The perpetrator of violence, whether by immediate personal choice or as part of a system that allows the executor to live in moral comfort or comfortable moral ambiguity, wants the victim to “renounce all claims to asserting his identity”. This is essentially what violence, torture, brutality are meant to do. To reduce a person, a mind, and consequently a collective of minds, to a “spiritless body”. And that, then, is what a repressive regime in Kashmir, an oppressive ruler in Arabia, or an occupying super power in Afghanistan, ultimately seeks to achieve: the complete destruction of the will of the victim, which in turn ensures a people kept in submission, slavery even.
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One of the concerns of my work, both in fiction and outside of it, is to examine how the perpetrator of such random and ruthless violence objectifies the victim. This is germane to all conflicts between the powerful and the weak: The perpetrator has to ‘otherise’ the victim – how else does a member of the security forces come to bludgeon a nine-year-old to death, as we saw in the killing of Samir Rah in Srinagar last year?
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More here.