junglemahal, ed. Biswajit Roy (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2012). 81 Ibid. Chakrabarty, “Mamata, Maoists and ‘Peace’ Brokers.” 82 Ibid.

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Although the issue of youth frustration and unemployment is not central in the discourse of activists and academic explanations of the conflict in Lalgarh, it was a recurrent theme that emerged in the interviews with local villagers, and it was perceived as a meaningful explanation of the root causes of the conflict. From their perspective, therefore, the local people had different understandings of why the conflict started, evolved, and ended. They also had many specific ideas about what actions, policies, and practices would bring positive changes for the locals, and would help building sustainable peace, as I discuss in more detail in Chapter Eight.

Conclusion Different actors explained the onset, escalation, and decline of the conflict in Lalgarh differently. As I have discussed, the mainstream narratives of Lalgarh were significantly influenced by broader explanations of the Maoist conflict in India and the civil wars’ literature, in particular, as it was dominantly problematised in relation to macro-level structural factors such as tribal identity, alienation of land and forest resources, and state violence. These mainstream narratives about the conflict in Lalgarh tended to construct linear causal explanations of conflict, based on assumptions regarding people’s beliefs, identity, grievances, and behaviour, that were contradicted by people’s narratives of conflict. In Lalgarh, the discourses of local people that did not fit into these dominant linear explanations of conflict were excluded. For example, the emphasis on adivasi attachment to land and forest as main causes for the conflict was reflected in the construction of conflict narratives that depoliticised the local people as relevant actors. The perceptions of the adivasis who did not feel that the movement represented their culture, the villager who hoped that state projects would bring development opportunities, the locals who thought that party dynamics were the cause of all the violence, or the experiences of the people who resisted the PCPA, were all missing in the dominant narratives of conflict. Local people’s narratives about their own embodied experiences and actions were often significantly different. In fact, the villagers did not even talk in their interviews about most of the issues that other actors emphasised. Local people’s narratives tended to provide more complex, diverse, and shifting understandings of the social dynamics of conflict.

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Linear explanations of the conflict overlooked this diversity of experiences and perceptions, the coexistence of different subjective truths, and the contested realities. When divergent voices are excluded from dominant discourses, including in the academic discourse, they become silenced. Importantly, as we have seen in this chapter through the lenses of the case of the PCPA, discourses become dominating or silenced through the dynamic relationships of power between actors expressed in institutionalisation processes, policies, and practices. As a resistance movement, the PCPA was indeed very impressive. They managed to keep the state and the police out of a significant territory, initially through a nonviolent strategy, and experimented alternative solutions to address local people’s problems. Although the discourse of the PCPA did not necessarily reflect people’s concerns, many of their local actions did show that they attempted to create a system that would involve the community and matters that mattered to local women and men. Nonetheless, even an actor such as the PCPA that is itself subjugated by other more powerful actors may alienate and silence voices through the process of the construction of discourse in their names, and perhaps, this ultimately led to their fall. The pressure coming from the involvement of violent actors and the escalation of violent conflict contributed to a more polarised stance by the PCPA, which also involved more silencing and alienating dissident voices that could have otherwise contributed to support the movement and resistance action in diverse and perhaps more powerful ways. This could be a crucial learning experience, and future movements could build on the lessons learnt in Lalgarh to make more room for including all voices and make the most of people’s resistance.

CHAPTER 6

Experiencing Conflict

Introduction When external actors such as scholars, activists, the media, and the state, talked about Lalgarh, they usually described the conflict as driven by the grievances of the local adivasi population. Local people’s own narratives and understandings of the conflict, however, were often different from the dominant ones: they had different perspectives on which factors and events brought to the onset of the conflict, the escalation of violence, the decline, and the socio-political changes in the aftermath of the conflict. The narratives of the local people were different because they described something that they experienced directly, and affected their lives. They were the actors in their own stories. ‘Conflict’ and ‘grievance’ were not abstract concepts to them, but the reality of everyday life. The next two chapters take a closer look at the perspectives of the local people. Sylvester argues that ‘a key characteristic of war in practice is that it engages and acts on bodies’,1 and that therefore, war needs to be theorised and understood from the point of view of experience. This is what this analysis is about: it starts from the body and explores the meaning of embodied experiences of conflict through people’s own narratives. Almost all the individual and collective interviews conducted in the villages made references to embodied experiences. Except for a couple 1 Sylvester, Experiencing War: 9.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Carrer, How People Respond to Violence, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11342-0_6

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of people who were not in Junglemahal at the time of the conflict or simply focused on other issues in their interviews, the majority of the people were affected by the conflict physically, emotionally, and through changes to their socio-economic situation. This was something that the local people shared, no matter their caste, tribe, gender, age, or socioeconomic condition. Local villagers, administration officers, policemen, Maoists, and activists, all talked about how they experienced the conflict through their bodies. I identified four main dimensions of people’s experience of conflict: the physical experience, the emotional experience, the impact of conflict on people’s socio-economic conditions, and gendered experiences.

Injured Bodies and Discourse As it could be expected, people talked about violence in their narratives. As we will see, violence is not necessarily just physical, but here we will start the analysis from stories of direct, physical violence, and how it affected the people who talked about them. These stories give a sense of what it was like to be there, but they also show that incidents of violence were not all the same to them. The story of the Lalgarh movement itself starts with the story of two injured body parts: an eye and a womb. The injured bodies of these women were mentioned in some of the interviews with local villagers, always emphasising the fact that ‘it all started from there’: A woman in a village called Chotopelia was tortured by the police and lost her eye, and another woman who was pregnant lost her baby as the police kicked her in her tummy. Everything started from there. The police tortured their women, that’s why they formed this committee. They made a pregnant woman lose her child, and pierced the eye of another woman with a gun.

The injured bodies of these two women represented the symbols of police violence on the adivasis. They were not the first and only bodies to be injured, but this was felt to be a breaking point, something that could no longer be tolerated. They were more than passive bodies being injured. The women of Chotopelia were the first to stand up against the injustice of the police, through their bodies. As a group of them told me in their interview, they encircled the man that the police wanted to detain,

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so that he could not be taken. For this reason, the story of resistance in Lalgarh starts from these bodies, rather than from the mass protests a few days later. The bodies of the women of Chotopelia became symbols of oppression as well as resistance and were among thousands of others who experienced it. The narratives about killings and injuries were by far the most dominant embodied experiences told in the interviews. The analysis of these narratives gives a sense of the local-level dynamics of violence and how the violence affected people’s lives during and after the conflict. The stories of violence were not limited to the violent incident, but also extended to what happened before and after, who was the victim and their relationship to the speaker, and what it was like to witness it. The main cause of injuries, for the people interviewed, was the violence perpetrated by the state. Most of the people got injured as a result of being beaten by the police or the Harmads, and sometimes they also got injured while running from them. In many different villages, the interviewees said that the police used to come and beat everyone up indiscriminately, trying to get information from them. Therefore, as soon as the people of a village heard that the police were coming, they all ran. The injuries were often very severe, so that many people had to spend a lot of money to get cured, and some had permanent disabilities as a consequence. The Maoist violence appeared to be less indiscriminate but more lethal. The form of Maoist violence that the locals witnessed the most were executions of individuals who were accused of being ‘enemies’ of the people because they belonged to a corrupt political party that robbed the people. This violence was made deliberately visible. In some villages, as the interviewees explained, the Maoists made public lists of individuals to kill before executing them or sent letters as notifications. In other places, the interviewees had to be present at the trials of individuals whose faults were named in front of the villagers in so-called ‘people’s courts’. The accused were beaten in front of everyone, and later executed: In my village at this meeting they beat up the Communist leaders in front of everyone. A few days later, they killed the leader of the village and his right hand.

Some of the interviewees also talked about incidents where the Maoists killed someone they knew simply for refusing to cooperate with them.

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For example, individuals were killed for refusing to give them money, or teachers were threatened and killed as they refused to close their school during a strike: They dragged out the teacher from the classroom full of kids and shot him in front of everyone, and then they left.

The bodies of those who were killed because they did not cooperate were made as visible as possible. Interviewees from different places told me about how bodies or body parts were brought to places where people could see them. The display of violence and dead bodies was a major theme emerging from the interviews. Similar to the findings of Zech and Kelly, in Lalgarh human bodies were used to deliver a message to an audience.2 As anthropologists that looked at the social meaning of violence often point out, the social actions that constitute violence can be understood as performance for an audience, or a meaningful ritual.3 Violence had different strategic, political, and economic functions, but at the same time, violence was discourse. The meaning of violence, for the people who interpreted it, was deeper than the strategic messages that armed groups sought to deliver. For example, some of them commented that human life had become ‘cheap’ during the conflict, and to describe the feeling used metaphors in which human beings were compared to animals: At that time, people’s life had no value, it was like the value of sheep or chickens in the market. We were like animals, you can kill a cow in front of another and the other won’t say anything. We were the same: we could be killed right here and we couldn’t make a sound. I was so scared that I got sick. […]. They used to leave parts of dead bodies inside bags by the river.

2 T. Zech Steven and M. Kelly Zane, “Off With Their Heads: The Islamic State and Civilian Beheadings,” Journal of Terrorism Research 6, no. 2 (2015). 3 Zulaika, Basque Violence: Metaphor and Sacrament; Johnston, “Ritual, Strategy, and Deep Culture in the Chechen National Movement.”; Jeffrey S. Juris, “Violence Performed and Imagined,” Critique of Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2005).

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In these interviews, the use of metaphors is a way of expressing what cannot be fully expressed: the pain of the body.4 For Scarry, violence silences bodies, empties them of humanity and cultural content.5 Thus, this represents an implicit profound critique of the violence perpetrated by the armed force during the conflict. Human dignity was not simply lost; it was stolen. These metaphors were a powerful element in local people’s discourse. People felt that their lives were given little value and could be easily disposed of by the armed groups. This perception was in sharp contrast to the justification of violence as a means to end people’s oppression used by both the opposing sides in the conflict. The loss of human life that people experienced did not come only from the Maoist assassinations. The fight between the two parties for the control of territory—Maoists and state forces—happened close to villages and resulted in victims from all sides, including the villagers living there. The state forces were reported to use excessive violence with the excuse of fighting the Maoists, causing casualties among the civilians. For example, some of the interviewees took part in demonstrations where the police used gunfire against the masses, and this resulted in the death of people from their villages. Furthermore, some of them reported incidents where the police assassinated people and claimed to have killed them during encounters: The morning after, at dawn, my neighbour thought that the police was gone, and it was now safe to go and till the land. So he left with plough and buffalos. The police found him and killed him. Before killing him they took his picture with five or six rifles. They killed him with a false case. The previous night three policemen had died. He was a normal, simple guy.

The massacre in the village of Netai was another episode that represented a breaking point in the story of the Lalgarh movement. Here, the Harmad Bahini opened fire against a group of unarmed villagers who had come to request them to stop taking their youth for military training. As a result, they killed nine people and injured more. For the interviewees, the violence on the bodies of the Netai villagers symbolised the peak of state 4 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 5 2ibid., 118.

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violence and the complicity of the police, and again, it was something that could not be tolerated. The interviewees who talked about Netai, including some of the injured, agreed that this episode marked the end of the CPM in Junglemahal, because they had crossed their limits and the people would not tolerate them any longer. Have you heard about the genocide in Netai? After the genocide in Netai the Harmads started retreating. The people were unhappy about this fact, and the elections were near.

In summary, injured bodies were important symbols and metaphors in local people’s discourse. In these meaningful narratives, the victims were usually active actors in the process of performing a political action. Violence had a discursive function. However, its perpetrators and audience attributed different meanings to it. Furthermore, violence was meaningful because of how it affected the life of the speaker, their families, and the members of the community. The meaning and relevance of these experiences of violence can be better understood in the context of the narrator’s attitude towards the violence, and the broader physical, emotional, and social aspects of those experiences.

Local people’s Understanding of Violence A further step into the analysis is to look not only at the description of violence, but also why and in what context the speaker narrated a specific experience of violence. The results suggest that the local people usually narrated their personal experiences to express a political point. The interviewees made more references to real-life experiences when they expressed a complex argument and illustrated dynamic changes in their perceptions of other actors’ behaviour. More specifically, the narratives on conflict experiences were, with very rare exceptions, part of arguments on coercion. Most of the interviewees gave examples of violence and coercion perpetrated by different actors—the Maoists, the police, the Harmads, or the central forces—but each of them emphasised the coercion perpetrated by only one of these actors. The local people attributed different meanings to the different forms of violence and coercion that they witnessed. Interestingly, their explanations of violence were often similar to established theories. For example, the people consistently described the violence perpetrated by the Maoists

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as selective political violence targeting individuals identified as oppressors. Many people understood the reasons behind these killings as a good cause. Some of them thought that killing these individuals was a necessary evil. Others did not agree with the violence per se, but considered the Maoists as a principled group of activists: The Maobadi did not want to win in a democratic way. They wanted to win with the guns. The people did not want this. That’s why now there are no more Maobadi. […] Initially when the Maoists shot the Communists, we were fine with it. I mean… it was good that the bad people would go. The Maobadi were the cry of suffering people, the weak, the poor. But there were poor people who worked under their flag (CPM), so they had been terminated. The Maobadi were the help of the poor, they did not do any harm to them. Perhaps they harmed someone who carried their flag (of the CPM) or helped them. I do not define this as bad behaviour of the Maobadi against the people.

This perception of the Maoists is close to Weinstein’s definition of ‘activist’ organisations. According to Weinstein’s theory, activist armed groups tend to recruit high-commitment individuals drawing on social endowments rather than attracting them with the promise of short-term material benefits.6 Thus, activist groups are likely to be able to discipline the use of force selectively. The interviewees also understood that one strategic function of the Maoist violence was deterring defection. In Kalyvas’ control-collaboration theory, deterring violence and maximising collaboration is the main function of violence in civil war.7 Many interviewees pointed out that the Maoists killed individuals who refused to cooperate with them, or were suspected of cooperating with the police. A recurring theme in people’s narratives was that some innocents died because of opportunistic violence. In the interviews, this violence was frequently described as something immoral. The interviewees identified two causes for this violence. First, they suggested that local individuals had denounced or killed other individuals to settle personal scores. The practice of denunciation, or intimate violence, is again an important factor

6 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence: 9. 7 Stathis, “Micro-Level Studies of Violence in Civil War: Refining and Extending the

Control-Collaboration Model.”; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War.

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in Kalyvas’ theory. For Kalyvas, at the local level, private and political violence overlap.8 Second, the interviewees often attributed the incidents of opportunistic violence to the recruitment of individuals attracted by the opportunity to profit through the use of violence in the Maoist ranks. Some of the interviewees argued that these people were not ‘real’ Maoists; the Maoist leaders were not able to control the behaviour of these opportunistic recruits when the violent conflict escalated: From what I know, those who were really Maobadi, they didn’t do these kind of things. But their friends, let’s say, those who came later, they did it.

Therefore, the local people perceived a change in the Maoist organisation from activist to opportunistic due to the violent escalation of the conflict. People’s reading of the dynamics of violence fits once again in Weinstein’s theory. For Weinstein, although armed groups’ strategies tend to persist, shifts in the organisation from activist to opportunistic may happen following disruptive shocks.9 Moreover, in relation to violence for ‘greed’ or personal profit, the importance of the economic functions of violence is well-documented in the civil wars literature.10 For example, David Keen links economic incentives to violence. Keen’s list of economic incentives in war includes activities that have been widely reported in the interviews, such as pillage, extortion of protection money and resources, and exploitation of labour.11 Bhattacharya’s narrative of Lalgarh from the perspective of the Maoist leader Kishenjii shows that there was some truth in local people’s perception that opportunistic violence often happened outside the knowledge and control of senior Maoist cadres. In fact, Bhattacharya talks about the

8 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War: 363. 9 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. 10 See: David Keen and Studies International Institute for Strategic, The economic

functions of violence in civil wars, vol. 320 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998); Berdal and Keen, “Violence and Economic Agendas in Civil Wars: Some Policy Implications.”; Keen, Complex emergencies; Collier and Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War.”. 11 Keen and International Institute for Strategic, The economic functions of violence in civil wars, 320.

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Maoist leader’s anger once he learns about the practice of misusing the Maoist name for extortion and personal profit, and attempted to establish channels of communication with the people in order to learn about their complaints.12 All the interviewees unanimously perceived the Harmad Bahini as an opportunistic group. As the armed wing of the ruling party, the Harmads were an informal militia, but at the same time, benefited from the protection of the state and could act with impunity. Its members profited both by working for the CPM party, and by extorting money and resources from the villagers. Hence, their violence had political targets, but it was widely indiscriminate. The negative attitude towards the Harmads’ violence had no exception in the interviews, not even among the police officers interviewed, who confirmed that the group had the protection of the government, and that as police they had to comply. The non-lethal violence perpetrated by the police was very indiscriminate during the conflict, and the local people understood that its main function was to gather information about the Maoists. This was confirmed by the police officers interviewed. They explained that, particularly during the initial phase of the conflict when they lacked resources, control, and cooperation in the villages, they relied on coercive measures to tackle the Maoists. The police behaviour here confirms Kalyvas’ argument that indiscriminate violence is likely where precise information is unavailable13 : Incumbent indiscriminate violence usually takes place in the context of military operations known as ‘mopping up’, ‘comb’, ‘cordon and search’, ‘search and destroy’, or ‘scorched earth’ campaigns, that seek to encircle and liquidate insurgents and undercut an insurgency’s civilian basis.14

In the narratives, this strategic violence was described as something that caused great suffering to the people during the conflict, but it was not emphasised as a morally wrong behaviour. Similar to Stoll’s findings in Guatemala,15 many local villagers felt that it was because of the Maoists that they were exposed to police retaliation. 12 Bhattacharya, Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India’s Maoist Movement. 13 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War. 14 Ibid., 149. 15 Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala.

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The interviewees who did emphasise police harassment and violence did so as part of a narrative on state oppression and political violence. This violence targeted the political opposition to the ruling party through violence, false cases, and killings framed as ‘encounters’ before, during, and after the conflict. This analysis shows that people’s understandings of violence are, in a way, close to micro-level theories of violence in the civil wars literature. In the interviews, ordinary people provided sophisticated descriptions of strategic patterns and organisational matters and differentiated between political and private functions of violence. What the theories do not grasp is that, for the people who experience violent conflict, not all the violence is the same. It mattered to them who was killed, injured, or taken away, and why. As I discussed above, one specific incident could be more meaningful than a great number of others in people’s discourses. Individuals make sense of the conflict through their own meaningful experiences. They constructed complex and shifting categories of good and evil, innocence and guilt, and, through those moral categories, they judged the behaviour of other actors. If civilian attitudes, as Kalyvas argues, are too complex to observe,16 I suggest that exploring people’s discourse provides an insightful glimpse into them. Moreover, as theories of violence tend to focus only on direct violence, often only lethal violence, they overlook the fact that there is a lot more to violent conflict than killings. Importantly, in the interviews, people stressed coercion more than direct violence per se. Coercion, in fact, was the most dominant theme that emerged from the analysis of the interviews with local people in terms of the number of references and number of interviews that referred to it. It was the core point of a great number of interviews. The threat of violence was the means through which coercion was exercised, and, therefore, it was always part of it. However, there were other ways in which people experienced coercion in their physical, emotional, and social everyday life during the conflict. These factors were central to people’s discourses and their core arguments about coercion.

16 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War: 90–101.

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Everyday Embodied Experiences Apart from the direct consequences of direct violence on bodies such as injuries and death, there were other ways through which people experienced the conflict physically in their everyday lives. The analysis of the interviews with the local people shows that certain dimensions of these experiences were very common, and many people stressed their importance. A frequent theme was the sudden interruption of daily activities. Many interviewees described how they frequently had to suddenly interrupt their meals or sleep, to escape from violence: At that time, we couldn’t even eat. When the police came, we had to run. We went through very hard days. For example, we were sitting and eating, and the police came, and we had to run holding the plate in the forest or in the fields. Someone carried the plate, someone left it half eaten, someone ran with small children.

Running was particularly difficult for elderly people, or families with small children. The conditions in which they had to run and hide in the forest, fields, or crossing a river, were particularly harsh. Some of the interviewees had to spend the nights sleeping outdoors, either in the forest or open fields, sometimes under heavy rains: We suffered a lot. We had to cross the river with the water to our throats to run from the police. My nephew was sleeping wearing a gamcha.17 When they came, he run leaving the gamcha, and he hid under the water the whole night. He held his breath and lifted his head to breathe from time to time and then went back inside. For the fear, his hands and feet were completely paralysed and his vocal cords were blocked.

On the other hand, the conflict physically affected people’s everyday life by restricting their movements and forcing them to stay at home. Being unable to move freely, either because of the risks, because it was imposed, or because the roads were blocked, was perceived by several

17 A gamcha is a very thin traditional cotton towel; men also wear it wrapped around the waist.

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interviewees as the main symptom of the atmosphere of terror and coercion during the conflict: You can’t speak anything, you can’t go from here to there after 5 o’clock. You can’t move. Everywhere you are questioned. When we went out to the market or to Kolkata, we were not sure we would come back. At least, after the Jouto Bahini came, we could stand outside somewhere. Otherwise, before it was impossible.

Another very common experience stressed by the interviewees was being coerced to go far away for demonstrations, rallies, and different kinds of actions or being allocated duties and jobs. Many of them had to walk for miles: We personally went there. We went to Mamata’s meeting. We went from here, walking 9 or 10 kilometres. They took us to Jhargram hospital to do a deputation. We had to occupy it and sit there to force the doctors to treat the Maoist who had been wounded. They wanted to coerce the doctors to do this. Another time we went to Jhargram police station to chase them away. They put the ordinary people at the front, and they stood at the sides or at the back.

The actions that people were asked to perform were often risky. For example, they were instructed to loot and destroy the properties of political leaders, occupy and protest in front of state buildings or police stations, sit on train tracks to stop trains, or undertake military training. Some of the embodied experiences that the people described in the interviews were a result of socio-economic structures before, during, and after the movement. Some of the pre-existing conditions that physically affected the people as a result of structural violence were the lack of food, drinking water, health care, and basic infrastructures such as roads. Although food deprivation was a theme that the local people frequently brought up to explain the causes of the movement, only four of the interviewees personally experienced deprivation of food and drinking water before the movement. During the movement, food deprivation was much more common. Several people said that they struggled to find food to eat during that time, and that they spent entire days without any food. This was reported by villagers, but also Maoists and police officers. There were also days during which the Maoists did not allow the people to eat, as a form of

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protest. In contrast, some people said that after the conflict they could benefit from new services enforced by the new government. As a result, cheap rice had become available, more drinking water facilities had been installed, and some infrastructure work had started. In summary, the narratives of embodied experiences during the conflict highlighted issues that strongly affected local people’s everyday life. The dimensions highlighted stressed the harshness of everyday life during the conflict, the obstacles to carrying on essential everyday activities and movement, and the coercion to perform other activities. These factors were considered important for many of the local people who experienced the conflict, though they are not usually captured in research or dominant narratives.

Emotions All the embodied experiences described so far were physical as well as psychological experiences. The narratives of personal experiences in the interviews often give a sense of the intense and complex emotions that the speakers sought to communicate. Sometimes, the interviewees found it difficult to verbally describe what they experienced and felt; they could not communicate the pain they went through18 : I really tell you, I cannot make you understand how we went through those days, how it was.

Whether emotions were explicitly communicated or implicit, the narratives were emotional. I believe that narratives are necessarily emotional, as communicating emotion is one of their main functions. Emotions are not arbitrary or irrational individual responses; on the contrary, as Fierke argues, ‘an emotion is often a rational expression of value within a relationship’, and emotion ‘expresses a relationship between feeling and value’.19 In fact, in the interviews, emotions were triggered not only by physical experiences, but also by people’s values, beliefs, and their shifting perception of what was happening. 18 Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. 19 K.M Fierke, “Human Dignity, Basal Emotion and a Global Emotionology,” in

Emotions, Politics, and War, ed. Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory (Oxford: Routledge, 2015), 46–47.

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Emotions, therefore, are extremely important to understand how people make sense of the social dynamics of violent conflict and their actions, although they have not had much attention in the literature on the micro-level dynamics of violent conflict and people’s choices during war.20 In some theories of rebellion, collective emotions described as moral outrage, sense of injustice, or grievance are considered as structural factors that lead to mobilisation.21 Wood’s work in El Salvador highlighted how emotional factors such as defiance and pleasure of agency motivated individuals to fight.22 Feelings of collective anger, moral anger, injustice, and pleasure of agency emerged as very important ones in this case as well. However, they did not motivate only violent actions. Moreover, other emotions were also very meaningful for the local people interviewed and were used to explain different kinds of decisions. In the next chapter, I discuss in more detail how emotions influenced local people’s choices and actions. The core point that I wish to stress in this chapter is that emotions are not relevant only as potential explanations of violent actions. Emotions are part of the human dimension of violent conflict that, according to scholars such as Sylvester and Mac Ginty, has been so far overlooked in the civil wars literature.23 Emotions tell us what it means to be human in a context of violent conflict, and they constitute a core dimension of experience. Moreover, emotions shape the sense of community in the aftermath of a violent conflict, and the possibility of constructing peace at the local level.24 In the following sections, an analysis of emotions in the interviews will highlight how meaningful emotions were constructed, and how those emotions affected social relations at the local level.

20 See, for example: Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War; Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence; Justino, “Poverty and Violent Conflict: A Micro-Level Perspective on the Causes and Duration of Warfare.” Humphreys and Weinstein, “Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War.”; Shane Joshua Barter, “Unarmed Forces: Civilian Strategy in Violent Conflicts,” Peace & Change 37, no. 4 (2012). 21 See, for example: Moore Jr, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt; Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia; Gurr, Why Men Rebel. 22 Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. 23 Sylvester, Experiencing War; Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development. 24 Hutchison and Bleiker, “Grief and the Transformation of Emotions after War.”.

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Fear Fear was the most dominant emotion described in the interviews. This is perhaps not very surprising. Witnessing violence and having to escape from it was obviously very frightening and stressful. Other frequent stressful experiences included being arrested, having money, and other goods extorted, looted, and coerced to take part in risky actions. Instigating fear through violence was a deliberate strategy used by all the armed groups. The interviewees often narrated incidents of violence to give an idea of what they called an atmosphere of terror, but they also emphasised the fact that the experience of fear was not limited to those violent incidents. The terror was often due to the uncertainty of what was to come in those circumstances. While the manipulation of fear as a strategy is well covered in the literature,25 less is known about how the everyday aspect of uncertainty affects the behaviour of all the actors during the conflict. Fear and uncertainty were related to different factors in the interviews. One of them was the suddenness of events that interrupted the normal routine that I mentioned earlier: They used to come suddenly, and even the village leaders, I mean the leaders of those village committees that they had formed, even they did not know when they would come. They came and told us to follow them. They took us to other villages, without telling us at the beginning where we were going, and we had to follow them.

In this context, it was difficult for the people to predict what was going to happen. This not knowing or not understanding what was going on was a crucial element of the context of ‘terror’ that the people described. A recurring theme in the interviews was that the villagers, even when they participated in actions or were brought somewhere, were not informed of where they were going, or what they had to do. The members of armed groups also experienced fear because of uncertainty. The police officers said that they felt vulnerable because the guerrilla strategy used by the Maoists was hard to predict:

25 See, for example: Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War; Kalyvas, “Wanton and Senseless?.”; Steven and Zane, “Off With Their Heads: The Islamic State and Civilian Beheadings.”.

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Here we are not sure of when the attack will come, and what type of attack will come. You cannot take any pre-planned measure, you have to be always cautious, no precaution can be taken.

For the interviewees, often uncertainty was also related to not knowing what was happening to their loved ones, or what could happen to them: What if something happens to one of these children, how could we go on then? Sometimes we had to walk very far, and sometimes they put us on trucks like animals, like they do for selling wood. It took so long and we didn’t even know where our relatives were, we couldn’t see them.

Uncertainty was also experienced in regard to the identity of the armed people who came to the villages. Some of the interviewees said that they did not know who they were, because their faces were covered. All they knew was that they carried weapons. Although the police forces wore uniforms, the Harmad Bahini’s men also wore either wearing casual clothes like the Maoists or wore police uniforms. Uncertainty, therefore, was often due to the lack of information available to individuals during the conflict. This tended to increase their sense of insecurity and diffidence towards actors whose intentions were unclear. The feeling of uncertainty could last over a long period of time, even in the absence of immediate threats. Many of those who talked explicitly about fear said that, although the violence had now stopped, the fear was still there, as they were unsure about the future: We still live in terror. On the surface we have peace, but deep inside we don’t know what may happen today or tomorrow.

Grievance As it can be expected, people suffered during the conflict. Some of the people I met had lost their loved ones, but they did not feel the need to discuss their overwhelming grief. The grievance that they did discuss in the interviews was not related to direct violence per se, but to three other main issues that were meaningful to them. First, the interviewees frequently said that the time of the conflict was ‘very hard’, as they were forced to give up on things that were meaningful to them. As I discussed earlier, most of the people struggled to

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carry on with the needs of their everyday life. Working, feeding the family, supporting the children’s studies, were priorities to them even then. This hardship was physical, as it included the struggle to fulfil basic needs such as food and rest. But it was also psychologically painful for the people not being able to do things that were meaningful to them, such as observing their culture or looking after the future and well-being of the family. I was very surprised when a young girl, who had witnessed very frightening experiences, told me that the most shocking thing that the Maoists had done was burning the national flag and not allowing them to celebrate Independence Day. The insult to national symbols hurt her more than coercion and direct violence. Some of the Santhalis interviewed suffered during the conflict for not being able to observe their traditional rituals and festivals, including those to honour the death of their brothers. A second factor of grievance was the insecurity of youth. In addition to being vulnerable to direct and structural violence, the children were targeted for recruitment by the armed forces of both sides, and this was an issue that the people felt very strongly about. Interestingly, when referring to the grievance for the children, most of the interviewees referred not only to the children of their family, but to the children of the community. It was felt as a collective, rather than individual grievance: They didn’t take adults, they took very young boys, those young boys who don’t yet understand things. For this reason, many families in these villages are ruined, because children were without parents.

The third grievance was related to political repression and arbitrary imprisonment. Some of the interviewees had been personally harassed and imprisoned with fabricated cases, and most of them were given multiple cases and detained repeatedly. Again, this was felt as one of the issues that affected the whole community, and it was still perceived as one of the main issues at the time of the interview: Many people were gone. Some came back but are still suffering because of false cases.

One of the interviewees commented that: Someone who cannot talk is suffocated. For him, living or dying is the same.

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Interestingly, all these three issues that the interviewees consistently described in relation to their grievances were related to the loss or restriction of things that they valued: the future and well-being of the children, culture, voice, and political freedom. Grievance was described in most cases as something that affected the whole community. As Parashar points out, ‘dominant emotions exist, acquire collective dimension and shape political and social processes’.26 The grievance in these narratives is very different from how it is theorised in socio-economic theories of violent conflict, in which grievance is assumed to be a cause of violent conflict, a variable that takes place before its onset. But the main difference is that the grievances described by the people in this context are not just material structures, they are meaningful experiences that can only be understood in the context of people’s values, cultures, emotions, and social relationships. Emotions and Social Relationships The emotions described in the interviews were often directed towards specific social actors and were a symptom of how the conflict influenced social relationships at the local level. For example, the uncertainty and fear discussed above increased the diffidence and lack of trust among actors. One interviewee felt that during the time of the conflict there was a general feeling of mistrust in the community and people did not talk to each other. But for many interviewees, it was quite the opposite. The context of violence affected the social relationships in the community in very different ways, sometimes creating division and suspicion, while in other cases, strengthening solidarity and cooperation. Suspicion and fear were more prevalent between civilians and armed forces. Some of the villagers said that they did not talk to the Maoists because they did not know how they would react. There was also an atmosphere of suspicion within the armed squads of the Maoists. All the former Maoists that I interviewed feared their own comrades. When they were inside the group, they did not feel free to express doubts regarding certain actions, and certainly were not allowed to leave. The theme of suspicion among Maoist ranks was also a prevalent theme in the interviews with former Maoists in Junglemahal and other areas conducted by 26 Swati Parashar, “Anger, War and Feminist Storytelling,” in Emotions, Politics, and War, ed. Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory (Oxford: Routledge, 2015), 72.

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Sengupta. These interviews show that younger and low-level foot soldiers felt alienated by the senior leaders, and felt threatened by the frequent killing of comrades, friends and relatives suspected of being informants.27 The relationship between local people and Maoists was a complex one. In the different villages that I visited, people experienced the relationship with the Maoists very differently, also depending on when the interaction started, under which circumstances, and who were the people who engaged in these exchanges. Shah’s ethnography in Jharkhand shows that the relationship between Maoists and local people evolved over time, and it was an important factor determining people’s participation in Maoist activities.28 Shah points out that in Jharkhand, where the Maoists were active for more than twenty years, the Maoists developed bonds of intimacy with the local people, to the point that they could be seen as part of an extended family.29 In West Bengal’s Junglemahal, too, the Maoists developed positive relationships with local people in some areas. However, many of the villagers that I interviewed experienced their first interactions with the Maoists at the peak of the conflict, under the pressure of the war and in the presence of large numbers of recruits that were not always committed to Maoist ideology and principles. In this context, the local people often expressed frustration, even when they did, to some extent, support the cause of the movement. The narrative on how the local people suffered and struggled to carry on their everyday activities and felt coerced to compromise on things that they valued, was completely absent from the discourse of the Maoists, and this was perceived as a major divide. The villagers frequently pointed out that the Maoists only wanted them to obey: One day I asked: ‘you are disturbing us, I want to know who you are’. He said, ‘you don’t need to know us, you only need to obey our orders’.

The people felt alienated, disrespected, their voices unheard, and their problems and even lives treated as something expendable. An interviewee pointed out that they had to lower their heads and gaze to show respect. 27 Sengupta, Out of War: Voices of Surrendered Maoists. 28 Alpa Shah, “The Intimacy of Insurgency: Beyond Coercion, Greed or Grievance in

Maoist India,” Economy and Society 42, no. 3 (2013). 29 Ibid.

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Also, many of the interviewees pointed out that the Maoists used to put the villagers at the front during the processions making them more vulnerable to police violence, while they watched safely from a distance. Hence, they felt that their lives were considered as cheaper: They were all drunk and did not speak politely, so you couldn’t have a conversation. We had to bend, we could not stand upright, and without looking at their faces. They said we had to show respect in that way. I was afraid so I accepted what they wanted. When they had to do a demonstration, and they knew that there was the police ahead, they put the village people at the front, and they stayed behind.

The people also ran from the police because they were afraid that the police would arrest or even kill them. The lack of trust and cooperation during the movement was mutual. The police officers said that they felt vulnerable too because they had no support from the people. However, both the people and the police perceived their relationship as much improved towards the end of the conflict, as the majority of the interviewees confirmed. These relationships are likely to have changed in the years that followed my fieldwork research in 2013–2014. In summary, emotions and everyday interactions matter in the construction of people’s attitudes towards armed groups. Looking at local-level relationships can be very insightful when trying to understand violent conflicts and revolutions, beyond greed and grievance explanations.30 As Kriger points out, it is important to look not only at local-level relationships between armed groups and people, but also among civilians. As the case of Lalgarh shows, local-level relationships may evolve in positive or negative directions and significantly change over time, and this might affect people’s choices, the dynamics of conflict, and the construction of everyday peace. Anger Anger was another prominent emotion in the interviews. Anger in people’s narratives was always directed against a certain political actor: the state, the Maoists, or the CPM party and its militia. The majority of 30 Ibid.; Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices.

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the references to anger described it as a collective emotion: the anger of the people. Only in two cases was the anger aroused by a specific personal experience, and ultimately led to a political decision. The two stories were similar. Both these interviewees were arrested and branded as Maoists although they were innocents, and this damaged their relationship with the family and the community. These incidents opened their eyes to the system of corruption that affected the community and they decided that it needed to be changed. More frequently, the interviewees said that ‘the people got angry’. The speaker usually identified himself with ‘the people’ and spoke as if his own individual feelings coincided with those of the group. Hence, the anger was an emotion that was personally experienced by the speaker, but was understood and described as a broader issue. The narrative of collective anger contributed to constructing ‘the people’ as one, united group. Collective anger, as narrated in the interviews, had its roots in the grievances of the people before the conflict due to the corruption of the CPM party when it was in power: The political leaders of the Communists made a lot of money stealing from the people, so the people were already angry. What they call Maobadi are not Maobadi, it’s the anger of the people that grew day by day for a long time. For a long time the democratic rights of the people had been suppressed, so the people got angry and roared.

This confirms Parashar’s finding that ‘individual experiences of oppression and injustice result in collective public anger that is targeted against those perceived as the others’.31 Some of the interviewees mentioned that, at the peak of the conflict, ‘the people’ also experienced anger against the armed groups: The people could no longer take it. The roads were cut in twenty points, there was no possibility to move, so the people were really angry and could no longer take it.

31 Parashar, “Anger, War and Feminist Storytelling,” 75.

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In other instances, the interviewees talked about anger to interpret the past or possible future actions of other actors. For example, several interviewees explained excessive violence as something that was perpetrated by individuals who were angry with someone else and used the conflict to settle personal scores. Furthermore, some former Maoists thought that the families of their victims might be angry and feared that they might retaliate with violence: If I saw those people, I think they would be angry, and the family members will feel resentment.

Interestingly, anger turned out to be a powerful emotion that people experienced personally, but even more it was a narrative used to explain the behaviour of others, and to define who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’. Therefore, collective anger is an emotion that people experience over time, and it influences beliefs.32 In the case of the conflict in Junglemahal, anger had a central place in constructing the idea of local people’s grievance and the need for change and action. In fact, the interviewees who referred to anger always did so to motivate a certain action during the conflict.

The Impact of Conflict on Local people’s Socio-Economic Conditions A theme that emerged very frequently from the interviews was how people’s socio-economic conditions changed as a result of the conflict. According to research on civil wars, micro-level economic factors are sometimes considered as variables that affect cost-opportunity choices made by civilians during civil wars. For example, for Justino, the viability of armed conflict is linked to the choices that civilians make throughout the violent conflict in response to the effects of violence on their economic status.33 For Weinstein, the support from civilians and the availability of

32 Ibid. 33 Justino, “Poverty and Violent Conflict: A Micro-Level Perspective on the Causes and

Duration of Warfare.”.

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resources that they provide are variables that influence the type of violence perpetrated by the armed groups during a violent conflict.34 Although I agree that local-level economic factors help us understand civilian choices during a violent conflict, this research shows that people’s behaviour is more complex than a binary choice based on costs and opportunities. Rather, their decision-making is influenced by the way in which they make sense of the social dynamics around them through their physical and emotional experiences. Socio-economic changes during the conflict are part of those experiences and can dynamically contribute to the social construction of grievance. In fact, in the interviews, changes to the household socio-economic conditions were usually part of the narrative on what life was like during the conflict. The local people interviewed came from different socio-economic statuses before the movement, and these differences in this context mattered a lot. Many of them depended on their daily work to support the basic needs of the family. Those who owned enough land were usually able, in normal times, to produce enough food to meet the needs of the family and were relatively better off. Some of them had permanent jobs, or ran small businesses and trades, and cultivated the family land. Others had no land and no jobs. Unemployed people usually looked for work as casual labourers, sometimes travelling to distant places. When no work was available, they collected wood and leaves in the forest and sold them in the market making a very modest profit. For them, having access to food, education, and health care was difficult even before the conflict. The narratives on the socio-economic changes during the conflict were never associated with the socio-economic grievances before the conflict in the interviews. The hardship during and after the conflict, for people of all backgrounds, was felt as a sharp break from normality. The interviewees attributed the economic household hardship during the conflict to different reasons. A reason frequently brought up was the paralysis of social and economic activities since the beginning of the Lalgarh movement. This was initially due to a deliberate protest strategy organised by the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities. Roads and transportation were blocked, and public services shut down. Continuous bandhs (strikes) were called, so the markets and shops were also usually shut as well.

34 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence.

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As the conflict escalated, it was difficult or impossible to work or study because of the risk. Some of the interviewees left their jobs in this context, and had not yet gone back to it at the time of the interview: After that, a teacher in Salboni at 11 a.m. had just opened the school, they dragged him out of the full classroom, shot him in front of everyone, and left. After this incident I informed the police that I could not keep working at school and I left my job.

Moreover, as many people had to spend a lot of time in other activities, such as going to processions, demonstrations, meetings, running from the police, or hiding, they were not able to work and cultivate their land. In this context, some interviewees said that they could not work for entire years. Similarly, the people who were detained by the police were not able to work to support their families: Sometimes they told us, you have to go to that place. When they called us, we had to leave straight away and go to that place. We went and we had to spend the whole day there. We couldn’t work and couldn’t cultivate the land, so we lost all the harvest.

In addition, as a result of the conflict, some families lost crucial resources needed to earn their livelihood. Many families lost their most important resource: human life. Many household members who used to earn for the sustenance of the family were killed, arrested, or injured. Other crucial material resources were also lost during the conflict, for example, due to extortion and looting: He couldn’t keep working because we didn’t have any more money. Her dad used to have a business selling wood. They took all the wood so we couldn’t continue. During that time, we lost everything and we became poor.

Some families also had to sell these resources to bear costs such as medical treatment for the injuries, or legal costs for the never-ending trials. The interruption of studies was also felt as an important issue that negatively affected the future of youth and the whole household. Many families struggled to support the studies of their children, hoping that they would be able to get better jobs. Often, young boys and girls were

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the first in their families to study up to a tertiary degree. Education in India is highly competitive, and it is very important to get high grades to have chances to get job opportunities. During the conflict, students said that they were not able to study or to pass their exams with good marks. The reasons were similar to those for the interruption of work. Schools were often closed, either for strikes or because they were occupied by state forces. If the schools were open, it was risky for the students to get there. In fact, schools were often very far from their home village. Some students were not able to study also because of the fear and trauma during the conflict. Furthermore, a few of them had to withdraw from their studies because their parents could no longer afford the fees. The conflict also created opportunities for the local people. Although none of the interviewees said that they personally benefited from these, they often hinted at the fact that others did. For example, some of them said that the Maoists approached local families asking to recruit strongbuilt boys and girls and they offered a competitive wage in exchange. The interviewees frequently pointed out that, as a lot of young people were frustrated because of unemployment, many of them were attracted by this opportunity. The conflict also created the opportunity for extorting money and resources from others. Some of the interviewees pointed out that those who had become rich through the conflict and harmed others were then also offered a rehabilitation package by the new government, and given jobs and money: The daughter of an important Maoist leader was given a job as a teacher in a secondary school. His wife was given seven or eight lakhs of Rupees. This created a discontent among the Maoist supporters. They said why when she already accumulated crores and crores of Rupees being a Maoist, she already became rich, why giving her more money?

In general, although the conflict did create some opportunities for the locals, most of the interviewees were negatively affected by it. Socioeconomic changes during the conflict contributed to everyday experiences of hardship. The impact of conflict on household conditions affected all the family members and the relationships between them. The future of the young generation was perceived as one of the most sensitive issues. Many families worried about the lack of future employment opportunities available to them, which were further reduced by the interruption

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of studies during the conflict. They also worried that the frustration of young boys and girls would make them more vulnerable to recruitment by armed forces. Protecting children from violent activities was a priority for many families, and often influenced their decisions during the conflict. The family, therefore, emerges as an important analytical dimension to understanding civilian behaviour during violent conflict.

Gendered Experiences In the case of the conflict in Lalgarh, women were not seen as invisible actors in the dominant narrative, as they often are in the case of other movements. A quick Google search for the ‘Lalgarh movement’ will immediately show images of village women carrying traditional weapons.35 Women’s heroic participation in the movement was applauded by urban activists in their accounts of the movement.36 However, women’s narratives emerging from the interviews were completely different. In fact, most of the women who participated in this research emphasised the role of Maoists’ coercion more than the men. There were a few exceptions from women who thought that the Maoists were fair to women and protected them, particularly among women who felt that state oppression was a bigger threat. More often, however, women’s interpretations of the behaviour of armed groups, from everyday interactions with them, tended to be very critical. Their remarks often questioned the idea that the Maoists represented the local people. Furthermore, the absence of recognition in the Maoist discourse of the gendered challenges that the women faced when they were forced to participate in their protest actions was perceived as a divide. Women’s experiences of conflict, in some ways, were similar to those of the men. They participated in actions such as demonstrations, occupations, meetings, and had to run from the police, too. They witnessed violence and struggled in hardship during the movement. As the Maoists emphasised gender equality in their discourse, they targeted girls for

35 https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=lalgarh+movement&client=firefox-b&source= lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj35YCuwMDSAhUEKpQKHQ0QCNkQ_AUI CCgB&biw=1394&bih=714 Accessed on 6 March 2017. 36 Sanhati, “Lalgarh Movement—Mass Uprising of Adivasis in West Bengal”; Bhattacharyya, Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram—Update 1.

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recruitment and there were many women fighting in their ranks. Unfortunately, I did not have the chance to interview any of them; however, some insights can be drawn from the interviews with Maoist women from Junglemahal published in the book Out of War. Voices of Surrendered Maoists.37 According to these life stories, the experiences of women guerrillas were very diverse. Women participated and led armed operations and some of them became senior leaders. For some, joining the Maoists was an emancipatory experience, while others resented the control of their male comrades over their lives, including choices regarding their family, relationships, and bodies.38 For the women of Junglemahal who did not join the Maoist ranks, the experiences of conflict were different from those of the men, even though they participated in the same activities, because of the different gender roles and social expectations. Local peoples’ attitude towards the coercion of women to participate in the movement was much more negative than the coercion of men, as it was felt as a break in a social norm. Although gender relations were different in different social groups, women were usually responsible for the running of the house and caring for the extended family. Many women worked to support the family financially, inside or outside the house, and young girls travelled far to study, but women’s place was still associated with the house and the family. The challenges that women faced during the conflict were different, depending on their age and family commitments. Some of the women were elderly ladies who usually hardly left their homes. Being forced to walk in the forest and run was a very traumatic experience for them. For example, a woman who had never left her village in her life, was separated from the family and got lost in the forest, unable to find her way back. Most of them got injuries because of walking for long distances or running. These women expressed their anger at being forced to participate. Many of the younger women were mothers of small children or were pregnant at the time of the movement. Having to participate in the movement’s protest actions or running to escape the violence involved extra challenges for them. In some cases, the Maoists allowed mothers with small babies to stay at home, but others were forced to go anyways:

37 Sengupta, Out of War: Voices of Surrendered Maoists. 38 Ibid.

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Men suffered, but women suffered too. Some of us were pregnant, and some had children, like this one was little, and we had to run with them.

For most of the young girls interviewed, the conflict meant an interruption of their studies. As a result, some of them had to marry early. Some parents said that they made their daughters marry during the conflict as a way to keep them safe and avoid recruitment. Although women participated in different kinds of actions during the movement, or had to run to escape from the violence, they were often at home away from the men of their families. Having to stay at home and not being able to go out was a frequent theme in women’s narratives. For them, home was not a place where they felt safe during the conflict. In their interviews, they frequently described the fear when they were at home not knowing or not understanding what was happening outside: The first time they came at 7 in the night for the meeting. I was at home with my two children; the youngest was not born yet. My in-laws locked me inside the house and went to the meeting. I was so, so scared not knowing what was happening outside, what was not happening, who was behind it, I was so scared of all this.

In many villages, all the men fled and only the women and the children were left in the villages. Women’s experiences were therefore different, as they had to face the armed groups that occupied the villages by themselves. Many of them felt very intimidated as armed people walked outside their homes, and often they could not understand who they were. They were asked to do things for them, such as cooking or participate in certain activities: We lived in terror. We were scared every moment that someone would come inside the house. We heard sounds of bombs and shooting and felt as it was happening to us.

The interviewees did not explain why only the men fled leaving the women behind. A reason could be that women were not perceived as targets of violence as much as men. In fact, the threat of gender-specific violence was not a dominant theme in women’s interviews. The lack of emphasis on gender-specific violence in the context of Lalgarh, unlike in many other civil wars, does not mean that episodes of violence did not take place. However, it again leads to how acts violence can be understood

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as a discursive social practice, and to how violence relates to discourses on women’s bodies. In fact, the contemporary discourse of the Maoists emphasises gender equality and the role of women as revolutionaries.39 The narrative of Lalgarh juxtaposes the abuse and exploitation of women’s bodies with their transformation into revolutionary actors. The punishment for acts of violence against women, such as sexual violence, domestic violence, and state violence, were at the forefront of the agenda of the Lalgarh movement. Although the local women I interviewed did not feel that the movement had done much to address relevant gender issues that affected their lives, they neither felt targets of sexual violence by the Maoists. The fear and sense of insecurity that the women described was more often associated with the risks for the whole family, rather a fear of threats to their own bodies. In relation to this, another reason why women stayed back in their villages while the men left could be related to women’s responsibility towards the family and the house. This was more challenging during the conflict. In their interviews, the women frequently talked about how the conflict affected their family members, and how this in turn affected them. This happened in very different ways. For example, an older woman was struggling to support her grandchildren, because a son was killed and the other was in jail. Another woman said that her husband had become very aggressive at home after being severely injured during the conflict. In summary, while the Maoist discourse emphasised gender equality and targeted women’s participation, women’s narratives bring attention to the extra challenges that they faced during the conflict because of their gendered roles. During the conflict, women participated in different kinds of actions, and at the same time maintained their family responsibilities. As a result, women alone often had to find strategies to cope with the occupation of their villages by armed groups and protect the family. Once again, this points to the importance of the family dimension and gendered roles to understand civilian behaviour during violent conflict.

39 Parashar and Shah, “(En)Gendering the Maoist Insurgency in India: Between Rhetoric and Reality.”.

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Conclusion Through their narratives about embodied experiences of conflict, the local people expressed their political views and attitudes towards the other actors involved in the conflict. Most of the interviewees described incidents of violence perpetrated by all the armed groups, but stressed either the political oppression exercised by the state, or to the Maoist coercion to participate in their activities. The locals frequently experienced direct violence and attributed different meanings to it. People felt particularly strongly about violence when they perceived it as instrumental to state oppression or to the coercion perpetrated by the Maoists. Importantly, the interviewees also highlighted other everyday dimensions of coercion and political oppression that affected their practical lives and discourse during the conflict. Because of coercion and political oppression, many local people struggled to perform everyday activities that were important to them. This often resulted in physical and emotional grievances and had a long-term impact on household socio-economic conditions. The family dimension, with the gendered and generational roles within it, emerged as an important dimension to understand the local-level dynamics of conflict. In particular, the ways in which the conflict affected young boys and girls was widely perceived as a major cause of concern. While these issues were meaningful for the people, they were absent from the discourse of the political actors that claimed to represent them, and this affected local-level relationships between them. Everyday interactions between people and members of the armed groups also affected their perceptions and attitudes. Furthermore, the atmosphere of uncertainty and fear contributed to widen the fracture between people and armed groups, which in turn pushed the armed groups to rely more on coercion and violence.

CHAPTER 7

Responding to Conflict

Introduction When people experience life in a context of violence, they constantly make decisions and choices. Exploring those actions will help us understand ordinary people’s agency and its role in shaping the local dynamics of conflict. In a literature review on civilian strategy during war, Barter points out that some aspects of civilian action have been widely investigated in the civil wars literature, yet without focusing on civilian agency.1 To explain why scholars overlook civilian strategy, Barter argues that they often make implicit assumptions about civilian strategy, and tend to problematise civilians as victims that are acted upon, or as strategic resources available to armed groups.2 Furthermore, Barter suggests that civilians are seen as weak actors compared to military groups: Another reason why civilian decisions have not been studied relates to dominant perceptions of war, in which military strength equals power. Because civilians are weak compared to armed groups, either they do not make decisions, or their decisions are unimportant.3

1 Barter, Civilian Strategy in Civil War: Insights from Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 13.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Carrer, How People Respond to Violence, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11342-0_7

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The tendency to frame civilians as weak actors who do not take decisions is also very prevalent in the discourse on Maoism in India, where the local people are often seen as actors who are easily manipulated by others.4 This chapter questions these assumptions and explores how people make decisions. The analysis is once again rooted in local people’s narratives. Drawing from the interviews conducted during my fieldwork, I look at how people explain their own decisions. The nexus between discourse, action, and experience is central here. In fact, this analysis focuses on the role of everyday discourse—constructed through a dynamic interpretation of experiences, emotions, and social interactions—in shaping local people’s action. During a violent conflict, ordinary people’s actions serve a variety of private, social, and political purposes. Private concerns such as personal security or economic considerations can be powerful motives for many individuals. But local people may also seek through their actions to achieve political goals such as transforming local-level power relationships, ending direct or structural violence, or improving the socio-economic conditions of a certain group. In order to achieve these goals, people may cooperate with a certain political actor or armed group. While cooperating with a group, however, individuals may not completely share its ideology and agenda, and still make separate decisions. Through this research, I focus on people’s agency by looking beyond their affiliation with other political actors. This means that, in the analysis, I look at how people make decisions that may differ from those of more powerful actors, even though they may be influenced by them or cooperate to some extent. I examine four dimensions of local people’s action: exit, participation, community solidarity, and voice. This structure is similar to Barter’s framework, which was developed from Hirshman’s exit, voice, and loyalty theory.5 Other scholars who looked at specific aspects of civilian strategy also identified similar repertoires of options available to civilians. For example, according to Arjona, civilians may choose to voluntarily support an armed group, passively obey, oppose it, or flee.6 The main difference 4 See chapter two on the literature on Maoism in India. 5 Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms,

Organizations, and States, vol. 25 (Harvard University Press, 1970). 6 Ana Arjona, “Civilian Resistance to Rebel Governance,” IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc (2014).

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here is that Arjona distinguishes between support and obedience. Masullo conceptualises a set of possibilities available to civilians. He argues that first, civilians choose whether to leave or stay put. If they stay put, they may choose between non-resistance and resistance. He further distinguishes between types of non-resistance and cooperation with armed groups, and between violent and nonviolent resistance.7 While adding distinctions between types of cooperation with armed groups and types of resistance, the main civilian strategies identified by these scholars fall within the broad analytical categories of participation, exit, and voice. In this chapter, I use these categories for analytical and descriptive purposes. This analysis shows that people make complex choices and often shift between one strategy and another. To Barter’s three categories of flight, support, and voice, I add a fourth dimension related to community strategies to cope and respond to the conflict.

Exit Barter understands the option of flight mostly in terms of internal or international migration and considers security as its primary drive.8 The findings of this analysis are quite different; they highlight the importance of short-term exit as an individual and collective strategy of avoidance and non-cooperation. In fact, in the context of Lalgarh, exit was a strategy adopted by the majority of the local people interviewed, but only a small number of people migrated. The very few who did migrate were in a position to do so because they could afford it. Either they were individuals from a higher socio-economic background who could live elsewhere, or they had already worked outside and had an established network. Hence, for them, living away from home was a safer choice, and at the same time, it was economically advantageous because they could continue working. While migration was rare in this case, exit as a short-term strategy was widely used by the local people; ordinary people often ran and hid to avoid an imminent threat, and later, when the threat was over, they returned to their homes. Most of the local people, at same point, ran.

7 Masullo J., The Power of Staying Put. Nonviolent Resistance against Armed Groups in Colombia. 8 Barter, Civilian Strategy in Civil War: Insights from Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

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It happened to men, women, and children of all ages and social backgrounds. Usually, exit was a response to an immediate violent threat, which in the majority of the cases was a police attack. Local people often said that they knew that the police would beat everyone indiscriminately or arrest them under false charges whether or not they had any information. Perceptions about security, therefore, influenced people’s decision to flee. However, the interviewees rarely said that they fled to save their lives. On the contrary, some of the interviewees explained that they ran from the police and cooperated with the Maoists because they perceived the Maoists to be a bigger threat. Many interviewees described how the people of the village organised themselves to avoid the police by setting up alert systems and identifying routes and places to hide, and then came back when it was safe. Through these collective support systems and geographical knowledge, thousands of people were able to disappear very quickly: They organized this: there were people who would inform via mobile phone when the police were coming and told everyone to run. So when the train driver called the police, the police came after two hours, and when they reached, all the people had already managed to flee.

In this way, the people could avoid giving information to the police. As a police officer explained in his interview, the lack of cooperation from the people made it very difficult for them to fight the Maoists. A good number of interviewees had to spend longer periods of time away from home. Many of them said that they had to sleep outside or live away from home. Frequently, those who left for days were the men, while the women and children stayed back. Those who left, rather than escaping from an imminent threat, often did so because of their political choices. Some individuals supported a certain political group and felt threated by the other sides. Others left to avoid taking a side altogether. With pressure on both sides, some people preferred not to be identified with any of the groups or wanted to avoid being coerced to participate. The choice could be a collective one. In fact, in some cases, the population of entire villages fled together. As armed groups targeted youth for recruitment, often people encouraged young boys and girls to flee to protect them from recruitment and

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violence. For example, the interviewees below convinced young relatives or co-villagers to leave and avoid recruitment: I used to take boys to work there. Once I took thirty boys from my parents’ village, at that time when they had killed some villagers. But one of them was killed when he came back. My sister had three daughters. One of them was strong-built, so when they came to bring back my nephews, they chose that daughter and offered money, fifty thousands Rupees in advance and then twelve thousands per months. So my sister asked my advice and I said no, don’t send her. She was confused, and I told the girl, ‘run!’ and she run and went to her married sister’s house.

In these circumstances, the choice to exit can be understood as a form of everyday peace. Although personal security was an important function of exit choices, this analysis shows that exit was often a deliberate political act to avoid cooperating with one or both the armed groups, and to influence others to do the same. Sengupta’s interviews with former Maoists reveal that in other parts of India, too, parents sent their children to study away from the village to avoid recruitment from the Maoists.9 For Mac Ginty, avoidance is the principal everyday peace activity,10 and the case of Lalgarh shows that avoidance can be a powerful organised non-cooperation strategy adopted by large numbers of people during a violent conflict.

Participation The question of why civilians join or support armed groups has been widely discussed in the civil wars literature. The theories that address

9 Sengupta, Out of War: Voices of Surrendered Maoists. 10 Mac Ginty, “Everyday Peace: Bottom-Up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected

Societies,” 555.

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this puzzle have emphasised structural socio-economic factors,11 peasantlandlord relationships,12 ethnic and political dynamics,13 selective incentives,14 social cohesion,15 coercion,16 and emotional factors.17 Whereas this section also touches on the theme of people’s participation and support, the questions that I seek to answer here are different. Rather than asking why people support an armed group, or why they rebel, this section is part of an analysis of what people do during a violent conflict and how they influence the dynamics of conflict and peace. Hence, the emphasis is not on the armed groups, but on people’s agency. In this view, participating can be a strategy that people adopt alongside others. For this reason, I prefer to talk about ‘participation’ rather than ‘support’ or ‘loyalty’. Moreover, this analysis looks not only at why people participate in war, but at how they contribute to constructing peace. As we will see, people’s own explanations of why they decided to participate in the movement partially confirm some of the arguments articulated in existing theories of collective action in civil war; however, none of these theories alone could fully explain or predict people’s action in this case. Rather, this analysis suggests that, as Humphreys and Weinstein argue, different logics of participation coexist in the same context.18 In addition, I have found that different explanations of why people participated motivated different kinds of participation. 11 See: Gurr, Why Men Rebel. 12 See: Jeffrey M Paige, Agrarian Revolution (New York: The Free Press, 1975); Gurr,

Why Men Rebel; Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. 13 See: Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict; F. Stewart, “Horizontal Inequalities: A Neglected Dimension of Development,” (2002). 14 See: Samuel L Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkely: University of California Press, 1979); Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, vol. 124 (Harvard University Press, 2009). 15 See: Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, 268. 16 See: Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Stoll, Between Two Armies in the

Ixil Towns of Guatemala. 17 Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador; Jeff Goodwin, James M Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (University of Chicago Press, 2009). 18 Humphreys and Weinstein, “Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War”.

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In the context of Lalgarh, the interviewees explained their participation mainly through discourses of change or coercion, or a mix of the two. Usually, participating was not the result of one single choice, but a series of choices that people made every day. Hence, participation was often one of the strategies that people adopted at a certain point during the course of the conflict, and many people changed it later on. Even people who described a strong support for the movement did not support all the decisions and actions of the group and chose not to participate in those actions. In this section, I first talk about the choice of local individuals who joined an armed wing of the Maoists. I introduce the topic by illustrating the story of Arjun,19 a former Maoist commander. His experience is a good example of how individuals make dynamic choices for a variety of reasons and logics. Furthermore, his story has many elements in common with the experiences of the other former Maoists interviewed, especially the fluidity of their decisions. I will then move to the forms and motives of participation of local people who did not formally join an armed wing. Fighting for the Maoists Arjun20 was a popular Santhali young man in his village. He had many friends and loved to drive different kinds of vehicles. He was considered a good person in the village. He had no commitment with any political group: he was free. One day he was arrested for a crime that he had not committed, and that changed everything. He was framed for a heinous murder and spent six months in jail. When he was released, he wanted to go back to his old life and relationships, but it was not possible. The label ‘murderer’ was attached to him. The people talked, and he could not get rid of the stigma despite his innocence. Even his wife, who was in Kolkata for her studies, said that she could not cope with this. He told her that she could stay in the city if she wished so, and so they separated. In his home village, politicians kept harassing him with questions, so he felt that he could no longer live there. At that time, some Maoists approached him too, but in a friendly way. Arjun knew that the Maoists worked in the area mainly to raise people’s awareness of their rights;

19 The name has been changed to protect the identity of the interviewee. 20 The name has been changed to protect the identity of the interviewee.

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hence, he decided to join their people’s organisation to help them in this effort. He felt that their principles were good, and he wanted to stop other local people from suffering the way he did. Slowly, he became more involved in the organisation. After six months, he started his military training. He had never used weapons before. Since he started training with weapons, he could no longer live in a village, especially since he had to report regularly to the police because of his criminal record. He had to live in the forest without a proper home, sleep without a bed, eat without a kitchen, and often not eat at all. It was an extremely hard life. Once he completed the training, it was time to start working. He was now fully part of the military branch of the Maoists. As such, he was required to always carry weapons and, in case of attacks, answer to the fire. He moved and worked in different areas in India, carrying out different tasks. He killed, too. Arjun did not feel good about taking lives. He kept reminding himself of why he was doing it, that he was at war for a good cause, and it was necessary to fight the state. Furthermore, he had no other option. The Maoists would not allow him to leave the organisation, and even if they did, he would be arrested and go back to jail for the rest of his life. So he had to stay, and to stay, he had to be active. He was given more responsibilities and was promoted to Zonal Commander, with ten young boys under his command. They carried out operations, planted mines, and executed targeted assassinations. He was told that he was good at it, and that he was like an action movie star. He did the stunts and survived. But within, the inner burden kept growing. When the Lalgarh conflict started, things happened very fast. People entered the organisation, the violence escalated, and rules were no longer followed. Many actions were carried out for the greed of individuals rather than out of ideals. Violence and opportunism divided the Maoist ranks. Arjun felt that the organisation was breaking away from the rules and principles that first inspired him. This was not what he signed up for. At this point, he could no longer bear it. He realised that what he was doing was not good and he wanted to leave, but it was not possible. When the new government offered the surrender package, suddenly there was hope. He would have the chance to go back to a normal life again. It was still very risky to try and leave, but he wanted to find a way. In the end, he decided to take the risk and share his plan with some of his comrades. It turned out that his friends felt the same, so the seven of them decided to leave all together. They planned it, waited for the right time, and surrendered successfully to the police. After his surrender was

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announced at a press conference, Arjun had to live under police protection. He worked and cooperated with the police, and was still afraid of Maoist retaliation, but he started living a new life together with his wife who was now back with him. With a baby on the way, family was now his top priority. When I was introduced to Arjun, I was told that he was once a ‘dreaded’ Maoist. Listening to his story, however, it was clear that being a Maoist was only a relatively brief chapter of his life. He did not become a Maoist in one day. It was a process that required taking multiple decisions: leaving his wife and home, joining a front organisation linked to the Maoists, starting military training, working in the armed squads of the Maoists, surrendering, working with the police, and re-building his family life. He also explained that he continuously thought about what he was doing and assessed his options. In his narrative, Arjun highlighted how his decisions were influenced by a variety of factors, including experiences, emotions, social relationships, moral values, coercion, and opportunity. He particularly emphasised his moral values to explain both his decisions to join the Maoists and leaving them. Through his actions, Arjun sought to change the structures of power and subjugation that oppressed his people. However, his experiences slowly changed his assessment of what was good and evil. Constructing categories of good and evil was a rational, as well as an emotional, process. Arjun felt passionately about the injustice that was done against him; even deeper was the feeling that he was doing something morally wrong. His ideas of good and evil, innocence and guilt, shaped his social relationships and actions. The emphasis on emotions was very prominent throughout his story: the sense of loss resulting from the deterioration of social relations after he was in jail; the harsh living conditions in the forest; and the sense of guilt. In the sociology field, scholars such as Jasper, Goodwin, and Polletta argued that emotions are crucial to understand protest movements.21 Feelings of moral outrage and injustice, in particular, are seen as key

21 Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, “The Return of the Repressed: The Fall and Rise of Emotions in Social Movement Theory,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 5, no. 1 (2000); Jasper, “The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions in and around Social Movements”; Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta, Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements.

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elements that drive protest actions and rebellions.22 Arjun’s experience of being unjustly arrested and punished fits Jasper’s definition of ‘moral shock’: a strong sense of outrage triggered by a public event or a personal experience that makes a person inclined towards political action.23 For Jasper, moral shocks are emotional and cognitive, as ‘the information or event helps a person think about their basic values and how the world diverges from them in some important way’.24 Although values and emotions were crucial in Arjun’s narratives, practical circumstances, opportunity, and coercion were just as important. Arjun perceived the coercive pressure from both the state and the Maoists as a limit to the choices available to him. He had to stay with the Maoists and kill for them, even when he wished to leave because he did not want to be killed by them or spend the rest of his life in jail. Then, the opportunity opened up from the side of the state; together with the surrender package came not only the possibility of going back to civil society without being persecuted, but also a monetary reward, a job, and, importantly, a partial removal of social stigma. Arjun’s story also shows the importance of relationships and intimacy bonds, which according to Shah are an often overlooked, but significant factor that explains mobilisation patterns.25 In Arjun’s story, the friendly relationship with the Maoists, and the esteem and respect towards them drew Arjun to join their ranks. These relationships were particularly meaningful at a time in which other relationships were falling apart—those with his wife, family, peers, and leaders of other political parties. As Kriger points out, participating in an armed group was also a way of renegotiating local-level relationships, from those between husband and wife, to

22 On moral outrage and protest or rebellion see: Jasper, “The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions in and around Social Movements”; Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. Moore Jr, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt; Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. 23 Jasper, “The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions in and around Social Movements”. 24 Ibid., 409. 25 Shah, “The Intimacy of Insurgency: Beyond Coercion, Greed or Grievance in Maoist

India”.

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relationships of power in the village.26 Moreover, the positive relationship with some of the police officers after his surrender motivated him to cooperate with them. The life stories of former Maoists collected in Sengupta’s book show that intimacy bonds were particularly important for young boys and girls who were inspired to join the Maoists out of their high esteem for Maoist leaders.27 However, many of them became disenchanted after noticing that Maoist leaders were not the role models they expected. In particular, a core reason for deciding to leave was that they could not justify the violence that they witnessed and committed.28 Just as Arjun told in his story, most of the Sengupta’s interviewees felt the violence was morally wrong: It wasn’t the simple, straightforward battle of good versus evil that I perceived it to be. […] I joined the war thinking I was part of the seas of poor people fighting the cruel government, but I soon realised that there were shades of grey in this conflict.29

The narratives emerging from the interviews with other interviewees who had joined the armed wings of the Maoists have many elements in common with Arjun’s story. I have interviewed five individuals who were active in the Maoists armed wings during the conflict. Although the sample is relatively small and not representative of the entire population of Maoist combatants, there are consistent similarities between their stories. For all these interviewees, the experience of fighting with the Maoists was only a brief phase. All of them were young local boys in their late teens or early twenties at the time of the interview, and they had been with the Maoists only during the time of the Lalgarh conflict. All of them except one narrated personal experiences of violence and oppression at the hands of the Communist government which triggered a decision to act and change the oppressive government:

26 Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices. 27 Sengupta, Out of War: Voices of Surrendered Maoists. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 37.

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The Communists created a situation where only they could exist, nothing else. So we created these Maobadis, it was necessary, there was no other way. We had to form this to get rid of them, make them disappear.

In order to bring a change, most of them initially joined what they thought was a people’s movement. All of them changed their perceptions when the violence escalated, but felt that they had to stay because of coercion. All of them ultimately switched sides. Once again, personal experience and moral outrage were part of the narratives through which the interviewees explained their actions. Selective incentives theories also have some explanatory power here30 ; in fact, opportunity was sometimes hinted at as a cause for recruitment. One former Maoist said in his interview that now he could see that he was wrong when he supported the Maoists, because ‘you cannot earn anything by being a Maoist’. Once he understood this, he turned to the police for better opportunities, since the police were now helping former Maoists. He explained that he looked for help because during the movement he could not study well. Other interviewees said that young people or local criminals joined the Maoists lured by the opportunities for personal profit. Hence, some individuals were more motivated to join and leave an armed group by a desire to stop the oppression of their people, while others were more attracted by the perspective of social and economic opportunities and security, but often it was a mix of social, political, emotional, and pragmatic considerations together. Strategies were not fixed and usually shifted along with changes of circumstances and perception. The discursive approach in this analysis helps grasping the complex and dynamic nature of people’s decision-making, highlighting the fact that logics that may seem contradictory, such as emotions and pragmatism, often coexist. Furthermore, the same factors that induced an individual to join a group, such as emotions, moral outrage, coercion, and selective incentives, were also factors that, in different circumstances, influenced the same person’s decision to leave or switch side.

30 See: Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, 124.

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Ordinary people’s Participation Though only a small portion of the local people participated in the conflict by joining an armed organisation, most people participated in some activities. The analysis now moves to explore the discourse of participation of people who did not formally join an armed group. We should remember that the Lalgarh movement started, and was perceived by many, as a nonviolent movement, so I will talk about whether participating in the movement and/or in the armed wing of the Maoist was different, or whether the distinction was blurred. Even though they were not part of any armed group, some people strongly identified themselves with the movement and emphasised the theme of change, similar to the interviewees who joined the armed wings of the Maoists. Many others participated mainly because of coercion. Finally, for another group of interviewees, it was a mix of the two. This section highlights the different quality of participation associated with different discourses. The distinction between obedience and support in Masullo and Arjona is useful for understanding the different kind of participation.31 Both the concepts of obedience and support entail a functional relationship between civilians and armed groups. The emphasis, therefore, is on the latter. In contrast, what emerges from this analysis is that in people’s discourses about voluntary participation, the armed groups are not central at all. What people emphasised, when talking about their voluntary participation, was people’s own initiative and agency. Furthermore, this analysis shows that for many people the line between obedience and support was blurred. ‘Making’ the Movement About a third of the local interviewees who talked about participation characterised their action as ‘making’ the movement, rather than supporting an organisation. In these narratives, there was a strong sense of ownership and agency among ‘the ordinary people’, especially in relation to the protest actions at the beginning of the movement. Some of these narratives were descriptions of specific actions in which the speaker participated, such as resisting the police or the initial protest marches.

31 Masullo J., The Power of Staying Put. Nonviolent Resistance against Armed Groups in Colombia.: 20; Arjona, “Civilian Resistance to Rebel Governance”.

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Among the interviewees who chose to participate in the movement, only one said that he participated in a violent action. Others said explicitly that although they were deeply involved in the movement, they never used weapons: Yes, I was in touch with the Maoists, but it’s not like I knew how to shoot, or I shot or killed anyone. He [another interviewee] was also a leader, but he never shot or anything like that.

For the majority, ‘making the movement’ was a way of opposing state repression through nonviolent practices. Some of the interviewees identified themselves as leaders and emphasised their own initiatives and role. For example, a village doctor told me in his interview about how he led a mass protest at the hospital to get admitted people from a village who had been beaten by the police and were rejected for being ‘Maoists’: There was a village where the police beat people randomly, so I had to take them to the hospital, but at the hospital they did not want to admit them because they said that they were Maobadi. So I called many people, I took them to Jhargram in many trucks, I brought five hundred people to protest at the hospital because they did not want to admit them, so then they arrested me as well.

Even though the result of the action was, as in this case, negative, the speaker communicated positive emotions in the narrative, arising from the pride of taking part in a morally good action, or perhaps even something more: the feeling of being part of something extraordinary. To describe similar emotions, Wood uses the expression ‘pleasure of agency’ ‘which is in part pride in exercising agency in defiance of unjust authority’.32 For Wood, emotions such as pleasure of agency and defiance help explain high-risk insurgent collective action, as she found in her research in El Salvador.33 A sense of social injustice was common to all these narratives when the interviewees explained why the people ‘made’ the movement. Narratives explaining the necessity of change were common to all these interviews and were always framed in remarkably similar words: the CPM ruled West 32 Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador: 237. 33 Ibid.

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Bengal for thirty-five years during which they did nothing good for the people, they only stole from them. Although, as I discuss in more detail in the next chapter, the construction of these narratives might have been influenced by the discourse of the Maoist, in the interviews, the people emphasised their own political awareness, cognitive understanding, and emotional response: These people, these politicians couldn’t be touched, because they enjoyed great security and the people saw that their followers enjoyed this luxury. So there was great rage in the minds of the people. We had to throw out these people. There was a fury, a feeling that we had to throw them out, all together.

The ‘anger of the people’ emerged in the narratives as a powerful drive to action. In some theories of rebellion, the presence of a collective sense of injustice or moral outrage is considered a necessary ingredient for mobilisation. For Moore, for example, feelings of injustice or moral anger that arise in contexts where structural changes challenge the legitimacy of the dominant stratum may lead to rebellion.34 Similarly, Scott explains peasant uprisings through the concept of the ‘moral economy of the peasant’, a form of collective moral outrage.35 Moral outrage, injustice, and grievance are therefore understood in these theories as structural issues. What is different in this analysis is that I draw concepts such as moral anger and grievance from people’s discourse rather than from a macro-level structural analysis. Nevertheless, structural issues are also part of people’s discourse, as I will discuss more in depth in the next chapter. Other factors emphasised in theories of rebellion, such as social cohesion and selective incentives, were not central in the narratives of this group of interviewees. Nonetheless, a few of them did hint at these factors, although not as primary motivations for their actions. For example, a local Santhali leader explained that the Santhali community used a traditional system to call and mobilise their people. The Santhali community was often described as very united and cohesive, which might have helped in mobilising the masses of people in the first days of protests.

34 Moore Jr, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt. 35 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia.

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The Santhali community probably had the structural social cohesiveness that, according to Moore, is a necessary factor for rebellion.36 The Santhalis interviewed, however, did not perceive their mobilisation as a rebellion, and they pointed out that those social networks were also used to resist the Maoists. Similarly, a few interviewees said that they participated because they were friends and always did everything together; but then again, friendship bonds influenced other strategies as well, including resistance. With regard to selective incentives theory,37 only one interviewee in this group mentioned that the monetary wages offered by the Maoists influenced his friends’ decision to participate in the movement. Selective incentives, even in this case, were not the only factor that induced the interviewee’s friends to participate. The main drive to action was the anger resulting from experiences of political oppression and lack of future opportunities available to young people of his age: There were like me many boys that the Communists harassed, so they created this movement. They committed a lot of violence upon people from the Jharkhand Party. They suffered a lot. For this reason, when the Maoists came, they started the movement. And many young boys were unemployed, so they took this opportunity. They told them they’ll give them money, and when someone is unemployed he could do anything for money. They took this opportunity.

Even when selective incentives did make participation more attractive, this interview shows that what drew these young villagers to action was more complex than a cost-opportunity choice. Young people suffered from both violent repression of political opposition and unemployment, both related to the local structures of power. In this context, the movement represented the opportunity to change those structures, and at the same time, it addressed the pressing immediate need for a paid job. In the civil wars literature, youth bulges are considered as a greed proxy that are expected to make civil war more likely, especially when

36 Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, 268. 37 On selective incentive theories see: Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, 124. Humphreys and Weinstein, “Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War”.

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linked to low levels of education and high unemployment.38 However, this research supports the findings of studies that indicate a more complex understanding of youth recruitment, which have to do with local-level relationships between youth and local elites, aspirations, intergenerational roles, young people’s perceptions of the socio-political context, and their hopes for a better future.39 Thus, it appears that is not necessarily the uneducated youth, but also modernised and educated boys and girls who join a protest movement or an armed group. This group of interviewees participated in what they understood as a people’s movement to change the structures of power and subjugation affecting their lives. Although I have used civil wars theories to address the question of participation, in this case ‘participation’ could be seen more as social movement mobilisation, rather than armed force recruitment. In all these narratives, the theme of change was central as an explanation of people’s agency and initiative in actions of protest and resistance, mostly in nonviolent forms. This reminds us that although the ‘violent’ part of ‘violent conflict’ is more visible, there may be more to it. Social movements and violent conflicts tend to be studied separately, especially as there is this conceptual divide between violent and nonviolent movements; however, in practice, the distinction is not always that clear, and there could be a lot of nonviolent resistance even during conflicts. Coercion and Participation Another third of the interviewees who participated in the movement explained their participation mainly in terms of coercion. At some point during the movement, these people were forced through the threat of violence to participate in activities such as rallies, meetings, and demonstrations. Often, in these narratives, security was the central concern. Many interviewees said that they had no other choice, and they had to go to survive: When the violence was at its peak, everyone wanted to survive as they could.

38 See, for example: Collier and Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War”; Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War”. 39 See, for example: Richard Fanthorpe and Roy Maconachie, “Beyond the ‘Crisis of Youth’? Mining, Farming, and Civil Society in Post-War Sierra Leone,” African Affairs 109, no. 435 (2010).

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People used to walk on this road, right in front of our house, nearby there is a river, from there they used to command to come there immediately, so we had to go all together to save our lives. We went, we had to go even in the night, we had to face this situation.

Similarly, where the Harmad Bahini took control of a village, the villagers felt compelled to cooperate with them and do as they were ordered to survive. These findings about coercion and participation are similar to those of scholars who conducted research in completely different areas. For example, Humphreys and Weinstein found that in Sierra Leone coerced participation was a fundamental part of revolutionary mobilisation and political violence.40 Drawing from his study on massacres in Algeria, Kalyvas argues that violence against civilians was a strategy used by armed groups to maximise support.41 Stoll also concluded, in his work on Guatemala, that coercion was the major reason why the Ixil population joined both of the armed groups during the conflict. More specifically, Stoll’s argument is that dual violence from the two opposing sides in the conflict was what coerced people to join an armed group.42 The theme of being sandwiched between the violence of the two opposed armed groups was very dominant in my interviews, too. Furthermore, similar to Stoll’s findings in Guatemala, in Lalgarh the interviewees also frequently blamed the Maoists for exposing them to state violence. For example, a group of interviewees talked about how people were used as shields by the Maoists and were exposed to police violence: Another time we went to Jhargram police station to send the police away. They [the Maoists] put ordinary people at the front while they stayed at the sides or at the back and did what they had to do. They put the people at the front so that the police couldn’t shoot. The police fired in the air, but they also fired for real, and some people of our village died.

Stoll points out that the fact that people were coerced to participate questions the assumption that the insurgent group was popular,

40 Humphreys and Weinstein, “Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War”. 41 Kalyvas, “Wanton and Senseless?”. 42 Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala.

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or that the guerrillas represented ‘the people’.43 A similar assertion can be made in the case of Lalgarh. This group of interviewees’ perceptions of the Maoists were predominantly negative. The people did not feel represented by the Maoists and did not think that the Maoists were helping them. On the contrary, they emphasised the problems that they faced because of coercion. As I discussed in the last chapter, the experience of coercion during the conflict had a strong impact on local people’s everyday life. They suffered physically, emotionally, and endured long-term socio-economic consequences. In Guatemala, although village rallies and other symbolic actions gave the impression that the guerrillas were backed by popular support, Stoll found evidence that it was the armed group who instigated those ‘mass’ activities.44 My findings in Lalgarh are similar. Many interviewees consistently stated that two members of every family were coerced to go to ‘people’s’ demonstrations, rallies, and other activities, under the threat of violent punishment. The people who participated in such activities solely out of coercion sought to limit their participation as much as possible. There was no hint of support in these narratives. Rather, participation was explained as passive obedience. Participating was only one of the strategies that they temporarily adopted during the movement. Most of them adopted other strategies as well, for example hiding or resisting. Passive obedience was a strategy adopted when hiding or openly resisting was difficult. However, these people did not necessarily obey at all times. In fact, this group of interviewees in their narratives emphasised the role of people’s resistance to the Maoists. Shifting Perceptions For the final group of interviewees who participated in the movement, the reasons to participate were a mix between a desire for change and coercion. Most of them described a shift in how they perceived the movement and the Maoists. In their narratives, they explained that initially they thought that the movement was a positive initiative for the rights of the people. Often, they highlighted that they did not know then that it was a Maoist movement. Some interviewees described the Maoists as outsiders

43 Ibid. 44 Ibid.

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who came as volunteers or people who came to do service. Later, they saw the violence and experienced coercion, and realised that the Maoists were behind the movement: Initially these people came as volunteers to do service for the people. Then they started doing violence. If they found someone with qualifications and skills they wanted them to join the group, otherwise they used violence, they killed people.

Everyday experiences of violence and coercion were an important part of these narratives explaining changes of attitude. For example, one interviewee said: Later they realised that Chhatraddhar Mahato wasn’t going in the villages any more: the Maoists were going. They gave weapons to everyone. For example, they sent ten people to a village and all ten carried weapons. They called someone, knocked at the door, and told to wake the whole village. Then the village people came out and whispered ‘Maobadi!’

While some of the interviewees changed perception in the sense that they later understood that the people’s movement and the Maoists were the same, others differentiated between the PCPA movement and the Maoists as two separate organisations. While they still considered the movement as a genuine people’s movement, they saw the Maoists as the group responsible for the violence and coercion. Some of the interviewees talked about both the positive and negative impact of the Maoist presence upon the village. Even though they suffered from the violence and coercion, they recognised that the Maoists led some good initiatives that helped the local people. In particular, some of the interviewees appreciated the construction of a dam that saved their villages from flooding. In other villages, the people benefited from healthcare services arranged by the Maoists. Interestingly, some of the interviewees from this group saw their support for the Maoists as an instrumental alliance. Despite directly experiencing the costly consequences of coercion and not having a very positive perception of the Maoists, these interviewees explained that the people ‘used’ the Maoists. In their view, this alliance was not ideal but necessary because democracy was suppressed by the violent and corrupted rule of the Communist government. An interviewee commenting on the

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Maoists’ use of violence, as opposed to people’s desire for democracy, said: The people understood that they didn’t want democracy, they were only taking advantage of the situation. So we used them too.

Against the dominant assumption that the Maoists were the brain of the movement and the local people were used or brainwashed by them,45 these interviews suggest that some local people saw the cooperation with the Maoists as instrumental to their own purposes. Thus, if people consider their cooperation with an armed group as an instrumental alliance, their participation is not equivalent to loyalty for that group. In fact, in these narratives, together with their shifting perceptions, the interviewees also stressed changes of strategy from participation to resistance. People who initially took part and contributed to the movement later worked against it. Furthermore, when the circumstances changed, particularly with the change of government, many interviewees no longer found it useful to support the Maoists, and ending the violence became the priority. In conclusion, local people explained their actions in different ways. The two main themes emerging from this analysis were the desire for change and coercion. The kind of participation that followed was also qualitatively different. The people who took part in the movement for change tended to emphasise their contribution through agency and the spirit of initiative. On the other hand, when people participated mostly out of coercion, they tended to limit their action in the movement as much as possible, attempted to stay out or worked against it. Perceptions and actions often shifted during the movement. Embodied experiences of oppression, violence, and coercion before and during the movement influenced people’s dynamic perceptions and decisions along the way. Individual priorities, moral values, and emotional responses to social events also played an important part in people’s narratives. The use of violence and coercion influenced many people’s perceptions of the movement, often alienating them from it. The people who experienced the movement mostly in terms of violence and coercion had very negative attitudes towards it. Others found in the movement a space 45 See chapter three on the myths and stereotypes emerging from the literature and dominant discourse.

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for nonviolent action. A good portion of the interviewees, in fact, interpreted their action as nonviolent resistance against direct and indirect forms of oppression and violence. Either way, except for a small group of interviewees who had joined an armed squad, most of the interviewees participated mostly in nonviolent activities. In people’s narratives, participation was hardly synonymous with loyalty or even support for the armed group. Even when participating or joining an armed group, local people were always critical and pursued their own ends and priorities.

Everyday Peace and Community Solidarity Something that struck me from the very first interview in the villages when we started talking about the conflict was that, while I expected to talk about violence and victimisation, the interviewees emphasised their commitment to pursue everyday activities that would benefit the community. Solidarity emerged as an important theme throughout my fieldwork. People in different villages engaged in different forms of activities to help one another face the challenges of living in a context of violence. In their narratives, the interviewees often stressed their commitment to enhancing the wellbeing of the community, or of groups perceived as most vulnerable. We can also think of these actions as forms of everyday peace. In fact, in many ways, these were actions that went beyond simply coping. They were small actions that brought people together as a community determined to make a difference, in a context where they were coerced to participate in violence and be suspicious of each other. It often involved high levels of commitment, risks, and of course, trust. Community solidarity was not something new at the time of the conflict. Before the conflict, individuals and groups were active in different kinds of formal or informal social work to address issues that affected the local community. Some of the interviewees, for example, were active in NGOs that focused on the socio-economic inclusion of marginalised groups, sustainable organic agriculture, health, and nutrition. Some of them explained that doing social work was a way to address socio-economic problems outside the divisive banners of political parties. Furthermore, the Santhali community used a traditional infrastructure to actively promote the culture and needs of their group. Most of the Santhali interviewees said that before the conflict, they were involved in activities related to the revival and promotion of the Santhali language and culture.

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Other interviewees conducted social work in informal ways. Devi’s story was a good example of everyday solidarity work.46 Devi built an informal social network among local women and used her local knowledge and ties to bring people’s resources together so that everyone could benefit from them. The social activities carried out during the conflict sometimes were in part a continuation of local people’s activities before the conflict. Some of the interviewees, for example, stressed their commitment to continue working, even and especially when official institutions were paralysed and no longer paid them, or their employers or the armed groups asked them to stop working. For example, a teacher explained that this commitment to continue working was his main aim during the time of the conflict: I tried my best to remain in my tuition, this was my cause.

All these interviewees were employed in jobs that provided social services such as health care, education, development projects, and distributing social pensions. Most of them encountered great logistical difficulties: During that time there were long periods of strike, so the government instructed us not to go to the office in those days, sometimes it happened even for fifteen days in a row. They blocked roads and cut trees, so during those days I used to go by motorbike. I worked anyways.

Some of them were able to carry on their work despite the challenges. For example, administration officers said that the Maoist did not harass them when they worked. On the contrary, the teachers were threatened with violence if they refused to close the schools during the bandhs (strikes). During the conflict, village communities also engaged in new strategies to answer to the changed situation and needs. A frequent theme was that, at that time, community bonds grew stronger. Only one interviewee said that, in his village, the relationships among the people deteriorated out of suspicion and fear. Most of the people, however, felt that the everyday pressures of facing the conflict brought the community together.

46 See Dipali’s story and everyday peace at chapter four.

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Avoiding violence and protecting individuals perceived as more vulnerable was one of the aims of community solidarity. As I mentioned earlier, in many villages the people organised alert systems to run from the attacks of the armed groups. Often, by the time an armed group arrived, the village was found to be completely empty. A main concern was protecting women with small children, young boys and girls. In case of sudden threats, families and communities tended to prioritise finding safe hiding places for them first, even when this entailed additional risks for themselves. They also sought to keep youth away from the armed groups in order to protect them from recruitment. For example, a grandfather said: We tried to stay at home quietly and tell the children not to go out, not to go, because they used to take young children. So for this reason we tried to keep them at home

Hence, through these mechanisms, the local people sought not only to protect themselves for security reasons, but also to stay collectively out of the conflict. In some villages, community solidarity during the conflict provided support to its members beyond the immediate need of escaping violence. As I discussed in the last chapter, the conflict affected local people’s physical, emotional, and economic everyday life. Some of the interviewees felt that community solidarity helped alleviate those burdens. The community provided material as well as emotional support. Reciprocal empathy and understanding encouraged individuals to face the fear and trauma of violence: People became so united for each other’s grief. We were so united, as if we were one single body.

The women especially emphasised the role of community solidarity in their narratives. In many villages, as the men fled and the women were left behind, they decided to live all together in one house. By living together, they enhanced their sense of security and found themselves in a better place to get organised, answer to everyday needs and responsibilities, and take decisions regarding how to respond to interactions with the security forces. From the narratives, it appears that simple social acts like talking to each other at community level made a difference. People talked about what was going on to make sense of the circumstances and think together

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about possible responses. It was a meaningful way of supporting each other and sharing crucial information. While the civil wars literature has focused more on how war breaks social bonds,47 some studies have shown that people who experience conflict may display more altruistic behaviour and were more likely to be involved in community groups and be active in nonviolent political groups.48 In addition, the case of Lalgarh shows that social bonds might grow stronger during the conflict itself. The emerging literature on everyday peace has also been highlighting the importance of solidarity, reciprocity, and community relationships, which is often seen as a core component of everyday peace itself.49 Individuals and communities may respond to the everyday challenges of violent conflict in different ways: violence may exacerbate suspicion, fear, and resentment or increase solidarity and positive exchanges. The nature of bonds and relationships among members of the local community before, during and after a violent conflict is certainly very different from place to place. Even in the context of this research, the levels of trust, cooperation, and solidarity were not the same in every village, and not always rosy. In some villages, the interviewees were not used to high levels of social exchange and interdependence with other families in the villages, and they tended to struggle more and be more isolated during the conflict. Furthermore, interpersonal disputes and rivalries were often mentioned as the real motivation behind ‘political’ executions during the conflict.

47 See chapter two on research based on the question of why people kill their neighbours, for example Gallegher, “My Neighbour, My Enemy: The Manipulation of Ethnic Identity and the Origins and Conduct of War in Yugoslavia”; Wilmer, The Social Construction of Man, the State, and War: Identity, Conflict, and Violence in Former Yugoslavia. 48 John Bellows and Edward Miguel, “War and Local Collective Action in Sierra Leone,” Journal of Public Economics 93, no. 11 (2009); M. Voorst et al., “Does Conflict Affect Preferences? Results from Field Experiments in Burundi,” IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc (2010). 49 SungYong Lee, “Understanding Everyday Peace in Cambodia: Plurality, subtlety, and Connectivity.” Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 16, no. 1 (2021): 24–38. Mac Ginty, Everyday Peace. How So Called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict. Anthony Ware and Vicky-Ann Ware, “Everyday Peace: Rethinking Typologies of Social Practice and Local Agency.” Peacebuilding (2021).

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The findings from this research show that community solidarity, when it is there, not only helps people facing the everyday challenges of conflict, but it also increases their ability to resist more powerful actors and pursue different goals. Studies on nonwar communities such as Anderson and Wallace’s research and Kaplan’s study on Colombia also highlighted the importance of community cohesion as a crucial factor that enabled nonwar communities to stay out of war.50 Community cohesion and solidarity can also be understood as a core part of everyday peace. Although the everyday practices described in this section did not openly confront or defy the armed groups, they were ways of resisting taking part in the violence and insisting on positive nonviolent actions instead. In Lalgarh, community solidarity practices were strategies to stay out of violence together. Local people’s strategies to stay out of war have been interpreted differently in the recent literature on this topic. For MacGinty, avoidance practices are a form of everyday peace. Masullo, in relation to the Peace Community in Colombia, argues that a community that refuses to cooperate with the armed groups is engaged in a process of civil or nonviolent resistance because ‘the opposite of cooperation is resistance’.51 Anderson and Wallace, who also examined case studies of communities that opted to stay out of war including the Peace Community in Colombia, point out that these communities did not seek to end the war or convince others not to join, and were mainly moved by pragmatic considerations. Therefore, they use the term nonwar communities rather than peace communities.52 Despite the different interpretations, all these considerations are relevant for the case of Lalgarh. The community solidarity practices described in this section did not aim at ending the war, but to engage in them did entail resisting the coercive pressure of armed groups. Rejecting violence just by focusing on carrying on positive everyday activities to support the community could be very risky; in fact, some people died in the process. We can think of these actions as everyday peace also because the idea of contributing to the community through positive actions was often explicit in the narratives, and it undermined the discourse of violence, destruction, 50 Anderson and Wallace, Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict. 51 Masullo J., The Power of Staying Put. Nonviolent Resistance against Armed Groups

in Colombia.: 20–22. 52 Anderson and Wallace, Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict; Oliver, “Nudging Armed Groups: How Civilians Transmit Norms of Protection”.

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and socio-economic paralysis. Unlike other case studies analysed in the nonwar communities literature, in Lalgarh many local people did actively attempt to end the conflict and bring peace.

Voice One of the main themes that emerged from the interviews was resistance. People resisted or spoke out in many different ways, individually or collectively, to the state, the Maoists, and the Harmad Bahini. Frequently, the interviewees—local villagers, local administration officers, police officers, and Maoists—stressed the causal relationship between people’s resistance and the outcome of the conflict. There was a feeling, among the local people, that through the experience of resistance to the Maoists, the state, or both, they managed to change something. The narrative of the effectiveness of resistance and assertion of people’s agency emerge as a powerful one, and it mattered to the people. In the interviews, the local people described a wide range of voice strategies and associated them with concrete positive and negative results. Whatever the outcome, the experience of Lalgarh shows that local people can choose to oppose more powerful actors. The literature on voice is much more limited than that on exit and support, as Barter also points out. He defines voice as ‘forms of active neutrality through which civilians exert independent views’.53 Whereas I agree that civilians exert independent views when they choose voice, I find the concept of neutrality problematic. In fact, what I have found is that people may decide to ally with an armed group to achieve their own aims. Furthermore, when voice takes the form of open resistance, it can hardly be considered neutral. Barter identifies three types of voice: defiance, everyday resistance, and engagement.54 In this view, voice strategies can include a range of open or ‘hidden’ forms of resistance, but also more cooperative strategies such as persuasion or negotiations. An important gap in this typology is the option of opposing physically the armed groups, either violently or

53 Barter, Civilian Strategy in Civil War: Insights from Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. 54 Ibid.

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nonviolently. Some studies show that in some contexts, civilians organise self-defence groups to protect themselves from the armed groups.55 In Lalgarh, the local people adopted a range of forms of voice, from persuasion to open resistance, including physically forcing the armed group out. Some people perceived the state as the main oppressor to resist, while others perceived the Maoists as the main threat. Often the perceptions changed, and people were able to apply the strategies learnt to fight the other side. In this section, I compare people’s resistance to the Maoists and the state and discuss the motivations to resist presented in the narratives. Forms of Voice and Resistance In the interviews, people described a rich variety of forms of resistance. Some of them were used to resist mostly the state, and others were mostly strategies to resist the Maoists; but, interestingly, many strategies were used against both. Arjona distinguishes between partial resistance, which aims to oppose only specific decisions or actions by the rebels, and full resistance against the group altogether.56 This distinction can be applied to people’s resistance to both of the parties involved in the conflict: in this case, the Maoists and the ruling party. Some resistance acts were reactions to a specific action by an armed group or the ruling party, but often, in Lalgarh, resistance was aimed at ending the hegemony of an actor altogether. In some cases, these actions result in conflict disruption, which according to Mac Ginty are a form of everyday peace.57 Voice and resistance actions were sometimes spontaneous reactions to a sudden event; others assumed more organised and structured forms. In order to resist the power of a violent actor, some people decided to join a pre-existing political group or institution or sought its help and alliance. The forms of voice emerging from the interviews were engagement, refusal to participate, individual protest, collective protest, political activism, forcing the armed forces out, and cooperating with the opposing side. 55 See, for example: Arjona, “Civilian Resistance to Rebel Governance”; Anderson and Wallace, Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict. 56 Arjona, “Civilian Resistance to Rebel Governance”. 57 Mac Ginty, Everyday Peace. How So Called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent

Conflict.

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Engagement Engagement is the least oppositional form of voice, and it involves a certain degree of cooperation. For Barter, this form of voice can be understood as a way of providing feedback to the combatants to improve things and may be tolerated to a certain extent.58 Both Anderson and Marshall and Kaplan found that nonwar communities engaged with armed groups and established relationships with them in order to negotiate their way out of the conflict.59 In Lalgarh, some individuals sought to influence the Maoists through persuasion, by talking one to one to individual combatants, or by speaking up during committee meetings. Some of the interviewees who engaged with the Maoists in this way supported the movement to some extent, but did not agree with specific decisions, while others tried to persuade individuals to leave the organisation. Either way, the interviewees who experienced this form of engagement did not feel that it was a very effective method, because, they pointed out, the Maoists did not listen. A Santhali man said that he often tried to reason with young boys of his community who had joined the Maoists: We often tried to reason with them, we asked why are you doing this to your families? When they will know about it, what will they say? People will not like it. They answered, we don’t want to know anything else. Are you obeying or not?

Negotiations took place in Lalgarh as well but were also not perceived as having been effective. Local tribal leaders at the beginning of the movement negotiated with the government to find a compromise, but were unable to stop the escalation of the conflict. In the last stage of the conflict, the government sponsored another round of ‘peace talks’ with the mediation of urban civil society members from Kolkata. The narrative on peace talks was emphasised by the state and urban activists, but it was hardly ever mentioned in my interviews with the local people.

58 Barter, Civilian Strategy in Civil War: Insights from Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. 59 Anderson and Wallace, Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict; Kaplan, Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves.

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Refusal to Participate Despite the coercive pressure from the Maoists to participate in their activities and observe their rules, some individuals and entire villages decided not to cooperate. For some of these interviewees, this choice was taken not so much to resist the Maoists, but rather it was motivated by other personal priorities. Furthermore, some of these interviewees expected to be able to demand an exception without negative repercussions; hence, not cooperating in these cases was a more attractive option. For example, a girl said she knew the boys of her village—who were working for the Maoists—and was on good terms with them, so she asked them to allow her to stay at home and study for the exams instead of participating. For others, the choice not to obey the Maoists’ orders was an act of open defiance, which, in many cases, resulted in retaliation from the Maoists. In some cases, this was a collective decision, and the whole village opted to stay out and resist the pressure from the Maoists: When there was the movement, they told us that if we didn’t go they will beat us. We said: ‘beat us, but we won’t go’. So we didn’t go. […] During the movement many things happened. They destroyed houses, did things, but we said that we’re not going to participate in the movement. Then the Maobadi came everywhere, there was violence everywhere, many murders, even right here, in this place, there was a murder. They tried to force us to go, they didn’t let us eat for three days, but despite all that we didn’t want to go.

The experience of these villages is similar to that of the nonwar communities described by Anderson and Wallace and Kalpan,60 although in Lalgarh it was not so formally organised and did not receive help or support from external agencies. The collective alert systems described previously to hide from the armed groups were often used for the purpose of staying out of the conflict. For some individuals, the coercive pressure to join a political party came from the state. Individuals active in opposition parties said in their interviews that they had been threated to join the ruling party, before,

60 Anderson and Wallace, Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict. Kaplan, Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves; Oliver, “Nudging Armed Groups: How Civilians Transmit Norms of Protection”.

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during, and after the conflict, even after the change of government. People who refused to participate were subject to different forms of violence and harassment. Nonetheless, many interviewees explained that repression reinforced their determination to resist. Non-cooperation was also a strategy adopted by the PCPA to boycott the police and state administration during the movement. The PCPA organised collective non-cooperation strategies such as not selling food, water, and other necessary items to the police. Individual Protest Some of the interviewees protested individually against the armed forces. All these individual protests were partial forms of resistance: individuals protested against specific decisions taken by the government or the Maoists. The costs of protesting against the Maoists were extremely high. In fact, all the incidents narrated in the interviews ended up with the person being killed or severely beaten. For example, a villager who protested against a killing said: I protested because I didn’t want them to kill this person. I said that he helped so many people. They killed him, and as I protested, they beat me too.

Nonetheless, ordinary individuals took it upon themselves to protest, especially against the Maoists’ decisions to kill other individuals. As Barter argues, conviction against injustice appeared to be the primary reason for civilians to raise their voice.61 Collective Protest Collective protests were preceded by a certain degree of organisation, ranging from informal discussions to setting up committees and other social infrastructures. Sometimes, the organisation phase was not followed by implementation. For example, after discussing protest plans, the interviewees ultimately decided not to proceed for security concerns. In other cases, the villagers, after discussing together, decided to protest despite the risks. A notable example was the case of Netai. Here, the villagers collectively decided to protest against the recruitment of young boys by 61 Barter, Civilian Strategy in Civil War: Insights from Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines: 31.

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the Harmad Bahini. This was a cause that they were ready to take risks for. When the villagers approached the Harmads, the latter responded by firing on the unarmed villagers, resulting in a massacre. Despite the high stakes, during the conflict the local people did organise and participate in protests against the state, the police, the Harmads, and the Maoists. Some of these protest movements were more formally organised than others, and political leaders and urban actors became involved as well. The Lalgarh movement itself started as a protest movement, and the Police Committee against Police Atrocities was organised to continue leading it. As I have discussed above, many local people actively engaged in it. Other lesser-known committees that were organised to counter the Maoists adopted similar forms of protest such as rallies and demonstrations. Political Activism Many of the interviewees who expressed a commitment to ending the hegemony of the ruling party decided to do so first by joining an opposition party, usually the Trinamool Congress or the Jharkhand Party. Thus, political activism was often the first step for people who wished to resist the ruling party, and many of them later ended up participating in the movement or joining the Maoists: I felt anger inside and I told myself that a day will come when I will throw out the Communists. Since that time, I started talking, participating to Trinamool meetings, and slowly slowly I joined it. On May 5th 2012 I have put the Trinamool flag in my area. We decided that we had to throw out this government, so we had to join politics and then we had to go to this committee.

Political activism was also a way to address specific issues affecting the local people as a result of the corrupted system. For example, a local Jharkhand Party member described his political activism as a way to address state violence and structural problems affecting his people: When a problem happened, we used to approach the government and protest. The problem started when the police created the Harmad Bahini. When the police was with this Harmad Bahini, they created disorder, beat many people, committed a lot of violence in the area. They started doing this since 2006-2007. […] When the people of this area united because here there were no roads and no drinking water, we asked to install water

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pumps, deep water pumps otherwise here if it doesn’t rain we can’t cultivate the land. So we asked this. And in that area there was a place for a hospital but no doctors, we asked that, too.

Many of the interviewees stated that democracy was their preferred channel for bringing change. However, in a context where politics was exercised through violence, they had been denied their political rights. Thus, they felt that they had to try other options to achieve a sociopolitical change at the local level. Once they got the chance to participate in fair elections, some of the interviewees said that they achieved the much-desired change by exercising their political rights. Forcing the Armed Forces Out A strategy that the local people used to respond to violent attacks from both the police and the Maoists was to unite and use their bodies as shields to prevent the attacker from accessing an area or other people. The women of Chotopelia were the first to use this strategy to keep the police from arresting a man. In this case, the police raid happened without warning, so the response of the women was not planned. In other villages, after the movement started, the villagers expected the attacks and could organise themselves to resist. When the police attacked, crowds of villagers carrying traditional weapons and domestic tools surrounded the police and successfully kept them out of the village, or even chased them away, mostly without using those weapons. Similar tactics were used to stop the Maoists. In a village called Radhanagar, when the Maoists tried to coerce the women to participate, the women collectively resisted and ultimately succeeded in chasing the Maoists away. This incident was mentioned several times in local people’s narratives and described as the inception of the resistance against the Maoists. This incident, according to the interviewees, inspired many other villages to do the same. Though these tactics were predominantly nonviolent, the boundary between violence and nonviolence was blurred. When the people organised themselves to resist the police, traditional weapons, and tools that they carried were perhaps mainly symbolic, but they did deliver an aggressive, threatening message. When the Maoists were chased away, it is not clear whether violent attacks also broke out in some cases. The people who narrated these incidents did not refer to an explicit commitment to

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nonviolence. However, many of them, especially the adivasis, pointed out that violence was alien to their culture. Cooperating with the Other Side Many interviewees perceived one side, the Maoists or the state, as the main obstacle to peace and thought that, in order to achieve peace, that actor needed to be defeated. In order to defeat that actor and end its violence, many local people cooperated with the opposing side. As I have mentioned above, to counter the hegemony of the ruling party, many individuals chose to be active in another political party, or accepted an alliance with the Maoists. Similarly, people who perceived the Maoist violence as the main obstacle to peace, especially towards the end of conflict when the violence was at its peak, started cooperating with the police. As I mentioned above, cooperating with the police was considered a very risky activity, as the Maoists killed anyone suspected of being police informants. Nevertheless, towards the end of the movement, people started systematically passing information to the police. Several interviewees said that in some villages they organised themselves collectively to pass on information to the police. They also described incidents where the villagers, in response to attacks by the Maoists, caught the attackers and handed them over to the police. Some of the interviewees said that when the villagers started standing up to the Maoists, the police started backing them up. The local police officers interviewed also said that the Maoists could not have been defeated without the cooperation of the people. Of course, cooperation with an armed group can be considered as participation or support for that armed group. This can be problematic, as it makes the distinction between combatants and civilians blurred. However, I am including cooperation with an armed group as a form of resistance because the interviewees often explained their action as a way of resisting the Maoists, or making peace. For example, a villager said: Everyone was scared, but all wanted to have peace at any cost. At that time, nobody really knew where anyone was. So what happened, one started secretly informing another, exchanging information, and then passed on the information to the police. Slowly people understood that we had to be united, so they united.

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Local people’s Explanations of Resistance In this section, I have presented a variety of forms of local people’s voice and resistance. The purpose here is not to categorise people’s action, but rather to understand its discourse. This is by no means an exhaustive typology, but it shows the rich variety of strategies that local people can come up with to challenge more powerful actors, and there is certainly scope to explore this further in future research. Some considerations can be asserted from this analysis. First, in the narratives, collective efforts were linked to a much higher rate of success than individual efforts. Stories of collective resistance became meaningful collective narratives that inspired others to do the same. In contrast, the negative outcome of individual acts of resistance was in most cases brought up to explain that those negative experiences deterred the speaker’s resistance action. This points, once again, to the importance of community relationships. Organising collective resistance can be risky because if there isn’t absolute trust among the group, there is the possibility that someone may inform the armed group. However, when trust is there and the people can count on each other for protection, their action can be more effective. Although many of these forms of resistance were small, everyday actions, they differ from Scott’s concept of everyday resistance because, in the case of Lalgarh, these actions often were not hidden, passive, nor the result of the action of atomised individuals.62 As we have seen, there was rather a continuum between different levels of organisation. Lilja et al. argue that everyday resistance and organised resistance encourage one another because ‘the resistance, agency and subjectivity of the agent are informed by the dominant as well as challenging and alternative discourses, which circulate in the very context of the subject’.63 The interviews in Lalargh highlight the fact that all the events that take place at the local level contribute to construct people’s discourse. Individual and collective narratives of resistance were often mentioned in the interviews as learning experiences that inspired or deterred future behaviour. Another important consideration emerging from this section is that the local people actively sought to influence the dynamics of conflict and 62 Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. 63 Lilja et al., “How Resistance Encourages Resistance: Theorizing the Nexus between

Power, ‘Organised Resistance’ and ’Everyday Resistance’,” 46.

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its outcome. As such, the local people may not be considered as neutral. However, they may still make independent choices, even when they cooperate with an armed group. In fact, the experience of Lalgarh shows that local people may pursue goals that are different from the agenda of the armed groups. The fact that people’s cooperation with an armed group was frequently very brief and limited indicates that, from the perspective of the local people, support for an armed group could be an instrumental strategy. Often people turned to resist the group that they had previously supported when the divergence increased to a breaking point. In the narratives, the main reasons for resistance against both the state and the Maoists were coercion and violence. People did not like to be coerced to do things against their will, or to be punished for having a divergent opinion. Many interviewees felt that the government was oppressive and did not represent them, but they were not ready to accept to be ruled by another actor that also exercised coercive power over them: Ordinary people wanted change, but we didn’t want to be told at any time ‘go out and go there’. We had our work and we couldn’t leave whenever they wanted. And we didn’t want our wives, our girls to go out.

As I discussed in the last chapter, many interviewees were frustrated with the Maoists because they felt the latter ignored their everyday struggle during the movement to carry on meaningful activities, and felt grievance for being forced to compromise on things that they valued. Everyday interactions with members of the armed groups mattered and influenced the construction of people’s attitudes towards them. The coercive pressure on women was another theme that people felt strongly about, and it emerged several times in the narratives as something that they could not tolerate. This narrative completely clashed with the discourse of spontaneous women participation in the movement sponsored by the Maoists. Violence consistently emerged as a main motive to resist in local people’s narratives. The first reason was a security concern: direct violence compromised the security of the locals, and therefore, for many, ending it was a priority. Moreover, many interviewees expressed a sense of moral outrage for the use of violence for political purposes by both the Maoists and the state. Often, the interviewees referred to a collective feeling of anger to explain resistance. While for some the outrage was due to the

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victimisation of ‘innocent’ local people, others rejected violence altogether. In other words, the use of violence to achieve political ends tended to negatively affect the attitudes of the local people towards political actors that resorted to it.

Conclusion People described in their interviews a wide variety of actions as their response to the conflict. Most of the people interviewed adopted more than one of the strategies that, for descriptive purposes, I have categorised as exit, participation, community solidarity, and voice. The shifts were due to both pragmatic considerations and changes in people’s perceptions—or discourse. Everyday experiences, interactions with members of the armed groups, and emotions contributed significantly to the dynamic construction of discourse during the course of the movement. The discourse through which people explained their own actions were not at all uniform. Some people, for example, emphasised structural violence and social injustice, while for others the main concern was direct violence. For some, the Maoists were the main obstacle to peace, while for others it was the state. Importantly, many local people sought to influence the outcome of the conflict according to their view of what peace and social justice represented, whatever that was. People’s action during the conflict had many functions and pursing an idea of peace was one of them. In the section on community solidarity, I have discussed how those action could be interpreted as everyday peace, and in the voice section, I have focused more on resistance. However, this was not to say that one category of action is labelled as peace, while the other as resistance. On the contrary, this research shows that from an everyday perspective peace and resistance are blurred and mixed together, as people sought to resist actors in power that they perceived as violent, improve their security, and achieve positive, sustainable, and peaceful change. As people had different views of what was violence and what peace or positive change they wanted to achieve, they engaged in a range of different actions. Although here I have categorised them for analytical purposes, it is important to think about people’s agency overall, and what it meant to them, beyond the single action. Exit, voice, and community solidarity strategies were often all linked together, and even participation, in some ways.

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The emphasis on local people’s agency here is not an assessment of the material impact of their action, but it shows that, in a context of subjugation and violent conflict, people saw themselves as agents who made independent choices. Although many people described a feeling of hopelessness in some circumstances where they felt that they had no choice but to obey, the theme of people’s power and agency was very prevalent in the narratives. Stories of open resistance were especially powerful in local people’s discourses as they represented the space where ordinary people asserted their own agency. Agency and emotions were often ascribed collectively to ‘the people’ rather than to individuals. This collective pathos in the discourse was also reflected in the strengthening of social bonds within the community, which, in turn, made resistance and avoidance strategies more feasible and effective.

CHAPTER 8

Perspectives on Peace, Change, and Development

Introduction As we have seen, local people’s action reflected their understanding of the conflict and their views on peace and change. In fact, peace was often mentioned as a reason for action in local people’s discourses. The kinds of actions interpreted as ‘peace’ were very diverse, as were the views around what kind of peace ought to be constructed. While some of the villagers felt that the main priority was to achieve a certain degree of security by ending direct violence, for others peace could only be achieved by ending deeper forms of violence and subjugation that many of them had experienced since long before the onset of the Lalgarh conflict. Often, the different perceptions of peace were related to the different ways in which individuals experienced violence and subjugation, but also to their systems of values and beliefs. The terms peace (shanti), change (paribartan), and development (unnati) emerged as key concepts in most of the interviews, and they were all deeply intertwined. The final step in this analysis is to explore the meanings around these concepts in people’s discourses. These people’s discourses need to be understood in relation to the dominant discourses that shape their social context. In fact, in a discussion on critiques of Scott’s concept of everyday resistance, Lilja et al. argued that the resisting subjects are not autonomous and do not operate outside the dominant

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Carrer, How People Respond to Violence, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11342-0_8

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discourse.1 According to Jackson and Dexter, leaders are able to construct hegemonic discourses because of power asymmetry.2 The question, then, is how does the dominant discourse influence local people’s discourses? And can local people construct alternative discourses that challenge the hegemonic ones?

Peace and Development in the Discourse of the State Before exploring meanings in local people’s discourses, I start with an analysis of the discourse of the state. In fact, while discussing whether people, especially marginalised groups, have their own agency, a critique that frequently comes up is that people’s discourse is influenced by dominant ones. Looking at the discourse of the state will allow to then compare it with people’s discourses and answer this question. I have analysed the discourse of the state on peace and change through an analysis of interviews conducted with local representatives of the state interviewed during my fieldwork: seven administration officers, four police officers, and two elected members of local government bodies. All the government officers came from outside of the Junglemahal region, most of them had been posted here very recently, and they were all men belonging to higher castes. These officials, who were mostly in high-level positions of authority, thus came from more privileged social backgrounds than the other local villagers interviewed, and they were also outsiders. Interestingly, I have found that the discourse on peace and development was quite uniform and central to most of these interviews with state representatives, except for a couple of interviewees who, although were in positions of authority, worked in the field in closer contact with the local people and had been posted to the same job for a longer period of time. These individuals were more integrated with the local society, and their discourse was closer to that of other ordinary people interviewed. Except for these, all the other state representatives interviewed shared very consistent views on how to build peace and on the role of tribal people.

1 Ibid. 2 Jackson and Dexter, “The Social Construction of Organised Political Violence: An

Analytical Framework.”

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According to this group of interviewees who represented state institutions, the conflict was caused by the deprivation of the local people, in particular, of tribal groups. They believed that, in turn, the deprivation of the people was caused by the negligence of the government: the interviewees often pointed out that the benefits of the state did not reach the people who were entitled to them, and that the government did not take care of the people. They argued that, as a result, the local people were ‘backward’ and had not seen ‘the light of civilisation’: Before the movement the situation was not good at all, actually benefits of the government policy did not reach the poor section of the society, because the government lost its way in the net of politics. […] The socalled Maoists started to circulate their policies among the people especially they chose the tribals, those who live in remote areas, those who did not get the light of civilisation that spread in India so far.

As in this quotation, the interviewees often explained that the Maoists exploited and manipulated the grievances of the people. Some of the interviewees also added that the state oppressed the people through the violence of the police and the Harmads: It was the autocracy against the tribals. It was a movement of poverty, and you know what is a Harmad? You know, the Lalgarh area was being controlled by the Harmads, they were looting, depriving the people, and torturing the common people through the police and they won’t harm the Harmads.

This explanation of conflict is very close to some classic theories of rebellion. In Gurr’s theory in particular, the onset of violent conflict is the result of a paradigm of perceived deprivation, frustration, and aggression.3 Similar to Gurr’s theory, the state representatives interviewed also stressed the core idea of a causal relationship between deprivation and aggression. The element of politicisation of discontent, in this case represented by the action of the Maoists, is also central to Gurr’s theory.4 Marxist theory is also based on the assumption that the exploitation of the working class will necessarily bring the latter to rebel. In 3 Gurr, Why Men Rebel. 4 Ibid.

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this perspective, the cause of violent conflict is the inequality between social classes as a result of uneven development.5 The idea of how socioeconomic oppression would bring about rebellion was central in the debates among Maoist intellectuals and academics since the inception of the Naxalite movement, as I discussed in Chapter 2. Interestingly, although the aim of the state was to end the rebellion, while that of the Maoists was to encourage it, both discourses were based on similar assumptions regarding the causes of political violence. For the state representatives interviewed, peace could only be constructed through the implementation of development policies by the state. All the interviewees emphasised the fact that the services needed to be delivered properly and reach the people, and that the government had to take care of the people amicably. The discourse of good governance of the new government as opposed to the violent, corrupted, and oppressive rule of the previous one reflected the rhetoric of the TMC. In fact, the new ruling party based its rhetoric on the idea of people-centric change. For example, an elected TMC member of the local administration said: Actually is a good governance. In the last government, under CPM Bhuddhadev Bhattacharya, there was no administration, it was the rule of the hooligans, looters, and murders, there was no administration at all. Mamata Banerjee’s government has a good governance and she established her authority, she used the police for peace making, not for making revenge.

The interviewees mentioned several new initiatives undertaken by the state to address what they perceived as the grievances of the people and to build peace. These initiatives included guaranteeing access to cheap rice, the construction of schools, the distribution of bicycles to female students, the construction of roads, the implementation of employment schemes, initiatives to reduce child marriage and encouraging the education of girls, the construction of sport facilities, the involvement of local people in various cultural programmes, sport events, and the implementation of community policing programmes. The local administration officers encouraged me to visit some of the projects and initiatives that were being implemented. They wanted me to see what the state was now doing to build peace. Through these construction sites, the state’s discourse of development was thus made visually 5 Roxborough, Theories of Underdevelopment.

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Fig. 8.1 Construction site (Source Photo by Monica Carrer)

visible. For example, the picture below shows one of the schools that were being built near Lalgarh, and, according to the development officers, it was supposed to make quality education much more accessible for local tribal children (Fig. 8.1). In the discourse of the state, socio-economic progress was prioritised over political rights as a means to construct durable peace. A local village supporter of the TMC reported that Mamata Banerjee said that political rights were not enough, because what the people really needed was social and economic progress. Delivering socio-economic services was seen as the main aspect of people’s political rights, because in this perspective, the main obstacle to democracy was corruption, which resulted in the failure of delivering services to the people. The failure of the state in delivering services to the people was therefore interpreted as a failure of the social contract. In this view, violence was seen as an expression of the breakdown of the social contract, similar to some of theories of civil war.6 In contrast, showing that socio-economic services were delivered was a demonstration

6 Tony Addison and S. Mansoob Murshed, “The Social Contract and Violent Conflict,” in Civil War, Civil Peace, ed. Helen Yanacopulos and Joseph Hanlon (Milton Keynes: The Open University, 2006).

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that there was no corruption and the political rights of the people were thus fulfilled. Paternalism and Development The rationale behind the development initiatives initiated by the state was that if the people could eat, they would not join the Maoists, as it was often repeated in the interviews. For the most part, these were initiatives that addressed very basic necessities, but did not change the relationships of power at the local level or increased local people’s chances to improve their status. The analysis of the discourse of the local state representatives shows that the approach of the state was based on paternalistic assumptions. The state, according to the state representatives interviewed, needed to ‘take care’ of the people, be sensitive to their suffering, protect, monitor, and guide them. For example, an administration officer explained how the lack of care by the previous government caused the conflict, while under the amicable care of the new administration, the conflict ended: The authorities did not care for them, and gradually they were difficult, they grew unrest against the government; and at present the government is caring amicably with the local peoples, so many tribes are living here, and that’s why the movement is now over.

This paternalistic approach was reflected in a very uniform construction of the tribal in all this group of interviews. All these interviewees described the tribal people as peaceful people, who however, got furious out of deprivation. In a couple of interviews, the tribal uprisings against the British were mentioned to support this point. All these interviewees also explained that the tribals were not the masterminds of the movement; rather, they were manipulated, exploited, and coerced by the Maoists through false promises or violence. The tribals, according to their views, could not be the masterminds of the movement because they were not much educated, were simple-minded, did not have much brain and knowledge, and did not know about politics. Therefore, they were not moved by ideology or ethics, but merely acted out of deprivation. The quotes below are an example of the language used referring to the tribals:

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These people were not the mastermind behind the incidents, they were simply like credulous enough that those people were able to use them for their own misguided aims. Basically, tribals, those who are the purely tribals, they had simply you know, they used to work as a force, nothing else, I mean they are not literate so much, they are not having so much brain, they were not having so much knowledge about the good and bad.

Because of these paternalistic assumptions, therefore, the tribal people, and other local communities belonging to disadvantaged groups, are erased as relevant political actors who influence the dynamics of conflict, similar to much of the civil wars literature.7 Furthermore, paternalism also justifies the exclusion of the local people as relevant actors in peacebuilding processes, as critics of the liberal peace point out.8 This paternalist discourse was reflected in the state’s peacebuilding approach where the local people were not considered as actors, but merely passive recipients. The state was the only actor involved in the peace process, by being sensitive and benevolent, providing basic needs and guidance, but at the same time expecting the people to ‘behave well’ and follow the ‘good path’. Many of the local people commented that the control on power of the new ruling party was even stronger, and many of them were asked to ‘behave’ by joining the party, or they were threatened and punished. An active member of the Jharkhand Party described how, in the current regime, he was asked to go ‘voluntarily’ to jail whenever the new Prime Minister came to the area; otherwise, he was implicated into false cases and had to bear legal costs: Since she rose to the throne [Mamata Banerjee] they are torturing a lot here. Every time a minister or Mamata comes to the area, they arrest me. The false cases given by the police, the TMC gives it three times more. When Mamata comes in the area, I have to go to jail.

During my fieldwork, I often observed this paternalistic approach expressed in the interactions that I witnessed between state representatives and ordinary people. The state officials often scolded the people as they 7 See Chapter 1 and Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices. 8 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace; Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development.

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would with young children, and the people tended to remain quiet and lower their gaze. During those interactions, the local people were scolded when they did not express gratitude and appreciation for the benevolent efforts of the state. On the other hand, many opportunities and advantages were offered to supporters of the opposition who decided to join the ruling party, including former Maoists or CPM supporters. Many of the local people were of the view that through this approach, the TMC had increased its power at the local level. A result of development, or a ‘side-effect’, as Ferguson points out, was a strengthening of the power of the state. For Ferguson, development is an ‘anti-politics machine’ because: It is not a machine for eliminating poverty that is incidentally involved with the state bureaucracy; it is a machine for reinforcing and expanding the exercise of bureaucratic state power, which incidentally takes ‘poverty’ as its point of entry - launching an intervention that may have no effect on the poverty but does in fact have other concrete effects.9

The strengthening of local autocracy through development funds might also be interpreted as a deliberate strategy. For example, Lacina argues that the central government of India supports local autocracy in the Northeast so that local autocratic leaders consolidate power and repress possible security threats.10 Thus, the large sums invested to address mass grievances are largely hampered by corruption.11 In Lalgarh, a strategy to increase the influence of the administration over the local people resulted in a changed approach to the way local officers interacted with the locals. Most of the officers interviewed explained that, while in the past they were confined to the boundaries of their offices and not allowed to visit the people, now they were encouraged to do the opposite. From the perspective of local state officers, and in particular for the police, this change of approach was instrumental to ensure cooperation from the population. For example, a police officer said:

9 James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 255–256. 10 Bethany Lacina, “The Problem of Political Stability in Northeast India: Local Ethnic Autocracy and the Rule of Law,” Asian Survey 49, no. 6 (2009). 11 Ibid., 1017.

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We have taken one cancer patient to Thakur P., by providing them one ambulance car to them. So when she gets any information about any bad elements, she will naturally give that information to us.

Nonetheless, both sides welcomed this increased contact between local people and state officials. Among state officers, there was recognition of how this was changing their individual perception of the people, so that they could now understand them better, mutually acknowledge each other’s grievances and mistakes, and develop friendly relationships. Many of them felt that, in this way, their work was more meaningful. Many of the local people also described a change in the relationship with the state. The majority of them felt that the police and state representatives after the movement were much more respectful, less rude, and spoke to them in a friendly manner. For example, in a village where people had earlier experienced high levels of police violence, a villager said that now in contrast: Now the police is well behaved. Here there is a camp. The name of the leader is J.J. We have a good relationship. I go there to visit them.

In summary, after the conflict, the state sponsored an approach to peace based on reducing people’s deprivation through development policies. In the name of peace and development, the local administration strengthened its hold on power and justified the repression of political opposition. The assumptions that justified the subjugation of divergent political voices in the discourse of the state were based on a paternalistic conceptualisation of deprivation and its causal relationship with violent conflict. The local people were considered as immature and incompetent political actors that could easily be manipulated. Therefore, the role of the state was to look after the people and guide them to the good path. The guidance was based on a benevolent approach, but also on punishing divergent individuals.

Grievance in Local People’s Discourses While analysing the discourses of the state, the Maoists, and the local people, I found important similarities in their main narratives of conflict, although the purposes and language could be different. In particular, the idea that the people were oppressed before the conflict and deprived

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by a corrupted government was common among interviewees from all different backgrounds and was central to the rhetoric of the Maoists, the TMC, the PCPA, and other opposition parties. Similarly, the nexus between peace, change, and development was central to both the dominant discourse and the discourses of the local people. The question, then, is what was the influence of the dominant discourse in the construction of the discourses of the local people? Were the local people ‘convinced’ by the grievance discourse of more powerful actors such as the Maoists and the state, or did they construct their own, independent discourse? There is probably no definite answer to the question of where discourse comes from because social actors constantly engaged in the process of constructing discourse, and their subjectivity was also being constructed in the process. Through a discourse analysis approach, however, I had the chance to explore patterns in the discourse, by tracing dominant discourse themes in the discourses of the local people. I have found two main themes about grievance that frequently emerged in local people’s narratives: starvation and corruption. As I discussed above, these two narratives were also prevalent in the discourse of the state. Hence, here I discuss the role of dominant discourse in constructing these narratives of grievance, but I also highlight local people’s discursive agency and the role of experience. Local people’s narratives on grievance also lead to a discussion on how people experienced everyday violence as an expression of local-level power relationships, and how this was reflected in a continuum of violence before, during, and after the conflict. The Narrative of Extreme Poverty and Starvation One of the recurring narratives in local people’s discourses that reflected the discourse of the new TMC government was the narrative of extreme poverty and starvation. As I discussed above, after the conflict, the new government emphasised the idea that peace was being constructed by addressing the most basic needs of the poor, such as access to food, education, and health care, as these grievances were understood to be the causes of the conflict. Similarly, when the local villagers interviewed explained the causes of conflict, they often said that ‘the people’ had no food and were starving. These propositions were framed with very similar words in several interviews. According to these, the people were forced

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to collect and eat eggs of ants from the forest to survive. In contrast, now thanks to the initiatives of the new Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, the people could eat, and therefore, there was peace. As the quotations below show, the starvation narrative was often linked, implicitly or explicitly, to the Chief Minister’s role in constructing peace: You have to write this: the people of Junglemahal used to eat eggs of ants and collect wood and leaves from the forest. In this way they could not fill their stomachs, it used to remain half empty. That’s how days passed. Now there is no longer that situation. Now they can eat fully. For 34 years there has been no progress in our area. We are in a better place by the road, but in the interiors, they didn’t have food, they had to walk in the forest, walk barefoot on the rocks, they walked there to collect wood and eat a certain kind of insect. Didi12 went there, saw what they were doing, and so she gave rice at 2 Rupees per kilo, so now the people can eat. They still sell those insects in the market though.

Interestingly, most of the interviewees who referred to starvation had not experienced it personally. In these narratives, the ‘starving people’ described were distant communities living in the forests or the mountains with which the speaker had no connection. The extreme grievance that was supposed to motivate people’s action against the state was therefore an imagined condition attributed to someone ‘other’. The small number of interviewees who belonged to communities that actually struggled to find enough food for the family, said that they did not participate in the movement; on the contrary, they emphasised the fact that they resisted the coercive pressure to join. The narrative of starvation and extreme poverty, therefore, was very prevalent in local people’s discourses, and it seemed to be more influenced by the dominant discourse than informed by people’s own experiences. This narrative was meaningful in constructing a sense of grievance, and the interviewees often referred to it as a broad explanation of the conflict. However, in people’s narratives, extreme starvation and poverty narratives were never used as explanations for the interviewee’s own actions.

12 The people often referred to the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee as ‘Didi’, which means elder sister.

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The Narrative of Corruption In the discourse of the state, the narrative of extreme poverty was related to corruption, as it was considered a result of the failure of the state in delivering services to the people. The theme of corruption of the CPM government was also one of the most dominant ones in the interviews with the local people. In fact, almost all the interviewees brought up the problem of corruption in the interviews. The narrative of corruption was framed with very similar propositions by the majority of local interviewees. The most common ones were: The CPM government was in power for about 30 years, but it did nothing good. The CPM government in 30 years did nothing for progress. The CPM leaders stole from the people, appropriated money meant for development projects and enriched themselves. The people were mistreated/ neglected and left aside. The local politicians did not give the people what was theirs. The CPM government did not follow the law; they did only what suited them. The CPM oppressed the people through the Harmad Bahini.

According to scholars such as Shah and Gupta, discourses on corruption have a moral dimension, as they are based on assumptions regarding what behaviours are considered morally correct.13 Furthermore, as Gupta points out, ordinary people’s narratives of corruption offer insights about how ordinary people perceive the state, what state actions are considered legitimate, and their ideas about citizen’s rights.14 For Shah, the discourse of corruption is based on the idea of the impersonal state that serves the 13 Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India; Akhil Gupta, “Narratives of Corruption,” Ethnography 6, no. 1 (2005). 14 Gupta, “Narratives of Corruption.”

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greater good. However, she found that in Jharkhand the locals perceived the state as an entity administered by elites pursuing their own agendas and unable to provide adequately for the needs of the local people. This lack of faith in the state legitimised illegal practices.15 The findings from this analysis in the context of Lalgarh are somewhat different. Although most of them had negative views about the performance of the state in recent times, they thought that the state should represent the greater good rather than the personal interests of the elites. For example, an interviewee said: What should we get out of Indian democracy? If my son is sick we should be able to take him to the hospital, but the fact is that here we can’t take him to the hospital. Unless a political leader calls the doctor, the doctor won’t see him. As I supported the opposition party, the politician wouldn’t have called the doctor, and my child would have died. When the people understood that this was their right and their rights were taken from them, they did this movement.

According to this discourse, a corrupted regime that did not provide services to the society was not considered legitimate. This argument was central both in the rhetoric of the Maoists and that of the new government. While for the Maoists, the illegitimate conduct of the government justified resistance action against it, the new ruling party emphasised the narrative of development to portray itself as the new benevolent legitimate ruler. Several interviewees mentioned that the Maoists talked to the villagers about corruption. They said that the Maoists collected and shared information about local politicians at village meetings, or ‘people’s courts’. For example, a group of interviewees said: In that place they told about who had been a Communist, for how many years, they were recognised. For example, if someone had been a Communist for 20 years, they asked, ‘you have been a Communist for 20 years, what progress have you achieved?’ And so as a punishment they pulled his ear and made him squat up and down. They asked how much money he got for which project, and how he spent it.

15 Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India.

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As these interviewees described, the villagers were brought together in the night and there was a sort of trial, during which a political leader was asked about how he had used the money meant for developmental project, and how much he had kept for himself or the party. The Maoist interviewed also described the same process. Both the local people and the Maoists interviewed said that the Maoists emphasised slogans about people’s rights and urged them to fulfil the rights that they had been denied. The Maoists, therefore, actively sought to construct this discourse of grievance and corruption, and played a role in spreading it among the local people. However, from this analysis, it also appears that the discourse that the Maoists spread at the local level was constructed by collecting information and knowledge from the local people. Many of the interviewees emphasised the fact that they already knew and understood that the local politicians were corrupted. For example, an interviewee said: Nowadays people move around India, they see different standards and they question why. And so they realise, they understand the reason behind this situation.

Often, in their interviews, the local people did not simply repeat the arguments of the Maoists, but they also commented on them by bringing evidence in support or against them drawing from their own experiences. Most of the interviewees described personal experiences and talked about how corruption affected their everyday lives. The incidents narrated were all different, but they were all about people being required to support the ruling party, have political connections, or pay money to have access to a social service. Furthermore, they described how the politicians in power and their associates systematically appropriated resources and job positions. For example, some elderly women who were entitled to receive a pension said that they were not receiving it because someone else took it: I am an elderly woman, but I don’t receive any pension. Here only those in politics with the Communists get something, but ordinary people don’t get anything. This is my misfortune.

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People were required to have the approval of a political leader to have their child seen by a doctor, get a birth certificate, submit a complaint to the police, receive fair marks at school, get a job, get married, and more. To describe systems similar to what the people of Junglemahal described, Clapham uses the term neopatrimonialism defined as ‘the construction of reciprocal relationships of an essentially personal kind between leaders and their followers, within the formal hierarchy of the state’.16 Clapham’s description of neopatrimonial mechanisms is very close to the situation described by interviewees in Junglemahal: the support for the political order was obtained by offering personal benefits to individuals through the use of state resources or sanctioning those who did not conform.17 Clapham explains how neopatrimonialism is an outcome of state-building processes: State-building requires high levels of social capital, and notably interpersonal trust and the capacity to create institutions that are in some degree autonomous from the individuals who run them. In the absence of such capital, the ostensibly public institutions will almost inevitably be subverted into more private mechanisms, designed to promote wealth and power of individuals, and their capacity to elicit the support of those who do not benefit from them will correspondingly be eroded.18

This system affected every sphere of social life at the local level, from what emerged from the local people’s narratives. One of the main issues raised was that of employment, both qualified and unskilled. Several interviewees explained that the problem of unemployment was a major source of income for the local politicians, particularly at the panchayat level.19 In fact, in the panchayat, politicians received funds from the government through employment schemes such as the NREGA. However, instead of using the money to pay the workers, the politicians stole part of the funds. Furthermore, they took sums from the workers by promising a particular

16 Clapham Christopher, “The Challenge to the State in a Globalized World,” in State Failure, Collpase and Reconstruction, ed. Jennifer Milliken (Malden, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 30. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 29. 19 The panchayat is the village level administration.

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job position, even though often the people who paid did not get the promised job. Another problem raised by the villagers in regard to employment was that qualified positions were not given to qualified individuals, but again, only to party supporters. Therefore, educated youth could not find proper jobs despite their efforts in their studies, and families could not raise their social status. A consequence of this system of employment was also reflected in the very low quality of the services provided. Individuals, who worked as teachers, doctors, policemen, development officers, and so on, were not required to do their job, but simply to support the party. As a result, people described a situation in which there were no teachers in schools, no doctors in hospitals, and construction works were left uncompleted or not done at all. The interviews with the local state representatives confirmed the same issues and patterns. Most of the interviewees admitted that they could not implement their work properly because of the political circumstances. Many of them wished to deliver proper services and justice; however, they were also subjected to pressure from politicians or their superiors who could, for example, post them elsewhere, fire them, or create other kinds of problems and pressure. Some of the individuals who worked for the administration or the police did struggle in the attempt to change things and deliver proper services; however, they were hindered and their efforts nullified by others in the system. For example, a development officer said: The gram panchayat is the dirtiest place in the world, because there are politicians, the people who work there, are all dirty and drunk. Dirty in the sense that there is a lot of money involved, and it is very difficult in that situation to be honest. I asked Baba [God] to be able to resist in those circumstances. All the projects are meant for the common good of the society, but for that you always have to fight the politicians. The projects are mostly eaten by the politicians of the gram panchayat, so to get the money for a project you have to fight. I do my best, I try to achieve as much as possible.

Opposing people in power could be very dangerous for single individuals, even if they worked for the state, as some of the police officers admitted in their interviews.

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The problem of corruption that most of the interviewees talked about was therefore a very complex system that affected the relationships between local people at all levels. Pretty much everyone at the local level experienced it daily. However, they experienced it differently. In this system, in fact, power relationships were based on exchange. In order to secure goods and services, individuals sought positions through jobs or politics that gave them access to the extraction of resources from others. This system intensified the differences between local people, depending on their access to the means to extract resources from others, and constructed hierarchies of power among them. The power of individuals depended on having someone below from whom they could extract resources to maintain their position. Participating in this system, for many, was the only way to secure basic resources and support the family. The discourse of grievance, corruption and development, masked these differences and contributed to the construction of the idea of the local starving poor as a homogenous group, dimming the fact that it could be a local who oppressed another local, while in turn under pressure by more powerful individuals. Shah came to similar conclusions drawing from her research in Jharkhand, a state neighbouring the Junglemahal area of West Bengal. Shah points out that the focus on grassroots development depoliticises development, as it does not consider the power inequalities between local people.20 In addition, in this system, there is also a complex relationship between local people and organised political parties. As Roy and Banerjee point out, the subaltern classes are critical of political parties and do not necessarily feel represented by them.21 Yet, at the same time, they count on this interaction to enhance their benefits. Thus, political affiliation shapes not only the relationships between political actors, but also those among ordinary people themselves. Power Relationships and Everyday Violence In local people’s narratives, neopatrimonial relationships were experienced as everyday violence before, during, and after the conflict in many ways. 20 Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India: 96. 21 Roy Dayabati and Banerjee Partha Sarathi, “Left Front’s Electoral Victory in West Bengal: An Ethnographer’s Account,” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 40 (2006).

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For example, corruption was often considered as a form of structural violence that, as I discussed, had significant repercussions on people’s everyday lives. Moreover, at the local level, neopatrimonial relationships also resulted in more direct forms of violence, and there was continuity between the violence that characterised ‘peacetime’ and violent conflict. The links between neopatrimonial systems or ‘fragile’ or ‘failed states’ and violence are not a new topic in the civil wars literature. Reno explains how, in countries with prevailing systems of personalist rule, rulers manipulate conflict within the military in order to protect themselves from the dangers of coups.22 Thus, rulers use state resources and access to illicit markets to buy the loyalty of these military groups. In the case of India, and more specifically in rural West Bengal, there is a similar relationship between political parties and armed gangs. As Banerjee points out, mainstream parties are involved in armed fighting for political dominance over the territory.23 As this ‘gun culture’ or ‘muscle politics’ dominates state politics, rulers also use state resources and access to illicit markets to sponsor these groups. Interestingly, Reno’s research suggests a continuum between patrimonial networks before and during the eruption of a violent conflict.24 In fact, the author argues that the groups that oppose the state, even those who criticise state corruption, have linkages with elite politicians based on the same pattern of gaining access to wealth and power. For Reno, this violence against the state does not constitute rebellion.25 In the case of Lalgarh, too, violence was a key means to consolidate political power. The strategies used by both mainstream parties and the Maoists during times of ‘peace’ and violent conflict were similar. During times of ‘peace’, violence was used to sanction supporters of opposition parties. The ruling party used both the police and its informal militia to intimidate political opponents, as in the examples below:

22 William Reno, “The Politics of Insurgency in Collapsing States,” in State Failure, Collapse and Reconstruction, ed. Jennifer Milliken (Malden, Oxford, Melbourne and Berlin: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). 23 Banerjee Partha Sarathi, “Party, Power and Political Violence in West Bengal,” Economic & Political Weekly (2011). 24 Reno, “The Politics of Insurgency in Collapsing States.” 25 Ibid.

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They gave me a case called skeleton case, according to which I stole weapons and killed people and buried them. This was the case. They took me to the forest and took some pictures. If someone did or said something against them, they used to put them in jail, give them false cases, all these things.

Law enforcement agencies were systematically used to detain people under false charges and force them to sustain legal costs. This was the most frequent theme in the interviews. Local individuals were also prevented from voting. In addition, as Banerjee shows, armed clashes regularly take place in rural areas of West Bengal where two major parties are engaged in a struggle to dominate territory. Banerjee’s findings are therefore consistent with the picture that emerged from my interviews with local people in Junglemahal. In fact, for Banerjee, these struggles aim at establishing exclusive hegemony over an area to control electoral outcomes: Elections in the state are usually controlled by parties having exclusive hegemony over a particular area. Exclusive hegemony ensures that no opposition polling agents will be present in polling booths to challenge malpractices of the dominant party. People can also be coerced to vote for a particular candidate while some may not be allowed to vote at all.26

Violence was also perpetrated in this system as political supporters of the ruling party could benefit from impunity from their violent actions, while ordinary people without political connections could not make complaints to the police. This impunity was used to gain access to illicit economies and to extract resources, as Reno argued.27 Moreover, both ordinary people and police officers explained how this impunity was the cause of violent crimes, domestic violence, and sexual violence. Although the Maoists officially objected to the system of electoral democracy, many interviewees pointed out that the Maoists sought to influence the political dynamics through their armed struggle. Many of them witnessed the Maoists organising the meetings in support of Mamata Banerjee and asking the people to vote for her. An interviewee explained: 26 Partha Sarathi, “Party, Power and Political Violence in West Bengal,” 18. 27 Reno, “The Politics of Insurgency in Collapsing States.”

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The Maobadi used to tell everyone to go to Mamata’s meeting. We all went to Mamata’s meeting, all of us. If there were no relationships between Mamata and Maobadi how would we know? She couldn’t have done this meeting. We went there, we brought all of them, we went to each home and brought two people from every family. […] Mamata couldn’t have flourished here in Junglemahal with all the weapons of the Communists.

Furthermore, according to the interviewees, violent clashes during the conflict happened in places where the control over local territory was contested by different parties. Establishing political control over an area meant making sure that local individuals became part of the neopatrimonial system and provided support and resources to local leaders. The Maoists sought to influence these political dynamics to gain direct control over an area or in support of another party. Moreover, as I showed in Chapter 6, individuals associated with the Maoists resorted to violence to extract goods and resources. Even though some of the interviewees pointed out that the ‘real’ Maoist leaders did not participate in these activities, many individuals and groups joined the Maoists as an opportunity to profit from the extraction of resources from others. After the conflict, the new government attracted these individuals by offering them more competitive positions, benefits, and protection, in exchange for their support. In this way, the new ruling party consolidated its own power and soon it was no longer dependent on an alliance with the Maoists. A critique of the argument that links fragile, patrimonial states to violent conflict is that, as Richmond points out, the construction of the weak, violent, and predatory patrimonial state is an expression of Orientalism and calls for more contextual, bottom-up approaches.28 Richmond’s critique of the liberal peace comes from an IR perspective, where the international is opposed to the local. Despite calling for a more bottom-up approach, this critique still does not consider the complexity, contradictions, and uneven power relationships at the local level. The analysis differs from both the failed state literature and Richmond’s approach because it looks at the neopatrimonial system as a complex net of relationships between local people in their everyday lives. As El-Bushra points out, power relationships are not just those between the governed and the governing, but they also work at an interpersonal 28 Richmond, Failed Statebuilding: Intervention and the Dynamics of Peace Formation.

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level, as well as on a mass scale. In this view, power relations are acted out by individuals and draw from their social and cultural contexts.29 I have found that a bottom-up approach, too, may expose everyday violent norms that are embedded in everyday social relationships. In this grey and complex context, everyday peace agency, too, takes place. However, everyday peace agency cannot be understood without looking at how subjugation and violence are reiterated in everyday relationships and structures. From an everyday perspective, the distinctions between different kinds of violence—structural, political, criminal, domestic—are blurred, and so are the boundaries between conflict and peace. In the context of Lalgarh, violence was embedded in local-level power relations. These findings, however, do not support Reno’s argument that the violence emerging from a context of patronage politics does not constitute rebellion, as it does not articulate a political protest.30 On the contrary, the discourse of people-centric change was very powerful for Maoists leaders, PCPA activists, and ordinary people who actively participated in the movement. Maoist leaders might have attempted to expose and challenge the prevailing violent relationships of power; however, they ultimately ended up perpetrating the same system, particularly when the conflict escalated. Thus, the prevailing system of muscle politics influenced the dynamics of the conflict. The inability of the Maoists to differentiate themselves from the mainstream practices of muscle politics was seen by many local people as a failure. The criticism from the ordinary people that emerged in the interviews, on the other hand, shows that they did construct alternative discourses that were critical of the overall system of violent politics and power relationships. These discourses might be subjugated and less visible; however, they are an expression of discursive resistance against the prevailing norms of everyday violence, and they plant a meaningful seed of change.

29 Judy El-Bushra, “Power, Agency and Identity: Turning Vicious Circles into Virtuous Ones,” in Civil War, Civil Peace, ed. Helen Yanacopulos and Joseph Hanlon (Athens and Milton Keynes: The Open University, 2006). 30 Reno, “The Politics of Insurgency in Collapsing States.”

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Peace in Local people’s Discourses Earlier in this chapter, I discussed how the discourse of the state emphasised the causal relationship between socio-economic grievance and conflict, and, as a consequence, development was seen as key for constructing peace in Junglemahal. Then, I have highlighted how grievance was also a core theme in local people’s discourses, but in a different way, it was experienced through everyday forms of violence that shaped the relationships of power at the local level. Hence, local people’s grievance was much more complex than the discourse constructed by the state, and it exposed the relationship between politics and violence, which contradicted the discourses of all the political actors—including the Maoists, the TMC, and even the CPM—that claimed to represent the interests of the ‘oppressed’. What is left to explore is local people’s views on the peace that ought to be constructed at the local level. How were local people’s meanings of peace different from those of external actors, including academics, the media, and the state? As Mac Ginty and Firchow point out, certain actors have the power to promote their own narratives of peace, conflict, and security and over-write the everyday narratives that people in conflict-affected areas use to describe their own reality.31 Nonetheless, local knowledge is useful because, as Lind and Luckham argue, it ‘offers grounded understandings of the dynamics and complexity of many violences and can be deployed to evaluate efforts to address and mitigate these violences’.32 To overcome the problem of over-writing people’s narratives by imposing peace indicators from outside, Mac Ginty and Firchow sought to re-include people’s perspectives on peace in their Everyday Peace Indicators Project by encouraging people to set their own indicators of peace and change.33 The purpose of this chapter is similar; however, the study has been conducted differently. During my interviews, I usually asked a

31 Mac Ginty and Firchow, “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Narratives of Peace and

Conflict.” 32 Jeremy Lind and Robin Luckham, “Introduction: Security in the Vernacular and Peacebuilding at the Margins; Rethinking Violence Reduction,” Peacebuilding 5, no. 2 (2017): 91. 33 Mac Ginty and Firchow, “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Narratives of Peace and Conflict.”

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direct question on peace, but the answers were always very brief. The interviewees usually interpreted my question as one concerning the end of hostilities, which is what they thought I meant by peace. Hence, most of them simply answered that yes, the war was over. When, as most of them did, they brought up the issue of peace spontaneously in their narratives, however, they elaborated what their meaning of peace was. This difference itself is a sign that Western academic concepts are not always adequate to understand the construction of meaning in different cultural contexts. In this regard, Walker points out that dominant Western models of conflict resolution do not take into account differences in deep culture or world view, which shape the approaches to dealing with conflict in different cultures.34 The analysis of the concept of peace in the interviews with local people shows that the concept was not only informed by a different epistemological position, but also that individuals came to construct a certain idea of peace through a process different from that of an academic. Rather than an abstract theoretical concept, the idea of peace in local people’s narratives was, for most of the interviewees, highly related to a specific experiential and cultural context and involved grounded solutions and activism. Peace as Culture Several of the interviewees talked about peace as something inherent to their cultural background. Violence, according to these interviewees, was alien to their culture and way of living. A recurrent remark made by the local villagers was that they were peaceful people, and they always wanted peace. For some of them, there was nothing more normal and obvious than desiring to live in peace. For example, a villager interviewed said: Tell me which living being would not want to live in peace?

The narrative of cultural peace was associated in particular with the Santhali culture. Most of the Santhalis interviewed said that peace was integral to their values, historical traditions, and social structures:

34 Polly O Walker, “Decolonizing Conflict Resolution: Addressing the Ontological Violence of Westernization,” The American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 3 (2004).

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We are peaceful, we never wanted to do something violently, because we believe in peace, that you cannot bring peace through violence. Santhali people never participated in this kind of violence. We always try to do everything with peace and diplomacy. If you look around, you will see that all the Santhali people are very kind.

While the activist narratives of Lalgarh emphasised the tradition of violent resistance of the adivasi, some of the Santhali interviewed said that the Santhali never participated in violence and always lived in peace. Even though the adivasi resistance struggles during the colonial time were meaningful events in the collective memory, for most of the adivasi interviewed, their group history was one of living in peace. Some of them said that a Santhali cannot kill and expressed their disbelief at the idea that many of them participated in the conflict. The interviewees did not mention explicitly a commitment to nonviolence in the Western sense; however, the idea of killing appeared in some of their narratives as inconceivable. Furthermore, this was related more broadly to other principles and values, such as honesty and spirituality, and a strong emphasis on being true to those values. Many non-Santhali interviewees also described the Santhalis as peaceful, honest, and strongly committed to their principles. As I discuss above, the adivasis were frequently described as peaceful people in the discourse of the state. In the discourse of the state, the peacefulness of the state was associated with their being ‘simple-minded’, passive actors incapable of initiating political action. At the same time, according to the dominant discourse, the adivasis could become very violent when aroused by anger and manipulated by other actors. For example, an administration officer said: Actually these people, these classes of people are not violent making, are not at all. When they are oppressed they express their anger, they become furious. […] They were not inspired by any ethics, they were not inspired by Maoism, or secularism, or communism, or any ethics. It is the result of deprivation. They [the Maoists] instigated their deprivation and at first they spread that these authorities and politicians are not providing their food and basic necessities of their lives, and they started from the angle of the Maoists to distribute food and clothes among them, so they followed the Maoists.

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In contrast to this idea of peaceful character as passivity, the interviewees who talked about cultural peace explained how peace was not just an abstract idea, but it was incorporated in a collective social system to deal with conflict, and it was implemented through individual and collective action. Some of the Santhali interviewed explained that in their culture they believed in solving disputes through peace and diplomacy rather than violently. Their system of conflict resolution was based on the trust on village leaders, the majhis , who were chosen by the villagers for their wisdom and skills. In case of conflict within the community, the preferred approach was to reason with people rather than punishing, and if an unethical behaviour persisted, to apply social pressure and isolate the offender. The Santhali approach to conflict transformation shares some of the elements of the world views underlying indigenous models of conflict transformation identified by Walker, such as interconnectedness, the emphasis on process and relationships, and holistic experience.35 Although it is beyond the scope of this analysis, a deeper understanding of adivasi culture, world views, and epistemology would help to achieve a better understanding of the meanings of peace, conflict, and violence, and how these concepts are different from Western ones. Unfortunately, as a foreigner, I am not claiming to have an in-depth understanding of this culture and world views, and I am simply referring to what the interviewees said in their narratives. These narratives of cultural peace do not entail that local adivasis did not participate in violent actions, or that they all attributed the same meaning of peacefulness and nonviolence to their cultural norms. However, the emergence of these narratives in a context of violent conflict is meaningful as they delegitimised the dominant discourses of violence. In Galtung’s definition, cultural peace means ‘aspects of culture that serve to justify and legitimise direct peace and structural peace’.36 The aspects of cultural peace emerging from this analysis constitute a subjugated knowledge, as they were completely absent in the dominant narratives on the Lalgarh movement discussed in Chapter 5. Furthermore, cultural

35 Ibid. 36 Johan Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 27, no. 3 (1990):

291.

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peace played an important role in influencing local people’s behaviour and actions during the conflict. Peace as Experience The majority of the interviewees talked about peace in terms of specific changes that they noticed between the circumstances of conflict and the current peace. These references to peace were almost always a comparison between the time of conflict and the time of peace. Peace was often a reflection on what was now different, and the memory of what they had left behind was part of it. Although critical and post-structuralist approaches to peace challenge the assumption that peace is a universal concept and call for more culturally sensitive and contextual understandings,37 the role of experience is often overlooked in debates on peace. The most frequent theme in the interviewees’ descriptions of the peace was the end of the atmosphere of terror and violence perpetrated by one side or the other, or both. Although through the lenses of Western academic concepts of peace we could interpret this emphasis on the end of terror as negative peace, in local people’s narratives this was not a simple and linear category. Rather, the idea of ending terror had very different meanings and interpretations related to people’s diverse experiences and multiple dimensions. The embodied experiences of direct violence, as I discussed earlier, had many more dimensions than just the physical one. Direct violence, as we have seen, had many repercussions on local people’s psychological, social, and economic everyday lives. The psychological sphere was particularly stressed in the references to peace. The ‘terror’ that people described was often related to the constant feeling of fear and uncertainty, rather than to incidents of direct violence per se. For some, peace was incomplete because they still felt this fear and uncertainty inside, despite the end of hostilities and violent incidents. The end of hostilities, therefore, was not synonymous with the end of insecurity for the local people. The negative and positive aspects of peace were often mixed together in the narratives. The interviewees described specific positive changes that, to them, meant that the violence was over. For example, for some of them, 37 Oliver P. Richmond, Peace in International Relations (London; New York: Routledge, 2008).

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peace meant a restoration of the freedom to move, go back home, or even just sit ‘in peace’. For many, peace was going back to the normal everyday life, being able to engage in normal activities such as working, cooking, or bathing: We used to live in terror, I also had to leave my home. But now we have peace, we can do our work.

The restoration of social and cultural activities was also considered very meaningful by some of the interviewees. Meaningful social activities were, for example, visiting friends and performing traditional rituals and festivals. Peace was expressed in an improvement of the relationship between people and mutual cooperation among them. Some of the interviewees pointed out that there was no anger or resentment among the people in the community, because people understood and forgave each other, even people who had caused suffering to others: Now there is no resentment, no bad words. I’m happy. I have no worries. Even if I go to the forest nearby to visit someone and I come back at midnight there is no problem. During that time of the movement, we had lost all our traditions. We couldn’t meet, there was nothing, there was no traditional festival.

As this reference shows, peace was also expressed in the psychological state of the individual. Several interviewees, in fact, described peace as being happy. For some, peace was feeling better after the pressure of violence and everyday hardship of the conflict were over. Interestingly, some of the themes emerging from these narratives of peace are very similar to the results of the Everyday Peace Indicators project discussed by Mac Ginty and Firchow.38 Although the project was conducted in different contexts, some of the indicators covered similar issues to those mentioned by the people in Lalgarh, for example moving freely during day and night, being able to send the children to school, having access to basic resources and services, the restoration of the local traditional social system to deal with disputes, and improving the social

38 Mac Ginty and Firchow, “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Narratives of Peace and Conflict.”

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relationships in the community.39 Importantly, the main similarity is that, in both cases, the indicators of peace are intimately linked to people’s experiences of conflict in their everyday life. In Lalgarh, some of the interviewees thought that the peace that was achieved was more than a restoration of normalcy; it constituted an improvement compared to their life before the conflict. For example, a young girl said: Now after the movement I am enjoying many opportunities to study. I am no longer afraid to move on the roads, and even in the world of employment they are reserving many safe job positions for women.

According to these views such as this, some progress had been achieved in addressing some of the deeper forms of structural violence. For example, some of the people pointed out that now they could benefit from new services, job opportunities, and less political oppression. Many others, however, had different opinions. Although many interviewees valued the forms of peace that were achieved, they did not necessarily feel that it was enough. For many, change was the requirement for a long-term sustainable peace. Peace as Change The theme of change, in Bengali paribartan, was very prominent in the narratives of the local people. For many interviewees, the issue of social change was intimately related to that of peace: without social change, peace was incomplete. This view of change was related to the fact that, as I discussed above, people experienced everyday violence not only during the conflict but also before and after its formal duration. Through their views on social change, people talked about a range of issues that they thought were necessary to achieve a long-lasting peace at the local level, such as opening the political space, improving the welfare system, addressing structural economic problems, and recognising cultural rights. The theme of change, therefore, was also related to the question of development and to how development in turn relates to power and violence.

39 Ibid.

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One of the main themes that the local people discussed in their interviews in relation to change was whether the change of government fulfilled these needs for change and would bring about a long-lasting peace. As I discussed in the last section, all the interviewees perceived the CPM government to be corrupted, oppressive, and exploitative. Thus, many felt that changing the government was a priority and that it constituted the first step towards constructing peace and social change. Similarly, the theme of change dominated the rhetoric of the TMC during the time of the conflict. The TMC manifesto for the elections in 2011 opened with the slogan: ‘West Bengal: a change for a better and brighter tomorrow’.40 The party promised that, once elected, it would bring an end to the authoritarian and exploitative rule of the CPM and establish a people-centric government.41 The victory of the TMC in the 2011 election was indeed perceived as a meaningful event for most of the local people interviewed. It has been more than 10 years now, much has happened, and people’s perceptions may be completely different now. However, at that time, a theme that emerged frequently in relation to the change of government was hope. Many of the people interviewed were very positive about the change that was being constructed at the local level; they saw the development measures undertaken by the new government as a sign that from now on their voice would be taken into account: The Communist government was in power for 35 years. The people wanted change, so we made the new government win. Now they are trying to improve the education system, I can see that. Not here, but nearby. Also, in places where there were no roads, now they are making roads. So that’s why we are hopeful.

According to a good number of interviewees, this change was a direct result of the movement, and to them, this meant that the movement was successful. Many of them perceived a change in the way the state, including the security forces, behaved with the local people, and they considered this also to be a result of people’s action. Hence, many of the local people felt positive not so much because the change was complete or 40 “West Bengal Assembly Election 2011 Manifesto,” ed. All India Trinamool Congress (2011). 41 Ibid.

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the initiative taken by the state was enough, but because they thought that they had managed to make the state listen, and therefore, they thought that now the conduct of the government would be more accountable. Nonetheless, many of them thought that much still had to be done to really achieve change and a sustainable peace. Not all of them were so certain that the new state initiatives guaranteed that the state had really changed its ways. Some said that only time would show if the new state was genuinely committed to a people-centric change: If the government thinks like a thief, they tie some bread in a cloth to keep the dog busy removing the cloth from the bread and in the meanwhile they steal, if they have this kind of mentality, if it the government is trying to do this kind of activity, this kind of peace will not last long.

Through this metaphor, the interviewee suggested that the people would notice if the government used development initiatives only to steal from them. This shows that some people were critical of the peace that the government was claiming to be building through development, and they suspected that the new administration had not abandoned the ‘thief mentality’. Similarly, other interviewees thought that those initiatives were only superficial, or commented that they were not allocated fairly. The interviewees who did not feel that peace had fully been achieved had ideas and suggestions on what specifically needed to change to improve the conditions of the local people and construct a sustainable peace. Some of these suggestions about what needed to change emerged consistently in interviews conducted across different areas with people belonging to different social groups and political affiliations. The main problem that the people identified as requiring change was that of political oppression, and this was the most frequent theme in relation to change that emerged in the interviews with local ordinary people. This is consistent with what I discussed in the last section in regard to how local people experienced grievance. Many interviewees felt that overcoming the system of one party politics by opening the political space through tolerance for different political voices was an important prerequisite for change and peace. Even under the new government, the concentration of power in the hands of the ruling party had significant violent repercussions in the lives of the local people, particularly those who sought to express their political views or were associated with people who did. Many people pointed out that they were still suffering from

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false cases framed against them. Some of the interviewees said that under the new government they still experienced coercive pressure, threats, and violence to join the ruling party: Now peace has come, but it’s only superficial. Those at the opposition are being jailed. They are giving them false cases for being Maobadi. Now our leaders have joined the TMC. Now you either have to be inactive or join the TMC.

Furthermore, many interviewees felt that the power of the new ruling party elites was also manifested in everyday practices of corruption and bad governance that also affected their lives. Some of the local people, therefore, linked the issue of political power to that of development, as they thought that overcoming this corrupted political system was necessary to build genuine development. Many of the interviewees thought that more progress was needed; however, this could only be achieved if there was a genuine change in the mentality of those who held power at the grassroots level: The mentality of people needs to change. If the way of thinking doesn’t change, if people don’t work beyond personal profit, it can’t happen.

The development measures suggested by the local people emphasised the need to improve people’s access to services such as health and education. Someone also mentioned social security for elderly people and access to a nutritious diet. In terms of infrastructure projects, many interviewees mentioned the need to develop proper irrigation systems for the agriculture and roads. The two main socio-economic structural problems identified by the local people were the two interrelated issues of unemployment and low purchasing power. The lack of job opportunities available to the local people was seen as one of the main problems by many interviewees. In particular, the lack of adequate opportunities available to the increasingly educated young generation was seen as a major issue and also as a root cause of the conflict. Some interviewees pointed out that even under the new government, local educated people were employed only in unskilled positions:

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I think that her government may be good, but those in it are not operating correctly. They are pushing people towards jobs that are inadequate to their capacities. I mean, to get unqualified jobs’.

Furthermore, for some of the interviewees, another root problem was that in the capitalist market economy, they were weak actors both as consumers and as producers. The suggested solutions for these problems were, on the one hand, policies aiming at increasing the prices of products produced by the villagers and at protecting the farmers from global capitalist forces, and, on the other hand, the creation and fair allocation of job opportunities, for example, through new development projects and encouraging the development of industry. In summary, the two main themes emerging from people’s discourses on change were political power and development. Though the emphasis on development seems to confirm the discourse of grievance and conflict that is often associated with the Maoist conflict in India—and Lalgarh in particular—local people’s discourses of change were different from the dominant discourse. In particular, the local people stressed the nexus between development, politics, power relationships, and violence which was absent in the dominant discourse.

Conclusion The concepts of peace, change, and development were intimately interconnected in the discourse of the local people. In local people’s narratives, conceptualisations and arguments about peace and change often emerged in relation to how people made sense of their experiences. These narratives of peace and change were as diverse as local people’s experiences of violence and oppression, similarly to Lee’s finding that ‘multiple levels and forms of peace coexists within and between local communities’.42 Not all the local people interviewed experienced violence and oppression in the same way also because they themselves were in different positions of power in the complex local hierarchy. In this context, in fact, violence was not simply performed by a warring party against another during a violent conflict; rather, it was embedded in everyday relationships, social

42 SungYong Lee, “Understanding Everyday Peace in Cambodia: Plurality, subtlety, and Connectivity.” Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 16, no. 1 (2021): 24–38.

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norms, and practices. This has important repercussions for our understanding of civil war, and it entails that peace needs to transform these everyday norms and complex social structures. In the context of Lalgarh, these violent practices were expressed in local people’s everyday interactions with the state. In their narratives, most of the local people linked the theme of state corruption to that of violence and underdevelopment. Similar to some arguments proposed by the failed state literature, this analysis highlighted a continuum between patterns of patronage politics and violence before, during, and after the conflict. A difference in this study, however, is that rather than looking at state-level macro-structures, I focused on local-level relationships. Hence, while in the failed state literature power is conceived predominantly as material and coercive power, a relational perspective shows how power becomes possible through a system of social norms that shape local-level social relationships and, at a macro-level, a legitimate political order. Scholars have conceptualised this kind of power using terms such as third-dimensional power, invisible power, or discursive power.43 McGee shows that violence itself can be a form of invisible power when it becomes a prevalent cultural and social norm.44 In these contexts, she argues, resistance is about challenging power relations, including social and cultural norms that normalise violence. This is what many local people engaged themselves with in the case of Lalgarh, according to the findings of this analysis. A dominant theme in the discourse of the local people, in fact, was that peace could truly be achieved only by changing these violent norms and structures of power. This was the main difference between the discourse of the local people and the discourse of the state on the theme of peace and change. In fact, although after the conflict the state implemented new development initiatives to address the grievances of the people that, according to the dominant discourse, were the root cause of conflict, the new government continued resorting to violent practices to maintain its hold on power and silence political opposition. 43 See: Lukes, Power A Radical View, 2ed; Jethro Pettit and Andrés Mejía Acosta, “Power Above and Below the Waterline: Bridging Political Economy and Power Analysis,” IDS Bulletin 45, no. 5 (2014); McGee, “Invisible Power and Visible Everyday Resistance in the Violent Colombian Pacific.” 44 McGee, “Invisible Power and Visible Everyday Resistance in the Violent Colombian Pacific.”

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The discourse of corruption and underdevelopment as a cause of grievance and conflict was thus central to both the dominant discourse and the discourse of the local people. In the discourses of the local people, the discourse of sustainable peace, however, was very multi-dimensional, and it included diverse views on issues such as cultural values, security, accountability, participation, voice, respectful social interactions, open political-spaces, renegotiating local-level structures of power, development, and more. Although the state also stressed the importance of delivering development to the people as a form of sustainable peace, its conceptualisation of peace was entirely different. For the state, in fact, peace was the achievement of political and military control. Divergent political voices represented a potential threat to the stability and security of the government. In this perspective, development could only be delivered by a strong ruling party which had the monopoly over politics, violence, formal, and informal economic networks. As Lacina points out, the consolidation of the autocratic power of local leaders can be a strategy used by the state to suppress potential security threats; however, at the same time, this increases corruption and local-level political violence.45 The state’s discourse of peacebuilding and development depoliticised grievance and constructed the local people as incompetent political actors. As a result, the discourse of development legitimised the power of the state, including its enforcement through violent oppression of potential dissenting voices. As an expression of this uniform construction of the local poor, the discourse of development flattened unequal power relations between local individuals. The development policies implemented also reflected this discourse and risked exacerbating those inequalities. For example, some of the interviewees pointed out that the new measures ended up favouring certain groups, areas, and individuals who were targeted for political purposes, while others with real needs felt left out. The idea that the local people were merely driven by very basic grievances was reflected in policies that focused on distributing primary needs, items, and services. As some of the local interviewees pointed out, these measures did not allow the people to improve their social status. The critiques of the discourse of development as the answer to violent conflict can be extended more broadly to the literature on peacebuilding. 45 Lacina, “The Problem of Political Stability in Northeast India: Local Ethnic Autocracy and the Rule of Law.”

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In the literature, peacebuilding is dominantly understood as synonymous with state-building, as strengthening the state institution is often seen as the way to provide stability, security, and development.46 Critics of the liberal peace, however, have highlighted the power relations underlying this conceptualisation of peace and problematised the paternalistic and romanticised construction of the local in the dominant liberal peace discourse.47 Despite the calls for a shift to everyday peace and local agency, the critics of the liberal peace still focus on the dichotomy of the internationallocal, where the international is always seen as the dominant actor.48 A local-level approach needs to take into account the subtler structures of power that operate locally; otherwise, there is a risk of further romanticising the local. What I have found through this research is how local people’s discourse and agency undermines violent social norms and structures of power embedded in the fabric of the society at the local level. In summary, people’s diverse conceptualisations of peace challenged the dominant discourse and exposed the fact that the state’s discourse of peace legitimised the consolidation of power structures that perpetrated everyday forms of violence.

46 See: O’Gorman, Conflict and Development; Richmond, Peace in International Relations. 47 Richmond, Peace in International Relations; Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace; Mac Ginty and Firchow, “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Narratives of Peace and Conflict”; Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. 48 See, for example the volume: Richmond and Mitchell, Hybrid Forms of Peace: From Everyday Agency to Post-Liberalism.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion: The Extraordinary of the Ordinary in Times of Violence

Introduction When I came back from my fieldwork, I was often asked what my findings were, but I struggled to answer. There was a feeling that my fieldwork had been very successful because I managed to interview so many people in this remote, exotic, post-conflict place. In particular, the fact that I interviewed some Maoists raised some excitement among academics, certainly much more than when I talked about ordinary people. It was as if I was asked to talk about a sexy action movie where a handful of heroes fight against injustice, while everyone else is part of the background and does not matter much in the story. Action was indeed part of the war stories that I was told, and the term ‘heroes’ was used a lot locally referring to those who perform them. But there was more than a handful of action movie heroes in those real-life stories, something that I could not grasp back then. It took two years of analysis of the data collected to try and make some sense of it. What I found, in the end, was the extraordinary of the ordinary in times of violent conflict: people who kept making their own choices and defining their priorities, despite the context of coercion; people who refused to be helpless, to lose their dignity in the face of violence; communities who found in war another occasion to look after each other, rather than to kill. Often, the resistance to war of non-heroes was simply about struggling to keep living their everyday life, which was © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Carrer, How People Respond to Violence, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11342-0_9

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not so easy, obvious, or risk-free in that context, and it did not happen without fear, loss, and compromise. Though the everyday may sound banal, what I found about people’s everyday response to violent conflict clashes with the prevalent assumptions regarding civilians as weak actors who lack the possibility to make independent choices during a time of war—except for joining one of the armed groups or leaving.1 From the findings of this analysis, on the contrary, the local people emerged as relevant political actors who actively sought to influence the local political dynamics and the outcomes of the conflict. The locals engaged in a wide range of actions even during the peak of the conflict, including cooperating with the armed groups, resisting them, staying out of the conflict, and more.2 Importantly, much of this action aimed at achieving the actor’s idea of what peace should look like, which varied from person to person. These diverse and multi-dimensional conceptualisations of peace challenged the dominant discourse according to which peace and development could only be constructed through the ruling party’s monopoly over political power and violence. This book, therefore, does not provide one single answer to the question of what everyday peace means. There are no definitions or indicators of everyday peace, as this would entail once again fixing the discourse into one narrative and excluding others. The meaning of peace, for most of the local people I interviewed, was something that kept evolving through their experiences and expectations. For many local people, peace was not yet achieved, as they still experienced a continuum of violence in many different forms.

Integrating Everyday Conflict, Everyday Peace, and Everyday Resistance: Emerging Areas in Peace and Conflict Studies The emerging research fields of embodied experiences of conflict everyday peace and everyday resistance are usually treated separately in the literature. From the perspective of people’s lived experiences, however, I have found that these are interconnected in many ways. In fact, we have seen how everyday peace can take place during all the phases of conflict, including during the peak of the violence. In Lalgarh, local individual and 1 Barter, “Unarmed Forces: Civilian Strategy in Violent Conflicts”. 2 See Chapter 6 on local people’s action.

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collective agency aiming at resisting violence and constructing everyday peace was an important dimension of their experiences of conflict. Furthermore, experiences of conflict were an important part of people’s narratives. In turn, the way people conceived of change influenced their behaviour and action during the time of the conflict. Exploring local people’s experiences of violence was thus very helpful for understanding everyday meanings and activism. The Social Construction of Grievance In chapter 1, I pointed out that, though grievance is understood as a main cause of internal conflict and mobilisation in the civil wars literature, we know little about how the discourse of grievance is socially constructed. Looking at grievance from an everyday perspective as a socially constructed concept is not a way to investigate the cause of the onset of conflict, but rather, to look at a different set of questions. Through this perspective, the findings of this analysis point to relevant considerations with regard to the assumptions on which the relative deprivation-aggression theory3 and much of the grievance literature that followed are based.4 First, while the civil wars literature emphasises socio-economic grievance, the nature of grievance in local people’s discourses was different. In fact, in the case of Lalgarh, local people described a long list of grievances that affected their everyday lives, including socio-economic issues. However, the grievances that mattered the most as drivers of action were related to everyday interactions and the complex relationships of power and politics at the local level. Furthermore, the social construction of grievance was dynamic, and it changed significantly before, during, and after the conflict, affecting local people’s dynamic attitudes and behaviour during the conflict. Moreover, the perception of grievance was not directed just against one entity—the state—but towards multiple actors, including the administration, but also the Maoists, the PCPA, the different parties, and local people who held different positions of power at the local level.

3 Gurr, Why Men Rebel. 4 See Chapters 2, and 3 on the literature on grievance and civil war.

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Second, people’s grievance did not generally drive them to engage in violent action. Some of them did join an armed group or supported it, but most of the people preferred to engage in nonviolent forms of action to achieve social change. In other words, grievance was a driver of political action, but not necessarily violence. On the contrary, an important factor of grievance was violence itself. Many of the interviewees were critical of the use of violence as a means to achieve political objectives, and they engaged in actions to resist actors that perpetrated coercion and violence in its different forms. Third, this analysis highlighted how dominant actors promoted discourses of grievance for political ends, such as undermining the legitimacy of other political actors and justifying violence and oppression against the opposition to consolidate their own hegemonic political power. The dominant discourses of grievance tended to flatten the inequalities among the local people, and to depoliticise the local actors, who were seen as needing care and guidance from benevolent leaders. In summary, a discursive approach to the question of grievance and conflict highlights the differences between dominant and subjugated discourses and shows how dominant discourses of grievance can be constructed to subjugate people’s grievances, rather than to represent them. In fact, local people’s discourses of grievance tended to be more multi-dimensional and diverse than the dominant ones, and if they diverged, they were silenced and subjugated. These aspects of diversity, complexity, and dynamicity of the relationship between local people’s discourses of grievance have important implications on the ground. This study, therefore, calls for a critical investigation into what discourses of grievance and conflict reproduce on the ground, and how they affect the lives of people at the local level. The Role of Local People’s Action in Conflict, Peace, and Resistance One of the major findings of this research was that the local people were very active during the conflict, and their role was not marginal. This confirms the findings of a fast-growing body of literature on microlevel dynamics of conflict, nonwarring societies, everyday peace, and self-protection strategies,5 which contradicts the more traditional view of 5 See, for example: Carla Suarez, “‘Living between Two Lions’: Civilian Protection Strategies during Armed Violence in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the

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civilians in the civil wars literatures as weak actors or passive victims. Most of the local people engaged in a diverse range of activities for different purposes, including private ones such as coping and finding security for themselves. However, many sought to influence the outcomes of the conflict. Local people’s views on peace and change were important drivers to action. Unlike in much of the nonwarring societies literature, this case study shows that local people do not just aim at self-protection or conflict avoidance, but are also political actors who actively seek to affect the local political dynamics and the outcome of the conflict itself. Though in this book I have stressed the concept of everyday peace, the findings show that local people’s agency can also be understood as everyday resistance. These findings bridge the concepts of everyday peace and everyday resistance in two main ways. First, while looking at violent conflict and peace processes from below, they bring about a critique of power structures, which is central to resistance. Similarly to Heredia’s findings, the critique of power in this book highlights a continuum of everyday violence perpetrated before, during, and after the formal duration of the conflict.6 The local people resisted the everyday violence that originates from structures of power both during the violent conflict and what is formally considered as peace time. Secondly, in local people’s discourses, the idea of peace was closely linked to that of change. Hence, in a way, everyday peace and everyday resistance overlapped in them. The findings of this analysis also shed light on the topic of civilian participation with armed groups.7 Participation was often not synonymous with cooperation.8 In fact, while some of the people participated

Congo,” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 12, no. 3 (2017); Krzysztof Krakowski, “Resisting Displacement amid Armed Conflict: Community-Level Conditions that Make People More Likely to Stay,” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 12, no. 3 (2017); Shane J. Barter, “Civilian Strategy Across Southeast Asia,” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 12, no. 3 (2017); Benjamin R. Naimark-Rowse, “Surviving Success: Nonviolent Rebellion in Sudan,” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 12, no. 3 (2017); Oliver, “Nudging Armed Groups: How Civilians Transmit Norms of Protection”. 6 Iñiguez De Heredia, Everyday Resistance, Peacebuilding and State-Making: Insights

from ’Africa’s World War’. 7 See, for example: Humphreys and Weinstein, “Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War”; Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence; Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. 8 See also: Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala; Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices; Arjona, “Civilian Resistance to Rebel Governance”.

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out of coercion, others thought of cooperation with the armed groups as an instrumental alliance and found space in it for individual initiative and nonviolent experiments. Participation or support was often only one among a broader range of actions implemented by local individuals. During the course of the conflict, they changed loyalties and strategies depending on their dynamic perception of what was happening. Many local people also engaged in different forms of resistance against armed groups from either side. Resistance tactics ranged from avoidance, resisting discursive violence through community solidarity, non-cooperation, protest, cooperating with the opposite side, and more. The Social Capital for Everyday Peace Another key finding in this research was the importance of local-level relationships. Although some of the findings from the literature and on warring communities and everyday peace point to similar conclusions,9 this field is otherwise quite new to the civil wars literature. This theme came up frequently throughout the book in relation to different aspects of everyday conflict and peace. While the civil wars literature tends to focus on cleavages, fractures in the society, and lack of trust,10 this analysis also highlighted the positive impact of social bonds. The local people often mentioned how conflict often strengthened those bonds, and how it was crucial for the local people to be able to trust and count on each other’s support. This social cohesiveness enabled some communities to make relatively independent choices, despite coercive pressure from the armed groups, and implement forms of conflict avoidance and resistance, similar to what civil war scholars found in other

9 Anderson and Wallace, Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict. Krakowski, “Resisting Displacement amid Armed Conflict: Community-Level Conditions that Make People More Likely to Stay”. 10 For example: Wilmer, The Social Construction of Man, the State, and War: Identity,

Conflict, and Violence in Former Yugoslavia; Arman and Stuart, “Hate Narratives and Ethnic Conflict”; Gallegher, “My Neighbour, My Enemy: The Manipulation of Ethnic Identity and the Origins and Conduct of War in Yugoslavia”; Frances Stewart, Graham K Brown, and Luca Mancini, “Why Horizontal Inequalities Matter: Some Implications for Measurement,” (2005).

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case studies of communities who managed to resist armed groups during violent conflicts.11 The solidarity among individuals often came together with the belief in a system of cultural norms and values that delegitimised violence. In this context, community solidarity did not legitimise violence outside the group, as it was not based on exclusive identity narratives. Rather, it constituted what I would call a social capital for everyday peace that was expressed in everyday peace actions such as constructing networks to collectively stay out of the conflict, stopping the armed groups from committing violence in their villages, and keeping armed groups out of the village. In the context of Lalgarh, after the conflict, this peace capital was also reflected in a prevalent tendency to forgive local perpetrators, rather than seeking revenge. Moreover, many local people also interpreted positive and respectful everyday interactions as an important indicator of peace. This dimension of social capital for everyday peace needs to be researched further in order to understand the potential of communities to resist violence in its different forms and the potential for everyday peace. Though the peacebuilding literature often uses the concept of civil society in relation to local agency, as Orjuela points out, this concept is often vague and risks confusing ordinary people, NGOs, and social movements.12 This concept tends to rely on a Western view of more or less organised institutions and activism. Some of the literature on nonwarring societies also describes how communities organise institutions to manage their relationship with warring parties.13 However, through the concept of social capital for everyday peace, I suggest looking beyond institutionalised activism, at the nature of local-level relationships, interdependence, norms, and social bonds that might help people unite and respond to the pressure of coercive violent actors.

11 See, for example: Anderson and Wallace, Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent

Violent Conflict; Kaplan, Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves; Krakowski, “Resisting Displacement amid Armed Conflict: Community-Level Conditions that Make People More Likely to Stay”. 12 Orjuela, The Identity Politics of Peacebuilding: Civil Society in War-Torn Sri Lanka. 13 Masullo J., The Power of Staying Put. Nonviolent Resistance against Armed Groups

in Colombia; Kaplan, Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves.

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The Role of the Family and Inter-Generation Relationships The family emerged as a very important dimension that shaped local people’s priorities and behaviour during the conflict, and as such, it influenced the dynamics of conflict and peace. The feminist literature has highlighted the complex, gendered experience of women during violent conflicts, undermining the dominant construction of women and children as passive vulnerable subjects.14 The dimension of family, however, does not have to do only with women and children. The concept of family is constructed differently in different social contexts. In Junglemahal, in the course of the interviews, concerns for the younger generations were expressed as priorities by parents, grandparents, uncles, aunties, neighbours, and fellow villagers who all shared the responsibility in the care of children and youth. The concern for the younger generation was not limited to protecting them from direct violence. Many people worried about their future, the opportunities available to them, but also the kind of people that they would become. Often, adults sought to protect their youth from taking part in violent activities and becoming perpetrators. The perspectives and behaviour of adults who cared for a younger generation, and single young people, were understood to be very different. Many of the local people pointed out that it was mostly very young people who joined the armed groups of both sides. Elderly people also often played relevant roles during the conflict. Family dynamics changed during those times, and as older people were often less mobile, their responsibilities increased a lot during the conflict. In fact, many of the senior people interviewed were left in charge of looking after the family and dealing with armed groups in the village. Being able or not to count on the support of the senior generation influenced some of the choices of the younger generations. Furthermore, many elderly men and women were able to negotiate with the armed groups as they were not seen as threats, and others were very vocal and open in expressing their criticism. Different generations had often sharply different understandings of the conflict and played different roles in it. Family was a priority during

14 See, for example: Baaz and Stern, “Whores, Men, and Other Misfits: Undoing ‘Feminization’ in the Armed Forces in the DRC”; Baaz and Stern, “Fearless Fighters and Submissive Wives”.

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the conflict for many people, and this affected individual and collective choices during the movement, as people from different generations sought to persuade one another. In particular, family was often a very powerful motivation for collectively avoiding recruitment, resisting armed groups from both sides, and for engagement in everyday peace. A focus on these relationships, therefore, could shed light on both mobilisation patterns and strategies to avoid and stay out of the conflict. Discursive Resistance to Violent Structures of Power The findings of this analysis also showed how neopatrimonial relationships of power at the local level were expressed in a variety of everyday forms of structural, political, criminal, and domestic violence before, during, and after the conflict. Although the discourse of the Maoists sought to undermine these power structures, during the conflict they relied more on violence and coercion, Maoist practices reiterated the same dominant mechanisms of muscle politics. McGee’s conceptualisation of violence as invisible power helps us understand how violence was embedded in social norms and everyday interactions.15 The analysis of local people’s discourses of peace highlighted how their discourse delegitimised those violent norms and everyday practices. In other words, many local people engaged in discursive resistance. In their discourses, a radical change that ended those violent social norms was necessary to construct a sustainable peace. The analysis of local-level relationships of power showed that violence is not just a confrontation between warring parties, but it takes place in the everyday, where violence is reiterated and manifested in the relationships of power among local individuals. This everyday approach offers an innovative way of exploring the links between conflict, political violence, and structural violence before, during, after a violent conflict. Rather than assuming that the grieving people would resort to violence, this approach looks at how local people seek to undermine violence as a social norm. Furthermore, this approach helps us understand how local people may see as problematic a top-down peace that does not challenge pre-existing violent norms and practices.

15 McGee, “Invisible Power and Visible Everyday Resistance in the Violent Colombian Pacific”.

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Limits of the Research and Future Research Agendas As I write these conclusions and I look back to the choices made throughout this research process, I reflect on the things inevitably that have been left out, or that could be explored further, or that could have been done differently in other circumstances. But I like to think that this journey does not end here. Bourke invites us to think about research as a process that continues after we finish writing our findings and results: For research to be valuable from the perspective of process over product, the value must lie beyond a sense of completion. Research continues as we reflect: on the development of an idea; on data collection; on findings, and, on implications.16

I have been constantly engaging in retrospective reflections on the limits of this research at every stage of the process, and it is a reflection that I am still engaging in, and it leads me to keep learning and problematising future research paths. Much of this reflection is about positionality, the meaning of the narratives that I am constructing, and the rigour of the research. One of the main limits of this research comes from the fact that I researched a socio-cultural context that was not my own, and there was much about it that I did not know, and perhaps I cannot fully understand. Whereas my expertise comes from the field of peace and conflict studies, this research would have also benefited from a deeper anthropological knowledge of the local culture, in particular, of the indigenous epistemology and social structures. To overcome this limit, it has been very beneficial to have the help of a linguistic and cultural mediator trained not only in translating language, but also in bridging some of those cultural barriers between people from different cultures. Nonetheless, being able to relate more directly with the local people and their language would have certainly made a difference. I think that it is important for researchers who study social realities that they have not experience and to cultures that they do not fully belong to, to acknowledge that we

16 Brian Bourke, “Positionality: Reflecting on the Research Process,” The Qualitative Report 19, no. 33 (2014): 1.

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cannot fully grasp those social and cultural meanings or experiences, and this should be reflected on the claims to truth that we make. A related issue is that of romanticisation of the local. Throughout the book, I pointed out several times that the literature often constructs romanticised narratives and categories about the ‘local’, especially when scholars are external actors who fail to engage with the local people and understand their perspectives. As I am myself an outsider and I construct specific narratives about the local, I am not exempt from this risk. The risk becomes greater as the research and writing process entails to a certain degree conflating and interpreting the data. Although I have attempted to take into account individual differences and meanings, some of them would have inevitably been lost in this process. I reflected a lot about the fact that this research cannot claim to represent the voices of the local people, and if not, what is the meaning of it. After discussing this issue with some of the local interviewees, I felt that participating in this research was meaningful to many of them, even though they knew that what I would write was my own interpretation. I believe that writing about them was nonetheless meaningful because of the relational process of listening and learning from voices that tend to be silenced by dominant ones, to understand more about power and people’s agency. Another limit of this research is that I have not been able to interview many women, especially as compared to the number of men. As I visited the villages and conducted the interviews, the women often avoided talking when men were present—although some of them were very vocal. A successful solution was conducting group interviews with women only, but it was not always possible. Unfortunately, I have not been able to interview any Maoist woman or female state-representative. Expanding the focus on gender experience and agency can be a future research agenda. A final point of discussion is the generalisation of the findings. In academia, the aim of research is often to come to general theoretical findings that can be applied to other case studies. This research is limited in the sense that its findings are rooted in a specific local context, and cannot be mechanically transferred to other case studies. Nonetheless, the findings in this book can help understand similar social dynamics in different contexts, as well as highlighting differences. In fact, I have found the

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literature on other local-level studies very helpful in this analysis,17 and it showed that there are similar patterns across different case studies. Hence, there is much scope for future research to investigate some of the patterns and social dynamics highlighted in this book in different settings. All the themes that I have mentioned earlier—everyday peace and conflict; the social construction of grievance; local people’s action; the role of the family; the social capital for everyday peace; and discursive resistance to violence as invisible power—are not only gaps in the literature, but broad new fields of research to develop further and that can vastly contribute to our understanding of conflict and peace.

Making an Impact with Peace Research I write a lot about positionality and my research journey, because I think that knowledge production is an expression of power relationships, particularly in a study like this that explores power and subjugation. I also wrote about normativity, and the fact that for me, peace research as a field has a responsibility towards actively working towards making an impact. This is not to say that theories and knowledge are not relevant on their own. I value knowledge deeply. But as this is a social science, we need to question what the relationship is between what we do, what we write, the social world that we investigate, and the way we influence and are influenced by that social world. When I wrote my doctoral thesis, I believed that peace research would help peace efforts. Looking back, I feel that this was a naïve hope, despite all I wrote and all my reflections on voice, positionality, and normativity. When we research, write, and publish through academic institutions in Western, English-speaking countries we serve those institutions and the monopoly they have over ‘science’. People outside those institutions will not have access to our publications, and we are not writing in formats or in a language that can be accessible and useful to activists, practitioners, communities, and everyday agents of peace. Moreover, even when we are talking about peace and violent conflicts that happen elsewhere, most of peace research that is most influential is produced and 17 For example: Berents, “An Embodied Everyday Peace in the Midst of Violence”; Anderson and Wallace, Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict; Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador; Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala.

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published by elite institutions in Western countries. This means that we do not hear the perspective of researchers who have more direct experience and knowledge of those social dynamics. In a thought-provoking article, Ragandang argues that it is difficult for peace practitioners, especially from the global south and post-conflict areas, to permeate peace research. He further shows that ‘this divide lowers the peace impact and is detrimental to the grassroot communities who suffer from violence and protracted conflict’.18 It takes an active effort to disseminate our research through deeper partnership with local communities. We need to find ways to get over this disconnect between social science and society. We need to be vulnerable and take action. I talked about how discourse influences social reality, and how there could be ways of challenging hegemonic discourses through research, but this is unlikely to happen if we simply follow the rules and practices of hegemonic institutions. Since the purpose of academia is to maintain the monopoly of research and to profit from its prestige, there are many barriers to making an impact by disrupting power structures— this is not usually part of the job. This is why we need resistance in academic environments to make room for peace. For me, this, in practice, entails being critical of power relationships in our everyday practices within academia as well as with the people and communities with research, building new practices, new alternatives, deepening relationships, and learning from them. In this book, I shared my whole research journey with fellow peace researchers and students because I think that every step of that journey itself shapes how we contribute to everyday peace. It was not a perfect journey, and if I could go back, I would certainly do things differently. I would especially want to understand more, from local communities themselves, about what they need to know from research, about how research could help, and I would incorporate that into research questions. I continue this journey by working on creating alternative pathways to connecting peace research and everyday peace agents, particularly through partnerships and developing digital technologies for everyday peace action.

18 Primitivo Cabanes Ragandang, “What Are They Writing For? Peace Research as an Impermeable Metropole,” Peacebuilding (2021): 1–13.

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Concluding Remarks: The Everyday and Social Capital for Peace I was personally very surprised to learn about all the peace that the local people managed to build in the midst of violence. I did not expect this before I went there. As I was researching violence, I was more prepared to encounter grievance, pain, anger, and social cleavage. Perhaps it is because growing up in the ‘West’, I was used to think about ‘developing’ countries as poor and violent, a view that was strengthened during my past academic journey. I learnt thereafter from the emerging literature on nonwar communities19 that in places that we think of as hopeless and violent, there are people who are incredibly resourceful in resisting violence and constructing peace. This made me reflect on whether, while devoting much energy to find peacebuilding recipes for ‘the Other’, it may be us in the ‘West’ who find it so hard to think about alternatives to violence. As I learnt about how people supported each other during the conflict and managed to resist the coercion of armed actors, I often thought about how we would respond to a similar situation if it happened in New Zealand where I lived, or in Italy where I come from, or elsewhere in the ‘West’. Would we know how to trust and support one another? What is our social capital for everyday peace like? The philosopher Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar points out that individuals tend towards different degrees of what he terms ‘socio-sentiments’: they may identify themselves with a narrow group such as the family or friends, with a certain community, nation, group of nations, or broadly with the entire human species.20 Socio-sentiment is reflected in an active engagement for the wellbeing of that group. Thus, while some individuals may actively engage in different kinds of social and political action for the benefit of the broad community, others may be concerned primarily with the narrow interests of a small group, or even just their own. Culture and socialisation may affect our socio-sentiments and sociopolitical engagement. In a capitalist society, the emphasis on the individual is functional to the consumerist economy and economic power. Local-level community studies may show whether, in capitalist societies, 19 Anderson and Wallace, Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict. 20 Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, The Liberation of the Intellect: Neohumanism (Kolkata: Ananda

Marga Publications, 1982).

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structures of power and inequality are a source of division, similarly as in Junglemahal, and fragment our sense of community. In a system where we rely on the state to guarantee peace, social security, and welfare, how do we take responsibility for the other? Is casting a vote a way of expressing our social responsibility, or of simply delegating it? The main point, through these broad and provoking questions, is that we do not need to look too far for everyday peace. So far, everyday peace research has been focusing on subaltern knowledge and practices, including this book. These studies have highlighted how everyday peace challenges dominant actors that operate in the name of peacebuilding. Violent norms, discourses, and power structures may influence affect our local communities, too. Do we know what is our everyday peace?

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Index

A adivasi, 108, 111, 113, 114, 125, 136, 226 agency, 2, 4, 5, 12, 34, 35, 37, 76, 124, 165, 170, 177, 185, 191, 202, 223, 237, 243 agrarian structures, 60 agrarian struggles, 57

B Banerjee, Mamata, 130, 206, 207, 209, 213, 221 bodies, 37, 76, 80, 135, 138, 139, 145, 197

C change, 177, 183, 185, 203, 212, 230–234 Chotopelia, 105, 106, 110, 117, 122, 136, 197 collective memory, 78, 103, 104, 128 constructivist, 27, 83 corruption, 207, 212, 214, 215, 236

cost-opportunity choices, 156, 180 counterinsurgency, 9, 59, 61 CPI(M), 53 CPM, 118, 122, 127, 129, 140, 214 CPM (Maoist), 8 Critical Discourse Analysis, 13 cultural peace, 227

D development, 29, 126, 206, 211, 219, 234, 235 discourse, 11, 33, 76, 104, 166 hegemonic discourse, 104, 204 subjugated discourses, 104 dynamics of conflict, 170, 199 dynamics of violence, 137, 144

E emotions, 32, 76, 147–156, 173 everyday peace, 6, 40, 42, 169, 186, 189, 190, 201, 223, 237, 240, 243–245, 253

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Carrer, How People Respond to Violence, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11342-0

273

274

INDEX

everyday resistance, 43, 85, 191, 199, 240, 243 exit, 166, 167–169 F families, 145, 161, 188, 246 fear, 12, 149–150, 152, 228 feminist, 39, 42, 54 fieldwork, 10, 12, 90–102 forests, 8, 61, 62, 114–118 G gender, 97–98, 126, 160 greed, 20, 24, 26, 61, 142 grievance, 1, 2, 14, 20, 22–24, 26, 55, 62, 65, 148, 150–152, 155, 179, 205, 211–223, 236, 241 H Harmad Bahini, 120, 130, 139, 143, 191, 196, 214 K Kishenjii, 127, 131, 142 L land, 114, 117 land reforms, 62 liberal peace, 30, 40, 222, 237 M Mahato, Chhatradhar, 122, 128, 130 Mahatos, 109 majhis , 111, 112, 227 Maoist, 49, 53, 56, 58, 105, 118, 122, 123, 127, 129, 131, 137, 152, 160, 171, 183, 215, 221 Marxist, 21, 205

micro-level, 5, 35, 64, 76, 144, 156 minerals, 61, 114–118 movement, 122, 133 muscle politics, 220, 223, 247 N narrative, 11, 33, 77, 78, 103, 128, 135 natural resources, 28 Naxalbari, 50–52 neopatrimonialism, 217, 219, 222, 247 new wars, 23 non-cooperation, 10, 125, 169, 194, 195 nonviolent, 125, 177, 186, 197, 226, 244 normativity, 102, 250 O ontology of violent conflict, 75, 79 Operation Lalgarh, 127 opportunistic violence, 141, 143 outrage, 106, 148, 174, 176, 179, 200 P participation, 153, 160, 166, 169–186, 243 PCPA, 7, 104, 110, 112, 113, 122–128, 129, 133, 195 peace talks, 131, 193 people’s courts, 137 poverty, 88, 212 power, 4, 14, 35, 83–85, 92, 210, 235, 247 R relative deprivation, 21, 205 representation, 87

INDEX

resistance, 14, 44, 84, 124, 125, 129, 133, 137, 167, 201, 235 S Santhali, 105, 109, 112, 122, 151, 179, 186, 225, 227 Scheduled Castes, 8, 49, 107 Scheduled Tribes, 8, 49, 50, 107 selective incentives, 180 starvation, 119, 146, 212, 213 state violence, 118–121, 129, 136, 139, 144, 168, 182 structural violence, 21, 146, 201, 220 T TMC, 8, 118, 130, 131, 206, 207, 210

275

tribal, 61, 65, 66, 68, 107, 193, 205, 208, 209 trust, 12, 95, 98, 152, 154

U unemployment, 132, 159, 180, 181, 217

V veracity, 95

Y youth, 40, 151, 158, 162, 168, 175, 180, 188, 195, 246