Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  It is no simple matter to determine exactly how influential such repression is in constraining the forms of resistance we have thus far observed. If the repression were to lighten or if it were to disappear altogether, it might be possible to judge, retrospectively, what its effect had been. Similarly, if the alternatives to resistance-for example, short-term wage work in the cities-were suddenly to evaporate, it might become possible to gauge whether the existing level of repression was sufficient to contain a more hard-pressed peasantry. In the absence of any such natural experiments, judgment must remain quite speculative. What we can show, however, is that the element of fear is present in the minds of many villagers and that it structures their view of the options open to them.

  An atmosphere of intimidation infects especially, but not exclusively, those villagers who are closely identified with the opposition party, PAS. Shortly after the 1978 elections, all PAS members were systematically dismissed from every village committee (JKK) in the state. This step not only set the stage for the denial of government benefits to all PAS members but also indicated that, henceforth, the opposition would have no legitimate role in community politics. In mid-1979 the Religious Affairs Office of Kedah took the further step of forbidding at least eight prominent PAS religious teachers, including Ustaz Fawzi from nearby Yan, from delivering sermons in any mosque or village madrasah in the state. The general atmosphere was such that many PAS meetings in the district were held secretly from 1978 to 1980. Opposition members in Sedaka itself experienced this general intimidation as an ever-present possibility of arrest at the whim of Bashir or other UMNO leaders. Thus a strong PAS member, Nizam bin Haji Lah, explains that he never goes to Bashir’s store to buy anything because he is afraid that Bashir will claim he stole something and have him arrested. He and other PAS members who haul paddy by motorcycle are always concerned that Bashir will arrange to have the police stop them on the road and fine them for their unpaid road tax and insurance. Shahnon claims that he is [Page 275] “silent” (sengap) politically because the JKK could have any member of PAS arrested if they wished and that the police would take the word of the JKK over that of any PAS farmer. When someone painted over the Village Improvement Scheme sign board in the madrasah, the police were called the next morning and questioned several PAS members. No arrests were made, but the visit had precisely the chilling effect the JKK desired. Tok Mahmud, as noted earlier, is afraid to tell me what he knows about machine breaking for fear of the police. To the particular fear of the JKK and the police in Sedaka must be added the general suspicion that even the most seemingly innocuous activities of the state arouse among the peasantry. This was evident when a petty official of the Information Department came to the village in February 1980 to prepare the way for the coming decennial census. Most of his talk was devoted to scolding villagers for their false replies in the past and to reassuring them, in vain, that the census had nothing to do with taxes and that they should not be afraid or run away. Thus, quite apart from specific fears, the classic peasant mistrust of the state operates to reinforce an atmosphere of apprehension.

  An object lesson in the limits of permissible protest was provided by the government’s reaction to a large demonstration held in the state capital of Alor Setar on January 23, 1980. The origins and details of the protest need not detain us long, for the purpose of this brief account is to focus on the fear created in its aftermath. The ostensible issue sparking the demonstration was a demand for an increase in the farm-gate price of paddy and opposition to a recently introduced cupon scheme whereby M$2 of the price per pikul of paddy would be retained and saved for the seller. Although the forced savings would yield a profit (not “interest,” which is forbidden) and could be redeemed after six months, the scheme was almost universally unpopular. It appeared to many that the producer price had thereby been lowered by M$2, and it was unclear whether the majority of growers who sold their paddy to Chinese middlemen would recover the “savings” at all.60 The fact that the chief minister of Kedah had campaigned on a promise of raising the paddy price and that the UMNO-dominated Farmers’ Associations had themselves opposed the cupon system added a certain legitimacy to the discontent. At any rate, a crowd of roughly ten thousand gathered in front of the state office building on January 23 to protest the cupon system and to demand a M$ 10 increase in the paddy price.61 When the chief minister finally [Page 276] appeared, he was shouted down, and the police and riot control troops (the Federal Reserve Unit-FRU-and Police Field Force) moved in to disperse and arrest demonstrators, some of whom fled in vain to the state mosque across the street. It was, by all accounts, the largest demonstration by paddy cultivators held in Kedah since at least 1954, when thousands of farmers demonstrated for government relief after a disastrous season.

  Over ninety people were arrested on the spot and held. The chief minister immediately claimed that the demonstration was “provoked by certain groups of a militant persuasion”62 and noted ominously that the Bolshevik, French, and Iranian revolutions had all “used” the peasantry.63 In the weeks following the demonstration more arrests and charges were made. Seven PAS officials in Kedah, including a state assemblyman, were arrested and detained. Three hundred special police officers were brought into Kedah to help with the investigation. The chief minister charged that “the PAS strategy of creating terror and fear is similar to that adopted by the communists and that the entire leadership of Kedah PAS must take responsibility for… organizing the demonstration.”64 A shadowy underground organization sharing the same initials as PAS (Pertubuhan Angkatan Sabilullah) and implying a “holy war” was identified as the center of the conspiracy.

  The effects of the police roundups were felt immediately in Sedaka. As men in nearby villages were taken in to be questioned, the word spread rapidly. Three men in neighboring Kepala Batas and one from Sungai Bujur were picked up, questioned, and released on bail. Well-known PAS members from Mengkuang, Guar Cempedak, Kampung Jawa, and villages in the Pendang and Bukit Raya areas suffered a similar fate. Most of them had not even attended the demonstration. As news of continued arrests poured in, an understandable fear began to grip local PAS members, three of whom had actually gone to the demonstration.65 Taib, a PAS member, interpreted the government response as an attempt “to smash us to pieces” (pukul jahanam kita) and said that he wanted to get a sickle to defend himself.66 Another PAS member, Sukur, spoke of “spies” (mata-mata gelap) in the village who might call the police and make false accusations. “It’s as if you didn’t steal but they say you did; they can do anything, it is tyranny (aniaya).” As it happened, no one in Sedaka was detained or arrested. But police from the Special Branch came twice to speak with Bashir [Page 277] and with the headman, Haji Jaafar. The visits had their intended effect, as I suspect they did in countless other villages on the rice plain. Many PAS members knew that a word from Bashir or the JKK could spell arrest and feared they would be victimized. As Mustapha noted, “Of course we’re afraid; they want to crush (menindas) PAS.”

  The kinds of resistance and the kinds of compliance we find in Sedaka cannot be understood without reference to this larger context of real and anticipated coercion. Routine repression does its work unobtrusively: an arrest here, a visit from the Special Branch there, an indirect warning from the head of the JKK are all that is normally needed to create boundary markers that no wary peasant would deliberately breach. The very existence of fairly stable boundaries of permissible dissent, however, makes this more a situation of fear than of terror, where there is no margin of safety. What is at least clear is that these boundaries-created, shifted, and occasionally reinforced by historical experienceserve to inhibit certain forms of open protest and defiance. Those who have benefited least from double-cropping have every reason to believe in “the law of anticipated reactions” and to avoid placing themselves in jeopardy. When they say, as they have, that “whether you complain or not it will come to nothing,” they are referring not only to the local economic power of the large
farmers but, beyond that, to the coercive power of the state and its local agents. The resignation this implies is “not an indigenous product of culture, but of the power situation in which the non-elite find themselves.”67

  It is against this background of larger constraints on resistance that the relative effectiveness of the “dull compulsion of economic relations” must be understood. Wealthy farmers can still provide or withhold, at will, wage work in the paddy fields, zakat peribadi, government assistance (for example, employment, loans, subsidies), recommendations for settlement schemes, aid to school children, loans, short-term credit (for example, at Bashir’s shop), and can stand guarantor for credit in a crisis.68 It is little wonder that quite a few poor households should not wish openly to offend those who control these strategic assets. But this potentially co-opting “benevolence” is inextricably linked with malevolence. The [Page 278] tenant who pays reasonable rents could have them raised or have his tenancy revoked; the poor family whose daughter is on the school aid list could be stricken from it; the man employed for casual labor could be replaced by someone else; the “troublesome” poor man who is tolerated could be charged with theft. The occasional benevolence of the wealthy farmers thus is not so very different from a protection racket. And, to the extent that it works, it works precisely because the larger coercive context of rural class relations all but excludes the kinds of direct resistance that might materially change the situation of the poor. That is, the coercive context creates and maintains the setting of relative powerlessness within which “the dull compulsion of economic relations” can then extract its daily toll.69

  ROUTINE COMPLIANCE AND RESISTANCE THAT COVERS ITS TRACKS

  The economic and political power of the wealthy farmers in Sedaka requires a certain minimum of public compliance on the part of any prudent poor man or woman. For those who now leave regularly for work elsewhere and depend little on help or wages within the village, that compliance can be minimal. But for those whose livelihood is more decisively tied to the village economy, the pressure for compliance is more pervasive. There is every reason for such men and women to conform to the stereotype of the “respectable poor” for the advantages that such a reputation can bring. The place, then, to look for the symbolic “taxes” that this agrarian system can extract is particularly among those who most closely approximate the stereotype. Even here we will find routines of deference and compliance which, while perhaps not entirely cynical, are certainly calculating.

  We have had an opportunity to hear Pak Yah’s views of the UMNO leadership (“They want to bury us”) and of the attitude of the village rich (“As they see it, those who are hard up are despicable”) when he is among friends. Pak Yah, however, is not always in such secure company. Much of the wage labor he manages to find comes from Bashir, the leader of those who “want to bury us.” In his relations with Bashir, he is the very model of the deferential worker: reliable, never questioning the wages, never refusing any work. Even at the [Page 279] height of his anger over being excluded from the RPK subsidy, he did not dare boycott Bashir’s daughter’s wedding, although his appearance was a brief one. A due regard for his livelihood requires a public comportment that is not in keeping with his private views.

  The public behavior of Hamzah, another “reputable” poor man, is, if anything, a more delicate affair. He works fairly regularly for Haji Kadir and for Bashir, although they are political enemies. Perhaps because, as a next-door neighbor, I got to know him quite well, he was disarmingly frank about why he, unlike most PAS members, received RPK assistance through Bashir and the JKK. He said he was favored because he was poor, because he worked for Bashir and never complained, because he looked after the madrasah, and because he did not “pay any attention” (takpeduli) to political parties. He added that he bought goods from both stores in the village and went to everyone’s kenduri when invited. Hamzah then actually went on to tick off the benefits that his tact and circumspection had secured for him. Before the last Ramadan when he was sick and could not work, he got twenty gantangs of rice, while Razak, his brother, got only five or six; he was given more zakat peribadi than most others; he had a line of credit up to M$60 at Bashir’s store; he got scarce jobs when others could not find work; and when he was sick at home recently many villagers stopped by and offered to help. Listening to him one had the impression of hearing an accountant self-consciously adding up the profits of his investment in deference and pleased with the results for the fiscal year. He is aware that Bashir and the others know he leans toward PAS, but he adds that he is not an active PAS member because “If I were a strong PAS member, UMNO people would not want to hire me.” Thus Hamzah’s comportment is a delicately balanced tightrope walk designed to bring him and his family safely through the inevitable economic crises. This does not mean that he does not experience anger and indignation, only that he is careful to control it for his own good. Here it is worth recalling again what he had to say when I asked him if he had complained when Haji Kadir underpaid him for filling gunny sacks with paddy from the machine: “Poor people can’t [complain]; when I’m sick or need work, I may have to ask him again.” “I am angry in my heart.” There is no false-consciousness here but just the necessary daily pose of a poor man. Hamzah has no difficulty recognizing when he has been exploited or shabbily treated; his effort and his achievement, in one sense, have been to swallow his anger lest it endanger his livelihood.70 [Page 280] One could claim for Hamzah’s deference what has been claimed for the deference of the English rural poor in the eighteenth century:

  And the deference was often without the least illusion; it could be seen from below as being one part necessary self-preservation, one part calculated extraction of whatever could be extracted. Seen in this way, the poor imposed upon the rich some of the duties and functions of paternalism just as much as deference was in turn imposed upon them.71

  The needs of the poor may also drive them actively to cultivate a rich farmer. Thus when Hamzah fell ill and could no longer work for Haji Kadir, Taib began to appear regularly at Haji Kadir’s house in the evening to chat. When I casually asked Shahnon why Taib, who had never come before, was always dropping in, he explained that Taib was coming to “chat up”72 and to flatter (jek) Haji Kadir in the hope of being given work. The strategy was successful, although it must have required a certain amount of willpower on Taib’s part, given the comments I had heard him make about Haji Kadir in other contexts.73

  The element of self-protecting compliance is most apparent in the choice of party made by a good many poor villagers. Mansur, another “good” poor man, is a member of UMNO, as is the man for whom he often works, Shamsul. When Mansur explains why, as a comparative newcomer to the village, he joined UMNO, he does not conceal the straightforward calculation of possible benefits:

  I keep in mind that I am a poor man. I figure this way: If I enter UMNO I can latch on to work from a rich man. I can take wage work from him. If I enter on the side of the poor, they can’t call me for work. I have to look after my own household. Because of that I’m friendly with everyone.74

  One could scarcely imagine a less sentimental account of the logic behind a choice of parties; it is also a formula for switching parties, if the logic of advantage were reversed.

  Two recent political “conversions” will help to illustrate the calculations that [Page 281] often lie behind UMNO membership. Dzulkifli bin Haji Wahab comes from a strong PAS family in another village but decided, in 1979, to convert to UMNO. When I asked why he shifted, he replied that “It was a little better in UMNO; there is development,” by which he means government subsidies. “PAS,” he adds, “can’t do anything.” In his case, he was rewarded by a small grant (M$200) from the RPK program, while his brother Bakri next door, who remains in PAS, got nothing. Karim is another recent “turncoat.” He explains to me that if he stayed in PAS “it would be hard to ask for assistance (bantuan)” and “difficult to go see the primary school principal” [about a special subsidy f
rom school funds for his children). He left PAS, he said, because “there were no services (jasa)” while UMNO provides “many services.” And yet, Karim may be playing a double game, since Sukur and Haji Kadir claim that Karim still votes for PAS, although he has paid his UMNO dues. “He’s clever,” Haji Kadir concludes, “he really follows us.” Whether or not this is the case is unclear, and Karim is not about to clear up the confusion. What is certain, however, is that it is quite plausible to anyone in Sedaka that a poor man, especially, might wish to dissimulate about his party affiliation in order to claim the benefits that nominal membership in the government party can provide. Rokiah and Hamzah have already done so to their advantage.

  Much the same logic of power and benefits prevail when ordinary UMNO members say they merely want to be on “the majority side” or that they “want benefits” by joining UMNO. Quite a few imply that the safest course is to be with the government party-a reasoning that combines the promise of benefits with a certain element of fear. Thus Abdul Rahman explained his UMNO membership by saying “I notice [who has] the power (kuasa) every day I live under the hand of the Raja.” Not more than six or seven villagers, most of them members of the JKK, even bother to refer to any public-spirited reasons for siding with UMNO.