Democracy, diversity, and disavowal: Tracing colonial lineages in India’s long wars

Abstract This article explores India’s ‘long wars’ – the counter-insurgency campaigns the state imposed on recalcitrant populations and territories. Existing critical debates have focused on colonial and imperial counter-insurgency waged by developed Western states and empires. Yet these powers hardly command a monopoly on how these are fought, rationalised, or imagined. Indian counter-insurgency campaigns are a key case in point. The aftermath of British colonial rule led to a revivification of rather than an end to counter-insurgency. Indian counter-insurgency thinking betrays similar logics of differentiation to those of the British. However, an engagement with Indian counter-insurgency archives reveals that the political economy of (post-)colonial rule results in its own particular sets of inclusions and exclusions. We tease out these tensions and anxieties that underpin India counter-insurgency by exploring how India’s long wars in its north-eastern states have been rationalised and explained away among Indian counter-insurgents, namely through references to ‘diversity’ and ‘democracy’. Such references index a politics premised on a disavowal of violence, which represents a weapon of war. This disavowal, narrated through exceptionalist claims, manifests itself through distinct modalities with their own tensions and even contradictions, leading to India’s own complicated relationships with notions and practices of coloniality.