haking
off a colonial power is never easy and rarely results in
anything one might call a clean break. With the waning of
Western domination, stretching from the 18th century
exploits of the East India Company, with buccaneering Robert
Clive and Warren Hastings, through the somewhat more
civilized heights of the post-Mutiny British Raj, the local
peoples and elites by the end of the Second World War
finally were set to impose their own vision, or, rather,
visions. Despite, or perhaps because of the colonialists’
deftness at dividing and conquering, the British were
leaving behind a secularly oriented centralized
administration, infrastructural improvements, and a solid
military force. If they got little thanks, it was because
they had done so largely for their own economic and
governing aims, and already had taken a heaping helping of
the region’s riches.
The post-war British Labour government, acceding to
inevitable departure, preferred one India, with
semi-autonomy arrangements, if necessary. Yet in August 1947
India became an independent nation and, perhaps avoidably,
so did Pakistan in what had become a hastily organized,
ghastly split of the subcontinent along religious lines.
Could not the Muslim Leaguers and the Indian National
Congress have put their collective wits together to devise a
reassuring non-sectarian agreement to run just one new
nation in some acceptable federal fashion? The debate over
how to allocate blame for partition goes on and hardly will
be settled here. Ultimately, for various reasons and with
whatever degree of justification, Muslim Leaguers were
unhappy with the conduct of a Congress leadership whom they
saw as either intent upon, or easy prey for, Hindu
predominance. Sunil Khilnani puts the predicament as
concisely as anyone:
The Muslims of British India did not form a single
‘communal’ identity or interest any more than Hindus did.
Class and region divided as much as religion might unite,
and beliefs about community and interest varied between
provinces where Muslims were in the majority and those where
they were not. ….Muslim politics had significant secular
voices, most notably Jinnah’s own. It is perfectly plausible
to construe Jinnah’s political project as intended not to
bifurcate India and create two territorial nation states,
but to safeguard the interests of Muslims in provinces where
they formed minorities . . . (p162)
It was not to be. So in what the British aptly called ‘Plan
Balkan,’ the Punjab and Bengal (the troublesome latter
province already up for partition in 1905) accordingly were
divided by Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s wobbly pen. Muslim-Hindu
communal suspicions and enmities, though obviously the major
problem, were hardly the only issue in play. Sikhs wanted
their own state too and the 584 princely states (with 90
million inhabitants) were inclined to side with the old
Empire. Were these groups preternaturally disposed to
sectarian ‘ancient hatreds’ or was sectarian violence
something ‘manufactured’ or at least, strategically goaded
Soon, Hindus and Muslims, about 6 million each, streamed
both ways – inflicting as many as a million casualties on
one another – over the new brittle borders of West and East
Pakistan - two ultimately untenable entitles, as it turned
out, separated by a thousand miles. Sixty million Muslins
remained in India and 10 million Hindus in West and mostly
East Pakistan. West Pakistan became the governing and
military center of what was intended to be a secular Muslim
State but the majority of the population lived far away in
East Pakistan.
Both independence movements (or a Muslim movement within the
wider Indian movement) were fired by near-utopian
nationalist zeal as well as haunted by mutual fears of
betrayal. Fear, as elsewhere, proved a reliable mobilizing
tactic by which cynical elites swayed people into their
camps and to back their agendas. India and Pakistan also
swarmed with idealists striving, ironically, to make their
cherished schemes for nonsectarian societies work across a
religiously defined divide, side by side rather than
together. Neither Jinnah nor Gandhi nor Nehru nor
Mountbatten had any truck with theocratic urges. But
disputed borders after 1947 make for friction, and the
bleeding sore of breathtakingly beautiful Kashmir provided
tinder for several subsequent Indo/Pak wars and a myriad of
‘low-intensity ‘clashes. Alliance formation pulled the
states further apart as they (voluntarily, to be sure) were
worked into the larger game board of the superpowers’
schemes.
Any state, like Pakistan, that borders India, Iran, China
and Afghanistan is not slated for an easy existence.
Domestically, Pakistan
can be said to have had brief bouts with democratic
parliamentary politics in between long military
dictatorships of varying character. India, a resilient
democracy but for Indira Gandhi’s ‘emergency’period in the
mid-1970s, finds itself unpleasantly surrounded by
non-democracies. Both India and Pakistan, bristling with
allegedly defensive arms, suffer from enormous poverty.
Pakistan, a quarter the size of its neighbor, must pony up a
far greater portion of its easily evaded taxes for weaponry,
and so does next to nothing for its needy populace.
Pakistan spends 3.5% of its budget on education and health
resources versus 38% on the military.
As for India, a critic points out that ‘One Agni [nuclear
medium range] missile would finance the operation of
thirteen thousand health centers,’ and the ‘annual budget
for [nuclear weaponry] would pay for primary education in
India for two years.’
The ‘great game,’ invoked romantically in Rudyard Kipling’s
Kim, is still afoot in updated forms. One domestic byproduct
is the threat of fundamentalism in both nations, stirred by
the spillover of the Soviet-Afghan war into initially tiny
zealot circles in Pakistan and, until the 2004 election
dumped the BJP, by an alarming hindutva upsurge in India.
The Gujurat ‘riots ‘of 2002 were perhaps the apex of this
trend. Geopolitically, the USA blanched from the beginning
at India’s nonalignment policy and essentially pushed them
into Soviet arms supply networks. India’s shocking 1962 war
with China made the latter a new Pakistan ally, along,
incongruously, with the USA. (So it goes in international
relations.) The arrogant and myopic treatment of East
Pakistan people by West Pakistan elites resulted in negating
the 1970 election result (which should have put the East
Pakistan Awami League in overall power) and in March 1971 a
shameful and brutal civil war broke out.
Bangladesh was born of India’s decisive military
intervention. General Zia-ul-Haq installed his shambolic
‘Islamic” dictatorship in 1977, cheerfully served as a US
conduit of aid to the mujahideen, and died in a 1988 plane
crash, clearing the way for a temporary restoration of
democracy. Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif switched
premierships until Musharaff in the wake of another bloody
misadventure at Kargil in Kashmir in 1999, took power over a
doubtless corrupt system and a growing “Kalashnikov
culture.’ Although the Soviets left Afghanistan in February
1989 the war itself continued with debilitating spillovers
for Pakistan, which always sought to reshape Afghanistan
into a secure and friendly regime on its Western border. The
notorious 1998 nuclear blasts incurred suspension of US
assistance but, expediently, good relations were restored
after 9/11 when Musharaff wisely acceded to American
demands. Not even the recent scandal over Pakistani
trafficking in nuclear materials and delivery systems to
North Korea, Libya and Iran have dented the new
relationship. As always, the uppermost foreign policy
concern for India and Pakistan is each other.
Logos assembles a quintet of essays examining the current
state of play in Indo/Pak strife - doing so from historical
perspectives and, usually, with a personal touch. The
contributions by Dawn editor Zubeida Mustafa and critical
essayist Sayeed Hasan Khan relate the sharp-eyed views of
Mohajirs (Indian Muslim emigrants who settled in Pakistan),
reflecting on the perhaps inevitable shortfalls between
youthful hopes and the grubbier reality of Pakistan, turning
what Yeats would call a cold eye on the shortfall from
higher aspirations that the new State evinced. Gerald
Meyerle, a journalist and now a PHD candidate, covers the
Kashmir crisis up to the present. Manju Parikh, a politics
professor, examines the prospects for peace from the Indian
side of the border. Journalist Tavleen Singh adds a vivid
‘on the ground’ essay on Indian views of Kashmir. These
essays explore both “high” (elite diplomacy) and ‘low ‘
(popular and informal) politics, and their interaction, in
appraising prospects for ending this dangerous and
unnecessary stand-off. The essays, we hope, provide
illuminating accounts especially for non-South Asianist
readers in appraising chances for reconciliation in what
Arundhati Roy justifiably said in 1998 (when both states
conducted provocative nuclear tests) and again in 2002 (when
they faced off with hundreds of thousands of troops along
the frontier) was an utterly insane stand-off by two
nuclear-wielding powers that cannot look properly after
their own populations. Of course, this reprehensible plight
is becoming the case with the largest wielder of nuclear
weapons in the world, but that is another story, to be told
elsewhere.
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