Vernon Hewitt
Since the Partition and Independence of the British Indian Empire in 1947, and the subsequent Independence of Ceylon in 1948, academic literature on the international politics of South Asia has proliferated, especially since the 1998 nuclear tests. Issues such as nuclear weaponisation, religious and ethnic violence, revolutionary movements, Islamic “terrorists,” and “failing states” have informed—or distorted—debates on what constitutes South Asia, prospects for peace and stability in the states of the region, and how and to what extent events and policies can be effectively influenced by outside sources—primarily the west, and specifically, US administrations.1
Although characterized by a series of diverging theoretical positions, this literature has been predominantly realist or neorealist in orientation. This has had a peculiar and unfortunate effect on the significance of South Asia in and of itself, reducing it to a systemic understanding of the international system as seen primarily from somewhere else.2 This predominantly static and ahistorical approach precludes any interesting or relevant discussion between, say, the nature of state formation in South Asia, the links between the state and domestic politics, how domestic politics is influenced directly by international non-state actors (and vice versa), or the role of cultural or ideational factors on policy or process.3 The view that South Asian elites have of the international system itself is deemed irrelevant since all states are the same, and the determining factor is international anarchy and the way this determines state behavior.4 Even within neoliberal and behavioral approaches, “states have fixed identities and interests … they are rational egoists that seek to maximize their long-term utility gains and … this can best be achieved when states harness themselves to cooperative norms”5 through international organizations and conventions.
This chapter will argue that the “naturalization” of the state is, for South Asia, singularly unhelpful in dealing with a part of the world where state formation has been derivative, and where formal sovereignty was granted (or won) at a unique moment in the international system, namely, the end of European primacy, the rapid retreat from empire, and the rise of bipolarity.6 Scholarship in the 1990s has, reassuringly, moved to problematize the links among the states, territoriality, sovereignty, nationalism, and community in ways that take history seriously and open the way for a more sociologically informed debate as to how “state–society complexes are agents that both constitute and are in turn constituted by, sociodomestic and international global structures,”7 This dialectic interest in agency– structure–agency must also consider non-materialist sources of power, such as culture and religion, if it is to have any real utility.
Influenced by post-structural and postmodern trends within international relations, recent scholarship has sought to “recover the roots of social constructs and categories of action by tracing the knowledgeable activities of culturally inscribed but strategic actors and the sometimes accidental turns that underline and define historical processes.”8 This is vital for an area of the world where “the artificial vivisection of British India created two states, India and Pakistan, with several nations and parts thereof, as well as multiple ethnies within them.”9 The “constructivist” turn in nationalist literature shows how nationalist elites inherited states that were, in effect, created by the colonial powers, and gave priority to the challenges of state and nation building posed for societies that were extremely pluralistic. It also reveals the social and cultural impact of colonial modernity that synchronized the emergence of local, regional, and “national” imaginations of the community at around the same historical moment.10 As such, the dynamics that drive the international politics of South Asia are not primarily derived from the international system but almost equally “rooted in contending national and ethnic claims and the failure of the state to capture the loyalty of its citizens.”11
The state is a constructed and contested concept. The degree and nature of this contestation critically affects the foreign policy of the states of South Asia, which must be concerned as much with securing the state from its own populations as from other states, and from competing subnationalist claims and ethnic separatism.12 In deconstructing the state, the study of international relations has begun to accommodate the rich ethnographic and subaltern approaches that stress the significance of domestic politics and identity formation, how the state is “experienced and perceived” by local elites competing for scarce cultural and material resources. As Jeremy Gould recently noted: “[T]he state in recent anthropological interest is less an efficacious regulatory force, than a quasi mythical entity with which competing actors attempt to associate and thus legitimate their claims to public authority.”13 Such recent turns within the field of international relations have done much to end the static ahistoricism and crude positivism of the Waltzian “real world” approach to studying international politics, although one may still puzzle why it took quite so long.
The impact of British colonialism on South Asia was contradictory and profoundly uneven. From 1857 onwards, part of the modernizing project was to reform society along lines already experienced in the west, including the creation of elected, institutionalized forms of government, representative of the subcontinent’s religious, ethnic, and social diversity as initially conceived by the British, while protective of British material interest.14 Another part was a desire to shield aspects of so-called “traditional” society from the impact of modernity and the “inappropriateness” of capitalism and majoritarian forms of democratic practice. Informed partly by preconceived notions of Orientalism, the importance of religion, and the distinctiveness of a Hindu majority from minority Muslim practices, and partly by what was evidently important to social elites and communities collaborating with the British state, the path of colonial reform by the early twentieth century thus faced in two quite contradictory directions.15
The British created a powerful state with a commitment to democracy and individual rights, but rights that were also subordinated to collective or communal identities. These were defined through separate electorates, nomination to legislative bodies, and the preservation of so-called traditional rulers.The British created a state that was administratively centralized, but in other ways federal, in which individual provinces or states were guaranteed rights in a written constitution interpreted by a supreme court. Yet they also created a state that contained, until the final moments of Independence, pre-Westphalian sovereign entities known collectively as Princely India, the most significant one being the Princely State of Jammu & Kashmir. Two-fifths of the British Indian Empire consisted of feudal entities embedded within the Raj. In the cases of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim, the British sought solely to protect traditional societies rather than modernize and transform them.
The consequences that followed from these conflicting ideologies of the Raj16 led, at Independence, to the formation of a regionalized state system, and not, as the British had hoped, a single sovereign state cemented to Britain through an active, militarily-defined commonwealth that would ensure Britain’s continuing role as a great power.17 The Partition of India was a product of elite negotiation among leaders, the status of some of whom had been defined in relation to communal categories recognized by the British; disagreements between Muslim minority and majority provinces; and intra-elite disputes over the spoils of central office. It created two states that were to have quite differing capacities to govern themselves, and two quite different personalities within the international system. The driving process behind colonial disengagement was the speedy collapse of British authority and will to govern as much as it was the mass resistance to British colonial authority.18 This collapse was in part a product of the Second World War, and increased US pressure on British colonial reformers from the late 1930s, but it was structured by a massive victory in Britain for a socialist Labor government committed to granting India full sovereign independence as quickly as possible. Independence was facilitated by the change in the international system from one dominated by a European empire to one shaped by the emerging Cold War.19
The carving out of East and West Pakistan, between June and August 1947, as a separate state for the Muslims of South Asia, seems now less the product of Jinnah’s articulation of the two-nation theory, premised on Muslim minority fears of Hindu domination, than a bungled attempt by the Muslim League to assure a weakly federal India with significant power vested in the provinces.20 It was not desired in principle by the British or, in its actual form—the creation of two widely separated new states comprising in both wings much less territory than claimed—by the Muslim leadership. The territorial configuration of Pakistan did not even map onto areas of electoral support for the League, or to areas that shared any cultural or linguistic similarities other than that they were majority Muslim areas defined crudely by the two boundary commissions coordinated and entirely dominated by Sir Cyril Radcliffe.
In some areas, such as the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the League was a relatively marginal political actor with little legitimacy. Even if it is accepted that Jinnah wanted a separate state, he was ambiguous about what the Muslim “nation” would be: religious or secular, pluralist or homogenous. Where societal pressures existed to mobilize support for Muslim separatism, it did so independently of the League’s central leadership.21 The process of state formation left a significant minority of Muslims behind in India, even after approximately nine million mohajirs (refugees), Urdu speakers, migrated to a “homeland” that was largely unknown. As such, Pakistan was founded by an émigré nationalist movement, and facilitated by the end of empire that created an impasse between regional and national identities as well as disputes over federal and confederal ideas of sovereignty.22 The formation of India and Pakistan thus prefigured the difficulties of ethnic irredentism that would characterize Africa from the late 1950s, where cartographic lines crossed cultural and linguistic communities, and where notional territorial sovereignty did not match the much weaker coercive, extractive, and institutional attributes of the Weberian state.23
“Fixing” the boundary was bewildering. Disputes followed between Pakistan and Afghanistan, with particular reference to the Pathan-speaking areas in the NWFP, with Iran over Baloch nationalist identities, and with India over several areas in Gujarat, the Thar desert, and in the northeast with reference to Assam and the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). India and China disputed significant areas of India’s northeast (tucked in behind East Pakistan), the status of Tibet, and the role of both states with reference to Nepal. Preliminary drafts of the boundary commission gave Chittagong and Lahore to India, while the final award, published the day after Independence, left numerous ethnic enclaves such as Gurdaspur and Sylhet arguably in the “wrong” state. Even on the island of Ceylon, the close proximity of the Tamils of southern India, from the Jaffna peninsula through the Palk straits, troubled Sinhalese Buddhists concerning Tamil nationalism as much as it concerned Nehru over Dravidian separatism in the South. But the critical divide was Partition itself.
India and Pakistan were born amid animosity, recrimination over the partition of the Raj’s financial and military resources, and with an actual armed conflict taking place in the Jhelum Valley.The regional state system was heavily dominated by India, which inherited over 70 percent of the territory of the British Indian Empire, and over 77 percent of its industrial and institutional capacity. Whatever the contradictions and tensions within the Indian National Congress over issues of secularism, the role of language, and the exact constitutional balance within an inherited federal structure, it was a more homogenous entity than the League24 and it had greater legitimacy and a more coherent (albeit improvised) idea of what it wanted its nation to look and feel like.25 Both states were relatively poor, but the physical imbalance between them was telling even in 1949. Each remained linked to the British Commonwealth, but British impartiality and weakness failed to resolve their disagreements, and their disagreements further marginalized the relevance of the commonwealth in South Asia.26
The Kashmir conflict of 1947–49 illustrated the tensions inherent in seeking to fix state boundaries free of any pre-existing local or regional consensus, and where loyalties to the prince were overlapping, feudal in origin, and in the case of the Poonch district, in active rebellion.27 Social and political movements acting to their own agenda, even with covert support from a neighbor, reveal the dynamics of state and non-state agency that were to bedevil the region through to the 1999 Kargil conflict, and beyond. Kashmir remains central to understanding the emergent relationship between India and Pakistan, and how the lines of foreign alliances radiated out from the centrality of this conflict to the international system.
The process of resolving princely India was botched by the British, who, having shored up the princes as a bulwark against nationalist sentiment, swiftly abandoned them in 1946. Having been reassured that, once their treaty obligations to the British were laid aside, they would revert to sovereign entities, the British political department proceeded to bully the princes into deciding which one of the two proto-dominions they wanted to join. The decision appeared to be one of princely fiat, but even this degree of agency was compromised by the overriding demand for geopolitical contiguity for the new states that was demanded by both the Congress and the League.28 Where the princes were of a differing religious persuasion from their subjects, these two principles clashed.The Nawab of Deccan Hyderabad was a Muslim presiding over an overwhelming by Hindu population. He was also situated in the middle of Indian territory. To Nehru’s outrage, he initially opted for Pakistan, made a dash for independence, and then was finally incorporated into the Indian Union.This drama was played out in a number of locations in the panic and drama of Independence.29 In Kashmir, the situation was reversed, with the Dogra Rajput Hindus residing in an overwhelmingly Muslim Vale, and with diverse communities of Muslims and Buddhists throughout the kingdom. Moreover, Jammu & Kashmir was the only significant princely state that was so located as to be contiguous to both new states and thus be able, in principle, to join either India or Pakistan.30
The Maharaja of Jammu & Kashmir first sought independence as a sovereign state, but then, faced with ongoing unrest in Poonch, and tribal incursions from the NWFP (i.e., from Pakistan) ostensibly to aid fellow Muslims, he opted for India with the promise of imminent military aid. There followed significant confusion over the exact sequence of events, and over the exact meaning of the Indian offer to hold a plebiscite to settle the dispute once the violence in the valley had abated and Pakistani forces withdrawn.31 The allegation that “Pakistan” instigated a covert tribal invasion is undermined by the weakness and incoherence of Pakistan at the time. The support by the National Conference Party—a popular movement in the Valley itself—for Nehru and the Congress, which is well attested in Indian historiography, meanwhile underplays the desire for independence as a sovereign socialist state, and an “idea of Kashmir” that places Sheikh Abdullah, a sunni Muslim with a secularist outlook, closer to the Hindu Maharaja and to Jinnah than to Nehru. The portrayal of Muslim interests as being pro-Pakistan likewise downplays the desires of many leading politicians, later presidents within Azad (Pakistan-administered) Kashmir, to create an independent state as well. This apparent consensus in favor of independence, however, was compromised by the fact that differing actors imagined different forms of national sovereignty.32
With the arrival of Pakistani troops into Baltistan, the Kashmir war became an overt “interdominion” conflict, initially—and bizarrely—involving British commanding officers on both sides. In an attempt to display international leadership, partly in the naive conviction that India’s position was above reproach, Nehru referred the crisis to the UN Security Council, after which, in 1949, a ceasefire was declared that effectively partitioned the state. India was left in control of roughly two-thirds of Jammu & Kashmir, including the Vale, with its nearly 90 percent Muslim population. India resented subsequent UN involvement, suspecting US and British support for Pakistan.
Much has been made of the fact that the inclusion of a Muslim-majority province in India provided an essential litmus test of secularism, while the exclusion of such a province made a mockery of Pakistan as the state for the Muslims of South Asia. Other arguments, strategic and geopolitical, were advanced that supported either the Indian or Pakistani position, while gradually a “third way,” namely the idea of a Kashmir separate from both Pakistan and India, reemerged in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1965 Pakistan launched a series of covert infiltrations across the ceasefire line on the eve of Operation Gibraltar—the code name for the Pakistani attack on Indian-administered Kashmir—but a second armed conflict failed to resolve the issue. In 1971, in response to Indian support for the Bangla rebels, Pakistan attacked parts of western India. The resulting conflict did not significantly change ground realities.The Shimla Accord of 1972 converted the ceasefire line into a Line of Control, an attempted “soft border” that sought to compromise the requirements of statehood with shared cultural and social communities on either side, and remove the issue from the clutches of the UN. Nonetheless, both India and Pakistan set about furthering the integration of their respective parts of Kashmir into their state structures and nationalist narratives. Pakistan continued to seek international support for sustaining the dispute, and to counterbalance India’s perceived hegemonic strategy, making Kashmir a precondition for any discussion with India over improving bilateral relations.
Thus the Kashmir conflict provided the prism through which these two states and their elites perceived each other, and the crisis that structured Pakistan’s foreign policy both within the region and towards the wider international community. Jinnah’s conviction that Nehru was determined to “strangle” the Muslim state at birth remains to many Pakistanis a demonstrable fact. And in Indian eyes, Pakistan remains a state that will stop at next to nothing to revise the territorial settlement of 1972, including masterminding covert militant strikes deep inside Indian-occupied Kashmir in 1999, allegedly funding terrorist strikes against the Srinagar and New Delhi parliament buildings between 2001 and 2003.
Pakistan’s concern over provincial instability and international vulnerability emphasized the role of the military and an alliance with the mohajirs around the central bureaucracy and the non-elective aspects of state power from the beginning. Military expenditure dominated Pakistan as a need to underpin domestic order and police an almost impossible territorial configuration that placed East Pakistan over 1,000 miles across an assumed hostile India. The state of martial rule had foreign and international policy implications as well as ramifications for a proclivity towards authoritarian forms of governance in which political parties were fragmented and personalized.33 From the moment of Independence, Pakistan sought International allies willing to secure prohibitive defense requirements against India, and against Bengali, and later Sindhi and Baluchi separatism. These requirements were funded primarily by the US, and involved the apparent support by Pakistan for Soviet containment, but it also—more problematically— involved support from China. Defined as an ally in US containment policy towards the Soviet Union, and encouraged by Washington’s mistrust of India’s emergent non-aligned, socialist rhetoric, Pakistan’s strategic position lent itself to CENTO and SEATO membership and soft loans and grants from a variety of US administrations. By 1972, the Sino–US rapprochement seemed to cement Pakistan’s ties with two key allies.Yet both these alliances were rather tenuous.
Initiated by the 1954 mutual security pact, the US commitment to Pakistan unraveled in the early 1970s, despite its rhetorical support for Pakistan in the Bangladesh war and the delay in granting diplomatic recognition to Bangladesh. To many in Pakistan, the US has been found wanting in failing to act more decisively to defend Pakistan’s territorial integrity. The US commitment unraveled further with increasing US mistrust concerning Pakistan’s nuclear weapons intentions, until the hapless Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979–80 transformed a tenuous military government (under General Zia) back into a frontline state. China’s support did not involve active military engagement in 1971 against India, and China has been equivocal in its attitude towards Pakistan’s nuclear tests in 1998.
During the 1980s, a new domestic political settlement led to a search for more useful allies. This involved General Zia’s espousal of an “Islamic” Pakistan, that would unite fragmentary ethnic identities into a single religious community under a unitary presidential system, and cooperation with the Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, and until 1979, with Iran as well. It also led to an active membership within the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Stressing the religious links between the Middle East and Pakistan made some economic sense, but it also facilitated and encouraged the growth of domestic Islamic movements, which the state failed to control effectively; nor did they provide a basis for a lasting new consensus on a “mainstream,” i.e., moderate Muslim identity. Often it placed Pakistan in the middle in disputes between moderate and extremist Muslim states. Seemingly as ignorant of intra-Muslim identities within Pakistan as the British were of those within British India, Zia’s policies generated sectarian violence as well as the proliferation of religiously and ethnically defined non-state actors active in the region, primarily in Afghanistan, and then, from 1989 onwards, in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Until the horrors of 9/11, Zia’s policies dovetailed neatly with US support for the Islamic resistance to the Soviet regime, and the strategic use of Saudi resources. However, the end of the Cold War, and of the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan, facilitated a return to democracy within Pakistan in the wake of Zia’s likely assassination in a plane crash in 1988.Yet the domestic creation of the militant, anti-western Taliban within Pakistan Punjab, its involvement in executing the Pakistan Army’s foreign policy in Afghanistan, and then, in fomenting the rise of religious violence in Karachi and Islamabad, meant that the restoration of democracy was problematic. Between Zia’s death in 1988, and the declaration of martial rule by General Musharraf in 1999, it was Pakistan’s misfortune that an emergent post-Cold War order emphasized conceptions of good governance, democratization, and civilian leadership, three areas in which Pakistan was particularly vulnerable. US concerns over Pakistan’s “Islamic” bomb also resurfaced in US policy circles. During 11 years of political instability and constitutional decline, the Pakistan state—never a unitary actor—fragmented into a series of parallel and disconnected areas of political and legal authority: president against prime minister, secular against religious authority, the judiciary against the executive, the executive against the legislature. In 1993, 1997, and again in 2007–08, such rivalries paralyzed the government and threatened the state with endemic instability. The impact of such duplication and rivalry on policy and its implementation remains serious.The security threats to Pakistan’s elites were diverse and diverging and they frequently collapsed distinctions between internal and external enemies.
The rise to prominence of the Inter-Services Intelligence unit within the executive, its combination of foreign and domestic intelligence and surveillance, and its dominance over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the office of the prime minister, indicate the weakness of democratic accountability or even the existence of established norms for foreign policy formulation. In 1999, prior to his removal in a bloodless coup, Prime Minister Sharif was significantly under-informed about the role of Pakistan’s military involvement in Kargil (an area within Indian-administered territory), and confused about the role of mujahideen irregulars in the fighting.34 When pressured by the Clinton administration to disengage from the conflict, Sharif appeared concerned about possible political revenge from the military, and especially from Musharraf who had headed up the Kargil operation. Earlier, in 1998, Sharif had struck a senior US negotiator as being entirely uninformed on Pakistan’s emergent nuclear posture, excluded from foreign policy matters, and more concerned about the army threat to his power base.35
Musharaf ’s coup in 1999 was domestically popular, although internationally condemned. Despite having demonstrable links with Islamic militants and ISI policy in Kashmir at the time of Kargil, Musharraf urged the Pakistani army to offer complete assistance to the US Bush administration in their planned attacks on Afghanistan in 2001–02. It was argued that significant economic and military resources would be forthcoming, while active resistance would lead the US to throw their support behind India, if not to “bomb[ing] Pakistan back to the stone age.”36 Such pragmatism overturned earlier army support and diplomatic recognition of the Taliban government, and was pressed home in the face of open hostility toward the US by domestic religious groups and communities, especially in the frontier and tribal areas of Pakistan.37 The paradox of a Pakistani state supporting Islamic militants, while drawing on the US as a principle ally in the US “war on terror,” was not lost on India, and provided the backdrop to a sustained crisis in Indo–Pakistan relations from 1998 through to 2002–04. By 2004–05, US State Department officials were increasing pressure on the Pakistani leader to demonstrate he was being tough on Islamic organizations operating within Pakistan, and active against unlicensed madrasah schools alleged to be training militants drawn from the wider Muslim diaspora.38
By 2006–07, US pressure was also aimed at improving Musharraf ’s democratic credentials, by coercing him into a dialogue with Pakistani politicians, especially Benazir Bhutto, in the run-up to scheduled elections in early 2008. That US foreign policy was pushing Pakistan in two differing directions seemed lost on the US State Department. Even the British Foreign Office continuously downplayed the generic weaknesses of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) as a democratic social movement, ignoring the basically feudal, over-personalized elite that surrounded Ms Bhutto. The Washington–London axis thus compelled Musharraf into a political accord with Benazir Bhutto that alienated sections of his own army, and angered Muslim hardliners, especially in the NWFP and areas affected by the influx of Pathan refugees.39 The assassination of Ms Bhutto in December 2007 fragmented opposition to the regime, and further underlined the systemic fragility within Pakistan and the extent to which the domestic compulsions of its foreign policy are ill conceived and little understood.40
Ayesha Jalal has argued that the tendency to compare democratic–civilian India with an authoritarian–military Pakistan, ignores the shared political and institutional legacy between them. At crucial moments, each country has demonstrated very similar forms of political dynamism, such as authoritarian populism during the 1970s, the institutional decline of party structures, and high levels of social violence. Gujarat in 2002–03, and the widespread communal violence associated with the rise of the BJP to power in the early to mid-1990s clearly indicate how volatile India can be, and the extent to which the cliché of the world’s “largest democracy” should not be taken at face value. Insurrections in the northeast, as well as Kashmir, and Punjabi violence throughout the 1980s do compel comparison with Pakistan. However, to draw too many parallels with Pakistan significantly misrepresents the extent to which India’s political elite has managed to connect an inherited state structure to emergent, and indeed diverging, sections of civil society, and given the state ideological and national cohesion. Important differences between the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress as national movements, and the differences in their leadership (or crudely put, between Jinnah and Nehru) translated into very different international “personalities” and very different foreign policy aspirations.
More geographically cohesive, less traumatized by Partition, and less hamstrung by its own internal security concerns, India’s political leaders were able to initially articulate a foreign policy premised less on survival than on an ideological commitment to internationalism, nonalignment, and an active solidarity with colonial peoples. From the outset, India’s political and intellectual elite set their ambitions apart from Pakistan, indeed arguably from South Asia itself.41 Individuals such as Nehru, Krishna Menon, and K. M. Panikkar came from a westernized intelligentsia that inherited from the British a conception of “great power” status, and the belief that India, by virtue of its size and ancient civilization would quickly assume a position of global responsibility. Such apparent continuities in the view of Indian greatness led Nehru to refer the nascent Kashmir issue to the United Nations as a sign of India’s commitment to internationalism, and to engage with China in lengthy debates over the status of Tibet and India’s northeastern and northwestern borders, despite the fact that such idealism yielded few results. Yet nonalignment was certainly not a pacifist stance, and the rhetoric of third world solidarity was to give India a high profile within the British Commonwealth on matters of African and Asian decolonization, and as an active member of the UN General Assembly important enough to influence the voting behavior of many member states.42
Yet the sophistication of the Nehruvian view of India’s place in the world was lost on various US administrations, irritated by the equation between oppressive neocolonialism and US foreign policy and, by the late 1960s, the growing collusion between India and the Soviet Union. India’s position on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty further irritated Washington. Nehru’s socialism and his suspicions of capitalism contrasted sharply with that of Pakistan, as did his condemnation of apartheid and Israel. As the formalized nonaligned movement continued to merge with Soviet allies such as Cuba, Iraq, and Libya, US concerns about India’s tilt towards Moscow were expressed more stridently, and were reflected as well in diminishing economic support. Although military humiliation at the hands of China in 1962—and another draw in the second Indo-Pakistan war of 1965— undermined much of Nehru’s naive illusions about the effectiveness of diplomacy, the search for military aid did not soften India’s criticism of the US. Neither did India allow the US to broker any deals over Kashmir, or provide any support for US global aims and objectives in East Asia, as during the Vietnam War, or over disputes concerning UN recognition of Cambodia. Subsequent difficulties over Indian socioeconomic planning, the forced devaluation of the rupee, and the conditional US food imports created resentment and concerns over Indian self-reliance.
The nadir of New Delhi’s relationship with Washington came in 1970–72, especially when Indira Gandhi signed a 25-year friendship treaty with the Soviet Union in 1971, and was able to utilize this effectively in the wake of the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War to checkmate US–Chinese support for Pakistan. Misread by US analysts as a mutual defense pact, and distorted by US global strategy aimed at using Pakistan to facilitate an opening with China, the State Department ignored the excesses committed by the Pakistan army in their attempt to suppress the movement of Bengali speakers in the eastern wing of the country, and interpreted India’s military incursion into East Pakistan as a Soviet-sponsored enterprise. In fact, the Soviets were as anxious to constrain India as the US, and were evidently relieved when India declared a unilateral ceasefire in the west following the surrender of Pakistan at Dhaka.43
India’s peaceful nuclear explosion (PNE) in 1974 deepened tensions with Pakistan. Moreover, India continued to challenge the US over whether the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was an arms control or arms elimination agreement. India’s objections to the NPT were both principled and pragmatic. They were principled in that they argued that the NPT was discriminatory in preventing non-nuclear weapon states from acquiring a legitimate means to defend themselves, while not compelling existing nuclear weapon states to eliminate their nuclear weapons. Indeed, the vertical proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the 1980s confirmed to India that the treaty was worthless. Delhi’s objections were also pragmatic in that China’s status as a nuclear weapons state created a security dilemma that was of regional significance to India, especially in the context of a Pakistan– China alliance. India’s allegations of US support for (or at least indifference to) a covert Pakistan bomb program, as well as criticisms over the Pakistan–China security relationship, blighted any attempts to improve US relations while the Cold War lasted.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979–80 heightened tensions with the US, while seriously compromising India’s understanding with Moscow. Again misinterpreted by the US, India was not so much complicit in the Soviet move as angered by the attack against a fellow member of the nonaligned movement, and at a time when Mrs Gandhi was the chairperson of the organization. India realized that Pakistan’s subsequent realignment with the US would have significant financial and military implications for the South Asia region, and increase the chances for Pakistan to acquire nuclear weapons covertly.44
The subsequent implosion of Afghanistan, and the support by the US and Pakistan for Islamic mujahideen fighters was to have regional and domestic consequences for India as well. In 1989–90, the situation in Kashmir took a dangerous turn when longstanding grievances against New Delhi’s disregard for the region’s autonomy, and its willful intervention into the political processes of the state’s ruling party, coincided with the rise of insurgency from Pakistan’s NWFP in protest over the Line of Control. Such insurgency marked in part a conscious Pakistan design to use covert forces in an asymmetrical campaign against India, especially in the wake of the Paris Peace Accords that ended the Afghan conflict.Yet it also marked the rise of non-state actors with their own socio-religious and political agendas acting both on Pakistan and within both Azad Kashmir and the Indian State of Jammu & Kashmir.
Although India supported the restoration of party politics in Pakistan after 1988, and Pakistan’s subsequent return to the Commonwealth, the irony remained that Indo–Pakistan relations tended to deteriorate during such democratic interludes.The rise of coalition governments often compromised mainstream politicians such as Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who found themselves dependent on the support of Islamic parties with extreme agendas concerning Kashmir. From 1989 onwards, with the exception of the Rao congress government, coalition politics weakened India as well, but less extensively on issues of foreign policy than on matters of regionalism and local autonomy.
The prolonged crisis in Kashmir during the years 1989 to 1996 especially, and India’s deteriorating relationship with Pakistan throughout the 1990s45 coincided with a profound political change within the Indian political system. Socioeconomic and political violence in the name of religion, associated with the rise of Hindu nationalism, challenged the basis of Nehru’s secularist state. Also for the first time, Nehruvian foreign policy was publicly attacked for allegedly leading to “50 wasted years.”46 The rise of the BJP to power in the central government coincided with a more overtly strident use of great power language. In 1998, the new BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government authorized a series of nuclear tests. Unlike the PNE of 1974, and in part provoked by Washington’s move towards a comprehensive test ban treaty that threatened to delegitimize any future Indian move to go nuclear, the 1998 tests were aimed at overt weaponization, and were justified by reference to China, and later Pakistan. The significance of China’s support for the Pakistan missile program was not lost on Indian intelligence, and the greater challenge that China posed to Indian ambitions was not lost on western analysts either.
A series of statements made it clear that India now claimed the de facto status of a nuclear weapons state (NWS). The move required an immediate reciprocal move by Pakistan, despite concerted efforts by the Clinton administration to prevent it.47 In the face of international condemnation and sanctions imposed by the US and other members of the OECD, India and Pakistan had succeeded in undermining the NPT and the ability of the US to prevent the horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons. Both India and Pakistan had sufficient expertise in the development and refinement of delivery systems to make deployment a reality, with India having a notable edge in domestic ballistic technologies, including guidance systems and software and satellite capabilities.
Although the unilateral declaration by India of its status as an NWS appeared at one level to indicate a significant ideological and policy break from previous governments, there was much continuity behind India’s policy on nuclear capability broadly defined, in which possession of nuclear weapons was less a matter of practical value than a symbolic emblem of great power status. Indian attempts to assert its moral superiority by claiming that New Delhi would renounce nuclear weapons once global nuclear disarmament was restored to the heart of the NPT regime, was a rhetorical gesture, a figleaf hardly able to hide India’s realist intentions.48 Yet, as always, the allegations of western and US moral duplicity struck their targets. The BJP leadership was candid, if not slightly crude, in recognizing that, armed with nuclear weapons, India would by definition become overnight an influential power whose views would be difficult to ignore or patronize. Opinion polls revealed that over 70 percent of the population supported the move by the Indian government to the status of a NWS. This support was not affected by the growing realization that Pakistan too had visibly increased its international profile, and by the growing risk of a nuclear arms race not only in South Asia but in the entire East Asian region.49
The complexity of the tradeoffs between status and security became apparent in 1999, when India and Pakistan engaged in open conflict over Kargil. As Kundu has noted,“the Kargil conflict, the first armed confrontation between … states equipped with nuclear weapons, [was] fought without either side having established a formal tactical or strategic doctrine for their use.”50 Subsequent allegations that “unauthorized” movements of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons took place during the conflict heightened tensions by revealing the very real lack of transparency or even defined procedure within the Pakistan chain of command. Many western observers were struck by the distressing level of “nuclear threats” uttered by statesmen on both sides in 1999, and in the subsequent crisis that followed Islamic terrorist attacks on the Kashmir parliament and then the Indian national parliament.
However, by 2003–04, both India and Pakistan had moved to clarify their nuclear doctrines, and had to some extent created or revised institutional arrangements to house, oversee, and ultimately authorize the use of nuclear weapons. In the meantime, ongoing negotiations with the Clinton administration aimed at putting the genie back in the bottle moved towards condoning some sort of “limited” Indian nuclear deterrent. In the wake of Clinton’s successful visit to India in 2000 (by far the most successful visit by a US president), the nuclear gamble of 1998 appeared, paradoxically, to have transformed the US–Indian relationship (or as one analyst stated, to have finally “lanced the boil” of the NPT issue once and for all).51 By contrast, the sight of a US president lecturing the Pakistanis on democracy boosted the BJP realist view as both appropriate and necessary for Indian success. By 2003–04, a more complex analysis of the security dilemma post-1998 implied that nuclear weapons might have prevented the Kargil incident from escalating into a full international conflict. While there remained concerns that India and Pakistan might use the threat of nuclear war to encourage low-intensity conflict, there was some room for optimism that it would proscribe the overall use of force in pursuit of political and strategic aims. However, the role and influence of armed non-state actors, and their proliferation and association with international militant groups linked to global terrorism against the west, would soon become of increased concern.
The election of George W. Bush, and the new international era that emerged in the wake of 9/11, hampered the Indian momentum towards rapprochement with the US because of Pakistan “outbidding,” but it did not stop it. While it restored Pakistan to US favor, it did not undo the gains that New Delhi had made from 1998 or blight the emergent symmetry between western concerns over Islamic terrorism and Indian concerns over “Pakistani”-backed terrorism. While retaining links with the Russians, and pursuing independent initiatives aimed at Iraq prior to the invasion by the coalition, India strengthened its new found understanding with Washington by forging an alliance with Israel. A series of intelligence and arms deals with this country opened the way for the modernization of some of India’s aging Soviet-era military hardware, while neoconservative rhetoric from within the Bush administration complemented Indian concerns over China’s continuing economic and military growth. Indo–US relations have continued to develop, despite India’s refusal to participate in the Iraq involvement without a UN mandate.
The successful transformation of the US–Indian relationship cannot be underestimated. It has paved the way for the recent and, to some, surprising recognition of India as a great power by a British prime minister and open support for an Indian seat on a revised UN security council. Yet such views reflect not so much the success of the BJP’s “outing” of Pakistan’s nuclear capability, but more significantly, the economic transformation that has been gathering pace since the early 1990s. India’s economic “takeoff ” and its ability to combine a nationalist strategy with the neoliberal compulsions of globalization are complex and open to dispute,52 but they have been transformative, both on the nature of the Indian federal system itself, and the role that India is playing in international entities such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).Taken as a whole, it is the degree of Indian economic prosperity that has commanded US and western attention as much if not more than its status as an NWS. During the late 1990s, India–US trade grew by a staggering 264 percent, with the US providing a market for one-fifth of Indian exports. Moreover, India is the second largest source of immigrants to the US after Mexico and has begun to generate a societal presence in the US, and a powerful lobby that is creating a domestic constituency that may influence US policy towards India in the future. More significantly still, the need to sustain economic growth and to deepen economic cooperation in the region as a whole, has improved the position of the troubled South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation, and led to significant moves towards enhancing India’s role in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well.53
India’s recent willingness to talk “trade” with Pakistan without pre-conditional postur-ing over Kashmir, overcoming the deadlock of the Agra summit in 2001, seems to imply a recognition that regional instability undermines Indian claims to greatness. It also follows that India needs a stable and workable “idea of Pakistan” and not a failing Pakistani state that would destabilize the entire Central and South Asian region.
India dominates the South Asian subcontinent, and presides over a regional state system that shares numerous ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities. These states are constantly mediating, resisting or encouraging specific forms of social identity. It has been argued in this chapter that such dynamics blur the anodyne distinctions made in IR literature among domestic, regional, and international politics. I wish to conclude this chapter by a brief overview of the regional dynamics of cooperation and resistance, and their consequences for the smaller states of South Asia.
The state elites of South Asia use resources gleaned from the international community— both material and ideological—to forward domestic ideas of the nation, and to shape the regional state system to their own liking and for their own security.The search for security is often as much a domestic one as it is international. As we have seen, shared sociocultural and religious identities facilitate such strategies, as well as encourage the risk of blowback. Both India and Pakistan have intervened in the internal conflicts within the other state, covertly or overtly. India has intervened in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. It has also sought almost continuously to influence and control the domestic and foreign policy of Nepal. India’s bilateral relations with the smaller states of South Asia have often been in competition with Pakistan, but also with China, especially in the sensitive areas of northeast India. Bhutan and—until its integration into India—the state of Sikkim, occupied curious positions as quasi-sovereign states under implicit forms of “trusteeship” that have had more in common with ideas of British paramountcy than with notions of Westphalian statehood. All have felt the attempted assertion of India’s primacy, and all have sought to challenge it.
In 1971–72, Pakistan became the first post-Second World War state to disintegrate.54 East Pakistan, containing a bare majority of its population, emerged from almost 25 years of economic and social discrimination against its Bengali-speaking community, to stake a claim to statehood. Delivered by Indian intervention, and conscious of a shared language and community that united it with West Bengal, Bangladesh has curiously mirrored Pakistan’s own political and social instability in trying to establish a national community congruent with the territorial state. This has involved a shift from a secular, socialist democracy to an Islamic republic, premised on sharia law that implies an important role for the mullahs. It too has veered from prime ministerial to presidential systems of government, and from civilian to military dictatorship.These struggles have been driven in the main by different images of the nation held by competing elites, who have used domestic, regional, and international resources to seize state power.55 A short but brutal civil war generated a radicalized, pro-Maoist liberation movement, a more orthodox Bengali secularist movement premised around the Awami League, and a pro-Pakistan movement linked to religious parties associated with ex-patriot officers and soldiers returned to Bangladesh after the war.56 The last group, exemplified by General Ershad, who held power between 1982 and 1990, had been influenced by Pakistani army views on Islam, and been removed from the profoundly galvanizing experiences of the civil war itself. Political parties quickly formed around each potential national signifier—Islamic and secular linguistic—despite the dominance of the Awami League, and although the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) was proscribed in Bangladesh until 1976. Neighboring states supported one preferred option over another, India a secular version of Bangladesh derived from its own experiences, and Pakistan a more Islamic version. And behind them emerged their international allies in turn.57 Intense party competition and social mobilization complicated and compromised these options further, especially following the restoration of party politics in 1990.
Indian support for the Awami League and Bangladesh’s first secular and socialist constitution of 1973 backfired. It was alleged that India was bullying Bangladesh on matters of economic assistance and trade, even implying that Bangladesh was a satellite of India. The murder of Mujibur Rehman brought to power an army that turned Bangladesh back towards Pakistan, and a strategic alliance with the US, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states, and away from India and the Soviet Union. This occurred despite the fact that the US was initially hostile to the Awami League and was pro-Pakistan throughout the civil war. This foreign policy shift, brought about by General Ziaur Rehman (in power 1976–81), went along with a move to construct a conservative Muslim—but not necessarily Islamist—nationalism led by the newly formed BNP, and through the rehabilitation of former so-called Pakistani collaborators. Gulf remittances into the Bangladesh economy made a significant contribution to state revenue, but also furthered external Islamic influences that competing elites charged were alien to Bengali Islamic traditions.
In the mid-1980s, during the presidency of Ershad, Bangladesh played a critical role in setting up the South Asian Regional Cooperation Council (SAARC) in the hope of getting away from India’s domination through collaboration with other smaller states anxious over Indian designs.At the same time, difficulties within Bangladesh, especially with reference to the ongoing insurgency within the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and the dispute over the sharing of water resources from the Ganges (especially in the wake of India’s completion of the Farakka Barrage in 1974), compelled cooperation with India, regardless of emerging ideological differences.Throughout the 1980s, Indo–Bangladeshi relations were bitter and confrontational. However, despite issues of illegal migration from Bangladesh into India’s northeastern states, and India’s attempt to construct a border fence, bilateral relations improved under I. K. Gujral’s brief policy of close cooperation between India and its immediate neighbors. Relations were also improved through SAARC, and in part by a more sophisticated appreciation by India of the internal constraints of its neighbor.
The termination of military rule in Bangladesh was facilitated by the end of the Cold War and by democratic restoration in Nepal, which momentarily demonstrated the power of mass protest. Still, although the restoration of elected government from 1990 fits to some extent within the so-called “third wave” of democratization, the results have been more complex and more disappointing than the democratization literature would have us suppose.58 Intense competition between the Awami League and the BNP has led to a degree of Islamic outbidding, similar to the experience of Pakistan between 1988 and 1999.The refusal of political elites to abide by electoral verdicts within Bangladesh has led to outside attempts at mediation from such diverse actors and organizations as the British Commonwealth, British labor politicians and US ambassadors. The extent of instability has led to Indian concerns over the role of Islamic groups, and also has raised concerns within the international community over issues of good governance and corruption, especially following the intense electoral instability since 2006.
Bangladesh’s extraordinary dependence on international aid, at a time of reluctance on the part of aid givers to commit to future grants, as well as increased conditionality on proposed loans, threatens to alienate domestic opinion concerned over compromising national sovereignty. Such concerns also have the potential to strengthen Islamicist parties that denounce western intervention. Between 1972 and 2006, Bangladesh has received approximately $45 billion in grants, and $44 billion in soft loans. These grants and loans have constituted between 12 and 25 percent of all government expenditure.Yet, some argue that up to 75 percent of this glut of external funding has failed to reach its targeted project or constituency.59 By 2005 pledges of further aid had declined considerably.
Given the role of Maoist parties in the formation of Bangladesh, and the location of the new state close to regions and territories contested between India and China, Bangladesh has proved relatively immune to Sino-Indian rivalry. Nepal, in contrast, has often found itself in the position of a “yam between two boulders.” Nepal shares the complex social and cultural pluralism of the rest of South Asia, as well as the preservation of feudal-like political structures within a modern territorially defined state.60 Its traditional elites are drawn from Hindu migrants who left India from the fourteenth century onwards, establishing themselves in and around Kathmandu. These elites supported a particularly orthodox Hinduism not found throughout the rest of Nepal or, for that matter, in modern India.The Bahun families dominated courtly politics, retaining hereditary offices such as head priest and prime minister, and managing non-Bahun clans through a form of amoral familism,61 in the form of strategic patron–client linkages known as the chakari system. Superimposed on, and refracted through such alliances, was an older division between the hills and the plains or the tarai, dominated by Hindus who migrated from the nineteenth century onwards, and influenced by social and cultural reforms stimulated in India during British colonial rule.
Nepal emerged after the British withdrawal as an independent state, but with India concerned over the former’s proximity to Tibet and, later, with Chinese collusion with Pakistan. Indian influence in Nepal was facilitated by shared sociocultural and development goals and, between 1948–61, close cooperation between the Indian National Congress and the Nepali Congress. However, in 1961, the monarchy banned political parties and imposed a Panchayat Raj scheme of local governance, which provoked tensions with India. As Sino–Pakistan relations solidified in the wake of the first and second Indo-Pak wars, Nepal’s fragmented elite came to resent India’s talk of nonalignment as a cover to support pro-democracy movements within the kingdom, and isolate Nepal from Pakistan. Chinese offers of developmental aid were also accepted as a counterbalance, but the construction of the strategically vital Karakorum Road linking China to Pakistan, especially following a border agreement between Pakistan and China over territory claimed by India, led to direct Indian pressure on Nepal. Bilateral relations deteriorated dramatically in the late 1980s, when various transit deals on commodities were held up by New Delhi, with immediate and serious consequences for the Nepal economy. SAARC provided a much needed opportunity for Nepal to negotiate with Bangladesh and Pakistan to try and reduce transit costs as alternatives to India’s control of the border through airlifting supplies from its two neighbors. Following the restoration of party politics in 1990, India has continued to support the Nepal Congress and assist in a series of bilateral aid and trade deals, while China tended to support the main Marxist opposition, but resisted supporting the Maoist insurrection.The fragmentation of the Nepali Left in the wake of the Cold War, and China’s own reform and moderation from the 1990s onwards, led to a lessening of overt Chinese antagonisms against India, and limited Chinese intervention within Nepalese domestic politics during the recent insurgency. In 1996, the decision by the Maoist Communist Party of Nepal to quit the institutions of parliamentary government and head a people’s rebellion paralyzed the constitutional monarchy. At one stage, the Maoists controlled over 70 percent of the territory of Nepal, but it did so without China’s backing.The struggle among king, parliament, and rebels led to a bewildering set of competing alliances (after 2005, increasingly between a fragmented parliament aligned with the rebels, against the absolutism of King Gyanendra), with the king seeking to reestablish local institutions of government in an attempt to undermine parliament’s claims to represent the will of the people. Such a move aimed at retaining the power of the monarchy incurred the risk of alienating support from both the US and India, both of whom favored party-based governance as a requirement for socioeconomic reform. Although China strangely remained more sympathetic to the king, its refusal to support the Maoists indicated a significant degree of conversion among the US, India, and China on regional politics in general and Nepal in particular.
Finally, the regional dynamics of state formation over and above shared senses of community and belonging can be dramatically illustrated with reference to the crisis and tensions within Ceylon (Sri Lanka after 1972) and their consequences for regional and international politics. Despite a very different colonial heritage from that of India and Pakistan, and despite a very different route to independence, Sri Lanka has been beset by internal conflict over the nature of national identity, what kind of state it supports, and what foreign policies such a state should pursue. Separate Tamil kingdoms, centered on the Jaffna peninsula, linked the island to India’s Dravidian south, while its long exposure to maritime trade brought diverse influence from Southeast Asia and ultimately Europe. Although administered separately from India, the transportation throughout the nineteenth century of indentured Tamil laborers to work the tea plantations added another connection that threatened Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Buddhist majority with the fear of Indian dominance. Unitary in origin, and initially elitist and solidly pro-western, pro-Commonwealth and pro-US in foreign policy, the formation of exclusively Sinhalese political parties (the United National Party, and later the Sri Lanka Freedom Party) led to ethnic mobilization based on xenophobic Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarianism that resulted in a civil war that for long dominated an otherwise wealthy and successful polity. Sinhala-dominated governments sought to accommodate Tamil political parties while abjuring federalism or even acknowledging the cultural diversity of the northern and eastern parts of the country in particular. The consequence was to create the very Tamil separatist movement they most feared and compelled the very Indian intervention they most desired to avoid.
During Rajiv Gandhi’s term in office, India sought forcibly to impose a settlement on the island, moved as much by electoral fallout for Congress in southern India, especially in Tamil Nadu where pro-Tamil sympathies were high. The ill-fated Indo–Sri Lankan Accord that led to Indian intervention between 1987 and 1990 seriously undermined India’s attempts to broker a deal, revealing that it could not act to disarm the Tigers, influence the Sri Lankan government to negotiate seriously, or prevent Tamil support in India for an independent Eelam. India lost more troops during its intervention in Sri Lanka during the peace accord than it did during its intervention in East Pakistan in 1971. The incident reinforced Sri Lankan mistrust of India as a regional hegemon and resulted directly in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. Such adventurism proved costly to Indian claims to be an emergent great power with global responsibilities, instead underlining its inability to influence events in its own backyard.
Active in SAARC, supportive of ties with China and with ASEAN, Sri Lanka has continued to view Indian ambition with concern, and has in particular remained a critic of the nuclearization of the subcontinent since 1998. Nonetheless, changes in the US–India relationship, as well as between India and Israel, have complemented India and Sri Lanka’s search for a more nuanced and intimate bilateral relationship by providing intelligence and support for “counterterrorist” operations. Sri Lanka remains the most consistently prowestern, pro-US ally in the region.The recent stress on the need for economic growth, and the “Look East” (i.e., to East Asia) policies of recent governments in New Delhi, have also complemented Sri Lanka’s East Asian connections, especially with reference to Japan, Thailand and the newly emerging economies of Vietnam and Cambodia.The breakdown in the ceasefire, and the intense warfare that therefore developed, imperils had the potential wealth of the island, and the role that SAARC and global wealth can play in providing resources to buy off separatist national claims. They can only play such a role, in any case, if domestic political institutions are redesigned to substantially devolve economic, social, and cultural power.
This chapter set out to show that an understanding of the international politics of the states of South Asia requires an awareness of the contingent nature of state formation, and the role played by elite competition in forming national communities that are congruent with state boundaries. Only a historically grounded, constructivist approach to South Asia can reveal the dynamics working themselves out among the states of India, Pakistan, and Nepal. International forces have constrained the foreign policy of state elites, but less so than might at first be imagined.The search for security has often as not entailed realigning domestic forces and institutions as much as changing foreign allies. And it has most often required the pragmatic use of external ideological quarrels, especially those of the US during the Cold War, and even the Bush administration’s ill-named “War on Terror,” for domestic and regional purposes. The roots of conflict are, often as not, domestic, but changes within the international system have enabled them either to have sustained themselves or threatened them with a scarcity of resources.
What of the future? Globalization, and the convergence of elites around the search for economic wealth through market-based solutions open up some scope for regional accommodation and cooperation even as they reveal new arenas of competition and risk. At the heart of the crisis of state formation in South Asia lies the strategic standoff between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, with both India and Pakistan preoccupied with identity and stability. India’s search for global power is still an irritant to China and a stark challenge to the status and prospects of Pakistan and the smaller states of South Asia. However, the prospects of economic growth and shared markets may well erode the crude assertions of power as a form of mercantilist, zero-sum assertion of “hard” power. Economic wealth not only complements hard power, it actually pays for it, and in the long term may actually be more sustainable.
In his work on the states of the Middle East, Michael Barnett analyzes how, despite shared religious and linguistic identities that challenged the premise of the modern Westphalian state, elites nonetheless managed to institutionalize their states in such a way that reimagined Arab nationalism as complementary to a stable system of Arab states.62 Can any insights be taken from the Middle East and added to that of South Asia? Given the contingent nature of state formation, nationalist elites need to structure interaction around processes that share cultural and economic activity in ways that increase cooperation. Can political structures be created that facilitate sharing resources among states, such as soft borders, social and cultural movements, free trade zones in place of foreign donor conditionality? It is ironic that the western powers have paid more attention to an India with a sustained and impressive growth rate, than an India with nuclear weapons.
It remains the dominant challenge within South Asia whether the ideas of sovereignty can be made to work without generating domestic or regional conflict. State formation entails violence, but it also entails a search for order and stability. If states, nations and communities are creative acts of political imagination, if they exemplify agency and not ahistoric, fixed and essentialized entities, then however difficult and demanding, solutions are possible because they lie firmly in the hands of elites and subalterns themselves.
The political formation of the Zardari coalition in Pakistan throughout 2008, and the on going proliferation of Taliban forces within the areas of Gilgit and Hunza continue to create tensions within the Pakistan state, and between Pakistan and India. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai in late 2008 reiterate much of the dynamics of state-nation-international system discussed in this chapter.The events in Mumbai exposed the extent to which non-state and state actors are either complicit in acts of social and political violence, ot powerless to prevent them. Despite immediate denials, subsequent US pressure from the newly elected Obama administration led to Pakistan’s acceptance of Indian findings that a majority of the operatives in the attack—members of Lashkar-e-Toiba—prepared for the attack within Pakistan, and drew on a wide range of resources from international Islamist groups as f ar away as Spain and the US itself. While Pakistan denied actively deploying the terrorists as a covert state-sponsored act of terrorism, India remains skeptical of the claim and of the ability of the Pakistani state to bring the sole surviving terrorist to justice, questioning the control the state has over non-state actors working within its jurisdiction. Furthermore, President Zardari’s decision to compromise with Islamic extremists in Swat by allowing the application of Shari’a law and ending military activity against the extremists undermines Pakistan’s internal sovereignty and the ability of the state to prevent the forcible and violent implementation of a form of medievalism that is neither Islamic nor popular. These two facets of the crisis of Pakistan: internal and external, domestic and foreign, are part of the on going struggle over what sort of social order the state wants to construct, and how successful the resulting state shall be in achieving regional peace.
1 See Stephen Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2004).
2 See Vernon Hewitt, The New International Politics of South Asia (Manchester: University Press, 1997).
3 See R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: University Press, 1992).
4 See introduction to S. Hobden and John M. Hobson, Historical Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: University Press, 2002). Exceptions to this exclusion of elites came, until recently, in “crisis” situations where the psychological or personal prejudices of leaders might be important, but even then these were not seen as requiring a societal perspective; see Richard Little and Steve Smith, Belief Systems and International Relations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp.10–12.
5 Hobden and Hobson, p. 11.
6 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1993).
7 Hobden and Hobson, p. 21
8 Michael Barnett, “Historical Sociology and Constructivism,” in Hobden and Hobson, p. 101.The sociological turn within IR has led to an intriguing debate between constructivists and postmodernists; see Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
9 T. K. Oommen, “New Nationalisms and Collective Rights: The Case of South Asia,” in Stephen May et al. (eds), Ethnicity, Nationalism and Minority Rights (Cambridge: University Press, 2004), p. 128.
10 Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: University Press, 1995).
11 Michael Barnett “Sovereignty, Nationalism and Regional Order in the Arab State System,” in Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, State Sovereignty: A Social Construct (Cambridge: University Press, 1996), p. 148.
12 See Christopher Clapham’s innovative Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival (Cambridge: University Press, 1996); also Paul R. Brass “National Power and Local Politics in India: A Twenty Year Perspective,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (February 1984), pp. 89–119; and his Ethnicity and Nationalism:Theory and Comparison (New Delhi: Sage, 1991); and Subrata K. Mitra and R.Alison Lewis (eds), Subnational Movements in South Asia (Boulder, CO:Westview, 1995).
13 Jeremy Gould,“Anthropology,” in Peter Burnell (ed.), Democratization through the Looking-Glass (Manchester: University Press, 2003), pp. 24–40. For a further discussion of this, see Vernon Hewitt, Political Mobilisation and Democracy in India: States of Emergency (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), esp. the introduction and chapter 2.
14 Thomas. R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
15 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: University Press, 2000).
16 Metcalf.
17 R. J. Moore, Churchill, Cripps, and India, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
18 Maulana Azad, India Wins Freedom (London: Sangam, 1988).
19 A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford: University Press, 2001).
20 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: University Press, 1994). See also the very useful edited work by Mushirul Hasan (ed.), India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilisation (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).
21 See David Gilmartin, Islam and Empire: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).
22 Gilmartin.
23 See the final chapter of Clapham.
24 See Ayesha Jalal, Authoritarianism and Democracy in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: University Press, 1995). Jalal seeks, perhaps too emphatically, to correct the view that India is a “success” and Pakistan a “failure.”
25 See Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997).
26 See R. J. Moore, Making the New Commonwealth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
27 For one particular take on the Poonch rebellion, see Alistair Lamb, Kashmir:A Disputed Legacy: 1846–1990 (Hertingfordbury: Roxford, 1991).
28 For a discussion of the Standstill Agreements and the Treaty of Accession, see Vernon Hewitt, Reclaiming the Past? The Search for Political and Cultural Unity in Jammu and Kashmir (London: Portland Books, 1995).
29 See Vernon Hewitt, “Ethnic Construction, Provincial Identity and Nationalism in Pakistan: The Case of Baluchistan,” in Mitra and Lewis, pp. 43–67.
30 See S. R.Ashton, British Policy Towards the Indian States, 1905–1939 (London: Curzon Press, 1982).
31 Obviously the entire narrative of the Kashmir crisis from 1947–49 is contested. For a discussion on the holding of all the plebiscites at the ending of the British Indian Empire, see Michael Brecher, India and World Politics: Krishna Menon (Oxford: University Press, 1959).
32 See Vernon Hewitt, “Never Ending Stories: Recent Trends in the Historiography of Jammu and Kashmir,” History Compass, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2007), pp. 288–301.
33 Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge: University Press, 1990).
34 Strobe Talbott, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb:A Memoir (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2004).
35 Talbot, pp. 108–9.
36 Owen Bennett-Jones, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (New Delhi: Viking, 2002), ch. i.
37 Bennett-Jones, pp. 27–9.
38 This was a particular concern for the British, in the wake of terrorist attacks in London in 2005, which linked British Muslims with religious seminaries and “camps” in Pakistan. See also Waheguru Pal Singh Sadu et al., Kashmir: New Voices, New Approaches (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006).
39 Care needs to be taken when trying to analyze the exact reasoning for this animosity to elected politicians and parties; some has genuinely to do with corruption and incompetence. See Samina Ahmed, “The Fragile Base of Democracy in Pakistan,” in Amita Shastri and A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, The Post-Colonial States of South Asia: Democracy, Development and Identity (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 41–68; see also Ian Talbot, Pakistan:A Modern History (London: Hurst, 1998), part iv.
40 See Katharine Adeney, “What Comes After Musharraf?,” Brown Journal of World Affairs, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Fall/Winter 2007), pp. 41–49.
41 In this sense, whatever their differences, Nehru would have agreed with Jaswant Singh’s rebuke to Strobe Talbott in 1997 condemning the US habit of always hyphenating India with Pakistan;Talbott, p. 85.
42 See Vernon Hewitt, New International Politics, ch. ii.
43 Nixon’s “that bitch” statement is now pretty legendary. See Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1992); also Katherine Frank, Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (London: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 339–40.
44 The argument here was along the lines of covert “selective” proliferation (such as in the case of Israel), by the US, in defiance of the logic of the NPT.
45 Vernon Hewitt, “Creating a Common Home? Indo–Pakistan Relations and the Search for Security in South Asia,” in Shastri and Wilson.
46 Jaswant Singh, Defending India (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
47 William Walker, “International Nuclear Relations after the Indian and the Pakistani Test Explosions,” International Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 3 (July 1998), pp. 505–28; see also Vernon Hewitt, “Containing Shiva: India, Non-Proliferation, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,” Contemporary South Asia, 9 (2000), pp. 25–39.
48 Confirmed by recent Indian discussions over Iranian nuclear ambitions and India’s support for US sanctions.
49 See Apurba Kundu, “The NDA and National Security,” in Katharine Adeney and Lawrence Sáez (eds), Coalition Politics and Hindu Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2005), ch. iv.
50 Kundu, p. 219.
51 See C. Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon:The Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Viking Press, 2003); also Dennis Kux, Estranged Democracies: India and the United States 1941–1991 (New Delhi: Sage, 1993).
52 See Rob Jenkins, Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India (Cambridge: University Press, 1999).
53 See Rob Jenkins,“The NDA and the Politics of Economic Reform,” in Adeney and Sáez, pp. 173–92.
54 Cohen, p. 2.
55 See Tazeen M. Murshid, “State, Nation and Identity: The Quest for Legitimacy in Bangladesh,” in Shastri and Wilson, pp. 158–82.
56 Richard Sisson and Leo Rose, War and Secession: India, Pakistan and the Creation of Bangladesh (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1989).There is some evidence that Indian intervention was in part determined by radical Left movements within the civil war making common cause with the Left in West Bengal; see Tariq Ali, Can Pakistan Survive? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983).
57 See D. Hugh Evans, “Bangladesh: South Asia’s Unknown Quantity,” Asian Affairs, 75 (1988), pp. 306–16; and D. Hugh Evans, “Bangladesh: An Unsteady Democracy,” in Shastri and Wilson, pp. 69–87.
58 Much of this literature derived from Latin America and Eastern Europe. For representative application to South Asia, see John M. Richardson, Jr. and S.W. R de A. Samarasinghe (eds), Democratisation in South Asia:The First Fifty Years (Kandy: International Center for Ethnic Studies, 1998).
59 World Development Report, Development and the Next Generation (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007).
60 See Leo E. Rose, “The National Political Culture and Institutions in Nepal,” in Shastri and Wilson, pp. 114–38; also Rishikesh Shaha, An Introduction to Nepal (Kathmandu: RPB, 1976).
61 See Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: Free Press, 1958).
62 Michael Barnett,“Sovereignty, Nationalism and the Regional Order in the Arab State System,” in Biersteker and Weber, pp. 148–89.