NOTES TO PAGES 424–27remaining 40 percent undecided, in a surprisingly short period of time the government managed
to change the proportions in its favor. It did several things to achieve this. For one, it repeatedly
(and unilaterally) pushed back the date of the referendum, while aggressively launching a series of
social programs and expanding the franchise to include sectors—e.g., foreigners long resident in
the country as illegal workers or scores of the poor who lacked official documents—heretofore
excluded from voting. The irony of the situation, which made it difficult for the opposition to
criticize these measures effectively, is that no matter how unconstitutional some of them were in
terms of timing, it was difficult to find fault with either giving citizenship to individuals to whom
in the past it had been unfairly denied or documents to those deprived of them by an inefficient
and unjust system. Something different might be said of such measures as altering voters’ circum-
scription on a massive scale where the results were likely to be unfavorable to the government. But
not even there was the opposition, lacking effective leadership and animated by a vapid triumphal-
ism, capable of mounting an effective critique. So confident was this sector of its success in the
referendum, regardless of what the government did, that at no point did it take to the streets in
order to counter whatever it was that the government was doing to assure itself a favorable outcome.
- The results were 60–40 in favor of the government.
- Louis Marin,Portrait of the King(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 6–7.
- Or, as government sympathizers like to say, are instantly fabricated by the media. In my
view, the distinction on which such sympathizers often insist—between ‘‘virtual realities,’’ which
they claim the opposition media project, and ‘‘real realities,’’ Venezuela as the government presents
it—does not begin to address the vexed implications of the ‘‘really real’’ in its manifold mediations. - Roberto Giusti, ‘‘La (re)vuelta de los fantasmas,’’El Universal, June 14, 2001.
- Teodoro Petkoff, ‘‘Magnicismo,’’TalCual,June 7, 2005.
- The sources from the Venezuelan press are somewhat contradictory and confusing on this
point. - Sa ́nchez, ‘‘Dancing Jacobins,’’ esp. 188–303. See also Sa ́nchez, ‘‘Channel Surfing.’’
Veena Das, The Figure of the Abducted Woman: The Citizen as Sexed
note: Reprinted from chap. 5 of Veena Das,Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the
Ordinary(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), with the permission of the publisher.
- Gyanendra Pandey, ‘‘The Prose of Otherness,’’Subaltern Studies, ed. David Arnold and
David Hardiman (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 8:188–221. - Ibid., 205.
- It is, however, important to note that, despite the gesture toward the ordinary, what is at
stake in this testimonial literature is not the history of the ordinary but rather the retelling of the
story from the perspective of ordinary people in extraordinary times. Hence, the emphasis is on
remembering the Partition and not on how it folds into everyday life in the present. See Gyanendra
Pandey,Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003). Among the most important contributions within this genre of writing are
Urvashi Butalia,The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India(Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1998), and Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin,Borders and Boundaries: Women in
India’s Partition(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998). See also Sukeshi Kamra,
Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence and the End of the Raj(Calgary: University Press of Calgary,
2002).
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