Road Blocks in Normalising Relations

If cross border terrorism ceases, facilitating a dialogue between India and Pakistan, will a dividend of long term peace follow?

For a proper understanding, a hark back to the late19th century is necessary when, for the first time, an awareness about a muslim identity in India started developing. At that time members of the muslim community drew their identity from class, region and language but not religion. Reformers like Syed Ahmed were the ones who sought to bring about a common cultural identity on the basis of the muslimness of the community. The grant of separate electorates in early 20th century invested the community with a political identity by recognising it as a constitutional minority. But the community still did not develop for long a track record of political activity and hence a homogenous political identity.

The Muslim elite who were the principal beneficiaries of separate electorates and who desired political power, used them for expanding communitarian discourses. Religion then became the instrument to establish identity. Nationalist Muslims were not interested in this communal approach since their objective was independence of India and not power community wise. A majority of the Muslim community of India at this time were still more concerned with regional and local issues and remained unresponsive to efforts to carve out a political All India identity for them.

The Muslim communalists were quick to realise that in independent India true political power would not come their way without generating a sense of common political identity and making a bid for power on the strength of numbers in the Muslim majority areas. The theme that in free secular India Islamic traditions and culture would be severely stressed was used to promote a separate identity. Thus was invented the Two Nation Theory to serve as an instrument for securing a political division of India.

At the heart of the Two Nation Theory laid religious communalism and after the creation of Pakistan it took a new shape in the form of the Islamic ideology of the State. Islamic ideology of Pakistan is thus the post partition face of the earlier religious communalism which had contributed to the creation of Pakistan. The conceptual antagonism against secularism now stands revealed as the consistent enmity against India. The Pakistani animus against India is not a post 1947 creation. Its roots run deep into the cultural history of the subcontinent.

Accepting Islam as the ideology has created many more complications. The following problems can be identified:

Identity: An Islamic identity was inadequate to create a sense of nationhood. The people of Pakistan did not know who they were. In order to know this they had to identify what they were not. Often such a question gets answered by examining against whom one stands. An enemy thus becomes essential and a role for India is found. The Pakistani military establishment and conservative Muslim groups have been hard at work to ground such a belief in the Pakistan psyche. If there is the further identification as the progeny of Turk and Mughal invaders of the past, Ghori Ghazni and Babar, an inborn hostility becomes the characteristic. Shared ethnicity or language get forgotten when choices have to be made on the basis of religious identity as events in Serbia and Bosnia have demonstrated.

Religion: Religion accounts for the deepest fissures in the history of human civilization. India, by promoting secularism as a state policy, seeks to underplay religious differences. The Islamic identity of Pakistan accentuates these differences. While in India there is the belief in ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ (Earth is one family) in Islam the concept of shared brotherhood is limited only to Millat. The spirit of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam is also negated by Islamic acceptance of Darul Islam, land of Islam, and Darul Harb, land of war. Such concepts promote ideas of “them vs. us” and recall to memory the role of the sword in the relationship of Islamic people with the non Islamic people.

Ideology: Ideology becomes the basis of the legitimacy of a state. Such a criterion places India and Pakistan in fundamentally differing camps. India’s secular nationalism and Pakistan’s religious communalism have no meeting points whatsoever and pre-partition commonalities such as shared coexistence, blood line or languages pale into insignificance. In this sense the Pakistani Muslim and the Indian Muslim also become a world apart. India’s secular ideology dominates its political choices, Panchashila, anti-imperialism, non-alignment, pragmatism, etc. In Pakistani ideology Islamic concerns override all other factors. The salience of ideology, therefore, acquires a role in the Indo Pak equation. Normalization in the relationship will require a correction in the ideological issue.

Islam: Political Islam is resurgent in Pakistan which is a phenomenon it shares with many other Islamic countries. Its rise negates nationalism and promotes mass mobilisation the nature of which is generally influenced by religious and cultural standards. Inevitably, its appearance in Pakistan has led to the emergence of fundamentalism which cannot be easily controlled. Gradually, the role of effective opposition to the regime in power in Pakistan seems to be slipping into the hands of these forces, even though popular support in their favour may appear to be lacking. There is a paradox in operation here. People do not wish their political destiny to be controlled by religious zealots but they seem to prefer to live in a society of “Islamised modernity” rather than “modernised Islam”. In the face of such developments, it is a moot point whether western support such as is being given today to the Pakistan Govt. can succeed in sustaining it for long. In the event of its collapse, the successor Govt. is likely to be a more pronounced Islamic Govt. Such a Govt. can be expected to be even more non accommodative towards India.

Universal values: Islam is not hospitable to the western universal values. Democracy cannot flourish in an Islamic country. The belief in the sovereignty of Allah and the pre- eminence of the Ummah over the nation state, overshadows the primacy of the people’s will. The Governments in Islamic countries, including Pakistan, have thus tended to be authoritarian or military oriented. Democracies take decisions on the basis of debates in Parliament or at public forums. Authoritarian regimes do not have the benefit of widespread consultations and their decisions are usually in- bred and reached in a vacuum. The Pakistani decision making thus remains flawed and subjective. It cannot evaluate what is in the best interests of Pakistan. Pride and prejudices will therefore continue to prevent it from taking correct and meaningful decisions about India. Imposition of four wars by Pakistan on India, 1947, 65, 71 and 99 are proof of Pakistan’s irrationality and its propensity towards violence. It is not generally known that Pakistan had considered three other wars ( in early 1980s, 1987 and 1990) which were all nuclear oriented. Such propensity is by and large a common feature of Islamic societies. Samuel Huntington’s comment is that “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards”. He reaches this conclusion after finding empirically that people from the Islamic civilization have been involved in more wars with people of other civilizations as compared to wars between people of other civilizations.

The foregoing will inform that Pakistan’s problems flow directly from attitudes which have been shaped by cultural and religious differences. In the multilayered identities which people or nations can have, the one based on culture is the strongest and a key factor in directing their antagonisms. Unlike other differences cultural issues do not lend themselves to easy solutions, witness the problems linked with Ayodhya and Jerusalem. In the Indo Pakistan context any number of instances can be cited to bring out the deep imprint of the context of the overarching cultural factor which comes in the way of solving their problems in the near future. A random sampling of such examples is listed below:

“If we were to make it clear that whatever nuclear deterrence we might have is primarily meant to deter the use of nuclear weapons from the otherside, then by saying so we will fail to deter a conventional attack”. The other side must be led to believe that “we are almost desperate to use our nuclear capabilities when our national objectives are threatened, (as) for example, a major crackdown on (the) freedom movement in Kashmir”.( Lt Gen Durrani (Retd), former ISI Director and presently Pakistan Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as quoted in “Pakistan and the Bomb”, ed. Samina Ahmed and David Cartright, Oxford University Press, 1998, pg. 71)

“ No real peace process has ever been started between India and Pakistan which could decide against a military option and in favour of peace” ­( Gen (Retd) Jehangir Karamat, former Pakistani Army Chief in an address to the Pakistan Professional Forum at Dubai on Oct 26, 2000, quoted in POT from dawn, Nov 13, 2000, pg. 4675)

Shaking the hands of the Indian prime Minister at the SAARC meeting at Kathmandu in early 2002 was described by General Pervez Musharraf as one of the three most difficult decisions taken by him. This is as good as saying that making peace with India is a very difficult decision.

Musharraf is on record stating that even if the Kashmir question is resolved, proxy war against India will not end. Such statements signify that Pakistan regards a military option the more credible one and even a nuclear strike could be triggered off without an Indian attack on Pakistan. The emphasis on peaceful solutions as contained in documents signed at Tashkent, Simla and Lahore for Pakistan is then so much balderdash. Pakistani confidence about support from most Islamic countries and its mutually reinforcing relationship with China seem to strengthen its resolve to be unaccomodative towards India. Islamic nations and people had displayed a similar ideological solidarity during the Gulf war.

A solution to the Kashmir problem has been informally on offer to Pakistan from the early days of this trouble. Most observers believe that conversion of the Line of Control (LOC) in Kashmir into an international border can be the only possible way out of this imbroglio. Such a solution neither involves transfer of population nor surrender of additional land. The adherents of Kashmiriyat are all left intact on the Indian side, creating no ethnic division. The Mirpuris and the Muzzafarbadis who were linguistically and culturally more identified with the pre- partition Punjabi Muslims would continue to remain with Pakistan. The LOC also marked by and large in 1947 the line dividing the influence of secular National Conference and communal Muslim Conference of the J&K state. Thus the LOC also qualified to be an ideological demarcator apart from being an ethnic and linguistic frontier. The Pakistani Establishment has consistently rejected this offer under the mistaken belief that some day it will be able to make Kashmir its own through war, proxy war or otherwise.

Peace thus, stands effectively driven out because while we are ready to go by principles of compromise and 20th century values of peaceful co-existence, Pakistan prefers to be governed by yardsticks as applied during the time of Muslim rule. Henry Kissinger has commented that “ the compromises suggested by India are viewed as amputations of cultural and theological patrimony” by Pakistan. It is no wonder that Pakistan remains impervious to the idea of peace, whether in abstract or otherwise. Whenever it has ostensibly supported an agreement like Tashkent, Simla or Lahore, it had in reality made only a tactical move, agreeing to just a stage on the road to its final goal. Cries for Jehad have never ceased to be uttered in the urban and rural areas of Pakistan. Pakistan, therefore, seeks parity with India in strength just as parity had been given by the British to the Muslim League vis-à-vis the Indian National Congress in the pre partition India. In the process it ignores the geographical and other realities of the subcontinent which alone will decide a country’s position in the regional and world equations.

To quote Henry Kissinger again, there is a deep philosophical gulf between how Pakistan defines peace and how India views it. Pakistan cannot win because India is too strong militarily. India cannot win because Pakistan will not give up the two nation theory.

he two nation theory is, thus, at the root of problems between India and Pakistan. Its post partition manifestation in the shape of Islamic ideology of Pakistan has carried forward its challenges to secular nationalism of India to the present day. Only by closing this philosophical divide can a season of peace be brought to the subcontinent. The policy of no discussions with Pakistan until cross border terrorism ceases should be extended to demand a reassessment of the two nation theory. Tackling this issue is of even more fundamental importance than trying to resolve territorial and other disputes.

Unless religion is given a fresh look in Pakistan, we can wait till doomsday for peace to descend to the subcontinent. The responsibility for finding a new direction for themselves lies on the Pakistanis citizens since they alone, by asserting themselves, can display whether their genius is in accord with Jinnah’s dreams of a secularised Pakistan or suggests submission to the whims and fancies of an irresponsible militarised power Establishtment.