COMMENTARY

Love as an Act of Violence

What Is at Stake When I Love You?
Anubhav Sengupta

the woman with a sharp object, injuring her brutally in several places. He then consumed poison and slit his own throat. The rumour doing the rounds of the campus has it that he had consumed a part of the poison even before he entered the classroom. A Cold Act One question has been bafing me: if he could manage to get a pistol, undoubtedly he could manage to get bullets too; then why did he not shoot the girl and then shoot himself? Would that not have been quicker with no fear of interruption pardon my mock cynicism bordering on the vulgar perhaps. I kept asking myself this question till I suddenly stumbled on the answer: killing with a gun is indeed too quick. What I want to draw attention to is not just the performative aspect of the attempted murder, but also to its preparation and planned aspect. It was a love-crime not simply blinded by the masculine obsession with possessing a womans body, even at the cost of death. It was something more. The excess of violence ironically was complemented by calculated planning. While it is not very difcult to procure a gun it is not fairly common either on a campus like JNUs. The whole episode involved getting poison, a sharp instrument and over and above plotting the exact timing. The attacker decided to hack the woman to death in front of classmates and faculty. And from the newspaper reports and hearsay, it is safe to assume that a few of them would have been aware of their supposed relationship, or even their so called intimacy, break-up, etc. So it can also be assumed that it was not just a heat-of-the-moment act but carefully thought out with all the consequences and implications taken into account. It was an act of supreme violence. It thus appears to be not only performative but also cold. A Punishment I would like to stress the rational kernel of the violent act. It was not only revenge and imposition of a male body on a female with fatal aggression and colonisation. It was also an act of punishment. It was not merely an act of violence aimed for consumption by a terried audience and
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On 31 July 2013 when a student brutally hacked a female fellowstudent and then killed himself in a classroom of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, it was not a heat-of-the-moment act but a cold-blooded planned move to punish her. Despite carrying a pistol he did not shoot her but grievously wounded her in front of teachers and students because such punishment needs an audience. Also, it is not surprising that it occurred on the campus of a progressive university because the tension between liberal values at the formal level and our feudal moorings in patriarchal structures gets stretched the most in spaces such as that.

Anubhav Sengupta (anubhavsengupta@gmail. com) is a Research Scholar at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

rticles and commentaries from various quarters have already appeared in newspapers, blogs and journals about the tragic incident on 31 July 2013, in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus. A consensus has emerged, particularly in the writings of faculties and students from JNU, to not view this particular incident of violence as an aberration or an exception. The complex aspects of the man/woman relationship and love relations in a society that is deeply patriarchal have been pointed out along with how and why JNU should not be exempted under the inuence of a vague idealism (Arunima 2013; Baxi 2013; Chirmuley 2013; Kannan 2013; Nag 2013). The underlying thrust of all these articles is to demonstrate how patriarchy is so deep-rooted that it can turn such an event on its head and come back to haunt women. While there can be no disagreement on the basic political argument of recognising a womans No as no and respecting her choice (or right) to reject or say no, this commentary seeks to push the point a little further by highlighting a neglected aspect of the incident. The performative aspect of the act of violence has already been observed (Baxi 2013). It has also been observed that this act of violence is often read in parallel to sacricial, self-destructive violence and thereby valorises the act (ibid). In other words, in spite of the performative aspect of it, this violence by a JNU boy perpetrated on his classmate is part of the violence which is being normalised beyond the boundaries of JNU (Arunima 2013). However, what has been glossed over is an account of the violence per se. It may be worthwhile to recount the unfolding of the event.1 It happened in the time between two classes the recess period. The boy entered the classroom and threatened the students in it with a country-made pistol. He managed to get them to hurdle in a corner and attacked
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COMMENTARY

then by hundreds of others through word of mouth. The excess of violence (or punishment) was not just symbolic but substantive. First, the violence was intended to inict pain and suffering (instead of a quick and instantaneous death through the bullet), comparable to the supposed pain and suffering that the attacker apparently underwent. Second, it was not just a matter of personal vendetta. It was a punishment and punishment always requires an audience if it is to serve the intended purpose.2 It was intended to be interpreted and understood. And as others have pointed out, this was exactly what was happening all across the media, JNU dhabas, and informal talks or even in the JNU Confessions page on Facebook. This is precisely why it is not surprising that the attacker even managed to garner sympathy being described as patriarch and murderer and also as lover and punisher.3 This logic of violence, if accepted, assumes that the issue here is a little more complex. It is not just the male ego which cannot accept a woman saying no. The patriarchal norm and feudal structure can supply enough (masculine) logic to even rationalise male rage, emotion, heartbreak and violence to the extreme of death. This supply of reason and rationality to make sense of the non-reason and nonrationality of a mans act by a society is what I think is the authentic political content of acts of violence such as the one we are discussing. It lays bare the politics of the feudal, patriarchal structure and its violence. It is the outright denial and violent brute suppression, if need be, of the subjectivity of the oppressed. What I mean by subjectivity is not just the question of agency here, or of the right to exercise choices of acceptance and rejection. What I am trying to allude to here is relational capacity or capability.4 To put it simply, that a woman (or a member of any oppressed section) is capable of choice, of exercising rights in relation to a man; that she (like him) can construct, produce or congure a relation, intimate or social in form. Liberal-Bourgeois Pretence In this case or even in the hundreds of other cases where the woman rejects a man, the feudal structured relations
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(operating through us), come out of the garb of liberal-bourgeois pretence. Formal equality breaks down in the wake of the real practice of such equality. In a relationship, in its most intense site, where emotion and reason irt with each other, and the line gets dangerously blurred, the male ego, and masculine self reveals its true political content. In the context of a rejection or break-up in relation to me a woman is still incapable of seeing my true love (the emotional content); insofar as this is true, her decisions are either uninformed or irrational and it is upon me to show it (the reason-content). In case she still goes ahead with that decision, in all likelihood the woman is either dubbed loose, heartless, undeserving of love or under inuence of wrong ideas. With a little self-reexivity then it is not very difcult to see the feudal protectionism that we (men) indulge ourselves in (similar to the feudal lord in the connes of his estate) in the practice of taking informed, reasoned decisions on behalf of and in relation to the women in our lives get extended and subverted in that process to erupt as it did on the morning of 31 July. Conclusions To conclude, I am not surprised that such an event occurred in a socially sensitive and progressive campus like that of JNU. I am not surprised because the tension between liberal values at the formal level and our feudal moorings in patriarchal structures gets stretched the most in spaces such as these. Either we fake5 the formal equality of the oppressed or we genuinely accept their capacity as subjectbeing in facing their growing active articulation. And when we fail to do either, the feudal-patriarchal root has to assert, in the last instance, in its most violent form. Thus, while not disagreeing with the point of recognising rights and choices, I believe there is a condition that needs to be met: it is to inculcate a new political habit of relating with the oppressed. In this particular context, to re-learn the fact that my classmate of the opposite sex is not just good in scoring marks in the exams and (maybe) better than me in studies, but she is equally capable
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(and also at times unable, but not incapable) as I am, to reason in and through her emotions, desires and make a choice that is good for both of us. A male masculine subjectivity drawing its reason from feudal structure and values to rationalise its most violent emotional eruptions can only be countered with the political practice of inculcating the habit of thinking and relating to heterogeneous forms of emotions and desires.
Notes
1 It should be added that such a detailing may not have taken place yet, precisely because of the ethical dilemma that academic-theoretical practice in the event of such a happening entails, taking into consideration the survivor and her future, relatives, friends. Therefore, I wish to be sketchy and use elements of the event, just necessary to make my larger point, which of course concerns events across the country, similar or equally traumatic. The conclusion follows from a simple understanding of the sociology of crime and punishment following the contribution of Durkheim. A repressive act of punishment is always aimed at a transgression which seems to violate collective conscience or morality. Therefore, an act such as this will always relate to a collective dimension, in other words requiring attention of the social audience for it to truly become an effective punishment (Durkheim 1997). For an elaboration on this aspect, see discussions by Baxi (2013) and Arunima (2013). I am indebted to Soumyabrata Chaudhury for indicating the possibility of thinking through this category in this way in his talk Ambedkar Contra Aristotle: On a Possible Contention about Who Is Capable of Politics organised by the Forum for Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, 22 September, 2012, JNU. In the sense of performing according to the demand of political correctness in a specic social context that we nd ourselves in and interact.

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References
Arunima, G (2013): Every Womans Right to Say NO, Economic & Political Weekly, XLVIII (33), viewed on 11 August 2013 (http://www.epw.in/ commentary/every-womans-right-say-no.html). Baxi, Pratiksha (2013): The Affective Claims of Violence: Reections on the JNU Campus Tragedy, Kala, 4 August, viewed on 6 August 2013 (http://kala.org/2013/08/04/the-affective-claims-of-violence-reection...campus-tragedy-guest-post-by-pratiksha-baxi/). Chirmuley, Parnal (2013): Gendered Violence and the Hall of Mirrors, Kala, 4 August, viewed on 12 August 2013 (http://kala.org/2013/08/ 04/ gendered-violence-and-the-hall-of-mirrorsparnal-chirmuley/). Durkheim, Emile (1997): The Division of Labour in Society (New York: Free Press). Kannan, Divya (2013): The Attempt to Murder at JNU Not Just a Case of Individual Insanity, Economic & Political Weekly, XLVIII (32), viewed on 11 August 2013 (http://www.epw.in/webexclusives/attempt-murder-jnu-%E2% 80%93-not-just-case-individual-insanity.html). Nag, Shivani (2013): Unrequited Love or Simply Self love? Reections in the Wake of a Campus Tragedy at JNU, Kala, 3 August, viewed on 12 August 2013, (http://kala.org/2013/ 08/03/unrequitedlove-or-simply-self-love-reections-in-the-wakeof-a-campus-tragedy-at-jnu-shivani-nag/).
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