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49 pages

English

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The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 left a legacy of hostility and bitterness that has bedevilled relations between India and Pakistan for over fifty-five years. The two countries, both nuclear powers now, have fought three wars since Independence and have twice come to the brink of war in recent years. Each of their attempts to make peace has failed, and each failure has added a new layer of anger and mistrust to existing animosities.So what will it take for India and Pakistan to put the long shadows of Partition behind them, once and for all?Reviewing the turbulent history of their past relationship, Radha Kumar analyses the chief obstacles the two countries face and looks afresh, in particular, at the Kashmir conflict, in the light of the new opportunities and challenges that the twenty-first century presents. Kumar’s comparisons with partition-related peace processes in Bosnia, Ireland, Cyprus and Israel-Palestine offer a radically different perspective on the prospects for peace between India and Pakistan, and illuminate the key elements that go into a successful peace process.Lucid, incisive and optimistic, Radha Kumar’s essay, written at a time when a new peace process between India and Pakistan has begun to unfold, challenges received wisdom as it argues persuasively that the South Asian neighbours are today better placed to make peace than ever before.

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Histoire

History of Asia

India

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Publié par	Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
Date de parution	28 février 2005
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789352141630
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Radha Kumar

Making Peace with Partition
Contents
Other books in the series
Dedication
Chapter 1
Notes
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Other books in the series
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For Eqbal Ahmad and Sushila Sahai Jinhe Naaz Hai Hind Par
The Dawn We Long For
In 1947, just days after India and Pakistan gained freedom as two separate countries, the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz wrote a famously furious attack on the two countries leaders for accepting Partition as the price of Independence. They told us the long and heavy night of British rule would lift to a new day when we would be united, he said accusingly; but when the morning of freedom did appear, it broke on a stained and disfigured dawn. Night weighs us down, it still weighs us down, wrote Faiz angrily, referring to the terrible violence that began with Partition. Our hearts do not feel, nor our eyes see, the hour of our salvation. 1
The two new countries fought three wars in the decades that followed, two over Kashmir and one over East Pakistan (now Bangladesh); and they came to the brink of war in 1999 and 2002. The first war divided Kashmir between India and Pakistan and the third war divided East from West Pakistan.
All three wars were linked to the unfinished business of Partition , a phrase more popular with Pakistani politicians than with their Indian counterparts, because they use it to stake claim to Kashmir as a Muslim majority territory. But the phrase also underlines the fact that partition rarely settles the ethnic or communal hatreds that cause it in the first place. On the contrary, it tends to give these hatreds an institutional life and so carries hostility to new and more difficult levels. Thus, though India won all three wars with Pakistan, it was unable to resolve any of the disputes that stemmed from Partition. Indeed, India s third war with Pakistan, which ended with the creation of Bangladesh, resulted in adding another hostile neighbour instead of stabilizing the eastern frontier. The sense of grievance over unfinished business also ensured that every peace initiative that the two countries launched-and there were many-failed, with each failure adding another layer of anger and mistrust to existing hostilities.
Today India and Pakistan stand at the brink of a new peace process, one that has the potential to mend the rifts of separation without challenging the sovereignties that Partition established. In January 2004, the two countries agreed to begin comprehensive talks to end the disputes that have bedevilled their relations since Independence, most of which are over contested borders. They also pledged to boost regional trade, put South Asian development on a fast track, and encourage people-to-people exchanges , with parallel progress in all areas.
The policy underlying these steps appears to be that opening up borders can help resolve conflicts or create conducive conditions for their resolution, as India s foreign office mandarins put it. It is certainly true that freedom of movement eases conflict, because it creates the ties that bind and loosens the ties that chafe. Regional trade builds interdependence and raises the cost of conflict, so it acts as a deterrent; and the free travel of people, goods and services encourages local autonomy and tempers central controls, reducing the invasiveness of the sovereign nation-state. This is a formula that has gained currency since the end of the Cold War, particularly with the expansion of the European Union.
But the possibility of open borders is only a distant glimpse on South Asia s horizon. It is still constrained by the unresolved issues of self and nation that were at the core of the 1947 Partition of India and the 1971 secession by East Pakistan, as well as the partitions within a partition that took place in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. India and Pakistan have embarked on a rocky road, and analysts in both countries doubt whether leaders on either side are well-equipped to deal with the many boulders that strew the way. Can India and Pakistan put the hostilities of Partition behind them to make a lasting peace? Might the dawn that Faiz longed for still appear-and what will it take for this to happen?
The Partition Dilemma
People and lands have been divided and redivided for centuries, but the uses of partition have been hotly debated only for the past 150 years, ever since it was tied to the birth of nation-states. Despite the intensity with which Partition continues to be debated, however, few are able to tackle its central dilemma-that one man s self-determination can be another man s loss of self and, equally important, that one man s loss of self can be another man s self-determination. This duality of Partition is just beginning to be recognized in South Asia, whose Hindus and Muslims experience it quite differently from each other. The vast bulk of the subcontinent s Hindus live in India, partly as a result of Partition, and many of them find it difficult to accept that the loss of self they experienced at Partition was a gain of self for those Muslims who went to Pakistan. They prefer to view Pakistan s creation as a sign that Muslims will only live with other religious or cultural communities when they themselves are the rulers.
Similarly, most Pakistani Muslims find it difficult to accept that their departure caused a whittling down of the Hindu sense of self. They prefer to interpret the Hindu expression of loss as related to territory, property or power, especially the last. India s Hindus, Pakistani Muslims tend to believe, cannot forgive Pakistan for denying them the opportunity to rule over the subcontinent s Muslims.
Indian Muslims experience the Partition dilemma most acutely of all, burdened as they are with a double sense of grief-self-determination for Pakistani Muslims meant the exodus of two-thirds of the Indian Muslim population, and the bulk of its elite, leaving those who stayed behind in a vulnerable position. It also divided Muslims at a more intimate level, because they had to decide whether to put their Muslim selves first, by choosing Pakistan, or opt for the supra-religious national identity that was as yet more a promise than a reality, by choosing India.
The choice caused bitter divisions, especially amongst liberal and modernizing Muslims. Faiz s view was not the prevailing one, as he himself laments. By the time Partition was finally agreed, most influential Muslims saw it as fulfilling the quest for Muslim self-determination rather than as the ugly underbelly of Independence.
Pakistan s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, put the case this way. Muslim self-determination was not a threat to India, he argued-on the contrary, the creation of an independent Muslim homeland in the Indian subcontinent would bring lasting peace to the region. The volatile north-western frontier between Afghanistan and British India, which erupted into frequent violence, would lose all importance once a Muslim state is established in the North-West , said Jinnah. The tribesmen and the people beyond the frontier are all Muslims. They will lose all religious and political fervour for jihad against non-Muslims once they find they have to reckon with their brothers in Islam. 2
By the same token, Jinnah continued, the creation of a Muslim homeland would not weaken the Muslims who remained in India-rather it would afford them protection. Muslim minorities in India, and Hindu and Sikh minorities in Pakistan, would be hostages for peace within each country. If a Muslim, Hindu or Sikh minority was persecuted in one country, its brothers in faith would take revenge in the neighbouring country. The fear of revenge, Jinnah inferred, would act as an effective incentive for the new rulers to protect minorities.
Jinnah s argument drew an impassioned rebuttal from Reginald Coupland, a constitutional expert whom the British government consulted when it had to decide how-and to whom-to transfer power after Britain withdrew from its colonies. Coupland first examined the question of partition in the Middle East, and was the author of the Peel Commission Report on Palestine in 1938. The report concluded that dividing Palestine was a complex and costly endeavour that would be difficult to implement or sustain, but it did so regretfully. Partition would be the most desirable option for Palestine if it were feasible, Coupland said, because Jews were essentially European and could not be expected to live with Arabs, who were not. In any case, he added, there were few national groups that had the maturity to rise above antithetical claims of self-determination. In modern history, the English and the Canadians were among the few that had done so-other groups such as Irish Protestants and Catholics, or Indian Hindus and Muslims, had not.
The comment marked Coupland as a colonial advocate of partition in my mind, and I was astonished and moved to discover his passionate plea against the Partition of India, written six years after the Peel Commission Report. Dividing British India into independent Hindu and Muslim majority countries, said Coupland, would create a comparatively weak Muslim state, and do greater harm to Indian Muslims than to Hindus. Even after Partition, India would be large and diverse enough to create its own markets and defend its borders. By contrast, Pakistan would need Indian markets to stabilize economically, and there was little reason to believe these would be offered. Stung by a separation that most Indians viewed as an act of betrayal ( the Muslims left us ), independent India s leaders would see no benefit in being generous to the new Muslim country. Instead, they would be tempted to punish it. The best that could be hoped for, Coupland concluded, was that India would turn its back on Pakistan. 3