Dr Asangba Tzudir
The word ‘camp’ may get connected with the Nazi ruled concentration camps for those few survivors who have gone through the horrendous experience or those associated or read through the ‘archives’ of the ‘biopolitical life’ in the Nazi ruled concentration camps. Under the Nazi rule the concentration camps manifested a ‘space’ where a life can and would be simply killed. The inmates, whose names were replaced with a number, wished a dignified death rather than a number being erased. That killing a human with a name had dignity compared to killing a numbered human.
In context, the prolonged existence of AFSPA fictionally legitimated by a ‘state of necessity’ in creating the desired ‘disturbed area’ has somehow brought about an imaging for the state as a ‘modern day camp.’
In the modern day, the camp can be taken to be any ‘spatial perimeter’ where killing is legitimated through ‘exceptional laws’ which negates all forms of rights. It not only proves the paradigm of biopolitics but also the way in which the very ‘rule of law’ operates. Life, then becomes an exception in the face of law and lawlessness and the rights of humans can get reduced to a mere theoretical postulate.
Within such an operative, it only pronounces the relationship between the ‘rule of law’ and the creation of ‘exceptional laws.’ While it can be contested regarding the assertion that the ‘exceptional laws’ today has become the rule of law, it also presses upon an underlying theory of law which accounts for the existence of a realm of human life and activity that is not subjected to law or rights. On the contrary, it undermines rights, freedom, human dignity and moral values.
This takes us to another spatial perimeter, an understanding of the camp not as a killing zone or the kind of killing that takes the breath away and therefore life, but a space that negates life in such a way that it negates the value and worth of the person by way of detaching the person from any discourse on justice and rights and therefore from ethics and morality. In many cases, rights and justice though may not be denied are rather delayed. However, rights and justice delayed simply is a denial of it. Unfortunately, within the helm of affairs, both seems to be in operation and ironically, within such a ‘camp’ there is no space for the human person to claim for one’s rights and justice. Even though it is claimed, the ‘exceptions’ within which ‘policies of governance’ operates only delay matters. Sadly, the process of negating the rights and justice begins when unaccounted or ‘exceptional’ powers are applied over its own citizens and thereby groups them within the parameters of the modern day camp. For now, there may be a name, but then there are classifications within which the human person is simply reduced to a number.
(Dr Asangba Tzudir contributes a weekly guest editorial to The Morung Express. Comments can be emailed to asangtz@gmail.com)
