Muslims and Liberals

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
June 1994

Early in April, India dispatched a playwright and his actress wife to the United States on a month-long mission to counter American criticism of Indian human rights abuses in Kashmir. Gopal Sharman and Jalabala Vaidya, the couple who produced the Indian movie classic “Ramayana,” brought along a “horror movie”—a two-and-a-half-hour documentary on violence by Muslim insurgents in the Himalayan valley. It does not mention any of the atrocities committed by Indian security forces in Kashmir.

The Sharman-Vaidya U.S. tour was timed to coincide with a U.S. diplomatic fence-mending mission to New Delhi. Indians have been fuming for months over comments by U.S. officials about Indian human rights violations in Kashmir, and public reiteration of the U.S. position that Kashmir is a “disputed” territory.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Assistant Secretary for South Asia Robin Raphel flew to the Indian capital to calm things down. They blamed the media for creating a “misunderstanding,” and assured their hosts that Washington wanted good, productive relations with both India and Pakistan while seeking to halt nuclear proliferation in both countries. Raphel reiterated, however, that she had been “quite correct in my statements” about the need to improve India’s human rights record in Kashmir and that the issue needed to be resolved in a way “acceptable to the people of Kashmir.”

In Washington, Sharman asserted that Kashmiris are “our countrymen” and “Pakistanis are our brothers; I hug them.” Indeed he hugged some of them in the documentary, entitled “The Kashmir Story,” which nevertheless portrayed the Kashmiri movement as a Pakistani “fundamentalist” assault on Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent, secular political creed. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, hosted the show on April 8. It was attended by journalists, writers and others interested in South Asian affairs. The guests were greeted by William Clark Jr., CSIS senior Asia adviser and former U.S. ambassador to India, and Maya Ray, the wife of the Indian ambassador to Washington. The documentary was to be shown in New York, Chicago and other American cities.

The narrative and interviews of “The Kashmir Story” are punctuated by “Long Live Islam” slogans, crackles of Kashmiri militants’ guns, and moans of Hindus who fled the Muslim uprising. The scenes of Muslim terror and Hindu pathos are paced with melodious Indian songs and sights of Kashmir’s sparkling falls, placid lakes, and glittering, snow-capped mountain peaks.

The message: Muslim separatism, which tore up the old India to create Pakistan (and Bangladesh), is now causing new physical and moral havoc in the enchanting, once blissful Himalayan valley. Sharman’s solution, with which he concludes the documentary, lies in letting the secessionists know that “India cannot surrender Kashmir to Pakistan” and in trying to win over average Kashmiris with the Gandhian message of interfaith brotherhood. Reinforcing India’s I cultural unity,” he emphasized in a later conversation, offers “the only solution” to the Kashmir imbroglio and other interethnic, interfaith quarrels plaguing India.

Deflecting Attention

“The Kashmir Story” is an attempt to deflect attention from the crimes that Indians have committed in Kashmir. Since the uprising began in 1989, Indian security forces have killed thousands of Kashmiris, mostly innocent civilians; burned down numerous houses they believed were inhabited by militants; and on several occasions went about raping women indiscriminately.

More ominously, the documentary and Sharman’s subsequent remarks betray a fascination for the myth of India’s “cultural unity, ” which has been at the root of much of the subcontinent’s political travails. During the 1940s, resistance by the Hindu majority to Muslim demands for constitutional provisions to preserve their cultural interests led to the partition of the subcontinent into Muslim Pakistan and secular India.

Partition triggered interfaith carnage that cost 500,000 lives and created 12 million refugees. India’s population still is 12 percent Muslim. However, a campaign to absorb Muslims into the country’s Hinduized cultural “mainstream” has turned the country into a caldron of Hindu-Muslim animosity.

Post-partition India remains a kaleidoscope of 15 major languages, 1600 dialects, most of the world’s major-and many minor-religions, and an endless variety of castes, tribes and ethnic groups. Yet Indian statesmen imposed on the country a quasi-unitary, parliamentary constitution.

This enables the political party or parties that can scrape together a majority of seats in the lower house of the parliament to make the laws and rule the country.

Today, almost to a person, Kashmiris are alienated from India.

The many Indian voters to whom parties and other secular, democratic institutions remain alien vote along religious, regional, caste and tribal contours rather than on party lines. The minorities, unable to translate their votes and aspirations into party platforms and government decisions, often resort to violence. The result, in the words of V.S. Naipaul, author of several books on his ancestral homeland, has been a “million mutinies” by India’s religious communities, castes, and ethnic groups. They include the secessionist movements in Assam, Punjab and Kashmir.

The Kashmir independence struggle seems to be the most intractable of these “mutinies” because of the especially brutal treatment to which the Kashmiris have been subjected. When the Indian subcontinent was partitioned, the Jammu and Kashmir state, then a principality with a Muslim majority and a Hindu ruler, acceded to India on condition its future political status would be decided in a statewide plebiscite. Also, under its “instrument of accession,” the state retained wide political and economic autonomy.

India subsequently reneged on its plebiscite commitment. Then it gradually usurped much of the autonomy stipulated in the accession agreement. Kashmiri resentment boiled over in the 1980s when New Delhi began manipulating the state’s politics.

India’s ruling Congress Party was playing off one Kashmiri political faction against another, engineering dismissal of Kashmiri governments and colluding in the rigging of the state’s elections. When Kashmiris rose in revolt, India unleashed its military and paramilitary forces on the valley and shut its eyes to their hair-raising brutalities. Today, almost to a person, Kashmiris are alienated from India.

There are arguments for and against independence for the land-locked, impoverished Muslim valley. The two other parts of the Jammu and Kashmir state the Hindu-majority Jammu and the Buddhist-majority Ladakh would oppose its secession from India.

They and many Kashmiri Muslims also would oppose joining Pakistan, still unstable ethnically and politically. Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, were both British educated barristers and shared a blind admiration for British institutions and a disregard for ethnic issues.

Jinnah thought of Islam, erroneously as it turned out, as an adequate “bedrock” for his multiethnic nation. The first post-partition Pakistan, ruled by autocrats, was racked by disputes between Bengalis and Punjabis over linguistic, economic and political issues. The disputes culminated in a bloody civil war and the secession of Bangladesh.

Today, what is left of Pakistan is reeling from continual strife between Punjabis and Sindhis, and between Sindhis and muhajirs, Muslims displaced from India. Hence many Kashmiris, while opposed to Indian rule, are unwilling to join Pakistan.

A Preference for Independence

The Kashmir tragedy and other centrifugal movements can indeed be overcome short of the disintegration of the multiethnic India. Ethnic and cultural groups do blend into nations and national states. But they do so through a long process of evolution.

France, the earliest national state, had to contend with regional and ethnic pulls until the mid-19th century. In fact, French peasants did not fully become French citizens until the introduction of mass education in the 1900s. Britain and other multiethnic West European nations took shape over similar lengths of time. The glue to their nationhood was provided in each case by secular, mass education; industrialization; and prolonged cross-cultural communication necessitated by division of labor.

Many experiments have since been made to short-circuit this process by providing ideology or force to propel multiethnic states. Some of these have failed, e.g., the old Pakistan, the old Ethiopia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the U.S.S.R. In many other cases multiethnicity has been used as a rationale for the suppression of democracy and human rights, as in the cases of Iraq and Iran.

Even though fissiparous movements appear to threaten democracy and statehood in India, the country can preserve both by adapting its political structure to the needs of its regions, ethnic groups and religious communities. A far-reaching solution to the subcontinent’s political problems was proposed by a British Cabinet mission 48 years ago, when Britain was winding down its colonial rule. The Cabinet Mission Plan envisaged a confederation dividing the subcontinent into various regions and subregions, according to their religious and ethnic characteristics, and providing for various quantums of autonomy for the various tiers.

A subcontinental confederation would seem an impossibility today. For India, though, a confederation—at least between its secession-prone states and the central Indian heartland—appears to be a feasible arrangement.

If India can be held together through a covenant reflecting fairness and magnanimity toward its minorities—the real legacy of Mahatma Gandhi—it will over time evolve into a more integrated national state through the modernization of the economy and society.

The modernization process is accelerating since the liberalization of Indian economic and trade policies three years ago. The growth rate, for example, has nearly tripled, from 1.3 percent in 1991-92 to 4 percent this past fiscal year. Inflation has dropped from 13 percent to 7.5 percent. Foreign investments are gradually picking up after a setback in the wake of Hindu-Muslim riots and political uncertainty. Yet it all could be reversed by new ethnic and religious convulsions and secessionist movements.

India may follow the footprints of the French—or of its former friends, the Soviets.