ARTICLE OF THE MONTH

Association for Communal Harmony in Asia (ACHA)
www.asiapeace.org & www.indiapakistanpeace.org
4410 Verda Lane NE , Keizer , OR 97303

Articles of the Month

1. Hate Not Last Word in Partition: Nandy, Ashfaque Swapan
2. Time for South Asia to act, Rajmohan Gandhi
3. A will without a way, M.J. Akbar

*Hate Not Last Word in Partition: Nandy, Ashfaque Swapan, India West, March 13, 2009
http://www.indiawest.com/readmore.aspx?id=999&Sid=1

BERKELEY, Calif. — It was not hatred, but a strong undercurrent of humanity, that was the surprising finding of research on the traumatic bloodbath of the Partition, iconoclastic Indian researcher Ashis Nandy told an audience March 3 at the University of California.

Nandy made some unconventional points: Even in the terrible bloodbath that claimed the lives of millions, as many as one in four people among survivors said they were saved by the other community, and their fondest memories were still of the days when they lived with the ostensibly enemy community. He added that while those who engaged in the killings virtually got off scot-free, they paid a price in terms of mental and physical health and some even accepted culpability in their later age.

Nandy, a political psychologist and social theorist whose path-breaking work has revitalized scholarship on political psychology, the Indian encounter with colonialism, mass violence, nationalism and culture, was the featured speaker at the Sarah Kailath lecture here.

In 2008, Nandy was listed as one of the top 100 public intellectuals of the world by the magazine Foreign Policy. UC Berkeley sociology Prof. Raka Ray, chair of the Center for South Asia Studies, introduced him as an “intellectual extraordinaire” who was India’s first postcolonial theorist, calling him a “prototypical public intellectual” and India’s most famous dissenter.

“I am a little perturbed by my steady decline into respectability, and I do not know what to do about it,” quipped Nandy, who brought an avuncular bonhomie to his lecture.

Nandy highlighted his presentation with gripping stories of individuals caught in the maelstrom of murder, hatred and exile in 1946-48.

According to conservative estimates, roughly one million people died, but Nandy puts the figure to over two million.

Nandy and associates carried out a study that included about 1,300 interviews with survivors of the Partition violence of 1946-48, including 100 in-depth interviews.

“When we started the study, we depended heavily on available data on other genocides, and I must say some of the things did not fit,” Nandy said.

“The first finding that surprised us that nearly one-fourth of all survivors said that they owed their survival to somebody from the opposition,” he said. “This figure was astonishing because nowhere we have come anywhere near it — in any other genocide.”

Another surprising finding was the lack of rancor among direct victims, he said.

“The second finding is … that those who actually faced the violence, those who are direct victims, the first generation of victims, those who have been subject to the violence, those who have seen it first-hand, mostly were those who had lesser prejudice and lesser bitterness about their experience than their own children and their grandchildren because they had lived in communities where the other side was the majority,” Nandy said. “They have lived with them and they had very warm memories of that experience. Many of them have said that those were the best days of their lives, whereas the children have a packaged view mostly of those violent days and how the family survived . . . So they carry more bitterness, more hostility.”

Nandy focused on an individual to underscore some of his points. During the research on the Partition, an associate had interviewed Madan Lal Pahwa, who was raised in what is now Pakistan.

Raised in a “kattar” (orthodox) Hindu family, Pahwa grew up to become a Hindu militant. He participated in vigilante groups that killed Muslims, said Nandy, and even threw a bomb at a prayer meeting of Mahatma Gandhi five days before Gandhi’s assassination.

Many years later, during an interview for the research, Pahwa appeared to have mellowed considerably.

What was Pahwa’s most treasured memory? “It is Pak Pattan (his ancestral village in Pakistan),” Nandy said. “And what he remembers in Pak Pattan the most, not only what he called the pure air and the pure milk and the green vegetables . . . above all (Muslim Sufi spiritual leader) Baba Farid’s mazar (tomb). He used to sneak out at night from his home . . . and with his friends go to the mazar.

“That Sufi music and the singing he remembers as the most valuable moments of his life. The memory of the shared shrine, the Sufi music, the ambiance of the mazar had left a deep impression on him.”

Pahwa also subsequently revised his earlier blanket condemnation of Muslims. “Muslims were otherwise friendly people,” Pahwa reportedly said. “A small minority of Muslims were bad, the politicians.”

“In South Asia, living with multiple selves is not an exception, we don’t diagnose it as schizophrenia,” Nandy quipped.

“I don’t think you should be surprised that even Madan Lal Pahwa showed at least some awareness somewhere that he was culpable,” he said.

“Fanaticism drives a person but insaniyat — humanity — is also there,” Nandy said.

Nandy also mentioned a “third striking feature of this genocide.”

“I have yet to meet, or any of our team has yet to meet, a killer who is happy in his old age,” he said. “I am yet to meet a happy killer. Even the ones that claim to be at perfect peace with themselves either have psychosomatic ailments or other instances of mental ill health directly traceable to the experience during the violence of ’46-48. So escaping prosecution is not the last word in this matter.”

India’s pre-partition history of various communities living together was the result of a pre-Western tradition of tolerance, Nandy said. This became clear after he researched the 600-year history of communal peace in the Kerala port city of Kochi.

The initial response of people, when asked about their history of peace, was predictable.

“They gave all the responses people like us would love,” Nandy said. People said that the absence of violence was because people were secular, progressive and educated.

However, said Nandy, deeper examination revealed something else.

“Nobody liked anybody else. Tolerance, alas, was based on mutual dislike,” he said. “Every community thought they were the best. Yet in Cochin there was no instance of serious violence in 600 years of recorded history.

“And then gradually I deciphered that in a community-based society, a society where individuation has not gone beyond a point, there is bound to be this dislike and this sense of superiority. . .

“But whereas you think your community is the best you also learn the (other) community’s right to believe they are the best. That mutuality is there. Secondly, the other is not only the other, but they are a part of you, you internalize. . . . The other is crucial to your self-definition. . . There are no annihilatory fantasies. . .

“This is not the enlightenment vision of cosmopolitanism, it is the alternative form of cosmopolitanism, and I am now convinced that this is the cosmopolitanism with which societies based on communities survive.”

He said that the most bitter opponents of Gandhi, including his killers, didn’t dislike him mainly because of his perceived appeasement of Muslims. Gandhi’s critics in India hated him because they thought he was too mired in tradition to allow India to develop as a modern state, Nandy said.

However, that may have been Gandhi’s strong suit, Nandy suggested.

“Somewhere Gandhi’s strength lay not in conforming to the ideas of proper politics of modern India and middle classes, that in any case found him a liability and a problem, people like you and me, perhaps his strength lay partly in the folk traditions of India, in the realities of India that is outside the reach of modern India,” Nandy said.

*Time for South Asia to act, Rajmohan Gandhi, Dawn, 22 Apr, 2009
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/editorial/time-for-south-asia-to-act

WE refuse to see it, but the time in which we in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan now find ourselves corresponds to that critical hour during the Second World War when Churchill proposed a union of England and France.

It would be utter folly to propose a reunion of Pakistan and India, or a union of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet it would be worse, in fact madness, to think that America can impose peace and stability in our region while quarrels continue within and among Pakistanis, Indians and Afghans.

Washington’s declared objective in our region is to destroy the Al Qaeda leaders that it believes are plotting in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan to damage American assets. Activity in pursuit of this limited goal may extend American involvement in ‘Afpak’ and possibly even in ‘Pak-Ind-Af’, but — as Pakistanis know all too well — such an involvement will come to an abrupt end the instance American priorities change. In the end, only Pakistanis, Afghans and Indians can protect their countries and their region from cruel extremism. Yes, Americans can help, for they are in the region anyway and have an interest in cooperation among Afghans, Pakistanis and Indians.

But the primary moves have to come from South Asia’s peoples and leaders. Decades ago in March 1948, Mohammad Ali Jinnah said to a reporter from the Neue Zurcher Zeitung: “[I]t … is of vital importance to Pakistan and India as independent sovereign states to collaborate in a friendly way jointly to defend their frontiers. But this depends entirely on whether Pakistan and India can resolve their own differences…. If we can put our own house in order internally, we may be able to play a very great part externally….”

With Jinnah’s agreement, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had planned a visit to Pakistan in February 1948, but he was assassinated at the end of January. In the six decades that followed, our nations have repeatedly fought each other. Notwithstanding a few brave attempts at peace-making, suspicion, blame and undercutting exercises have piled up. The task before the leaders of India and Pakistan today is to leave those piles behind and start anew.

There are no signs yet of a new start. However, those in its favour may find a clue in a speech that Bacha Khan made in Shabqadar in May 1947. In that speech Bacha Khan appealed to the Frontier’s Muslim Leaguers to sit “like brothers” with his Khudai Khidmatgars in “a joint jirga” to look at the difficulties that lay ahead.

Today a joint India-Pakistan jirga, held in mutual respect, is the need of the hour. In any such jirga Pakistan should indeed admit that its alleged support for militancy that injured India was a mistake; and it should commit itself against repeating this. On its part India should admit that the Kashmir dispute has to be resolved in a way that satisfies India, Pakistan and the people of Kashmir.

Such matters should be acknowledged bilaterally. If India and Pakistan lobby Washington or other capitals or the UN with their complaints, it only means that they are determined, in spite of common dangers, to continue with their quarrel. Indians unwilling to assist Pakistan in its hour of need would be guilty not only of indifference but also of self-injury, for fires in Pakistan will not show respect for the international border. They will add to India’s internal fires, which are not insignificant.

A Pak-Afghan jirga is also the need of the hour. If after eight years, and tens of thousands of boots on the ground, force alone has not worked in Afghanistan, why will it work in and around Fata? It is a pipe dream to think that Afghanistan and Fata can be tackled the way in which the Sri Lankan forces seem to be finishing their drive against the LTTE, which in any case may not be the end of that island’s story. Ultimately, extremism can be defeated only by the coming together of an area’s people, not by an army, let alone by a foreign army.

Perhaps there is something to be learned from Bacha Khan’s story, old as it is. In that speech of May 1947, after killings had occurred in several parts of India and in the Pakistan-to-be, Bacha Khan also said: “We are passing through critical times…. Some people mislead you in the name of Islam. I feel it is my duty to warn you against future dangers so that I may justify myself before man and God on the Day of Judgment….”

At this difficult time Pakistanis have at least two reasons for feeling thankful. For one thing, democracy returned to them, even if imperfectly shaped. Since its return, comment by the Pakistani media has remained largely free, and to its credit the army has exercised restraint. Then, more recently, thousands of risk-taking Pakistanis successfully used their time and energy to ensure that principles — not the whims or interests of select individuals — would guide Pakistan’s courts and legislatures. How many other countries have seen comparable accomplishments in the last 18 months?

Pakistanis wishing to strengthen their country should recognise that fellow Pakistanis whom they dislike today may prove to be valuable allies tomorrow. Like India, Pakistan presently is polarised across several divides. Yet a handshake with a compatriot from whom one feels divided may turn out to be the rock on which a new Pakistan, or a new India, is created. There is honour in going down while fighting a bigger enemy, none in sinking while fighting with your brothers. And a handshake with an estranged compatriot may lead to a handshake across a border.

I will conclude by reminding Pakistanis of what a 40-year-old Jinnah said in 1916 in Ahmedabad: “For a real new India to arise, all petty and small things must be given up. To be redeemed, all Indians must offer to sacrifice not only their good things but all those evil things they cling to blindly — their hates and their divisions, their pride in what they should be thoroughly ashamed of, their quarrels and misunderstandings. These are a sacrifice God would love.”

Had he spoken in 1947-48, he would have referred to Pakistan and Pakistanis. Were he to speak today, he might refer to Pakistanis and Indians in the same breath.

*A will without a way, M.J. Akbar, August 2, 2009 http://www.mjakbar.org/mjblog.htm
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is juggling with a hydra-headed question that is both philosophical and practical. Worse, it is also immediate.

How much benefit should one give to doubt?

Doubt is theoretically equidistant from right and wrong, but in real life, there is evidence, evidence creates weightage, and the weight of evidence demands judgement. Doubt is the classic weapon of both spies and diplomats. They might as effectively sow it with violence, or plant it with a smile. Doubt is the one fully certain component of the Indo-Pak equation. Call this the first of many a paradox.

On his part, Dr Singh is committed to finding peace with Pakistan during his second term. He also knows that if he cannot find it soon, it will elude him later. That is yet another paradox. He was ready with a formula for such an excruciating dilemma in his speech in the Lok Sabha on 29 July, bravely defending the joint statement with Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani. He recalled Ronald Reagan’s useful corrective: trust, but verify. An American President, alas for the rest of us, has options that others cannot claim. Reagan would not trust Muammar Gaddafi with a toy duck in a bathtub. When American intelligence satisfied the President with verification of Libya’s role in a terrorist incident, Reagan ordered up the air force, roused the ever-willing Margaret Thatcher, and bombed the capital of Libya back to the sand dunes. Gaddafi, living in a tent (a practice he has not given up), escaped but lost a daughter in that aerial bombardment. Reagan’s trust-verify relationship had a third dimension: act. This is not readily available to Dr Singh.

A more relevant analogy may be Reagan’s arms talks with Leonid Brezhnev, where trust could be fused with verification. But here too we enter unique territory defined by a unique moment in history. The objective situation had changed. USA and USSR were no longer military equals. The Soviets might have had the nuclear capability to destroy the world, but nuclear arms are a deterrent, not a means of offense. The Vietnam syndrome had already been overtaken by the Afghanistan syndrome. One empire was cranking up. The other empire was winding down.

There are few practical means of verifying good or bad intentions on our jinxed subcontinent. There are so many wheels behind wheels in the terror juggernaut — we saw only the front end in Mumbai last November. Dr Singh might be generous enough to give Islamabad benefit of the doubt on the evidence of a dossier presented to him two days before he left for Egypt, but this dossier does not explain the non-arguments by the government lawyer in the Lahore High Court that permitted Hafiz Saeed, leader of the Jamaat ud Dawah (the new name, a thin camouflage, which the Lashkar e Tayaba has acquired upon being placed on the list of terrorist organisations by the United Nations). The Lahore High Court released Saeed because, while the official accusation linked him to Al Qaeda, “The security laws and anti-terrorism laws of Pakistan are silent on Al Qaeda being a terrorist organisation”. The dossier does list the few who have been arrested, but hundreds and thousands remain at liberty to plan and implement the next Mumbai. The India-baiters in Islamabad now have a tool as well — the Balochistan clause in the joint statement.

The Jamaat ud Dawah tells any visiting journalist that there has been no change in its objective: to ‘liberate’ the Kashmir valley from ‘Hindu rule’. They have not promised any concessions to a Sikh Prime Minister. To what extent is this still the policy of the Pakistan government and its key military-intelligence wings? A clear and written answer to this question is the only thing that will eliminate doubts.

Are we likely to get an answer from Islamabad? First, we must ask the question.

Are there are any options in-between?

There is one option, which no one seems to have investigated, possibly because it sounds too boring. But it can re-energise the impetus towards a visit by Dr Singh to Pakistan next year and a possible agreement. There are two distinct advantages to this option. It is relatively painless. And it can be done under a sort of cover since Islamabad might be reluctant to move into the limelight, carrying a perceived concession behind its back. Since the Indian reaction to the joint statement has created some strains upon the process of bilateral dialogue, this could be a useful methodology for India as well.

India and Pakistan should seek to solve some of their intermediary bilateral problems under the disguise of multilateral negotiations. This does not mean that Kashmir can be sorted out through a multilateral mechanism. There will be only two nations at the table when Kashmir is discussed. Nor is this an invitation to America to join the discussion party: the multilateral forum available to both is SAARC.

Pakistan has been holding up implementation of the South Asia Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) on one pretext or the other. Dr Singh’s first verification of trust could be Pakistani concurrence to SAFTA at the next Saarc summit, which he should hasten. In fact, he could even make it a priority, or even a precondition. Trade is a vital ingredient of peace-construction, because it creates masons on either side who are propelled into partnership by the common need for profit. Profit is a solid vested interest in conflict-resolution.

Saarc could also be a convenient medium for taking a few quantum leaps on terrorism protocol. When Pervez Musharraf suggested that India and Pakistan should think out of the box he meant jumping out of the Kashmir box. Saarc creates an entirely new box completely. Gilani can take cover from any local flak by explaining that the pressure of Saarc nations made it impossible for him to leave Pakistan in isolation. The public opinion created by Saarc decisions will reinforce the momentum that has been injected into the peace process by Dr Singh.

Dr Singh has made it clear to Parliament that he has the will. But without a way, his will will flounder.

M.J. Akbar is Chairman and Director of Publications of the fortnightly newsmagazine Covert (www.covertmagazine.com)

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