4. Passage 3: Read the passages given below and answer the questions No. 32-35
So far I have been describing the damage done by persistent and endemic poverty as a kind of violence on the poor. However, what justification is there for the use of the term violence to describe the injuries caused by poverty? Further, why describe it as structural violence? Even if we accept this term, there remains the question of why the state should be linked to it. One way to further a careful and critical appreciation of the term structural violence is to ask what kind of limitation it imposes on one's analysis and imagination. I shall argue below that structural violence is both necessary and problematic as an analytical category.
When Max Weber defined the state as the institution that has "the monopoly of violence within a given territory," he was not thinking about structural violence. Rather, he employed violence in the usual sense of a direct act afforce that causes physical harm to another person. I take the term structural violence from a germinal article published by Johan Galtung in the Journal of Peace Research in 1969. Galtung's definition of violence takes one far afield from a narrow focus on the somatic. He identifies violence to be any situation in which there is a difference between the potential and actual somatic and mental achievements of people. Put another way, violence occurs in any situation in which people are unable to achieve their capacities or capabilities to their full potential and almost certainly if they are unable to do so to the same extent as others.
The reason such violence is considered to be structural is that it is impossible to identify a single actor who commits the violence. Instead the violence is impersonal, built into the structure of power. Far from being intended, violence in this sense does not even have to be causcd by a particular agent. What one finds here is a classically structuralist social theory wedded to consequentialism. Gaitung's interest is in outcomes, not in processes. Whenever outcomes are unequal, violence is present. In fact, in this way of thinking, any system with Icss than full equality displays evidence of violence. The absence of violence is an ideal state that is not likely to be achieved in any given social formation. This interest in outcomes, however, has a broad scope,
not limited to questions of food, livelihood, and income. Structural violence is a capacious term that encompasses not only the exclusion from entitlements such as food and water, but also the exclusion of certain groups from particular fonns of recognition (citizenship rights, equal rights before law, right to education, representation and so on)...
The difference between structural violence and direct violence goes even further. In its ordinary meaning, violence requires a perpetrator who commits the violent act and a victim who is injured by it. In the case of structural violence, although there is a victim-someone who is injured by the inequities of social arrangements, it is hard to identify a perpetrator. It is not a victimless crime but its opposite: a crime without a criminal. This particular fact raises the question of what makes it different from the destructiveness of natural disaster-the devastation that a hurricane or an earthquake can cause in the lives of the poor. One does not identify natural disasters as violence xcept perhaps when one speaks metaphorically ofthe violence of nature...
Why should the ill effects of structural inequities be termed violence at all? Is there not a danger of conflating two very different phenomena by the use of such a term? I believe the analytical perils are very real. However, there is one compelling-perhaps overwhelming reason to retain a focus on violence; it keeps one's attention on its impact on mortality. Structural violence results in the premature and untimely deaths of people.... What distinguishes such violence from the destruction caused by acts of nature is that these unfortunate outcomes result from the deliberate actions of social agents. One must keep in mind that certain classes of people have a stake in perpetuating a social order in which such extreme suffering is not only tolerated but also taken as normal. All those who benefit from the status quo and do not wish to see it changed then become complicit in this violence against the poor. In a country like India., the perpetrators of violence include not only the elites but also the fast-growing middle class whose increasing number and greater consumer power are being celebrated by an aggressive global capitalism.
[Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, 2012]
Q. This passage expands the notion of violence to include: (University of Hyderabad Ph.D 2019)