Retaliatory Violence

This is in response to the editorial titled “Violence as Parenthesis” (EPW, 21 December 2019). In the editorial, Gopal Guru has rightly pointed out how violence has been injected into social relationships. The way the government has unleashed violence on the mostly peaceful students of Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) and in turn tried to tweak “brutal state suppression” as “retaliation to violence” makes it further complicated.

The allegation floated by the police officials that outsiders had set public property on fire did not clarify who these outsiders were. The next action of the police to arrest 10 people from Jamia Nagar with previous criminal records for spreading arson was testimony to their arbitrariness. Though it was rarely clear whether the arrested people actually were involved in the case of violence, the disassociation of the students from the “locals” was successfully done. Immediately, the alumni association of JMI came up with a statement claiming that no student was engaged in the act of violence, and it was the outsiders who conducted it.