Chinu:
When you the time I would appreciate your thoughts on this article by Hendrik Hertzberg I have partially excerpted from the June 17th edition of "The New Yorker" magazine.
Thanks.
"Gandhi's ideas are largely ignored on the subcontinent nowadays, but he was right about many things, including the two great historical mistakes that are at the root of the current crisis. He was right in his opposition to the partition of the British Raj into India and Pakistan. In 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru and the other leaders of the Indian National Congress reluctantly accepted the division, thinking that the alternative was bloodshed. But the carnage that followed anyway was greater than anyone except Gandhi had imagined, and it has continued sporadically down to the present. (A million died in 1947 and 1948, and by 1949 Nehru was bitterly regretting his acquiescence.) The other mistake was the disposition of Kashmir, which, given the brutal logic of partition, ought to have been part of Pakistan. The majority of its population was, and is, Muslim, but its maharaja was Hindu, and the maharaja dithered, and there was fighting, and Kashmir ended up divided but mostly in Indian hands--a partition within the partition, a wound within the wound.
Like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in the Middle East, the Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir is one of overlapping rights and wrongs, religious and ethnic hatreds, and existential fears. Pakistan sees itself as defending the principles of self-determination and majority rule; India sees itself as defending a a larger idea of democracy, and the principles that terrorism must not be rewarded and borders altered by force. Each fears that the "loss" of Kashmir would be fatal to its very identity--Pakistan's as a Muslim state, India's as a secular one. Despite the alliance of India's present government with Hindu fundamentalism, India's conception of itself--one that Westerners naturally find sympathetic--remains that of a multi-ethnic society held together by a democratic political and social contract. To India, the surrender of Kashmir would invite the collapse of the whole national experiment. Yet Pakistan's dilemma--its need to simultaneously resist, co-opt, and appease Islamism--is at least as vexing. What makes the situation especially dangerous, of course, is the nuclear arsenals on both sides. Even though each side is capable of destroying the other as a functioning society (and plunging itself and the rest of the world into unthinkable horror), deterrence cannot be relied upon. The United States and the Soviet Union took pains to avoid direct hostilities between their armed forces; but the 1947, 1965, and 1971 wars between India and Pakistan were hot, not cold, and their soldiers are shooting, shelling, and killing each other at this moment along the Line of Control that divides Kashmir. Between the two countries there is a perilous asymmetry. Pakistan is weaker than India in every way--in military power, in economic resources, in political stability, in civic strength. The result is a combustible dynamic of desperation on one side and arrogance on the other. And, as has been widely reported, neither side appears to have anything like a realistic picture of what a nuclear war would be like.
In the Middle East, everyone knows what the solution must be: land for peace. Kashmir offers no such obvious formula. It is possible to envision a future arrangement whereby Kashmir remains, in some confederated sense, part of India but also has both a high degree of autonomy and some kind of formal political association with Pakistan To get there, however, the world is going to have to accept that Kashmir is --like the Middle East, like the terrorism emergency--one of the handful of problems that demand unrelenting international attention and involvement. As in the Middle East, the world, led by the United States, has to provide cover for the sides to make the compromises they can't make on their own. The crisis (along with its international dignity) has to be elevated to the point where it is understood as singular and unique, so that its solution, whatever that turns out to be, is understood to have as few implications as possible for the self-conception of the countries involved." |
