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coloniality, political subjectivation and the gendered politics of protest in a ‘state of exception’

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Feminist Review

abstract

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue that a series of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception.

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Notes

  1. Extra Judicial Execution Victims Families Association (EEVFAM) & Anr. v. Union of India (UOI) & Ors. (2016) WP (CRL) 129/2012 PIL-W (Supreme Court of India, 8 July 2016), p. 86. Available at: http://supremecourt.gov.in/jonew/ropor/rop/all/741422.pdf [last accessed 3 March 2018].

  2. In theory, habeas corpus exists, but in practice it is hardly ever upheld or invoked. According to Babloo Loitongbam, the founder and executive director of Human Rights Alert and also a petitioner to the Supreme Court in EEVFAM (supra note 1), this effectively means that ‘in almost all cases, even after a finding by the high court of enforced disappearance and extra judicial execution, no FIR (First Information Report) is registered by the authorities against the perpetrators’ (personal communication, 11 October 2017).

  3. Article 21, the Constitution of India.

  4. In particular, I am referring to Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998).

  5. Papori Bora (2010, p. 342) refers to the ‘paradoxical’ state of affairs in Manipur where counter-insurgency operations coexist alongside ‘democratic institutions’.

  6. See in particular The Report Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law Government of India (Verma, Seth and Subramanium, 2013) and the Report of the Committee to Review the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (Reddy et al., 2005).

  7. See the United Nations Human Rights Committee’s Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 40 of the Covenant: Concluding Observations of the Human Rights Committee India (1997), and the UN Human Rights Council (2012, 2017) Working Group’s Universal Periodic Reviews (UPR) of India’s human rights records.

  8. See Naga People’s Movement of Human Rights v Union of India’ (1998) AIR 1998 SC 431.

  9. EEVFAM, supra note 1, p. 28.

  10. Compare this with the hunger strike of the prominent anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare, to which the government responded within eighty-seven hours (Bhonsle, 2016).

  11. The Report of the Commission of the Judicial Inquiry (Manorama Death Inquiry Commission) (Shri C. Upendra Singh Commission, 2004) was hidden from public view for nearly ten years and only became public when it was submitted to to the Supreme Court in 2014 (see Rajagopal, 2014).

  12. Extra Judicial Execution Victims Families Association (EEVFAM) & Anr. v. Union of India (UOI) & Ors. (2012) WP (CRL) 129/2012.

  13. The term ‘encounter’ is a euphemism for murder in cold blood by the military and paramilitary forces under the protection of the AFSPA or, indeed, in state-sponsored killing.

  14. It is important to note here that the Writ Petition explicitly deployed international human rights law, such as The Minnesota Protocol on the Investigation of Potentially Unlawful Death (2016) (OHCHR, 2017 [1991]), also drew on the InterAmerican Court for Human Rights and the European Court for Human Rights for specific case law (Babloo Loitongbam, personal communication, 1 October 2017).

  15. EEVFAM, supra note 1, pp. 65–66.

  16. As a matter of fact, neither did the EEVFAM lawsuit. There were twenty-four women among the 1,528 killed extrajudicially, but none were both murdered and raped as in the case of Manorama (Babloo Loitongbam, personal communication, September 2017).

  17. ‘Gender justice/injustice in South Asia: feminism, protest, and the neo-liberal state’ was a one-day symposium held on 13 February 2015 at SOAS, University of London.

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acknowledgements

My thanks to Billy Holzberg for research assistance and to the two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments. I am indebted to Babloo Loitongbam for numerous conversations on the AFSPA.

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  1. LSE Gender Institute, London, UK

    Sumi Madhok

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Madhok, S. coloniality, political subjectivation and the gendered politics of protest in a ‘state of exception’. Fem Rev 119, 56–71 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0121-z

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