OK, some very bad luck has befallen you and you find yourself held forcibly on a small island from which you cannot effect an escape. Those holding you there - three thuggish types - regularly threaten you with violence if you will not do as they command, and they periodically, when you don't do as they command, carry out this threat. They pull your hair; they beat you up; they waterboard you. Mostly, therefore, you come to do as they say.
Much of what they force on you is unwelcome. They take away some of the books you happened to have with you when you arrived on the island, and refuse you access to other books (from the island library), so restricting your range of access to the world's literature. They forbid you to attend a weekly lecture given by one of their number on the geography of the island; they cut your healthcare provision (which started out quite generous), so that it becomes, first, only just adequate and, later on, really poor.
These measures you regard as prejudicial to your interests, but you do not call them violence. You do not do so because, although they are backed by the very real threat of violence, and though in that sense they depend upon violence, and violence really shows its face from time to time in actual attacks on you, you don't want to confuse all the 'bads' that you suffer at the hands of these thugs by designating them all by the same word. You understand that violence is one kind of bad thing and that there are also other kinds of bad thing. Not being permitted to read certain books is an unhappy state of affairs, but it's in a different category from being beaten up or waterboarded.
There's another reason you don't call the reading restrictions, educational prohibitions and health cuts imposed on you 'violence'. You have a friend on a nearby island, whose letters your thuggish captors capriciously allow through. You know from her that on her island things are arranged differently. Decision- and law-making take place through democratic deliberation, voting, that sort of thing. According to your friend, the policies which result from this she does not always perceive as fair or just, though there is nothing as bad as what is forced on you by the three thugs. Still, your friend is very unhappy about some recent decisions, including one that has had a worrying effect on both her pension prospects and her healthcare provision. She considers this, and you agree, to be gravely unjust. But she does not, and you do not, call the resulting policy violence because neither of the two of you wants to perpetrate a confusion between a polity at the centre of which there is the daily threat of coercive physical assault, and one in which free deliberation and the more or less voluntary acceptance of democratic decisions is the norm. Aggrieved as your friend is about what has been decided and implemented with respect to her pension and her healthcare provision, she doesn't see it as equivalent to the episodes of violence that you have undergone at the hands of those thugs when you've resisted their will.
Now, Priyamvada Gopal, on the other hand, bidding fair to become one of the Guardian and Comment is Free's more active yes-butters hoping to distract attention from practices of which others are, with good reason, critical, has a different idea. For her, violence is just everything, more or less, that she politically opposes. Gopal 'teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge'.