IT was several years ago that Prof Eric Hobsbawm cautioned us about the revival of barbarism in the 20th-century West and its spread to the rest of the world.

His profound and worrying prescience has only become more forbidding with each passing day.

Be it in warfare, which has progressed from the holocaust of Ypres to the precision-driven callousness of pilotless planes, or an ever-present readiness to annihilate the opponent with nuclear weapons, or be it the well-funded experiments in torture to deal with adversaries from an ever-widening definition of terrorism, barbarism has acquired a prescriptive legitimacy of its own.

And though he illustrated his thesis by showing up a penchant for bloody methods applied by the all too briefly civilised West, there is hardly a region including South Asia today where Prof Hobsbawm’s argument falters.

‘Disappearances’ is routinely another word to define possible cold-blooded murder by state agencies of individuals they fear fighting frontally. Terrorists equally viciously partake of the methods invented by the nation states in the early 20th-century Europe.

Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh are firmly in step with brutal methods used by the region’s largest democracy to get even with perceived foes. Indian security forces are not averse to courting barbarism to tame the restive regions of Kashmir and the predominantly tribal north-eastern states.

In New Delhi, just a few weeks ago, a woman teacher suspected of being a tribal conduit for Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh was ordered by a court to be handed over to her state police. Soni Sori pleaded she would be tortured in Chhattisgarh but was assured it wouldn’t happen.

In the event the state police mercilessly battered her. Her gruesome torture according to her medical reports involved pushing large stones into her. Meanwhile, Anna Hazare, the self-styled messianic Indian apparently fighting corruption, has decreed that those drinking alcohol should be strapped to a tree and whipped till they promise to give up.

His barbaric advice earned him the sobriquet of an Indian Ziaul Haq not the Gandhi his followers project him to be. Do Pakistan’s human rights activists and other assorted admirers of Mr Hazare detect a hint of fascism he is feared to be leading the country into?

Prof Hobsbawm suggests that barbarism results from the disruption and breakdown of the systems of rules and moral behaviour by which all societies had regulated relations among their members and, to a lesser extent, between their members and those of other societies.

It denotes “the reversal of what we may call the project of the 18th-century Enlightenment, namely the establishment of a universal system of such rules and standards of moral behaviour, embodied in the institutions of states dedicated to the rational progress of humanity: to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, to Equality, Liberty and Fraternity or whatever.”

Where are we headed then? India’s tryst with its intellectually shored up barbarism offers a glimpse. An entire school of right-wing ideologues has the tacit blessing of the state in promoting a callous polity. Not that the Maoists on their day are any better even without state patronage.

The soufflé rose twice — first in the vendetta lynching of thousands of Sikhs in 1984. It rose again in 1992 with the destruction of the Babri Masjid by a frenzied mob looking to elusively reclaim national honour against alleged historical injustices blamed on Babar possibly the most romantic and misunderstood 16th-century king to rule India.

It was the 13th of December on Tuesday, a day observed in memory of the security personnel killed when five Kashmiri gunmen tried to attack the Indian parliament. Calls to hang Afzal Guru, a convicted conspirator, rang through the news media again.

To ask how the former Kashmiri militant who had surrendered to the security forces and was under regular surveillance after that had got involved in the heinous plot would leave you open to charges of sedition. The fact that his former captor boasted on TV how he tortured Guru was virtually treated as the right thing to do.

It is no secret that those who see torture as a legitimate tool to fight the enemies of state belong mostly to the right-wing; its practitioners are more evenly spread and include mainstream communists.

Possibly the most ardent advocate of India’s reliance on questionable methods in the war on terror is Arun Shourie, respected in right-wing circles as an intellectual par excellence. A former minister and journalist Mr Shourie, like Anna Hazare, was an icon in the fight against corruption.

Prof Hobsbawm gave his lecture in 1994. Mr Shourie published his landmark piece in the Indian Express, curiously on Dec 12, 2001, a day before parliament was attacked!

“No war has been won by deploying ‘minimum force’ — the quantum that liberals concede when the terrorist leaves them no option but to allow that something just has to be done. Wars are won by overpowering the opponent with overwhelming force.

And so it must be in the case of terrorism, and of the states that sponsor it: not ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’; for an eye, both eyes, for a tooth, the whole jaw.”

The questionable way the Indian state dealt with the allegedly Pakistan-backed Sikh insurgency draws a prescription from him: “It is a fatal error to judge what needs to be done in an area or in times infested by terrorists, by standards honed from normal places and quieter times.”

The soft Indian state — a right-wing description of the country’s not yet completely vanquished liberal ideals — may not be quite ready to accept all of Mr Shourie’s prescriptions. Still, countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh appear to have not let him down in the lure of barbarism.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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