Durkheim's Theory Of Solidarity

Durkheim says that law, solidarity and sanction are intrinsically connected to each other. It is almost as if they form a triad where each is affected by and affects the other two. If solidarity is how people relate to each other, then law determines how these solidarities are to be regulated and sanction tells what happens if the solidarity is less or more than required. Solidarity, according to Durkheim, is an abstraction and it is only through law that it gets its meaning. That is not to say that law has an impact on solidarity but that law and solidarity go hand in hand, as a process. Durkheim also says that there exist two kinds of solidarities – mechanical, which is forged unconsciously, as a survival tactic and organic, which is consciously

Solidarity, as Durkheim says is a process of relationships and not unity per se. Solidarity then can be the common identity of being Indians which is regulated by AFSPA being the law and is sanctioned repressively in cases of lack of this solidarity. It is certainly enforced upon people who refuse to conform to the identity, in this case, the Nagas of Assam and Manipur who declared themselves independent of India in the 1950s. It is clearly an identity that is being created and could then be related to organic solidarity. The solidarity of nationality and AFSPA together formulate the processes of nation building and creating boundaries geographically as well as demographically. The sanctions that one faces in AFSPA are defined in the legislation under the “special powers” as “Any commissioned officer, warrant officer, non commissioned officer or any other person of equivalent rank in the armed forces may, in a disturbed area...fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death... destroy any arms dump, prepared or fortified position or shelter... arrest, without warrant... enter and search without warrant any premises.” These threatened penalties for not conforming to the solidarity of being Indians will undoubtedly be successful in ensuring that the “disturbed areas” are not disturbed

Foucault quotes Bentham who said that power should be visible yet not verifiable and that is what the prison system does. Power then lies not in the person who is supervising but in the knowledge that there could, at any moment, be someone looking at the prisoner and thus, the prisoner, because of that knowledge, behaves in a disciplined manner. Power and knowledge work in a continuum here in order to discipline the body. However, this doesn’t really relate to AFSPA. In the document of the legislation, there is no explicit mention of the kind of gaze that Foucault talks about. Implicitly, however, the logic of AFSPA is all about supervision and constant checks. On the one hand, the army men have the right to patrol streets of the disturbed areas as and when they feel like, on the other, supervision also emerges in the definition of who declares an area as disturbed. Earlier, it was just the Governor (and Administrator in the case of union territories) who could declare regions of or the entire state as disturbed. But later, that decision making capacity got extended to the centre as well. This makes it certain that the supervision is twofold and on a much larger scale than one can imagine and