The use of violence as a means of resistance invokes problematic actions. In the context of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, militias made use of child soldiers to fight against the military. We quote from the narrative of Sukumar (male, 36 years) a Tamil refugee living in a camp in India, who was kidnapped as a child by a militia and trained to become a soldier,

‘My father used to work as a school teacher. He taught me to read and write. One day, I was at home, and my father had gone to work. I was 10 years old at that time. The people from a local militia came and kidnapped me. I was to be trained to become a child soldier. When my father came back and discovered what had happened, he broke down. He went to the people in the militia and begged them to let me go. They refused. He came there everyday for a week and cried, but the people in the militia showed no sympathy. So at the age of 10, I started participating in physical exercises that trained me for the military. I also learnt to use the gun. As a child I did not understand what was happening. Also, the sense of physical fatigue was easily overcome, and I got used to the drill. I stopped going to school. Whatever little I can read and write was due to what my father had taught me when I was very young.’

The kidnapping of the child is an act of colonising the body. In converting the child into a soldier, the body of the child is mechanised. The resistance has been reduced to the practice of management. Continuing the conflict needs resources. The child's body is a valuable resource for the militia. Resistance has been reduced to military strategy.

Sukumar's father breaks down when he comes to know of his son's kidnapping. Kidnapping is an act of rupturing and breaking the social. Rather than the recognition of mutual vulnerability and shared precariousness, kidnapping reduces the social to the ability to inflict harm, and the need to protect the body from harm. Harming and protecting are acts of creating boundaries, and the politics of the body once again becomes trapped in the discourse of autonomy and sovereignty. But breaking down is an overflow of the body, a transgression of the boundary, a sign of vulnerability, a sign of the self traveling beyond the boundary of the body. To break down, to cry is to show discontent. Tears are an uncomfortable challenge to the organisation of rationality (Sosa, 2009). The rational system has not calculated for tears, it does not know how to deal with them. Tears are messy, they cannot be part of the rational process of enacting society and organisation. Tears need to be ignored. The practice of kidnapping should not be allowed to crumble due to the incursions made by the subject who cries.

Abductions continue after escape as a refugee as well. A Tibetan refugee living in India described how he fled Tibet as he feared for his life,

‘My father had been jailed by the Chinese for 9 years. Then they killed him in the jail itself. My mother told me, leave Tibet and go to a foreign country. If you remain here, you will also be killed one day … My mother and sister stayed back. My mother has died now. Only my sister is there now. No one else … Earlier I used to speak with my sister. But now I don’t. The Chinese monitor the phone calls from India. They then trouble people to find out, what the person from India was speaking about.’

The sense of being imprisoned thus remains with the refugee even after escaping. The nature of the conversation that the refugee can have with his family is constrained by the surveillance of the state. After escaping, the family becomes the inmates of the prison, and the refugee is speaking to them from the outside. But the outside is not significantly different from the inside. There is apparently greater space for conversation in a liberal democracy, but the space exists only so long as the structures which organise the state and regimes of work are not disturbed. Conversations and dissents are managed within these structures (Denzin, 2005). Earlier the refugee was to be killed, his body was not to be kidnapped, it was to be destroyed. Now, the refugee’s body has been abducted by the politics of the liberal democracy, and resistances are staged within its grammar.

This is not the only abduction that liberal democratic regimes engage in. Liberal democratic regimes legitimise a variety of contracts, and subjects are abducted within the grammar of these contracts. Ramalingam (male, 45 years), who works as a mason in Mumbai, points out how contracts legitimise wage related inequalities,

‘For instance, assume that there is a contractor, who has got a fitting contract. He will finish the contract in 2 days. At the most he will take 3 or 4 days to finish it. Forget about materials, that is a different issue. I want to talk about labour only now. Now for the contract, he will get 6000 rupees. So he will keep the 6000 rupees with him after 4 days. How much will he pay labour? To a person like me, he pays 200 rupees per day, say. To another mason, he may pay 300 rupees per day. So how much has he paid labour? He has paid 800 + 1200, that is 2000 rupees, and the remaining 4000 rupees is with him. He has done no work, but he has earned 4000 rupees, whereas labour has to do all the hard work. They are able to put in money, and earn money in return. Labour is not able to do this.’

The contract appears to simulate the relationship between the kidnapper and the kidnapped. The kidnapped are a resource who will yield returns for the kidnapper, and therefore they need to be kept within regimes of consent without struggle. The kidnapper satisfies the needs of the kidnapped with this in mind. But there is also a violence which retains the kidnapped within the confines of the kidnapper. The kidnapper will not refrain from doing damage to the kidnapped, because it is this potential to do violence that is able to convert the kidnapped into a monetary resource. Therefore, the relationship between the kidnapper and the kidnapped is a strange intersection of violence and non violence. The violence of the contract for a mason is similar. Ramalingam does not have access to capital to start his own enterprise. The choice before him is to accept the contract of exploitation or enter unemployment. The contract, while apparently suggesting freedom, involves processes of subordination (Pateman, 1988).

The injustices of the contract can sometimes also appear to become immune to the politics of tears and protests against that which appears to be grossly wrong. Injustices are not restricted to refugees or informal sector workers alone, they also extend to employees of the national government. The case of Dhanalakshmi (female, 35 years) is one such narrative. Dhanalakshmi and her husband work in a vaccine producing unit which functions under an autonomous central agency set up by the National Government. For around ten years after their marriage, they had no children. After ten years Dhanalakshmi became pregnant. The director of the unit transferred her to a section where bacterial and other material which could be harmful to a pregnant woman was handled. Dhanalakshmi appealed to the director to transfer her from this section till she delivered her child. The director turned down the appeal. Dhanalakshmi and her husband contacted a trade union leader affiliated to a left political party. The trade union leader and several left party Members of Parliament wrote to the union ministry under which the unit functioned. The Union Minister forwarded the representations to the director of the unit for appropriate action. The director, instead of addressing the grievance and anxieties of the aggrieved employee, wrote to the trade union leader and made several insinuations about an illegitimate relationship between the trade union leader and Dhanalakshmi. No corrective action was taken and Dhanalakshmi had to continue working in the same anxiety inducing work to which she had been assigned.

The director of the public sector unit thus behaves like a kidnapper. He wishes to exercise complete control over the worker. The unit is a camp, and subjects are inmates over whose lives the kidnapper and the warden has complete control. Tears of the subject expressed as grief and grievance, as protests of public representatives are of no avail. The state does not intervene within the politics of the camp. It leaves the director to dispense justice within his territory of control. The politics of employment within contracts of the state and capital, is thus the politics of being abducted. The state of abduction is reminded to the subject of the worker during different instances of indignity and violence. The subject of the worker only has an apparent escape. The subject has been abducted by the discourse of the contract, not by the contractor. If the subject escapes from one contract to the other, the social relations of production would inflict another range of subordinations (Pateman, 1988).

The act of abduction is an act of producing subordination. The subordination is not at the level of individuals, what is involved is a discursive subordination involving a set of material practices which degrade the lives of subjects. A Tibetan activist, Lobsang (male, 42 years) had this to say about traditional livelihoods were being damaged by the Chinese state,

‘We will publicly expose them. We will make everybody know what they are doing. The killing that they are doing, the marginalisation they are doing. The genocide. For example, take mining. Chinese population has now entered Tibet and is merging with the local population. And then urbanisation, industrialization. And then damming, unnecessarily, the Tibetan rivers. Changing drastically the lives of Tibetan nomads and making them settle in matchbox kinds of houses, and therefore completely threatening traditional ways of livelihood. Instead of supporting them, they are changing. So what they are doing is homogenising Tibetan ways of living to the consumerist, industrial ways of living that China is adopting, which caters to the market economy.’

The abduction of the subject of the worker is related to the project of modernist development. The project of modernist development associated with the practice of the nation requires murder and marginalisation. Subjects need to be murdered on two counts. First, they need to be eliminated because their bodies are in the way of production systems such as mining, which clear the way for regimes of work based on exploitation and precariousness of workers. The second reason for murdering subjects is to abduct them within a discursive life world of terror. The terrorised subject loses the ability to politicise issues, and actions follow the logic of the regime, and politics is not available as a mechanism for reframing the action. The subject can become an industrial worker living in a matchbox house, a consumer engaged in the spectacle of organising the urban market economy, but the subject cannot raise political questions about the murders which are the foundation of producing the spectacle. Marginal subjects often feel a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness in the face of the violence inflicted against them (Banerjee, 2000). What the politics of violence and terror does not calculate however is that the memory of violence cannot be erased by contemporary insecurities. Grief and mourning keep alive the memory, and there is a strong sense of rage in seeking to publicly expose the tragedy of violent injustices that lie behind the facade of modernist development.

In a physical sense, the kidnapper can murder the life of the kidnapped. The subject of the kidnapper is formed by this threat of violence. When the subject of the worker is kidnapped within the frame of an unequal employment contract, those who manage the contract believe they can toy with the subject of the worker, just like the kidnapper toys with the subject of the kidnapped by inflicting wounds and playing games, thus keeping the threat of violence alive. Through a variety of disciplinary mechanisms, the threat of violence is kept alive for workers as well. They are expected to conform and give consent to the subordination of the contract. When they refuse to give consent and engage in struggle, the managers of the contract eliminate them from the life world of the organisation and employment. Mahesh (56 years, male) describes how more than a hundred workers were dismissed by a manufacturing factory when they formed a trade union and resisted the management,

‘I never felt the company would close down. I thought this is a good company. It will do very well in the future. The production is very good. But I don’t know what happened. Everything changed. We were among the finest workers. You couldn’t have got better workers than us. Because of us, the owner could rise high. But what the owner did to us in return was extremely bad. He ruined our lives. He made us hungry, he made us bankrupt. Because of us he could open so many other businesses. He could buy thousands of buildings. But he ensured that we were left on the road …Yes, he has done a lot of injustice.’

The kidnapper visits ruin on the kidnapped, and the owner visits ruin on workers like Mahesh. The injustice of the employment contract is that just like the kidnapper benefits by converting the life of the kidnapped into a resource, the owner as well uses the labour of workers to achieve prosperity. Thus, built into these models of economic prosperity are their own tendencies towards crisis (Potts, 2011). After the ransom has been received the kidnapper has no obligation to honour the contract of releasing the kidnapped safely. This is a decision that the kidnapper can yet take. Under any circumstance, the kidnapper must maintain her anonymity, she leaves the kidnapped on the road when she leaves her, there is no formal handing over ceremony. The owner is not anonymous here, but he also leaves workers like Mahesh on the road after he has achieved enough prosperity by using them. The kidnapper is anonymous because formally she is an exception with respect to the law, a symbol on whom the law relies for its existence. But there is an identity here. By earning enough money without being caught by the law, the kidnapper becomes a legitimate owner of property. Now her property will be protected by the law. The time of her escape from the law has ended. The exception has become the norm, in embodiment. But the owner of the factory is also a kidnapper in anonymity. The employment contract conceals the act of kidnapping the labour of the worker, it acts as a ruse. After enough money has been earned, the ruse can be thrown aside. The subject of the worker can be left on the road. The law will protect the kidnapper now. The law is the defence of property. For the law, if the worker resorts to violence to contest injustices, it is the worker who will be seen as the kidnapper. Strangely, for the law, the kidnapped become the kidnappers.