08-23-2006, 08:23 AM
Statehood in South Asia.
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst;jsessionid=G...=o&d=5001526317
by Ainslie Embree
In the vast region now known as South Asia at the beginning of 1997, most of the major states--including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka--have some form of democratic government for the first time since the formal British withdrawal in 1947. All of these nations are engaged in measures of economic liberalization, moving away from government control of resources toward a market economy. All are also seeking, however tentatively, to increase and strengthen interregional relationships.(1) Although democracy, economics and foreign policy have been important, the overarching concern in all the states and the one that shapes all the other issues is the quest for national unity. The process of decolonization that led to the formation of the separate states of South Asia meant that the externally imposed unity of the colonial state had to be replaced by policies that required the assent of the governed.
It is this theme of the search for national unity that will be analyzed in this article through brief examinations of three of the states, with a fourth, Bangladesh, being noted in relation to India and Pakistan. More attention will be given to India, since the same factors that give India a special prominence within the region make it an excellent starting place for considering the South Asia region in general.
The first factor that explains India's prominence in the region is its overwhelming dominance in population, industrial development and military power. Equally important is the geographical factor. Since the state of India comprises almost three-quarters of the subcontinent, which is bound by mountains and seas, it is an "intelligible isolate." A third factor is that the civilizations and cultures of India have made an impression on all the states of the region, despite the other states' own strong indigenous cultural and religious characteristics, such as Islam and Buddhism. A fourth factor giving India a special importance is that all the states in the region, especially the four largest ones, have experienced political trends rooted in what is now the state of India. Beginning with the Mauryan Empire in the fourth century B.C. and continuing into the modern era, political forces have emanated from India throughout the region.
India had a special importance for the British empire and had a legal and political status different from any of the other colonies. It was regarded as the dominating power in the region. Lord Curzon, as governor general, expressed a grandiose but widely held vision of India's hegemony in 1909 when he wrote:
On the west, India must exercise a predominant influence over the destinies
of Persia and Afghanistan; on the north, it can veto any rival in Tibet; on
the north-east it can exert great pressure upon China, and it is one of the
guardians of the autonomous existence of Siam.(2)
This was a dangerous legacy for the Government of India to leave to its successor state, the Republic of India, as the world discovered when India and China quarreled over the borders that had been left by the British. Upon British departure in 1947, India's influence in the area continued when it began to interact with the new border states of Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Sikhim. The word "empire" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "the aggregate of many states under one common head." The British viewed their empire in these terms. Britain had conquered and brought under one rule what was a hackneyed congeries of states and kingdoms in the geographical area that Europeans had called "India" since ancient times. That the official and legal documents usually referred to the "Government of India" and not "India" reflects that the British perceived India as a government, but not a state and certainly not a nation.
Looking back over 50 years of independent statehood in South Asia, one can identify dominant issues and concerns in each of the states. First, a variety of economic strategies emerged, all of which required an active role for the national government. These strategies were devised to address age-old problems of poverty while providing for the infrastructure of a modern state, including defense, communications, education and health services. These strategies were a post-colonial rejection of the laissez-faire economic policies that had characterized British rule.
Second, dominant trends have emerged from the function of religion in national life in all the countries of South Asia. Religion has been closely related to the question of national language. Third, democratic forms of government according to the Western model were established in all the states, although with many modifications. Fourth, foreign relations have been a constant preoccupation. Only recently has cooperation been embraced with the creation of the functionally-limited South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in 1983. Despite South Asia's limited independent history, post-independence regional animosities and the fear of Indian hegemony have prevented the growth of normal economic and cultural contacts. Relations with the wider international community during the Cold War era were focused on the United States, the Soviet Union and China. As noted above, however, all of these concerns of the different South Asian states were deeply affected by the necessity of maintaining territorial integrity while fostering a sense of national consciousness.
India
During India's half-century of independence, the concern for national unity has had two broad aspects. One is the preservation of territorial integrity; which has been tested by wars with China and Pakistan and by internal insurgencies. The other aspect is the creation of a unifying national consciousness and this, in India as elsewhere, has been far more difficult than defending territorial integrity
Indian territorial integrity was challenged first in 1962 when China and India went to war over territories in the Himalayan borderlands. In 1959, Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai suggested that the borders of India were not legitimate because they were drawn by foreign imperialists. He told Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in an accurate and elegant phrase that the border issue was a complicated question left over by history."(3) This was unacceptable to Nehru, who believed the borders were integral to India's sovereignty and to its sense of nationhood.(4) In an official note, the Government of India declared its northern frontier "has lain approximately where it now runs for nearly three thousand years," and that the people within the area it enclosed have always regarded themselves "as Indians and remained within the Indian fold."(5) After the war started, Nehru told a New Delhi audience that it would begin "pushing us into the modern world and make us realize the hard realities."(6)
One of the hard realities for India was that it would be forced to reconsider its non-aligned status in foreign affairs, in order to obtain outside pressure to deflect the Chinese advance. Nehru wrote to U.S. President John F. Kennedy that India's situation was desperate, and asked for large-scale military assistance, including squadrons of supersonic fighters and B-47 bombers.(7) The Chinese ceased their advance, either because of the threat of American involvement, or because they believed they had humiliated India and proved that China, as they put it, "was one head taller than India imagined herself to be."(8)
The 1962 war with China was a turning point in defining India as a nation. Nehru spoke of it as a blessing in disguise because internal disunity had been swept aside by the Chinese threat and the new mood could be used to achieve industrial advances as well as military preparedness.(9)
A variety of militant insurgent movements within India also placed severe strains on the government during the past 50 years. By threatening to secede or demanding a degree of autonomy that the government felt would destroy the nation's unity, insurgencies challenged the government's legitimacy. Countering rebellions was expensive in material and human resources and left bitter memories of alleged brutalities and grave human rights abuses. All Indian administrations since 1947 have believed, however, that violent and secessionist movements should be crushed quickly. Although the numerous insurgencies had different local origins and agendas and affected widely separated areas, the common threads among them were a sense of grievance, often rooted in perceived economic discrimination.
Bonds of language and religion became important characteristics among insurgents because of their belief that the government, in seeking national unity; was trying to replace local traditions with a Hinduized culture. The longest-lasting example of rebellion began soon after independence in the hilly area in the northeast against the tribal people known as Nagas and was occasioned by what the Nagas saw as an attempt to erode their customs, language and religion by the Government of India. Eventually, the government succeeded in forcing a peace settlement, including the creation of a new federal state, Nagaland, in 1963. However, groups of rebels continued to fight until 1978 when they realized defeat was inevitable and consequently agreed to make peace.
The current insurgencies in Kashmir and Punjab are on a much larger scale. The insurgents are far better armed, have more support from a wider constituency, and are given more ideological coherence by potent appeals to loyalties based on religion, language and history. Furthermore, the insurgents in Kashmir and Punjab have allegedly received support from Pakistan, which has fought India three times since 1947. According to conservative estimates, India had committed a quarter million of its armed forces to quelling armed insurrections in the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. The insurgencies are carried on by many separate groups with different aims and without a unified command. Some want a union with Pakistan, some want independence, and others might settle for a high degree of autonomy within India. This is not an open war between India and Pakistan, but two previous wars between the two countries involved in Kashmir. There is always a danger that a new war may ensue, now with the added peril that both nations could develop and use nuclear weapons.
India's insistence that the accession of the state of Jammu and Kashmir is a closed issue and that its partition or secession cannot be discussed as part of any solution to the problem has angered Pakistan. However, this stance reflects India's fundamental view of its statehood. Indian leaders argue that permitting self-determination to the Kashmiris would lead to a demand from ethnic groups within India to secede, destroying the fabric of the nation's unity. Indian leaders, including Nehru, have argued repeatedly that a concession to a Muslim majority in Kashmir would lead to a new outburst of communal violence against Muslims in India, especially now that Hindu nationalism is ascending. One thing is reasonably certain: In the foreseeable future, India will violently resist any secessionist attempts or movements for greater autonomy that threaten the state's territorial integrity and stability
While the Kashmir situation attracted more international attention because of the threat of war from Pakistan's involvement, armed insurgency in Punjab in the 1980s probably affected the people of India more directly Punjab has historically been part of the Indian heartland. It is also one of the most prosperous and progressive Indian states. The conventional explanation of the insurgency was that it originated in a power struggle between political leaders in the Akali Dal party and the ruling party, the Indian National Congress. The Akali Dal represent Sikhs.
However, the element that gave the insurgency its violence and passion was the dynamic leadership of a militant young religious leader, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, and his followers who began a crusade against the enemies of Sikhism. These were identified as the elderly Sikh leaders who had grown weak in the faith and, above all, the external enemy, the Government of India, which was seen in religious terms as a Hindu power inimical to Sikhism. What has been called "the logic of religious violence" took over and a religious cause legitimized violence, "for the language of warfare, of fighting and dying for a cause, is appropriate and endemic to the realm of religion."(10) As elsewhere, the opportunity for religiously sanctioned violence appealed strongly to young men who felt marginalized by the economic and social changes taking place in the Punjab. They became recruits for a campaign that led to the murder of many thousands of civilians and, in the attempts by the authorities to end the insurgency, the death or disappearance of thousands of militants.(11) Human rights groups, both in India and abroad, have reported that the security forces adopted brutal methods, including torture, detention without trials, and summary killings of suspected militants and of civilians who may have helped them. However upsetting, the authorities now point to a return to elected government and normal conditions throughout the state by 1992 to justify their harsh actions during the insurgency.
While preservation of its territorial integrity from external enemies and internal insurgencies taxed the nation's energies and resources, conflicts over the creation of a sense of a national identity consensus through language and religion have also strained the unity of the nation. In regions, both language and religion have been rallying points for national unity, but in India as elsewhere in South Asia, they also have often been divisive.
The choice of Hindi, the most widely spoken of India's 12 major languages, as the national language provoked bitter debates in the Constituent Assembly and throughout the country in 1948 and 1949. But the demand in the 1950s for the creation of linguistic states posed an even greater threat to Indian unity The states, or provinces as they had been known during British rule, had been formed largely for administrative convenience or as a result of conquests at different periods, but in 1920 the Indian National Congress demanded that the country be divided into states that reflected the language and culture of the different regions.
The subject was raised again shortly after independence, but Nehru postponed action, seeing that the formation of linguistic states posed a threat to Indian unity by emphasizing regional, not national, loyalties. There were serious outbreaks of violence as powerful groups in the different regions pressed for linguistic states. In a revealing statement, Nehru said how dismayed he was as he watched what was happening in the country. The struggle that had gone on for a free and united India seemed to be endangered and he was, "face to face with the centuries old India of narrow loyalties, petty jealousies and ignorant prejudices engaged in mortal conflict and we were simply horrified to see how thin was the ice upon which we were skating."(12)
The process of reorganization was finally resolved, with most of the country eventually divided on the basis of the dominant language group in the different regions. Those involved in the process were aware of how potentially dangerous this was to the unity of the country The States Reorganization Commission noted in its report that a unitary form of government with the divisions based on purely administrative considerations would have been the best solution, but, mindful of the violence the demand for linguistic states had created, the report concluded in laconic understatement that, "in the existing circumstances, this approach would be somewhat unrealistic."(13)
The issue of religion is potentially more divisive than language. A carefully worded statement on the right to freedom of religion was included in the constitution of India. In 1977, a constitutional amendment interpreting the freedom of religion clause declared that India was a secular state. In the Indian constitutional usage, a secular state is defined as one that guarantees freedom of worship, treats individuals as citizens irrespective of religious affiliation, and does not support any particular religion.(14) This insistence on India as a secular state was a recognition of the religious pluralism of Indian society, which includes 700 million Hindus, 125 million Muslims, 21 million Christians, and 18 million Sikhs. The partition that created Pakistan on the basis of religion led in a few months to the killing of half a million people, both Hindus and Muslims, and a migration from one country to the other of perhaps 12 million people. Beyond that trauma, numerous communal riots have led to the deaths of many hundreds of people. Because of the bitter realities of violence associated with religious identity, a secular identity seemed necessary.
Nonetheless, in a direct challenge to the secular state, many well-organized groups argued that secularism undermined the only true basis of Indian nationality, Hinduism. The overwhelming majority of Indians, these groups argued, identified themselves as Hindu--participants in the culture that deeply molded Indian civilization, not just in terms of religious practices, but in art, literature and styles of living. The most vigorous exponent of this definition of Indian nationality was a powerful organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, and its many related groups, most notably the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which in the past 15 years has emerged as a major force in Indian electoral politics.
The leaders of such groups are often referred to as "Hindu fundamentalists," suggesting a primarily religious motivation, but this term is misleading. "Hindu nationalists" is a more accurate description, for their aim is not to create a theocratic state, run by priests as spokesmen for a deity Rather, it is to create a modern nation-state in which the ideology of Hindu nationalism, to which they have given the name "Hindutva," would be the guiding force for national unity. The proponents of this nationalism identify as its enemies the religious and cultural traditions of Islam and Christianity, aided by the advocates for secularism in what they regard as the denationalized, Westernized Indian elites.(15)
This conflict over the nature of Indian nationalism was dramatized in December 1992, when a mob of militant Hindu nationalists destroyed the Babri Masjid, a mosque believed to have been built by the Mughal Emperor Babur between 1526 and 1530 on the site of the birthplace of Lord Rama, a widely venerated deity The destruction of the mosque was seen as a dramatic assertion of the victory of the Hindu nation over the Muslims, who had once conquered India centuries earlier. In the next few days, riots broke out in a number of towns and cities, most notably in Mumbai (Bombay), where hundreds of people, mostly Muslims, were killed. India is unhappily accustomed to violence, but these events appeared to signal "a shift away from the fragile political consensus of religious neutrality, the secular state, that held together the diverse ethnic, religious, and social communities since independence, toward the new configuration of a Hindu nation."(16)
Cultural symbols deeply rooted in the dominant cultural tradition have a powerful unifying potential, but, given the diversity of Indian society, Hindu nationalism has difficulty finding a unifying voice. Many members of the Hindu upper classes view Hindu nationalism as a deeply divisive force, while the lowest classes view it as an attempt to restore historic patterns of upper caste dominance and the Muslims see it a threat to their existence as a community. For these reasons, a careful political analyst concludes, "unless the democratic system breaks down, or there is a major external crisis, Hindutva nationalism cannot sweep the country."(17) While this is probably true for immediate electoral prospects, there can be little doubt that Hindu nationalism will continue to have enormous appeal, even if it does not express itself overtly in the electoral victory of a specific party.
Pakistan
Shortly after the secession of Bangladesh in 1971, Professor Rounaq Jahan summarized the problems of Pakistan by noting that the difficulties of nation-building were compounded by the fact that the ruling elites had to perform simultaneously the two independent, and at times contradictory, tasks of state-building and nation-building.(18) India inherited a functioning state when it became independent, symbolized by the grandeur of New Delhi, while Pakistan had to make do with the hastily cobbled together facilities in the temporary capital of Karachi.
In terms of state-building, the first 10 years of Pakistan's existence can be characterized as an attempt to govern a country with a population of about 75 million (in 1950) divided into two areas separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory, with an unstable power structure. The structure consisted of a Constituent Assembly of 79 members as a central government, a governor-general with great executive power, elected provincial assemblies in the four provinces in West Pakistan and one in East Pakistan, a civil bureaucracy and a military establishment.
From the beginning, three issues posed a challenge to both state-building and nation-building. The first was the position of Islam as the dominant ideology of Pakistan. The second issue posing a challenge to state- and nation-building was the existence of regional differences within Pakistan. A third source of conflict was how power was to be shared within the governing structure.
The irony of the nation-building process was that Pakistan, unlike India, seemed to begin with an accessible and easily comprehended unifying ideology of Pakistan as a homeland for Muslims in South Asia. This was the point Muhammad Ali Jinnah made in 1943 when consolidating his claim to be spokesman for India's Muslims. Envisioning a Muslim homeland, he declared, "Never before in the history of the world, has a nation rallied around a common platform and a common ideal in such a short time as the Muslims have done in this vast subcontinent.... Never before has the mental outlook of a nation been unified so effectively."(19)
Why was the outcome so different from this vision, which had some basis in reality? The answer is surely that an appeal to found a nation on Islam, or indeed on any religion, in a region as complex as the Indian subcontinent would face enormous difficulties. What was wrong with Jinnah's vision was spelled out with brutal clarity by Maulana Maududi, a powerful theologian, when he reminded Jinnah that true Muslims did not believe in government by the majority, but rulership by God under the laws of Islam, not those made by a democratic majority: "In the sight of God, Muslim nationalism is just as cursed as Indian nationalism."(20)
The failure of Islam as a political ideology to create a unified nation was shown with shattering force in the secession of East Bengal and its emergence as the new nation of Bangladesh in 1971. Even before this, however, Islam became a source of disunity as attempts were made to spell out its place in the national life. There were a number of contentious issues that illustrated the divisiveness of Islam in South Asia. One was defining the nature of the new state. Pakistan has enacted four constitutions in 30 years, with many revisions. The first one, adopted in 1956, saw Pakistan as a modern, democratic state. Yet, it was also to be an Islamic Republic, with no laws repugnant to Islam. As one scholar has noted, ideologically Pakistan was suspended, "between the ambiguity of her founder's call for a Muslim homeland and the varying expectations of the majority of the populace for an Islamic state."(21)
The regional conflicts that emerged after the formation of Pakistan were related to the new political arrangements, but as Stephen Rittenberg has shown in his study of the independence movement of the North-West Frontier Province, they were rooted in ethnic and tribal differences within the region itself as well as with the larger arena of the nation. The major tribal group in the province, the Pakhtuns, had ethnic loyalties and social organization that "have given provincial politics a stability which has survived the periodic upheavals in Pakistani politics since independence."(22) This was true in large measure of the other three divisions of West Pakistan--Sind, Baluchistan and Punjab--but stability for dominant groups within each of them meant friction with each other and with the central government. The largest of the provinces, East Pakistan, with a greater population than the rest of the provinces combined, was to become the test case for national unity, since from the beginning this region was marked from the beginning by a sense of alienation from West Pakistan.
There were many complaints of unequal treatment in the allocation of government resources and of positions within the military and the civil bureaucracy, but the clearest indication of the depth of this bitterness came, as it had elsewhere in South Asia, over the issue of a national language. East Pakistan was the most linguistically homogenous region in South Asia, with the overwhelming majority of the people speaking Bengali. But the central government decided to make Urdu, widely regarded as an "Islamic language," the national language of Pakistan. Student groups protested the imposition of Urdu and demanded that Bengali also be recognized as a national language. This student activism represented a wider unrest in society and, in 1956, Bengali was declared a national language along with Urdu. By this time, however, more than a sub-nationalism had developed: Articulate leaders were demanding social change and autonomy for East Pakistan. This first phase of Bangladeshi separatism, dependent upon free elections and political representation was halted when "the established political institutions were swept aside, and the civil-military bureaucracy, in which Bengal representation was minimal, assumed power in the country."(23)
The abrogation of civil power was the result of the third source of conflict within Pakistan, a struggle for power within its governing structure, particularly after the new constitution came into force in 1956, giving elected representatives more power. General Ayub Khan, who assumed power, justified the military takeover in 1958 on the grounds that the state was in danger of collapse, as it was torn by regional animosities, religious strife and racial differences. In their mad rush for power, the elected politicians whom he had overthrown, had shown that "the country and the people could go to the dogs as far as they were concerned."(24) The ulema, or Muslim religious leaders, were also to blame, for instead of Islam promoting the unity of the country, their version of the faith was dividing it. The ulema, Khan argued, were against the creation of a modern state because they feared power would pass from them to the educated classes. Khan asserted that what was needed to unify the country was a strong central government that would encourage industrialization in order to raise the standard of living of the poor, give Pakistan a place in the world and end the bickering of corrupt politicians.(25)
A somewhat different, and persuasive, reading of the reasons for military rule has been given by Ayesha Jalal. While not denying the effect of politicians on the political process, she suggests that the alliance of civil bureaucrats and the military was stretching the "ambit of central authority in order to give a long delayed impetus to their ambitious plans to industrialize and militarize Pakistan, while at the same time nurturing their own recently forged links in the international arena."(26) Ayub was forced from office, however, partly because of the failure of his regime to meet the economic needs of the masses and partly because he was unable to maintain an alliance among the military, the bureaucrats and the industrialists whom he had encouraged.
Ayub was succeeded not by a civilian but by another military leader, General Yayha Khan, against whom East Pakistan revolted. Yayha Khan's government responded with startling brutality, killing perhaps a million civilians, but India's intervention led to the defeat of the Pakistan Army and the emergence of a new country, Bangladesh. Pakistan is not and never was, in the pejorative phrase attributed to Henry Kissinger, a "basket case," but its simultaneous search for statehood and national identity has been a daunting task.
Pakistan's military defeat in East Pakistan by India in 1971 led to the fall of Yayha Khan and the establishment of a civilian government under Zulfiqar Bhutto, who attempted to move the state away from its heavy dependence on the military. His failure was dramatized by the seizure of power by the military in 1977 under General Zia, again on the grounds that the civilian politicians did not have the ability to maintain law and order. Bhutto was arrested and executed in 1979 on a murder charge.
General Zia's regime attempted to give unity to a dispirited and divided country through a vigorous program of Islamization, combined with economic development and strict control of the press and political parties. Islamization meant an attempt to introduce traditional Islamic law and social customs, as spelled out in detail in an ordinance in June 1988, making shari a (revealed law) the supreme law of the land.(27) This met little resistance from the masses, who followed such customs in any case, but the educated elites regarded such efforts as a futile attempt to impose standards that ran counter to the thrust of modernity. General Zia's death in an airplane crash in 1988 led to a return to civilian government and the re-emergence of electoral politics, which resulted in the election in 1988 of Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the executed former prime minister. The president of Pakistan, Sardar Leghari, dismissed her from office during her second term in 1996 for misgovernence and corruption. To some observers, her subsequent electoral defeat in February 1997 seemed to replicate the fate of other civilian governments at the hands of the military, even if behind the scenes. Others, more optimistic about electoral politics, saw it as the ability of the president, in a use of constitutional powers validated by the Supreme Court, to safeguard the state.
Sri Lanka
While the danger of disunity in South Asia from religious, linguistic and ethnic differences have always been stressed in the rest of South Asia before independence, there seems to have been little perception of such danger in Sri Lanka, either by the British rulers or the leaders of political parties, until it became independent in ! 948. In contrast to the fearful communal killings that marked the birth of statehood in India, Pakistan and eventually Bangladesh, the transfer of power in Sri Lanka was remarkably peaceful. The government of the first prime minister, D.S. Senanayake, concentrated on the economic development of a society characterized by high literacy, a developed political system and a social order where the division between rich and poor was not as striking as elsewhere on the subcontinent.(28)
There were, however, very powerful forces at work within the island that combined to threaten the existence of the unitary state established in 1948. Economically, the country was faced with growing unemployment and the inability of the government to pay for the extensive social welfare programs. These problems became involved with ethnic, religious, and linguistic issues as well as struggles for power between the two families that dominated Sri Lankan politics, the Bandaranaikes and the Senanayakes.
The most explosive issue was the question of making Sinhala, the language of the ethnic majority, the Sinhalese, the national language. The appeal of Sinhala--and its potential for disunity--was increased by the fact that it was closely identified with Buddhism, the religion of the Sinhalese majority. If this came to be the case, English would cease to play its traditional role in government, education and business. The disadvantaged group would be the Tamil-speaking minority, about 18 percent of the population, which was mainly Hindu by religion. The Tamils had originated in Tamilnadu in south India, some having come to Sri Lanka many centuries before, while others had come in the 19th century during the period of British rule. They form the majority of the population in Jaffna, the northern district of the island.
Perhaps the clearest way to summarize the development of fierce ethnic antagonism leading to violence that threatened to overwhelm the state is through a brief chronology. In 1956, Bandaranaike's government moved to fulfill election promises to make Sinhala the only official national language and to recognize Buddhism as the national religion. This movement received militant support from the bhikkhus, the monks who had great influence in the countryside. Rioting broke out in 1958, in which hundreds of Tamils were killed.
In 1971, a serious insurrection that had no direct connection with the language issue exploded when bands of students, known as the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP), who were not supported by any major political party, began an attack on government institutions. The government had inadequate arms to fight back, but quickly received help from India, the United States and Great Britain. The insurrection was halted only after an estimated 15,000 insurgents were killed. Although the government won, in the judgment of two scholars with exceptional access to sources in Sri Lanka, there is no mistaking the historical significance of the insurrection: "It was the harbinger of political violence on an unprecedented scale ... of which groups of Tamil activists (in the period 1975 onwards) have been the most prominent exponents."(29) Furthermore, the JVP was not fully crushed, and in the 1980s continued to assassinate political leaders.
Groups of young Tamils, melding language grievances and claims of economic discrimination, became increasingly violent and, appealing to ethnic separatism, they demanded independence for the Jaffna region. After 13 soldiers were killed by the Tamil militants in 1983, fierce riots broke out in other areas of the island, and thousands of Tamils were killed. From this point on, the Tamil insurrection ceased to be an internal affair and became a regional one, with India as a major player. It was well known that the militants, especially the most violent group, known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were being trained and armed into a formidable guerrilla force in the Indian state of Tamilnadu, a few miles across the Palk Strait from Jaffna, with the knowledge of the Indian government.(30) Out of desperation, but with considerable political courage given that there was intense anti-Indian sentiment in Sri Lanka, President J.R. Jayawardene sought an accord with India governing the deployment of Indian armed forces known as the Indian Peace Keeping Force. However, this well-armed force had little success in controlling the LTTE. In the face of strong criticism from within Sri Lanka, the Indian government withdrew the Indian Peace Keeping Force, with memories of the problems that the Soviet Union encountered in Afghanistan and the United States in Vietnam when fighting determined guerrillas.
Sri Lanka's long agony continued, despite high hopes raised by peace talks in early 1995 between the LTTE leaders and the Sri Lankan government. In the summer of 1996, the LTTE, although driven out of the towns and into the jungles, killed more than 1,000 soldiers at an army base. According to Marshall Singer, the model for the LTTE leaders is the situation in Israel: The Israelis' only hope for peace was to agree to a settlement in Gaza and on the West Bank, which they may see as "something short of a separate country," but "the Palestinians see it as an independent state."(31)
Conclusion
Is there any conclusion that can be drawn from 50 years--which is a long time in the life of any modern notion--of the dual quest for statehood and nationhood by the major states of South Asia, with their vast populations, material resources, and immensely rich legacy of civilization? One is, of course, that none have succumbed to the pressures of insurrections, civil wars and militant movements for secession. This is true even of Pakistan, which lost half of its population but retained the framework of the original state. Another conclusion is one drawn by an Indian analyst, Bharat Wariavwalla. Surveying the insurrections and secessionist movements in India, he argues that they have resulted from the attempt to impose a concept of "nation" upon India's many ancient communities, leading ironically to disunity, rather than the unity that was sought. According to this view, Kashmir and Punjab are the price paid for trying to create "an imaginary nation" out of South Asia's deeply rooted multiculturalism.(32) One may sense the validity of this argument looking at the history of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, while at the same time recognizing that the loose federalism that it suggests may be unacceptable to their leaders after half a century of striving to create unitary states and to impose nationhood upon them.
(1) The term "South Asia" apparently first used by the U.S. State Department after the Second World War to designate all the newly independent states of the area, also includes the three smaller states of Bhutan, Nepal and Maldives.
(2) Lord Horace Curzon, The Place of India in the Empire (London: John Murray, 1909) p. 12.
(3) Zhou Enlai to Nehru, 8 September 1959, White Paper No. II (New Delhi: Indian Ministry of External Affairs, 1959) p. 27.
(4) ibid.; Nehru to Chou En-Lai, 26 September 1959, White Paper No. II (New Delhi: Indian Ministry of External Affairs, 1959) p. 27.
(5) ibid., Appendix I.
(6) Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), vol. 3, p. 227.
(7) ibid., p. 228. These letters were not published by the State Department in the documents included in Foreign Relations, 1961-1963, Volume XIX, South Asia (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996), because the letters have not been declassified by the Indian government.
(8) Gopal, p. 230.
(9) ibid., p. 240.
(10) Mark Juergensmeyer, "The Worldwide Rise of Religious Nationalism," Journal of International Affairs, 50, no. 1 (Summer 1996) p. 15.
(11) U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1990 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990) p. 1426.
(12) Selig Harrison, "The Challenge to Indian Nationalism," Foreign Affairs, 34, no. 3 (April 1956) p. 621.
(13) Report of the States Reorganisation Commission (New Delhi: Government of India, 1955) p. 230.
(14) Donald E. Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963) p. 4.
(15) Ainslie T. Embree, "The Function of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh: To Define the Hindu Nation," in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Accounting for Fundamentalism (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994) pp. 617-652.
(16) ibid., p. 645.
(17) Bharat Wariavwalla, "Die Zerstorung des Muslimtempels und die Problematik des Nationalstaats," Comparativ, Heft 6, (4 January 1994) p. 87 (Author's translation).
(18) Rounaq Jahan, Pakistan: Failure in National Integration (New York: Columbia University, 1972) p. 3.
(19) Muhammad Ali Jinnah, "The Thrust Toward a New Muslim Nation," in Stephen Hay, ed., Sources of Indian Tradition, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) pp. 231-232.
(20) Anwar Syed, Pakistan: Islam, Politics, and National Solidarity (New York: Praeger, 1982) p. 35.
(21) Ali Banuazizi and Myron Weiner, eds., The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986) p. 335.
(22) Stephen Rittenberg, Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Pakhtuns: The Independence Movement in India's North-West Frontier Province (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1988) p. 256.
(23) Jahan, p. 49.
(24) ibid., p. 55.
(25) Muhammad Avub Khan, Friends, Not Masters: A Political Autobiography (Lahore, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 1967) pp. 194-201.
(26) Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan's Political Economy of Defence (Lahore, Pakistan: Vanguard Books, 1991) p. 194.
(27) Golam W. Choudhury, Pakistan: Transition from Military to Civilian Rule (Buckhurst Hill, England: Scorpion, 1988) pp. 245-249.
(28) Howard H. Wriggins, Ceylon: The Dilemmas of a New Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960).
(29) K. M. de Silva and Howard Wriggins, J. R. Jayawardene of Sri Lanka: A Political Biography (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), vol. 2, p. 213.
(30) ibid., p. 607.
(31) ibid.
(32) Wariavwalla, p. 87.
Ainslie T. Embree is professor emeritus of history at Columbia University During his tenure at Columbia, he has been chairman of the History Department, director of the Southern Asian Institute and associate dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. Mr. Embree also served as president of the Association of Asian Studies. From 1978 to 1980, he was counselor for cultural affairs at the American Embassy in Delhi and was special consultant to the Ambassador between 1994 and 1995. His books include India's Search for National Identify; Imagining India: Essays on Indian History and Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in India. He was also editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Asian History.
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http://www.questia.com/PM.qst;jsessionid=G...=o&d=5001526317
by Ainslie Embree
In the vast region now known as South Asia at the beginning of 1997, most of the major states--including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka--have some form of democratic government for the first time since the formal British withdrawal in 1947. All of these nations are engaged in measures of economic liberalization, moving away from government control of resources toward a market economy. All are also seeking, however tentatively, to increase and strengthen interregional relationships.(1) Although democracy, economics and foreign policy have been important, the overarching concern in all the states and the one that shapes all the other issues is the quest for national unity. The process of decolonization that led to the formation of the separate states of South Asia meant that the externally imposed unity of the colonial state had to be replaced by policies that required the assent of the governed.
It is this theme of the search for national unity that will be analyzed in this article through brief examinations of three of the states, with a fourth, Bangladesh, being noted in relation to India and Pakistan. More attention will be given to India, since the same factors that give India a special prominence within the region make it an excellent starting place for considering the South Asia region in general.
The first factor that explains India's prominence in the region is its overwhelming dominance in population, industrial development and military power. Equally important is the geographical factor. Since the state of India comprises almost three-quarters of the subcontinent, which is bound by mountains and seas, it is an "intelligible isolate." A third factor is that the civilizations and cultures of India have made an impression on all the states of the region, despite the other states' own strong indigenous cultural and religious characteristics, such as Islam and Buddhism. A fourth factor giving India a special importance is that all the states in the region, especially the four largest ones, have experienced political trends rooted in what is now the state of India. Beginning with the Mauryan Empire in the fourth century B.C. and continuing into the modern era, political forces have emanated from India throughout the region.
India had a special importance for the British empire and had a legal and political status different from any of the other colonies. It was regarded as the dominating power in the region. Lord Curzon, as governor general, expressed a grandiose but widely held vision of India's hegemony in 1909 when he wrote:
On the west, India must exercise a predominant influence over the destinies
of Persia and Afghanistan; on the north, it can veto any rival in Tibet; on
the north-east it can exert great pressure upon China, and it is one of the
guardians of the autonomous existence of Siam.(2)
This was a dangerous legacy for the Government of India to leave to its successor state, the Republic of India, as the world discovered when India and China quarreled over the borders that had been left by the British. Upon British departure in 1947, India's influence in the area continued when it began to interact with the new border states of Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Sikhim. The word "empire" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "the aggregate of many states under one common head." The British viewed their empire in these terms. Britain had conquered and brought under one rule what was a hackneyed congeries of states and kingdoms in the geographical area that Europeans had called "India" since ancient times. That the official and legal documents usually referred to the "Government of India" and not "India" reflects that the British perceived India as a government, but not a state and certainly not a nation.
Looking back over 50 years of independent statehood in South Asia, one can identify dominant issues and concerns in each of the states. First, a variety of economic strategies emerged, all of which required an active role for the national government. These strategies were devised to address age-old problems of poverty while providing for the infrastructure of a modern state, including defense, communications, education and health services. These strategies were a post-colonial rejection of the laissez-faire economic policies that had characterized British rule.
Second, dominant trends have emerged from the function of religion in national life in all the countries of South Asia. Religion has been closely related to the question of national language. Third, democratic forms of government according to the Western model were established in all the states, although with many modifications. Fourth, foreign relations have been a constant preoccupation. Only recently has cooperation been embraced with the creation of the functionally-limited South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in 1983. Despite South Asia's limited independent history, post-independence regional animosities and the fear of Indian hegemony have prevented the growth of normal economic and cultural contacts. Relations with the wider international community during the Cold War era were focused on the United States, the Soviet Union and China. As noted above, however, all of these concerns of the different South Asian states were deeply affected by the necessity of maintaining territorial integrity while fostering a sense of national consciousness.
India
During India's half-century of independence, the concern for national unity has had two broad aspects. One is the preservation of territorial integrity; which has been tested by wars with China and Pakistan and by internal insurgencies. The other aspect is the creation of a unifying national consciousness and this, in India as elsewhere, has been far more difficult than defending territorial integrity
Indian territorial integrity was challenged first in 1962 when China and India went to war over territories in the Himalayan borderlands. In 1959, Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai suggested that the borders of India were not legitimate because they were drawn by foreign imperialists. He told Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in an accurate and elegant phrase that the border issue was a complicated question left over by history."(3) This was unacceptable to Nehru, who believed the borders were integral to India's sovereignty and to its sense of nationhood.(4) In an official note, the Government of India declared its northern frontier "has lain approximately where it now runs for nearly three thousand years," and that the people within the area it enclosed have always regarded themselves "as Indians and remained within the Indian fold."(5) After the war started, Nehru told a New Delhi audience that it would begin "pushing us into the modern world and make us realize the hard realities."(6)
One of the hard realities for India was that it would be forced to reconsider its non-aligned status in foreign affairs, in order to obtain outside pressure to deflect the Chinese advance. Nehru wrote to U.S. President John F. Kennedy that India's situation was desperate, and asked for large-scale military assistance, including squadrons of supersonic fighters and B-47 bombers.(7) The Chinese ceased their advance, either because of the threat of American involvement, or because they believed they had humiliated India and proved that China, as they put it, "was one head taller than India imagined herself to be."(8)
The 1962 war with China was a turning point in defining India as a nation. Nehru spoke of it as a blessing in disguise because internal disunity had been swept aside by the Chinese threat and the new mood could be used to achieve industrial advances as well as military preparedness.(9)
A variety of militant insurgent movements within India also placed severe strains on the government during the past 50 years. By threatening to secede or demanding a degree of autonomy that the government felt would destroy the nation's unity, insurgencies challenged the government's legitimacy. Countering rebellions was expensive in material and human resources and left bitter memories of alleged brutalities and grave human rights abuses. All Indian administrations since 1947 have believed, however, that violent and secessionist movements should be crushed quickly. Although the numerous insurgencies had different local origins and agendas and affected widely separated areas, the common threads among them were a sense of grievance, often rooted in perceived economic discrimination.
Bonds of language and religion became important characteristics among insurgents because of their belief that the government, in seeking national unity; was trying to replace local traditions with a Hinduized culture. The longest-lasting example of rebellion began soon after independence in the hilly area in the northeast against the tribal people known as Nagas and was occasioned by what the Nagas saw as an attempt to erode their customs, language and religion by the Government of India. Eventually, the government succeeded in forcing a peace settlement, including the creation of a new federal state, Nagaland, in 1963. However, groups of rebels continued to fight until 1978 when they realized defeat was inevitable and consequently agreed to make peace.
The current insurgencies in Kashmir and Punjab are on a much larger scale. The insurgents are far better armed, have more support from a wider constituency, and are given more ideological coherence by potent appeals to loyalties based on religion, language and history. Furthermore, the insurgents in Kashmir and Punjab have allegedly received support from Pakistan, which has fought India three times since 1947. According to conservative estimates, India had committed a quarter million of its armed forces to quelling armed insurrections in the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. The insurgencies are carried on by many separate groups with different aims and without a unified command. Some want a union with Pakistan, some want independence, and others might settle for a high degree of autonomy within India. This is not an open war between India and Pakistan, but two previous wars between the two countries involved in Kashmir. There is always a danger that a new war may ensue, now with the added peril that both nations could develop and use nuclear weapons.
India's insistence that the accession of the state of Jammu and Kashmir is a closed issue and that its partition or secession cannot be discussed as part of any solution to the problem has angered Pakistan. However, this stance reflects India's fundamental view of its statehood. Indian leaders argue that permitting self-determination to the Kashmiris would lead to a demand from ethnic groups within India to secede, destroying the fabric of the nation's unity. Indian leaders, including Nehru, have argued repeatedly that a concession to a Muslim majority in Kashmir would lead to a new outburst of communal violence against Muslims in India, especially now that Hindu nationalism is ascending. One thing is reasonably certain: In the foreseeable future, India will violently resist any secessionist attempts or movements for greater autonomy that threaten the state's territorial integrity and stability
While the Kashmir situation attracted more international attention because of the threat of war from Pakistan's involvement, armed insurgency in Punjab in the 1980s probably affected the people of India more directly Punjab has historically been part of the Indian heartland. It is also one of the most prosperous and progressive Indian states. The conventional explanation of the insurgency was that it originated in a power struggle between political leaders in the Akali Dal party and the ruling party, the Indian National Congress. The Akali Dal represent Sikhs.
However, the element that gave the insurgency its violence and passion was the dynamic leadership of a militant young religious leader, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, and his followers who began a crusade against the enemies of Sikhism. These were identified as the elderly Sikh leaders who had grown weak in the faith and, above all, the external enemy, the Government of India, which was seen in religious terms as a Hindu power inimical to Sikhism. What has been called "the logic of religious violence" took over and a religious cause legitimized violence, "for the language of warfare, of fighting and dying for a cause, is appropriate and endemic to the realm of religion."(10) As elsewhere, the opportunity for religiously sanctioned violence appealed strongly to young men who felt marginalized by the economic and social changes taking place in the Punjab. They became recruits for a campaign that led to the murder of many thousands of civilians and, in the attempts by the authorities to end the insurgency, the death or disappearance of thousands of militants.(11) Human rights groups, both in India and abroad, have reported that the security forces adopted brutal methods, including torture, detention without trials, and summary killings of suspected militants and of civilians who may have helped them. However upsetting, the authorities now point to a return to elected government and normal conditions throughout the state by 1992 to justify their harsh actions during the insurgency.
While preservation of its territorial integrity from external enemies and internal insurgencies taxed the nation's energies and resources, conflicts over the creation of a sense of a national identity consensus through language and religion have also strained the unity of the nation. In regions, both language and religion have been rallying points for national unity, but in India as elsewhere in South Asia, they also have often been divisive.
The choice of Hindi, the most widely spoken of India's 12 major languages, as the national language provoked bitter debates in the Constituent Assembly and throughout the country in 1948 and 1949. But the demand in the 1950s for the creation of linguistic states posed an even greater threat to Indian unity The states, or provinces as they had been known during British rule, had been formed largely for administrative convenience or as a result of conquests at different periods, but in 1920 the Indian National Congress demanded that the country be divided into states that reflected the language and culture of the different regions.
The subject was raised again shortly after independence, but Nehru postponed action, seeing that the formation of linguistic states posed a threat to Indian unity by emphasizing regional, not national, loyalties. There were serious outbreaks of violence as powerful groups in the different regions pressed for linguistic states. In a revealing statement, Nehru said how dismayed he was as he watched what was happening in the country. The struggle that had gone on for a free and united India seemed to be endangered and he was, "face to face with the centuries old India of narrow loyalties, petty jealousies and ignorant prejudices engaged in mortal conflict and we were simply horrified to see how thin was the ice upon which we were skating."(12)
The process of reorganization was finally resolved, with most of the country eventually divided on the basis of the dominant language group in the different regions. Those involved in the process were aware of how potentially dangerous this was to the unity of the country The States Reorganization Commission noted in its report that a unitary form of government with the divisions based on purely administrative considerations would have been the best solution, but, mindful of the violence the demand for linguistic states had created, the report concluded in laconic understatement that, "in the existing circumstances, this approach would be somewhat unrealistic."(13)
The issue of religion is potentially more divisive than language. A carefully worded statement on the right to freedom of religion was included in the constitution of India. In 1977, a constitutional amendment interpreting the freedom of religion clause declared that India was a secular state. In the Indian constitutional usage, a secular state is defined as one that guarantees freedom of worship, treats individuals as citizens irrespective of religious affiliation, and does not support any particular religion.(14) This insistence on India as a secular state was a recognition of the religious pluralism of Indian society, which includes 700 million Hindus, 125 million Muslims, 21 million Christians, and 18 million Sikhs. The partition that created Pakistan on the basis of religion led in a few months to the killing of half a million people, both Hindus and Muslims, and a migration from one country to the other of perhaps 12 million people. Beyond that trauma, numerous communal riots have led to the deaths of many hundreds of people. Because of the bitter realities of violence associated with religious identity, a secular identity seemed necessary.
Nonetheless, in a direct challenge to the secular state, many well-organized groups argued that secularism undermined the only true basis of Indian nationality, Hinduism. The overwhelming majority of Indians, these groups argued, identified themselves as Hindu--participants in the culture that deeply molded Indian civilization, not just in terms of religious practices, but in art, literature and styles of living. The most vigorous exponent of this definition of Indian nationality was a powerful organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, and its many related groups, most notably the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which in the past 15 years has emerged as a major force in Indian electoral politics.
The leaders of such groups are often referred to as "Hindu fundamentalists," suggesting a primarily religious motivation, but this term is misleading. "Hindu nationalists" is a more accurate description, for their aim is not to create a theocratic state, run by priests as spokesmen for a deity Rather, it is to create a modern nation-state in which the ideology of Hindu nationalism, to which they have given the name "Hindutva," would be the guiding force for national unity. The proponents of this nationalism identify as its enemies the religious and cultural traditions of Islam and Christianity, aided by the advocates for secularism in what they regard as the denationalized, Westernized Indian elites.(15)
This conflict over the nature of Indian nationalism was dramatized in December 1992, when a mob of militant Hindu nationalists destroyed the Babri Masjid, a mosque believed to have been built by the Mughal Emperor Babur between 1526 and 1530 on the site of the birthplace of Lord Rama, a widely venerated deity The destruction of the mosque was seen as a dramatic assertion of the victory of the Hindu nation over the Muslims, who had once conquered India centuries earlier. In the next few days, riots broke out in a number of towns and cities, most notably in Mumbai (Bombay), where hundreds of people, mostly Muslims, were killed. India is unhappily accustomed to violence, but these events appeared to signal "a shift away from the fragile political consensus of religious neutrality, the secular state, that held together the diverse ethnic, religious, and social communities since independence, toward the new configuration of a Hindu nation."(16)
Cultural symbols deeply rooted in the dominant cultural tradition have a powerful unifying potential, but, given the diversity of Indian society, Hindu nationalism has difficulty finding a unifying voice. Many members of the Hindu upper classes view Hindu nationalism as a deeply divisive force, while the lowest classes view it as an attempt to restore historic patterns of upper caste dominance and the Muslims see it a threat to their existence as a community. For these reasons, a careful political analyst concludes, "unless the democratic system breaks down, or there is a major external crisis, Hindutva nationalism cannot sweep the country."(17) While this is probably true for immediate electoral prospects, there can be little doubt that Hindu nationalism will continue to have enormous appeal, even if it does not express itself overtly in the electoral victory of a specific party.
Pakistan
Shortly after the secession of Bangladesh in 1971, Professor Rounaq Jahan summarized the problems of Pakistan by noting that the difficulties of nation-building were compounded by the fact that the ruling elites had to perform simultaneously the two independent, and at times contradictory, tasks of state-building and nation-building.(18) India inherited a functioning state when it became independent, symbolized by the grandeur of New Delhi, while Pakistan had to make do with the hastily cobbled together facilities in the temporary capital of Karachi.
In terms of state-building, the first 10 years of Pakistan's existence can be characterized as an attempt to govern a country with a population of about 75 million (in 1950) divided into two areas separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory, with an unstable power structure. The structure consisted of a Constituent Assembly of 79 members as a central government, a governor-general with great executive power, elected provincial assemblies in the four provinces in West Pakistan and one in East Pakistan, a civil bureaucracy and a military establishment.
From the beginning, three issues posed a challenge to both state-building and nation-building. The first was the position of Islam as the dominant ideology of Pakistan. The second issue posing a challenge to state- and nation-building was the existence of regional differences within Pakistan. A third source of conflict was how power was to be shared within the governing structure.
The irony of the nation-building process was that Pakistan, unlike India, seemed to begin with an accessible and easily comprehended unifying ideology of Pakistan as a homeland for Muslims in South Asia. This was the point Muhammad Ali Jinnah made in 1943 when consolidating his claim to be spokesman for India's Muslims. Envisioning a Muslim homeland, he declared, "Never before in the history of the world, has a nation rallied around a common platform and a common ideal in such a short time as the Muslims have done in this vast subcontinent.... Never before has the mental outlook of a nation been unified so effectively."(19)
Why was the outcome so different from this vision, which had some basis in reality? The answer is surely that an appeal to found a nation on Islam, or indeed on any religion, in a region as complex as the Indian subcontinent would face enormous difficulties. What was wrong with Jinnah's vision was spelled out with brutal clarity by Maulana Maududi, a powerful theologian, when he reminded Jinnah that true Muslims did not believe in government by the majority, but rulership by God under the laws of Islam, not those made by a democratic majority: "In the sight of God, Muslim nationalism is just as cursed as Indian nationalism."(20)
The failure of Islam as a political ideology to create a unified nation was shown with shattering force in the secession of East Bengal and its emergence as the new nation of Bangladesh in 1971. Even before this, however, Islam became a source of disunity as attempts were made to spell out its place in the national life. There were a number of contentious issues that illustrated the divisiveness of Islam in South Asia. One was defining the nature of the new state. Pakistan has enacted four constitutions in 30 years, with many revisions. The first one, adopted in 1956, saw Pakistan as a modern, democratic state. Yet, it was also to be an Islamic Republic, with no laws repugnant to Islam. As one scholar has noted, ideologically Pakistan was suspended, "between the ambiguity of her founder's call for a Muslim homeland and the varying expectations of the majority of the populace for an Islamic state."(21)
The regional conflicts that emerged after the formation of Pakistan were related to the new political arrangements, but as Stephen Rittenberg has shown in his study of the independence movement of the North-West Frontier Province, they were rooted in ethnic and tribal differences within the region itself as well as with the larger arena of the nation. The major tribal group in the province, the Pakhtuns, had ethnic loyalties and social organization that "have given provincial politics a stability which has survived the periodic upheavals in Pakistani politics since independence."(22) This was true in large measure of the other three divisions of West Pakistan--Sind, Baluchistan and Punjab--but stability for dominant groups within each of them meant friction with each other and with the central government. The largest of the provinces, East Pakistan, with a greater population than the rest of the provinces combined, was to become the test case for national unity, since from the beginning this region was marked from the beginning by a sense of alienation from West Pakistan.
There were many complaints of unequal treatment in the allocation of government resources and of positions within the military and the civil bureaucracy, but the clearest indication of the depth of this bitterness came, as it had elsewhere in South Asia, over the issue of a national language. East Pakistan was the most linguistically homogenous region in South Asia, with the overwhelming majority of the people speaking Bengali. But the central government decided to make Urdu, widely regarded as an "Islamic language," the national language of Pakistan. Student groups protested the imposition of Urdu and demanded that Bengali also be recognized as a national language. This student activism represented a wider unrest in society and, in 1956, Bengali was declared a national language along with Urdu. By this time, however, more than a sub-nationalism had developed: Articulate leaders were demanding social change and autonomy for East Pakistan. This first phase of Bangladeshi separatism, dependent upon free elections and political representation was halted when "the established political institutions were swept aside, and the civil-military bureaucracy, in which Bengal representation was minimal, assumed power in the country."(23)
The abrogation of civil power was the result of the third source of conflict within Pakistan, a struggle for power within its governing structure, particularly after the new constitution came into force in 1956, giving elected representatives more power. General Ayub Khan, who assumed power, justified the military takeover in 1958 on the grounds that the state was in danger of collapse, as it was torn by regional animosities, religious strife and racial differences. In their mad rush for power, the elected politicians whom he had overthrown, had shown that "the country and the people could go to the dogs as far as they were concerned."(24) The ulema, or Muslim religious leaders, were also to blame, for instead of Islam promoting the unity of the country, their version of the faith was dividing it. The ulema, Khan argued, were against the creation of a modern state because they feared power would pass from them to the educated classes. Khan asserted that what was needed to unify the country was a strong central government that would encourage industrialization in order to raise the standard of living of the poor, give Pakistan a place in the world and end the bickering of corrupt politicians.(25)
A somewhat different, and persuasive, reading of the reasons for military rule has been given by Ayesha Jalal. While not denying the effect of politicians on the political process, she suggests that the alliance of civil bureaucrats and the military was stretching the "ambit of central authority in order to give a long delayed impetus to their ambitious plans to industrialize and militarize Pakistan, while at the same time nurturing their own recently forged links in the international arena."(26) Ayub was forced from office, however, partly because of the failure of his regime to meet the economic needs of the masses and partly because he was unable to maintain an alliance among the military, the bureaucrats and the industrialists whom he had encouraged.
Ayub was succeeded not by a civilian but by another military leader, General Yayha Khan, against whom East Pakistan revolted. Yayha Khan's government responded with startling brutality, killing perhaps a million civilians, but India's intervention led to the defeat of the Pakistan Army and the emergence of a new country, Bangladesh. Pakistan is not and never was, in the pejorative phrase attributed to Henry Kissinger, a "basket case," but its simultaneous search for statehood and national identity has been a daunting task.
Pakistan's military defeat in East Pakistan by India in 1971 led to the fall of Yayha Khan and the establishment of a civilian government under Zulfiqar Bhutto, who attempted to move the state away from its heavy dependence on the military. His failure was dramatized by the seizure of power by the military in 1977 under General Zia, again on the grounds that the civilian politicians did not have the ability to maintain law and order. Bhutto was arrested and executed in 1979 on a murder charge.
General Zia's regime attempted to give unity to a dispirited and divided country through a vigorous program of Islamization, combined with economic development and strict control of the press and political parties. Islamization meant an attempt to introduce traditional Islamic law and social customs, as spelled out in detail in an ordinance in June 1988, making shari a (revealed law) the supreme law of the land.(27) This met little resistance from the masses, who followed such customs in any case, but the educated elites regarded such efforts as a futile attempt to impose standards that ran counter to the thrust of modernity. General Zia's death in an airplane crash in 1988 led to a return to civilian government and the re-emergence of electoral politics, which resulted in the election in 1988 of Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the executed former prime minister. The president of Pakistan, Sardar Leghari, dismissed her from office during her second term in 1996 for misgovernence and corruption. To some observers, her subsequent electoral defeat in February 1997 seemed to replicate the fate of other civilian governments at the hands of the military, even if behind the scenes. Others, more optimistic about electoral politics, saw it as the ability of the president, in a use of constitutional powers validated by the Supreme Court, to safeguard the state.
Sri Lanka
While the danger of disunity in South Asia from religious, linguistic and ethnic differences have always been stressed in the rest of South Asia before independence, there seems to have been little perception of such danger in Sri Lanka, either by the British rulers or the leaders of political parties, until it became independent in ! 948. In contrast to the fearful communal killings that marked the birth of statehood in India, Pakistan and eventually Bangladesh, the transfer of power in Sri Lanka was remarkably peaceful. The government of the first prime minister, D.S. Senanayake, concentrated on the economic development of a society characterized by high literacy, a developed political system and a social order where the division between rich and poor was not as striking as elsewhere on the subcontinent.(28)
There were, however, very powerful forces at work within the island that combined to threaten the existence of the unitary state established in 1948. Economically, the country was faced with growing unemployment and the inability of the government to pay for the extensive social welfare programs. These problems became involved with ethnic, religious, and linguistic issues as well as struggles for power between the two families that dominated Sri Lankan politics, the Bandaranaikes and the Senanayakes.
The most explosive issue was the question of making Sinhala, the language of the ethnic majority, the Sinhalese, the national language. The appeal of Sinhala--and its potential for disunity--was increased by the fact that it was closely identified with Buddhism, the religion of the Sinhalese majority. If this came to be the case, English would cease to play its traditional role in government, education and business. The disadvantaged group would be the Tamil-speaking minority, about 18 percent of the population, which was mainly Hindu by religion. The Tamils had originated in Tamilnadu in south India, some having come to Sri Lanka many centuries before, while others had come in the 19th century during the period of British rule. They form the majority of the population in Jaffna, the northern district of the island.
Perhaps the clearest way to summarize the development of fierce ethnic antagonism leading to violence that threatened to overwhelm the state is through a brief chronology. In 1956, Bandaranaike's government moved to fulfill election promises to make Sinhala the only official national language and to recognize Buddhism as the national religion. This movement received militant support from the bhikkhus, the monks who had great influence in the countryside. Rioting broke out in 1958, in which hundreds of Tamils were killed.
In 1971, a serious insurrection that had no direct connection with the language issue exploded when bands of students, known as the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP), who were not supported by any major political party, began an attack on government institutions. The government had inadequate arms to fight back, but quickly received help from India, the United States and Great Britain. The insurrection was halted only after an estimated 15,000 insurgents were killed. Although the government won, in the judgment of two scholars with exceptional access to sources in Sri Lanka, there is no mistaking the historical significance of the insurrection: "It was the harbinger of political violence on an unprecedented scale ... of which groups of Tamil activists (in the period 1975 onwards) have been the most prominent exponents."(29) Furthermore, the JVP was not fully crushed, and in the 1980s continued to assassinate political leaders.
Groups of young Tamils, melding language grievances and claims of economic discrimination, became increasingly violent and, appealing to ethnic separatism, they demanded independence for the Jaffna region. After 13 soldiers were killed by the Tamil militants in 1983, fierce riots broke out in other areas of the island, and thousands of Tamils were killed. From this point on, the Tamil insurrection ceased to be an internal affair and became a regional one, with India as a major player. It was well known that the militants, especially the most violent group, known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were being trained and armed into a formidable guerrilla force in the Indian state of Tamilnadu, a few miles across the Palk Strait from Jaffna, with the knowledge of the Indian government.(30) Out of desperation, but with considerable political courage given that there was intense anti-Indian sentiment in Sri Lanka, President J.R. Jayawardene sought an accord with India governing the deployment of Indian armed forces known as the Indian Peace Keeping Force. However, this well-armed force had little success in controlling the LTTE. In the face of strong criticism from within Sri Lanka, the Indian government withdrew the Indian Peace Keeping Force, with memories of the problems that the Soviet Union encountered in Afghanistan and the United States in Vietnam when fighting determined guerrillas.
Sri Lanka's long agony continued, despite high hopes raised by peace talks in early 1995 between the LTTE leaders and the Sri Lankan government. In the summer of 1996, the LTTE, although driven out of the towns and into the jungles, killed more than 1,000 soldiers at an army base. According to Marshall Singer, the model for the LTTE leaders is the situation in Israel: The Israelis' only hope for peace was to agree to a settlement in Gaza and on the West Bank, which they may see as "something short of a separate country," but "the Palestinians see it as an independent state."(31)
Conclusion
Is there any conclusion that can be drawn from 50 years--which is a long time in the life of any modern notion--of the dual quest for statehood and nationhood by the major states of South Asia, with their vast populations, material resources, and immensely rich legacy of civilization? One is, of course, that none have succumbed to the pressures of insurrections, civil wars and militant movements for secession. This is true even of Pakistan, which lost half of its population but retained the framework of the original state. Another conclusion is one drawn by an Indian analyst, Bharat Wariavwalla. Surveying the insurrections and secessionist movements in India, he argues that they have resulted from the attempt to impose a concept of "nation" upon India's many ancient communities, leading ironically to disunity, rather than the unity that was sought. According to this view, Kashmir and Punjab are the price paid for trying to create "an imaginary nation" out of South Asia's deeply rooted multiculturalism.(32) One may sense the validity of this argument looking at the history of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, while at the same time recognizing that the loose federalism that it suggests may be unacceptable to their leaders after half a century of striving to create unitary states and to impose nationhood upon them.
(1) The term "South Asia" apparently first used by the U.S. State Department after the Second World War to designate all the newly independent states of the area, also includes the three smaller states of Bhutan, Nepal and Maldives.
(2) Lord Horace Curzon, The Place of India in the Empire (London: John Murray, 1909) p. 12.
(3) Zhou Enlai to Nehru, 8 September 1959, White Paper No. II (New Delhi: Indian Ministry of External Affairs, 1959) p. 27.
(4) ibid.; Nehru to Chou En-Lai, 26 September 1959, White Paper No. II (New Delhi: Indian Ministry of External Affairs, 1959) p. 27.
(5) ibid., Appendix I.
(6) Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), vol. 3, p. 227.
(7) ibid., p. 228. These letters were not published by the State Department in the documents included in Foreign Relations, 1961-1963, Volume XIX, South Asia (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996), because the letters have not been declassified by the Indian government.
(8) Gopal, p. 230.
(9) ibid., p. 240.
(10) Mark Juergensmeyer, "The Worldwide Rise of Religious Nationalism," Journal of International Affairs, 50, no. 1 (Summer 1996) p. 15.
(11) U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1990 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990) p. 1426.
(12) Selig Harrison, "The Challenge to Indian Nationalism," Foreign Affairs, 34, no. 3 (April 1956) p. 621.
(13) Report of the States Reorganisation Commission (New Delhi: Government of India, 1955) p. 230.
(14) Donald E. Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963) p. 4.
(15) Ainslie T. Embree, "The Function of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh: To Define the Hindu Nation," in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Accounting for Fundamentalism (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994) pp. 617-652.
(16) ibid., p. 645.
(17) Bharat Wariavwalla, "Die Zerstorung des Muslimtempels und die Problematik des Nationalstaats," Comparativ, Heft 6, (4 January 1994) p. 87 (Author's translation).
(18) Rounaq Jahan, Pakistan: Failure in National Integration (New York: Columbia University, 1972) p. 3.
(19) Muhammad Ali Jinnah, "The Thrust Toward a New Muslim Nation," in Stephen Hay, ed., Sources of Indian Tradition, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) pp. 231-232.
(20) Anwar Syed, Pakistan: Islam, Politics, and National Solidarity (New York: Praeger, 1982) p. 35.
(21) Ali Banuazizi and Myron Weiner, eds., The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986) p. 335.
(22) Stephen Rittenberg, Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Pakhtuns: The Independence Movement in India's North-West Frontier Province (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1988) p. 256.
(23) Jahan, p. 49.
(24) ibid., p. 55.
(25) Muhammad Avub Khan, Friends, Not Masters: A Political Autobiography (Lahore, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 1967) pp. 194-201.
(26) Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan's Political Economy of Defence (Lahore, Pakistan: Vanguard Books, 1991) p. 194.
(27) Golam W. Choudhury, Pakistan: Transition from Military to Civilian Rule (Buckhurst Hill, England: Scorpion, 1988) pp. 245-249.
(28) Howard H. Wriggins, Ceylon: The Dilemmas of a New Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960).
(29) K. M. de Silva and Howard Wriggins, J. R. Jayawardene of Sri Lanka: A Political Biography (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), vol. 2, p. 213.
(30) ibid., p. 607.
(31) ibid.
(32) Wariavwalla, p. 87.
Ainslie T. Embree is professor emeritus of history at Columbia University During his tenure at Columbia, he has been chairman of the History Department, director of the Southern Asian Institute and associate dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. Mr. Embree also served as president of the Association of Asian Studies. From 1978 to 1980, he was counselor for cultural affairs at the American Embassy in Delhi and was special consultant to the Ambassador between 1994 and 1995. His books include India's Search for National Identify; Imagining India: Essays on Indian History and Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in India. He was also editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Asian History.
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