Madhusree and I are set to visit Dhaka and are very worried about the pre poll violence in the city. The opposition has taken to the streets burning public transport and blocking roads and, on many days, there has also been a near complete shutdown of the city.

Violence is a weapon in the hands of the opposition when the party in question is well entrenched in power while it becomes a tool in the hands of the ruling party when its chances of winning the polls seem somewhat compromised. Violence is therefore a weapon of democracy as much as it has been under autocracy. While violence is expected to be an accompaniment of autocracy where the ruler’s will stands opposed to those of the rules, a democratic state is supposed to be the embodiment of the general will and hence designed to eschew violence. Yet, violence escalates in democracies precisely to escalate the democratic process, it becomes intrinsic to elections and even necessary for the elected governments. Here is how.

Democracies are about human wills finding a home in the state; democracy is the carryover from the Hegelian absolutist state of the tradition of Idealism. It contains the assumption of a harmonious equilibrium of a supra individual social will. But objective conditions may not be conducive to such a transcendence and conflicts over resources and opportunities remain which lead to fractures in the supposed unity of purposes. Hence, unities of nations and states are fractured into groups exercising their choice of the ruler. Violence is useful in the generation, aggregation, and creation of wills.

The world-famous dog whisperer, Caesar Millan and many other animal tamers insist that animals look for pack leaders and are drawn to those who they sense has power and the force of will. The violent may appear to be a pack leader to the people whose wills are weak and may appear as a nuisance for the better poised ones. Nonetheless, violence serves as a dividing force where the choices of party are formed and hardened. Violence helps set camps and draw lines. Democracies run the risk of total consensus much more than they run the risk of hung houses; violence ensures that the contesting claimants to power have clear stands and positions. Violence is a divisive force; democracies draw more out of divides than they draw from ideological consensus.

Democracies have an innate conflict between ideology and interests. Ideology ensures consensus and moves the individual free wills towards the supra individual will of the Idealist State while interests crack up the unity into diverse groups challenging the transcendental will accusing that the State is an oligarchy if not wholly absolutist and autocratic. Interests carry with them the violence of disruption of the general will, trying to push the identity of the state from representative to dictatorship; violence is instrumental in this redefinition to open spaces and opportunities for those out of power. Violence is endemic to democracies and in fact, a part of its processes, if not a necessary one at that too.

Nonviolent mobilization of masses is only possible under great ideological transformations and upheavals. The Indian Freedom Struggle is one. While the most nonviolent resistance movements are possible under autocratic rule, as there is a total separation of ideology between the people and the government; in a democracy, ideological consensus is more likely the case. Then the competition for power is only sheer struggle for opportunities, positions, offices; corruption, for the same reason is also more possible in democracies than in autocracies for in the latter, wealth is supposed to be cornered by the ruling oligarch. Violence, born out of envy and jealousy, greed for power by sabotaging the working of the government to harass the ruling government is unique to democracies.