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Monday, 27 December, 5.00 - 7.30 pm (Performing Arts Studio)
Chair: Milind Wakankar (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore)
Plenary speakers
This paper analyses the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi controversy by focusing on the legal and administrative literature through which the ‘Ayodhya dispute’ (by which the controversy is named) acquires a life in law. Specifically I wish to argue that the law in relation to the dispute is concerned more with the restoration of the status quo, and less with issues related to justice, restitution and rehabilitation. Through the status quo the Ayodhya dispute enters into the official public domain in such a way that it affects the legal case material and colours the legal vocabulary. Since its initial elaboration in 1885, the status quo has highlighted a residue of temporal change, in the absence of which the dispute cannot be recognized.
The status quo becomes a title of legitimation open to occupation from all sides so much so that specific legal and administrative strategies would no longer be possible without it. The questions that this paper asks are both empirical and normative: From what does the status quo emerge and which choices does it bring into being? What are the limits within which change is possible? Normatively, to what extent is the status quo privileged and how can change from the status quo be legitimized? In dealing with these questions I will argue that the status quo addresses not only transformations in the long history of the Ayodhya dispute, but also constitutes its temporality.
My paper addresses the refiguration of ‘politics,’ and of the political subject in the aftermath of the critique of violence. (I use the latter term as shorthand for forms of thought associated with thinkers like Agamben, Arendt, Benjamin, and Schmitt that challenge the organizing conceits of political liberalism, albeit in different ways.) In particular, my paper will focus on the productive tension between (sovereign) ‘exception’ and (political) ‘universality’ — rooted in the specificity of Dalit lifeworlds — to rethink the theoretical-historical concept of ‘the human.’ My interest will be to challenge the putatively universal reach of concepts deriving from European experiences not so much by provincializing them, as by de-provincializing competing narratives of historical violence and of political subject-formation in order to explore alternate imaginations of the human, and of human sociality.
Constitutional historians have long protested that Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of the “state of exception” as the primary mode of modern government is oblivious to actual developments within constitutional theory. In other words, Agamben is more concerned with an ethico-political stance towards our present than with the longstanding discussion and experimentation within constitutional theory on how to ensure that the temporary resort to emergency powers does not become permanent. If one were to retain Agamben’s ethical posture of concern for our present vulnerability to exception with its accompanying void of rights and distinctions, yet also attend to developments within constitutionalism, one can do no better than to consider two recent efforts to scale back the encroachment of military government and martial law upon constitutions, notably in Pakistan and Bangladesh. In 2009, the Supreme Court of Pakistan declared Musharaff’s 2007 proclamation of emergency rule illegal on grounds that it constituted an attempt at a coup. This declaration came over the course of a robust lawyers movement aimed at re-instating civilian authority over the military. In 2010 the Supreme Court of Bangladesh upheld a High Court decision to nullify all amendments made to the constitution under various military governments, effectively reversing it to its 1972 version. It is noteworthy that both of these are efforts at reverting to a previous state, whether imagined or desired. In the Pakistan case this is the Archimedean point at which military was under civilian authority and in the Bangladesh case it is the point at which socialism and secularism held greatest promise. I take such reverting not as wishful thinking producing a turn away from the present or an erasure of history but as an attempt to return to a previous aspiration to a collective self. The American philosopher Stanley Cavell calls such gestures within writing “aversive thinking.” To inquire further into the potentialities of aversive thinking for each case, I read the texts of these two Supreme Court judgments within their moments with the following in mind: How are these returns effected? What founding concepts and tensions are re-found? How is this re-founding moment peopled by others, if indeed they are? In other words, how do these exercises in aversive thinking find a foothold within the present darkly described by Agamben? And, do they open us to “careers of constitutionalism” beyond exception?