Milan talks to political scientist Paul Staniland about the significant decline in political violence in South Asia.
The political landscape of South Asia has changed dramatically in the last two decades. Insurgencies that were raging across the subcontinent in the 1990s and early 2000s have largely been contained and the heavy-hand of the state has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence. Why has this happened and what exactly does it mean for South Asia’s future?
To shed light on the surprising conflict dynamics in South Asia, this week Milan is joined by political scientist Paul Staniland, author of a recent Carnegie essay titled, “Political Violence in South Asia: The Triumph of the State?” Paul is an associate professor at the University of Chicago and nonresident scholar with the South Asia Program at Carnegie.
Milan and Paul discuss intra-state conflict trends in the region, the massive rise in India’s internal security forces, the precarious state of liberal democracy in South Asia, and what South Asia can tell us about political violence in America.
Episode notes:
Milan 00:11
Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. The political landscape of South Asia has changed dramatically in the last two decades. Insurgencies that were raging across the subcontinent in the 1990s and early 2000s have largely been contained, and the heavy hand of the state has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence. Why has this happened and what exactly does it mean for South Asia's future? To shed light on these and many other questions, I'm joined today by Paul Staniland, associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago and, proudly for us, non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment. Paul is the author of a recent Carnegie essay titled "Political Violence in South Asia: The Triumph of the State?" I'm pleased to welcome Paul onto the show for the very first time. Paul, good to have you on.
Paul 00:55
It's great to be here, Milan. Thank you.
Milan 00:56
So, I want to just jump in and talk about this terrific essay that you wrote for us on political violence in South Asia, and I want to begin by quoting something that you wrote: "In the first decade of the 21st century, anti-state rebellions were an endemic feature of South Asia's political landscape... Yet by 2020, the state is ascendant in South Asia. Most anti-state revolts across the subcontinent have been crushed, demobilized, or contained." So, take us back, Paul, to that first decade of the 21st century. What did political violence look like back then?
Paul 01:30
So, the starting point is this observation that at various points in different countries in the early 21st century, you saw fairly intense anti-state rebellion. And I choose that word specifically. I'm not talking here about riots, police brutality, or other forms of political violence, but specifically about anti-state insurgencies. So, in Sri Lanka, I think probably most famously, we saw the ascendance and very high level of power of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, better known as the Tamil Tigers. As of 2005, 2006, they controlled substantial parts of northern and eastern Sri Lanka, had very well-developed governance structures, institutions that in many ways resembled a state - policing, education, tax collection. In Nepal, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) was a very powerful insurgent group that had mobilized over the previous decade to achieve something like a military stalemate with Nepal's government in ways that were, I think, quite unusual [given its origins as a] post-Cold War […] rural Maoist insurgency. Bangladesh didn't see that kind of anti-state rebellion, but we saw concerns about Islam as terrorism, there were bomb blasts, assassinations, etc. In Pakistan, probably most dramatically, we saw the rise of the so-called Pakistani Taliban, really from 2005-2006 into actually the middle of the 2010s. So, for instance, substantial areas of northwestern Pakistan were under at best tenuous state control. There were explosions in Islamabad, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto - the military was directly targeted in ways that were quite new and different. In India, the late nineties and early- to mid-2000s are kind of the high points at least in terms of direct force-on-force violence in Kashmir at the northeast. And then, later on, around 2010, we see a big spike in areas where the Naxalite Maoist insurgency was operating. So, that was kind of - when I started studying South Asia, that was the landscape that I went into. And what the essay does is it argues that there have been some fairly dramatic drops in at least the kinds of violence we could systematically measure. I focused in the essay on lethality by fatalities. And there are many other kinds of violence that are really important - sexual violence, abductions, torture, intimidation - that we don't have this kind of systematic data on. But in terms of the specific question of fatalities linked to these conflicts, we've seen dramatic decreases over the last two decades.
Milan 04:09
So, let me just zero in for a second on the Indian case, because you note that since the year 2000, there have essentially been these three insurgencies: you have the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, you have the violence that's wracked the northeast, and then you have the violence in the Maoist-Naxalite belt. Now, in all three, according to publicly available data, we see significantly reduced levels of violence against the Indian state. These are three very different geographies, three very different cases - you could well write a book about any one of them - but tell us a little bit why, in your view, at the kind of 30,000-foot level, violence has gone down in all three locales.
Paul 04:51
Yeah, so I think a couple caveats. First, the essay actually has a question mark at "The Triumph of the State?" So, I'm not claiming that these are permanent changes or that these conflicts are over. And I also do want to be clear that I'm not claiming that state violence has necessarily disappeared or gone away. But in terms of what we think of as classical insurgent violence, there have been pretty dramatic drops, especially in Kashmir and the northeast. So, what are some factors? Obviously, these are, as you said, very different places, lots of specificities. I mean, one big background factor is the simple fact that the Indian internal security apparatus is enormous and just keeps rolling. And you see this in the northeast, the Naga insurgency and its various manifestations have been going on since the mid-1950s. So, on the one hand, it's an incredibly enduring kind of evolution of insurgent movements; on the other hand, the Indian state is still there, and there's very little prospect of leaving anytime soon in any of these conflict environments. So, it's a huge security apparatus that over time, in some cases, has been able to wear down the opposition, often through, you know, abductions, killings, various other forms of direct violence, but also simply its presence, that it just kind of doesn't go away. So, that's one background factor. More specifically, again, it depends a lot on the context. In the northeast, we've seen ceasefires, for instance, in Naga areas with groups like the NSCN-IM and, until 2015, the NSCN-K that have bought substantial reductions in violence. They haven't settled the conflicts, they haven't necessarily demobilized armed actors or generated political settlements and deals. But in terms of just this very narrow proxy of fatalities linked to conflict, they have made a big difference in reducing violence. Depending on the place, we've also seen amnesties - like, surrenders - some of which are honestly very murky, and it's not clear who exactly is surrendering or why. But to some extent, those can have an impact. And then there have been some peace deals that actually demobilize armed groups, again in the northeast in particular. In other areas, you know, in Kashmir, you don't really see that whole bundle of amnesties, ceasefires, peace deals that we've seen in the northeast. There, it's more a story of security force operations. To some extent, there have been changes in international conditions in J&K where, in a variety of ways, Pakistan has been limited in some of its support for militant groups - there's a lot more pressure that's been put on. There is some evidence, especially in Naxal areas, or areas affected by Naxalite mobilization, that some bundle of state infrastructure creation - there's some evidence that proves that road-building has an effect on reducing Naxalite violence, whether that's because it allows security forces to move more effectively, whether it's because people benefit from development, there are a lot of different mechanisms that can be going on - but in some areas, you could tell a story about something about state infrastructure. And then, to some extent, I don't want to overplay this because I think there's some real limitations to this argument. In some cases, electoral politics has been an effective way of kind of drawing individual movements out of militancy and into what is known in India as mainstream politics. I think this is primarily the case in the northeast - it has had some impact, especially in the northeast. So, there are a lot of different things going on, but those are three or four factors that you can point to as, in some of these cases, driving some changes.
Milan 08:23
So, I want to just kind of pause on the conversation on India and ask you a data question, which is: you mentioned several times that a lot of this is pretty murky, it's not very transparent, particularly when you get to things like peace deals, violence, and remote places. What data were you able to marshal to look at conflict trends for this piece? And I know this is part and parcel of a larger body of work that you were undertaking. Tell us a little bit about what you think that frontier looks like, as you think about where this goes next.
Paul 08:59
Yeah, so I mean, as you've heard, and as you would see in my work, there are just caveats shot through here. Because it's really - especially anything that doesn't involve… Let me step back. In a weird and really sad and grim way, fatalities in some ways are the easiest kinds of things to measure in these contexts, and even there, you can have disappearances where people just disappear and you don't know what happened to them. But things like sexual violence, abductions, torture, or extortion are incredibly difficult to measure. And so I'm not making any claims about trends in those. But what can we try to draw on as we try to study these environments? There's publicly available data, right, so the Ministry of Home Affairs in India produces this stuff. But also there are projects by academics, by think tank analysts, by journalists to try to use, for instance, media sources to come up with independent estimates of fatalities and trends. So, collaborative research has been done, for instance, on violence in Naxel areas that is not just reliant on government sources. Interviews, field research, where possible, is incredibly valuable. And there are a lot of people doing excellent work on the ground, talking to people. And this ranges from political scientists to historians and anthropologists using archives, interviews, to try to get a sense of dynamics of conflict here. But it's a hard problem. But I think the best thing to do is, one, be kind of caveated about it, and also try to look at different kinds of sources. Now, more broadly, I think what we're seeing are our possibilities for exploring some of these questions in new ways. Some of this just, you know, involves looking through government documents and seeing what you can find. So, for instance, we'll talk maybe later about the expansion of the Ministry of Home Affairs, internal security forces, and border security forces in India - a lot of that is just if you go looking in parliamentary reports or MHA annual reports, right, so those are fairly easy budgetary documents. There are other possibilities that I think are kind of interesting. So, for instance, with a couple of co-authors, Adnan Naseemullah and Ahsan Butt, I did a project on measuring the career trajectories and then post-retirement jobs, basically, of corps commanders in the Pakistan Army, which is not something that, like, the military produces a dataset of for us to look at. But we use open sources - you know, newspaper articles, the annual reports of corporations, which like to talk about the members of their boards - LinkedIn profiles are surprisingly available.
Milan 11:25
So, LinkedIn is actually good for something, Paul!
Paul 11:27
LinkedIn is actually somewhat useful for something - in my case, for kind of being a little bit of a detective on what people are up to. And so, you know, now we're starting to see analysis of social media. I'm doing a different project with a couple of other co-authors looking at the use of Twitter by Pakistani political parties, but also the military, around the 2018 general election. So there are all these ways in which information can be generated - in addition to knowing the context, in addition to reading the literature, in addition to trying to do field work and interviews, you can get kind of a leverage - with caveats and serious limitations - but maybe, you know, kind of pushing the frontier a little bit in terms of things we can study.
Milan 12:05
So, with those caveats in mind, Paul, let me ask you about the situation in Jammu and Kashmir. You know, I think it's fair to say we are still waiting to feel the full ramifications of the Article 370 decision in Jammu and Kashmir. The state was on lockdown, as you know, even before the COVID lockdown was enforced, so many people are saying that Kashmiris are essentially living through a lockdown within a lockdown. What are the prospects for renewed violence there once this double lockdown eases up? I realize that this is putting an academic in an uncomfortable situation of speculating about the future, but what are the kinds of things that you worry about once this double lockdown kind of subsides?
Paul 12:48
Well, I mean, we already have continued to see various kinds of violence - state violence, non-state violence, violence of unclear origin. So, there have been - you know, as we're recording this, a lawyer was just killed by unknown assailants. And so there is already violence. It's at a comparatively, relatively low level. But the point I'm making in the essay is there's a big difference between a low level of violence and a place where there is no violence and nobody's trying to, you know, kill police officers, or there aren't security forces on every street corner. And so I think one of the limitations of just looking at violence trends is you're often missing the broader political context. So, I try to make that point as well in the essay. And I think in J&K, there's still a huge security footprint. There is, even with this heavy footprint and multiple layers and rounds of lockdown, there continues to be mobilization by non-state armed groups, targeting of security forces, and the security forces act in a whole variety of ways fairly freely - in now, I guess, the union territory? I could be totally wrong, but I don't foresee that changing in the future. I think there's such a heavy security footprint that you're unlikely to go back to the year 2000 or 1991. But it's also possible that it just continues the way it has in recent years with kind of waxes and wanes, but you're not getting to what the Indian government likes to call normalcy. Right? And so there are these basic political problems where you've got, basically, the undercutting of the so-called mainstream pro-Delhi parties without any real substitute put in place, lots of big claims about development and governance reforms that very much remain to be seen, underlying public opinion resistance... So, it's not clear to me that you could see a major internal security force drawdown without a resurgence of either protests or violence or some other forms of resistance there. So, a lot of big claims were made in August of 2019. I don't think there's a lot of really compelling evidence that there's been some kind of fundamental shift in the political orientation, especially the Kashmir Valley. I could be totally wrong about that, but that's my current sense of where we are.
Milan 14:54
Now, if we transition for a second to the northeast, right, this is a place where we have seen a lot of change. In fact, you write in your piece that the northeast is the site of India's most successful peace deals when it comes to internal conflicts. Now, the Prime Minister and the ruling party the BJP more generally have touted their efforts to bring peace to the northeast as among their foremost internal security accomplishments since first coming to power in 2014. And so, the question is, in your view, as someone who studies this pretty closely, has there been a marked shift in conflict dynamics since the Modi government came to power? Or was there a shift that was already kind of underway that you could detect?
Paul 15:35
Yeah, so, it's an interesting question. I think there a couple ways to look at it. It's certainly the case that the BJP as a political party has moved into the Northeast in really kind of new and interesting ways in recent years. That said, the internal security, conflict dynamics - it's not obvious to me they're really dramatically different since 2014. I mean, if you just eyeball the quantitative data on fatalities, basically, we've been seeing a drop since about 2007 or 2008, you know, with some ups and downs, and it's down a little bit since 2014, but the trend line is fairly similar. That's also true in a lot of other cases. 2014 doesn't really seem to mark any kind of breakpoint, at least in that admittedly very crude proxy of conflict fatalities. Now, in terms of the northeast, it's a complicated question, because there continues to be heavy militarization, ongoing conflict, and a huge number of other pressing political and economic issues. So, I would never claim that, like, there's no conflict or this has all been solved. That's obviously not the case. That said, I think what we've seen in recent years is actually a continuation of decades-old, basic kinds of policies. Let's go back to the mid-1950s. You see the Naga insurgency created, and then you see a bundle of responses that look fairly similar to what we've seen over the last 10 years or, you know, 20 years, 30 years. There's an initial crackdown, ongoing security force presence, but also the use of various kinds of sub-national autonomy, the creation of a state - there was a ceasefire and a Naga peace mission in the sixties, into the early seventies, then another crackdown, the Shillong accord in 1975. Similarly, in areas that become Mizoram, we see initially very intense conflict started in 1966, then the seventies through the mid-eighties, there's kind of on-and-off ceasefire-negotiation-conflict dynamic that finally culminates in an accord in 1986. So, this doesn't - to me, at least - really look all that dramatically different than what we've seen in recent years. I think there's a lot more continuity than change, at least in this very specific question of kind of managing insurgencies and counterinsurgency posture in the northeast.
Milan 17:36
Paul, let me come back to something that you mentioned earlier, and that you've also written about in another forum, which is the kind of quiet but significant growth of India's paramilitary forces over the past few decades. You know, to me, this is a story that is not widely known outside of the expert security community, and so for our non-expert listeners who don't live and breathe this stuff, can you give us a flavor of what this growth in paramilitary forces has sort of looked like?
Paul 18:04
Yeah, so, I don't know if this is even widely studied in the security community. I mean, there are lots of people who care a lot about, like, nuclear stuff or grand strategy or whatever, but very few who study internal security specifically. And part of that is, like - India's Ministry of Home Affairs is not super interested in these kinds of things necessarily being studied in a lot of detail. Let's put it that way. But, for instance, we've seen some pretty major increases in the size of the Ministry of Home Affairs' internal central armed police forces. There are several of these that do a variety of things. One of them is border management. So, the border security force along the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh, we see the Indo-Tibetan border police along the China border kind of doing border-guarding activities in various forms, we also see the largest force, the central reserve police force, that does all kinds of things. It's involved in counterinsurgency activities in the three major areas of insurgency, but also has dedicated units aimed at kind of dealing with communal violence, which can do various other things as well. So, we've seen major growth since 1988, just as an example. So, I went back through annual reports at the Ministry of Home Affairs - and these are sanction sizes, so they're different than the actual size, but the trend is pretty clear. So, in 1988, the sanction size of the CRPF was about 121,000 people. Now, it's almost 325,000. Right? So, that's a huge increase that's well ahead of population growth. In that period, the border security force in the same period goes from roughly 135,000 to roughly 265,000. Another really major increase. And so, similarly with other border guarding forces like the ITBP along the China border, which goes from about 23,000 to a sanctioned size of about 90,000. It's not actually there yet in terms of real size. But we've seen Home Affairs kind of creating this massive paramilitary set of forces. There's some ambiguity - so, for instance, the assault rifles are operationally under the Ministry of Defense, but administratively under the Ministry of Home Affairs - but the basic picture is one of substantial growth. And I think Home Affairs is this powerful ministry in Indian politics that doesn't receive anywhere close - like within any kind of order of magnitude – [to the scrutiny] of other key ministries. There are reasons for that, but I think this is one kind of measurable, tangible way of looking at the growth in MHS power over time.
Milan 20:36
Obviously, this is a podcast about India, but I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about similar trends in India's neighbors. First and foremost, let's talk about Pakistan. In your essay, you argue that while "all of the active conflict zones remain potential areas of resurgence... compared to a decade ago, Pakistan's security establishment has achieved a major shift in the balance of forces." I'm wondering, in your view, how did the Pakistani government approach the question of countering this kind of political violence? And are there clear differences you see between the strategies employed by the Pakistanis on one side and what the Indians have done in their domain?
Paul 21:19
It's just really striking - there were real concerns about state failure or regime collapse or something along those lines in 2009, 2010, and so it's a very different world now. Now, I think there are a lot of similarities. So, let's say two things that will be unpopular among different audiences. First, we're really talking about the Pakistani military primarily here. That's not to say that there's no civilian role, but when push comes to shove, we're mainly talking about the military. So that's the first - some listeners, maybe on the Pakistani side, will disagree with that. The second thing is, I think there are some actual similarities with the Indian posture. The first is just a very heavy security footprint, large numbers of forces being used, often in a very heavy-handed way. There are people who are very invested in kind of a "hearts and minds" approach to counter insurgency - I don't see that as the modal form of counter insurgency in the region. It's a combination of huge security forces, hard-hitting, relatively limited constraints, expansion of intelligence and surveillance capabilities, and, to some extent, some kind of nebulous deal making with kind of splinter groups and local armed actors. There are some similarities there. There are also some differences, right? So, one is that obviously, there's a civil military dynamic in Pakistan - it's radically different from that in India, right. So, that creates this very different kind of big picture elite dynamics. There's also traditionally in Pakistan much closer collusion with non-state armed groups, including in counterinsurgency, but also this overlap and tension with Pakistani support for non-state armed groups in Kashmir or Afghanistan. And there's also been, in the Pakistani case, less explicit political dealmaking. I think it's fair to say that in the Indian case, at least in India's northeast, where you get just this profusion of ceasefires and demobilizations and surrenders and amnesties, there are lots of questions open about all of those, but I think it tends to be less institutionalized in the Pakistani case. These are obviously, you know, broad brush generalizations. But those are some ways of thinking about potential differences.
Milan 23:22
You know, you end your piece by cautioning readers not to assume that South Asia's battles with political violence have come to an end. I mean, you mentioned that a few minutes ago. You note in particular that the increasingly volatile international politics of the region could provide new dangerous incentives for governments to support armed groups across borders. And so, if you were in the seat of, say, an Indian strategic planner, what are some of those international sources that you would be most focused on?
Paul 23:56
Right, so I should say, I think the international is usually secondary - it's kind of what we might think of domestic politics in these cases - but it has obviously proven to be really important. So, if I were an Indian security planner - I mean, the primary concern has always been Pakistani support, right, and exactly what that looks like, and the extent, and all of these vary over time and are obviously objects of contestation, but that's one concern: Pakistan, from an Indian perspective, just hasn't gone away, right? Again, there's often this kind of rhetoric of, like, putting Pakistan in its place, but still - a big military, fairly risk-acceptant, the Line of Control remains very active, and so this is not an issue that's going away, I think, anytime soon. China is an interesting question, and I don't think it's likely that China is going to get deeply involved in supporting the armed groups or militancy, but at least there are media reports that maybe have suggested that China looks the other way at, you know, insurgent leaders aimed at India's northeast taking shelter, or getting arms from, or some kind of loose, maybe vague linkage to China on that front. You could imagine - I don't think it's likely or the main issue, but it's conceivable at least - that that becomes more of an issue like it was in the late sixties, early seventies, when there's Chinese support, for instance, for Naga armed groups. There's also this spillover that's more nebulous from Afghanistan. Whatever happens there obviously has implications, very big implications for India, there's nothing enormous that India can necessarily do about any of those things - like, you know, Afghanistan is gonna take the direction it takes without Delhi being able to do an enormous amount about it. But those are some of the things that one might want to be thinking about.
Milan 25:36
So, Paul, one might think that the reductions in violence that you've been speaking about could open up space for some kind of rejuvenated liberal democracy in South Asia. Obviously, that's not what we're seeing - instead, we're seeing quite the opposite signs of democratic decay. And I get this question a lot, I'm sure you do as well: How do we actually know that democracy is weakening? You know, are there signs that scholars such as yourself are paying attention to that, indeed, show that there is some kind of decline in democratic adherence?
Paul 26:12
Yeah, this is a great question. I mean, by way of background, one of the reasons it's worth thinking about this is some of the justification for security force expansion, surveillance, weakening of constraints of security operations, it's precisely to defend democracy or the nation or whatever against, you know, perceived enemies within. So, then the question becomes, well, what actually happens when those enemies are either defeated or marginalized or co-opted, brought into mainstream politics? And the answer varies across the region. So, I think it's fair to say Nepal, compared to, like, 2004, is more democratic and pluralistic. But in some of the largest cases, we haven't seen expanded democracy under the shadow of a protective security apparatus. And so what are things that we look at? And I think this is a great question because it gets us into these questions of what democracy means. Right? There are a million different ways you can think about this. And the way I tend to think about it is, there's a set of issues related to elections themselves and then a set of issues that are kind of non-electoral, are not directly electoral, as we think about liberal democracy in particular. And I think it gets to the point that you can disaggregate democracy among different kind of topics or dimensions. And so I actually encourage listeners, if they're interested, go look inside the Freedom House, you know, components of their democracy scores, or go look at - there's this great project called V-Dem that tries to measure countries by year and over time on multiple indicators of democracy.
Milan 27:38
This is the Varieties of Democracy project.
Paul 27:40
That's right. So, it's v-dem.net - it's really interesting. Okay. So, electorally, in South Asia, there isn't the kind of wild vote-rigging we see in, for instance, authoritarian regimes back in the 1980s where there's just pure sham elections, but a lot of the things we worry about are ways of illicitly shaping the political field in the run-up to elections, where the state or parts of the state in particular can tilt the playing field to make it much harder for an opposition to win, even if voting is free and fair on election day. And I think that's really an important distinction. So, what can this look like? It could look like the repression of the opposition - you know, detaining opposition figures or dissidents, intimidation and censorship of the media, sending people into exile, the politicized use of the state apparatus to kind of favor the ruling party, or parts like the military within the ruling apparatus, over the opposition. And so, I think it's fair to say that Bangladesh with the ruling party, Pakistan with its military - if we want to expand outside a little bit farther, there have been various claims about the oversize role of Myanmar's military - and so that's kind of how we might think about electoral manipulation that's not about vote-rigging, necessarily, but it's about tilting the playing field in a particular direction, where you can have a free and fair vote, but half of the opposition is in jail, and the other half have been harassed, and the media is unwilling to report on any of this. And so, that's one component, and then we can-
Milan 29:10
In other words, just to interrupt for a second, those are all things which happen before the election. The election may actually proceed swimmingly.
Paul 29:18
Sometimes, it's both. But one of the things that political scientists worry the most about are free and fair election days that are preceded by months of repression, intimidation, harassment, and manipulation that make the results kind of a foregone conclusion, and this is sometimes called competitive authoritarianism or illiberal democracy. So, there's a second component we can think of broadly, which is, when we think of democracy, we don't just want the majority to be able to do whatever it wants. So, there's this famous phrase: "the tyranny of the majority." So, what you want are checks on majority power or on ruling party power from the judiciary - depending on the country and its political system, maybe the legislative checks on the executive. You want a media that is vibrant and doing what it's supposed to do. And you want equal protection under the law where the security apparatus and the legal apparatus are doing what they're supposed to do and they're not favoring partisans of some particular political parties or some ethnic or religious categories over others. And so this is where we get into the liberal part of "liberal democracies" - the protection to the extent best possible of these kinds of rights and protections under law. So for seeing things like disappearances, if we're seeing things like, you know, vigilantes or mobs being allowed to do what they want, if we're seeing detentions and harassment, if we're seeing the media being intimidated or the judiciary giving up on trying to stop the security apparatus from doing whatever it wants, these are real kind of threats to that conceptualization of democracy. So, you can have threats to both of these, you can have threats to one of them - it can get very complicated very quickly. But, for instance, if you just look at Freedom House, which you know, there are critiques of, but as a useful example: India does pretty well on electoral process and its political participation and pluralism categories - like, the ruling party can lose and at the state level loses all the time - but less well on civil liberties, rule of law, and personal autonomy and individual rights. Pakistan does poorly not just on, you know, civil liberties and rule of law, but then also on electoral process and political participation. And so there are these different ways of kind of disaggregating what we mean by democracy.
Milan 31:29
So, Paul, just to wrap up: reflecting on the broad swath of your argument in the subcontinent as you describe it, is it possible that, on the one hand, political violence as manifested by insurgencies and inter-state conflict have indeed subsided, but they have been essentially displaced perhaps by more low-level forms of violence, such as - in the Indian case, for example - mob violence, gang violence, lynchings, obviously we've seen this rise in cow vigilantism... So, violence according to the traditional ways that we've measured them look like it's gone down or has gone down, but in fact, it's just being reborn in a difficult-to-measure and more disparate form?
Paul 32:29
So, I think that there's kind of a broader question here, which is, how do we think about the future of political violence in this context, right? And first, I would say that even, you know, insurgencies that are down in terms of their general level of fatalities are still very important, right, and are sources of concern on their own terms regardless of how one thinks about how they should be resolved. So, in a number of these cases we've seen what we might think of as violence suppression rather than conflict resolution, and so we're seeing, for instance, the Pakistani Taliban have continued operations, we see continued violence in Kashmir, we see continued lower-level but still kind of steady state violence in that area - so, first, these things have not gone away, these issues have not gone away, the politics, the economics around them have not gone away. So, that's one kind of important caveat. Second, though, there are these other forms of violence that, depending how you want to measure them, have either always been there but now are more prominent, or they have grown, or in different countries have different answers. But you could imagine two different kind of possibilities. One is that these escalate in unexpected ways, where you get blowback, you get spirals of conflict that could generate maybe not insurgencies per se, but intense political violence that escapes the control even of the political patrons who have supported it in a very grim and tragic way. This is how you get Sri Lanka's Civil War, right, and mob violence that eventually kind of pushes people to the wall - you start to see the rise of increasingly radicalizing Tamil militancy that culminates in the Tamil Tigers. Or you could get a steady state in which, basically, the state or parts of the state, or political parties or parts of political parties, kind of look the other way, collude or work with vigilantes or mobs or whatever the specific manifestation is, which then generates all these negative effects on rights, protections of equality, democracy, representation, basic questions of human wellbeing. And so the story here, it's not necessarily a happy one, right, depending on your views of any of this, and it's not obvious that the future is, like, a rosy place in which legitimate states are backed by legitimate democratic representation and constraints and security forces kind of do their thing. This could be a much murkier and sadder story. The final thing I guess I would say about this is a lot of the violence suppression we've seen could be contingent. So, you could see political instability, for instance, in a country like Bangladesh that generate opportunities and motivations for new forms of violence. You could see civil-military cooperation in Pakistan break down in ways that, you know, generate unintended consequences. I think in the Indian case, it's the gargantuan security apparatus. But there are always dangers. And I think we've seen some of those already - of ideological hubris and overreach that can make matters worse rather than better. So, there remain these triggers, and also these new forms or manifestations of violence that I think we need to be really attentive to.
Milan 35:20
You know, as I've been listening to you speak, Paul, I can't help but be struck by developments in our own country, the United States. As somebody like myself who has studied democracy and governance in India, I sort of feel like I have a kind of cognitive dissonance, because you could argue that one of the biggest tests of liberal democracy is happening right before our very eyes and in our homes. And I'm wondering if you feel something similar as somebody who studies political violence. Obviously, the United States has not seen the kinds of political violence that you were writing about in the South Asia context, but we are seeing pretty disturbing signs - whether it's the militarization of the police, obviously police shootings, militia violence, and the prospect potentially, of more of this to come as we inch closer to election day. So, just as a kind of final reflection, how are you grappling with this? And are you finding perhaps unexpected resonance with your work in our own democracy?
Paul 36:32
Yeah, I mean, definitely. So, actually, I was quoted the New York Times in October of 2016, because I'd tweeted something like, "Oh, this looks bad." But it was about how Trump, his rhetoric about, like, "This election means everything, we need to lock her up, if we don't win this time, they're going to wipe us out" kind of reflected a logic of really dangerous electoral politics. Like, "If we don't win, then everything is over. Therefore, we must win at all costs." And we saw echoes of this already in October of 2016. We certainly are seeing it now. In terms of violence, specifically, like the number one, there's always been a lot of political violence in the United States, we just haven't necessarily thought about it in those terms. Like, police violence is political violence. The police are as political an institution as you get. We've seen different kinds of terrorism and, you know, non-state armed groups, especially the sixties and seventies, but I think certainly we're seeing a much greater kind of potential for, like, militia-ization with elite (at least tacit) support. That, I think, is incredibly dangerous, because it doesn't take much violence to really set off dynamics that can't be controlled very easily. And the potential use of highly militarized police, including federal security forces, to get involved, to be used as tools of political power competition... So, I think this is actually a really dangerous moment of the United States, and I think there are certainly echoes of the South Asian context, but also kind of deeper echoes of American history as well that maybe we haven't appreciated as fully or understood as fully as we should.
Milan 38:00
My guest on the show today is Paul Staniland. He's an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment. He's the author of a recent Carnegie essay titled "Political Violence in South Asia: The Triumph of the State?" (Important question mark.) We will link to that as well as Paul's other writings on the show notes. Paul, it's great to have you. I'm sorry that we can't do this in person and have a beer afterwards in Washington, but hopefully that day will come. Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule in Chicago to be with us.
Paul 38:31
Totally. My pleasure. Thank you so much.