Nacropolitics & its consequences

From Cambodia to Darfur, from the Holocaust to Rwanda, and from Afghanistan to Nepal we know how states, political institutions and local ideologies decide who may live and who must die. Such dying decision is referred to as – in Achille Mbembe’s language – nacropolitics. Nepalis, thanks to all of us, have come out of such ideologies, but its consequences are still evident. I will first discuss what nacropolitics is in relation to the concept of biopower and then try to read some consequences of such politics.

In relation to nacropolitics, biopower is a contrasting strategy and decision over life. There are locations of power that prescribe and decide how to live with safety by dietary prescriptions and health plans, retirement benefits and insurances, and so on. Such power is about the concern over life by international agencies and institutions, by worldwide institutional medical prescriptions, and multinational operative systems. These agencies try to make us physically fit and shape us to be able members of consumer cultures.

Mbembe’s concept of nacropolitics is a sharp and penetrating analysis of political ideologies which decide over deaths of those who do not fit into the schemes of nation building, ethnocentric purifications, and religious singularity.

Darfur is one of the most terrifying places at present where international philanthropic gaze shows concern on constant deaths but sadistically witnesses how one group of people decide over who may live and who must die for the sake of the nation. Nepal has come out of such ideological imposition and, with tremendous efforts, is trying to live like a civilized nation. Congo is still reeling under such life-denying ideologies.

Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas have histories of nacropolitics, the power over death. We are always caught up in these two extremes of power over life and power over death. They happen side by side and all of us are participants and witnesses to the two extremes of human existence: One decides how to be here and the other decides why to not be here.

The disturbing fact is not that one looks for life and other looks for death, but to realize how such opposite international (biopower) and local (nacropolitics) schemes work at proximity. The viewers stay very near to such international drama and participate through daily experiences and media information. The images of narcopolitics come constantly to us in our living rooms. We become so familiar with them that we shift news channels, we move from sports, soap operas to Darfur around cups of tea and the daughter’s homework.

Due to some fortunate course of history, Nepal did not plunge longer into nacropolitics, but the remains of such ideology have forced Nepalis to various kinds of cultural partitions from linguistics to ethnic.

Nacropolitics has shaped out mindsets from East Asia, West Asia to West Europe. Such acts are evident in ethnic cleansing, genocide, racial hatred, and religious animosity. Poorer nations adopt such methods to define nation, ethnic superiority, and monotheism.

Due to some fortunate course of history, Nepal did not plunge longer into nacropolitics, but the remains of such ideology have forced Nepalis to various kinds of cultural partitions from linguistics to ethnic. The utopian ideas of multiculturalism do not seem to work. Ethnocentric demands mock at any idea of plurality. Nepali federalism does not reflect the inhuman notions of killing but is the ideological result of the cults of killing. There are demands for autonomy, right to decision, and right to live with freedom but once such democratic demands are not cultivated with the sense of proportion, ideologies of exterminating others are not distant events to imagine.

Nepal is in the crucial situation of post-nacropolitical phase and is moving toward segregation without much thinking about what would happen to a tiny nation which has weak political institutions, aid-based developmental plans, and misdirected educational programs. The post-nacropolitical phase still reels with common feelings that my right to live has something to do with the disrespect for your right to live. Such claims of right have passed the phase which once believed that my right to live is based on your extinction. We have almost done away with nacropolitics but the remains of such nation-building ideas affect ethnocentric demands.

The existing modes of federalist demands can be internalized by democratic awareness otherwise newer forms of nacropolitics may appear without much warning. This is what I mean by the consequence of nacropolitics in forms of, first, segregation, and then the acts of extermination of the others.

Many of us believe that the conflict in Nepal in the recent years has done one good thing: We have become more politically conscious, and we know what our rights are. Such conflict has also taught us to practice cultures of hatred on ethnic, linguistic to caste lines. Federalism as political awareness in conceptual level, to my mind, is very appreciable. But federalism as an ideological consequence of nacropolitics is threatening.

A few individual and local cases of killings on ethnic lines are evident around us in Nepal. There are multiple such cases in Darfur and Afghanistan. One life lost is the same as hundred peoples killed. The uncanny connection of a victim’s body in the middle of the street and my right is nacropolitics.

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