The Age Of Miniaturised Violence

Although literally eating fellow-humans is rare, preying upon them is common. In 18th century Bihar and UP, villagers often used to set out after harvest, attack neighbouring villages, loot and pillage them and return with booty and women. Within our lifetimes it has happened in Punjab in 1946 and 1947. But this kind of laissez faire predation is difficult to live with. In Jamaica, which I visited this summer, a common crime is the stealing of crops. No wonder that Jamaica produces little food for itself; most meat, fish, grains and even fruit are brought in from the US. Jamaica pays for the food by exporting bauxite and entertaining tourists. A large and populous land like ours could hardly survive like that; so we need controls on human predation.

 

Predation is much older than mankind; but controls on it are man-made. The earliest control was to confine the right to prey to a small minority; this became possible as arms became more lethal and costly. Thus in the world of the Pacific, the most lethal weapon was a big stick shaped into a mace; anyone could go into the neighbouring woods and make one for himself, so it was impossible to confine violence to a minority. Things became easier with hard metals: knives and swords could only be made with copper and iron that were not available everywhere and with technology not known to all; with their arrival, societies became possible where a small minority preyed on the majority. Economies of scale set in. It was cheaper to make swords on a large scale, and larger armies had an advantage. Thus local monopolies of violence emerged; armed groups held sway in a certain territory and strove to extend it. And with arms, a science of their effective use emerged: armed men began to be organised and trained, some of them learnt better than others how to use violence more effectively, and thus leaders arose. These local monopolies of violence are now known as states, or countries, or to use a more self-congratulatory term, nations. Effective deployment of violence has had momentous consequences in history; this is how Alexander is the byword for prowess in the Indo-European world from America to India, how Napoleon, the self-made king, heralded the death of hereditary monarchies across the world, how Hitler demonstrated a model of mass violence which the world has spent the last half century trying to exorcise.

A world divided into local monopolies of violence is unstable for two reasons. First, it is obviously more comfortable to be a predator than the prey. Everyone wants to join the predators; but predation can be an enviable profession only if there are sufficient victims. Hence the predator class is prone to overpopulation and the class of preys to decimation. Second, a local monopoly of violence is always subject to threats from neighbouring monopolies. So the monopolies are in competition with one another, and live a precarious existence: the balance of power, which is the scholastic name for this competition, is unstable. The instability has been the greatest when new technologies of warfare have emerged. Thus the advent of the horse as a vehicle saw the intercontinental excursion of Alexander; the perfection of archery enabled the Turks to subjugate a vast territory from central Asia to Hungary; the advent of guns led to colonisation of the whole world outside Europe and East Asia; mass production of armour and warplanes created the Second World War; and today, miniaturisation of guns threatens to destroy the economies of scale in state formation and return us, perhaps to the tribal world.

We are in the midst of this new age of miniaturisation, and cannot yet see its full implications. But the scale of the phenomenon is awesome. It began with Vietnam. The overflow of small arms from Vietnam fed the insurgencies in north-east Thailand, northern Burma, southern Philippines and quite possibly in northern Sri Lanka in its early stages. It also fed the local cultures of violence which made armed robbery the most dreaded scourge in Manila and Bangkok in the 1970s. The predominantly small arms supplied by the United States to the Afghans bled the Soviet army to its death, turned Pakistan into a cauldron of internal violence, and spilled into the insurgencies in Punjab and Kashmir; the arms supplied by Iran and Iraq turned the Palestinians into a dreaded force and made Israel sue for peace, and turned the scales in the war between the well-armed Serbia and the underdog Bosnian Muslims. The overflow of small arms from gun-ridden United States have enabled the drug cartel of Cali to challenge the Colombian government, and made so many cities of the New World dangerous. Small arms produced in China, Iran, Iraq, Germany, the United States and Brazil are competing in an underground market; they fed the successful insurgencies in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the massacre in Rwanda. Certain suburbs of Kingston in Jamaica are known as garrisons; they are ruled by armed gangs which decide who can enter them and who can go out. There is a sea of urban violence and local insurgency whose waves are breaking at the shores of India. They will engulf our large and fractious country