The Nation Form: Essays on Indian Nationalism [1 ed.] 8132116798, 9788132116790

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The Nation Form

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THE NATION FORM Essays on Indian Nationalism Ranabir Samaddar Copyright © Ranabir Samaddar, 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 1/12

First published in 2012 by

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Acknowledgments [I thank Sugata Ghosh of SAGE Publications for suggesting this collection; it gave me the opportunity to closely rethink the issue of the nation form as a still relevant problem of our time. The sections listed below are reproduced here with the kind permission of the publishers. These sections have not been changed except in cases of minor editorial needs, and are reproduced here in their original form.] 1. Chapter One: “The Manifold Meaning of Territoriality in Nationalism,” in Whose Asia Is It Anyway? Region and the Nation in South Asia (Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, 1996), pp. 1–14. 2. Chapter Two: “What Was Asia to the Asians?,” in Whose Asia Is It Anyway? Region and the Nation in South Asia (Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, 1996), pp. 15–54. 3. Chapter Three: “The Birth of a Nation,” in A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947–1997 (SAGE Publications, 2002), pp. 19–38. 2/12

4. Chapter Four: “Promises of Revolution,” in A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947–1997 (SAGE Publications, 2002), pp. 39–79. 5. Chapter Five: “The Dynamics of Passive Revolution,” in A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947–1997 (SAGE Publications, 2002), pp. 80–118. 6. Chapter Six: “The World of the Edges,” in The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (SAGE Publications, 1999), pp. 25– 51. 7. Chapter Seven: “Legality, Illegality, and Reasons of State,” in The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (SAGE Publications, 1999), pp. 52–63. 8. Chapter Eight: “Cartographic Representations and Anxieties,” in The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (SAGE Publications, 2002), pp. 117–118. 9. Chapter Nine: “Shefali,” in The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (SAGE Publications, 1999), pp. 190–198. 10. Chapter Ten: “The Ineluctable Logic of Geopolitics,” in The Politics of Dialogue: Living under the Geopolitical Histories of War and Peace (Ashgate Publications, 2004), pp. 54–76. 11. Chapter Eleven: “The Autonomous Spaces within the Nation,” published originally as “Introduction” to Ranabir Samaddar (ed.), The Politics of Autonomy (SAGE Publications, 2005).

Introduction: The Conflicts and Contradictions in the Nation Form The essays included in this volume, written mostly in the nineties of the last century as chapters of various books and published, at times two–three years later, are now presented here as parts of a selection of my writings on the nation form. The task of selecting these sections has given me a rare opportunity to revisit many of the earlier ideas of the scholarly community, including mine, on the great question of the nation form. The only difference today is that whereas at that time of writing while I knew why I felt dissatisfied with contemporary writings on nationalism, and therefore had to engage with them, I was not quite sure how to present precisely the problematic under discussion, or how concretely I could present the alternative views. In that sense, these writings have been a great clarifying exercise for me. But I can see now, it was not all that a shadow engagement. It was and still remains a dispute about how to study the nation, and therefore the form of the nation. In this sense, these writings remain valid till today. The question still remains: why and how should we study forms? These selections and the books from which they have been taken, thus, loyally follow the formalist strand in social thinking and try, though feebly, to emulate the materialist way of thinking which tells us to study forms rigorously—forms of power, forms of production and reproduction, forms of state and the political society, forms of accumulation, forms of life and death, and so forth. 3/12

These engagements were and still are necessary because of the massive hold of idealism over our thinking, which clouds our understanding of ways of power, control, rule, and governance. Studying form is therefore important—the limits of the form, the intersection of forms, its internalities and externalities. I mentioned these aspects in my introductions to three books where most of these chapters first appeared. Two of them looked at the form of the nation from outside (thus the issue of a political region within which nation as a form of political society first appears, or issues of borders, migration, citizenship, statelessness, etc.), and the third one looked at the issue of the form from inside (therefore features of the internal dynamics of the change of the form, transition, etc.). Geopolitics, territory, political assemblages which at times cross borders in course of taking shape, partition, revolts and revolutions, rights, passive ways of change, and forms of security, that is to say, securing the nation appear here as more important issues at stake than ideas and ideologies per se. These essays in their present collective appearance thus take us back to the question of forms of politics. There is no transcendental ideal of the nation, and to the extent that such an ideal is present, it only serves to hide the reality of the nation form. This book, thus, is not about nationalism, but about nation. I shall explain briefly what this signifies. Recently, Saskia Sassen has drawn our attention to global assemblages and the roles that particular configurations of territory, authority, and rights play in the making of those assemblages.1 This is the question of form. Thus, when I show how a particular phenomenon of Asian nationalism influenced the making of the postcolonial nation, I am not only drawing attention to a particular way in which nations with anti-colonial pasts shape up, but I am also drawing attention to the issue of external conditions of the emergence of the form. Charles Tilly conducted precisely this investigation when he drew our attention to conditions like formation of standing armies, emergence of certain forms of collective protest, new fiscal methods, and the emergence of rights and citizenship as the field of bargaining relations between rulers and the ruled that made the emergence of the Western nations possible. Obviously the conditions of the emergence of the nations in the east cannot be the same. Here, too, conditions were going to be specific, varying from case to case. It is in that spirit that I approached the issue of the marginalities of the nation form, a study that led to my works on migrants, aliens, refugees, borders and boundaries, and the displaced— in short the marginal situation of a basic rightlessness, the absence of right to claim rights—that defines the configuration of the rights of the subjects of the nation, and thus the nation’s simultaneously inclusive and exclusive nature. Also, it was imperative to realize that the strategies of inclusion and exclusion were not decided once and forever. These were contingent strategies, which meant that while the two principles remained constant, their particular forms and the interface of these forms depended on historical dynamics. Thus, in A Biography of the Indian Nation, I aimed to shed light on the specific working out of these two principles through a few select accounts of the life of the Indian nation. The internal conditions of the emergence and the persistence of the nation form—through the capacity of the nation to re-form itself—were investigated and discussed in that work, also on the basis of the same imperative. 4/12

What practical implications follow from the difference in approaches? I shall mention here three points of difference. First, what are the ways in which the nation form and the state are connected, and how do we see this connection? Is there any possibility of a nonimperial form of the nation? Second, how do we visualize the relation between nation and democracy—the two universals yet extremely specific in their combinations? Third, and this relates to the previous two posers, what are the ways the reasons of the state and those of government influence and condition the nation form? Let us see what these questions signify in terms of the specifics of approach and their implications. These points remind me of the criticisms variously made of the books from which these chapters have been taken. In fact, some of the criticisms of A Biography of the Indian Nation were made on the ground that I had confused nation and the state in my narrative. Some argued that the history of the nation presented there was not continuous, and shifted from window to window. There has been a third line of criticism, which complained that I had included the account of revolution in an account of the nation. To that critic, a venerable retired professor of a university in Delhi, nationalist problematic was something else. The same type of criticism was made also in the case of The Marginal Nation; on this occasion the objection being that again state and the nation were being confused. While as a human rights manifesto for the victims of forced migration, the book was fine, but, in the high theory of postcolonial studies or studies of nationalism, this had little relevance. The problem is that, till date, we have no satisfactory result in our investigation into the possibilities of nonimperial form of nation; likewise, only in other forms (such as old empires and multinational states), we can investigate what a nation would look like when not associated with political power and state form. Even, a nation in its anticolonial form aspires to assume independence and state power, whence appear the distinctions between sovereignty, freedom, independence, and liberation. This is where the problem of passive revolution is located; also the constantly unsettling possibilities of the national-popular. To Antonio Gramsci, the solution of the contradiction between the state and the nation appeared in the form of civil society, also in strategies of hegemony. While this in many ways has enlightened us of the phenomenon of constituent power, hence of the possibilities of the national-popular, it is my argument that, notwithstanding the Gramscian insights, we are not freed from the bind that the close relation between state and the nation form and the contradictions emerging from there produces for popular politics. Precisely it is the interface of state and the nation that the chapters in this collection seek to investigate. This was one reason why I felt dissatisfied with the studies on the national question inspired by Gramscian insights and theory. That takes us to more material determinants of the nation form. The moment we decide that nation is not primarily a cultural question but a political question, involving choice and forms of political society, we are driven towards discussions of territory appearing as the kernel of the nation form, or discussions of partitions, of various nationalizing strategies, fundamentally all those aspects that are marked by collective claims, and 5/12

forms of collective politics. Nation is not harmony, but is the congealed form of various contentions. Thus, national inquiry takes us into the origin of rights. Rights appear as claims, and claims as part of an inseparable history of the nation and citizenship. Hence the inquiry of the nation form leads us to ask: wherefrom rights such as citizenship rights originated? This was also the theme of Barrington Moore’s classic work, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy2 Can we then write a history of the nation form without an account of rights as historical products and therefore outcomes of struggle? I was trying to raise these kinds of questions considered as alien to studies of nationalism made in the heyday of cultural studies. This also explains why studies pursued in a materialist manner were ignored in high circles of cultural theory and postcolonialism. Democracy means the making of rights, and crucial rights come to fruition by means of revolution and class struggle. In the old studies (of the Ernest Gellner kind) we can recall that there was a centrality of the discussions on modernity and of feudalism in the account of genesis of rights, because we hold that certain crucial events had occurred after the general dissolution of feudalism. But today accounts of the nation form, enriched in particular by understanding of anti-colonial struggles, are marked by insistence on factors such as resistance and the grounding of rights in specific histories of different regions. Thus, today we have to inquire how rights have spread to larger and larger populations and how they eventually become citizenship rights. Were the rights wrested from local authorities and spread to the larger population groups? Or did the rights spread due to a struggle at a national scale? This remains still a classic inquiry. Therefore, not modernity but democracy is the mirror in which we can countenance the nation. This is the other principal question that marks the books from where the chapters have been taken. Browse the books on nations and nationalism and, in general, you will notice an absence of a discussion on democracy. It is the same failure, now enacted in another way—namely the inability to deal historically and in a contingent manner the relation between the emergence of the nation form and democracy—a problem that I have attempted to clarify in details in a recent essay.3 Struggles at the national scale often had to do with the rise and spread of rights. Rights and duties were enlarged and enforced obligations—the result of bargaining between the two parties—states and peoples. In short, we can say that democracy as a process of transformation has been perched on a national template. It is in the national sphere in which collectives have emerged and made claims. There has been resistance over demands made by the state on its subjects; similarly subjects have at times resisted each other; and specific groups of subjects have struggled to enter the polity, to help others to enter the polity, to defend certain polity membership, or to exclude others from the polity. This process has resulted in citizenship rights. If the state has found it necessary to create a standing army consisting of members of the domestic subject population, it had to also continuously nationalize the society to claim collective loyalty. Nation form thus signifies the passage from indirect rule to direct rule. Indirect rule meant that the state till that time had to rule through a series of local power holders. Bargains over the supply of resources, therefore, were of different types. Direct rule, on the other hand, is centralization of power by means of which the states take charge of resources including 6/12

human resources. The nature of the relation between the rulers and the ruled, thus, changes with this transformation. Direct rule creates rights. But this creation of rights is accompanied by an all-round securitization of life, politics, and territory. The process of the emergence of rights in what thinkers call a “liberal framework,” meaning emergence of the organs of representation and adjudication, hides the other process that, in fact, accompanies the former, namely the process of securitization. We require more researches in the history of the birth of the nation form to gain deeper understanding of the inseparable yet contradictory relationship between nation and democracy. This also shows us why we need to link the problematic of transition (revolution, passive revolution, decolonization, etc.) with the theme of the nation. I shall argue that, in fact, the colonial context is the key to a general understanding of the nation form, and this context provides the best ground to gain such an understanding of the contradictory historical process—the simultaneity of (a) nation as an organic form of congealed power and (b) democracy as the form of diffusion of power. Therefore, in posing the question, if there is anything substantially different in Western and Eastern forms of nationalism (raised for instance by Benedict Anderson), we often miss the great question at stake, namely what sense are we to make of the worldwide anti-colonial resistance for over two hundred years in the making of the nation form? Judged in that light, we find two interlinked issues involved here: issues of the universal and the postcolonial. Let us first briefly visit the question of the universal. As we know, theorists of the South in the 1980s and the 1990s raised the question, and I think rightly, as to why one should accept the implicit claim that the Western form of nationalism was the only available form, and the Western experience of nationalism should be considered as the universal experience with other experiences derived from that. As we can see now, this was a return to the debate on universals and particulars, and a new engagement with the issue of how knowledge was produced in immense intimacy with the dynamics of power. Yet, in accepting the division, these theorists of the South selected a false ground, and abandoned the more fruitful line of inquiry, namely what makes a concrete universal? How did the experiences of anti-colonial nation making inhere in them the dialectical relation of the universal and the particular? How did singularities combine as if in a fold in the making of the anti-colonial nation? In fact, the investigation into the emergence of the solidarity called the nation, and an accompanying study of the dynamics of the twin factors of contention and dialogue show us how a concrete universal emerges, and how in this emergence the idea of a fold operates in form of a practical operation of the principle of the singularities within singularity. As singularities jostle within themselves, we have the beginning of democracy. That is why, in ex-colonies people say with some justification that our learning to become democratic began long before we became independent. In fact, it was in the colonial world that we learnt to make “always singular adjustments between freedom and equality.” Politics became a concrete procedure of truth. But this also means, and I think that the historical material presented in various researches on anti-colonial nationalism proves also, that thinking of singularity in its pure form (by that I mean the historical form) also signifies at the 7/12

same time thinking of pure multiplicity, consistent self-dissemination, and therefore limitless multiplicity. That is how the singular and the plural, the concrete and the universal went on negotiating each other in the emerging national or the collective political life. Shorn of high words, all these not only mean that we must look at political life as practical life, but also a practical way of negotiating the paradox of equality and difference in our collective life. Such practical wisdom tells us the possibility of what Richard Rorty called a “post-philosophical culture.” Precisely because the history of colonialism and the anti-colonial nation demonstrated the truth of the concrete universal (of the coexistence of singularities in a fold, of dialogues and contentions, of power and resistance, of particular desires towards universality, of the persistence of the spectrum of locality, region and the nation, etc.), that the postcolonial reality is now the reality of the world. We are all postcolonials. All nations are postcolonial, and the postcolonial predicament is the universal predicament. Is this a mere hyperbole, or a metaphor? Of course, there may be a rhetorical element in such a claim, but to a large extent the claim of the postcolonial predicament being a universal one is based on a reality, whose core is made of the particular way in which the nation relates with governmental rationality. And, once again, the transition in colonial countries and the experiences of decolonization shows, to an unparallel degree, the mutually complimentary but separate dynamics of the reasons of state and government and their impact on the formation of a distinct political society. Michel Foucault, in a series of articles on security, has shown how the development of the state form in Europe was accompanied by a parallel development of the governmental form. At the same time, he showed, through a particular analysis of post-War German neoliberalism, how a particular form of governmental rationality helped to bring the state back in the post-War milieu in West Germany with nonexistent conditions of a state. In the decolonized societies, at least in Asia, it happened in a somewhat different manner. In India, for instance, the new or the independent nation after ridding itself of the colonialism had achieved the state, but did not have its own government. Thus, in the 1950s in India, as almost everywhere in Asia, political leaders tried to erect a government appropriate to the task of governing the nation, in fact several tiers of government. This was a crucial task, in the performance of which possibly Indian new state succeeded to some extent, but in most other cases the history was of failure. In Burma, civil war engulfed the country; in Indonesia the armed forces took over power and imposed an extreme rightwing centralized rule of coercion; in Iran roughly the same thing took place; in Sri Lanka the result was mixed; in Malaysia government could be built up by the state only by the most authoritarian path; in Indo-China decolonization took some more time to complete; and in post-independence Pakistan the failure to establish appropriate conditions of governing finally resulted in the dissociation of one part from the country. Everywhere the challenge was: how to combine the tasks of security with government? In the last chapter of A Biography of the Indian Nation, I tried to address this feature of the nationalist destiny and demonstrate how the “nation at war with amazing ease 8/12

becomes a nation at peace.” Unfortunately that chapter could not be included in this selection. But the chapter called the “The Ineluctable Logic of Geopolitics” tries to elaborate the problematic at length and show how the dynamics of security and government interface in making a particular nation form. The details are of interest here; they show the emergence of the security problematic and the two possible ways of addressing it—the authoritarian or the dialogic path. It is in all these senses—that of the postcolonial predicament of how to deal with postcolonial dissensions, contradictions, and the tension-ridden relation between the state and the government—that we can say that this is today’s universal predicament. It is also in these senses that borders and geopolitics become significant in shaping governmental thinking—defining the compulsions of rule while framing the art of government. The issue of having an appropriate government to serve the nation and democracy is the greatest challenge for a nationalist resolution of the issue. That means, the search becomes paradigmatic, how the nation is to be governed. The theory and practices of representative government are found to be inadequate; administrative mechanisms are found to be anti-people, laws become burden, and people claim the status of the political subject not by measuring up to the obligations and demands of citizenship, but by stepping beyond citizenship’s bounds, by becoming subjects of illegalities and semilegalities. This is where all theories of nationalist democracy have failed. In the 1960s and the 1970s, one section of the communists argued for a noncapitalist path of development of the newly independent nations. The failure of that vision lay not in an absurdity of that imagination, but in the failure to understand that the key to that path lay in forging an appropriate government out of the myriad of practices of the national popular. Our leaders including Nehru’s failure was in that lack of understanding. Indeed, if we closely follow many of the anti-colonial struggles in India in the first four decades of the last century—such as against particular Acts, taxes, measures, laws and systems of representation, and provisions with stakes in life and also such as regarding diseases and public health, public education, public supply of essential goods—these were all against a particular way of governing. A new art of governing—“selfgoverning”—could be gleaned out of those demands and parallel practices. In the Indian Constituent Assembly proceedings, therefore, we can see two interconnected, at times conflicting, streams of thought around which clashes of ideas and notions erupted throughout its three-year-long life: on one hand efforts to give shape a sovereign state, on the other hand erecting a government that would work for the nation, and while listening to the cacophony of democracy, would be able to rule. Nowhere was this more evident than in B. R. Ambedkar’s speeches and rejoinders to interjections to the effect that the passion for democracy must not ruin the chances of a working government. Yet, as we know, this concern for a government capable of preventing anarchy came in a fundamental sense in the way of thinking of new type of governing that would respond to the urges of the national-popular. Nehru and others completely ignored these issues and possibilities. Once again, nationalism as an ideology of taking over state power overwhelmed them, and nation as an ensemble of anti-colonial practices bypassed

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them. The study of the contradictions and conflicts in the nation form requires, therefore, not only rigor but a sense of combining transcendence and immanence. On this we need to spend some time before we close the introductory remarks. Researches show that Congress and League ministries in 1936–39 were riddled with these conflicts and efforts on the part of the nationalist leadership were on from that time to maintain the old colonial form of governance and institutional structure, and systemically discourage and suppress the urgings of the national-popular. This trend became more acute during the caretaker rule in 1946–50. Yet, as the history of the early decades of rule after Independence shows, the situation was still fluid; there were attempts to create new institutions and the trend towards securitization of governance was in its early stage. Therefore, the record of those early years tells of improvizations, the interpellations of popular voices, and the first rumblings of democracy in a postcolonial milieu. That is the first sounds of realization that the nation cannot be satisfied with colonial mode of governing. These indications arise from within and without. Precisely this is what I have wanted to demonstrate in the series of writings of the Indian nation that governance is an area of contests where forces from within and without make their political moves as how the nation is to be administered. Governance is not therefore pure government, or even the act of governing, but the field that always indicates the yearnings and practices exceeding the rules of government, and the contests that ensue. What, therefore, is the key to an understanding of the nation form? An understanding of the infinite contradictions the nation as the political subject carries in its wake. The nation exists as a conjuncture—this is what A Biography tells, this is also the implication of The Marginal Nation. My writings are therefore not on the anti-nation, but the contingent nation. To repeat what I wrote in my preface to The Marginal Nation, this is the nation in the sense of Althusserian over-determination. The beyond always makes its presence felt within the existence of the nation form. To use a phrase of Etienne Balibar, nation always “incompletes” itself. 4 There cannot be a general theory of the nation; it should therefore be never studied independent of specific conjunctures, because it has never existed beyond specific conjunctures. And that is the reason why I have held that we need not go into the sterile debates witnessed in theoretical circles of postcolonialism as to what is provincial and what is global, or what is derivative and what is universal in the nation form, but require studying the conjunctures that tell us of the infinite contradictions of the nation form. How are we to study the conjunctures within which a nation exists? Of course historical study is the best route. Methodologically we can advance few suggestions: first, we can mark out the situations of closure, out of which the nation form emerges. A situation of closure indicates a void, contentions creating deadlock, and blocked (existing) choices. It means impossibility of thinking and acting as before when heretical ideas begin to be shared by many. Second, living as conjuncture also means incompleteness almost as a permanent condition. This also implies break in the chain of significations, a continuous challenge to modes of representation. Finally, it means that it is not enough 10/12

to say that the nation emerges as a collective subject. It is important to investigate the self-construction of the subject—the form of historical individuality the nation acquires. Borders, migrants, aliens, citizens, the tradition of protests and rebellions, ethnic solidity—all of these and many others play significant roles in this self-construction of the nation as the subject of history. This is the reason why it is said that the nation arises as a product of the modern time, and that the nation form is a question of modernity, that is to say, a form built on the mission of knowing its own time with a distinct attitude to what we can call the contemporary. Yet, as the experiences of the nation form having roots in anti-colonialism demonstrate, two great ideals or images secretly haunt this process of self-construction, namely, democracy and ethnicity, with one playing on universality and the other playing on anthropological differences, conversely, with one trying to shrink the nation from within, while the other trying to widen the form—at times bursting the seams. This is the secret of the nation’s biography, its essentiality as well as marginality. In the last 34 years the discussion on nations and nationalism displaced discussions on class, and save in few cases, writers on the nation form divorced their discussions on class, labor, peasantry, and all other material existences in order to perch their discussions on cultural significations. Its roots were of course in good old Gellner, who while pointing out industrialism as the main factor behind the emergence of the nation form, brought in the question of modernity almost as a self-explanatory term. Then came writers and historians such as Anthony Smith, Hobsbawm, and others, who relied, if at all, on East European experiences as instances (outside the Western metropolitan core) of nations representing freedom from external domination. But it was Benedict Anderson who squarely put the issue of subjectivity in the field of nation studies. But if he wanted to show how through reproduction of certain cultural forms (following the analytical lead by Walter Benjamin) the cultural unity called the nation was replacing other materialities and was emerging as a material form, others carried this line of genealogical analysis even further, refining, revising, and repolishing it to give it a postcolonial gloss. Along this line, the nation emerged as a cultural configuration, borne out of a cultural response, and boasting of its own cultural strength as against the West’s material strength. Nation, as these people famously said, was narration. All other material existences were suppressed in these discussions; similarly all other accounts of conflicts and collective claim makings, particularly class dynamics, were pushed under the carpet—as if a repressed anxiety about the fate of class in the happy days of prosperity in the West and subsequent globalization was working in the minds of all these social scientists. However, the turn of globalization towards neo-colonization, then 9/11, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq changed all these. Time has compelled the intellectual world to recognize the fundamental reality of conflicts and contradictions within the nation form. The theoretical developments in this age of renewed conflicts also show how we can avoid the trap of the closure that a single-minded attention to discourses always brings in its wake. In the reformatted method of study, discourses too become unfinished things, constantly in struggle, as apparatuses or as some call “dispositive,” and not finished system of representation. 11/12

Discourses not only show how they constitute the mechanism for representing realities, but also the historical conditions of their own constitution as discourse, therefore their conditional, contested, and quarrelsome nature. Reassembled in this volume, these essays, I hope, will not only lead us to fresh efforts towards an understanding of the nature of the nation as political society, but also remind us of the past three decades when the disputes over how to understand the nation form raged with many voices ranging from the postcolonial world to the AngloAmerican, joined in what would at times become an acrimonious debate unraveling the divide between a “culturalist” and materialist understanding. The import of the past disputation has not died, and I believe that in today’s postcolonial context of making our own political society these essays have not lost their relevance. Notes and References 1. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006). 2. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). 3. “Jayaprakash Narain and the Problem of Representative Democracy,” Economic and Political Weekly, 43 (2008), 31. 4. Etienne Balibar, “The Infinite Contradiction,” in Yale French Studies, 88 (1995), 142–164.

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1 The Manifold Meaning of Territoriality in Nationalism Nationalism has never been a question of imagining a collective ideality only. It has been one of imagining territories also. Nation being a modern configuration of power, it is, thus, two questions at the same time: organizing power “on whose behalf” and “over whom” and power extending to “what territorial limit” so that the issues of “on whose behalf” and “over whom” can be correctly addressed. This link between imagination and reality, and identity and territoriality often seems so natural and axiomatic that in discussions on a country-specific nationalism, the link is not sufficiently analyzed except by way of some historical description. As an essential structural element of nationalism, this link remains simply nondiscussed or under-discussed. But in analyzing the emergence of a South Asian country in terms of nationalist identity, it can be shown that such a link remains essential to any such construction, though one has to admit that defining the link between identity and territoriality remains extremely complicated. If identity is something historically conditioned, so too is territoriality. But this historical determination implies that territoriality passes the stage of geographical reality and assumes multiple stages of territorial existence. I shall discuss here this phenomenon of the multiple existence of the territoriality of nationalism–territoriality’s manifold meaning (Figure 1.1). This three-tiered structure of the territoriality of nationalism is adopted from Peter Taylor’s discussion on the multiple tiers involved in a “world-systems approach to political geography.”1 However, whereas Peter Taylor draws his levels, i.e., experience (locality, home/work), ideology (nation-state, national economy) and reality (world economy, world market, interstate system) along the core–semi-periphery–periphery model, my own understanding of nationalism has been that these three aspects are not hierarchical; they interpenetrate and make the multiplex reality of nationalism. Thus, nationalism comprises three concurrent elements, more so in the case of a South Asian country, viz., the local experience, the ideology of the entire nation as well as extended consciousness—in the sixties it was often an Asian identity or “Asian nationalism,” an even more extended consciousness linking the nation to the worldwide anti-colonial, anti-imperialist sentiment of the post-War era continuing up to the seventies. Figure 1.1 Three-tiered Structure of the Territoriality of Nationalism Source: Author. In analyzing nationalism, locality and the nation have been variously scrutinized in their interlinks. My concern here is with the third factor, i.e., the making of a nation in relation to the region/at times with the world. Not surprisingly, political geographers 1/8

have found inexorable connections between nationalist ideology and territory, so much so that they have described nationalism in terms of a “Janus-faced temporal/spatial characteristic.”2 A little more discussion on the different forms of territoriality is in order before we confront the question of “Asian nationalism”—a form of nationalism that at once “contradicts” itself, a nationalism that directly “contravenes” its own territoriality. Sociopolitical amalgamation has resulted in the superseding of clan forms. The transition has produced much more extensive political regions within which nationalism has developed in the colonial countries. Thus, we have “African nationalism,” “Asian nationalism,” and other such phenomena. If much of the coherence of earlier societies derived from the belief in a common lineage, today too nationalism derives from such a belief. And thus people, politics, and territory continue to exist in a dynamic equilibrium. Hence, we should think less in terms of a hierarchical core–semi-periphery–periphery structure. Nations often arise within political regions, where boundaries, divisions, extra-territoriality, traditionally neutralized fields or zones, civilizational impact, etc., predicate nationalism and nation-states. To take an example, migration on a transnational scale may show that while the political may be one type of classificatory criterion for a nation-state, settlement (like primary, secondary hollow) may be another type of classification; in relation to the indigenous population of the frontier zone; in one type it may be exclusion, in the other it may be inclusion; in relation to the pace of advance, in one it is dynamic, in the other static; finally, in relation to the degree of transfrontier contact, in one it is separation, in the other contact.3 Thus, neither chronologically, nor locationally (with respect to the state area), nor even scalewise can we establish a hierarchical sense in the territoriality of nationalism.4 Such a sense would only bring back Karl Deutsch’s hierarchical notion when he had mapped out the “growth of nation according to the growth of the elements of nation” like nation growing in the society–community–people–nationality–nation way and the communicative element growing from urbanization and commerce-growth of communication networks, to adoption of group symbols and traditions to communicative efficiency.5 This hierarchical notion, we have seen, becomes very weak in face of the ambiguity inherent in the territoriality of nationalism. Territoriality means besides enforcing control over access to the territory and reifying power or “containing” events but also mapping out “political regions,” disciplining people’s historical memory and realizing the “space–time” union in the career of a nation-state. All these unite in the career of a nation-state. All these make territoriality a very crucial but ambiguous requirement of nationalism. They make the study of territoriality a fruitful entry point to the study of the nationalism of a particular country.6 If during the last century, the colonial powers, who were competing for territory in Africa and Asia, often resorted to the device of proclaiming spheres of interest or of influence over unclaimed territory, and, thus, made bickering between the emerging 2/8

nations (and subsequently nation-states) over frontiers and boundaries inevitable, the same colonial history as well as the colonial century has resulted in political regions, within which nations have emerged and have drawn sustenance from the spirit of such a region. For example, Jean Francois Bayart has shown with respect to Africa, how traditional African studies in the West remained unintegrated with contemporary political studies and how this has to be changed. Africa’s true historicity, Bayart has argued, arises from the conjunction of the colonial takeover of the continent and the development of internal dynamics. Bayart argues how the genesis of the state, the pursuit of hegemony with the formation of postcolonial historical blocs, the functioning political networks, and the “shadow theatre of ethnicity” show a continental pattern, and by prevailing over the entire region they make the specific nation-state in Africa possible. Out of his wide-ranging comparative exercise of the politics in African states, Bayart conceptualizes the politics of the belly.7 The emergence of a political region, thus, becomes the background of particular states and their politics and subsequently the site for comparative studies of politics. Indeed, such a region has been an essential requirement for the emergence of the once colonized nations. As the history of nationalism in Bangladesh shows both national frontiers as well as transnational political regions have remained fundamental elements in the emergence of third-world nationalism. Hence, we find “national patterns” and “nation-state patterns” by continents; in the words of two political geographers in a slightly altered sense, “this century’s awkward form of compromise”8 compromise between the geographically bound form of the nation-state and the imagined political region (continental or sub-continental) of nationalism. One can cite the example of Japan also in this context. Stephen Tanaka has shown in his researches on Japanese nationalism how Japan had to define her relations with the Asian continent, particularly China and South East Asia. Tanaka has found that in the construction of Asia, there were two processes in operation: First, finding equivalence in the experiences of other Asian nations; this took mainly two forms—the search for the history of old relations with other countries and the convergence of the East and the West. Second, creating difference with the experiences of other countries of the continent. This took the form of finding differences in traditions, the separation of Japan from China, the narration of Japan’s special emergence, the institutionalization of modern Japan, and the authorization of a discourse.9 By now, students of nationalism have become familiar with Stein Rokkan’s idea of a “conceptual map of Europe” wherein he showed how the prerequisites like economy, political power, law, and culture of a continent provided the institutional domains within which the processes of state formation and nation formation went on. In this conceptual map, dominant languages at the territorial centers were combined with strong movements of cultural resistance at the peripheries. Modern states produced “majorities” and “minorities”—more specifically, “minority groups.” Dynamic pressure was exerted by volatile countries. Frontiers changed into borders.10

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Yet Rokkan’s concessions to a continental/regional perspective to state building and nation-building histories, remains excessively marked with the Parsonian scheme of functionalism (the above mentioned four functional prerequisites make possible nationstate formation). It cannot adequately show how Europe had to be first invented or conceptualized before European institutions meant to tackle the problems of Europe as a particular region could come into existence. Gentz had confronted the Napoleonic Empire and had proposed the reestablishment of the classical balance of power. Bernhardi was unhappy with such a solution and had argued for a hierarchic Europe dominated by Germany.11 Still, all the institutionalization of concepts, alliances, ententes, and great power leadership took more than a century as Europe had not arrived yet. Indeed, today with the successful conceptualization of a Europe, creating European institutions has been placed firmly on the agenda. We can think of certain examples in this respect. The 32-member (states) Council of Europe was founded only in 1949 to achieve “greater unity between European parliamentary democracies.” The 12-member European Community was formed even later. The European Cultural Convention was opened for signature only in 1954 so that European countries, not members of the Council of Europe, could take part in the Council’s programs on education, culture, sports, and youth. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), formally renamed so by the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in the CSCE Budapest summit of December, 1994, could adopt the post and mandate of the High Commissioner on National Minorities in Europe only at the Helsinki meet of 1992. And now with the collapse of socialism in the eastern part of Europe, Europe as the “common homeland” of the Europeans could be firmly visualized. The last hurdle was gone. The Council of Europe could now launch programs like the cultural cooperation program, whereby a European education (designed as intercultural) can replace national education or the various cooperation and assistance program for Central and Eastern Europe. Though the transformation of the OSCE from a conference framework to a fully operational institution was declared as only a result of “new challenges, new crises” in the postconflict situation, and not a “grand design” with “plans for a new security architecture,” it is clear that the idea of a Europe as the “common land of the Europeans” had to first take shape and then only institution-building could follow and proceed.12 The dialectics of nation, region, and the continent is, thus, now for everyone to see. Plan-Europeanism based on West Europeanism has become the twilight zone where nationalism, greater nationalism based on West European values, and regionalism in the form of a continental political awareness can meet, merge, or coalesce. Rokkan’s “conceptual map of a region” based on certain functional prerequisites can be faulted on another ground. It cannot show how colonialism produced “Asia” or how “Asian nationalism” produced nationalist states in the continent. This calls for a dialectical explanation, an explanation, which will show how a South Asian nation like Bangladesh was one of the last products of such a “conceptual political region”—the “new Asia.” It will also help us to understand how the form of the nation in South Asia is predicted by the declining fortunes of “Asian nationalism.” 4/8

The situation can be envisaged ( Figure 1.2): Yet, strangely, in studies on nationalism, territoriality has always evoked the core– periphery concept and while much of this concept still remains pertinent in studies of country-specific nationalism in the third world, the hierarchical notion inbuilt here obfuscates to a great extent the nature of over-determination. We can show this in a brief reference to South Asia in relation to the metropolitan world, where the world metropolis is the core, South Asia, the periphery or semi-periphery. As we shall see, such an idea will be no different, no less a fetish than the idea that the nation is the core and the region/metropolis is the periphery! Wallerstein has called it an “unholy antinomy.” He suggests that the dispute can be avoided by proceeding “via media.” He says: Is there, for example, a particularity called South Asia? Is there a generality called world capitalism? I myself doubt it very much South Asia is an invented abstraction. The very term is quite recent. And world capitalism is an extremely complex and dense historical phenomenon which is not merely singular but unique. Nothing could be more concrete, empirical and idiographic than world capitalism. Nothing could be more abstract, theoretical and nomothetic than South Asia. We shall get absolutely nowhere by pursuing this quarrel, either in a cut-throat manner or in muffled parlour niceties…. Where does that leave us? Humble, I hope. But how to proceed? I fear I can offer no better advice than a very traditional one-the via media …. The via media I propose is the study of historical system, of systems that are historical, of historical trajectories that are systemic.13 Figure 1.2 Interrelationships between the Various Dimensions of Continental/Regional Nationalism

Source: Author. So, that is how the problem is sought to be resolved, between world system and area, particular and general, system and history, core and periphery, geography and political specificity and other such opposites. In the classic Wallersteinian argument, “Asian nationalism,” “bourgeois relations in Asia,” and “development of capitalism in Asia,” in other words, an aspect of world capitalism, is the backdrop against which South Asian nationalism takes root and manifests itself. But it is easy to see how such a via media resolution fails to tackle the dilemma. For, by proposing a “study of historical systems” as the via media, Wallerstein again falls back to universalism, a charge he has sought to refute. “Study of historical systems” is itself model oriented, confesses Wallerstein. It still remains predicated by the “sociology of modernity”—the gospel of the unique Western origins of capitalism.14 Such a model ignores or minimizes the political

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specificities like state, nationalism in the third world in general, and South Asia in particular. South Asian nationalism as a product of a worldwide historical bourgeois political system will tax one’s imagination to the extreme. Yet, in probing the trajectory of a country-specific nationalism in the context of a wider political phenomenon, there is something to learn from the Wallersteinian theory—his insights about semi-periphery. South Asian nationalism’s incorporation into a wider political phenomenon may reflect just that dynamics of semi-periphery, though once we appreciate the insights of Wallerstein’s semi-peripherality, we shall see, it no longer needs the concept of “periphery” at all! Wallerstein realizes that the notion of semiperiphery as an essential part of a world system cannot have a specific economic rationale. But the world system would be far less politically stable, without a semiperiphery, for it would mean a polarized world system in that case.15 We can add a more legitimate historical argument to this and see in this light South Asian nationalism occupying a semi-periphery position in the “world capitalist political system,” whatever that may mean. Two implications may follow from such a political explanation about semi-periphery: 1. Third world nationalism is a buffer between bourgeois political order and socialism; in that case, which one is the core, which one the periphery? However, we can keep that intriguing question apart for the present. 2. Historically, bourgeois politics is spreading worldwide and conquering new areas via third world nationalism; again, this will mean that Asian nationalism from the first decade of this century to the decade of the seventies has been the middle epoch between a pre-capitalist Asia and the capitalist Asia (the Asia of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)–World Bank epoch), Asia of the coming Pacific century, Asia of petro dollars, and Asia of the new liberal political order. South Asian nationalism, specifically nationalism in a country of South Asia, we shall see now, makes more sense, though it begs the question: why at all call it “semiperiphery”? The world bourgeois political order is as much reinforced by third world nationalist politics, as it sets the latter in motion. Power is not a one-way flow. Nor, for that matter, dialectics is only a matter of “cause–effect,” “core–periphery” relations. But we shall not get entangled in semantics. We have arrived at (the idea of) Asian nationalism and its strategic position in the conceptual map of the nation form. Notes and References 1. Peter Taylor, Political Geography–World Economy, Nation State and Locality (London: Longman, 1985), p. 30. 2. James Anderson, “Nationalist Ideology and Territory,” in R. J. Johnston, David B. Knight and Eleonor Kofman (eds), National Self-Determination and Political Geography (London: Croom Helm, 1988), Chapter 2, p. 25; Anderson discusses in this connection the relation between “economics and space” (pp. 30–31). See also the editorial introduction on “Nationalism, Self-determination and the World Political 6/8

Map,” where they discuss “nationalism, history and territory” (Chapter 1). On a historical study of the relations among the different units of territory with a nation like India, the readers may see John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson and Anil Seal, Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics, 1870 to 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 3. Richard Muir, Modern Political Geography (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 121. 4. Chronologically it may be nuclear/ephemeral; locationally it may be central/peripheral/external; scalewise primary, i.e., national/secondary, i.e., continental/world. 5. K. W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1953); see also his “The Growth of Nations,” World Politics, 5 (1953). 6. For functions of territoriality, one can see R. D. Sack, “Territorial Bases of Power,” in A. D. Burnett and P. J. Taylor (eds), Political Studies from Spatial Perspectives (New York: Wiley, 1981). 7. Jean-Francois Bayart, The State in Africa–the Politics of the Belly, translated by Mary Harper, Christopher, and Elizabeth Harrison (London: Longman, 1993). 8. W. Gordon East and J. R. V. Prescott, Our Fragmented World (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 20. 9. Stephen Tanaka, Japan’s Orient–Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 10. Stein Rokkan, “Territories, Centres and Peripheries,” in J. Gottman (ed), Centre and Periphery (London: Sage, 1980), pp. 163–204; also Stein Rokkan and D. W. Urwin (eds), The Politics of Territorial Identity (London: SAGE Publications, 1982). 11. The views of Friedrich von Gentz (Fragments Upon the Balance of Power in Europe, London, 1806) and Friedrich von Bernhardi (Germany and the Nex War, New York, 1914) are discussed in detail in Jurg Martin Gabriel, Worldviews and Theories of International Relations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 12. On the evolution of the Helsinki Process relevant to the work of OSCE, Adam Daniel Rotfeld, “The Evolution of the Helsinki Process,” OSCE Bulletin, Warsaw, Fall 1995, 3 (3), pp. 1–6; on the intercultural education promoted by the Council of Europe, Antonio Perotti, The Case for International Education (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Press, 1994); on Council of Europe’s policy toward central and eastern Europe, From Assistance to Democracy to Democratic Security (Strasbourg: Division of the PanEuropean Cooperation Programme, Directorate of Political Affairs, Council of Europe, n.d.)—particularly the Preface by Daniel Tarschys, Secretary General of the Council of Europe. 7/8

13. Immanuel Wallerstein, “World-Systems Analysis and Historical Particularity–Some Comments,” in Sugata Bose (ed), South Asia and World Capitalism (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 23–24. 14. This has been, indeed, David Washbrook’s criticism of the Wallersteinian position of reconceiving the history of South Asia since 1750 as part of the development of a capitalist world system. See David Washbrook, “South Asia, the World System and World Capitalism,” in South Asia and World Capitalism, pp. 40–84. 15. Immanuel Wallertsein, The Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 23.

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2 What Was Asia to the Asians? Since both radical nationalism and communism were strongest in the Southeastern part of Asia, in most of the commentaries on Asian nationalism, Asia in the fifties was south, southeast and the far east of Asia. South Asia was a close adjunct of South-East Asia. And in a slightly more sophisticated version, characteristic of the British academia, an analyst found nationalism in Asia to be suffering from several structural constraints. In a book published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the writer found that in the emergent Asian countries, “one form of political control, Western Imperialism, was replaced by another form of control, that of an Asian avant garde of ideologues and men and affairs” and “for the ordinary Asian, there was no sudden and striking change.” He found patron–client relations obtaining everywhere, a spirit of independence resulting in the psychological claims of minorities. Democratic institutions were under severe test, for parliaments were often unrepresentative—he chose to call them “freedom movement parliaments”; there were “professional governors,” and a cult of violence. All these were to be found in Asian nationalism, which seemed to pass through three stages: “folk,” “liberal,” and “fascist.”1 To appreciate the intellectual milieu from which these comments emanated, we have only to recall that Karl Wittfogel around this time produced his Oriental Despotism (1957), arguing that autocracy was inherent in the Asian outlook on governance; John Plamenatz in On Alien Rule and Self-Government argued that non-European peoples had been entirely imitative in changing their institutions and in the way they sought to make progress which is why it was natural that they would adopt European methods. This was also the decade when the Princeton Behaviorists were analyzing the “politics of the developing areas” by abstracting a model of “transitional politics”—a situation of transition from the traditional to a modern political system. The element of competitiveness was the essence of modern political system. If nationalism in Asia had prospered from the ascendancy of a certain competitive group, as it was suggested in Samuel Huntington’s analysis of Turkish nationalism,2 this nationalism in the absence of a moderating agency that marks a liberal institutional framework was now bound to suffer and, indeed, collapse from acute competitiveness. And worse then, that failure could now invite communism.3 In a volume edited for the International Commission for a History of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind, Asia appeared as The New Asia, though the editors admitted that “the very title of this introduction to The New Asia raises a series of difficult and embarrassing questions.”4 But then modernization of new Asia meant the “first steps from splendid isolation toward modernization”; it also signified that the “cutting from the tree of liberty (had) struck root in the soil of Islam.” It also meant “a journey for the new Asian countries from oriental empire to modern national states.” It 1/20

meant a whole continent would now respond to Hume, Mill, and Bentham, who meant nothing to the continent earlier. In this Asia, like communism and nationalism, Islam too was rediscovered. Like India Old and New (London, 1921) where Valentine Chirol had approvingly cited the Montagu-Chelmsford Report that had said “Indians are intellectually our children,”5 Bernard Lewis found the impact of the French Revolution on a renascent Near East.6 It was also the time when Arab nationalism became an integral part of the imagery that The New Asia conveyed. Arab nationalism became the official ideology of the Egyptian state in 1956; Syria and Egypt united. Monarchies in Iraq and Yemen toppled. Ba’ath nationalism galvanized Iraq and Syria, and pan-Arab nationalism produced the dream of Greater Syria.7 We must not, however, think that “nationalizing the Arabs” was a problem-free enterprise. Characteristic of the tensions in the idea of Asian nationalism, Arab nationalism was also bound to suffer from the irreconcilables. Sati al-Husri had said, “I believe only in the national tie which is based on language, and I regard the words, ‘East and Eastern and West and Western’ only as geographical terms.”8 The Arab nationalist was, however, wishing away the problems, for recognition of language as the key to nation-making was itself laden with “eastern” and “western” histories; moreover, this nationalism itself would be soon considered as an obstacle to the Umma, as the Islamic Brotherhood could argue citing the Prophet: Verily this Brotherhood of yours is a single Brotherhood and I am your Lord: Therefore serve Me (and no other). (The Quraan, 21.92) The political geography of Asian nationalism had, thus, one further connotation. Nationalism on a continental scale would produce regional and sub-regional hegemony like Malaysia in the mid-sixties, Arab nationalism under Egyptian domination, Greater Syria, Ba’athism, etc. Asian nationalism was, thus, a complex phenomenon, and it gave rise to different Western perceptions. There were some who would concentrate on religions and religious tensions in the emerging nation-states of Asia, some on ethnicity, some again on the irreconcilable territorial demands of the neighboring states of Asia. Some again said that nationalism in Asia was merely a bargaining ploy to extract more concessions from the rich West. Nations of Asia were not at heart committed to communism; their social system and culture would not welcome it. Thus, if there was an apprehension in intellectual and academic circles in the West that radical nationalism and communism might dominate Asia, there was an accompanying relief and a lingering hope also that “there was too much of Asia” to extend welcome radical ideologies. This mixed reaction and outlook was best expressed by William Holland in his summing up of the deliberations in the Eleventh Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations. Holland spoke of “new trends in Asian nationalism.” He wrote9: Asian nationalism may be pictured as a huge and often uncontrolled source of energy. It is often not clearly formulated either in ideological slogans or in concrete economic and political programs. It is, rather, a huge emotional reservoir, which can be tapped and 2/20

used for good or ill depending on the kind of leadership, which captures it. In recent years, and especially since the victory of communism in China, there is a natural, though sometimes oversimplified, tendency on the part of Westerners to think of Asian nationalism chiefly as a possible alternative to communism. Recognizing (often belatedly) that the Chinese Communists owed much of their success to their skill in taking over the leadership of Chinese nationalism, leaders of the Western democratic nations are deeply concerned that the nationalist emotions of southern and southeastern Asia shall not be similarly captured by a militant communism now reinforced by the new military and political prestige of Communist China. In the hope of averting this disaster, the United States has embarked on considerable programmes of economic, technical, and military assistance to this part of the world. On a smaller scale, this effort has been paralleled by the similar programs of the United Nations agencies and by the Commonwealth countries in the Colombo Plan for the economic development of India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, and Malaya. It is, of course, still too soon to know how far these measures will in themselves succeed in preventing the spread of Communism in this area. Holland found “pre-liberation ideas and slogans still tending to dominate”, that nations were now “struggling to maintain and operate the modern state and prevent it from failing into anarchy or dictatorship”; that due to desperate shortage of educated people … few have had the time to devote themselves to formulating a code of national ideals or given specific political and economic content to the vaguely expressed slogans and aspirations which their leaders have hitherto used to arouse popular support. The Pacific Relations Conference further noted the “continuing problem of internal disorders inspired by rebellious political or military factions” and the “real danger that in Asian eyes great prestige does not always attach to that special combination of political democracy with capitalism, private property and individualism which much of the Western World has so long extolled and preached.”10 Thus, with nationalism in power, it was a case of changed problematic. It was also held that nationalism in Asia was not aroused by nationalist movements, but by wars. Thus,11 wars have played a great part in arousing the self-consciousness of Asia—the SinoJapanese War of 1894–95, the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Western expeditions to China round about 1900, the Western expeditions to China round about 1900, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, the First World War of 1914–18, the Turkish War of Independence of 1919–23, the intervention and civil war in the Soviet Union proper, 1917–24, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the China proper in 1937 and, of course, particularly the Second World War. Not strangely, agrarian revolutionary wars, national liberation wars, and various 3/20

peasant wars did not feature as catalysts in this analysis. Asian nationalism had two strategic paths to choose from: China, the revolutionary way, and India, the evolutionary one. The notion of “changed problematic” found an echo in the writings of other European observers also. One author spoke of the post-Bandung era in these terms12: The Bandung Conference marked the end of an era, the era of European ascendancy, in Asia. This end was the logical outcome of a development, which started at the turn of the century with the growth of national movements aiming at modernization, and resulted in the liberation of the colonial and semi-colonial countries of Asia, with or without social revolutions. Bandung formally rang out old Asia and ushered in the new …. In its political-national aspect, the Asian revolution has been accomplished, but it has to be recognized that so far as the solution of social problems is concerned, the “Asian century” has not yet come to an end. Thus, “solution of social problems” did not imply combating colonialism in its new form, that is, neo-colonialism, domination of metropolitan capital, unequal exchange relations, global militarism etc. It was to be a “changed problematic.” Similar calls for pragmatism in Asian nationalism went out from other circles also. It was noted that the “new Asia” was not of Bandung, but “on a more or less pragmatic basis with relatively close ties with the West.” With “Japan, Republic of Korea, Republic of China (Taiwan), Malaysia” rapidly “moving into modernity,” the “new Asia was with the West.”13 It was found that though the Bandung rhetoric and anti-Westernism seemed to dominate Asian nationalism, “yet to most leaders of the new nations, this concept appeared to be perfectly compatible both with selective imitation of Western models and with reliance on large amounts of Western development aid.”14 In a way, they had sensed correctly that nationalist rhetoric was not to be taken at face value, for basically the nationalist leaders of Asia through the rhetoric had given the signal that they were for “a third road between western capitalism and Soviet communism.” It was a correct guess because in the fifties the Soviet leadership too had started preaching “a non-capitalist path of development” for backward countries, i.e. neither capitalist, nor socialist, but a mixed economy, a strong state sector, a strong nationalist government, continued socialist aid —in short a path for the nation that prevents imperialist domination and neo-colonial control, and strengthens Afro-Asian solidarity. If Gunnar Myrdal wrote Asian Drama, the Western observers proved to be more insightful than the Soviet observers regarding the historical destiny of Asian nationalism. Looking at the Asian situation in the sixties, Myrdal had noted that with the “immense interests at stake” Asia represented to the West,15 it is natural that the national authorities, the institutions sponsoring and financing research and indeed public opinion in the West, all press for studies of the problems of underdeveloped countries…. But the studies are also expected to reach opportune conclusions and to appear in a form which is regarded as advantageous, or at least not disadvantageous, to official and popular national interests…. This same concern with 4/20

national interests is also being seen in the underdeveloped countries themselves. Their institutions and their educated classes are becoming more and more touchy about questions dealing with social study. Myrdal found the effects of such an approach in the “opportunistic arrangement of facts…. The use even in scholarly writings of labels like ‘the free world’ or ‘the free Asian countries’” to denote, not that people are free in the ordinary sense of the word, but the purely negative fact that a country’s foreign policy is not aligned to that of the communist bloc. Thus, Asia in the sixties represented two failures to Myrdal. The “failure” of much of Asia to develop was compounded by the failure of western social science in understanding Asia. This double failure became the subject matter of what was to rank as one of the most massive and influential social science books written about Asia in the post-War era, Asian Drama (1968). But if Myrdal wanted “objectivity” and the removal of the prevalent set of ideological blinkers, the pragmatic response of the West toward the specific phenomenon of Asian nationalism represented that “objectivity” in its own way. The reasons for taking a pragmatic view of Asian nationalism on the part of the West were obvious. Certainly the Cold War rhetoric was there; the imperative was also there —that of forcing the nations to become the foot soldiers in the War against socialism by constantly warning the emerging countries that their nationalism must not slide into left radicalism, and worse, communism. But the pragmatic view sprang from the element of pragmatism inherent in the notion of Asian nationalism itself. This nationalism knew that the peasant character of the agrarian economy ruled out any thoroughgoing agrarian radicalism that could have its basis only in a sharp class differentiation among the peasants;16 this nationalism was only too aware of the elements that make its fragmentary nature, such as religion,17 caste, gender, locality, etc.; it also knew that howsoever hegemonic it might strive to be, it had to stoop to the communities to conquer.18 This nationalism further realized at the outset of its postcolonial career that if, as the corporate soul of the masses it had to undertake certain welfarist functions like the king or the zamindar who used to undertake such activities in the olden days, this nation had to grovel at the feet of the world bankers for technology, for capital, for even the simplest means of survival, for even the money to siphon off! Asian nationalism was, thus, pragmatic, because it was the mediatory layer through which metropolitan capitalism reached every corner of Asia, and because, above all, it was structurally bound to be pragmatic so as to ward off the pressures of fragments like classes, gender, communities, etc. In short, apart from the commonality of a colonial past, a common class nature and an imagined bond between the Asian nations lasting through centuries, the commonality of fragments, and also the fragmentary nature of the ideology of nationalism in Asia made it specifically the Asian nationalism. This implied, again, Asian varieties of nationalism like Nehru’s socialistic pattern of society and secularism , Nasser’s Arab nationalism, Maulana Bhasani’s Islamic socialism, Sukarno’s The New Path, Ayub

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Khan’s Basic Democracy, and, as late as in the later seventies, Imam Khomeini’s Vilayat I Faqih. All these paths of Asian nationalism indicated the strategic character of the phenomenon—its middle position, the semi-peripheral situation, expressed in such terms as “Asian pragmatism,”“non-communist nationalism,” etc.19 No wonder, the Asian nationalist leaders understood their strategic position better than outside observers. What was Asia to the non-Asians? Thus, leads us to enquire: What was Asia to the Asians? How did Asian nationalism conceive its own destiny? The middle position was best expressed by Jawaharlal Nehru, who addressing the Eleventh Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1953, ruminated20: For a long time, I have thought that from many points of view the problems of the world will be more entangled in those of the Far East and that the centre of gravity of trouble will be the Far East or large parts of Asia. It has struck me that while people often talked about this, they usually passed by the problems of Asia and discussed the other great problems of the world, notably of Europe. They were, of course, very important, but it seems to me that in the perspective of things to come they were not paying enough attention to the problems of a developing Asia…. For Asia is an area which is not only in a process of change but in a process of storm. I am referring to the inner changes that are taking place all over the world no doubt but perhaps more so in Asia than elsewhere…. Asia is a huge continent and, when we talk about an Asian feeling, I do not quite know what it means, because we differ so much amongst ourselves. Great countries like China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Burma or the countries of the Middle East have ancient traditions and cultures, with a tremendous background of history and past experience. It is difficult to jumble them together and call it Asia because geographically they happen to be in that area. Yet, I think it is true that in the present context there is such a thing as an Asian sentiment, although there may be large differences between these countries. Possibly it is merely a reaction to the past 200 or 300 years of Europe in Asia…. Countries like India or China or those of the Middle East have a very long background of history and tradition. It is both good and bad. If it had not been good we would not have survived. We have survived and found there is a great deal of good and we propose to hold on to that. At the same time, there is, no doubt, a great deal of bad in it too. It prevents us from doing things, which we ought to do. And so, between the bad and between the past and the future, we do not quite know what we are, and what we should do…. If you ask me—and I am not without experience of my country—it is very difficult for me to answer briefly, because I see so many forces at play. I am often asked what is communism doing in this country? How does it affect us? Certain questions may be important; I do not deny that. But we have to deal with deeper problems. When I say 6/20

“we”, I am not referring only to India, but also to other countries. Deeper problems, more difficult questions and more complicated questions—not just being Communists and spreading communism or being anti-Communists and fighting communism and thinking that that is the only question left in this world. If you ask me about India, the major difficulties will not be external to us but internal, of the mind and of the spirit; tendencies pushing us ahead, tendencies pushing us backward; revivalism on the one side and progress on the other. I have to be pardoned for the long citation. But the reason will be apparent soon. Nehru then went on to say something in this astonishingly lucid speech that has a direct relevance to what we are discussing now21: As you meet here in India to consider problems of Asian nationalism, I wonder what exactly you mean by Asian nationalism. It is different from its European variety and, if so, how does it differ? What exactly is nationalism? I do not know; and it is extremely difficult to define. In the case of a country under foreign domination, it is easy to describe what nationalism is. It is anti-foreign power. But, in a free country, what is nationalism? Certainly it is something positive, though opinions may vary. Even so, I think a large element of it is negative, and sometimes we find that nationalism, which is a healthy force in a country, a progressive force, a liberating force, becomes—may be after liberation—unhealthy, retrogressive, reactionary or expansionist and looks with greedy eyes on other countries, as did those countries against which it fought for its freedom…. All that is “nationalism”. Then, where do you draw the line? What do you call right and what do you call wrong? We have just been through our struggle for independence and freedom. Naturally, nationalism was a war-cry which warmed our hearts. It is still there in our hearts and it still warms the hearts of almost every Asian wherever you may go, because the memories of past colonialism are very vivid in our mind…. The vast masses of the people do not forget them. Any other force, any other activity that they seek to function, must define itself in terms of this nationalism. That is to say, if it is anti-nationalism, it comes up against a great barrier. If it is going parallel and in line with it, then it may be helped by it. That is why I said a moment ago that, when the question is put, as it often is by people coming to us from abroad, “what is your reaction to communism”, the answer is a somewhat complicated one, When they get a little angry with us and say, “Cannot you see the great danger which is threatening the world?”, we answer, “We see many things, not one; certainly that danger it there, but there are many others, too—many other dangers from outside, and many inside—and we try to balance them.” An individual may answer this question differently. But I am telling you what the national answer would be. When Indonesia was struggling for freedom, it seemed a monstrous thing to us to ask any country to support Dutch imperialism there. Whatever the reason, Communism or no Communism, it was a monstrous thing. Fortunately, in the end the right counsels prevailed and Indonesian nationalism was supported, and it won. No argument in any country of Asia is going to have weight if it goes counter to the nationalist spirit of the

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country, Communism or no Communism. That has to be understood. I am not arguing for or against, but am trying to put the position as I understand. Whatever country in Asia you may go to, you have to see what is the nationalist urge, how you can support it, and, if you go against it, whatever your other arguments may be, they will not be fully appreciated or understood. In this clearly yet intriguing speech, the signals are clear. So are the signs and signifiers. The Pacific Relations Institute, a notoriously anti-communist platform of those days, is the audience. They signify “Europe.” “They are coming to us from abroad” and asking, “what is communism doing?” “How are we to check them?” They have to be given the message: Do not worry about communism. Take caution, see that you do not wound nationalist sentiment, for “whatever your other arguments may be,” if they go counter to the nationalist spirit, “they will not be fully appreciated or understood.” This was the pragmatic voice of Asian nationalism speaking to the West. But that is not all in this speech. Nationalism in Asia is not merely the signifier, it is the sign itself—supporting nationalist states in Asia must be a priority of the West over waging war on communism in Asia, even if it is an Indonesia-like situation, where nationalism and communism are in close embrace. In this involved communication, communism too has a discursive role to play. Communism is used a sign, not a primary sign but a sign of the second order that unless nationalism is appreciated, communism may occur. In other words, it is a speech not on communism, but on nationalism, but where communism is brought on to signify the imperatives of acknowledging nationalism as the hegemonic ideology in Asia. The signified is the thematic of pragmatism. Yet, even this is not all. If Nehru here speaks of “good nationalism” and “bad nationalism,” it is not simply a liberal problematic, for two things obtain here, and both are of interest to this chapter. First, if nationalism is “good and bad,” it is not a choice of some individual, not a question of judgment, for Nehru is “speaking for the moment of national tendencies.” In other words, the message to the West is—do not judge nationalism by its association with communism or anything else, but judge it as a secular reality, the existence of nation-states as a fact. Second, if it is a question of “national tendencies,” it implies that Asian nationalism is not a monolithic whole. And this implication, for us, is more important. It imparts a sense of its destiny of disintegration, being swallowed by competitive nationalisms, being devoured by etatisme, of which Nehru was speaking on that occasion, suggesting that it was not a question of judgment, but simply a phenomenon to be accepted. In this monologue of Asian nationalism, we have then pan-Asianism, nationalism, and pragmatism at the same time. Agrarian radicalism (it was read as communism) was something with which nationalism was destined to co-live, but with which it would not like to be bracketed. We can now see that the West was not alone in taking a pragmatic view of Asian nationalism. Asian nationalists themselves were eager to adopt such a view, particularly in their reflections on the heady years of the early fifties. Krishna Menon, one of the 8/20

architects of the Bandung spirit, was to defend the pragmatic approach that he along with Nehru had adopted in Bandung. In a candid interview with Michael Brecher years after 1955, Krishna Menon said that Bandung grew not so much out of a militant AfroAsianism, as out of the Colombo proposals on economic aid and the Bagor Communique (December 29, 1954).22 Krishna Menon said that India indeed had been against “Continental compartmentalism.” It was “colonialism in all its manifestations” that had propelled Asianism. Indonesia had been persistent on it, “China had wanted to be Asian,” but “we [India] were not so effusive.” In fact “I [Krishna Menon] introduced Chou to others.” The “Bandung spirit was essentially a compromise”; Nehru wanted it that way, therefore, “the Bandung spirit was Nehru.” “China wanted to be good liberal.” But if in 1955 “every Asian country realized that solidarity was a good thing for them,” now each wants (in 1968) “its own kind of solidarity.” China wanted Pakistan very much in the Bandung movement, and “it was quite clear (and we were able to accept the fact) that China was a large country and that if she was trying to play the role of Asia, she was not going to put Pakistan outside it.”23 Why was India correct in moderating the militant and active Asianism? Krishna Menon found the post-Bandung situation vindicating India’s approach. Asians were fighting Asians: China was fighting India; Pakistan troubling India; China fighting the Soviet Union. China was trying to be hegemonic by becoming the “harmonizing element”; “Bandung was,” therefore, like “Geneva and Locarno” (1925).24 Summing up Krishna Menon’s views, Michael Brecher was to comment25: He [Krishna Menon] does not recognize the region as a distinctive subordinate system, and, in any event, he perceives it as peripheral to India’s vital interests. India’s policy must continue to be preventive and responsive—to the threat of penetration by the blocs and the super powers, especially to the danger of neo-colonialism. In negative terms, the proper role for India is to help keep the region free from cold war alliances and nuclear weapons. More specifically, it is to press for the elimination of US power in Vietnam and the self-assumed “burden” of protecting the entire area from Chinese expansionism. Stated more positively, India should aim at strengthening the nonaligned character of Southern Asia as an “area of peace” and the prevention of independence of States in the region. In other words, Asia, and South Asia in particular, was not to be the major engagement of India’s external policy. Here it was more preventive and, therefore, only reactive, negative.26 In fact, S. Gopal unwittingly substantiates this in his biography of Nehru. In his talk with John Sherman Cooper on May 5, 1959, Nehru had repeated that communism/anti-communism clouded the issue. If Asia was to be built, it was to be done by overcoming the conflict. But China wanted to be hegemonic. The communist challenge at home also irked Nehru, who viewed it as damaging to India’s (and his) role in Asia.27 At the height of the India–China conflict, in a televised interview released in New York on December 4, 1962, Nehru said that there was no non-alignment vis-à-vis China.28 This Asianism was far from the militant Asianism that events in Asia in the 9/20

fifties had suggested. It recognized the tensions within the ideology of Asian nationalism and wanted to moderate it to a noticeable extent. Not for nothing was Winston Churchill to call Nehru “the Light of Asia” in a letter of 1955 29: I hope you will think of the phrase “The Light of Asia”. It seems to me that you might be able to do what no other human being could in giving India the lead, at least in the realm of thought, throughout Asia, with the freedom and dignity of the individual as the ideal rather than the Communist Party dull book. It can be well imagined why the Asian Relations Conference (ARC) of 1947 never really took off and the euphoria was so shortlived. The myth of Asianism springing from the ARC, however, continued. But 40 years later as a few gray-haired people and some others collected in Delhi to take stock of the legacy of the ARC, they could not hide their disappointment. H. Venkatasubbiah, a member of the staff of the Asian Relations Organization (ARO) and author of the Asia in the Modern World, said that Appadorai, the key organizer of the ARO and the ARC, wanted to revive the organization in the wake of Bandung, but the Ministry of External Affairs threw a wet blanket on the attempt. He also said that China had been willing to be the next host in 1948. But India did not actively support the idea.30 Another functionary, who many years later became India’s ambassador to Nepal, ruminated in 1987 that Nehru clearly told Appadorai that the ARO should be abolished. The Indian Council of World Affairs had been a private body backed by the government. The ARO had hosted the Conference will full government support. Now with the Government itself backing out, there was little prospect of its continuity. The chances of nonofficial bodies and persons organizing an ARC again were very remote. The ARO had to wind up.31 M. S. Rajan was more candid. A member, also the Assistant Secretary of the ARO, he reflected, “Why and how did the ARO come to achieve precious little and reach and inglorious and unpublicized end?” According to him, irresponsibility, Nehru’s preoccupation, governmental character of sponsorship (for Nehru was the president of the ARO), and a changed China were the factors.32 He added33: After all, it took another eight years (in 1955) for the first Asian-African (Bandung) Conference to be held. Having been unable (after trying) to hold a second Bandung Conference, all that the organizers could do was to celebrate in January 1985 the thirteenth anniversary of the first conference. Eric Gonsalves, editing the volume commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the ARC (October 2–5, 1987) in New Delhi, could not but say, “the expectations that had been engendered in that Conference were not to be immediately realized as is the way of many human designs.”34 The pragmatism of the postcolonial Indian state in approaching the phenomenon of Asianism was evident in winding up the ARC and discontinuing the Conference. The pragmatism was equally evident in these reflections (cited above) 40 years later, when the pragmatists again defended the decision to discontinue the Asian Relations initiative. This pragmatism defined Asianism not in terms of anti-colonialism, neo-colonialism, radical agrarian change, Asian trade bloc, growing trade and commerce among Asian countries, political noninterference and

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anti-militarism, but in terms of a tension between “tradition and modernity.” Thus, a delegate from Singapore to the commemorative meeting assumed that if enough Asianism has not developed, the reason was, “identity development is a process.” Professor Takdir Alisjahbana from Indonesia detected “the oscillation of modern Asian and African man between tradition and modernity” and the “crisis of the modern secular and rational man in our time.”35 Another delegate from Singapore, Professor Lau Teik Soon, said that the Asianism of 1947 has rightly evolved into “pragmatic regionalism” with growth, pattern changes as well as new Asian financial trends. 36 The most effusive in defending pragmatism was the Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. After Shankar Dayal Sharma, then the Indian Vice President, had raised the issue of “Asian solutions to problems of Asia,” Rajiv Gandhi defined the Asian question in these words37: The Asian drama continues, a drama of swift change, a drama of self-discovery and selfassertion. The Asian dilemma also continues, the dilemma of modernization, without sacrificing what is valuable in our tradition, the essential Asian challenge lies in reconciling change with continuity…. In that dawn of freedom, when Asians first gathered in New Delhi, there was promise of peaceful cooperation amongst newly liberated countries. Asia has proved too vast and complex to build institutions of allAsian cooperation. Glowing words, but they do not hide the stark realism that nations should never be too radical. In this Asian nationalism, postcoloniality was mediated by modernity, which explains why in country after country of Asia, postcolonial reconstruction followed largely the colonial model, why such features of modernity marked postcoloniality as a strong state, an emphasis on building up technocracy, political mobilization through conventional channels, and strong doses of developmentalism. The Bandung Conference was a perfect reflection of this combination: selective anti-Westernism and full-scale reliance on Western models and on large amounts of western development aid—acceleration of the process of decolonization and quick economic development.38 K. M. Pannikar, a leading nationalist intellectual of India, spelt out clearly the imperatives of modernity in the era of postcoloniality. He wrote39: They (the newly independent Afro-Asian states) have had in every case to build up a political organization. Their own traditional political structures had disappeared during the period of their subjection and new institutions had therefore to be built up. The administrative services necessary for a modern government had also to be provided. Their economy, formerly adjusted to the policies of the metropolitan government, had to be reorganized. The social system, which had been in most cases outside the purview of the colonial government, had to be modernized. In fact the new states, on achieving their independence, realized for the first time the immense responsibilities, which they had to face. 11/20

Pannikar further wrote that there were problems of political structure, problems in the way of a successful working of parliamentary democracy, and he commented, “unfortunately most of the new countries are ill equipped for such intellectual work in the political sphere.”40 Therefore, in most of these states democracy remains a borrowed ideology, whose implications are little understood and whose institutions have no special significance.41 There were “problems of administration,” “lack of superior personnel,” a state of affairs little short of mā-bāpism, bureaucratic domination, lack of education, and little of science in these new states. No wonder, postcolonial Asian nation-states exhibited so many types of system: parliamentary democracy in India, guided democracy under Iskandar Mirza in Pakistan, basic democracy under Ayub Khan in Pakistan, controlled democracy under Sukarno in Indonesia. Thus, if to the modernist Asians “Asia was a developing unity,”42 Asia also had problems, which grew out of the encounter of postcoloniality with modernity. Indeed this was discernible immediately after the war, when Gandhi asked the ARC of 1946 in Delhi, which Asia was meeting there.43 Yet by the end of the sixties and early seventies, that is, the last years of Asian nationalism, if moderation and pragmatism were the keywords coming out of the engagement between post-coloniality and modernity, revolutionism and agrarian radicalism were also reaching their peak. Kathleen Gough accused “American social science research on South Asia [of] remarkably lacking in studies dealing with the dynamics of imperialism as well as with the revolutionary movements that have arisen to destroy the system.”44 The veteran anthropologist found nationalist programs failing in all the major states of South Asia. The “rhetoric of socialist patterns” was accompanied by “foreign investment,” “foreign control,” “super-power rivalry,” “specific interstate rivalries,” “border wars,” “increasing amount of military aid,” etc. The failure of the nationalist agenda was being countered now with revolution. The vision of an Asian revolution was not surprising because it was not merely the decade of Vietnam (when she wrote those lines); a South Asian uprising too seemed round the corner. Daniel Thorner had spoken of both the “red” and the “steel gray” colors of the revolution in the Indian countryside.45 Kathleen Gough, of course, admitted revolutionary “weaknesses.” Class struggles were sharpening, yet there was “a lack of strong, unified revolutionary socialist movements.” “The South Asian peasants and workers had been drawn into the capitalist world specifically as objects of imperialism”; there were “increasing polarization of class relations and incomes, and greater immiserization for large number of peasants.” Dual economy prevailed over the entire region. Against this background, Gough found the emergence of a radical left as the most remarkable phenomenon on the South Asian scene. Bangladesh was found to be a result of a fractured revolutionary process. Asian revolutionism had given birth to a new nation, but again due to revolutionary weaknesses Bangladesh was to be viewed as an abortive birth.46 Gough’s vision of an Asian radicalism reaching climax in South Asia was shared by some others too at that time. I am here leaving out for the moment the contemporary commentaries on political events in Asia coming from the organs of the Chinese 12/20

Communist Party. “Spring thunder” seemed to break out not only over the Indian sky, but also over Burma, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, the Palestine region, Indonesia, and Cambodia. That narrative and its fate are too well known to be recounted here. But we can make at least one observation. In the above cited speech of Nehru, communism was only a sign of the second order; that is, it not merely signified itself, but helped to signify something else in the communist commentaries, radical activities, and the surge of leftism throughout Asia represented the primary sign. It was signifying that the Asian destiny was now reaching its apogee. It was yet to be seen whether this was the revolutionary climax or the nemesis of it. Paul Brass and Marcus Franda, two well-known area specialists of the West specializing in South Asia, could not mistake the surge of radicalism. In one of the first in the series of their studies of radical politics in South Asia, Paul Brass argued47: The subject of radical politics remains a sensitive one in South Asia; but cold war ideology and propaganda have lately been replaced by more detached and analytical perspectives. Social scientists have been using more of the tools of their disciplines in comparing radical movements in different areas of the world and attempting to define the conditions for the success or failure of such movements rather than simply operating on the tired assumptions of cold war propagandists. Area specialists have also altered the perspective on radical movements by their greater concern for the indigenous roots and aspects of radical politics rather than with the international aspects. Brass set out to enquire two sets of questions, viz. (a) the conditions for the success or failure of parties of the radical left in South Asian conditions and how far ideologies derived from Marxism had been related to South Asian conditions and (b) the functioning of radical and revolutionary parties in a parliamentary system. He found that indigenous factors had been more important than international influences in the development of radical movements in South Asian conditions. Requirements of political adjustments to regional, national, and local environments had been more important for radical left strategies than ideological beliefs. He also found that political adjustment among the older and more organized left parties had led them increasingly in the direction of reformism rather than revolution and this reformism had resulted in newer left political formations.48 Brass agreed that49 Clearly therefore, the prospects for radical change in South Asia by conventional parliamentary means are surely limited. The radical left parties … operate in the context of a severe political dilemma. If they attempt to move too rapidly, they face the constraints of contemporary political alignments and of the threat of repression. If they become too reformist and gradualist, they face the prospect of defection by more radical and revolutionary groups…. The support of external powers, which has generally been necessary for the success of revolutionary movements elsewhere, is not readily available in South Asia because of the regional and great power stalemate in international politics in the South Asian region. The parties of the radical Left in South Asia are on their own. They must maintain a militant posture, promote mass movements, and keep up

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constant pressure for radical policies to maintain popular support and to promote social change, but their ultimate impact is likely to be only gradualist and reformist despite all the commotion. This recognition of the surge of indigenous leftism in South Asia by area specialists like Brass or Franda not merely implied that Cold War rhetoric were to be largely sidelined in coming to terms with the phenomenon of Asian leftism, it conveyed a message of real politic also—once again a message of pragmatism. Indeed, it meant a new way of incorporating the element of leftism in the overall task of the West of assessing the destiny of Asian nationalism, plagued by radical opposition and radicalizing elements everywhere. Talukder Maniruzzaman, one of the persistent analysts of leftism in Bangladesh erstwhile East Pakistan, commented prophetically as early as 197350: Nevertheless, the triumphant beginnings of Bangladesh are only a door to massive problems for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his government. The enormous tasks of development and reconstruction in one of the poorest countries of the world, with about 70 million people in an area of only 55,126 sq. miles, are likely to prove more difficult than the leadership of a liberation struggle with millenarian appear. Given the best of efforts and intentions, it will be a massive task to alleviate to any appreciable degree the economic distress of the people of Bangladesh, who have now been ravaged by West Pakistani troops. Under these circumstances, the buoyant optimism at the birth of the nation could soon become pessimism, and the vast army of the educated unemployed, many of whom participated in the liberation war, may feel particularly frustrated. Given the proclivity to opposition politics, and the extreme politicization of the Bengali masses, the reassertion of strong radical opposition movements can be expected to develop rather quickly. (Author’s emphasis) Twenty years have rolled by since Maniruzzaman’s comment, and we know today what happened to that left opposition. I have argued elsewhere that this rather quick rise of militant leftism and its decimation at the hands of a strong state were to be the elements of passive revolution everywhere in Asia.51 Not much was left of Asian nationalism. With the eighties ushering in the Fund-Bank regime, a new industrialization consequent to the global technological revolution, redivision of labor accompanied by structural reforms taking place in the Asia-Pacific region,52 and the weakening and subsequent collapse of socialism, many of the questions of the fifties and sixties stood pari passu resolved. The debate over the path that Asia should take the viable line of confronting neocolonialism, strategy of development, ways of achieving Asian solidarity and neighborhood unity, and other such issues have vanished from the agenda today. The national question, in a sense, stands resolved in a milieu of Fund-Bank–propelled realism. As radical movements have declined or collapsed in most countries of Asia, nations have entered a phase of social pacifism. The transition theorists are equally elated. They can now argue that national revolutionism is an impossibility; the transition to democracy from authoritarianism can be brought about in Asia primarily through negotiations and pacts between reformers in the ruling regimes and moderates in the opposition. 14/20

Asian nationalism has to be, thus, redefined. The political implication of this argument has been that the pro–democratic-nationalist elements must be prudent; they must be prepared to offer concessions in exchange for democracy. Another corollary, now more and more loudly suggested, has been that the democracy resulting from this process has to be, of necessity, conservative, economically, and socially. Seen in this perspective Asian radicalism was a product of a perception that a choice had to be made between maximalism and co-option. It is now argued that the choice is now no longer so—for a whole range of strategic possibilities lie in between, capable of influencing the course of the transition. Asian nationalism need not necessarily be the ideology of radical transition from colonialism, authoritarianism, and the retarding conditions of postcoloniality; it can be simply Asianism—pragmatic, cautious, and moderate. Yet, ironically, even in this successful story of transition, popular movements and social mobilizations have gone on to play a central role in creating the conditions of transition and shaping further possibilities. With the victory of the transition theorists, at least for a period, and also with the stunned silence of defeated revolutionists, the role of popular movements in the emergence of the nation form in Asia has been successfully suppressed.53 It is legitimate in scholarly circles to study nationalism without a rigorous study of decolonization. Notes and References 1. Hugh Tinker, Ballot Box and Bayonet–People and Government in Emergent Asian Countries (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs/Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 33–49, 54, 84–94. 2. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 3. This prognosis was the crowning result of the three decade long search for systematization of behavioral researches in “politics of developing areas,” in the form of a massive four volume series entitled Democracy in Developing Countries (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1989), published in India under the title Democracy in Asia, edited by Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset (Delhi: Vistar Publications, 1989). 4. Guy S. Metraux and Francois Gouzet (eds), The New Asia (New York: Mentor Books, 1965), p. 17. 5. The quoted passage in full reads: It is one of the most difficult portions of our task to see … [the educated elite] in their right relation to the rest of the country. Our obligations to them are plain, for they are intellectually our children. They have imbibed ideas which we ourselves have set before them, and we ought to reckon it to their credit. The present intellectual and moral stir in India is no reproach, but rather a tribute to their work. The Raj would have been a 15/20

mechanical thing if the spirit of India had not responded to it. (Ravinder Kumar, “Liberalism and Reform in India,” in Guy S. Metraux and Francois Gouzet (eds), The New Asia (New York: Mentor Books, 1965), p. 197. 6. Bernard Lewis, “The Near East and Islam–The impact of the French Revolution on Turkey,” Journal of World History, 1(1), 1953. 7. Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament–Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Daniel Pipes, Greater Syria – The History of an Ambition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); for a brief account of how the West received Islam, Abbas Kelidar, “Europe and Islam,” Middle Eastern Studies, 30(2), April 1994, pp. 385–414. 8. Al Husri, cited in William L. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist– Ottomanism and Arabism in the life and thought of Sati al Husri (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 161. On al Husri and Arab nationalism, L.M. Kerry, “Sati al-Husri’s Views on Arab Nationalism,” The Middle East Journal, XVII(3), 1963, pp. 231–256: Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism–A critical enquiry, ed. and trans. by Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett (London: Macmillan, 1981). For a criticism of the idea of Arab nationalism, Mohamed Yehia, “A Criticism of the Idea of the Arab Nationalism,” in M. Ghyasuddin (ed.), The Impact of Nationalism on the Muslim World (London: The Muslim Institute and Al-Hoda Pub., 1986), Chapter 3, pp. 37–60. Other significant essays in this book are Kalim Siddiqui’s “Nation States as Obstacles to the Total Transformation of the Umma” (Chapter 1, pp. 1–22), Malik N’Daiye’s “Nationalism as an Instrument of Cultural Imperialism–A Case Study of French West Africa: (Chapter 6, pp. 89–102), and Tengku Hasan M. di Tiro’s “Indonesian Nationalism–A Western invention to contain Islam in the Dutch East Indies” (Chapter 4, pp. 61–74). 9. William L. Holland (ed.), Asian Nationalism and the West (New York: Macmillan, 1953), pp. 4–5. 10. Ibid., pp. 3–9. 11. Ibid., p. 301. 12. Jan Romein (in collaboration with Erik Romein), The Asian Century—A History of Modern Nationalism in Asia, translated by R. T. Clark (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1962), pp. 389–390; for the Bandung Conference documents, Selected Documents of the Bandung Conference–Texts of Selected Speeches and Final Communique of Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia, April 18– 24, 1955 (distributed by the Institute of Pacific Relations, New York, 1955). 13. Richard Walker, Asia in Perspective (New Delhi: Associated Pub. House, 1974), p. 4; see also Richard Walker, “Asia in Focus,” Criterion, 4 (3), May 1956; Walker, “The West and the New Asia,” Modern Age, 2 (2), Spring 1967. 16/20

14. Richard Lowenthal, “Development versus Anti-Westernism-Russia, China, and the Dilemma of the New States,” in Richard Lowenthal (ed.), Issues in the Future of Asia– Communist Alternatives (New York: Frederick Praeger, 1969), p. 5. 15. Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Enquiry into the Poverty of Nations (1968; abridged version, London: Allen Lane, 1972), pp. 5–6. Graham Chapman has shown how the “post-War Asian phenomenon” produced specific Western institutional responses in social sciences, like the Hayter Report of 1961 which expanded the activities of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London by setting up new departments; see Graham Chapman, “Asia’s Future As Seen in the Mid-1960s,” in Graham P. Chapman and Kathleen M. Baker (eds), The Changing Geography of Asia (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–10. Indeed, area studies as a separate field of research was the academic response in the West to phenomena like Asian nationalism. 16. Indeed, how far the peasantry in these countries had become internally differentiated into classes became the subject of a long debate. See, for example, Utsa Patnaik (ed.), Agrarian Relations and Accumulation—The “Mode of Production” Debate in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). 17. See, for example, Donald Smith’s argument in “The Political Implications of Asian Religions” and “Emerging Patterns of Religion and Politics,” in Donald Eugene Smith (ed.), South Asian Politics and Religions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 3–4, 21–48; also Donald E. Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963). 18. For example, Mohammad Ayub Khan, Life and Religion (Karachi: Government of Pakistan, 1959); this was a speech to Darul Uloom Islamiya, May 1959. In this connection it will be interesting to see how religion featured in an agenda of postcolonial modernization in Asia. For example, when the Central Institute of Islamic Research was founded in 1960 in Pakistan, the government said, the Institute had been established to “define Islam in terms of its fundamentals in a rational and liberal manner and to emphasize, among others, the basic Islamic ideals of universal brotherhood, tolerance and social justice” and to “interpret the teachings of Islam in such a way as to bring out its dynamic character in the context of the intellectual and scientific progress of the modern world” (Karachi: The Central Institute of Islamic Research, n.d.), p. 3. 19. On China’s criticism of such a position (presumably written by Chou En-lai) written in the fifties, see On Nehru’s Philosophy and More on Nehru’s Philosophy (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1956 and 1957). 20. Opening Address by Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru to the Eleventh Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, included in appendix of Asian Nationalism and the West, pp. 349–356. 21. Ibid., pp. 353–354. 17/20

22. For full texts of these running up to Bandung and the post-Bandung proposals such as the Colombo Proposal on the India–China dispute (January 14, 1963), Foreign Policy of India—Texts of Documents, 1947–1964 (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1966), pp. 525–549. 23. Michael Brecher, India and World Politics–Krishna Menon’s View of the World (Oxford University Press, 1968), Chapter 5, pp. 51–61. 24. Ibid., pp. 60–61. 25. Ibid., p. 330. 26. B. N. Pandey has argued that the westward positioning of India’s foreign policy was the consequence of British India’s outlook on Asia. In his words, “Nehru’s government inherited its ethics and morality from the national movement, (but) its structure, style and appearance of infallibility from the British Raj” (Nehru [London: Macmillan, 1976], p. 293). Pandey has shown how the westward positioning was one reason of conflict between Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose in the pre-War years; see, Nehru, Chapter 8. “Farewell to Revolution, 1936–42,” pp. 219–220. 27. Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru—A Biography, vol. 2: 1947–1956 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), Chapter 11, “The Light of Asia,” pp. 243–244. 28. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru vol. 3: 1956–1964. The third volume (Chapters 2, 4, 6, 10, 11) shows how deeply Nehru realized that “there was no Asian spirit.” 29. Letter to Nehru, February 21, 1955, cited in Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 2, p. 236. 30. H. Venkatasubbiah, “Forty Years of the Asian Relations Conference, 1947,” in Eric Gonsalves (ed.), Asian Relations (New Delhi: Lancer International and India International Centre, 1991). 31. Bimal Prasad, “Trends in Asian Relations, 1947–1987: An Overview,” in Asian Relations, pp. 69–70. 32. M. S. Rajan, “The Asian Relations Organization,” in Asian Relations, p. 103. 33. Ibid., p. 104. 34. “Foreword” to Asian Relations. 35. Takdir Alisjahbana, “Emerging Asia and the Future of Humanity,” in Asian Relations, pp. 84–86. 36. Lau Teik Soon, “Political Realities of Regional Cooperation—the case of ASEAN,” in Asian Relations, p. 114.

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37. Address by Rajiv Gandhi, Asian Relations, pp. 28–29. For a detailed study on Asianism up to the seventies, George T. Yu (ed.), Intra-Asian International Relations (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1977); see particularly the essays by Robert Scalapino, “Intra—Asian Relations—an overview,” pp. 9–30, and by Donald C. Hellmann, “Japan and Asia–growing entanglement,” pp. 91–106. 38. On Bandung, G. M. Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia April, 1955 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956). 39. K. M. Pannikar, The Afro-Asian States and Their Problems (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959), pp. 11–12. 40. Ibid., p. 23. 41. Ibid., p. 24. 42. Srikrishna Venkatesh Puntambekar, The Developing Unity of Asia (Nagpur: Nagpur University, 1951); Puntambekar found this unity to be spiritual, cultural, geographical, and historical. 43. On Gandhi’s comments to the audience in the Asian Relations Conference, see Iqbal Singh, Between Two Fires–Towards an Understanding of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Foreign Policy, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1992), pp. 291–296. 44. Kathleen Gough and Hari P. Sharma (eds), Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), “Preface,” p. vii. 45. Daniel Thorner and Alice Thorner, Land and Labour in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1974), “Preface.” 46. Kathleen Gough, “Imperialism and Revolutionary Potential in South Asia,” in Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia, pp. 3–42. 47. Paul Brass, “Political Parties of the Radical Left in South Asian Politics,” in Paul R. Brass and Marcus F. Franda (eds), Radical Politics in South Asia (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1973), p. 4. 48. Ibid., p. 7. 49. Ibid., p. 116. 50. Talukder Maniruzzaman, “Radical Politics and the Emergence of Bangladesh,” in Radical Politics in South Asia, p. 277. 51. Ranabir Samaddar, Many Histories and Few Silences—The Nationalist History of Nationalism in Bangladesh, Azad Institute Paper 1, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, March 1995. 19/20

52. The literature on “New Asian Industrialization” is quickly increasing. See, for example, Manuel Castell, “High Technology and the New International Division of Labour,” Labour and Society, 14, 1989; Frederick C. Deyo, The Political Economy of New Asian Industrialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); also Deyo, Beneath the Miracle—Labor Subordination in the New Asian Industrialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 53. For a similar discussion, see Glenn Adler and Eddie Webster, “Challenging Transition Theory: The Labour Movement, Radical Reform, and Transition to Democracy in South Africa,” Politics and Society, 23(1), March 1995, pp. 75–77.

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The Nation Form 3 The Birth of a Nation

Not a Leaf in the Archives, but a Rogue Past Sixty-five years ago our leader had declared at the stroke of midnight the birth of a new nation. On the fiftieth year of independence, the nation remembered that it was born through partition and glanced back at that tragic happening. In a vicious turn, the inadequate nation had been made adequate. A partition had made the nation supposedly complete, so that the subject could now become the citizen, and the nation could enter into the full panoply of state. This desperate effort to be adequate was to weigh heavily on the nation’s behavior subsequently. Hereafter, nationalist strategies would become revisionist. They would be the testimonies of a perennially inadequate nation trying to be adequate through revolutions, passive revolutions and other defining tools, namely territoriality, modernity, federality, and the tools of war and peace. Not unnaturally, therefore, in recent times there has been a surge of interest in the partition of the subcontinent, though historical scholarship has continued to argue along predictable lines. Nationalists say that this was the ultimate betrayal of the ideal of composite secularism which had been all along the main basis of the anti-colonial movement. For some historians, partition was the damning testimony on a nation that had failed in coming to be, and according to them, the nationalist history of a such a nation cannot bring out the history of the violence, sufferings, and trauma still in the memory of the masses. The Left has gone on arguing (though, ironically, few had put their faith in the argument of the Left whose position had become less convincing in the subcontinent after the collapse of the Soviet Union; recently, however, the Left has been enjoying a renewed interest in the arguments of the politically aware) that partition was a particular form of decolonization in the region, the retreat of a great power, a way of ensuring the residuary existence of the colonial mode of power, and the final ascendancy of the bourgeoisie in the region defeating the upsurge of the anti-colonial radical masses in the period 1945–1947. Yet in this last argument, we have more political explanations and less history; thus, the radical explanatory argument becomes a history with big spaces and gaps. Interestingly, all these arguments which link the destiny of the nationalist movement with the movement for a separate identity, and the arrival of independence, have to rely, as a necessity or a matter of imperative, on history. Therefore, the question of political particularity escapes all of them. This indeed remains at the bottom of an intriguing and, thus, interesting, conjecture, that is, the arousal of interest today in partition and the stranglehold on history of the event— 1/16

the watershed in our region’s experiences of decolonization, and the consequent failure in understanding the continuities and discontinuities in the subsequent biography of the nation. Writing on partition, therefore, means understanding the birth of a nation—a birth that was not simply a synonym for independence, but also indicative of a more fundamental process of decolonization. Anything less than a full engagement with that specificity is unlikely to “explain” the event—the transition—and will be inadequate if we want to do more than just end our research by assuming the very thing that needs to be explained, that is assuming in a circular fashion its prior existence. Since the event is linked to a “transition” from colonialism to independence or postcoloniality, from nationalist secularism to separatism and communalism, and from a united entity to a vivisected region—we have here all the peculiarities of a transition debate, namely the characteristics of tautology.1 This characteristic of tautology in discussions on the birth of the independent nation leaves the particularity of the birth all the more unaddressed, particularly as the dynamics of decolonization in South Asia have now been laid bare after 65 years. It is this dissatisfaction with the birth which remains at the root of the arousal of memory, the strivings for different possibilities of the same history, the deliberate construction of a region called South Asia, and what Anthony Giddens2 has noted as “the heavily counter factual nature of future-oriented thought—an essential element of the reflexivity of modernity.” A “modern” India today is patently dissatisfied with its origin in 1947. Three wars with neighbors, its own insecurities and the insecurity syndrome, the permanent division of the nation into majorities and minorities, the failure of a state-induced capitalist developmental agenda, the insubordination of the permanently underprivileged classes, and a refusal by all sides, including the right, the Center, and the left, to accept the modernist consummation and demand, instead, a redefining of the agenda of a modern nation—all these not only indicate but also fuel dissatisfaction with the origin. All this is likely to “reopen” the partition question. The official position till now was that communal violence was “madness” and that partition was rational—now as genealogical dissatisfaction spreads, partition’s legitimacy can neither remain unaffected nor escape its gaze. Its rationality now appears as strictly contingent (thus, disputing the inevitability argument)—this contingency, in turn, reactivating memory, creating new regions and sub-regions, problematizing transborder population movements in the region, provoking alternative discourses of nationhood. Not unnaturally, therefore, we find the rationalist explanation of partition that appears as “reason’s externalization,” being investigated by heretics who demand that this mode of modernizing the nation be dragged to the court of critical consciousness. We can point to a deep paradox around the idea of the birth of a nation. The paradox springs from the dialectic of the familiar and unfamiliar. The idea that political and national units should be congruent is familiar to the people, it appears as natural. But the experiences of such congruencies are unfamiliar. They have been, to say the least, shocking, rather, traumatic. A nation will mean minorities; each ethnic structure will 2/16

have a “historic background”; nationalisms will present themselves in terms of language and cultural rights; suppressed identities will mean “new majorities” or “new minorities”; and finally, communication as a strategy will appear as the key to interethnic conflicts and intercommunity relations.3 The unfamiliarity of these experiences, particularly in terms of their congealed form and rationalization, drags the nation back to partition. The “stability” of 65 years leads our gaze to the most unstable event of the preceding century in our part of the world. The paradox produces not mere intellectual curiosity, but also a “rogue” past and a genealogical heresy spreading remorselessly in society. The received history is clearly inadequate in understanding the situation. Even when all details of partition have been excavated, dissatisfaction in terms of “explanation” will be incessantly produced. Such dissatisfaction is because of the transformations produced by partition: from a colonial state to a welfare state; from a subject to a citizen; from the nation as a locus of desire to the nation as the locus of depravity; from tropes of respectability to tropes of malignity; from “our nationalism” to “their sectarianism;” and finally, from the language of commonness to one of grievance. Partitioned independence has been the “imaginative trigger”—it has triggered claims to permanently ascribed communal and secular discourses. The structures and rhetoric in the separation of one discourse from the other have underpinned the distinctions in the subcontinent. Partition, thus, will never be a settled fact, in the sense of settling something like an authentic record of the birth of a nation or disorder. In producing the differences, it will remain unsettled and unsettling, provoking the “others” in the subcontinent. Even while receding into a past of over half a century, partition remains a reality, more so as it becomes a concentrated metaphor for violence, fear, domination, difference, separation, and the unsatisfactory resolution of problems; a metaphor, in one word, for the past, one that goes on making the present inadequate.

Birth and Recovery of Memory Ayesha Jalal has recently taken to task some historians for neglecting, in their study of partition, the elite politics of communalism which was associated so intimately with the birth of two nations in the subcontinent. According to her, the politics of the elites became, at one point, the mass politics of communalism. She criticizes the overemphasis on the feelings of the masses in times of violence, separation, and carnage, and the simultaneous neglect of the fundamental political forces represented by major political parties and personalities; she criticizes also the failure “to unpackage the notion of an all-India Muslim ‘communalism’ to create analytical space for the conflicting regional strands in Muslim politics which fashioned the League’s demands.”4 The radical historians, she has argued, have been so involved in “the question of the inability of the ‘nation’ to come into its own,” that it was a “trifle awkward” for them “to recognize the subjecthood of the ‘Muslim Other.’” She has criticized the simplistic belief that the history of the masses in 1947 can be recovered through a historiographical emphasis on the recurring episodes of violence in Indian history and on a specific moment of violence like in 1947, because according to this notion all violence that is not 3/16

state violence becomes an undifferentiated category. While she admits that there may be a need to write a history of partition and of its violence that is not assimilated and subordinated to the career of the Indian nation-state, she cautions that this historiographical argument cannot be overemphasized. Communal consciousness in the subaltern mind has to be dissected and fundamental political forces have to be analyzed —historical investigation “of the high level of politics and the areas of state [becomes] indispensable in unraveling the dynamics of the post-colonial transition.” Implied in this criticism by Jalal is a rejection of the new methods and points of analysis which will lay more stress on memory, oral history, experiences of violence and contingency, as well as a basic rejection of the rationality represented by the nation-state. It is not within the purview of this discussion to judge Ayesha Jalal’s views. But her criticisms provide an occasion to bring to light certain problems inherent in a genealogical exposition on the birth of a nation. First, events like partition show how the “hard history” of a time, trying to explain the event, ends up being baffled by the particularity of the event. For instance, the historiography of communalism in India has spoken of communalism, secularism, nationalism, and separatism; yet, it has rarely spoken of how, in a country like India, traditional religion works in an ethnic context; in other words, how, with “ethnic integration” (of certain communities/societies), legitimation, and mobilization, religion becomes “civil religion” and, hence, a mode of articulating rights; how coupled with a concurrence of certain circumstances, the civil religion becomes (and will continue to be) the occasion of “events” like partition. In other words, we shall have history, but as a history of explanations. Furthermore, in stressing the context, we face a kind of elite closure. As we have seen in the case of the official language of secularism, this over contextualization silences certain things, while evoking others. The language of contextualization has power over the subject positions —it exercises authoritative modalities, and it can strategically refuse to answer some crucial questions, thereby refusing the text. 5 In this milieu of over contextualization, the birth of the nation remains the most enigmatic chapter in the nation’s life. The second problem emanating from Ayesha Jalal’s views of what should be our historical understanding of partition is more fundamental. If the argument is that in order to understand the event, that is, partition, we have to move to a kind of eventless macrohistory of the longue durée; how are we to understand the actions and the actors which “culminate” in the new configurations and interconnections of material conditions, identities, social relations, shared beliefs and experiences, collective interactions, and the reordering of power? Obviously it is not enough to say that we have to move from an “eventful history” to an “events-in-history” argument, which bases itself on some master process. As partition shows, as against events-in-history, we also witness history-in-events, in other words, as against a history which had never anticipated partition, we now have a history of the region created by partition, and a history that lives under it. This is true of all contentious politics, particularly the contentious politics of the forties.6 Third, it may be accepted for argument’s sake that the event is only the surface of the 4/16

fundamental. But how does one recover the fundamental? How is one to be assured that the given method of history will recover the event as people saw, experienced, and lived it; as they found themselves victims by it and as they perished under it? I can anticipate two criticisms to this poser. It may be said that this is a valorization of the event and that such valorization is a later construction appended to the happening; also that this is a mystification of the event, for, by suggesting that by resorting to extra-historical methods one can recover the event, one actually ends up by invoking the ephemeral only, like, in this case, memory. To the first criticism, it can be reasonably replied that it is not some particular method that privileges the event in this case; rather, it is the history that this event creates in its wake which continues to privilege it. On the second criticism, we need to devote some attention. Why does the retrieval of popular attitudes involved in the event become so crucial in recovering the fundamental? Possibly because the given history of partition has left very little space for its political neutering. A political history of partition that throws light on the transformations in the process of power will have to throw light, above all, on whom power was to be exercised. Hence the importance of all which speak of them, their memory, their attitude, their literature, in other words, the repertoire. And again it is not memory per se that is important, but the politics of the contemporary time which evokes the memory—the politics of oral history. As one recent analysis of the reminiscences of the refugees from East Pakistan after the partition shows, people talk of the past so as to distinguish “now” from a different “then” in a way that often underlines the fact that every “now” is the consequence of many “thens,” of vastly different durations, in at; amalgam characteristic to each person experiencing it.7 Recovery of memory is, thus, not a clinical practice producing trauma stories, rather, it is a historical practice. To put this in political language, we can recall the words of Alessandro Portelli, the oral historian of the working-class movement of Italy: To tell a story is to take arms against the threat of time … the telling of a story preserves the teller from oblivion. Told as it must be at a specific time and in a phase of irreversible time, the tale itself creates a special time, “a time outside time”. Time is one of the essential things stories are about.8 Therefore, making sense of the time of partition—the time when it was created and the time in which it is recounted—means the acknowledgement of coexistent times. Conventional history fails to grasp the coexistent phenomena—the subcontinent remaining in the pre-partitioned past, the past of partition creating its subsequent biography, the partitioned present that often refuses to acknowledge the reality of the partitioned times. Paul Ricoeur had defined events with great emphasis on contingency, uniqueness, and individuality.9 He could have added that each such event then creates a structure, a structure governing the present, and its narratives of the past. It is this close link between the narrative form and historical knowledge which Ayesha Jalal seems to have missed. This is not to suggest that representations of “pastness” have some unique linguistic status. To grasp their historical intent we need to view the representations of “pastness” 5/16

as literature, and to grasp their literary mode we need to view them as part of social action. This means viewing them in terms of historical intent.10 In other words, in the historicization of the event of the birth of a nation we have all the elements of a strategy —authors and their authorizations; the structure of accounts; temporality, that is, narrators and their times; truthfulness; and finally, the dialectic that if memory makes us, we also make memory. Thus, a genealogical account of the nation is fundamentally a case of recall and social reproduction of knowledge, a case of flexible relational boundaries between history as lived and history as recounted or written, a relation between cognition and history, that is politics. The hour of birth seems destined to remain as that dark hour of mystery which will keep on inviting the chroniclers, narrators, and the interrogators throughout the life of the nation.

The Lost Home Where the Nation Was Born Now of course beyond the intellectual arguments about the required history of the birth of a nation, there is today the partitioned region of South Asia—decolonized and arranged into a states-system. Decolonization through partition has ensured a particular continuity of colonial relations and ways of power. The transmogrification, expressed in the familiar word “postcoloniality” remains a daily reality as relations between nations, states, communities, and sub-regions in this part of the globe continue to be influenced by that fateful event of 1947, even as globalization overwhelms it, as it does with respect to other regions. Indeed, it will not be irrelevant to remind ourselves that globalization is mediated here through the order ushered in by partition. With partition, we have today a South Asia, what was earlier known to us as Hindustan, a region whose margins would vanish imperceptibly into another region, now known to us as our Turco-Persian past or the Turco-Persian part of the continent.11 That indefinability is gone forever; the home where the nation was born is now lost, and a region that has been constructed on the reality of vivisection now suffers from its raison d’être—partition. Yet that home remains, ironically, only in form of others, others previously part of us; it was a home that is gone and is able to relive only in the form of reflexive images, more accurately, in the form of reflexive nationalisms. The question is, how will this home of today tackle the phenomenon of reflexive nationalisms that lie beneath it? This reflexivity is evident in the character of nations which define themselves in respect to each other. Moreover, it implies that South Asia’s own identity is, in fact, constituted by the Other. Now that partition and the succeeding 65 years have ruled out the easy or programmatic solutions of either complete reunification or total dispersion, the implication is both universality and difference, for old pre-partition times containing many values were never enough to ensure respect for each other. Europe, these days, is increasingly talking of reunion. Southeast Asia is talking of union in form of association. People here are learning from them and want South Asia to return in its history and geography like one who is returning home. But returning where? To a common cultural space? But culture would mean, first of all, identity, that is, difference with others, and then difference with(in) itself. How then to 6/16

accommodate these differences, the permanent process of Otherization? Through a common economic space? But the truth is that, marked by multiple colonial linkages and the exclusion of the majority from the “economy,” it had never been a common economic space at all—this common economic space can arguably be created, but we cannot return to it. Through a common historic space? But this historic space includes partition, and today we cannot return to it excluding that epoch. Like every history, this history of partition, that is, the history that created it and the history that it created, can be summarized. Then how can we include this summary in this other history of commonness, whose summary will have other movements, memories, promises, and identities? All this simply means that we cannot “return;” we can only “turn” on an acknowledgement of differences, the differences of a unity, in unity, with other unity.12 We have yet other reasons to enquire into the way partition has marked the regionalization of South Asia. Interestingly, in this regionalization there is a rediscovery of old fault lines. Orthodox and fanatic Islam, backward sub-regions, non-patriotic frontier tribes, small neighbors prone to blackmailing the stable and strong nation, historic connections with other regions, natural areas of influence—all these are being rediscovered, much in the same way that fault lines are being rediscovered in Eastern Europe in the process of Europe’s regionalization today.13 The irony, therefore, is briefly this: In the regionalization of South Asia, unity is the theme, that is, how the nation is to return home. But in forging a policy of uniting, it rediscovers the old fault lines; in fact, the nation has to mark these out, redefine them in order to erect the new politicoeconomic and security arrangements. Therefore, designations of underdevelopment, permanent fundamentalist threats to liberal values and civilized existence, backwardness, and the like, are found out, and they become the reinforcing material for a neo-modernization theory which can map out the cultural region of South Asia–the home of this nation. That is how the core of the region is built. In this process of building the nation, which results in the marginalization of certain elements, partition still remains the reference point. The agenda of finding back the home seems to have an inviolable validity, so too remains the validity of partition—the most stringent event or theme contradicting the former exercise. In short, we have not one, but two declarations of independence and decolonization, which we celebrate in recalling the birth of a nation. One celebrates the advent of independence of nations, the rise of South Asia as a distinct region, and the beginning of decolonization; the other announces the commencement of the journey of a fractured region, the validation and legalization of the conservative approach to community empowerment, the strategic success of a policy of weakening the left, the creation of a milieu that will allow strong residues of colonial ways of power, and, finally, the strengthening of the rhetoric of the “besieged fortress” that will be the justification of the call by the new right to support traditional values and cultural homogeneity. These two declarations of independence have sanctified a political scene which is dominated by the issue of collective representation and, consequently, reactionary demagogues are given a clear advantage as well as legitimacy. The result is a strict policing of the community’s mores, a paranoid suspicion of other groups—the easiest way to create a 7/16

sense of national and/or communitarian unity. In short, this Janus-faced independence gave South Asia political power, democracy and an assurance that the dream of ethnic liberation was worth pursuing; it also created communities of the afflicted and alien in the homeland.14 Yet, why is there still such a naive belief that 1947 was not a Janus-faced event, that it only created two (subsequently three) independent states, and that it may have been unfortunate, but that accommodation between the states will undo the contradictory aspects thereof? If, as seems clear, minority categories (religious, linguistic, territorial, tribal, and the like) in this region called the “home of the nation,” are historically formed and continuously in the process of formation, then there cannot be an easy recourse to an administrative or statist solution to such contradiction, on the basis of an assumption that such categories are fixed points of descriptive reference. In the absolutization of such categories, there is a populist substitution by what they are “today” in place of the more complex accounts of their historical location, differential access, internal cleavages, and potentialities of transformations. The breakdown of such fixed categories and the realization that these are more complex accounts always appear as sudden. Their lessons are, therefore, always unlearnable and the analysis of the institutional operation of the partitioning categories, therefore, remains always unsatisfactory as entities, therefore, with eternally unlearnt experiences. More important in this context is the psychological framework of a populist right. Partition provided an abiding lesson to the populist right, namely that the politics of identity is not necessarily a threat to conservative goals and constituencies. The cooption of identity politics by the populist right since 1947 has presented the left with three major problems: (a) conservative constituencies have proved well suited for a “cultural war” in which different communities fight for their mutually exclusive empowerment; (b) their success has stemmed from the fact that a populist mixture of reactionary ideology and anti-establishment feelings and postures have been undeniably empowering in the sense that a community’s empowerment has become synonymous with the increase in the prestige and power of its leaders; and (c) the liberals, in the long run, have been pushed to the right. This New right, basing itself on populism, achieves success because its program is moralistic; it is a loosely organized movement, strongly anti-intellectual, opposed to the “establishment” and, finally, communal, nationalist and often xenophobic. This success again was clearly demonstrated in the agenda and act of partition and has capitalized on that experience. Partition, in other words, has become a signifier of the duality of our nationhood, independence and democracy and the potentialities toward a fascist orientation of the New Right. We have, here, a conflation of two meanings. It signifies certain things; it also has the capacity to create other signs of politics. In short, partition has become a part of the symbolic order of politics in South Asia. However, it would be wrong to find in partition only the rise of the populist right in the postcolonial modern politics of South Asia. At a more fundamental level, we have in this birth of our nation the question of a modern representative politics in conditions of South Asian 8/16

postcoloniality. The question, classically stated, may be like this: representative political systems are based on representation of necessity, identity and the self, in other words, on interest. Where interest has been articulated mostly around a group or a collectivity, the representational problematic will be concerned with how to organize the hierarchies of representations. On one hand, representational politics will validate the nation which is the highest group or community; on the other hand, it has to give space to other interests, hierarchically, for by according supremacy to the nation it has admitted the logic of hierarchy. Therefore, the genealogy of the citizen in South Asia is caught in the representational bind. If citizenship in South Asia has, thus, been a transactional identity only, based on the necessity of exchange of unequally endowed individuals and of unequal agencies, it should not cause surprise for the language of citizenship in South Asia has been embedded for too long in collectivities of various kinds to be discarded by any liberal rhetoric about a clean birth of the nation. It has been rightly noted: The history of thinking about citizenship, like that about the state, belongs to the vast category of ancient things made modern by their adaptation first by Christians and then by medieval Italian urbanites—the difference being that when we use “state”, we intend the modern definition, whereas when we use “citizen”, we intend the ancient, notwithstanding the anachronism.15 Partition was the instrumentalist solution (reason of state) to these dilemmas of hierarchy, anachronism and necessity, because it was thought that by partitioning the polity (hence the society as well) the problematic of representation would achieve the most drastic and the most modern solution—though as can be seen now, the problem retains itself at the heart of the solution. It has indeed exposed the nation to the deep instabilities in the notions of representation and citizenship. Globalization has not minimized these instabilities; instead, by accentuating the particularities of both the self and the communities, it has accentuated them. Salman Rushdie has commented that writing of the homeland from outside like being obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.16 He may not know that for the inhabiting citizen also, it is a life dealing in broken mirrors.

A Place under the Sun, Else a Place in the Shade Of course, in spite of being battered from within, where all problems faced by the nation seem to have both internal and external links, the nation must have a place under the sun and if not, then “a place in the shade.” Buffeted by the simultaneous process of rapid globalization and massive regionalization in various parts of the globe, the nation in India finds itself in a world which is unfamiliar and deeply disturbing. Political parties also realize their limited influence in this process of regionalization, as they have been working since partition almost solely under national laws, terms and frames. Economic dissatisfaction and political alienation have led to movements for local selfgovernment or movements based on local identity. The local is now being redefined, its 9/16

locus rediscovered, often leading to new regionalizing links, mistakenly called subregional or external links. In this milieu, the notion of territory is assuming increasing importance. Again, we can mark the hour of its birth as the beginning of a territorial consciousness. Up to the fifties, and maybe a part of the sixties, the leaders of this nation had ambitions of having a place under the sun—the glory of an independent nation had not still rusted, to remain European was a possibility. But world events, the decline and finally collapse of the Soviet Union, increasing irrelevance of the Non-Aligned Movement, crisis of a bureaucratic–capitalist economy, and the increasing realization that the area of South Asia cannot be made into a “national lake” of India, brought into open the limits of a South Asian power. The ambitious actor’s role remained cruelly unfulfilled. Ironically, the realization of the impossibility of being a world actor led to the “alternative,” that is, of being a major power in Asia, the hegemony of South Asia, an alternative which in effect may sometimes mean being the green helmet of the world’s peacekeeping forces and undertaking punitive responsibilities in this region. Almost 300 years ago, Montesquieu had pointed out the difference between kingdoms and republics, namely that kingdoms want to achieve glory through international action, while republics pursue long-term interests. But parliamentary regimes and today’s republics follow, in many cases, the policy of the kingdoms of the olden days. George Bush (Sr) wanted America to recover from defeatism and regain self-esteem through the Gulf War. In South Asia, too, glory has become the objective of the republics. Territorialism has become an essential part of the policy to attain glory and this territorial consciousness, we can say, almost begins with partition. Inevitably therefore, a foreign policy based on territorialism and aiming at glory and prestige, as well as at healing national frustrations, has brought back to surface the very differences in the historic heritages that had begot these same frustrations and had resulted in territorial losses and shrinkages 65 years ago. The political project of South Asian unity is, therefore, an impossibility unless the problem of territorialism is solved either democratically17 or through a conquering sword as of Prussia or through an axis. The current difficulty of the territorial problem being disentangled prevents the nation from embarking on “grand politics,” the type of politics which jolts the imagination of the masses and provides glory, standing and rank. The acknowledgement of this inadequacy to indulge in “grand politics” has led the nation-state to try for the second best policy—if not a place under the sun, at least for a place in the shade.18 There is, however, always a danger in seeking this place for it means ignoring the past of partition and the unclean birth. Jurgen Habermas has insisted on the singularity of the Auschwitz experience and has seen in the attempt at its banalization the danger of a deviation toward a sonderweg—a separate path. Similarly we are now faced with the banalization of our past, the past of partition, and a desire to develop our “own” geopolitics, ignoring that it was the event that first led to this search.19 It is like pushing the frontier back, enlarging one’s own area of security, eternally defining the cordon sanitaire. What is then this cordon or frontier? It may be a mythic

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exercise, but in being so, very real. It is the edge between “civilized” and “uncivilized” land, “settled” area and the area of “epidemic”; it is a geographical concept being adapted to an imaginative exercise. This exercise orients the postcolonial history of this nation to one dominated by space rather than by time. In such a mythic region, the fungoid territory is eternally contracting for some, while expanding for others. It is necessary, however, to understand in a more concrete way the issue of territorialism as the product of partition. By cutting the territory, also by making the task of guarding the territory defined by the colonial rulers as “India” (in this context we have to only think of the British frontier policy in the subcontinent) an imperative, partition has accentuated the territorial consciousness in the region. The logic of territory, namely standardization, formalization, centralization and configuration, euphemistically described in the region as “territorial integrity,” has now turned into a statist strategy to rationalize, affect, influence and control. Originating from an “unclean partition,” the territorial consciousness of the nation in the subcontinent will eternally disturb the neatly segmented universe of the standard political map of this region of South Asia, the home of this nation. The result of 1947 was not only a partition of the territory, but the foundation of a new states system in the region, prone to be revised again and again. The superimposing maps of dreamland states drawn by Chaudhuri Rehmat Ali, now hanging on the walls of the Lahore Museum, speak of the strength of the geopolitical imagination active in the subcontinent.20 What is surprising, therefore, is not the uniqueness of Rehmat Ali’s imagination, but the extraordinary similarity of the spirit of those maps with the inherent instability of the geopolitical imagination of the nation in South Asia.

Framing History, Silencing Voices A definitive history of the birth of this nation has, therefore, been ruled out, though attempts to frame a history will continue. Indeed, greater the embarrassment with the counter voices (that is, counter to the political essence of partition), extinct and extant, greater will be the despair in framing a history. It is important to note that one of the most clever attempts to silence these counter voices is today taking the form of an argument, which, in the name of advocating the specific history of each third world country, almost denies the universality of the experiences of these countries: the experience of being subject to colonialism; the almost universal experiences of the process of partition and decolonization; the destruction of indigenous social, and often political, institutions; the universality of poverty, underdevelopment and neo-imperial control; and the problematic fate of the agenda of building nationhood under the conditions stated above.21 If India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have suffered from partition, bloodshed, and mass eviction, so too have other third world countries, more or less in a similar way. Partition, in this sense, has been one of the earliest chapters in the universal history of decolonization, a process so specific to the experience of colonized countries. It is this specificity of colonization and decolonization that is now being sought to be denied in 11/16

the name of denying universalization of third world experiences. In the name of “political specificity,” “longue durée history,” “indigenous patterns of inequality,” and “absence of feudal structures,” we are now being told that we shall have to substitute the universal categories of colonialism, racism, decolonization, nationalism, and neocolonial domination with a specific “discursive genre of politics” which will bring out our political specificities—the regimes of power in our countries and the governing paradigms that enable the governing of subjects, who, we are told in a strange recourse to Foucault, are “subjects because they belong to, behave as both an element of and an actor in a global process whose development defines the current field of possible experiences, inside of which the fact of being subject can only be situated.”22 This is not to deny that countries belonging to the third world have specificities, that one is distinct from the other, that universalist categories are insufficient to explain the political histories of the states and patterns of rule in these countries. Yet, if we are told that partition, an experience very specific to South Asia, can be studied without the perspective of decolonization, the agenda of nation-making, and other such processes, it will imply, in effect, the silencing of the histories of partition—the first step toward silencing the counter voices. The backdoor entry of the developmentalist discourse of third world politics has had pervasive results in our own political thinking. Thus, partition is still the result of “weak indigenous political traditions,” a “weak civil society,” “the refusal of the society to go along the rationalist path of a secular nation-building,” etc. In all these arguments the common refrain is the disjunction between state and society which supposedly led to the partition of the country. By implication, it is also argued that this country had no long tradition of statehood, that the state was only a colonial gift/result, and, hence, that the state breaks down not unexpectedly during times of disorder. And indeed, as the argument stretches a little, since the indigenous state is incapable of conflict resolution on such a scale, either we should not have a state (the radical version) or they should come to train us in statecraft (the conservative version). One need not be a statist to see through the hollowness of such a revised developmentalist argument. Its only relevance as an argument lies in silencing the specificity of the context of partition (and other similar events, the current situation in the Balkans being an obvious example, where restoration of peace has to be accompanied by a compulsive agenda of new statebuilding)—a context from where the counter voices stem and, in fact, a context of which they were a part. Framing a history to silence certain voices: exactly what do we mean by this in the context of our efforts to understand the secret hour of the nation’s birth? We can end this discussion only after trying to answer the poser, for the history of the partition of India remains incomplete without the narrative of how this history is built upon the silencing of counter voices. The rise of the various radical movements since 1942 is too well known to be recounted here. There is now enough documentation on the activist and rebellious mood of the masses and the radical mass upsurges between 1945 and 1950. It is curious that those who should have been most proud of this legacy and of the fact that this activism and rebelliousness had characterized the time of partition, are 12/16

embarrassed and hesitate to accept these as the counter voices to the particular process of decolonization through partition. Also, those who speak of the specific experiences of the people during the times of partition do not speak of the experiences of the uprisings and of their defeat at the hands of the state, the colonial power and the forces soon to assume power. Expectedly, those obsessed with the search for a history of secularism versus communalism and with the defeat of the former do not link these events at all; they are an embarrassment to all. They are not appropriate for a history of the mass psychology of the people, for a secularist history, for a developmentalist history, in short for a positive history of the birth of a nation. It is, however, worthwhile to remember that this exclusionary framing, premature narrative closure, and the mythification of certain aspects of the event were inevitable to the process of partition and decolonization itself, in short to the genesis of the nation. Victor Turner had suggested by the (now known) word “liminality” a moment in which “the possibility exists of standing aside not only from one’s own social position but from all social positions and of formulating a potentially unlimited series of alternative social arrangements.”23 Was the hour of the birth of the nation such a situation? The silence about the complexities in partition about the extraordinary coincidence of the radical upsurges and the turn of the radical mood of the Muslim masses into a communal activism (In East Bengal it was said, what Tebhaga? Why fight for it? With Tebhaga you get only a share, with Pakistan you get the whole) and the “peasant utopia” 24 suggests a premature closure of different possibilities by authorizing a straight jacketed history, by the social and disciplinary forces of political and ideological establishment, and by information management and an ensuing collective self-censorship. We shall require a great amount of research into the discourse of partition in all the three countries— India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—to come to a full understanding of the silencing process. Without this aspect, very difficult now to recover, the birth of this nation remains a theoretically knowable but actually unknown historical story, which makes the consideration of the various versions of the event a part of the history of the event itself.25 That story is now closed for all except for some impossible dreamers, and is now regarded as an aberration of catastrophic measure. The nation seems to have learnt the lesson well. It is now determined that this catastrophic past must not be allowed to be repeat. Indeed, the past, appearing as such has silenced those counter voices. The passive revolution was completed not only by a change of guards and a bloodbath, but also by a persuasive silencing of the discourses of all other possibilities of that time.26 That is how the history of the birth of a nation has prepared the nation for its own subsequent history. Notes and References 1. This has been noted by one of the perceptive commentators on the transition debate. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution— Reflections on the Brenner Debate and Its Sequel,” International Review of Social 13/16

History, 41(2), August 1996, pp. 209–232. 2. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 154. 3. These are indeed the issues “discovered” in the East European landscape today. See, for example, Jana Plichtova, Minorities in Politics—Cultural and Language Rights (Bratislava: Czechoslovak Committee of the European Cultural Foundation, 1992). 4. Ayesha Jalal, “Secularism, Subalterns, and the Stigma of Communalism: Partition Historiography Revisited,” Modern Asian Studies, 30 (3), 1996, pp. 681–689. 5. On I am indebted to Norman Fairclough’s Languages and Power (London: Longman, 1989) for my understanding of elite closure effected through the language of contextualization. 6. For a helpful discussion, see Sidney Tarrow, “People’s Two Rythms—Charles Tilly and the Study of Contentious Politics,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38 (3), 1996, pp. 586–600. 7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition,” Economic and Political Weekly, 10 August 1996, pp. 2143–2151. 8. Alessandro Portelli, “The Time of My Life: The Function of Time in Oral History,” International Journal of Oral History, 2(3), 1982, p. 162. 9. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990). 10. Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Reconstruction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 9. 11. On the construction of a region and its relation to nation, Chapter 1. 12. On a similar question concerning Europe, see Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading— Reflections on Today’s Europe, translated by Pascale Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indian University Press, 1992), pp. 4–20. 13. The best instance of such rediscovery is, of course, S. P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs, 72 (3), 1993; also Huntington, “If not Civilizations, What? Paradigms of the Post-Cold War World,” Foreign Affairs, 72 (5), pp. 186–194. On an analysis of such paradigms in regionalizing Europe, see Elizabeth H. Prodromou, “Paradigms, Power, and Identity—Rediscovering Orthodoxy and Regionalising Europe,” European Journal of Political Research, 30 (2), 1996, pp. 125–154. 14. On this see, Michael Rogin, “The Two Declarations of American Independence,” Representation, 55, 1996, pp. 13–30. 14/16

15. Peter N. Miller, “Citizenship and Culture in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 57(4), 1997, p. 728. 16. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms, 1981–91 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. 9–21. 17. Harry Blair has recently argued for the relevance of localities and sub-regions cutting, across the boundaries of the states, for a democratic solution of problems such as forests, waters, and areas, emanating from the territorial division of the subcontinent through common property resource management; see Harry W. Blair, “Democracy, Equity, and Common Property Resource Management in the Indian Sub-continent,” Development and Change, 27, 1996, pp. 475–479. 18. I am indebted to Giueseppe Sacco’s essay on the problems of European foreign policy. See Sacco, “A Place in the Shade,” The European Journal of International Affairs, 12 (2), 1991, pp. 5–23. 19. Even perceptive observers miss the role of 1947 in the development of Indian geopolitical thinking—an event that marked the shift of the nation from marking out a cultural region/area to a geopolitical area as its “natural habitat”. See for example a RAND study by George K. Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought—An Interpretive Essay (Santa Monica, CA: National Defense Research Institute, 1992). 20. These maps are of “Pakistan in 1757,” “Pakistan in 184T,” “Pakistan, Dravidstan, Bangastan, Uttarstan,” and the like. 21. For example, see Jean Francois Bayart’s “Finishing with the Idea of the Third World —The Concept of the Political Trajectory,” in James Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 51–71. I am grateful to Partha Chatterjee for drawing our attention to similar attempts, though in a different context. See Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments—Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). 22. Jean-Francois Bayart, “Finishing with the Idea of the Third World: The Concept of the Political Trajectory” in James Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics (London: Longman, 1991), p. 67. 23. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 13. 24. Taj-ul Hashmi in his Pakistan: A Peasant Utopia (Dhaka: University Press Ltd. 1994) discusses the dynamics of the development of the Pakistan consciousness and the coexistence of the radical agrarian consciousness in East Bengal, but does not adequately discuss the relation and the link between them and how in fact the former succeeded in co-opting and eventually silencing the latter. Partha Chatterjee in his Bengal 1920–47: The Land Question (Kolkata: K.P. Bagchi & Co., 1984) also does not explicate the issue of the coexistence of these and how the latter was subsumed by the 15/16

former, and keeps the question suspended. Possibly we shall need much more detailed accounts of the ground-level experiences of the fate of the movements (of both types and of the mixed ones) in East Bengal in the period 1935–1950 to have a surer answer to this important question. Fortunately, after 1971, in Bangladesh we have now autobiographical and biographical accounts covering these years, some examples being the accounts of Jasimuddin Mandal, Hatem Ali Khan, Amulya Sen, Satyen Sen, Maulana Bhasani, Maulavi Hannan, Jatin Mukherjee, Abdul Matin, and Md Toha. We also have now more and more analytical reports throwing light on the said coexistence, like the first two volumes of the six-volume series of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies on the language movement in East Pakistan: see Atiur Rehman and Lenin Azad (eds), Pariprekshit O. Bichar, 5 Volumes (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1995). 25. With 1971 and the birth of Bangladesh, we can say that one of the possibilities of 1947 was realized, and one of the counter voices was ultimately heard. See, in this context, the writings of Abul Hashim, In Retrospection (Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 1974) or Abul Mansur Ahmed, Atmakatha (Dhaka: Khosroj Kitab Mahal, 1978). This, however, does not alter my argument. 26. In an essay on the passive resolution in India, Sudipta Kaviraj discusses the coalitional relations of ruling classes, seen particularly in terms of a crucial initial stage of political realignments, and as phases of experimentation, consolidation and instability. The formation of a ruling bloc was certainly important in the strategy of a passive revolution. Yet he does not discuss, in the otherwise detailed essay, the role of force in “passivity” and the particular nature of decolonization in the subcontinent in the unfolding of the strategy of building the state. Here again it seems that the orthodox left arguments have stood the test of time better. See his “A Critique of Passive Revolution in India,” in Partha Chatterjee (ed.), State and Politics in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 45–88.

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The Nation Form 4 Promises of Revolution

The Ancien Regime and the Nationalist Predicament It is not enough to say like Eric Hobsbawm that nationalism, like so many other characteristics of the modern world, is the child of the dual revolution.1 For Hobsbawm the duality lay in industrialization and Westernization; elsewhere he speaks of the comfortable existence of Jacobin clothes, manners and prose in a drawing room of the ancien regime, the ease with which one of the greatest bourgeois reformers of the nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham, communicated with Catherine the Great of Russia and the strange fact in English history that the most extreme statements of middle-class political economy came from members of the eighteenth century British House of Lords. Our problem is not only to note the coexistence, but also to trace the process through which this coexistence becomes one of the crucial characteristics of nationalism; and, in particular, the manner in which this duality helps a nation to purge itself of all “undesirable” elements—the “dangerous” tendencies—in order to restructure the state. This is the moment when the reconciliation between the nation and the state is finally effected. Each nation, in the beginning, comes with promises of revolution. The promises end with passive revolution; in other words the promises of revolution end in the promise of the nation to achieve completeness by uniting with the state. It is a myth of modern nationalism that a national revolution does away with the ancien regime. More often than not the nation finds virtue in the ancien regime—in its hour of instability as dangerous revolutionary tendencies threaten to engulf it or as its own inadequacy begins endangering its legitimacy, and sometimes even its survival. The fifties in India, preceded by the riots and bloodbaths of the late forties and marked by the survival of colonial rules and technologies of administration, were very much the decade of the existence of an ancien regime in a milieu of declining nationalist euphoria. The dominant element in the nationalist leadership was still the old leadership of the last two or three decades; the bureaucracy still carried the musty smell of the Indian Civil Service (ICS); the industry government nexus remained as in colonial days, with all the trappings of the managing agency system and the boxwallahs; land reforms, to the extent that they would be carried through, had just begun; and most important, the rise of the Dalits, backward classes and communities, and regional economic and political forces was still not on the horizon. The cauldron of democracy not yet boiling, the fifties and the first half of the sixties were still the years of the ancien regime. The period, marked by four events, was one of failed hopes and aspirations. These events were: the final suppression of the rebellion in Telengana; the denial of 1/30

democracy in the form of refusal to grant linguistic statehood with the consequent widespread movement for a full linguistic reorganization of states2; the border dispute with China, leading to the war of 1962 and a closer relation with the United States; and, finally, the 1965 war with Pakistan and the communal and food riots in the country. These events shaped the techniques of nationalist suppression of dissent and ordained that there would not be any abolition of the ancien regime in the Jacobin method, but instead in the gradual amalgamation of the ancien regime into the nation. This strategy of amalgamation fuelled a crisis of legitimacy—chiefly among those to whom the nation had mattered the most, and whose hopes in the nation had been the highest. I am speaking here of the lower middle classes, specifically peasants and students. However, before we go into the still vivid decade of the sixties (again a decade stretching to five to six more years), characterized by peasant and student revolts, it will be instructive to see how the four events were politically critical in defining the nation that was to be and, thus, in unleashing the rebellions of students and peasants. To begin with, the final suppression of the Telengana revolt under jackboots, and exactly a decade later, the large-scale suppression of the communists in 1962–1965 was marked by all those special powers of the state which signified that the nation was to rest on postcoloniality, one of the chief features of which was the strong residuary existence of a colonial mode of governance. Second, the linguistic reorganization of states was enacted under duress; it brought out for the first time in the life of the young nation the fact that nation and democracy do not always sit happily together. The narrow basis of states’ reorganization was itself a reminder that recognition of nationalities and federalization of polity were going to be fundamental challenges to the task of defining the polity. Third, the period 1958–1965, characterized by closer relations with the United States, the conclusion of the PL 480 agreement, the 1962 border war with China, the devaluation of the Indian rupee, and the industrial stagnation and general agrarian crisis,3 accompanied by widespread food riots, put to rest the anti-colonial premise on which the nation had been founded. It signaled a realism which had till then been advocated only by a section of nation’s leadership but which had now gained the nation’s consensus. The nation had to be strong and virile. This masculinization received further impetus in the 1965 war with Pakistan. The jai jawan jai kisan chant of 1965 was a brilliant rechristening of Professor Stoke’s theme of “peasants and the raj.”4 Indeed, it was not the decade of the fifties when the nation realized the need for virility and masculinity; rather, it was the sixties that was the decade of the evocation of masculinity. Contrary to many a myth, the first decade of nationhood was not stringently anti-Pakistan; rather it was the sixties in which the nation not only became decisively anti-Pakistan, but also—and more crucially—anti-Muslim. War became one more phase in state formation on the subcontinent; riots became another phase in redefining the nation. If one were to draw a genealogy of today’s feature of riots being selected as the chief medium of redefining the nation’s agenda, one must start from the riots of the sixties when anti-Pakistan and anti-Muslim riots became indistinguishable from each other. Borders acquired an inviolable sanctity through two wars. Henceforth, borders in place of a participating citizenry were to define “territorial integrity” as the chief marker of the nation, and these borders became the nation’s soul. Amidst the 2/30

agenda of producing a national consensus on realism, masculinity, and strength, those who were governing the nation did not care that this agenda also occasioned the eclipse of the dream of a happy and prosperous nation. Not unnaturally then, the collapse of this liberal dream was an extreme shock to those to whom the nation had mattered most and for whom the dream of happiness and prosperity for the nation had been the strongest. While recording the sixties and the seventies, conventional political history of independent India does not take into account the fact that these were also the years of revolts against the ancien regime, these revolts interrogated inadequacy of the nation, and the measures taken by the state in consequence, signaled the restructuration of the state and a redefining of the nation.5 These revolts, which, in effect, questioned the narrow basis of the nation and posed challenges to the contours of nationalism, were critical existential encounters with a calamity in the moral order of the nation. They were a moral response to failed promises, more accurately, a response characteristic of the age of “lost prosperity and current misery.” Nation’s new realism was questioned, its new morality interrogated by praxis. If the crisis of the sixties signified a breakdown in the moral order, the popular response was also a critical encounter with a moral entity called nation that had betrayed promises, and was resting securely on the strength and durability of the ancien regime. A radical history of the post-independence nation locates the decades under study as the years in which there was an upsurge of the toiling masses, workers, and peasants in particular. Ironically, this radical history, similar to the conventional one, commits the mistake of ignoring the particularity of the decades, namely the radicalism of the middle classes.6 The sixties, characterized by the radicalization of the middle classes, in fact, pose the issue of what can be called the “nationalist predicament.” The middle classes questioned the illusory promises of the nation as if they were telling that the nation could not be guaranteed and assured of loyalty any more within the boundaries of the defined nationhood. Yet, since the complaint was that the nation was only inadequate and there was no question or agenda of challenging the nationhood itself (contrast this with the Naga movement and the predicament becomes clear), the revolts were to remain only as promises of revolution. A restructuration of the nation ironically became the agenda of those who were ruling over the nation and seized this opportunity, while the revolutionaries remained trapped in the predicament. Historians of postindependence nationhood have neglected this predicament. In fact, the “nationalist predicament” in India has a long history marked by a very complex narrative. This history is closely connected with the intellectual history of the middle classes in independent India. Unfortunately, however, this history has remained, till now, beyond serious historical scholarship.

Peasant, Commissar, and the Nationalist World One of the most enduring and remarkable features of the peasant movement during colonial times had been the organized middle-class leadership. Indeed, it was not so 3/30

much the peasant movement which, by itself, determined its relation with the nationalist movement, but specifically its middle-class leadership which determined the dynamics of that relation. Nowhere was this more evident than in Bengal for reasons that we all know today. Yet, what was true of Bengal held true for other parts of the country also. In fact through the example of Bengal we shall see how the political alliance of the middle class and the peasantry determined the relations of the latter with the nation. Ultimately this was to characterize the sixties when the peasantry stood opposed to the given nation form and the ethicality of the peasant movement was in direct contrast to the politics of the ancien regime masquerading as the nation. This ethicality of the peasant movement had a past, which lay in a contrast: the absence of a direct material incentive for the middle class to motivate or support the peasantry and the contrasting presence of an ideological/ethical impulse to mobilize the peasantry. This contrast led to an ambivalence. In order to understand the ethicality in the nature of the peasant rebellions of the sixties, it would be worth our while to go into the prehistory of the middle-class attitude to the peasant movement, even though briefly. As we all know, the middle class in Bengal had originated from the Permanent Settlement, whence a class became divorced from land and assured of a couponclipping income in varying degrees, gradually opted for Western education and professional avenues. However, there arises the historically intriguing question: why did the peasants, instead of standing on their own feet and enacting their own movement against landlordism, usury, and a colonial state, thus, making their nationhood, look askance for support and leadership from urban educated classes as well as the rural gentry? This is a double enigma. One, the middle class in Bengal, as distinct from elsewhere, was not rooted in land any more, particularly with the advent of the twentieth century. Yet, the spiritual leadership of the peasant revolts came from this urban middle class, for the peasants continued to look for urban inspiration and support. Second, why did the middle class on its part not forget the rural constituency? From Vidyasagar to Fazlul Haq, Bankim Mukherjee to Charu Mazumdar, the middle class continued to produce intellectuals, leaders, ideologues, campaigners, rhetoricians, and organizers, that is, feeder channels of all varieties to bring in organized politics among the rural masses. Logically none of this should have happened. Yet, the middleclass leadership over the peasantry became well established in course of time, and, indeed became naturalized to an extent beyond historical and political enquiry. The middle class–peasant relationship is, thus, a fascinating part of the double story of nationalist conquest and the moral resistance against such hegemonic nationalism of the land. In the history of the nation in Bengal, the middle class deviated only rarely from its tradition of supporting the peasant. In the beginning, the national revolutionaries did not pay much attention to the need for enlisting support, especially the support of the Muslim ryots and peasants. But this was a short-term error. With the rise of the Noncooperation Movement, the policy of attending to rural constituencies returned. As we know, both the Congress and the Praja Party, and subsequently the Muslim League, had a network of rural channels. The Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha (BPKS) with the 4/30

support of the All Indian Kisan Sabha (AIKS) secularized the metropolitan leadership even more, though under different ideologies and different politics. Bengal clearly stands out here as the most acute example. If we take any AIKS session in the pre-World War II era, for example the 1939 session at Gaya or the 1940 session at Palasa in Vishakhapatnam, we shall find that among the strongholds of the AIKS like the United Provinces (UP), the Central Provinces (CP), Malabar, Orissa, Punjab, Bihar, Andhra, and Bengal, the Bengal contingent was the most radicalized and secularized, and the BPKS leadership as well as BPKS representation to the AIKS council the most urban in nature. Bankim Mukherjee, Muzaffar Ahmed, Shibnath Banerjee, Bibhuti Guha, Niharendu Dutta Mazumder, Rebati Barman—leaders like them were leaders of an urban movement and could easily pass off as the most authentic representatives of the urban awakening of Bengal.7 Probably, the BPKS leadership was more urban than rural and more ideological-political than a peasant movement would be in a colonial land. It clearly could not incorporate and absorb the Praja base in the countryside. Its depeasantization reflected the original de-peasantization of the educated gentry. Its urban roots were responsible for the tragedy of peasant leaders such as Abdullah Rasul and Mani Singh. The AIKS failed to absorb the base of the Praja Party and, subsequently, that of the Muslim League, though justifiably the peasant leaders of the BPKS became mythical leaders to the next generation of radicals, notwithstanding the historical failure of the middle class in creating or sustaining a mighty peasant movement throughout the length and breadth of rural Bengal. Perhaps, the nature of the organized middle-class leadership militated against such an eventuality. Agrarian unrest in Tamluk, Tebhaga, or Naxalbari is, thus, typical not only of a nationalist awakening in rural Bengal but also symbolic of the hold of a political class whose main contribution in fashioning nationalism has been overwhelmingly moral, ethical and millenarian, hence, ideological.8 In fact, the ambivalent relationship between the middle class and the peasant was evident in the nineteenth century. The baboo appreciated the age of reason, became either a rationalist in religion like the Bramho Keshab Sen or the rebel monk Vivekananda, and being a hybrid product of a cross-cultural birth was made up of the values of both old and new worlds, of feudal and bourgeois ideals, of pre-colonial and colonial elements. Thus, while living off the peasant’s toil, the baboo grew aware of the unrest engulfing the Bengal countryside and gave ample indications of his ambivalence. How would the peasant mark his world of enlightened nationalism—this remained a persistent inquiry. Historians like Rajkrishna abhorred the subject, while the presence of a rural milieu was acknowledged only in a roundabout way in the religious or Indological historiography of chroniclers such as Akshoy Kumar Dutta, Haraprasad Shastri or, later, Kshitimohan Sen.9 The Varendra Research Society researched on topics connected with India’s past, but avoided the issue of ageless misery and stagnation of rural India and particularly rural Bengal. The peasant was never acknowledged directly or politically as a critical part of the entity called the nation— especially in the cultural realm. However, peasant revolts like the Blue Mutiny and the Pabna Riots were exceptional events when members of the educated middle class broke their reticence in sharply drawn phrases, narratives, sketches, satires, articles, 5/30

memoranda, representations and excursions to rural Bengal. Otherwise, the nineteenth century middle class thrived on a rural–urban divide and displayed a peacocklike attitude, as the owl derisively remarked in the Sketches of the Owl (Hutom Pencher Naksha). Following the lead from Rammohun, who himself had petitioned the Select Committee on the plight of Bengal ryots, Derozians like Rashik Krishna Mallick (1810– 1858), Dakshinaranjan Mukhopadhyay (1812–1878), Ramgopal Ghosh (1815–1868), Kishori Chand Mitra (1814–1877), or Ramtanu Lahiri (1813–1898) represented the typically ambivalent attitude. Like the enlightened followers of Hume and Paine, they would enquire into the peasant’s lot. But when the revolt of Titu Meer broke out, the organ of the Young Bengal, Gnananweshan, spoke aloud against “Mohametan fanatics.” At the same time it is true that this Young Bengal, through the Bengal Spectator, had conducted detailed enquiry into the condition of ryots on issues such as extent of rent oppression, effect of the resumption of landholdings on the cultivating peasantry, crop patterns, costs of cultivation, number of intermediaries, and usury. The questionnaire had straightaway posed the question as to what the landlords were doing for the benefit of ryots. The Bengal Spectator reported on incidents of oppression of ryots and was, thus, the forerunner of the Hindu Patriot which played a similar role during the Blue Mutiny.10 We can cite a few more details to prove the ambivalence of the middle class. The Somprakash, founded by Vidyasagar, had started recording the protests of the laboring classes. Radhanath Sikdar continued that task of recording and documentation in the Bengal Spectator. But at the same time the Hindu Patriot avoided a classic peasant movement like the Santhal Revolt, while supporting the Blue Mutiny, that coincided with landholders’ interests also. Shivanath Shastri continued that tradition. Atulkrishna Mitra, Upendra Chandra, Girish Ghosh, Nagendra Nath Gupta, and the Reverend James Long kept on recording the peasant question in various literary forms. The Pabna Riots resulted in an explosion of writings. The Gramabarta Prakashika of Harinath Mazumder was one of the most eloquent journals. Meer Musharraf Hussain wrote Zamindar Darpan. Ramesh Chandra Dutta wrote in 1873 “An Apology for the Pubna Rioters” in Lal Behari Dey’s Bengal Magazine. The Indian Mirror and the People’s Friend continued with this work. Even the Sulabh Samachar of Keshab Sen at times sympathized with the rioters. In fact, the Pabna Riots became an occasion for the middle class to articulate its stand on the peasant question. By the time the mass politics characteristic of the twentieth century arrived, the middle class of Bengal was ideologically, politically, and culturally ready to attend to the peasant constituency. Nonetheless this task proved the most hazardous task in the historical mission of the middle class. The support and building up of rural subsidiaries was a controlled process. Whenever rural agitations like the Union Board agitation threatened to spill over the boundaries of metropolitan politics, the lid was quickly put on and rural leaders were shown their assigned places. The question in the thirties in Bengal was twofold. With a declining landlordism and a rising rich peasantry, how exactly were the peasant demands to be articulated vis-à-vis the colonial power and the metropolitan political leadership? This 6/30

went along with a more direct question—how was the “communal” entanglement of the peasant problem to be solved to the satisfaction of the leadership? As we shall see, even the BPKS failed to convincingly address these twin questions. However, there remains a brief interlude. The early decades of the twentieth century saw the completion of the main corpus of Bengali nationality. A well-standardized language had developed. The form of education was also standardized and governmentalized. The Bengali press had developed. Charismatic figures like Chittaranjan Das, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Fazlul Huq occupied the assigned roles of mass leaders. A historical heritage to draw sustenance upon had been built in the nineteenth century. The muffasil towns—Dhaka, Rajshahi, Barisal, Midnapore, Jessore, Sylhet, Burdwan—were, unlike today, thriving transmission links from the metropolitan center to the periphery. Caste distinctions were considerably subdued in the nationalist world of the upper-caste dominated liberal Hindu elite, so much so that specific attempts to combine the lower castes and the Muslims to counter the liberal Hindu hegemony and give a new face to the nation in Bengal were to fail at the most critical time in the life of the nation under colonialism.11 “The specific combination of urbanism and radicalism”12 was the chief element in the completion of the growth of Bengali nationality. Bengal did not have a significant bourgeoisie, nor did it have a working class which could have radicalized the entire length and breadth of the rural hinterland. In China, the peasant constituted the nation. In Bengal, the nation was constituted by the middle class, and the peasants were exhorted to keep their faith in this dwarfed nation. By the time a Bengali working class grew up, the peasantry had become too differentiated internally to constitute a solid peasant nationalism and the hegemonic hold of the middle class over Bengal would not allow a workers’ culture to develop. As the growth of the Bengali working class in Howrah, where the members came from a dominant caste group,13 or in Durgapur, where the workers are of a heterogeneous composition, shows, working-class culture here has become an extension of that middle-class culture. Today the middle-class character of the nation in Bengal (with its specifics mentioned above) is showing cracks as sub-regional aspirations, which are basically peasant aspirations stoked up by the local elites, are causing splits. This is, however, anticipating the issue. The most serious crisis in the domination of the middle class over rural Bengal came in the thirties. The Congress leadership had, in the twenties, effectively immobilized its own rural arm by opposing the Praja Party and concentrating on constitutional politics. This was the decade when Birendra Nath Sasmal’s challenge was also contained—a development on which Pal himself wrote.14 The “Pact” was also a non-starter. But, paradoxically, the thirties had ushered in unprecedented opportunities for an agrarian movement against colonial comprador constitutionalism and the colonial terror unleashed on Bengal. The decade also saw the emergence of labor unrest on a noticeable scale.15 Possibly this was the decade when an agrarian upsurge might have found its consummation in a surge of national protests against the colonial regime with all sections of the democratic masses participating. That, however, was not to be. The middle class was scared and felt itself to be completely powerless to steer politics away from the “communal” entanglement. Landlordism was on the decline, and there was a rent crisis of massive proportions. This gave a chance to the Muslim elite to tie the Praja 7/30

movement in communal knots by articulating middle-peasant demands—mainly demand for steps against excessive rent settlement. Though the Permanent Settlement had been opposed, the opposition was perfunctory in nature. The upcoming rich peasantry, gaining strength from a restructured market, was the main beneficiary of the Praja movement. Communal articulation of peasant demands showed its ultimate limits in carrying on anti-feudal and anti-colonial struggles in the post-partition period in East Pakistan. Though the illusion of achievement lasted up to few years more, the “return of Muslims to [the] home land,” as one perceptive commentator has said,16 was a shattered return. Fazlul Haq’s second coronation as the savior of the Bengal peasantry was a tragic happening, bordering almost on the farcical. This coronation was the ultimate failure of a section of the Bengal middle class. Here, on this side of the border, the nationalist middle-class leadership found its much needed ally in the countryside in the jotedar, the rich peasant class, which was interested in the constitutional–reformist aim of ending landlordism,17 but not in the revolutionary–democratic end of providing land to the tillers. Congress bases in areas like Burdwan, Midnapore, Hooghly, and Jalpaiguri had grown strong in the 1930s. These bases served two purposes—they curbed any effective mass peasant mobilization against landlordism and functioned at the same time as the mobilizational elite in the countryside. The role of a functional elite was performed from the metropolis. It was in the twenties and thirties that the Bengali middle class learnt the simultaneous roles of a mobilizational and functional elite of a developing polity. 18 Indeed, it is the satisfactory performance of this dual role which has sustained, till this day, the hegemony of the middle class in Bengal. Today, the bureaucracy performs the role of a functional elite. Engineers, technocrats, and teachers also play a role in this; also the panchayats and the block development officers (BDOs) are a part thereof. Today, the left, the most organized political force of the middle classes is complementing the role of a functional elite with a command performance in the role of a mobilizational elite. The peasantry is caught up in this scissors-grip. The peasant can have the space to maneuver only in the event of a conflict between these two command performances. Again this is an issue which we need not anticipate here. The BPKS had arrived at the juncture of the thirties when the Krishak Praja Party was still strong, the Muslim league had started making inroads, and the revolutionary middle class was turning its attention to the peasant cause. Potentiality of this decade was lost sight of amidst political confusion. The movement of 1942–1943 was neglected, condemned, and ridiculed. The anti-famine campaign was run along a most reformist line. Hence, when the spontaneous peasant disturbances broke out with slogans of “Tebhaga Chai,”19 as the historian of Tebhaga records it, the BPKS was found wanting. It is not our purpose here to rechronicle those lost years, but to pose the whole question of the nature of middle-class leadership over the peasants which led to such abortive end. I am referring here not only to an abortive resolution of the peasant question, but also to the abortive end to the nationalist agenda, whose main element was peasant nationalism. The nation to be reborn could be only an inadequate nation. It may be the wisdom of hindsight to note that the chief characteristic of the theoretical 8/30

solution offered by the middle class to the colonial peasant question was the piecemeal nature of it. Even the Netrakona session of the AIKS in 1945, dominated by the BPKS leaders, did not place the peasant struggle in the general anti-colonial, anti-feudal framework of nationalism. The Netrakona session had raised demands20 like fighting black market and hoarding, and effecting commodity distribution and people’s relief. The charter of 21 demands had everything, except an unambiguous call for ending the colonial and zamindar raj. Even when it talked of resisting riots, the specific peasant nature of the “communal” problem was ignored. So immersed was the AIKS leadership in the piecemeal solution of the question that it ignored even the departure of leaders like N. G. Ranga, Indulal Yagnik, and even the redoubtable Sahajananda Saraswati, who represented the upcoming rich peasantry and the middle peasantry. It of course indicated that the BPKS was gradually finding out a class line. But prone to defending the position of the middle peasants, particularly the owner peasants or the ryots, the BPKS never attempted any comprehensive class analysis of rural Bengal. As the Tebhaga historian comments: Evidently the Kisan Sabha sought to reconcile the interests of all categories of peasants —from the rich peasant to landless labour—and unite them on a common platform, the preservation of peasant unity seemed to be the overriding consideration.21 This line of all-peasant unity against the backdrop of increasing peasant differentiation from the onset of the thirties suited the rural middle class well. It blunted the antifeudal struggle. When the Tebhaga movement broke out on the issue of sharecroppers’ rights, the BPKS could neither expand the movement into a militant and wide antifeudal struggle nor could it place the central issue of land in the wake of the movement. Basically, it was an antagonism between small peasant sharecroppers and jotedars. Adhiari had been an acknowledged form of tenancy or sub-tenancy. But this historical form was given more substance by increasing commercialization, mass impoverishment after famine, and rural indebtedness. Thus, it was the spread of capitalism in agriculture that exacerbated the crisis. Yet, the BPKS remained happily imbued with old antizamindari ideas, marked by middle-peasant confusion. Even though sharecroppers’ struggles flared up in Jalpaiguri, Dinajpur, Rangpur, the 24 Parganas, Jessore, Khulna, Midnapore, and Mymensingh,22 the movement had to end under heavy state repression and political opposition of the Congress and the League, representing the interests of the rural rich. Another political factor was that as soon as the relatively prosperous sharecroppers representating middle-peasant interests were satisfied, the movement slowed down with their gradual withdrawal. A BPKS leadership, which had only a few years ago ignored the struggle of the Tamluk peasantry and had exhorted the peasants to produce more was now at a loss about how to continue the struggle. The leadership, represented by organizers like Bhawani Sen, did not have the political will to extend the issue of struggle to the domain of the rural poor of Bengal with the slogan, “Snatch the paddy, build up common granaries and seize the land.”23 Is this reading of “Tebhaga Chai” undoubtedly one of the most heroic peasant struggles led by the communists, as contributing to the birth of an inadequate nation too much? 9/30

To understand the interpenetration of the middle class and the peasantry in the realm of struggle, let us once more move back a few years. Formed at Bankura in 1937, the BPKS did not have a single peasant among its top leaders. Peasant leaders like Mani Singh, Haji Danesh, Bhupal Panda, or Deben Das were never at the top level of the Sabha which was securely metropolitan. The BPKS never attempted any class analysis, except faintly, when submitting its memorandum to the Floud Commission. It observed a “peasant day” each year and concentrated on sectional issues without having a clear anti-feudal program.24 “Land, to the tiller,” the central slogan for propaganda, was not for immediate action, and “agrarian revolution still lay in the future.”25 Even if land redistribution was occasionally referred to, land consolidation was far off. However, it must be kept in mind that in spite of the gross inadequacy of the middle-class leadership, Tebhaga was an authentic peasant movement, which not only faced the communal tricks of the bourgeoisie and the rural rich, it threw up peasant leaders like Kangshari Haldar, Mani Singh, Bachha Munsi, Charu Mazumder, or Mahi Bagchi. We do not have to repeat here the fact of the piecemeal nature of the theoretical solution offered by the AIKS—namely the concentration of the BPKS on sectional issues— something we have already discussed. Suffice to say now that while in the course of developing a struggle, the organization has to concentrate on issues, the leadership must have a clear political perspective. It is here that the political commissars failed. The post-war upsurge was certainly a total mass uprising. Yet, the Communist Party wavered indecisively—from reformism to tail-ism to adventurism. The decade of peasant upsurges, mass strikes, and student rebellions was lost; some would say the chance of democratizing the nation was lost forever, while some may say that the nation would have to wait for another 20 more years for such a phase to reappear. Ironically, Partition and Tebhaga gave a new lease of life to the middle-class leadership over Bengal, even though now a truncated Bengal. There is no doubt that the Bargadars Bill, brought by Suhrawardy, and subsequently the West Bengal Bargadars Act of 1950 and the Zamindari Abolition measure of 1951, blunted peasant struggles. The Congress was historically committed to a reformist policy, a halfway abolition of zamindari. The Bargadars Bill initially gave a fillip to the struggle of the sharecroppers. But, then it slowly usurped the legitimacy of a partial anti-feudal struggle which had threatened to spill over the boundaries of a partial movement—a fact which the Tebhaga historian Sunil Sen has failed to note. However, as we know, though initially blunted for a few years, middle-class radicalism again took an upswing. Rid of communal entanglements and of the zamindari system, and with urban progressivism returning with a vengeance (also Calcutta now ruling West Bengal totally, no longer challenged and hindered by the relatively rich cultural presence of East Bengal and its towns), the Bengali middle class reassumed its natural leadership over the peasantry. The bhadralok again became the main feeder channel for bringing organized institutional politics among the rural masses. Though the rich peasantry tried for a while through the Congress and the Bangla Congress to control the villages, it failed due to increasing marginalization of peasantry along with the marginalization of West Bengal in national politics, relative decline in the growth of cash crops in Bengal, and, above all, the omnipresence of the 10/30

middle-class intelligentsia in West Bengal’s body politic and social fabric. In short, we have here the demonstration through the last hundred years of a secular phenomenon— namely, the persistence of a historically inadequate present. Today, as one political commentator has noted, 26 middle-class intervention in the agrarian question has assumed the form of state intervention. The historical disinclination to consider the peasant question in its entirety is again evident today in its line of “setting the peasant question right” through specific, issue based, government intervention. The panchayat has usurped the role of the Krishak Sabha,27 and peasant organizational activity has boiled down to conducting The National Rural Employment Program (NREP), the Integrated Rural Development Program (IRDP), the Rural Labour Employment Guarantee Program (RLEGP), and other central government-aided antipoverty programs. It is now a form of statism whose principal aim is the preservation of the present form of production coupled with the abolition of taxation in the form of land revenue; the end of the eviction of sharecroppers, and provision of help to rural consumers through state purchase, distribution of various inputs, and other such measures, without going for a total change in the agrarian and social economy. This, then, is the classic passive revolution that the middle class has attempted throughout the past several decades. The commissar was there not to exhort the soldier to move ahead, fast and bold. The foot soldier was to move, but slowly, extremely cautiously. Yet, one question remains. Even if it is granted that the middle class was the natural leader of peasant politics, why did the peasants accept it? Why did they not throw out this half-hearted leadership lock, stock, and barrel, and create their own authentic domain? This is a more difficult poser to which a few tentative answers can be suggested here. Historically, subinfeudation of land has been so deep in past in Bengal that a mobilization of the mass of peasantry against the zamindars proved to be extremely difficult. Peasant resistances were often resistances of a certain layer of owner-peasants against a higher echelon of the hierarchy. Often, the middle class related with those layers got involved in peasant disturbances. Moreover, as has been noted by various observers, the communal mode of living marked by religiosity was a feature of the peasantry. This communal mode of living, however, hampered rather than expedited the growth of an authentic leadership. It made the peasantry a sitting duck for baboo politicians who, with demagogy and populist talks, could cater to communal sentiments and win over the peasants. In fact, populism worked all through this period as an ideological milieu appropriate for maintaining middle-class hold over the peasants. After all, populism is the gray area where popular democratic traditions merge with ruling-class thoughts and become a weapon of the ruling class to defeat the former.28 Fundamentally, however, the factor which in recent times has helped the middle class to keep intact its sway over the villages is the natural domination of middle peasants in the Bengal countryside.29 In fact, unlike in the olden days, today the middle class does not have to send urban cadres to the countryside to organize the peasantry; the rural middle class can be depended upon for that. Paradoxically, though the political aspirations of

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the middle peasantry are being fuelled now through panchayats and the neoclassical “choice” approach of the present regime, today increasingly accepted as the national model of peasant development, the latter is singularly unable to solve the genuine problems of the middle peasantry exacerbated through growing commercialization. The delicate apple cart is still intact and the fragile urban–rural power structure still stands. Only two eventualities can upset that balance: one, the rise of an authentic leadership of the rural poor, consisting of marginalized, pauperized peasants and labor; second, the acute dissatisfaction of the middle peasantry with the present regime and a consequent inclination toward the poor peasants’ cause, or, conversely, a populist reaction. Both these possibilities are on the horizon. The middle class’ natural role of the commissar may then face its acid test. In any case, today West Bengal presents the picture of an almost unending stretch of undulating green countryside from Jalpaiguri to Burdwan– Hooghly where the middle peasants hold the reins. Their problem is the peasant’s problem, their aspiration is the peasant’s aspiration, and their leadership is interpreted as authentic peasant leadership. They act as a bulwark against the emergence of any kulak party, but they are an insurance against the emergence of the rural poor too. During the agrarian disturbances of the sixties and seventies, they recoiled from peasant mobilization and the uprising failed.

The Question of a Revolutionary Middle Class Once Again If peasants have needed a middle class to represent them in the making of a nation, 30 we must also remember that the middle class too has needed to be represented. The story of the promise of revolution is bound up intimately with the intriguing tale of the representation of classes, sections, and communities in the nation. We shall have to go back to the decades of the fifties and sixties again to see how the middle class attempted to secure its own representation in a revolutionary nation by refusing the ancien regime, how students and the youth became the “vanguard,” how “student centrality” became the representational ideology of the nonconformist masses. In this attempt to secure its own representation, the traditionally cautious class became the “vanguard”— as if “the subject [was trying to] hear or speak to himself and be affected by the signifier he produce[d], without passing through an external detour, the world, the sphere of what [was] not his own.”31 There is no doubt that the argument of student centrality in the convulsions of the sixties and seventies draws largely on urban, specifically metropolitan, experiences. I wish to make two things clear in this respect: First, in unleashing violent clashes in urban areas, and most fiercely in the metropolis, violence in rural areas played no small catalytic role. Unrest and strife over food and kerosene, and against forcible procurement of paddy and rice, was led by village and muffasil students and youth. Second, though social attention in these times of unrest was focused on students and youth, we must not lose sight of the all pervasive rise of the left in those days. The general rise of the political left on the basis of an entire range of democratic issues— land reforms, subsidized food through public distribution system all over the state, 12/30

political freedom in educational institutions, revocation of black Acts such as the Defence of India Rules, release of political prisoners, full trade union rights—provided the general backdrop in which the militant and millenarian student and youth movements flourished. We are indeed writing here of a period, which though hardly 30 years old, has already become a part of history. The period is not yet over in the sense of its continuities, but the decisive years are clearly over. The story of the postcolonial Indian nation is, after all, only current history, and though passions still surface over those years of student activism and similar war cries still reverberate at times, it has become an imperative to rewrite the history of the nation, its one period at least, in the mirror of a middle class which had become revolutionary in that contingent situation. The facts of that period are many, so are the analyses. The deceptively simple task of keeping the record straight as far as the young rebels of those days are concerned is really difficult. Equally difficult is to capture those years in the form of a retrieved narrative—a narrative of the experiences born out of the critically existential encounter between the rebels and an ancien regime passing off as the nation. 32 C. Wright Mill’s elegant phrase “present as history” is enticing, but the question to be reckoned with here is: history of what, if many histories then why not many presents, that is, many presences? In such a poser, we have a choice regarding representation—the inadequacy of a nation represented by an angry populace; a history represented by the present; finally, an architecture of morality in which morality represents a particular form of politics and a “new politics” challenging some old morals, “old consensus of the nation.” But to understand this present, pulled apart by so many choices, it is best to recapture the experiences, for it is in experiences that choices remain congealed. Such an experiential narrative may show the non-conformist pattern of the student and youth movement of those days and help us understand the historical transformation of the nature and institutions of a revolutionary middle-class movement. In this nonconformity we find a break with past patterns and values and the attempt to chart out of a new course. The student and youth movement of the mid-sixties made a break with the past, renounced political parentage, and became the prodigal child of the society. If we have to mark out a period of protest and nonconformity in the life of this nation, including its prehistory and history, we cannot find a more nonconformist age or moment than this; even the accomplishments of the young Derozians seem minor to it. How can one describe the rebellious youth of those days? Of course, the label of extremism overshadows all other facets of the young rebel of the mid-sixties. But the main thing was that he (sometimes she) spurned liberalism of all kinds and argued for thorough change. He was a member of a middle- or lower middle-class family, perhaps family of a teacher or that of a white-collar employee or a shopkeeper. He had seen enough of liberalism since his childhood, enough to convince him that all of this liberal talk and the liberal hope in the nation was worthless amidst the degrading poverty and corruption surrounding him. He had no respect for education. He had received 13/30

education only to hate it. He knew that college or university meant a loss of answer scripts, errors in mark sheets, rampant nepotism, and a farce named examination. But it was not simply that. The whole academic world signified a gradualist and a fiercely competitive life, against which he had been taught so much by his liberal mentors. He had to fight for ration and kerosene, the issues over which Bengal was aflame in 1965– 1966. He faced unemployment after the ritual of school and college education. In 1953, the number of educated unemployed was 163,000; by the end of 1966 the figure stood at 917,000. This figure, however, is only from the employment exchange registers; in reality the position was far worse.33 He shouted, “We want jobs not diplomas.” Yet one must not think that the youth in Bengal had grown restive due to petty economic considerations. If he was a student he was enlightened enough to try for a change in the system. It was something more than the natural propensity of students and youth toward an anti-establishment attitude, for, despite his frustration, s/he had a genuine desire to work for the people. He was a radical. This was natural considering the fact that for the past 150 years the climate of his land had been nourished by radical ideas. Politics was in the air, it was his bread and also fired his dreams. He left his studies, went to the villages to live like a peasant, and campaigned for new ideas among the peasants. Many differed from him, but his friends and foes admitted that here was a new generation of committed activists. He loved to be called the Red Guard. He was heated, passionate, fierce, uncompromising, idealistic, and often, impatient. He had seen hypocrisy in the form of “cultural enlightenment.” Hence, he had become an opponent of previous culture. Formerly, he was an ardent nationalist. Now, dreaming of world revolution, he thought of nationalism as a bourgeois ploy to thwart the unity between the peoples of different countries. Hence he said, “We want food and clothing/War drums beat up instead.” His predecessors had fought on the streets of Calcutta in 1945 against the British, demanding recognition of Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary government in Indo-China; now he said, “Your name, my name, Vietnam, Pnompenh.” In short, the Bengal youth was a brave man disillusioned with the present world and ennobled by something greater than himself. All these explain his revolutionary radicalism, “which occasionally took the form of furious outbursts at the slightest encroachments on his rights and privileges and sudden spurts of individualism.”34 We must not think, however, that every young man in Bengal at that time was like this. This is indeed an experiential narrative involving some idealization and any such symbolic portrayal must involve some sort of oversimplification. The active participants in youth and student movements comprised, at best, 20–25 percent of the student and youth community. But they had the unquestioned support of many more. Necessarily, the outburst was a mix of social, economic and political reactions, but this, indeed, is the witch’s brew of every movement. What marked a departure here was the absolutely political, hence, absolutely moral, character of the outburst. There were vagabond elements who became allies of the youth. To the youth, however, if the vagabond elements were ready to be hired by others, they were at the service of the revolutionary youth also. For long, the lumpen proletariat had lived on the crumbs of society; now they took the opportunity to settle personal scores and vendetta. The revolutionary 14/30

youth, however, chose to ignore the ignoble side of the lower depths. Like Fanon, the ideologue of Algerian nationalism, he thought, no matter if the man is a vagabond or a lumpen element, for he is so because of society; he must be organized by the forces of rebellion. The government, of course, chose to remain blind to the ethical questions with which the movement had confronted the nationalist agenda of the fifties and sixties. It said that student indiscipline posed a threat to public peace; it moaned the lack of a proper academic atmosphere and the absence of respect for authority. The educated youth were not amenable to any kind of authority—parental, educational, or governmental. The government noted the ideological frustration of the youth, their lack of faith in the state. Surprisingly, it said that the students were politically indifferent, meaning, perhaps, that they were indifferent to ruling politics. The number of cases of student agitation rose from 271 in 1965 to 607 in 1966. About 42 percent of the cases in 1966 took a violent turn. Of course, the Bengal youth was prepared for violence. His slender bearded figure would be excited by Mao’s dictum, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Thus, he faced persecution. The very lumpen elements whom he had drawn earlier into the vortex of political activity now turned against him. He had showed no mercy, and now he did not expect and receive it from any quarter. He was hounded out by the police, sent behind bars, or shot dead on the deserted streets of the metropolis at night. For long, the leaders of the nation had exhorted the youth to rise up for social values. But when youth power actually captured the imagination of the metropolis, everyone shrank back. Whoever could be termed as belonging to the party of order—the state, liberals, intellectuals, gentlemen communists, and, of course, members of the ruling class, and the landed gentry—thought that the hour of the nation’s nemesis had come and that the nation had to be saved by killing the dangerous extremists. It was a crime now to be a youth of Bengal. It was a fight to the finish—one could be whisked away at any moment by the gendarmes for the simple reason that one was a youth or an angry student. What marked the youth movement of the sixties more than anything was its intensely violent character. It was not merely a matter of state violence unleashed upon students and the youth, but the very bloody nature of the conflict itself. The nation in its more intense moments of the last 60 years of existence had nurtured the cult of violence, and many of her finest sons had faced the gallows. The 1943 famine had shaken the complacent body fabric of society. Clashes with the police were nothing new. The student movement of 1959 was the precursor of the food demonstration where 80 unarmed men and women had been shot dead by the police. The student was naturally first enlightened, then nationalist, then progressive, then leftist, and then a revolutionary extremist. Thus, from 1964 onwards, students increasingly turned violent in their protests on economic issues—against a rise in tram fares (1965), in support of the striking workers of Jay Engineering in Calcutta (1964–1965), confronting violent police and the military for food and kerosene (1966), or on political issues such as revocation of Emergency and the suspension of democratic rights under the Defence of India Rules (DIR) (1964). In that sense, it was a fitting backdrop for a violent conflict. 15/30

Even then, when regular barricade fights started in a real sense in Calcutta, Krishnanagar, Howrah, Burdwan, Siliguri, and other towns of Bengal, the state as well as liberal politicians were caught unaware. In almost all the student union elections in colleges, from an elite institution like Presidency College to a plebeian college like Bangabasi, the parties of order were defeated and the rebels won massive mandates. Even a small demonstration involved at least 500 to 1,000 participants and each violent outcome of the demonstration added glory to the rebels, which in turn led to bigger demonstrations. One of the most massive demonstrations was against Robert McNamara, the former Defence Secretary of the United States (in trying to kill whom Neguen Van Troi had become a martyr in Vietnam) who had arrived in Calcutta in 1968 as the Chief of the World Bank. It was a demonstration by around 50,000 people. McNamara could not come to the city by road—he had to be flown in by helicopter. Violent clashes between the police and the students and youth continued through the day over a wide area of the metropolis stretching from the city airport to its heartland. The vice chancellor of the university was condemned for joining a dinner party attended by the butcher of Vietnam and surrounded (gheraoed) by hundreds of students. Violence was now worthy of the cause of social change, and if the political rulers sometimes chose to be polite and suave, they were nonetheless fascists; as the rebel youth would say “nice fascists,”35 echoing the famous phrase of the American Black Youth revolutionary, George Jackson, killed in the Soledade Prison at the age of 29. The custodians of the nation could not but condemn the air of violence of that time; they fretted, fumed, wailed, cursed and ultimately killed or demobilized those violent and nonconformist members of the nation. Students and youth, by repeatedly engaging themselves in abortive clashes with the armed forces, dissipated their energy and helped the forces of order to regroup and crush them with counter violence. Yet, stating this is not enough. We need here an analysis of violence—a sociology of violence in which the experiences remain concentrated and the memories remain congealed. The educated city youths were predominantly of middle-class origin. Hence, the desperate situation which the middle class faced affected them. Expansion of higher education coincided with the shrinkage in educational opportunities and the industrial recession in 1966–1967 adversely affected the prospects of employment. We have already mentioned the economic issues. The schools and colleges were overcrowded, and the youth gave vent to the general frustration through frequent outbursts. The middle class had grown on liberal values, and its mentality had been nourished with leftist ideas from the days of national revolutionary terrorists to Subhas Bose, and later on, the communists. Violence was now only a question of time. It would have erupted sooner or later. Second, we know today that the patient parliamentary activity signaling liberal constitutionalism was wearing thin with the revolutionary minded middle-class youth activists. Violence was a reaction to parliamentary cretinism. The rebels were violent not only while facing the organized violence of the state—violence also became a demarcating line with routine politics and routine activities of “national reconstruction.” Violence was needed not only to make the demarcation clear before the public, but also to clarify the issues within the ranks of radical students and youth. With 16/30

violence becoming in this way a self-clarifying exercise, it became a mark of difference between Jacobins and Girondists; the question of violence turned out to be a priority in the clarifying agenda. No wonder, in a similar situation where a nation had to face such a clarifying moment, the radical student leader of that nation, Daniel Cohn-Bandit, wrote of the catalytic nature of violence of 1968 in clear terms when he said that the French students’ determination and willingness to take on the police was astonishing. The mere presence of police would create barricades on Paris streets and the trickle of protest swelled into torrent. The radical youth everywhere—the Americas, France, Italy, Germany, South Korea, India—thought of violence in those days as having a cleansing virtue. The students and youth, by placing faith in utopia by means of a cult of violent action, exhibited, in a certain sense, an “unreason” toward revolution. This unreason was created and shaped by the “myth” of past violent revolutions and struggles. It is not that struggles and revolutions had not taken place in the past, or that the nation had not experienced radicalism, but myths were woven around them by young imaginative minds of a later generation. The rebels created the myth, and then sacrificed their lives in pursuit of these myths. If we have to understand the cardinal role of violence in the movement of the sixties, we must comprehend the sociological implication of a myth which drove the youth into fearlessness. Fanon argued that the violence of conquest had dehumanized the native and only counter violence could make him whole again. Violence was now a cleansing force. It freed the native from his inferiority, despair, and inaction. It made him fearless and restored his self-respect. For the native, life could spring again out of the rotting corpse of the settler. Thus, violence was found to be the only effective means of individual and social therapy; violence could unify the people. It was almost in this sense that the ideologue of revolutionary students and youth had declared that a revolutionary must soak his hands in the blood of the class enemy. George Sorel (1972) had commented that myths were not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act. Myths cannot be refuted, for a myth is identical with the conviction of a group. Thus, peasant revolts at Telengana or Tebhaga, and even earlier peasant revolts shaking the colonial rule, as well as the very contemporary Naxalbari peasant movement took a mythical character in the minds of the youth. Struggles could be reenacted; in fact, Red areas were being created in the countryside and Red Armies would march through the plains of Bengal. The nation was to be liberated from all social exploitation in the 1970s, and these hopes became expressions of myth. Violence, thus, assumed a double significance. The myth of armed peasant revolts occupied the rebel mind; the myth of armed student power, in turn, haunted the rulers. Naturally, the rebels did not stop to analyze how far violence per se could help the cause; how far the peasant revolution was going to engulf India; how far the violenceprone lumpen proletariat, who they rightly thought were physically near the city but spiritually far from it, would stand by them when the chips were down, and when the full weight of the urban reaction would fall upon them; and, whether violence as the leitmotif of determination and clarification, would frighten the populace away, instead 17/30

of drawing them nearer. The situation deteriorated fast for the young insurgents. Mass student participation started to decline while radical students boycotted student union elections; their organizational pattern started growing secret, anarchist, and sectlike; frequent bloody clashes decimated their numbers; ranks were not filled up; and fear and frustration loomed large. The large mass participation, characteristic of 1965–1968 started shrinking from 1969. By 1971, only small number of urban guerrillas remained, and they became aware of the impending doom. Violence now became the major method of settling conflicts within the ranks of the revolutionary youth. It was like Robespierre being sent to the guillotine. Violence now became an expression of the decline of the student movement (after 1970) and its pathetic state. The white flag of reaction took the upper hand. The youth were rounded up, tortured and summarily shot dead. Counter-revolutionary violence became victorious and sporadic acts of heroism on the part of the remnants of the revolutionary youth showed that the rebellion was now nearing an apocalyptic end. No more red flags were seen unfurled on the top of school and college buildings; authority was no longer interrogated about its moral basis; the teacher was no longer asked about the social relevance of his teachings; there was no more avant-garde action. It was now silence of the grave. So, when after 1971, some sections of the youth tried to reenact the heroic deeds of the 1960s sheer despair marked their work. As Marx had said in the Eighteenth Brummaire, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Besides violence there was another signifying element in the experiences of the rebels. It was the question of the way the rebels made sense of the hegemonic hold of the nationalist liberal culture. The radical students and youth belonged to the middle class, but more than anything else they tried to deny their origin. They tried to inculcate revolutionary culture by combating liberal progressive culture. They mixed with workers and peasants; helped strikes and movements in factories and establishments like the Guest Keen Williams, the Statesman, New Allenbery, and Hind Motors; and went to the countryside to mix with the peasants of Naxalbari, Murshidabad, Sundarbans, Debra, Gopiballavpur, and Birbhum, living like them and sharing visions with them. In short, they tried to declass themselves, an act which required that they lose their identity. If it were a program of only a select band of advanced cadres, it could possibly have been managed; but they tried to enact en masse this high act of revolution. It was a theatre of the impossible acts of the vanguards, engaged in the most self-deluding act. This odyssey into revolution led the students and youth into the blunder of being “anti-culture.” In all probability they had not intended that but in the specific environment of hegemonic liberal culture in the land, this had to be so. Liberal middle-class values, morals, teachings, and reforms had become part of the nation’s self through a process that spread over one-and-a-half centuries. The rebels tried to ignore or deny this reality, and act in spite of it. There were bound to be excesses in this act of denial. But it was not the “excesses,” which made the mobilization of various social forces against the rebels possible; the very fact that they had started questioning the heritage was enough to scare the crows. The interrogation of the 18/30

nationalist consensus was taken as an act of extremism. The heritage-assessing project in this nation could not, therefore, be like the May 4 Movement in China. Thus, sporadic ventures like critiquing the syllabus of social sciences or questioning the relevance of science and technology, which pleaded to being value free became even more frightening. In the eyes of the nation, the students and youth had gone fundamentally against the godfathers of liberalism—they were now the iconoclasts. Gandhi, Subhas Bose, Tagore, none was spared—their statues were demolished, their pictures destroyed. Whoever could be called “somebody” in Bengal’s cultural heritage was asked, posthumously, to explain before the tribune of revolution his attitude toward the masses, his record in protesting against colonial and feudal exploitation, and his act of solidarity with the struggles of the oppressed. The reactionaries and imposters took fright, and the liberal middle class, so strong in the body fabric of Bengal, were scandalized at this outrage. No one, at that time, defended the anti-culture attitude of the revolutionaries for that was indefensible. However, in tracing the biography of the nation we can pause and ponder a little. Thirty years have passed, war cries have ceased, and the insurgents have departed the scene. Does not the soul of this nation find any rationale in their moods and sentiments now? Does it not agree at certain unguarded moments that their attitude of “Red republicanism,” to quote a phrase of the late Professor Sushobhan Sarkar had something to commend, that history could be looked at in a different way, that the history of the genteel classes was not the history of the subalterns? 36 In fact, student and youth movements of the late 1960s left a deep and indelible imprint upon intellectuals. Struggles led to studies. One eminent social historian of Bengal revised his earlier adulatory opinion of the Renaissance.37 Others started finding out the history of the oppressed. Biographies became critical. The revolutionary-anarchist attitude of the rebels resurrected all that was progressive in culture, which the ruling class had sought to ignore or to silence. The intellectuals of course fared very badly in those days. They ran helter-skelter as their ivory tower was being shattered. They said they could not support the excesses and, therefore, they could do nothing to stop the cold-blooded murder of unarmed youths or the suppression of liberties—they had no means of preventing Calcutta from being turned into a huge concentration camp. Obviously, what prevented them was fear, dishonesty, and compromise, not the “radical excesses” of the youth. The nemesis of liberal intellectualism was not brought about by nihilist youths and students; ironically it was brought about by intellectuals themselves, stricken by the terror of the state. Only a few writers, singers, dramatists, and actors passed the ordeal with honor. They behaved in the public political space exactly in the manner in which C. Wright Mills had characterized the behavior of the middle groups: Since they have no public position, their private positions as individuals determine in what direction each of them goes; but as individuals, they do not know where to go, so they now waver. They may be politically irritable, but they have no political passion. 19/30

They are a chorus…. In [the] shorter run, they will follow the panicky ways of prestige; in the longer run, they will follow the ways of power, for in the end, prestige is determined by power.38 Studies of Indian nationalism have not always shown adequate sensitivity to the regional or global milieu in which this nationalism has developed. The supposedly radical project of retrieving the Indian nation from a global meta-historical discourse39 has not always been so radical for such a project has clearly ignored, in the end, the wider perspective in which the national became radical and the revolutionists received their impetus. As opposed to the current fashion of cultural studies which shuts out the presence of any wider phenomenon in the making of a progressive cultural consciousness, it will be wiser to look back at the broader perspective that influenced and shaped the experiences of the rebels. Indeed, how the metropolitan student and youth movements took such a revolutionary turn from the mid-sixties onwards cannot be understood fully without reference to the international perspective prevailing at that time. This was the time of the rise of the New Left throughout the world. The Vietnam liberation struggle had become the symbol of revolutionary heroism around the globe and even if the Soviet Union had fallen from the high pedestal of revolutionary inspiration, China seemed to have filled in the gap. Millions of marching and singing Red Guards on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai sent waves throughout the world. Campus revolts and sit-in demonstrations in innumerable educational institutions were a new feature—there were student rallies in Berlin, Stuttgart, Rome, Milan, London, Bangkok, and Paris. Angry youths tore up draft cards for the US Army; civil rights movement gathered a new momentum with the assassination of Martin Luther King and widespread “black rebellions” in the form of ghetto uprisings shook America. Above all, students in Paris created a revolutionary situation in which workers, white-collar employees and farmers, joined the students and the fate of France hung in balance for days, when a single call from the premier left party would have set the whole country ablaze.40 It was this international inspiration, which added a lofty character to the student movement here. If the strongly internationalist character of this movement seemed a departure from the earlier ones, it was not accidental. First, the root of this departure lay in the past. Bengal students, being pronouncedly under a left and communist influence, had responded frequently to anti-imperialist calls in the past. Calcutta had witnessed student demonstrations in support of Vietnam in as back as 1945—it was Calcutta where, in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, some liberals had toasted the victory of the French Revolution of 1830. The Bolshevik Revolution stirred the minds of Bengal youth. The Anti-Fascist League became active in the city in 1935. Thus, it was not surprising that some of the biggest student demonstrations in Calcutta in the late sixties, comprising several thousand students, were on international issues: showing black flags to the visiting World Bank President, McNamara, in 1968; a massive student rally celebrating Tet offensive in Vietnam, also in 1968; hailing student uprisings in France and Germany in 1967 and 1968; and commemorating May Day in 1969. Second, the whole world was in a revolutionary crisis as the decade drew to a 20/30

close. The world capitalist economy was in the doldrums; severe recession hit the West; the United States attacked Cambodia, thus, extending the frontiers of war; and the Suez War of 1967 and 1973 started the oil crisis and provided a shot in the arm to the Palestinian struggle. In 1971, the mutiny of the Sinhalese youth broke out under the leadership of Janata Vimukti Perumana. Around 1970–1971 the erstwhile East Pakistani youth challenged the military regime. Finally, we know of the profoundly democratic experiment in Chile under the socialist Salvador Allende. And finally, finally it was also the decade of Fanon and Guevara. The nation here was no exception. The revolutionary crisis was fast maturing here. Working-class strikes, peasant revolts, and the breakup of the hegemony of the ruling party in 1967 were all symptoms of the fact that the nation was fast approaching the cataclysmic hour. When the time came, all sections of society except the peasantry and the youth failed. Since no one else was ready to march to the battleground, the students and the youth went forward. They fought almost single-handedly, and with no assistance forthcoming from other social classes, they perished. This was the universal fate of student movements. Even then, one interesting point remains: why did bourgeois nationalism fail to capture the imagination of radical students and youth of those days? In the United States, students said “no” to American patriotism, while in France they refused to line up for the Gaullist “vision” of French glory. In the case of Bengal we have to go back a little. In India, the bourgeoisie and the elites had led the movement of nationalism for several decades and had come to power on the crest of overwhelming national popularity. Nationalism was the chief ideological weapon with which the ruling class had asked their countrymen for almost 25 years after independence, to strive for country’s development, accept poverty and austerity as the price of development, in the name of national defense agree to the rising military expenditure and not be cynical or lose faith in leaders in guiding the nation ahead. But like any other much used weapon, this means of rousing national sentiment to ensure loyalty to the rule was also wearing thin. As we have recounted at the beginning of this chapter, there was a severe economic crisis in the closing years of the fifties, and the Third Five Year Plan was virtually abandoned. Widespread food riots broke out in several parts of the country. The community development project was almost forsaken. Ties with the United States were strengthened and PL 480 aid started flowing in. Border clashes with China climaxed to a full-scale war in 1962. Though national sentiment was roused to a frenzy in 1961– 1963, it was not enough to halt the tide of radicalism. There was severe inflation, and food riots along with successive droughts (in 1964, 1965, and 1966) compelled the country to swallow its national honor when the rupee had to be devalued in 1966. The Indo-Pak War of 1965 could not stop the elemental erosion of nationalist loyalty to the rulers. So, when in the late fifties, the revolutionaries, riding the wave of internationalism, decried nationalistic feelings, it seemed a logical and natural outcome of past history. But within a short time they were to realize that they had grossly

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underestimated the strength of nationalism: the middle class of Bengal, which had earlier looked toward them with admiration, support, and indulgence, went over to the other side of the fence with the outbreak of Bangladesh War in 1971. One thing is certain—a combination of the three elements I have discussed here, namely, violence, iconoclasm and internationalist fervor, led students and youths to march toward the battle for a social revolution. In that sense, they, and not the commentators, gave birth to the notion of “student power.” It meant that this fight was going to be cleansing, but lonely, and with ethicality being the sole virtue, the movement could not be but a movement-unto-itself. Ironically, the chief marker of such ethicality was that student and youth revolutionaries themselves never spoke in support of such a concept. In fact, they loathed the notion of being particularly concerned with the problems of students and youths or with the economic problems of the youth alone. They disdained the idea of being “economic” in that sense. They were going to cleanse the nation. Yet, it is interesting to see how the phenomenon of student centrality at a certain moment in the life of a nation appeared to social observers as “student power.” C. Wright Mills noted in the early sixties: In Turkey, after students riots, a military junta takes over the state, of late run by communist container Menders. In South Korea, too, students and others knock over the corrupt American-puppet regime of Syngman Rhee. In Cuba, a genuinely left-wing revolution begins full scale economic reorganization without the domination of U.S. corporations. Average age of its leaders about 30 and certainly a revolution without any labour as agency…. And even in our own pleasant South land, negro and white students are—but let us keep that quiet: it really is disgraceful.41 One American youth movement leader said: Previous revolutions aimed at the seizure of the state’s highest authority, followed by the takeover of the means of production. The Youth International Revolution will begin with mass breakdown of authority, mass rebellion, total anarchy in every institution of the Western world. Tribes of longhairs, blacks, armed women, workers, peasants and students will take over.42 The world capitalist crisis, in particular the crisis in India in the late sixties, hit the middle classes in an unprecedented way. Imperialism had not yet started ancillarization on a large scale, and new technologies and automation were being just introduced, which hit the middle class, not yet accustomed to the mass misery of capitalism. Aid from rich countries was still only a trickle. The liberal intellectual world was drawing to a close, with its giants like Bertrand Russell or Jean Paul Sartre castigating it openly. The workers fighting for generations against capital were not surprised at the crisis; moreover, their parties having accepted capitalist status quo as inevitable took it in their stride, but the middle class felt betrayed and resented its increasing proletarianization. This, in part, explains the worldwide reaction of the petty bourgeoisie against the horrors and crises of global capitalism. Students and youth became most rebellious and nonconformist in such milieu as did the most advanced section of middle classes. 22/30

Global capitalism learnt from this outburst. It started paying more attention, both nationally and internationally, to the task of tagging the petty bourgeoisie to its order. It did this by developing the tertiary sector, by increasing “social welfarism,” by allowing what one may call “a long rope” toward nonconformism, in order to corrupt the intelligentsia, and, finally, by engaging in a wide restructuration of state and the polity.

Radical Paradoxes We can now see the contradictions inherent in the situation of the sixties, the deep contradictions in these attempts at revolutions, agrarian and urban, which overwhelmed the young revolutionaries. Indeed, each revolutionary situation faces a number of critical dilemmas on the successful solution of which the fruition of a revolutionary effort depends. Some of the dilemmas exist as part of the situation itself, which opens up several possibilities; others, however, remain within the minds of the revolutionaries who find the present, as they confront it, not merely as a “presence” but also as history. It is in this sense that we shall be speaking of “radical paradoxes” here,43 paradoxes in the life of a nation. We have already spoken of the contradictions which the rebels faced. We can now see these contradictions in their dense form in the prism of an eternally inadequate nation. The workers had failed to rise up to the demands of the crisis of the sixties which implied nothing short of an end to the ancien regime. The received tradition of trade unionism and politics was unequal to that. The struggles of the peasantry against the old semi-feudal order transforming into a kulak economy with the onset of the green revolution needed some push from the outside for a coherent organizational shape, which in this case was not performed by any political party or urban class. The students and the youth tried to fill this vacuum. Clearly, the nation in the sixties was waiting for such a force. The young rebels tried to force the slow moving wheels of history and they failed. The situation demanded radical politics, but the radical parties refused to venture into uncharted territory. It was, thus, a revolution without a revolutionary general, a war without a commander. Then again, as the students developed links and connections with extremist politics, as well as identified with it, they lost their distinctive character. The difference between a party and a mass tribune, between politics and ethics, and between the old and the new was obliterated. When revolution was knocking at the door, everyone was a revolutionary; so why make an academic distinction then? Thus ran the thoughts of the young rebels. Each unit was both a political and a striking unit. If guns now commanded politics, the revolutionaries thought, had not former politics failed precisely because of the lack of guns? The major dilemma of the activists was whether they should become revolutionaries shedding their particular character or whether they should remain students and youth. By identifying with other classes, they lost their own identity. This was possibly the New Left of India, which replaced communist programs, strategies and organizational forms 23/30

by a faith in utopia, a cult of violent action, away from organizational discipline. Clearly, the old world offered nothing of hope to the revolutionaries. The entire decade of the fifties had contributed nothing substantially toward challenging the hegemony of the ruling class. The old leftist style of organization had created bureaucratism and had stifled initiative from below. The same set of leaders continued for years. With a dead mind-set and inflexible and unimaginative politics, there was no hope of anything new. The sixties were, thus, a reaction to the stifling and drab fifties. But the revolutionaries of the sixties themselves were the product of this old tradition—the consummation of a national, liberal, and radical heritage. They were much too burdened with the imprint of the past to think and act afresh. Thus, they repeated in a sense some earlier messianic experiences of the nation, particularly the terrorist activities of the radical nationalists of the early decades of this century, the revolutionism in the cities immediately following independence, and the same impatience with ideological and political dissent that has marked the Indian Left throughout this century. Yet, there were other factors also in what I am calling now the “radical paradoxes” besides the dilemmas of the rebels. In order to arrive at that larger theme we have to shift our attention from the activism of the students and the youth of the sixties to the strain of ethicality inherent in the larger movement—the theme of a moral critique of the nation, of the conditions of postcoloniality, of an agenda of nation-building on the “secure” foundations of an ancien regime. For it was in the impossibility of such a sustainable moral critique that the paradoxes lay. On May 24, 1967, peasants of Naxalbari had raided jotedars’ houses, had attacked a police party resulting in the death of a police officer, and had shouted slogans in defiance of the state. For the first time since independence, the peasants had declared that land problems could not be solved without attacking the state. On May 25, the police retaliated, killing women and children. Thereafter, paramilitary forces had been rushed to that tiny area and, within two months, Naxalbari had been silenced. But the “spring thunder,” though short-lived, marked one of the most remarkable attempts at rebellion in the life of the nation. The encounter had been clearly unequal: bows, arrows, and spears against guns; amorphous masses against organized police and paramilitary detachments; slogans against well-honed counter-insurgency strategies of the state. Yet, history springs its own surprises. Srikakulam, Debra-Gopiballavpur, Birbhum, Bhojpur, and many more areas later witnessed much more intense and persistent armed peasant struggles. The earlier movements and struggles of Tebhaga and Telengana, or even the Food Movement of 1966, had been characterized by greater participation of rural and urban masses. Nevertheless, the “spring thunder” has remained unique. The reason? The radical writings of the sixties like Kanu Sanyal’s Report on Terai Peasant Movement (1978) or Charu Majumdar’s Eight Writings and subsequent articles published in Deshabrati and Liberation; T. Nagi Reddy’s critique of Indian economy and society, documents of other peasant movements; and even Beijing Radio’s “Spring Thunder over India” can be understood less as components of an anthology on 24/30

radicalism (the weekly Frontier brought out one) than as steps in an argument, an interrogation, or a critique—in short as an encounter. At this point ideology no longer remains merely a coherent body of thoughts and principles but becomes the most intimate and immediate experience. Thus, beyond the charters, proclamations, photographs, and reports in the media, Naxalbari focused on inertia, drought, near famine conditions, industrial struggles, and unemployment, and on the loss of an ideal world of nationalism. Criticism suddenly and literally turned into a weapon. Tebhaga and Telengana had been larger movements but, as a criticism of the reality, they had not been ideological enough. By becoming a real criticism Naxalbari developed into a supremely successful ideology against the consensus of the nation. Some have sought to explain this enigma in terms of a difference between literate and an existential ideology, the former devoting itself to scriptures, texts, and systematization, and the latter to the stark immediacy of existence. But no academic hair-splitting is necessary to establish that Naxalbari could not have been what it is today if, from the outset, it had not been intensely ideological, if it had not displayed the quality of a lived critical existence—an existence that challenged an equally lived but reified social life of the nation, if it had not questioned the relations between the state and the citizens, party and the masses, movement and the organization, and nation and the people. An Indian critical theory emerged from the event and gave birth to a New Left in India which still lives by the sword. In all these ways, Naxalbari generated paradoxes. Without pioneering a culture, it was in many ways a counter-culture movement. It repeatedly tried to draw legitimacy from Marxist orthodoxy, and yet the whole enterprise was unorthodox. It stressed the solidity and care of a terrorist organization, and then lived through the triumph of the movement over the organization; it emphasized the importance of class experience, class struggle, and a strict class ethos often going beyond the popular and the populist and then it took on itself the task of representing the entire people; it poured scorn over bourgeois humanism, which nevertheless formed the core of its appeal to the nation. The complexities of its doctrines and the solidity of its organization and programs were to be quickly submerged under the surging passion to revolt on humanist grounds. The revolutionaries sustained themselves by denigrating the reality, which often included their own person and affirming the nobility of the soul. Little wonder then that this event—the Naxalbari—has been possibly the most powerful moral critique of the nation’s ills. Or certainly one of the most. We have witnessed other criticisms too— Gandhian, neo-Gandhian, environmentalist and Dalit. Critiques.44 The spectrum ranges from Gandhi, Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Monohar Lohia and B. R. Ambedkar to Sundarlal Bahuguna. They were strong personalities and the legitimacy of their criticism stemmed from their role in the life of the nation. But, in the case of the Naxalbari movement, the moral criticism was epitomized in an event and its aftermath. By extending and accentuating the political, Naxalbari became ethical—by stressing the moral, it ushered in a new kind of politics. Naxalbari showed how the postmodernity of the event and its impact can tellingly confront the modernity of bourgeois state power. As I have repeatedly mentioned in the course of this chapter, many of the original 25/30

radical formulations were wrong or at least do not apply to the situation today. Rural India has changed vastly, so have patterns of struggle. Newer forces have appeared. The strength of the ruling classes and the state has been renewed and has become more secure than what it was in mid-sixties. The market ideology has come back with strength and has won over large sections of the middle classes. But the innovative approach to politics and the insurrectionist method continue to resonate. In fact, with the New Right on the rise throughout the world since the sixties, and particularly with the restoration of 1989, the relevance of a New Left in India which argues for a morality in people’s politics and in the life of the nation and fights the ethos of money and market which guides the New Right, has increased. The politics of going beyond official politics has been the event’s abiding contribution to the Indian revolution. As we know, the missionary spirit of the revolutionaries was not enough to effect the restructuration that they wanted. But the revolts signaled the occasion that the nation had to purge itself of dangerous tendencies; with some irony it can be said that they helped in the restructuration of the state, and thus became the markers of a postcolonial time when the reconciliation of the nation with the state was finally effected. The promises of revolution were to end in a passive revolution, in the promise of a nation to achieve completeness, perhaps through the restoration of a national consensus. This is an aspect of the passive revolution in India which has not received due attention from historians of nationhood or from political scientists. Notes and References 1. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (Reprint, New Delhi: Viking, 1995), p. 145. 2. On the linguistic reorganization of states, see Krishna Mukherji, Reorganization of Indian States (Mumbai: Popular Book Depot, 1995); Paul Wallace (New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 1985); and Robert J. King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 3. For a general survey of that time, see Francine R. Frankel, India’s Political Economy 1947–77: The Gradual Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978). 4. E. Stokes, Peasants and the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 5. Thus, Rabindra Ray in his The Naxalites and Their Ideology (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988) for all his attempts at finding out the reason behind the moral appeal of the Naxalites, does not bring into discussion the question of the nation. But it was precisely the interrogation of the basis of the nation that was at the root of their moral appeal. 6. Even the justly famous chronicle of the revolt(s) in the 1960s, Sumanta Banerjee’s In the Wake of Naxalbari (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1980) does not specifically address the dialectical role of the middle classes in the radical interrogation of the nationalist consensus. 26/30

7. On the 1939 Gaya Session of AIKS, see M. A. Rasul, A History of the All India Kisan Sabha (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1974). The Gaya Session was the last significant united session of the AIKS before the split between the communists and others. Its programme of demands and actions was also more significant than the deliberations of other sessions. See also in this connection the interesting discussion by Jnanabrata Bhattacharya, “An Examination of Leadership Entry in Bengal Peasant Revolts, 1937– 47,” Journal of Asian Studies, 37 (4), August, 1978. 8. To understand this, readers are advised to consult the “biographical sketch” appended to Dipankar Bhattacharya’s Peasant Movements in Bengal and Bihar (Calcutta: Rabindra Bharati University, 1992), pp. 187–211. 9. Haraprasad Shastri, Rachana Sangraha, Vol. 3 (Calcutta: Paschim Banga Rajyo Pustak Parshat, 1984); Kshitimohan Sen, Madhyayuge Bharatiya Sadhanar Dhara (Calcutta: Visva Bharati, 1965). 10. Amar Dutta, Derozio-O-Derozians (Calcutta: Manisha, 1973). 11. On this we have by now a few significant analyses. Of them, mention may be made of the following: Sekhar Bandopadhyaya, “A Peasant Caste in Protest: The Namasudras of Eastern Bengal, 1871–1945,” in Suranjan Das and Sekhar Bandopadhyaya (eds), Caste and Communal Politics in South Asia (Kolkata: K. P. Bagchi, 1993); Partha Chatterjee, “The Second Partition of Bengal,” in Ranabir Samaddar (ed.), Reflections on Partition in the East, (Kolkata and Delhi: Calcutta Research Group and Vikas Publishing, 1997), pp. 35–58; and Ranabir Samaddar, Bharater Jatiya Andolan O Jatiya Sanghatir Samasya (Kolkata: West Bengal Book Board, 1985), pp. 157–165. 12. Partha Chatterjee, “The Fruits of Macaulay’s Poison Tree” in Ashok Mitra (ed.), The Truth Unities: Essays in Tribute to Samar Sen (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1985), p. 85. 13. Raymond Lee Owens and Ashish Nandy, The New Vaishyas (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1977). 14. Pramathanath Pal, Deshaparan Shasmal (Calcutta: Central Book Agency, 1345 B.S.). 15. Sanat Kumar Basu, “Industrial Unrest and Growth of Labour Unions in Bengal, 1920–24,” Economic and Political Weekly (Special Number), November 1987; Nirban Basu, The Political Parties and the Labour Politics, 1937–47 (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1992). 16. On this, we now also have the five-volume history of the period extending up to 1953. See Atiur Rehman and Lenin Azad (eds), Bhasa Andolan–Pariprekshit O Bichar (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1995), especially volumes 1–2. Also see, Badruddin Umar, Sanskritik Sampradayikata (Dacca: Chirayata, 1964). 17. Partha Chatterjee, Bengal 1920–47: The Land Question (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi and 27/30

Co., 1984); A. R. Desai, ed, Peasant Struggles in India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1979); Asok Majumdar, Peasant Protest in Indian Politics (Delhi: NIB Publishers, 1993); and Sunil Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal, 1946–47 (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1972). 18. On the two types of mobilizations, see David E. Apter, Rethinking Development— Modernization, Dependency and Postmodern Politics (Thousand Oaks, C.A.: SAGE Publications, 1987), Part 1. 19. Majumdar, Peasant Protests in Indian Politics; Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal, 1946–47. 20. On the Netrakona Session and its impact, see M. A. Rasul, A History of the All India Kisan Sabha (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1974), pp. 115–134; Bhabani Sen, Nirbachita Rachana Sanfgraha (Calcutta: Manisha, 1974); Satyen Sen (Dhaka: Kali Kalam Prakashan, 1970); Mani Singh, Jiban Sangram (Dhaka: Chirayata Prakashan, 1983); and the Tebhaga Sangram Rajat Jayanti Smarak Grantha (Calcutta: Kalantar, 1973). 21. Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal, 1946–47, p. 19. 22. For an account of the spread of the struggle, see also Nu uh Alam Lenin (ed.), Tebhaga Sangram Challish Barsha Smarak Purti Barsha (Dhaka: Bangladesh Krishak Samity, 1988); and Satyen Sen, Gram Bangler Pathe Pathe (Dhaka: Kali Kalam Prakashan, 1970). 23. Most of the historians of Tebhaga conspicuously fail to discuss this point: see, for example, the volume, Tebhaga Sangram Rajat Jayanti Smarak Grantha (Calcutta: Kalantar, 1973). 24. This is clear from the reports of various sessions of the AIKS in the pre-War era. 25. Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal, 1946–47, Chapter 2. 26. Chatterjee, Bengal 1920–47, p. 211. 27. Resolution adopted at the Second Annual Conference of Sangrami Krishak Aikya Samity, Naxalbari, 1988. 28. On populism, see Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: Verso, 1982). 29. Resolution adopted at Naxalbari, 1988 (see note 14). The strategic domination of the middle peasantry was ideologically reflected in Chayanov’s theory of peasant economy, where the typical farm unit was taken to be a pure family farm: see also the interesting analysis by Hamza Alavi, “Peasants and Revolution,” in A. R. Desai (ed.), Rural Sociology in India (Mumbai: Oxford University Press, 1979). 28/30

30. Marx’s Eighteenth Brummaire of Louis Bonaparte is still the classic for understanding the dynamics of peasant’s representation in the making of a nation. See also, Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen—The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1979). 31. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomenon and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs cited in Meenakshi Mukherjee, “Interrogating Post-colonialism,” in Harsh Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee (eds), Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory, Text and Context (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advance Studies, 1996). 32. In spite of many other writings on this, Sumanta Banerjee’s In The Wake of Naxalbari is still the classic in terms of retrieving the experiences. 33. Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari, pp. 64–66. 34. Ibid., p. 66. 35. In the prison letters, George Jackson repeatedly uses the phrase “nice fascists.” See Soledad Brothers—The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Foreword by Jonathan Jackson Jr. (New York: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1994). 36. Amit Sen, Notes on Bengali Renaissance (Calcutta: New Age Publishers, 1973). 37. Benoy Ghosh added two epilogues to his Banglar Nabajagriti, third edition (Calcutta: Rupa, 1976). 38. C. Wright Mills, The White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. xv. 39. That is the argument, for example, of Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History—Who Speaks for Indian Pasts?” Representation, 37, Winter, 1992, pp. 1–26. 40. Eric Hobsbawm provides an intense discussion of the moment in his Revolutionaries—Contemporary Essays (New York: New American Library, 1975); for a portrayal of the time see Gabriet and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism—The Left Wing Alternative (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). 41. Mills cited in Peter Clecak, Radical Paradoxes: Dilemnas of the American Left, 1945–1970 (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1973), pp. 53–54. 42. Clecak, Radical Paradoxes, p. 259. 43. I borrow the title of Peter Clecak’s book on the 1960s: Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left, 1945–70 (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1973). 44. For a succinct view of such critiques in a comparative perspective, see Rajni Kothari’s “Rise of Dalits and the Renewed Debate on Caste,” in Partha Chatterjee (ed.), State and Politics in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 29/30

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The Nation Form 5 The Dynamics of Passive Revolution

The Lost Decade of Bihar Deliberations on passive revolution bring in references to Antonio Gramsci. But in the usual discussions on passive revolution one of the angles he had in mind when he enunciated the idea is not recalled. He put it in this way: Is it possible to write a history of Europe in the nineteenth century without an organic treatment of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars? And is it possible to write a history of Italy in modern times without the struggles of Risorgimento? In other words: is it fortuitous, or is it for a tendentious motive, that Croce begins his narratives from 1815 and 1871? That is, that he excludes the moments of struggle; the moment in which conflicting forces are formed…. The ideological hypotheses could be presented in the following terms: that there is a passive revolution involved in the fact that-through the legislative intervention of the state, and by means of the corporative organization–relatively far-reaching modifications are being introduced into the country’s economic structure … it is capable of creating and indeed does create a period of expectation and hope, especially in certain social groups such as the great mass of urban and rural petit bourgeois.1 (Emphasis added) By the time we have discussed the decade of seventies in Bihar and its significance in the life of the nation, we shall realize why it is necessary to remember the particular angle that Gramsci had in introducing the idea of passive revolution. The defeat of the revolts in the sixties showed that the nation had reached a consensus. That nationalist consensus was against radical change, and it reinforced the alliance against radicalism. Since this signified an irreducible historical experience, we have looked into the history of how a nationalist consensus held sway against attempts for radical change, and forced defeat on the insurgent sections of the nation. Yet, this does not complete our task. If this is the story of passive revolution, then, for once, and against the current grain of writing, we must look into the dynamics of passivity built in the situation. To delineate this, Bihar seems to me to be the most appropriate example of such a historical experience in the life of this nation. To the liberals, sarkari (government officials) people and the educated gentry outside, Bihar is a lost case, a law unto itself. The well-meaning administrators in New Delhi find that Nehruvian socialism is ineffective in Bihar, the liberals from the Sarvodaya school to the socialist variety find to their dismay that their idea of lokniti or people’s 1/31

politics is more often than not absorbed or incorporated in rajniti or state politics, and their strategy of sangharsh (struggle) totally distorted in the incomprehensible chiaroscuro of Bihar’s caste–class politics. Even the gentlemen communists dare not dream of building up an on-the-whole peaceful mass movement and of capturing Patna in the way they have done it in West Bengal. Thus, Bihar politics proceeds in its own way, according to its own rules. Though it is the last outpost of the so-called Hindi heartland and tied securely to the overall fortunes of this vast agglomerate, its distinctiveness here too lies in its incomprehensibility. It shows potential for social change, dynamism frequently expressed through various outbursts, yet the potential somehow fails to materialize. Yet, there was a decade in Bihar’s recent history, which could have realized that potential, and erased the inscrutability and stigma that Bihar has carried in India’s liberal polity. The seventies was the decade. A brief discussion of the political mobilizations in Bihar in the seventies will show that there was a chance, created amidst the events, of Bihar overcoming the stereotype—the threshold of “mobile immobility”—and realizing potential. However, the decade was lost. Even now, Bihar remains destined to suffer the stigma of being a “lost case.” Bihar had achieved the dubious distinction long ago. In Uttar Pradesh (UP), despite opposition from Gandhi, the demand for the abolition of zamindari was voiced from the Congress platform, and the kisan (farmer) movement and national movement were closely interlinked. Even in the mid-twenties, two separate tenancy laws for Agra and Oudh had been enacted in response to the demands of peasant proprietors and the holders of secure and permanent tenurial rights—a process culminating in the passage of the UP Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act, piloted by Charan Singh.2 In Bengal, Congressmen had opposed measures aimed at curbing rack renting and usury and providing security of tenure. Thus, in Bengal the flag of peasant leadership remained mostly in non-Congress hands and the leadership passed in course of time from the Praja Party to the Communist Party. However, Bihar was neither here nor there. There was no Congress leadership over the kisan movement; nor, despite the presence of Swami Sahajananda Saraswati, did a viable non-Congress leadership emerge. Bihar did not have a Charan Singh, and the man who could have fit that role best, reflected Bihar’s “adrift middle class” that did not have a stake in the abolition of the zamindari and the transfer of rural proprietorship from absentee landlords to peasant proprietors. Thus, Rajendra Prasad, even when representing Bihar’s nonBrahmin leadership, continued to cling to conservative positions all along. Even when the Bihar legislature had passed a bill to abolish zamindari, he withheld his consent to the bill for quite some time after the landlords of the state approached him against the enactment. Thus, Bihar had to wait for long for the rise of a dominant class of peasant proprietors, consisting of various non-Brahmin castes and sub-castes, whose positional strength would accrue from the diminishing status and strength of the upper-caste landlords, also from the continued suppression of actual tillers of soil held in a bonded and semi-bonded state. Bihar’s middle class could not break the impasse in the way that its counterpart did in Bengal—it also did not have anyone who could enact the role played by Charan Singh in UP. This was roughly the state in which Bihar found itself at the onset of the seventies. 2/31

Bihar’s working class was brought up in a milieu where some of the acute class struggles did not relate to their immediate social environment, but as if stopped at the borders of Bengal. Alternatively, one can say that this class was too enmeshed with other social identities—for example, sub-regional or tribal identities—to exert a decisive influence over the politics of the whole of Bihar. A massive strike in Jamshedpur would not radicalize the situation in the state in the same way that a similar strike in Durgapur–Burnpur–Chittaranjan belt had done in West Bengal. Thus, Bihar’s agony was accentuated by the stunted role of the three most potent classes—the peasants, the workers, and the middle class—an agony vividly portrayed in the writings of Satinath Bhaduri. The sense of liberation felt by Bihar in 1967 and 1977 with the formation of the Samukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD) and Janata ministries, respectively, was thus not only a sense of democratic relief, but also a sense of liberation felt by the peasant proprietors. The new landed interests saw the electoral victory as one which put their representatives in power both in the state and at the center for the first time, and they went on a rampage.3 The popular victory in Bihar both in 1967 and 1977 was, thus, torn asunder by the conflicting pulls between the interests and urges of the new landed gentry and the landless. The continuing feudal influence indicated the limitations of this victory, which culminated in a “lost end” for democratic politics. However, it was not merely the presence of peasant proprietors drawing sustenance from feudal values that accounted for the lost decade; even politicians belonging to the ruling party could not utilize their enough position or the new found eminence on order to keep their party hegemony intact. For them, them, too, the decade was lost. Then when the peasant proprietors began backing opposition politics and helped the democratic movement, obviously in their own interests, this was incomprehensible to Mrs Gandhi, who agonizingly cried out that these very peasant proprietors owed their economic position to Congress policies since independence, yet were now turning against the Congress. The claim was true in Bihar as elsewhere, for all the rural development schemes of Congress governments were meant for the benefit of the peasant proprietors. It is to this “lost decade” that we propose to go back in order to analyze and examine the potentialities, the chances of crossing the threshold of despair, the inaction and frustration, and then the aborted consummation. In such a situation we can witness the clash of forces, watch the dialectic of “revolution/restoration” (so acutely analyzed by Gramsci in the case of the Italian national history)—played out with intensity. We can also see the limits to mobilization in the face of the structure of the nation, and, finally, observe the nation at its moment of flux as well as at the juncture of the victory of the passive face of change. Ironically, in such a situation we can see the limits of the agenda of passive revolution as etatisme too proved ineffective in face of the stalemate of Bihar. Let us, thus, look at the conundrum posed by Bihar’s current history.

Mobilization and the Politics of the Nation We know that political mobilization essentially implies a process of collective making 3/31

around social and political cleavages. For instance, where an entire society mobilizes, dominantly along religious or military lines, there is a need to project an “outside” enemy.4 In Bihar, the dilemma of the seventies was that political mobilization could neither base itself securely around deep social and political cleavages, nor could it successfully project an “outside” enemy against which the entire society, that is, Bihar could be mobilized. To elaborate, it is true that Bihar in the seventies witnessed great mobilizations. It is also equally true that there were deep social cleavages in the state. However, in contrast to these social cleavages, there also existed a whole range of ideological-material worlds centering around caste, nationality, sub-nationality, and the like. To be sure, the mobilization has to either run along social cleavages or else it has to be holistic rather than particularistic; thus, ensuring that these cleavages are temporarily submerged in the face of a greater cleavage projected between the entire society—in this case Bihar— and the world outside, that is the center in Delhi or rest of the nation. Owing to the fact that the ideological worlds in Bihar were both numerous and strong, the mobilizations achieved neither aim. From the time when ties with Bengal were snapped, Bihar was deprived of a powerful source of democratic influence. At the same time, it achieved very little internal democratization. Whatever was accomplished in terms of the widening of the power base, was along caste lines. In reality, the structure of power widened beyond the Brahmin–Bhumihar nonagricultural high castes to include the owner–peasant castes, that is, the rich and upper-middle peasantry. This incomplete broadening of the power structure was shrouded by the ideology of caste and parochialism. Thus, neither were social cleavages firmly anchored to political mobilization, nor was it possible to mobilize Bihar as a whole against the “outside,” where the people could think in terms of “we” and “they.” Whatever mobilization was witnessed had its social base in an aspiring landowning peasant stratum, determined to grab political power, but equally determined to keep the landless and the poor peasants under them. Indeed, to cover up these cleavages, what reigned was an amorphous ideology free of the notion of cleavages. Moreover, Bihar never completed the process of constituting itself into a nationality, a fact which becomes clear when counterposed with the political history of West Bengal. Sub-regional identities are fairly pronounced in Bihar, including the culturally rich subregions like Mithila or Bhojpur or the fairly distinct Jharkhand region (now a separate state), different in so many ways from the rest of Bihar. A stunted process of democratization ensured that castes, sub-regions and sub-nationalities would retain their own pulls and prevent Bihar from attaining the corporate spirit that other states, say West Bengal, Punjab, or Tamil Nadu, had attained. In all probability, the absence of a dominant caste was also a factor in this. It is necessary to note this connection that certain specific factors have contributed to the formation and blossoming of a nationality, such as the decline of old landlordism; the growth of an industrial commercial market; the growth of a middle class; the leadership of a dominant caste 4/31

(like the Marathas or Jats) over a region; a cultural renaissance; and political democracy. In Bihar, can we speak of a caste or caste group that dominates the area, forming the bulk of the middle class, comprising the bureaucracy, leading a cultural renaissance, and fighting for political democracy? The Kshatriyas had given birth to a new educated middle class and leaders like Rajendra Prasad. But unlike West Bengal, in Bihar, groups with landed roots prevented the society from continuing with an antifeudal agenda. They abandoned their historical mission midway and Bihar, caught in the conflicting pulls of sub-regions, sub-nationalities, sub-cultures and castes, and bereft of any hegemonic leadership of a social group, remained an anachronism amidst an expanding territory of mass democratic politics. In fact, and this is no secret, modern politics in Bihar has itself been traditionalized, much in the same way that tradition needs modern political sanction in order to survive. These twin tendencies of traditionalization of politics and the politicization of tradition that formed the backdrop of the two great mobilizations in the seventies in Bihar. Any detailed observation of the mass mobilization in Bihar in 1974–1975 will bring out certain points, the first being the issue of corruption. An administration which lives as the recipient of quasi-rent is by nature corrupt; in fact all administrations have an inherent tendency to breed corruption. But what marked the popular consciousness in Bihar was the perception about the nature of public power, the bhrashtachar perpetrated by an all-pervasive corrupt sarkar (government). Corruption symbolized the absolutely anti-popular nature of administration. The movement of 1974–1975 symbolized popular rage against a public power that considered the nation as its private property. It was not so much a political upsurge against central rule, regarding which popular attitude was still ambivalent, but more an expression of the grievances and fury against bhrashtachar (corruption) and against local despots and local pillars of power who would not allow the democratization of the structure of power and who formed the last lingering link with the old Brahmin–Sabukar raj. These groups formed the “they” vis-à-vis the “we” of the people. Corruption marked the dividing line—the poor certainly bore the brunt of corruption and had, consequently, lost faith in the legitimacy of the rule. However, any issue seeking to be the focal point of a mobilization cutting across traditional divides and even across class divides could not simply be a class issue; it had to be a broad social issue as well. Corruption was such an issue. Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) understood the nature of the theme and taking the cue from the Nav Nirman Andolan in Gujarat, transformed an anti-price rise agitation among the Bihar students and lent it a dimension which, due to its ideological amorphous character, spread across the plains of Bihar. This ideological amorphousness, at times called populism, was crucial to the structure of Bihar’s political mobilization process. Ideological amorphousness was, first and foremost, the screen behind which multiple social layers could pursue their distinctive aims and ambitions. It suited Bihar because it was consonant with the foggy caste–class social structure, yet it facilitated the attack on the local pillars of power, effectively calling into question the legitimacy of their rule. Thus, it evolved spontaneously into a call for dissolution of the legislative assembly. Finally, it could bypass the vexing problem of the inadequacy of traditional party based 5

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mobilization in Bihar,5 where conventional party politics looked more like palace intrigues and the opposition parties were yet unprepared to replace the crumbling old monolith, the Congress, hitherto held intact by the Rajput–Bhumihar combine of twoand-a-half decades or, more specifically, by Srikrishna Narain Sinha and Anugraha Narain Sinha. With their archaic rallying slogans, the Jan Sangh, the Congress-O, the SSP, and others were ineffective as vehicles of mobilization. A new situation demanded a new policy, while new forms of mass movement and mass organization were needed at the time. These parties could only, thus, gratefully accept Jayaprakash Narayan’s suggestion that in the program of mass mobilization no individual party banner or party slogan would be allowed. In short, Bihar was on the threshold of new politics. Addressing the biggest meeting in Patna in 40 years on November 18, 1974, Jayaprakash Narayan told his audience: Indiraji herself has now publicly stated that Jayaprakash Narayan should wait till the next election…. But she has committed a great mistake. She has brought elections into the arena of struggle. In this drama you the people have an important role to play. Whoever may be the candidate adopted or supported by the students’ and people’s struggle committees, you have accepted the challenge. Now it will be for you to act.6 Elaborating on the theme of a new kind of movement, it was emphasized: What are needed and JP has been emphasizing it over and over again, are permanent instruments of people’s power, forged through struggles that would not only revive the mechanism of self-correction but also ensure that it continues to function, whoever may be in power. Quite understandably, even opposition parties do not seem to be very enthusiastic about the idea…. These instruments of youth and people’s power have to work not only on the political plane but also for institutional changes all round.7 The opposition parties were enthusiastic about the non party form of mass mobilization, which suited their needs also. They bided time and with the institution of the Janata Party in power, contrary to Jayaprakash Narayan’s expectations, it was he and his mechanisms which were sidelined, not the parties. However, the point here is not that the non-party mobilization failed. Organically linked as it was to the politics of the Hindi heartland, to the project of developing an opposition and also to the political rebirth of the liberal bourgeoisie on the basis of a rising affluent owner-peasant class in the countryside and regional bourgeoisie in various parts of the country, this could not but be so. But student rebellion and “total revolution” showed some promises of helping Bihar to break out of the syndrome in which it had long lost itself. Students were the catalyst in this mobilization; being a “non-class” agency of mobilization, they made for a “non-class” issue possible to galvanize the state. Here too, old stereotypes of student organizations which basically functioned as “fronts” for various parties, broke down. New type of organizations, the Chhatra Sangharsh Samitis came up at all levels and in almost every college in Bihar. Chhatra Sangharsh Samitis led to Jan Sangharsh Samitis. Student politics tended to cover diverse issues of 6/31

life—probity in public life, food, drinking water, health care, employment, panchayati raj, and the like. In fact, mobilization made a quantum leap from politics to sangharsh, which did not merely mean a confrontation with rulers—even though that is how Indira Gandhi perceived it, but also an assertion of people’s identity for a positive cause. The Communist Party of India (CPI), until then the dominant left party in Bihar, was so trapped in political stereotypes and old grooves that it failed to notice changes in reality and missed a historic opportunity of playing the vanguard role in radicalizing Bihar through a cleansing mass movement and other innovative means. Gandhiji’s concept of sarvodaya had little of sangharsh, though during the anti-colonial movements, noncooperation had assumed the form of sangharsh. Sangharsh was a step forward from non-cooperation and soon became the essence of sarvodaya in Bihar,8 occasioning a bitter difference of opinion between Vinobha Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan on the policy the Sarvodaya Seva Sangh should adopt in Bihar. Even party politicians paying daily obeisance to Jayaprakash Narayan, were aghast at his idea that people’s candidates at the elections would be selected by constituency councils composed of representatives of the action committees. What the CPI failed to see was that, as the nonparty form of mass mobilization would gain ascendancy and sangharsh informed the ethos, the initial domination of the Jan Sangh would weaken. The role of political parties would become increasingly less important as sangharsh developed. What better tribute could be paid to it than the fact that the moment the principal bourgeois opposition party came to power, it buried the whole thing with unseemly hurry? The natural relation between “total revolution” in Bihar and the Grand Alliance of opposition parties contrary to common belief was, therefore, not so natural and conflictfree. These were two parallel developments, with strong interlinks, but not one and the same. In fact, sangharsh showed that even right-wing mass parties had strong plebeian elements in them, which required to be neutralized, utilized and mobilized in other ways—elements steeped for long in the received consensus of the nation and its culture. The CPI failed to consider the rumblings in Bihar society dialectically, while the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]) wavered. All in all, the parliamentary left in Bihar failed to seize the moment. Jayaprakash Narayan had argued earlier for small states, proportional representation, decentralization of power, and people’s committees.9 The mainstream nationalist opposition had rejected all these propositions. However, when the Congress (I) swept into power in 1980 and Jayaprakash Narayan’s fractured Janata Party and Lok Dal were found gasping, the moment of self-searching had arrived. Could people’s selfidentity assert itself with an authoritarian power structure remaining intact? The answer was known: “Total revolution” could not stop midway and still remain a total revolution. The janata sarhars, the sangharsh bahinis earlier being sidelined, the confrontation with the authoritarian power structure in Bihar society, in fact, in the country as a whole, could not be continued. As the later history of the nation in Bihar showed, the way to democratize Bihar society could have been found only through a bitter and negative lesson. The turmoil of 1973–1975 in Bihar indicated some lessons. As has been noted earlier, 7/31

the ossified society could not be meaningfully confronted merely by emphasizing “class” issues—instead, social and popular mobilizations that would pit a popular solidarity against the local and national pillars of power were crucial. It further proved that the old type of party structure with parliamentarianism and electoral arithmetic as its dominant concern could hardly be the agency of such mobilization. Political mass organizations, organizations of new type, came into existence in response to the demands of a new reality.10 This reality was new in the sense that the liberal politics reminiscent of the Nehru era could not provide avenues for self-assertion to the rising strata, groups and sub-nationalities. Land reforms, of a severely limited character, had also more or less run out of steam. Poverty and destitution had become a mass phenomenon in Bihar from the preceding decade onwards, and near-famine conditions stalked the countryside in the early seventies. Bihar’s middle class was an adrift social force incapable of leading revival of liberalism—it did not have a Charan Singh to lead an aspiring peasant class, and its Karpoori Thakur was a maverick, always short in grasping the complexities of nationalist politics. But if Bihar lacked Charan Singh, it had Jayaprakash Narayan who almost single-handedly succeeded in effecting a transformation, not merely of the old supine sarvodaya niti, but of Bihar’s politics as well through his idea of lokniti.

New Issues, New Politics In a way, the second instance in support of my argument that the seventies in Bihar presented a critical situation in the life of the nation when conflicting forces were locked in acute struggle and that the resolution could be only in the form of a passive revolution, follows from the first. This instance is also one of a new kind of mass mobilization. Although, historically this was contemporary to the first kind of mass mobilization, yet politically it flowed from the former. The leaders of the second kind of mass mobilization would probably be the first to deny this link, another irony in Bihar’s politics which also explains its relative failure. However, it is politically essential to look at the second instance in the context of all its structural and historical links with the first. I am speaking here of the massive agrarian mass mobilizations in Bihar by the radical left. Many perceptive observers have said that violence is the hallmark of mobilizations in Bihar, indeed that it is the distinctive mark of agrarian mass mobilization in the state. There is no doubt that the struggles erupting after the Janata Party’s accession to power were marked by intense violence: landlords brutally gunning down insurgent rural poor; castes and sub-castes viciously fighting each other for a share in the new found cake of power; and Dalit agricultural laborers ready to cut off the landlord’s haughty head and face the police with country guns and handmade bombs. But this violence of protest as also the counter violence was intensely political in character, and not just pathological behavior of certain social groups. Two immediate reasons can be cited for this. First, Bihar’s society was not so sharply divided into two great hostile camps that the violence of one could be successfully pitted against that of the other; second, along with the violent revolutionary protests led by agrarian revolutionaries, other forms of 8/31

violence also flared up—communal violence, inter-union violence, caste violence. It was not a simple picture of counter-revolutionary goons, policemen, and toughs killing the protesting poor, but of groups of people fighting each other under the spell of reactionary ideologies, as well as displaying the typical peasant subaltern psychology of attacking the local and immediate symbols of inequality and oppression, a mentality which keeps the fountainhead of injustice intact. Other factors too, have to be kept in mind. Not all members of the upper caste and peasant caste gentry were landed monoliths. Indeed, some were middle peasants with whom the relations of the rural poor became extremely antagonistic, particularly in central Gangetic Bihar, where social consensus collapsed. The report of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) on “Agrarian Unrest in Patna” (1981) admitted that all categories of landowners, whether they had been marginal farmers owning about two acres of land or large farmers with holdings of over 50 acres, were employers of agricultural labor. They were the usually called zamindars or samant. Though a zamindar could own above 50 acres of land, this was neither necessary nor always true. For example, in the Bikram block of Patna, no one categorized as a samant possessed more than 15 acres of land. In fact, the substantial farmers had less than 10 acres of land. Hence, violence could hardly be the catalyst in mobilization and failed to achieve a consensus among the segments of a plural society regarding the target of struggle as also the minimum agenda for the struggle. Unlike Sun-Yat-Sen’s legacy, which was absorbed by the Communist Party of China under Mao’s leadership, Jayaprakash Narayan’s legacy remained futile. It was, thus, a tale of serious political inadequacies leading to the enactment of a doom foretold, the same age-old inability of the left to correctly grasp the peasant question, particularly the relation of the peasant to the nation. More than a decade ago there was much discussion on the development of capitalism in Indian agriculture, as well as its impact on caste structure. Commentators have written how the caste structure in Bihar has undergone shift with changes in tenurial structure. Middle castes have come up in politics, but these are little more than the reflections of an upcoming rich peasantry flexing its muscle. However, as with the earlier concept of semi-feudalism, this scenario too has something wrong with it for it suggests an exaggerated notion and takes rural stratification to an unrealistic degree. True, rural immiserization and rural proletarianization are there in Bihar, probably on the increase even. But are they only due to the increasing stratification and depeasantization among the agrarian population or also because of underdevelopment on a national scale? What is the specificity of capitalism in Bihar’s agriculture—a small section of reactionary kulaks and a large impoverished rural labor force acting as the rural working class or the entire mass of peasantry being subject to the vagaries of the market, of unequal exchange, domination of cities, underdeveloped productive forces, and a corrupt bureaucracy? Who is the principal enemy of Bihar’s peasantry? The tiny section of the landed monoliths along with an amorphous phalanx of prosperous peasantry, the upper-caste bigots who have myriad links with the village population or the corrupt Patna government and, more fundamentally, the state? This was a crucial question, for it suggested an answer to the mystery of the intrinsically limited nature of revolutionary 9/31

peasant mobilization in Bihar. A close look at the charter of demands by the Kisan Sabha reveals the limitations. There is mention of issues like the implementation of land reforms, of laws regarding sharecrop-ping, and the Minimum Wages Act and demands for jobs for the jobless and freedom from exploitation by imperialist capital, but there are very few demands of interest to the middle peasantry. There certainly were demands for writing off debts of farmers owning up to 15 acres of irrigated land or 25 acres of unirrigated land, as well as for an adequate supply of agricultural inputs and a reduction in the prices thereof, but nowhere in that charter of the demands of the Sabha does one get an indication of the importance of those vital demands of the mass of owner–peasantry against the state, which continued to fire the imagination of the peasants throughout the late seventies and the eighties along the length and breadth of the country. The rural poor was certainly mobilized, but the civil society in Bihar remained beyond the reach of Bihar rebels. In short, the crucial position of the middle peasantry in Bihar and the issue of owner–peasants remained beyond the political agenda of the agrarian revolutionaries.11 Thus, Naxalism in the Plains of Bihar 12 and the saga of the Flaming Fields 13 had the tragic element of a foretold doom. It is, however, true that these mobilizations and struggles created the climate and made possible a larger campaign for broad democratization of Bihar society and polity, which started taking shape in the next decade in several forms. More importantly, it was now impossible to reimpose the older moral economy that had sanctioned past history, customary claims, caste inequity and religious immobilization. The customary notions of legality and legitimacy took a severe beating. But this also shows that mere radicalization of demands was not enough to defeat the reactionary stranglehold—the “legitimacy” of the demands required to be demonstrated in as much as their “moral correctness” would have to be shown, and the presence of a total “civil sanction” behind them had to be ensured. Had the continuity between Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement and the subsequent agrarian struggles been established, much of the dilemma could have been solved. In spite of so many obvious contradictions between the two, this has to be borne in mind. But it raises another politically interesting query. Does not the lost decade of Bihar show that the “codes of politics” in the subaltern domain are not merely “communal” or “communitarian,” but also “popular” in the sense that they entail so many interlinks, interconnections and concatenations with other segments in a plural society? Does it not indeed prove that there are not two watertight codes, that in fact the presence of one domain is justified by the degree of its links with the “other”? Does not the experiences of the seventies in Bihar show that its struggles failed precisely because it refused or faltered in connecting the two? The linkages between different elements of popular consciousness still remain an unexplored area in the historiography of revolution in Bihar.14 This view may raise serious objections. Critics will have a valid point in arguing that the two instances of mass mobilization (the student movement or the navnirman andolan and the agrarian struggles by the rebels) were entirely different in nature and political 10/31

import, and that there were serious contradictions between the two. Thus, it may be argued that locating the failure of the seventies in Bihar in the failure to connect the two, actually amounts to overlooking these contradictions and artificially wishing for a communion which real1y had not permitted. It is true that Jayaprakash Narayan was ambivalent to the revolutionary agrarian movement of his time. The bloody killings of the Dalits embarrassed him. While fighting the autocratic rule of Indira Gandhi, he feebly protested against state atrocities and the slaughter of insurgent Dalits by private armies of landlords. The scions of the Rashtriya Sawamsevak Sangh (RSS) whom he trusted to assist his movement often helped the armed training centers of upper-caste landlords. In fact, sarvodaya’s initial role was to stem the tide of agrarian conflict that had first manifested itself at Musheiri in Muzaffarpur in 1968. After a prolonged exile from politics, Jayaprakash had assumed the role of a messiah and an ideologue, but continuous agrarian disturbances made his position uneasy. Jayaprakash Narayan in fact deliberately ignored the Bhojpur killings for a while, almost as if these were not taking place. Though, he tried, from 1974 onwards, to absorb agrarian revolutionism in his perspective of total revolution, he failed. Probably the imposition of the Emergency saved him from embarrassment and failure. Possibly he thought that case for agrarian democracy could remain suspended as Indira tanashahi became a greater threat. He sent sarvodaya workers and members of sangharsh bahinis to disturbed areas. But instead of pacifying the rebels, the nonviolent preachers often got proselytized. The Sahar Report, jottings from the field trips, of these activists, suggested a package solution that was essentially idealist and carried a mixture of sarvodaya and Lohia’s socialism. The tired old man was by now unable to effect the bridge. My point, however, is different. Nobody expects that Jayaprakash Narayan could have effected the bridge. But the tragedy of the seventies was precisely that—the absence of any historical force and personality to achieve the bridging. The union of petty bourgeois liberalism and agrarian democracy could have negated the one-sidedness of each of the two forces. However, political mobilization remained tied to received social alignments. Its structure proved to be the hindrance in the way of a total mobilization of Bihar’s civil society.

Nation, Nationality and Limits to Democracy It is necessary to recall in this context that the development of nationality in Bihar could not gain from the abrogation of Bangla-Bihar sanjuktikaran prastab, not a little due to the left agitation in Bengal against it, for it thereby lost a vital form of democratic sustenance which it had had in the past. Further, it could not mature due to the nonresolution of the sub-regional question. A democratization of Bihar society also implied decentralization of its polity. Here too, the two great mobilizations failed to link up and give a lead. Jayaprakash Narayan was perhaps hinting toward such a process when he suggested smaller administrative units, but the Janata combine did not allow such possibilities to mature. All these were “new issues” in the seventies and demanded 15

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a new form of articulation, a new form of politics, in fact, a, whole new politics.15 Besides the traditional demands connected to land, the issues thrown up in the seventies related to the themes of dignity of the Dalits, the displacement of large numbers of people due to mining, irrigation and other construction projects, women’s rights, the autonomy of the region of Jharkhand, and a clean and accountable administration. Many of these issues had figured before, but the sharpness of their articulation was a product of the time. Thus, the seventies produced not the parliamentary, liberal politics of the fifties and sixties, but the politics of environmental opposition that drew sustenance from the subterranean, subaltern, and the nonformal, in short, from the popular domain of politics. However, apart from the two great mobilizations where new politics achieved new articulation at least in essentials, the forms of articulation in general remained old. Even radical political activists who had spontaneously given birth to new forms of organizations such as the sangharsh bahinis and platforms like the Indian People’s Front (IPF), the Majdur Kisan Sangharsh Samiti (MKSS), or the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), could not draw lessons from their own work and spread the practice of new forms of politics to other areas or sections of society. One glaring example was the relative lack of importance accorded to women’s issues by the agrarian revolutionaries, though in Bihar and certainly in central Bihar, in the districts of Gaya, Jehanabad, Aurangabad, Bhojpur, Rohtas, and Palamau, women came out repeatedly in large numbers in the agrarian struggles, specifically against sexual oppression. Belchi, Pipra, Parasbigha, Kansara, Daramia, Gaini, Chotki Sethani, Dalelchak, Babhora, and Damua Khagiu were instances not just of the murder of Dalits, but specifically of Dalit women. Yet, strangely, while retaliation against sexual oppression became fierce, it never expanded into an issue of women’s dignity and rights to occupy a prime place in the agenda of the democratization. The nation in Bihar waited seemingly without end for the political mass organizations to break the political and social stereotypes. The seventies probably laid the groundwork for the new politics to emerge. Both Lohiaite socialism as well as official communist politics which had been class bound while remaining insensitive to caste realities met their failure in those turbulent years. The social forces which had earlier prevented Swami Sahajananda Saraswati from becoming the liberator of the Bihar peasantry, now again proved to be a strong hindrance in the path of Lohiaite socialism or of official left politics. How to combine the popular with the political became the biggest question in those days. However, one snag remains in this retrospective: Did Bihar show the promise, even if it failed, of crossing the threshold of “mobile immobility” in the seventies? Or, did it show the limits of crossing the threshold? In other words, given the abruptness and the stunted character of the formation of nationality in Bihar, was it really capable of effecting a radical orientation of democracy and nationality? For that, would it not have to split up and/or link itself to some vital source of sustenance? In other words, then Bihar would not have remained the Bihar of today any more. The deep limitations of linguistic state formation in India on a bourgeois–liberal basis was seriously exposed in all these. 12/31

More fundamentally, however, Bihar in the seventies showed one face of the passive revolution in India, namely, the blocked dialectic of revolution and restoration, and of the evolution of the national-popular and the continuing claim of the “historic Right” over the nation. It is to this theme that I now propose to turn in order to understand the full significance of the this experience in the life story of the Indian nation.

The Strange Readings of the Passive Revolution Therefore, the question we face is: how to read the passivity of change in the course of nationhood in India? In other words, how do we read the great changes whose passive face has been demonstrated repeatedly and ruthlessly in the experiences of the nation? In short, what is the relation between revolution and passive revolution theoretically as well as in the particular experiences of this nation? Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution has been read in a strange way by political scientists and historians of the Indian nation. An answer to this question, thus, becomes a necessity. Sudipta Kaviraj in a seminal essay on the enduring structures of class power looked at the state as a site of several dominant classes which, while trying to outmaneuver one another, entered into coalitional arrangements among themselves in order to preserve their collective domination over the nation.16 Kaviraj of course does not speak of the nation; he speaks of the country, India. Thus, in his reading of the passive revolution in India, politics becomes a structure in terms of class forces and also a history in terms of changing balances. It is, thus, a passive revolution of capital, which introduces institutional changes in order to stabilize and prolong its rule, though as Kaviraj shows, the success of such a strategy leads to an institutional failure of the political system. In this analysis, the phenomenon of “ruling bloc” is of strategic importance. After tracing out and detailing the dynamics of the ruling bloc as the mechanic of rule and the intrinsic difficulties there from, Kaviraj concludes that these difficulties are structural and hence the crisis of rule is political—it is “structural, not conjunctural [as] it arises from inside the basic laws of movement of a system, rather than externalities.”17 He ends with a terse remark: The state’s difficulties should be seen as a structural crisis…. It is not a condition of “abnormality” which could be expected to disappear with a change of leader of parties. It is coming to be a condition of stressful, violent normalcy of the late, backward, increasingly un-reformist capitalist order…. The tragic thing is that the crisis of ruling class politics plunges not only the ruling bloc, which has ruptured its protocol, into serious disorder, but the whole country, the festival of which we are celebrating. Exhaustion of the politics of the ruling bloc does not automatically prefigure a radical alternative.18 Much of this reading is beyond dispute. Yet it is an uncertain reading. What gives the strategy of ruling blocs its relative success if not a certain consensus of the nation? Experimentation (1950–1956), consolidation (1956–1964), instability (1965–1975), and 13/31

crisis (1975–1987) as discussed by Kaviraj are true, but how much sense do they make without a discussion of struggles, revolts and revolutions, marking precisely the transitions from one of these periods to another? If we keep aside the history of the nation, how much of the politics of the bloc, that is, the consensus of the nation, will be understandable? Therefore, if the crisis is structural, it is also conjunctural as the “intrinsic” was intrinsic due to the eternal vulnerability of the structure to the tensions and cleavages generating from struggles and revolts that regularly broke the nationalist consensus. In Sudipta Kaviraj’s reading, passive revolution has assimilated the revolution, and its crisis is only “from within.” The Indian unrest is a distant shadow in such a mirror. Structure in this sense cannot explain history, though it may be argued justifiably that structures do not intend to explain history. As I have tried here to show through a small period in the history of Bihar, structure by itself does not show the deep networks of exclusion, silence, marginalization, and the various forms of negotiation. The deep configurations are subtle, and they become intelligible through experiences and clashes of the moment, that is through history. It is history which enables us to understand how the structures become contingent, how their “classical lines are constantly wrenched in different directions” due to the individuality of experiences and the specificity of the engagements with the (received) nation.19 In another significant reading of the passive revolution in the country, Partha Chatterjee moves to a different direction by showing sensitivity to the conjunctural factors, as he finds that in “passive revolution” the historical shifts in the strategic relation of forces between capital, pre-capitalist dominant groups and the popular masses can be seen as a series of “contingent, conjunctural moments.”20 He also agrees that passive revolution is a “process involving a political-ideological program by which the largest possible nationalist alliance is built up against colonial power.”21 In India this meant a series of alliances between the bourgeoisie and other dominant classes and also mobilization of mass support from the subordinate classes. Chatterjee does not of course discuss in details the significance of the alliance, that is, a consensus of the nation; he only notes that this was a consensus within the “modern” sector.22 Here, though he notes that what Sudipta Kaviraj calls the “externalities” may include dissent and protest, he in fact refers to the “food crisis” of the mid-sixties, the externalities for him do not imply mainly the struggles and the political revolts against which the nationalist consensus is aimed, builds up and operates. Therefore, the result is almost the same. The politics of the national state is a politics of coalition, a politics of state induced accumulation, of the continuous effort to fit nicely the “economic” and the “extra-economic” in the agenda of development, of combining the “science and rhetoric” of planning and, finally, the imperatives of economics and legitimation. It seems that these are to be combined without the pressures from below, without the overarching presence of the struggles of the masses against the “developmental” agenda of the state, in short, without the phenomenon of revolt. In seeking to explain the theme of dominance of the national state, the theme of resistance is lost. In Chatterjee’s analysis of legitimation, there is no indication therefore that resistance is a compulsory factor in 14/31

the dynamics of passive revolution. In another nuanced work written earlier, he had spoken of nationalism as a problem in the history of political ideas, of the thematic and problematic of nationalism, and the various moments in the course of the nation—its departure, maneuver, and arrival.23 In fact, Chatterjee explicitly titled the chapter on Nehru as the “The Moment of Arrival: Nehru and the Passive Revolution.” Yet nowhere there is any evidence of the compulsion of a passive revolution, for in this nation of Chatterjee there are no masses (except as an audience for leaders, as objects of nationalist intellectual thinking), no mass struggles, no revolts, no revolutions. Therefore, nationalism remains only an intellectual problem, not a political problem; the departure, maneuver, and arrival are all intellectual projects and not political phases in the life of a nation, whose politics is still characterized by revolution/restoration, the consensus that arrives out of this blocked dialectic, and the repeated attempt to break the consensus. In the assimilative argument, in short, passive revolution is able to assimilate opposing tendencies within itself. Further, its dynamics are from within. In the argument based on the theme of dominance, passive revolution is, in its fundamentals, a technique of domination, a strategy of securing power. In both, revolution is absent from the discourse of passive revolution. The discourse of passive revolution conveniently takes off from the triumphal journey of the ruling class. As Gramsci said so caustically, Croce’s history begins not from 1789, but from 1815.24 The uprisings and struggles in the mid-forties and the revolts in Bengal in the sixties and in Bihar in the seventies are crucial for an understanding of the Indian nation because it is in their failure that the passive revolution is situated. Without revolution there is simply no passive revolution. Without this dialectic the nation cannot come into being, and the national-popular cannot attain its particular character. More fundamentally, the search for a legitimation of the nation goes on because it decides to embrace the passive form of change and welcomes a consensus in lieu of leading a life of contentious politics. Consensus produces legitimacy in as much as the legitimacy of the nation produces consensus. Passive revolution is situated in this duality.

Democratic Desire and Passive Change I have further objections to the assimilative argument, which ignores the duality on which a strategy of passive revolution is based. Since writings on passive revolution do not, in accounts of statecraft, integrate the democratic desires and resistance of the masses, it appears that the nation arrives free of the tension of duality. State induced reforms, however, are not only impelled by democratic desires, but also have to contend with the democracy that the nation has promised to base itself on. When the nation promises to democratize, in statist terms it implies that the state will liberalize. But if this is the agenda of a passive revolution, then the ever present shadow of democracy continues to pursue it. The agenda to combine liberalism and democracy becomes the core of a program of passive revolution. In short, passive revolution is not a settled strategy. There remains the permanently unsettled account of democratic desires. Never has this been clearer in the life of the postcolonial nation than when it settled recently 15/31

through a consensus for economic reforms. The question that arose in the wake of such consensus is: can the polity both liberalize and democratize? Can reforms be introduced democratically? The democratic desire is in fact desire for justice. Where does justice feature in a scenario that is torn between an agenda for passive change and the activist or the unsettling element of democracy? The problem of democracy under a neo-liberal regime and the imponderables in this simultaneous pursuit of reforms and democracy, essentially pose the question as to how the state can continue with the agenda of passive revolution, that is to say, how it can manage the task of reforming the economy and the polity while keeping democratic tendencies under control. Obviously, with the adoption of market principles, the emergence of a minimalist state does not automatically lead to the establishment or consolidation of a liberal democratic regime and eliminate, thereby, the possibilities of acute conflicts in the polity. If the polity decides to liberalize, it does so only at the expense of many rights and entitlements in short, at the expense of democracy. And what happens when a country embarks on a path of democratization? It finds its options limited. Severely restricted in terms of opportunities and avenues, political democracy cannot expand in a substantive way. Neo-liberalism as a way out of the dilemma then itself appears as a problem for democracy. I think that this point has to be pursued further in the context of the present theme. Are the imponderables in the agenda of passive revolution a matter of governing the nation? Is the issue of the non-compatibility of liberalization and democratization a question of governability? One political scientist has treated the issue as one of a “disjunction between weakening institutions and multiplying demands,” a “crisis of governability in a democratic developing country.”25 In his words: Thus a democratic developing country is well governed if its government can simultaneously sustain legitimacy, promote socioeconomic development and maintain order without coercion. The growing incapacity in India to perform these tasks is … a manifestation of a crisis of governability.26 But why is there this crisis of governability, if we look at the experiences of revolts and agitations that I have sketched out in this and the preceding chapters? Probably the answer offered would be that Indian democracy has itself contributed to the overpoliticization of Indian polity. There may be two ways to overcome the governability crisis—(a) a strengthening of party organizations; and ( b) bringing the state’s capacities in line with commitments.27 These prescriptions unfortunately do not rouse confidence —after all, the fact is that the parties once strengthened will contribute even more to an “over-politicization of the polity” and second, the state’s capacity and overextended commitments are two sides of the same thing, namely a way of governing. However, I wish to draw attention to something else arising out of this. If it is suggested that the roots of decay are in the national authority structure, we have to explain what the authority structure was intended for, whether it ever meets commitments, and why commitments appear as overextended. The state’s capacity to manage the economy is 16/31

essentially a political task and the nature of division between the state and business clearly lies within the process of political policy formulation. More important, there is no single state policy, nor is there a single entity called business. Therefore, it is difficult to say that in attempting reforms the governability crisis originates from the conflict between the rational calculations of the state and the rationale of retaining or ensuring popular support. Thus, while it may be tempting to explain the incompatibility question by a disjunction thesis, that is to say, a disjunction between capacity and expectation, authority and legitimacy, democracy and economic necessity, and existing structures and new imperatives,28 such a thesis is tautological. Resting on the issue of governability, it takes away from the specifics of the political, in this case, politics of reform and reform of politics. If governing is at the heart of politics, the point is that the mode of governing is indeed changing, now as on other occasions, for people must be governed anew, afresh, atypically, otherwise they cannot be governed. Neo-liberalism, as a way out of the crisis in governance, nowhere ends its innings with a story of success, though it reforms the polity and sometimes the economy. The governability crisis rather points to a different phenomenon—the persistent moves from below for further democratization and the limits to it set by the structures of authority, the freedom of the citizens to create new niches in a democracy and a constitutional representative system which, while defining the freedom and capacities of the citizens, allows agencies to escape the defining rules of a democracy.29 The literature on democracy has another suggestion. It relates to a redefining of democracy in its own terms instead of relating it to governing capacity. In such a suggestion, there are democracies and not “a” democracy which other democracies approximate. According to such an argument, the definition of democracy should not be confused with its stability and durability. Robert Dahl, we know, went one step further and recommended the designation “polyarchy” to underscore the intrinsic relation between democracy and the commensurate structures of authority.30 Yet, the escape route is not clear even when we shift the discussion from the terrain of governability to that of the intrinsic rules of decision-making, that is, “procedural democracy.” Joseph Schumpeter was brutally honest when he said that democracy could not mean that people would actually rule, in the obvious sense of the terms “people” and “rule.” Democracy only meant that people could have the opportunity of choosing—in the sense of accepting or refusing—the men who were to rule them.31 In other words, reforming the rules of decision-making does not take us through the closure, in as much as the emphasis on the governability crisis with its consequent suggestions does not enable us to overcome the problem of the incompatibility of democratization and the reforms, which in the present context go by the name of liberalization. There is the further argument that if the rules of the market are introduced, the arbitrariness of the state can be ended. Currency reforms, monetary reforms, trade reforms, tax reforms, and industrial reforms will liberalize both economy and society in the long run. Even if we agree to the hypothesis that there are rules of the market which, if introduced in the polity, can end the capriciousness in a democracy, we do not have an answer to the problem—the market may reform the state, but what will reform the 17/31

market, which as watchers of the current globalization scenario tell us repeatedly in the context of the currency crisis, seems unreformable today? Again, if there is not one single market but several markets, who will prioritize them? The state? But what if the state represents only one among the many? Markets may reform despite all these imponderables, but since market reforms do not automatically lead to political reforms, we cannot be assured that such reforms pave the road to more democracy. The recent history of Southeast Asia demonstrates the limits to the “reforming potential” of the economic reforms and shows the essential disjunction of reforms in politics and economics. On the other hand, we have already seen that the argument for redefining democracy in its own terms cannot take us far. We are, thus, back to the problem posed earlier: how do we connect the two agenda of democratization and liberalization? Before we proceed further, however, a detailed look on the essentialist argument of political democracy is necessary. The question here is—is there no way to effect changes in the rules of making decisions so that those who need reforms can take the decision to reform? The first problem relates to how we decide the comparative importance of reforms in different sectors and solve the ancillary issue of the needed mechanisms to ensure relative freedom of various sectors to reform. The importance of this poser should be obvious in view of the fact that reforms in our country have meant reforms that lead to gains for the big sector. Rarely are the reforms oriented toward the sectors and people who need them most. The second problem flows from the first. We have a firmly established majority principle in the rule of decision-making. But what about its social cost? I am not referring to the most apparent costs—horse trading, the cost of holding general elections frequently, corruption in polity, or weakening of political structures. I am indicating the two most important ones—(a) degradation of the principle of representation and representativeness; and (b) its relative ineffectiveness in settling those conflicts in society which are bound to arise in the wake of reforms. A majority principle is clearly inadequate, and we do not know of any democratic theory which, at the end of the day, questions the majority principle in decision-making. The problem again relates to public policy-making—the object of control and the form of control. How shall we ensure popular control of all public decisions and also the designs of these policies? Like Schumpeter, one might have argued that one should not have any expectation on this score. But fortunately we live in another age. Not only has the argument of rationality been hoisted with its own petard, but also theoretically at least no one can question any more the citizen’s competence in judging the need for reform or the policies of reform. The matter of reforms in this way forces democracy to leave the high ground of ideology and face the demand that it be rein-scribed in the mode of decision-making. It also impels us to be aware of the return of the modernization theory in various forms, the latest being the argument that there has to be economic reform before there can be any effective reform of the state, for economic reforms improve socioeconomic conditions without which the polity cannot be democratic. The final problem concerns the institutional aspect of the essentialist argument in favor of political democracy. What do we lack? An administrative system that functions? A parliament? A federal polity? 18/31

Further decentralization? A public sector? A professional army distinct from political apparatus of rule? A public press? It seems that we could not have asked for more. Yet all these seem to leave increasingly little impact on the procedural democracy that we all desire should be situated at the heart of politics, political democracy, and liberal reforms. In short, political democracy does not by itself ensure that the liberal reforms will be commensurate with democracy or that democracy will lead to necessary reforms.32 If the culture of democracy is unable to ensure that it always leads to desirable reforms, can we turn to the culture of the market and see if we can proceed by turning the question on its head. For the purposes of that inquiry, let us allow ourselves first to escape the need of defining culture and assume for a moment that “the market has a culture.” I understand that to assume the existence of a “market culture” is to dispossess culture of some of its particularities and to comprehend it in a transcendent way that tempts one to speak of the market in India as readily as that of say Ukraine or Ghana or of the culture of a Punjabi entrepreneur as readily as that of the Marwari businessman the Chettiar financier or the Sindhi shopkeeper. Speaking of market culture, we have to understand that it is not merely an issue of economic activity but that there is no single culture of the market place. There are different cultural environments in which market exchanges take place. Much of the faith in the supposed multiplier effect of the market culture is because of a long-held belief in the power of an assumed self-regulated mechanism of the market. However, till now this belief was a matter for economists to ponder and debate. But we live in a time when the contest between the two roads suddenly seems to be over. There is no third alternative before the countries, globalization and liberalization are no longer matters of choice, and the fate of nations hangs in the balance. In this milieu, the implications of a culture for the market and of the market on culture assume more importance than only scholarly interest would warrant. In short, if the country needs to reform the market, it should watch out for the prerequisites and the milieu of the reform. This needs some explanation. If the market is linked to politics, and if market reform is, thus, a political matter as well, it is relevant to see, even if briefly, the comments of social theorists on this issue. Karl Polyani thought that the program of setting up a selfregulating market mechanism on a world scale was a “utopian endeavor.” The market was always there, in almost all societies, and market activity was at times only an incidental aspect of economic life. Markets did not lead by themselves to that endeavor of establishing a regime of self regulation, which Polyani, like Max Weber thought to be of recent origin. Such self-regulation meant: Nothing must be allowed to inhibit the formation of markets, nor must incomes be permitted to be formed otherwise than through sales…. Neither price, nor supply, nor demand, must be fixed or regulated, only such policies are in order which help to ensure the self-regulation of the market by creating conditions which make the market the only organizing power in the economic sphere.33 This definition of a self-regulated economy was close to the definition offered by the

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laissez-faire doctrine which, as Polyani showed, was in any case ideal. And whenever there was effort to realize such a notion of self-regulated economy, it went against human history. C. B. Macpherson looked at the import of the phenomenon of the market in a different way. To him, the market bred possessive individualism. Liberal theory stood on possessive assumptions, but ignored the implications of the possessive attribute of an individual who had been instructed in the belief that “the individual is essentially the proprietor of his person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them.” 34 However, it is to the longue durée (long history) of Fernand Braudel that we owe our understanding that the market has specific cultural attributes which are different from “capitalism.” Capitalism, Braudel argued, was different from “market economy.” The market would live as long as it had, while capitalism, which depended on the market but was not constituted by it, might go away. In fact, Braudel found capitalism—which he regarded as an “accumulation of power,” “a form of social parasitism,” which “may or may not be inevitable”—as slowly changing. It was a “long lived structure” but, owing to its dependence on monopolies, it was alien to market exchange and could undergo change. However, markets would remain. In his words, if we can make a distinction between market economy and capitalism, we can avoid an “all or nothing” approach, which tells us that it is impossible to retain a market economy without giving freedom to monopolies or that it impossible to do away with monopolies without nationalizing everything.35 Thus, if cultural concomitants of the market are specific (irrespective of whether they lead to capitalism), then reforms imply very hard choices. We must debate thoroughly over the supposition that markets are essentially “open” or “open-ended,” that is to say, that they lead to universalism. In the light of the insights such as these, we have to appreciate also why the state cannot ignore “the culture of the market” in deliberating on reforms only at its peril; why a democratic system does not naturally lead to market reforms; why market culture, having its specificities, does not give way to universal prescriptions—in short, why there cannot be any easy synchronization of the market and the state and, more importantly, of political democracy and market reforms.36 Reforms are indeed a much more serious business. However, regarding the culture of the market, reform and the state, this is not all. If the governors and citizens of the country were as serious and public-minded as liberal theorists of democracy would have us believe, then they would meet in halls and discuss the pros and cons of reforms, read reports and books, consult references, and decide how to proceed in harmony. However, governors are not governors if they do not succumb to pressures, do not do somersaults, take half-measures, think of public pressures, and take steps to retain support. Similarly, citizens are not citizens if they do not protest, do not behave according to their stations in life, and do not condemn the governors for making a mess of their lives. One also has to note the presence of the media, other forums, and different groupings (regional, sub-regional, and local), and, finally, elections of all kinds, all of which are baying at the government, shouting over policies, supporting some measures, and cursing the rest. In such an atmosphere, contrary to what the liberal theorists would want one to accept, it is most often a committee (behind the public and the governors) which decides whether to reform, what to reform, when to reform, and how much to reform. That is how Manmohan 20/31

Singh, India’s Finance Minister in the early nineties, introduced reforms. It is a “comedy of manners.”37 Therefore, as is expected, citizens are more interested in the process of decision-making, and do not buy the fiction of nationalist consensus. They want to know, if somewhere someone has made a fast deal in the process, who then got the shares of the money. An open state deliberating on markets and reforms is a myth. And if we had argued a little while ago that the openness of the market is a myth, since markets are very much culture or milieu specific, we can conclude this line of argument by saying that reforms through democratic deliberations are also so. The icon of the “openness of markets” and of “going global,” the citizen will point out, is not the bespectacled professor of economics, but Harshad Mehta. If you say this is pure prejudice and give the citizen another chance to select a more authentic icon, our bet would be on the financiers from abroad buying up companies, football clubs and race horses. We can now see the implications of the reality of conflicts for the way we interpret the theory of passive revolution.

Public Interest, State, and Market Reforms One of my intentions in raising the question of the intrinsic tension between liberalization and democratization in the context of a program of passive revolution was to show that what is conceived as the domain of public interest or of democratic polity vis-à-vis the market and market reforms is specific, and we cannot have any sweeping universal standard so as to foreclose the democratic argument that potentially endangers a solution. Since the nation-state is supposed to represent public interest to which the market interest has to adjust itself, we should think little more deeply about whether the state, as the depository of public interest, can initiate market reforms with ease, that is with nationalist consensus. In India the state controls the public sector which is in need of reform. But what are the assumptions underlying the demand for reforms in the public sector? In fact, the country seems to have reached a consensus. Public-sector activities are inappropriate for a representative democracy, because public sector programs are carried at a level higher than they deserve—they are executed in an inappropriate manner; and they increase at a rate exceeding all other sectors, even though their productivity does not increase suitably. Thus, additional resource shift to “public activities” can result in a net decline in the nation’s total productivity. Individual welfare erodes and extensive regulations become a noose around the polity, without there being any increase in the sum of individual welfare. The representative character of the polity declines as the state begins to primarily serve a group that goes by the name “public sector,” “public activities,” and “public welfare.” The problem in this formulation begins when we counter-pose the failure of public welfare functions to market failures. Market failures invariably give rise to the cry that the state has not regulated the economy properly. How are we to judge the relative casualties of public sector failure and market failure? Then how are we to solve the issue of settling the representativeness of a polity that decides to take market considerations 21/31

as public considerations, and leaves out all other considerations? Will that polity be considered as “open?” In any case, welfare theory is normative and may fail to explain actual practices. The second problem clusters around issues of utility. Individual utilities may increase as a consequence of certain measures, induced or natural. But shall we term this as an increase of social utility? The increase of the prices of public utilities and their privatization is a case in point. Milk, water, transport, sewerage, waste disposal, fuel, primary education—all these are public utilities, but are essentially beyond measurement, because their welfare function cannot be adjudged by any measure of individual welfare. The best we can say is that if they do not represent public “goods,” they are public “bads,” that is, external diseconomies.38 In reforms, therefore, we not only acknowledge social choice, but also the welfare limits of that choice. So, we cannot just say that since in the case of the market all losses are internalized by the shrinking firm and the external market forces discipline firms that fail to absorb losses and reward those who succeed, in the case of public utilities also we can easily combine public utility with individual welfare and gain. State actions, therefore, are essentially based on an acknowledgement of limits to choice. Similarly, there are limits to the “benefits and costs” argument. In deciding whether public goods are to be made available through the public sector, a representative state has to judge whether they are “public” only in the sense of serving the collective good of a particular group, or whether they are truly “public.” Reforms introduced by the state are, therefore, clearly a public goods problem. The methods of governing through common law, statute, regulation, and public incorporation go intrinsically beyond market structures, though the word public in the phrase “public welfare” being particularly determined, there will always be a public sector undersupply of public goods. To sum up, the problem of defining “public good” is compounded by two facts: ( a) public good is defined at a particular time to the political advantage of the organized groups; and (b) in the name of authenticating the public nature of public good there is an assault, in phases, on organized groups, so that public good shrinks even further. It is difficult to see how, then, a representative state through its institutions can address such public problems as unemployment, interest rates, tax and spending limits and regulatory reforms, without cynically being private or, at least, less public. Clearly these are relegated as problems of the society, of groups, but not of the nation. One can see again, how passive revolution figures as a failed task in ushering in nationalist consensus. To explain little more: As I have said a little while ago, democracy rarely generates a pure “public” rationality that would lead to market reforms. The nation thus returns to a situation of closure, to which neo-liberalism appears as a political solution. As a global phenomenon, neo-liberalism has exhibited certain characteristics—a minimalist state; a reduced supply of public goods; encouragement of the ideology of self-ownership to the extent where every person thinks s/he can be a Ford; planned offensive against organized sectors, particularly organized labor; an increasingly emphatic discourse of national security; a massive swing among the middle classes toward what they perceive as benevolent authoritarianism; a monetarist regime; a strong redefined nationalism; 22/31

militarization; and, finally, a running down of old welfarist ideals with the promotion of the ideals of choice. Since such neo-liberal politics is not bound by any commitment toward the old liberal principles or by principles of public policies, public choice, and procedural democracy, it feels that it can break out of the closure. In the appearance of neo-liberal politics, we find the juxtaposition of two trends—what is called the Latin Americanization of politics indicating the alliance of the middle classes, at least a section of them, with the New Right, and the Atlanticization of politico-economic relations. The experiences of a first world country like the United Kingdom or of a third world country—Mexico, Brazil, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, or India—do not assure us of a success story of neo-liberal politics in preserving democracy. All nations stand in the same line in meeting this destiny. The distinguishing feature of liberal democracy is the division between the market and the state. This division is rooted in a division between the public and the private, where ownership of productive assets is a matter of the private (property) and major social decisions—such as regulation of industrial relations, minimum standards of compensation of labor, and patterns of political management to be adopted for facilitating production and exchange are matters of the public (affairs) and are, therefore, to be handled by the state, though here also, industrial owners and managers are given considerable discretion in framing their own policies, besides influencing those of the state.39 Neo-liberalism, in its quest for introducing and accentuating reforms, does away with this division of labor. The actors representing the state and business interact more closely, a feature which liberal politics would not or cannot permit, given the activities of group interests in the polity. Citizen preference and public activity are not, therefore, that important in a neo-liberal polity. For the fundamental concern behind the importation of neo-liberal politics is what to do with popular control and how to revise the division of labor between the market and a popularly controlled polity, the two major sets of practices that combine in a particular way to constitute a liberal democracy. A neo-liberal state retains some features of liberal democracy like elections, some essential freedoms, parliamentary government and parties. But by introducing plebiscitary politics in a big way to win the middle classes over to the line of reforms that the state wants to pursue, a neo-liberal state changes the rules of the game. Public officials concerned with popular welfare suddenly become “laggards” or their posts become the punishment posts reserved for “laggards.” Officials concerned with economic performance become prized personalities. “Human rights” becomes a dirty phrase. Businessmen who protest against “citizens who assume the prerogatives to control market behavior” are given a sympathetic ear by the officials who now remind the public that such a democratic prerogative, if conceded, may result in bad economic performance leading to compulsory curbs on such prerogatives. Thus, management of market reforms becomes a private matter, suitably garnished as a public affair. Broader concerns pertaining to the citizen now occupy a distant third in the hierarchy of concerns of a democratic state. In the context of reforms, this significance of this change in the content of democracy cannot be minimized. So long, liberalism had been commonly defined as a regime of minimum coercion of all agencies including the state. But democratic ideas promote an expansion of the public sphere, of the state, of other 23/31

bodies; in other words, democracy in contrast to liberalism is a regime of expansiveness. It accommodates the market just like any other institution. But it keeps on reinforcing the idea that all public institutions, including institutions of popular control, must be justified on the ground that thereby the society is justly organized. Evidently, in the context of drastic market reforms, this combination becomes extremely uneasy, at times unworkable. Market reforms must look just and must be justified as fulfilling a very broad public need. This also means a change in the nature of the bureaucracy. The government comes to be identified with the state and the bureaucracy comes to be taken as the government. In the liberal panoply, we have the legislature, the cabinet, and the court. To it are now added administrative agencies which enjoy great discretionary and residual powers and are very loosely anchored to popular expectations, preferences and scrutiny. Added to this is the situation of the general weakening of political parties in which new parties very seldom strike roots and old parties find difficult to sustain themselves at a credible level. Parties had hitherto been an important (though imperfect) means of enforcing accountability. Now the decline of parties leads to a government dominated by some “policy networks” encoded in administrative machineries. Parties no longer provide a guarantee that public officials will not be detached from public concerns. The state, as we find in our country, comes to be dominated by an administrative apparatus to an extent that makes it seem like an administrative state. And yet there is no other way. Since sectors of the economy are disarticulated in terms of a common structure and heterogeneous with low functional differentiation within sectors, and because the organization of production is around social relations and the expansion of the economy is dependent on the form of its incorporation in the global economic system, we have a situation where structural complexities and the dynamics of transformation demand a change in the politics of the country. Neo-liberalism is then not an expression of the advancement of the economy, but its backwardness. The polity it reshapes in its wake also resembles a regression. Such neo-liberal politics is no longer justified, because it is unable to prove that it has considerations of justice. Politics has always experienced naturalization of rights, and this has led to naturalization of justice. This means that, for the citizen, rights once acquired are, in course, naturalized, and then become natural. Granting them, recognizing them in law, and validating them becomes the first act of a just state. The state has to appear as the defender of a certain pattern of justice which has roots in natural rights. For the requirement of ruling, justice then has to be defined by the state. That is how the state justifies itself and helps in the rebirth of political ethics.40 The functions of the state can continue if they attain legitimacy as well. Justice and justification are, thus, bound together. The historically existing pattern of justice (which is naturalized justice) becomes a condition for the pursuit of justice and, at the same time, a limit to its arbitrary redefinition by a state poised to undertake new functions. In India we had such a historically existing pattern, strongly influenced by the national movement and by welfare ideals, pluralism, and goals of social equality. Rawls had once said that a back-and-forth process between critical reflection and our intuitive (emphasis mine) 24/31

sense of what was right would lead to an equilibrium in which we would be satisfied that we had hit upon the universal principles of justice.41 The intuitive is nothing but the naturalized. It tells us the importance of limits to the attempt by a state to redefine justice in the interest of new programs. Officially defined justice has to endure the presence of radical justice that keeps on pursuing the former like a shadow. 42 All this ensures that democracy will embody a certain pattern of justice in order to exist. This imperative is so strong that the new mercantilism we witness today cannot gainsay, despite its strength, the ideals of global justice.

Justice as the Site And thus, what the ideology of the nation had least expected becomes a reality, namely that the nation can appear to be justified as a concept and reality only when it is perched on justice. Democracy, therefore, does not only have to be open, but also just. Nothing invokes citizenship more than the principle of justice in a democracy. Niraja Jayal refers to two ways in which this citizenship which “indeed lies at the heart of democracy” is undermined: (a) when the state fails to ensure the enforceability of the constitutionally guaranteed rights of equal citizenship; and (b) inadequate social conditions that would have made possible the effective exercise of citizenship rights.43 The discourses of democracy that emanate from the state frequently stress “procedural” aspects at the expense of “substantive” aspects. They are, therefore, often “manipulative, ranging from expedient majoritarianism to cynical utilitarianism.” The procedural emphasis is based on a “minimalist, institutionalist, and even instrumentalist conception of democracy.” Democracy’s desirability is taken to be primarily due to its “fairness as a decision-making procedure” and “opportunities for representation.” Such state discourses invoke components of the democratic idea selectively, and leave out the issue of justice. To one section of citizens the state remains open to democratic negotiation, to another consisting of the vulnerable groups, the public agenda remains “severely exclusionary.” 44 Welfare, secularism, development— either these are, as now, the items of a severely exclusionary agenda, limited to procedural aspects of democracy only or they become, again as they sometimes do, subjects of democratic negotiations. Needless to say, in the first case, justice has not much role to play except in an officially defined role; in the second, democracy is perched on justice. These issues—welfare, secularism, and development—which have defined Indian democracy, stand somewhere in the middle. Each of these has been born out of state responses to a particular situation and each is being redefined by citizens’ interventions. The talk of reform of the economy appears in such a scenario. Since reforms do not take place in a vacuum, they have to negotiate these principles of welfare, secularism and development, in short, the principle of justice. Neo-liberalism thrives when there is a distinct difference between civil society and political society. Neo-liberalism’s political program is to maintain the distinction. But in an expanding democracy (and I leave out here the temporary vicissitudes) this distinction tends to be perpetually eroded, notwithstanding the efforts of the political class to maintain the specialty of political 25/31

society. What the gurus of neo-liberalism forget, particularly in India, when they attempt to redefine the political ethos of the nation, is that the nation survives through intermittent erosion of the boundary between the two and a renewed emphasis of the civil at the expense of the political. That is why neo-liberalism as a solution to the closure I mentioned at the beginning fails after some time, a conclusion evident in the recent events in Europe and Asia. Market reforms continue, but in a substantially altered form. The politics of reforms alters first. Therefore, we need concrete studies of how markets are looked at by the citizens, how the state react, and the meaning of the existence of the markets to citizens. Similarly, we need studies along the line, namely that there is not one public sphere constituting civil society, but many publics making up many societies. When a “public” realizes that it has been excluded from the celebrated sphere of civil society, the immediate response is to create pressure for the breakdown of the exclusionary wall. This is a political act. It generates the discourse of human rights which reinforces old rights also such as those guaranteed by the basic law of the country and other laws, like the Factories Act, the Boilers Act, the Employment State Insurance (ESI) Act, and the like. At the same time, this discourse gives birth to ideas of new rights, sometimes completely reinterpreting the existing ones through public interest, such as interventions as in the case of Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. In such a situation, the civil can be so only by being recognized as political, while the political attains sanctity by intervening in the civil. The civil sphere is no longer the civilized sphere only, where behavior is bound by law—it is a sphere that straddles the state, economy, and society. Its claim to be recognized by rulers as an entity that straddles the three worlds ensures that it is political. More so, because it becomes the sphere of contested meanings, an arena which some “publics” try to harness to their interests, while some others, which have remained excluded, try to gatecrash and claim as their own. However, this also means that democratization does not rule out reforms. In fact, the issue of market reforms becomes another subject of contest and intervention by citizens. Conventional leftist political commentators are right when they point out the incompatibility of democratization and liberalization. But that is only the beginning. Beyond that is the unending path of popular intervention—intervention on reforms, around reforms, for reforms. In short, the argument here is that there is nothing intrinsic about the program of passive revolution that lends it success. Such a program is wrought with democratic desires which make it essentially vulnerable. The nation is, thus, perennially inadequate. A program of passive revolution with which it is supposed “to have arrived” shows itself to be a station where the nation cannot pause, stop, or take breath for long. This makes the task of legitimation of the nation difficult. The mode of governing the nation becomes crucial. It is time, therefore, to look into the so-called externalities, the modes of governance, which make passive revolution a success, yet always an incomplete story of such success. 26/31

Notes and References 1. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowel Smith (eds and trans.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Indian Edition, Chennai: Orient Longman, 1996), pp. 118–119. 2. On this see, Peter Reeves, Landlords and Governments in Uttar Pradesh—A Study of their Relations Until Zamindari Abolition (Mumabi: Oxford University Press, 1991); M. H. Siddiqi, Agrarian Unrest in North India—The United Provinces, 1918–22 (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978); and Elizabeth Whitcombe, “Whatever Happened to the Zamindars?” in E. J. Hobsbawm, Ashok Mitra, and Ignatio Sachs (eds), Peasants in History—Essays in Honour of Daniel Thormer (Kolkata: Oxford University Press, 1980). 3. See the introduction to Udayan Sharma (ed.), Violence Erupts (New Delhi: Radhakrishna, 1978). 4. See J. P. Nettl, Political Mobilization—A Sociological Analysis of Methods and Concepts (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), pp. 124–126. 5. See the interesting discussion by Rokkan Stein in “Cleavage Structures—Party System and Voter Alignments: An Introduction,” in Seymour Martin Lipset and Rokkan Stein, Party System and Voter Alignments (Glencoe: Free Press, 1967). 6. Jayaprakash Narayan’s speeches reported in Everyman’s Weekly, Patna, 1974. 7. Ibid. 8. See Geoffrey Ostergaard, Non-Violent Revolution in India (New Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1985), Chapters 4–5. 9. See Jayaprakash Narayan, Socialism, Sarvodaya, and Democracy (Mumbai: Asia Publishers, 1964) and Towards Total Revolution, ed. Brāhmanand (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1978); B. T. Ranadive’s well-informed critique misses the vital point in the evolution of sarvodaya thought, see Ranadive, Sarvodaya and Communism (New Delhi: Communist Party of India, 1958). 10. On new type of movements, see Ghanshyam Shah, Protest Movement in Two Indian States (New Delhi: Ajanta, 1977). 11. The vulnerability of the strategy of relying exclusively on the rural poor and Dalits is apparent from certain facts. As the 1971 Census revealed, only 14.6 percent of Bihar’s total population (56.35 million lakhs) belonged to the category of scheduled castes (8.8 per cent belonging to the category of the scheduled tribes). The Select Plan Statistics of Bihar Planning Board in 1976 showed that cultivators formed 43.3 per cent of the total workforce in Bihar in 1971. In one prominent district with agrarian unrest, Patna district, for example, only Punpun Block showed a scheduled caste population over 25 27/31

per cent; it was 29 per cent here while four blocks showed the figure to be below 20 per cent and the sixth, Masaurhi showed a figure of 21 per cent. In that same troubled district, as the Agricultural Census (1970–1971) showed, holdings of 2 to 5 hectares formed 13.4 per cent of total holdings and commanded 35.6 per cent of total land. And if holdings of 1 to 2 hectares were to be included, the figures went up even more. Pradhan H. Prasad shows in “Rural Violence in Central Bihar” (Science and People, 1 [1] 1991) that Yadavs, Koiris and Kurmis, and 18.85 per cent of other backward castes belong to the middle-peasant categories. Moreover 25.71 per cent of Yadavs, Koiris and Kurmis and 63.87 per cent of other backward castes are poor peasants. 12. Kalyan Kumar Mukherjee and Rajendra Singh Yadav, Bhojpur: Naxalism in the Plains of Bihar (New Delhi: Radhakrishna, 1980). 13. See “Flaming Fields—A Report on Bihar” (Calcutta, 1988). In fact, a report on peasant struggles in Palamau makes a virtue of the opposition against the middle peasantry. See Palamau Krishak Sangramer Bibaran (Kolkata: Mabhumi Prakashan, 1989). 14. That the struggle in the seventies opened up possibilities of huge mass mobilization is clear. The PUDR report, Agrarian Unrest in Patna—An Investigation into Recent Repression (New Delhi: PUDR, 1981), quoting a local paper Janamat tells us that from August to October 1981, Patna district witnessed instances of huge mobilization, the lowest figure being 2,000, and the high 50,000. Areas like Luhsuna, Punpun, Dulhinbazar, Bariyari, Bikram were the prominent places. 15. Many of these emerging issues have been documented by individual observers, though a summing up is yet to happen. See, for example, “Green Acres or Red? Bhoomi Andolan in Bodh Gaya” (Patna: SJLSC, 1980); the PUDR report on “Agrarian Unrest in Patna” (New Delhi: PUDR, 1981); Mathew Areeparampil, Dispossession of the Indigenous People of the Chhotanagpur Plateau due to the Development of Industries and Mines (Chaibasa: Mimeograph, 1987); the PUDR-APDR “Joint Report on Police Repression in Jahanabad” (New Delhi: PUDR-APDR, 1983); the “Report of the Committee set up by the Government of Bihar to enquire into the Land Holdings of the Bodh Gaya Math” (Government of Bihar: Patna, 1980); and Nirmal Sengupta, Destitutes and Development—A Study of Bauri Community of Bokaro Region (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1979). The “Report of the Chauri Firing Enquiry Commission” (Patna: CFEC, 1976) also gives ample evidence of rising Dalit militancy and the land question in the 1970s. Also see the famous report in Searchlight by B. N. Sinha, DIG (Naxalite) Sinha, “From Naxalbari to Ekwari,” Searchlight, 11 June 1975. 16. Sudipta Kaviraj, “A Critique of Passive Revolution in India” in Partha Chatterjee (ed.), State and Politics in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 45–87. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 86. 28/31

19. Again, in another strange reading of the biography of the nation, the “structures of power and movements of resistance” appear without the dialectic of revolution/restoration. Such a reading, thus, does away entirely with the phenomenon of passive revolution. See T. V. Sathyamurthy (ed.), State and Nation in the Context of Social Change (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). 20. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 212. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., pp. 211–214. 23. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World—A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986). 24. Hoare and Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramci, pp. 118–119. 25. Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 387. 26. Ibid., pp. 383–384. 27. This line of argument also occurs in Sunil Khilnani, “India’s Democratic Career,” in John Dunn (ed.), Democracy—The Unfinished Journey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Also see, Kohli, Democracy and Discontent, p. 20. 28. Pranab Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); and Sukhomoy Chakravarty, Development Planning—The Indian Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) give us a sense of the reason of such closure in analysis. 29. Mill underestimated the problem when he thought that there can be a balance, perhaps delicate, between the two. He wrote in Considerations on Representative Government: Identity of central government is compatible with many degrees of centralization, not only administrative, but even legislative. A people may have desire, and the capacity, for a closer union than one merely federal, while yet their local peculiarities and antecedents render considerable diversities desirable in the details of their government. But if there is a real desire on all hands to make the experiment successful, there needs seldom be any difficulty in not only preserving these diversities, but giving them the guarantee of a constitutional provision against any attempt at assimilation, except by the voluntary act of those who would be affected by the change. (John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray, reprint (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991) p. 446. 29/31

30. See Robert Dahl, Polyarchy—Participation and Opposition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982) and Dahl, Authority in Good Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). 31. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1947), p. 284f. 32. On the limits to the emphasis on “procedural” innovations, see Axel Hadenius, Democracy and Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 33. Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 69. 34. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 3. 35. For his views on this, see Volume 3 of Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism—Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century: The Perspective of the World—Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century, translated by Siam Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), particularly pp. 620–632. 36. See, Thomas Haskell and Richard Teichgraeber III (eds), The Culture of the Market —Historical Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–39. 37. I take this phrase from James E. Combs and Dan Nimmo, The Comedy of Democracy (Westport, CT: Prager, 1996), Chapter 4, “Politics and the News Media—A Comedy of Manners.” 38. I adopt this semantic turn from the important essay by Peter Aranson and Peter Ordeshook, “Public Interest, Private Interest and Democratic Polity,” in Roger Benjamin and Stephen L. Elkin (eds), The Democratic State (Kansas: University of Kansas, 1985), pp. 93–94. 39. The classic statement of this discussion is in Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 40. Milton Fisk draws our attention to this in The State and Justice—An Essay in Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1–28. 41. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (3), 1985, pp. 223–251. 42. Fisk differentiates in this way in The State and Justice, p. 8. 43. Niraja Gopal Jayal, Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 249. 30/31

44. Ibid., pp. 256–257.

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The Nation Form 6 The World of the Edges

Aliens and the Shelters They Get On June 4, 1986, there was a fire in New Simapuri colony of Delhi. New Simapuri is a colony conspicuous for two things: slums inhabited by migrant workers from Bangladesh; and recurrence of fires in these slums. The colony had witnessed fires earlier in 1975 and 1983. In 1986, fires swept through the unauthorized constructions, which were in reality mere hut like structures of scrap material such as plywood, cardboard, and canvas. They burned easily. On June 5–6, 1986, the local politicians arrived and communal tents for fire victims were provided. Eventually, each affected 250 as compensation. Most huts were quickly rebuilt family received a sum of with durable materials. Some brick houses also came up and the colony could even boast of a few double storied buildings. Each successive fire had served to make the unauthorized settlements a little more established—each passing year and each new calamity had helped in the process. While some of the slum dwellers managed to 300 each to local party workers in the hope construct brick houses, others paid of getting official land allotments which very few, however, later got. Unofficial brokers also gained. The fire seemed to have benefited everybody. The immigrants drove cycle rickshaws and collected rags while their women worked as housemaids. From peasants they had become the sub-population of the metropolis. But that was not the end of the story for the fearful immigrant community. Their protector was an important Delhi politician to whom they flocked for succor. But his hold on this reliable vote bank had angered other political parties. On December, 6 1992, the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya was demolished. The country burned in the fires of a communal holocaust for more than a month. Then, in mid-January, 1993, another important politician of Delhi rallied his supporters to march to the areas where these fearful immigrants were residing to forcibly evict them. However, concerned citizens and local residents, determined not to allow a reenactment of the recent horrendous violence and atrocities of Bombay, forced the rally to back off. New Simapuri was not, however, the only instance of such linkages between illegal migrants and the legal–political system. There would be other instances in the years that followed, which would show how the migrants of Bangladesh had become victims of fear and social insecurity that had made them captive vote banks—victims who were typical examples of the way in which the State treats alien migrants in South Asia. Societies and postcolonial states of the region are producing transborder migrants who 1/24

have become symbols of everything that is wrong in these countries: ethnic violence, labor displacement due to structural adjustments, minority persecution, deft political management of the parliamentary system, and its social security measures by political forces. People in the South Asian region live in a world where large segments of national populations subsist on incomes below or near the official poverty line. As opportunities with respect to employment and wages continue to decline, income gaps widen, violence rises, persecution of minorities increases, and more and more people find themselves on the move. Their dreams of a home of their own turn into waking nightmares. The reasons cited by the migrants for moving are invariably the failures of government and development policies, discrimination in housing, health and environmental disasters, speculation and commoditization of housing, evictions, armed conflicts, structural adjustment programs and debts, changes in crop patterns, poverty and deprivation of means, and finally the very recurrence and perpetuation of homelessness. However, such regional patterns of migration and homelessness rarely find mention in literature on the subject. For example, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, comprising 58 governments, rarely recognizes the regional dimensions of migration and homelessness. In South Asia, in particular, only a handful of people emphasize the need of a regional imperative for preemptive or post-migratory policy and action. Migration patterns in South Asia, however, are distinct to the region cutting across national boundaries. This pattern of migration, within a country or between countries, is almost uniform. So are government responses. The provision of ensuring for the people “adequate food, clothing, housing, and the continuous improvement of living conditions” is laid out in Article 11 (1) of the International Covenant of Social and Economic Rights. The article underlines the need for “international cooperation based on free consent.” This implies regional cooperation in the first place since migration due to ethnic unrest and political repression has been the uniform feature of migration patterns in South Asia. It is important to note that unfortunately only three countries of South Asia—India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka—have ratified the covenant while Bhutan, Bangladesh, the Maldives, and Pakistan are yet to ratify it. Southern Bhutanese of Nepali origin have fled to Nepal, Chakmas of Bangladesh have fled to India, and Tamils of Indian origin have sought shelter in India from Sinhalese persecution in Sri Lanka. It is difficult to tell when the large-scale, long-term, seasonal, two-way migration of Nepalis and Indians in the Terai region will turn into another flashpoint.1 In any case, South Asia does not repeat the “melting pot” experience of the United States; it remains rather a boiling pot. The realization of human rights in South Asia is closely linked with some kind of a multilateral agreement to stop ethnic evictions, guarantee nationality rights, and religious tolerance. A restructuring of the polity in the countries of South Asia as well as bilateral and multilateral agreements remain the three most important requirements toward guaranteeing a minimum of 2

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human dignity to the peoples of this region.2 The need for such a perspective can be substantiated through a number of examples. The flight of the people of Nepali origin from Bhutan furnishes a case in point. According to the annual report (1993) of the Human Rights Organization of Bhutan, till November 1992, 72,256 refugees from south Bhutan had taken shelter in Nepal. The “one nation, one people” policy pursued by Bhutan as elsewhere has resulted in 84,245 people living in refugee camps in south-eastern Nepal. Yet, Bhutan’s home ministry speaks of a “demographic siege on Bhutan.” Southern Bhutanese of Nepali origin had migrated to the land and settled there long back–some even a century ago. Now the ethnic fear that the native Drukpa culture would be swamped by the Nepalis stands counterpoised to the anti-monarchy movement in south Bhutan. Without a multilateral framework the Bhutanese refugee problem cannot be solved. India occupies the area between Bhutan and Nepal. There was large-scale movement of refugees via India. Bhutan receives 70 percent of its foreign aid from India and is further bound to it by the 1949 treaty signed by the two. Indian participation, therefore, remains essential if a satisfactory solution to the southern Bhutanese question is to be found. A single-state centric solution is becoming more and more unlikely in view of the demography, the question of nationality, and the historically easy movement of peoples throughout the region. But Bhutan cannot be singled out for blame. All countries of South Asia find themselves in the same situation. The carving up of South Asia at the end of the colonial period into a number of modern nation-states has been reflexive. India is predominantly nationalist with reference to Pakistan or Bangladesh and not with reference to the United States or the United Kingdom. Bangladesh defines its nationalism against India and Pakistan and not Japan or the United Kingdom. Reflexive nationalism in South Asia is a gross caricature of its predecessor—anti-colonial nationalism. It makes ethnic suppression and sufferings due to forced migration tolerable to the ethics of a nation. Hence, homelessness and migration in the area have to be tackled regionally, both bilaterally and multilaterally. In India, a few political parties have called for sealing the country’s borders to check migration. Such a “porous border” argument, while echoing the fears of the native population, remains impractical, costly, inhuman, and contrary to the historically established patterns of migration in South Asia. The appropriate policy must be found elsewhere. Even problems related to intra-country displacement and migration need multilateral efforts. For homelessness within often results in emigration abroad. Communal violence is a ready example—the exodus of Bengali Muslims in India from Bombay, Surat, and Ahmedabad to West Bengal followed communal disturbances in these places in 1993, anti-Hindu disturbances in Bangladesh have led to displacement of a number of Hindu Bangladeshis, and riots in Sindh in Pakistan have, again, forced a large number of people to move. Apart from the political problems, environmental factors like water management and flood control have also contributed to homelessness and consequent migration 3/24

throughout South Asia. The flood action plan in Bangladesh clearly shows the relation between floods in Bangladesh, amount of water discharges outside the country’s political borders, the links within an eco-agricultural region, and the persistence of flood intensity zones within the country and outside. Land alienation, depletion of natural resources, fencing-off areas for military purposes and, finally, drought, also prompt movements of people, already on the increase due to vagaries of crop pattern and different levels of commercial crop cultivation in different areas. 3 Once again, the pattern of homelessness, displacement, eviction, and migration of the rural poor is uniform throughout South Asia. The pervasiveness of structural adjustment programs in countries of South Asia which resulted in deterioration of social–cultural measures is the backdrop against which the various construction projects, consequent displacements and migration continue apace. Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka—all these countries are witnessing frantic construction of dams, thermal plants, tourist resorts, airports, highways, and transport and cargo terminals in a desperate effort at “development.” Scarce water resources are greedily swallowed by tourism promotion plans and industrial expansion. Within India, the Narmada dam project is not alone in creating uncertainty in the lives of the poor people inhabiting the affected areas. Similar plans are afoot elsewhere in the region threatening to cause large-scale displacements of the native poor. In Nepal, communities like the Taru, Chepang, Limbu, and Sunuwar, have lost their land as a result of such “developmental” measures. The Nepal National Coordination Committee for the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights has shown in its report of 1993 how bonded labor, landlessness, and migration remain connected. Everywhere, environmental activists are being considered the “new terrorists,” holding the process of development to ransom. The search for security and livelihood by the rural and urban laboring people becomes increasingly desperate in this context.4 Even though transborder population flux in postcolonial South Asia, as noted here, is a complex of many elements and many phases, violence has blurred the distinctions between elements, phases and incidents of migration. Thus, today’s realities of South Asia remain laden with bitter memories of the past. Massive migrations of the late forties, associated with large-scale violence, have become subjects of collective memory, sometimes of national memory, and all subsequent migrations have been haunted by their shadow. Though the legitimizing framework of some liberal democratic institutions of the “guest” country may have acted as attraction for incoming people across the border, violence has continued to be associated with population movements both at the point of origin and resettlement. If we take a brief look at the 12 important flows of rejected peoples and unwanted migrants in South Asia, we shall see that violence was the chief characteristic of the process. These 12 flows are: (a) India–Pakistan refugee flows, 1947–1948, involving nearly 15,000,000 Hindus and Muslims; (b) exodus of Burmese Indians numbering about 1,000,000 during 1948–1965; (c) exodus of Sri Lankan Indians and Tamils to the tune of about 1,000,000 from 1954 which is still continuing; (d) flight of almost 4/24

10,000,000 Bangladeshis to India in 1971; (e) “stranded Pakistanis” in Bangladesh numbering nearly 300,000; (f) flight of some 200,000 Burmese Muslims to Bangladesh in 1978; (g) flight of about 100,000 Chakmas to India in 1981; (h) nearly 3,000,000 Afghans fled from Afghanistan to Pakistan during 1978–1993, of whom an estimated 2,000,000 have returned; (i) flight of Tibetans to India from 1958 to 1963 numbering about 100,000; (j) exodus of nearly 60,000 Bhutanese of Nepali origin to Nepal in 1990–1991; and the two controversial and unwanted population flows, (k) from Bangladesh to Assam in India and (l) the two-way flow between Nepal and India. Certainly these cases are different and distinct but violence remains their common denominator.5

The Underclass It will be worthwhile to remember that moments and epochs of economic and political restructurings have always provoked, and been accompanied by, demographic movements, both within the subcontinent and across entire continents through group migrations.6 There has also been a tradition of seasonal mobility across mountains and widespread swamp areas amongst communities like the Chakma, M’to or Mizo or Kuki peoples in the Patkoi ranges on either side of the India–Myanmar–Bangladesh trijunction. Thus, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indentured labor— mostly landless and poor peasants who had already been moving from hills to plains and from one area to another in eastern and central India—were shipped from Calcutta, for manning sugar and coffee plantations, railway construction sites and mines, to the Indian Ocean islands, the South Pacific, the Caribbean islands, Guiana in the Amazon delta, and to the east and south of Africa. The historian of this phenomenon, Hugh Tinker, called it a “new kind of slavery.”7 If this kind of labor exodus became obsolete with British decolonization and new industrial opportunities in the subcontinent, the growing West European demand for economic restructuring in the fifties and sixties led to the next phase of labor outflow from the subcontinent with another generation of Indian poor and the dissatisfied middle classes seeping into England, France, the Low Countries, Germany and even into the erstwhile socialist countries of Europe and, of course, into the United States. Most of them swelled the ranks of the underclass of Atlantic capitalism. This feature, however, was not unique to labor migrating from the subcontinent. One has only to think of the Algerian or Senegalese menial labor in the public establishments of France or even engaged in peddling consumer goods or Turkish labor in Germany, Central African apprentices in East European economies, and the ex-colonial subjects of the Netherlands in the Atlantic economies of the continent to locate parallels.8 All these factors spurred on catalysts of a new phase of racialism and racial tensions. As one perceptive commentator has remarked: Such residual outcrops of neo-colonialism in reverse, reminiscent of the older imperialist social dichotomy of herrenvolk (master race using but not desiring to intermingle too closely with service untermensch of different color) have now contributed to neo-Fascist immigration laws, and to the enclave formation of Asians and Africans as marginalized minority groups, jackclaw-nested among resentful white 9

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host nations.9 A recent report from Paris describes the situation vividly in these words: Across Europe, life is becoming tougher for asylum-seekers or for those who seek to escape from what Mr Juan Maria Bandres, president of Spain’s commission to help refugees describes as “a land called hunger.” Several countries have beefed up laws to deter and prevent illegal immigration from outside the European Union. This coincides with the establishment of the Schengen zone, a border-free region that includes five nations and is set to include several more EU members. Last week, Italy, a principal migratory crossroads in Europe, adopted one of the toughest bills in Europe against illegal immigration. It provides for the immediate expulsion of anyone without a residence permit and people committing even minor criminal offenses. Anyone, failing to show a passport risks up to three years in jail. Employers who hire undocumented immigrants face prison sentences of up to six years. Those who smuggle illegal immigrants into the country, a mafia specialty, could receive jail terms of up to 15 years. Similarly, Britain’s Conservative government also proposes to bring in prison sentences for anyone hiring illegal immigrants. It goes further by saying that school heads and hospital directors should check on the immigration status of anyone requiring their services. It also proposes to make asylum-seekers ineligible for welfare benefits. The Schengen zone includes Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, and Portugal. An asylum-seeker turned away in any one of the member countries is thereafter banned from all the signatories. The Schengen accord has been signed but not yet put into effect by France, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, and Australia, while Denmark, Finland, and Sweden have said they wish to join the agreement. France has warned that it may not drop its border controls as promised on January 1 because of drug smuggling from the Netherlands and surge of terrorism attributed to Algerian fundamentalist factions. Nevertheless, France has gone even beyond the Schengen agreement in matters of immigration. As part of its emergency response to terrorism, the French government recently beefed up its arsenal of legislation against illegal immigration, including the possibility of jail for anyone hiring undocumented aliens. Last December, a new law established that anyone helping illegal immigrants would be liable to imprisonment. Despite assurances that the law targeted organized smugglers, some French courts have interpreted it in such a way that ordinary citizens have been caught in the net. Thus, a Roman Catholic priest was sentenced to six months in jail for housing a Lebanese student. Last month, a court sentenced a 26-year-old French woman to suspended three months prison term for failing to denounce her Congolese fiancé to the police. Although the couple had applied to marry, he was banished from France. The Protestant Federation of France announced last month that it would defy 6/24

the law by continuing to aid foreigners in need, whether they had the right papers or not. President Jacques Chirac reportedly told fellow heads of state during a visit to Africa earlier this year that he would halt foreign aid to countries that failed to curb emigration. Spain threatened to renege on trade agreements with Morocco unless it controlled the stream of emigrants seeking to cross the Strait of Gibraltar. In a continent suffering from relative recession and high unemployment, immigration has become an explosive issue, creating a backlash of resentment that the extreme right in France, Italy and some other countries has been quick to exploit. Not that opposition to immigrants is a monopoly of the right, in Italy the new legislation received unanimous support from all parties in Parliament. In the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta last month, resentment against foreigners exploded into violence against hundreds of black asylum-seekers in the city. Mr Bandres expressed the frustration felt by many when he said that Europe could not accept everyone who came calling at its door, but neither “can we tell a person who is dying of hunger to remain quietly in his place”. The only long-term answer, he said is a fairer distribution of the world’s riches. Experts say that tougher legislation has not had the intended effect of reducing illegal immigration. Rather, it has had the effect of delivering asylum-seekers into the hands of ruthless professional smugglers and forcing many of them into crime and prostitution. The number of undocumented aliens in Europe is a matter of conjecture. But the experts say the way the issue is exploited by certain politicians has created a profound misunderstanding of the nature of immigration. For example, in France many “immigrants” were born in the country, have lived here all their lives, and have no intention of returning to their parents’ country. And many immigrants have become naturalized and are legally French.10 The world of the migrants seems to be really the same everywhere in this age of footloose capital and mobile or displaced labor. Large-scale population movements across borders categorized as movements of “refugees, migrants and internally displaced persons” have become, thus, one of the defining characteristics of the post–World War II global order. Mass population displacements are on the increase, the phenomenon remains seemingly unaffected by the end of the Cold War, end of history, rise of regionalism, and a resurgence of nationalism. If anything, those who had predicted the final victory of liberalism backed by a benign state, economic prosperity and economic integration, are now terrified by the “coming anarchy,” which according to people like Robert D. Kaplan, Zbignew Brzezinsky, and Paul Harrison will be most signified by “break-up of nations under the tidal flow of refugees from environmental and social disaster.” “Wars [will be] fought over scarce resources especially water, and war itself [will become] continuous with crime, as armed bands of stateless marauders clash with the private security forces of the elites.”11 In other words, transborder population flux is being increasingly viewed as 7/24

a challenge to the neo-liberal world order—a challenge that originates from a combination of technological change, environmental degradation, ethnic unrest, and demographic growth. The intensity of the phenomenon has given rise to debates regarding appropriate approaches to it. This intensity can be sensed from the following facts. The total number of refugees and “other persons of concern” by a conservative estimate reached a figure of 274,189,000 in 1995. Of this, refugees numbered 148,877,000; returnees 39,832,000; others of concern 35,241,000, and internally displaced persons 5,423,000. Africa accounted for the greatest number with 111,816,000; next was Asia with 79,215,000; then Europe with 65,201,000. Latin America, North America, and Oceania had contributed 1,846,000, 9,255,000 and 512,000 respectively.12 The states are increasingly taking steps to obstruct the arrival of asylum-seekers, to push hack and contain displaced people within their homelands and to return refugees against their will to their country of origin. This is because today population displacement is not simply a consequence of some occasional conflict, but an explicit objective of warring parties and a continuous product of the present global order. The threat of superpower confrontation has receded, but new notions of security are emerging on the basis of demography, resources, and territory. Therefore, refugee problems are, by definition, transnational problems. Given the security perceptions of the states, these problems cannot be resolved by means of uncoordinated activities in separate countries. An alternative consensus or paradigm is required, and may possibly be emerging, in view of the situation. Such an alternative view has to be based on new definitions, proactive policies, a holistic attitude, and the need to recognize the integral link between population flux and patterns of global/regional economy and order.13 It is clear that today’s human rights abuses are tomorrow’s refugee movements. Major population displacements in the present decade have occurred in the context of wars, ethnic strife, partitions, minority persecutions, new state-formations, and environmental disasters. When people abandon their homes and lands, they do so because of the modern forms of threats of violence which can more accurately be described as perpetual threats of perpetual violence. Therefore, guarantees of a minimum of human rights are guarantees of a minimum of stability which discourage population movements.14 But there is one more aspect of this linkage. Human rights abuse occurs when such fleeing people are denied shelter and sustenance because of the security perspective of the states and various particularisms and also due to the lack of vigorous international and regional refugee protection regimes. Ironically, human rights abuses are compounded as the states frequently disregard the historical lesson that population flux need not always be forced or violence-driven and that such population flux has often featured in world economic history. If we can have free movement of goods, why can we not have free movement of labor and services? This brings us to the question of the rights of the refugees, particularly of the women, old, and child refugees. Such rights are rarely or almost never recognized because it is generally assumed that refugees or displaced persons never have the will to return. It is 8/24

an assumption of exile. Therefore, they have to be given citizenship and helped to get integrated legally and economically. This is known as the strategy of “local settlement”—an exile-oriented approach. The history of refugee management has shown, however, that such a strategy has often failed in the current situation of heavy population flux. A different policy that recognizes the rights of the refugees, impels the home state to encourage the refugees to return in conditions of safety and security, guarantees of property rights, deploys international human rights monitoring, improves conditions and security of the refugee settlements, and progressively ensures freedom of the skills of the displaced persons to be gainfully employed and utilized in the host country as well, will be a much better one. In other words, the concept of refugee and displaced persons’ protection is inseparable from the notion of human rights. Refugee women and girls, particularly, have to survive a great deal of violence and neglect. As experience shows, while the use of rape as a weapon of persecution and war has found its way into the media headlines, the protection problems of displaced females are to be found predominantly in conditions of less dramatic and day-to-day struggles for survival. Therefore, economic and social rights and the relevant institutional arrangements and relationships to ensure them are very important. Institutional arrangements mean in the first place establishing and/or reforming an international presence, but we have to understand that no amount of diplomacy or international safeguards will succeed in preventing population displacements if a state based on majoritarianism is determined to violate the rights of the people. While citizenship is an indicator of certain rights, the concept of citizenship creates the category of “non-state persons,” who are without any recognizable important right to social and political existence. In many countries today, stateless persons remain a testimony to the ironies of the nationalist discourse of “citizenship.” A civil rights agenda of protection of refugees, migrants, and internally displaced persons is, above all, linked to a campaign for peace. Traditional peacekeeping methods have failed partly because they are outdated, and partly because they are now the instruments of great power hegemony and aggression. New directions in any campaign for peace have to be different from peacekeeping. This means stress on a range of rights, on consensus and consent, new legal instruments, anti-militarism, clarity of roles and objectives, and priority to reconciliation. Humanitarian assistance is often looked upon as having political consequences and is, therefore, manipulated by states, who are parties to a conflict, for their own ends. This cynicism has increased as states know that with the end of the Cold War, the great powers have a significantly reduced interest in impoverished nations and regions. With international migration growing and becoming more complex, states are placing more curbs on the migrants. This adversely affects the situation of the refugees and the internally displaced persons also. A campaign for peace, reconciliation, minority rights, rights of migrants, and free movement of labor will help in the formulation of policies that are unfortunately confined at present to “peacekeeping” and creating “safe areas.”

Labor on the Move 9/24

Yet, the question of “rights” remains silenced amidst the overwhelming image of masses of destitute people on the move mainly because the dynamics of globalization still remain uncomprehended, indeed, de-linked from discussions on population flux in the present era. But the large-scale cross-border mobility of population in South Asia and elsewhere, often continuing in conditions of petty production, and the sudden dramatic displacements with periodic spurts in industrialization and political consolidation of the nations indeed cannot be fully explained without taking into account the far reaching effects of transformations often termed as “globalization.” Deregulation policies promoted by the Fund-Bank regime, massive aid to specific projects, export-oriented growth of certain industries have all contributed toward making the decade of nineties the decade of “footloose capital.” Ancillarization and decentralization of certain industries which make small production units viable, growing trade linkages, offshore assembly, subcontracting, and the export processing centers and zones have, ironically, made sweat labor a necessity in today’s production system in Asia and, particularly, in South Asia. Low-wage workers from a neighboring country sometimes compete with the low-wage workers of the host country, but often they fill the void created by an expansion of labor market due to developments stated here. Sweat labor by immigrant workers, as is evident for example in India, their lack of organization and bargaining power, their drastically reduced power of negotiating the conditions of work, indicate shifting patterns of accumulation. The employment of non-national labor in South Asia, mostly of illegal immigrants, seen in this context, has emerged as a component of the restructured international division of labor. One can get an initial picture by considering the enormity of legal labor migration across the countries of Asia. Following the oil price increases of 1973–1974, international labor migration became a major influence on the domestic economies of many labor-surplus countries in Asia. During the early years of the large-scale outflow of workers to the oil-rich countries in the Middle East, labor migration was viewed as a temporary phenomenon which did not justify long-term arrangements. Structural changes in international labor flows since the late eighties have, however, forced attention to the phenomenon. While labor outflow now seems to have considerably slowed down following the cessation of the economic boom in the Middle East, there has been a clear shift in the pattern of labor demand in that region—a shift away from several categories of unskilled and semi-skilled labor and toward service, operations, and maintenance workers—requiring higher skills. This development has generated new opportunities within a situation of overall decline. However, its implications with regard to unskilled labor have been serious; they must now search for new areas and places of work. Moreover, the high-growth countries in Asia, notably, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan have begun to absorb an increasing volume of labor from the labor-surplus countries in the vicinity. Thus, it is generally expected that in the foreseeable future, Asia will continue to face the implications of an increasingly internationally mobile labor force, and the labor-sending countries will also continue to face the implications of their resultant dependence on substantial foreign exchange income through labor exports. 10/24

The issue of labor export has become so important for many countries of Asia that they have enacted new legislations and set up regulatory mechanisms to deal with it. For example, the Government of the Philippines enacted a new Labor Code in 1974 (to supplant Act 2486 of 1915) with a view to providing an institutional framework to regulate private recruitment of labor. Under the Labor Code, the Bureau of Employment Services at the Department of Labor was entrusted with the task of private recruitment of labor and the National Seamen’s Board was established to regulate shipping agencies engaging Filipino seamen. The Overseas Employment Development Board (OEDB) was created to recruit land-based workers for overseas employment in direct competition with private recruitment agents. The initial aim of the Labor Code was to expand the operation of the OEDB and displace private recruiting agents. The Code prohibited the issuing of new private recruiting licenses and envisaged phasing out of private recruitment within four years. The rapidly expanding overseas demand for Filipino workers, however, was soon found to be beyond the capacity of the OEDB to manage. Attempts to suppress private recruitment activities were ineffective and only led to a proliferation of illegal recruitment. Faced with these circumstances the government amended the Labor Code in 1978 to allow for increased participation of the private sector. In India, a new Emigration Act was passed in 1983 to supplant the Emigration Act of 1922. The Act gave the protector general of emigrants in the Ministry of Labor of the Government of India the power to grant and suspend or cancel licenses to recruit workers for overseas employment and to set minimum standards for foreign work contracts. A new institutional structure comprising seven field Protectorates of Emigrants in six states and union territories was formed to implement the new regulatory procedures. Subsequently, government bodies were set up at the state levels to undertake recruitment of labor in competition with the private sector. In Bangladesh, the Bureau of Manpower, Employment, and Training was created in 1976 (under a parliamentary act which replaced the colonial Emigration Act of 1922) by expanding the manpower and employment wing of the Directorate of Labor. In 1982, a new public limited company, Bangladesh Overseas Employment Services Limited (BOESL), was formed by the government for promotion of overseas employment. Until 1985, Thailand regulated recruitment activities of the private sector under the Employment and Job Seekers Act of 1968. In 1985, this Act was subject to drastic reformulation to provide foreign employment promotion a firm legal basis. The Overseas Employment Administration Office was established in 1985. Indonesia began its overseas employment program in 1978 when the government officially recognized a few recruitment agencies and placed their activities under the supervision of the Department of Transmigration, Manpower, and Cooperatives. The labor administrations in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia focus only on regulating recruitment activities of recruitment agents and the emigration of workers overseas. Obviously, workers’ remittances being the attractive factor, countries like India and Pakistan pursue an active interest rate policy relating to these remittance accounts, in order to ensure an attractive premium over world financial market rates for account holders.15 Hassan Gardezi, in his study of the migrant Pakistani workers in the Gulf countries, has 11/24

pointed out how with or without formal arrangements between states on contract workers, states and employers do acquiesce in clandestine migration to meet the requirements of capital, particularly in semi-skilled and unskilled categories. 16 The migrant worker in South Asia makes minimal demands on the social expenditure of the host country, and since the worker is mostly an illegal immigrant, the country sending labor has little or no say in determining the wages of the emigrant’s work, her/his conditions of work, duration of stay and social benefits. The situation is, thus, at times close to slavery—often branded as a threat to natural security, public order, and public morals; their alienation and disenfranchisement from the social collective is extreme. Once again, this situation calls for closer scrutiny of the existing social theory of migration. The argument of neoclassical political economy has been around the central notions of “push” and “pull,” that is, gains to be won by movement from areas of relatively low productivity to areas of high productivity motivate migration. But “push” factors which include such circumstances as overpopulation, unemployment, scarcity of land, low wages, and natural calamities and “pull” factors which attract people to new locations due to employment opportunities, high wages, educational and cultural facilities for personal enrichment do not operate in their neoclassical neatness in South Asia. It is an integrated labor market, howsoever imperfectly integrated. Again, people often migrate to take up sweat labor jobs. Violence, ethnic networks, general lack of confidence in the nation’s stability or even a historically established tradition of seasonal migration, typical of the peasantry in South Asia—all these defy the conceptual neatness of the “push” and “pull” theory of neoclassical political economy regarding migration. The pattern of economic development in South Asia and the accompanying structural adjustments have created and exacerbated the segmented nature of the labor market here. Thus, agriculture in Punjab, urbanization in Delhi, cotton and diamond industry in Gujarat, irrigation projects in West Bengal may attract labor from elsewhere—but it is most likely to be sweat labor, while the reproductive level of skilled labor, that is, the enskilling process may remain narrow. A “rational choice” theory may have little meaning in such a context. Migration of people from areas with low to high productivity does not establish equilibrium, for wage rates in the economically disadvantaged areas do not improve enough with consequent shortage of labor supply, nor do wages level off in areas of immigration consequent upon abundance in labor supply. There is no selfequilibrating mechanism of free labor market eventually halting labor flows. A combination of old patriarchal supervision and flexible labor operations constitutes the specific labor regime. Segmented labor markets, closely linked to the process of labor migration, remain an important feature of the development process in South Asia.

The Question of the Alien or an Agenda of Rights Cross-border migration in South Asia, it should be clear by now, involves the issue of a whole range of rights. But as with regard to the other dimensions of migration, the question of rights too has to be seen in specific context of South Asia. Since migration in 12/24

South Asia is an ensemble of communal, economic, historical, and environmental elements, the specific situation of the region becomes important. A study like the present one, dealing with transborder migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal, therefore, cannot lose sight of the perspective—how nation-state boundaries have been drawn and subsequently made rigid, cutting into separate parts the erstwhile collective existence of communities in the region. Community networks, not unnaturally, have revived and expanded much in the sense of what Tilly describes as “transplanted networks.”17 Community rights, particularly land rights, become crucial from that perspective. Indeed, many of the population movements would not have been termed as “migration” at all were we not living in the post-partition age in South Asia. The social reality of migration is consequently often a distorted version of the natural human flows through centuries—particularly the last two centuries when vast stretches of land were colonized and settled, agriculture started in low-lying areas, industrial and mining towns boomed and the labor market expanded inconceivably. To a large extent, “rights,” like the “right to move,” therefore, do not imply granting of new privileges or recognitions, but simply acknowledging “realities and relations” which may be old but retain their relevance. Women constitute a significant number of the migrants. They are refugees, migrants, as well as bonded persons to be sold in the flesh markets of South Asia and beyond—they are the most abused of refugees and the most unwanted migrants. As is the case throughout the world, the sexual victimization faced by these women is the most gender-specific human rights violation of the whole process of migration. These abuses, whatever their degree, violate women’s fundamental right to their own bodies, to their physical and psychological integrity, and ultimately to a life of dignity.18 However, it will be simplistic to suppose that all are being coerced, and coerced directly, into leaving the country. Rising family violence, ecological disasters, increasing incidence of polygamy, divorce, etc., force women to look for safety and shelter elsewhere—sometimes across the borders. Again, once the initial phase of emigration is over when only men emigrate and the families stay back, families start migrating. Women, earlier confined to household labor, now take up jobs outside the house in unaccustomed, difficult circumstances to add to the family income. In most of the cases, women manage to get only the most low-skilled, least-paid, most abused and dishonorable jobs. Although 80 per cent of the world’s refugees are women, and women also represent about 80 per cent of health-care workers in refugee camps, they have little say in the development of national and international refugee policies. Family survival depends upon the women’s ability to adjust to and compensate for impoverishment. A woman fleeing the scene of destitution, violence, and war faces a very real threat of rape by the border guards which is followed by the arduous task of child care, cleaning, cooking, collecting fuel and water often without resources—a task that frequently invites further violations of her body and soul.19 There is no way, therefore, that the question of “rights” can be taken up overlooking the gender dimension.20 However, the irony is that since the presence of these women remains

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beyond the pale of law, even the women’s forums, what to say of state institutions and the law, do not take cognizance of their plight.21 Even when their presence is noticed, they are, more often than not, humiliated, abused, jailed and finally “pushed back.” Small wonder then that, many prefer to suffer in silence than be “pushed back” to the inferno from which they had come. Even when they are forced to go, many resolve to come back. Their common sense tells them to wait patiently till their presence is “naturalized,” and till they develop their own collective self-defense mechanism. To acquire an understanding of the dilemmas and strategies of the vulnerable migrant women, gathering testimonies is a more effective method than others. For, “testimony” here acquires a double connotation—it contains objective, public, judicial, and political elements as well as subjective, emotional, and private ones. It, thus, unites the two spheres of the public and the private and helps us understand the world of oppression, vulnerabilities, and strategies that migrants and refugees cope with and adopt. Protection of minorities has become a catchword for the liberal agenda in South Asia. Precisely because of its use as a slogan, we tend to ignore the complexities of it. Protection of minorities is impossible given the way the states of South Asia are developing both politically and economically, and assuming the form of “nationalizing states,” that is, states which are not sufficiently nations must develop into nations to gain legitimacy. Such states, therefore, go on producing, of necessity, majorities and minorities for they can survive only on the basis of a continuing and permanent agenda of building an “ethnic core” and thereby marginalizing the others. Riots, therefore, continue to appear seasonally, giving clarity to the agenda of nation-building. Migrants, often becoming the markers of the “minority niche” in a country, become in such a context, the targets of attacks, insults, torture, killings, and riots. They are not citizens. Hence, they can be allowed to die an ignoble and unnoticed death.22 Illegal migrants, therefore, have their own notion of “rights”: they negotiate for citizenship. They go to any political party which can help them with the issue.23 They hope to escape their destiny with the magic wand of citizenship. As Jawaharlal Nehru and Liaquat Ali recognized that minorities had rights to be mutually protected, as Mujib and Indira recognized that citizenship had to be granted to migrants (the ones who had entered before a specified period), the logic assumes an inexorable character. Unless, civil rights are well assured, freedom of movement guaranteed, and local community rights protected, the clamor for citizenship will continue to give birth to volatile reactions as happened in Assam. The entire Indian north-east is a grim reminder of the intractability of the problem.24 Migration in South Asia, it deserves repetition, defies the neoclassical world of equilibrium. But, most of all, it is as labor that an immigrant requires recognition. His/her labor rights are a crucial factor in the creation of a humane society. Here again, the first condition of ensuring the rights of the migrant labor is granting legal recognition to the situation, be it through a system of work permits, agreements or reciprocal provisions, the absurd illegality of the situation must be remedied. Labor rights and social security measures follow from that—a South Asian monitoring of the situation, a social charter 14/24

of immigrant labor rights, and their organization under the umbrella of the labor movement and legal protection can be the necessary steps that follow. Minimum wages, social security of workers in unorganized sectors, labor rights for women, and freedom of movement should not be viewed in isolation as just labor rights, but in association with the rights earlier spoken of. Finally, we cannot ignore the rights of the refugees to seek asylum and shelter. The Indian handling of the Tibetan refugees is a critical example. Though in the decades of fifties and sixties, and even up to the mid-seventies, Tibetan refugees often became pawns in the power game between India and China, and the Dalai Lama was allowed to use his stay and hospitality by the Indian side not always with circumspection, yet the strength of democratic awareness in India and official caution have kept the Tibet issue within manageable limits and have not allowed it to become a weapon for whipping up an anti-China hysteria. China too understands the fragility of the situation and has used circumspection in dealing with the issue of Tibetan refugees in India. If India and China in spite of the bitter memory of the 1962 war can handle the issue of refugees with understanding and flexibility, then why cannot the South Asian states do the same among themselves? It is true that refugees are often caught in the crossfire in the endemic low-key wars in South Asia, giving rise to what one observer has termed as the “insurgency crossfire” in the region.25 Accepting refugees is a form of diplomacy, practised with telling effect here. A radically clean break with the past is, therefore, called for. Only a South Asian protocol and covenant can establish and protect the rights of refugees whether in Pakistan or in India or Nepal or Bangladesh from different regions of South Asia stretching from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka to Myanmar.26 It is a delicate task. If shelter is to be given to refugees without using them for territorial interference, while persuading their home countries to take them back, the fundamental reality must first be recognized: in South Asia most major internal conflicts have external linkages. In other words, they defy “internal” and “external” markings, that is, they often need a bilateral and multilateral solution. Extension of “rights” calls for such an imperative. A nation by itself cannot and will not guarantee rights of migrants and refugees because it is the very process of nation-formation in South Asia which produces them. To go beyond the concept of the nation-state, therefore, becomes crucial in our understanding and efforts toward ensuring the rights of refugees and migrants in the region.27 There is no doubt that migrants and refugees will continue to be treated as unwanted guests by the ethnic core of the nation-state in South Asia in the process of defining itself through exclusionary practices. Its champions will argue that migrant labor brings down wage levels by competing with the local wage workers, that they put undue pressure on the social security provisions of the country, accentuate the trend of lumpenization and criminalization, that they have no loyalty to the country which provides succor and, hence, they deserve periodic beatings, warnings and sometimes even expulsion. The tragedy of these refugees and migrants is doubled because their home country, too, does not want them, treats their emigration in the spirit of “good

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riddance” which is as an opportunity for consolidation of the “nationalist core.” Migration, therefore, becomes linked with the emergence of the New Right, the increasing fascization of polity of both the host and the guest nation, the elaborate defense of persistent inequalities. Institutionalization of the rights of the migrant population is, therefore, not only necessary in their interests but also in the interests of peace and democracy. The very fact that the cause of peace, democracy, and justice can be seen to be served better by going beyond the idea of national frontiers shows the overvalued notions of security for what they are worth and strikes at the antiquated yet persistent nationalistic political structures in South Asia.28 Migrants and refugees always remain on the margins of the system they are there to be ignored, to be eternally removed to the periphery. But they are required to define the system, to define the core and the periphery of the nations in South Asia. The “illegal” migration makes possible a mode of political and economic management which exploits the difference between the legal and the illegal; migrant labor, therefore, becomes one of the principal forms of the investment of national boundaries with power. The notion of “rights,” therefore, is the notion of counter power; the granting of rights is in direct proportion to exercise of power, a critique of nationalist chauvinism in practice, and recognition of South Asia as an interlinked region from within.

Aliens and the Language of the Nation While writing this book I am aware of the controversial nature of the subject: transborder migration from Bangladesh to India produces not only nationalist disputes, that is, between India and Bangladesh, but also disputes within the country. It makes sparks fly between the right and the left, between “Hindu” perceptions and “Muslim” perceptions, between “fundamentalism” and “secularism,” “true secularism” and “false secularism,” and also between the “state” and the “unstable” sections of the population. Not only this, but I also became aware how much of this quarrel is misplaced since the disputes are only a desperate fight against the windmill, the much more fundamental reality of post colonial existence of South Asia. The treasures of conventional social sciences often seemed meager in this context as I found myself doubting at each step the validity of the received distinctions between refugees and migrants, legal and illegal immigrants, citizens of a nation and the aliens, old inhabitants and new settlers,29 pull and push, security and threats, and finally the empirical method and the subjectivity of the phenomenon. I have been wary of these which is why the discussion at certain point takes the form of a mere narrative leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions, while at others it turns to specific social positions to highlight the inadequacy of received categories. The entire study is, thus, both a report on transborder migration as well as an attempt at strategizing, marked by procedural quarrels and wrangles. I do not wish to anticipate the discussions here and trust that the readers will appreciate the problem at the end. 16/24

Movement of populations has been so obvious in world history that historians paid insufficient attention to it till recently. Overland migrations, population movements by seafaring people, pastoral and nomadic movements, sedentary-nomadic conflicts involving migration and other “self-directed” migrations were followed by “induced” ones. These latter mostly characterized an enormous variety of social subordination turning helots, women, serfs, debt peons, and laborers into commodities to keep the slave trade flourishing. Plantations, we have already mentioned, required different forms of migrant inputs, particularly with technological changes in production and developments in ocean shipping. Varying death rates in different places induced countries to move people from the “Old” world to the “New.” In other cases, migration was violently forced with high incidence of outright kidnappings or even murder. Using their labor power was less important; using them up physically was the system and the recruitment of the next lot upon the exhaustion of the preceding batch was the goal.30 Yet the history of the past 200 years, and particularly of the preceding 50 years, of this region has managed to appear so absolute that transborder and transnational migration causes enormous political controversies and makes passions run high. For, possibly, at no time in the history of our region at least, migration has been so closely linked to the issue of power, security and the destiny of a state. Herein lies the rub—migration is no longer simply an issue of demography or labor economics, it is now perceived as an issue concerning or threatening a nation’s survival/consolidation. To the migrant also, moving to another place is not just an economic choice, but also a political one.31 Not unexpectedly Bangladesh has become the land of emigrants in South Asia. The youngest of the nations, she had to face the fiercest of conflicts, upheavals and crises. Her political nationhood has been dominated by the educated middle class to a degree unrivalled in the rest of the region. Consequently, the disappointment, dejection, and the desire to escape the sorrows of a world of lost hopes are also the greatest there. She has become a nation of footloose people. To the leaders of state and keepers of the nation’s conscience, the exodus is an embarrassment to be philosophized, explained away or be glossed over in silence. The greater the distance from Dhaka, the greater is the urge to move. Migration has become the most emphatic question mark on the career of political nationhood in South Asia—for the nation which the moving population leaves as well as the nation which it enters. The travels, testimonies, reports and documents that follow in this account of transborder migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal are, thus, only a note on how the nation is being marginalized in South Asia. I can only beg the forgiveness of my elderly well-wisher who had suggested that the book be titled, Marginal Elements in the Nation. I could not defer to his judgment. Notes and References 1. Of late, various reports have appeared on the refugee and population displacement question in South Asia. See, for example, The Task Force Report on Migration, National Commission on Population, Nepal, Internal and International Migration in Nepal17/24

Summary and Recommendations (Kathmandu, 1983); Saleem Samad, “CHT: Refugee First, Peace Talks Later,” Dhaka Courier, 28 April 1995, p. 19; Soutik Biswas, “Braving the Wind,” India Today, 15 January 1995, pp. 46–47; “Bhutanese Refugees,” Refugees, 92, 1993; M. Sivasithamparam, “Refugees, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction in the North-East,” Social Justice, 105, pp. 8–10; Kenneth D. Bush, “Reading between the Lines: Intra-group Heterogeneity and Conflict in Sri Lanka,” Refugees, 13 (3), June 1993, pp. 15–22; Report of the British Refugee Council, “Coming Home,” The Sri Lankan Monitor, March 1995; and “UN Refugee Warning,” ibid., March 1996; on Afghan women refugees in Pakistan report by Avesha Khan, “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back,” Refugees, V2, 1995, pp. 21–25; C. R. Abrar, “Repatriation of Rohingya Refugees,” UNHCR report on Regional Consultation on Refugee and Migratory Movements, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 25–27 September 1995. 2. The periodic consultations initiated in South Asia by the UNHCR on cross-border population displacements recognize such need, though nothing concrete seems to come out of them. For example, the Regional Consultation on Refugee and Migratory Movements held in Colombo (25–27 September 1995) proposed: The term “Refugee” in the South Asian context will in addition to containing elements of the definition in the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol, and reaffirmed in principle in 1966 by the African Legal Consultative Committee (the Bangkok Principles), include among “Refugees,” persons who have fled their country or are unwilling to return to their country, because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have disturbed public order. (UNHCR Report, p. 11) On the other hand, we have examples of regional consultations on mechanisms of conflict prevention, management and resolution, where mass displacements causing conflicts or owing to conflicts do not come into focus as all, most surprisingly in case of Africa which has witnessed the tragedy in Rwanda. See, for example, Report of the Cairo Consultation on the OAU Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution, cosponsored by International Peace Academy and the Organization of African Unity with the support of the Government of the Arab Republic of Egypt (New York, International Peace Academy, 1996). 3. Not unnaturally these migrants are today called “environmental refugees” and “development refugees.” See, for example, the various reports in the journal of the UNHCR, Refugees. Some of these may be cited here: Susan Forbes Martin, “The Inhospitable Earth,” 89, 1992, pp. 13–15; Hugh Hudson, “Money Trees in Pakistan,” ibid., p. 17; George Lombard, “Cyclone Alert,” 3, 1994, pp. 18–19; J. F. Durieux, “The Hidden Face of the Refugees Problem,” 1, 1996, pp. 3–9. See also, “Sources of City Growth,” The State of World Population, 1996, UNFPA, 1996, pp. 35–39. 4. Partha Ghosh has examined in detail the relation between population movements and inter-state conflicts in South Asia and has argued that the demographic variable has 18/24

become crucial in the inter-state conflicts. My aim has been to show, however, that population movements cannot be understood in the framework of conflict-resolutions in inter-state relations in South Asia. See Partha S. Ghosh, “Population Movements and Inter State Conflicts in South Asia,” in Kurt R. Spillmann and Giinter Bacher (eds), Environmental Crisis—Regional Conflicts and Ways of Cooperation (Bern: Swiss Peace Foundation, 1995), pp. 92–109. 5. On a brief description of these 12 phases (cases), Myron Weiner, “Rejected Peoples and Unwanted Migrants in South Asia,” Economic and Political Weekly, 21 August 1993, pp. 1737–1746. 6. For a historical understanding of phases of migration and how these phases through their coexistence have shaped the history and identity of an area (people[s]), I have gained much from Neal Ascherson’s Black Sea (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). I am indebted to Barun De for suggesting this book to me and allowing me access to it. 7. Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas (Oxford University Press, 1974). 8. On this see, S. Collinson, Europe and International Migration (London: Pinter, 1993). 9. This is from a perceptive lecture by Barun De (unpublished). The veteran essayist, Annada Sankar Roy speaks in the same vein, “Everywhere Infiltration–Is It a Fear Only of the Hindus of India”; “Anuprabesh Sarbattraiee Ghatche–Bhoy Ki Sudhu Bharater Hinduder”, Ananda Bazar Patrika (Calcutta), 18 January 1996. 10. Barry James, “Doors are Tightly Shut on the Asylum Route to Europe,” International Herald Tribune, 25 November 1995. 11. R. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation. Tribalism and Disease are rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet,” The Atlantic the Twenty-first Century (New York: Charles Scribner, 1993); P. Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-first Century (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 35. 12. UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees, 1995 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 247. 13. Talking of “the need for proactive policies,” it is interesting to note that advices are often conflicting. It has been suggested in response to the question, “What steps will the High Commissioner and her staff have to take to ensure that UNHCR retains the support of key donors like the US government?” I would urge UNHCR to continue to pursue its mandate, which is not development, but assistance to refugees—and not to become involved in purely development-related projects in the name of refugee prevention UNHCR can play an important role by 19/24

continuing its excellent early warning and monitoring work in order to provide information to the international community that can alert it to work in advance of the development of critical refugee situations. This excerpt is form Republican Benjamin A. Gilman’s essay, “The View from Washington,” Refugees, IV (102), p. 23. This suggestion appeared under the heading “The High Cost of Caring.” However, a report by the UN Secretary General himself speaks of the strong connections between development and migration flows. See, International Migration Flows and Development, Report by the Secretary General of the United Nations, the Economic and Social Council, UN, New York, Document Reference E/1995/69, 14 June 1995. This report speaks of the need to: 1. identify ways to encourage receiving countries to commit themselves to protecting the economic and social rights of legal migrants; 2. develop ways of assuring the application and reinforcement of existing rights of migrants; 3. draft policies and strategies for encouraging the integration of labor migrants; 4. design measures aimed at improving economic cooperation between migrantsending and receiving countries and at increasing development aid to the former; 5. plan strategies tailored at preventing forced migration or attenuating its nefarious consequences; and 6. And finally, impress upon the governments that there was the need for efficient measures that reinforce and facilitate the procedures for the return of temporary migrants to their place of origin. 14. On the relation of the issue of transborder mass displacements to the question of human rights, one can consult the detailed survey in the UNHCR annual report. The State of World’s Refugees, 1995 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Chapter 2, pp. 57–96. 15. For a detailed study, see, Premachandra Athukorala, Statistics on Asian Labor Migration: Review of Sources, Methods and Problems (New Delhi: ILO-ARTEP, 1993). It contains a detailed bibliography on international labor migration within Asia. According to Athukorala’s study, based on the data provided by the overseas labor administration of various countries, between 1970 and 1991 Bangladesh sent 147.1, India 117.5, Indonesia 126.2, Pakistan 147.3, Philippines 701.8, Sri Lanka 65.0, and workers (Table A2.1 in the book); his study contains other significant figures also. The undocumented labor migration (that is, total emigrant workers minus workers registered with the Bureau of Foreign Employment) in Sri Lanka in only two months (November-December, 1991) was 12,420 and the rate of undocumented migration in that period was 56 per cent (Table A2.3 in the book). The documented labor outflow figures of Bangladesh and India to West Asia in 1991 were 144,226 and 139,220 respectively. From Indonesia the figure in 1991 was 121,902; from Pakistan in the same year the registered labor outflow to countries of Asia was 147,093 and from the 20/24

Philippines it was 435,417, the relevant figure for Sri Lanka was 62,592 and for Thailand it was 79,669 (Tables A2.4–A2.10 in the book). From Bangladesh 58,615 unskilled workers went outside on contract in 1991 out of the total emigrant workers numbering 147,131: from India, 58,779 unskilled workers went abroad in 1990 out of 143,565; from Indonesia out of a total of 126,245 emigrant workers 64,535 workers went for domestics services; from Pakistan in 1991, out of a total of 142.818 emigrant workers 60,501 were unskilled; from Sri Lanka out of a total of 42,624 the number of unskilled workers was 8,884 (Tables A2.11–A2.16 in the book). As regards remittances, again some figures are significant. In case of Indonesia with regard to remittances, out of a total of US$218,105, the countries of Asia contributed US$217,082; in case of Pakistan, out of a total of US$1,088, the Middle East contributed US$724; in Sri Lanka, Middle East contributed 8.088 million rupees out of a total of 18,120 million rupees; and finally in Thailand in 1980 the total figure was 5,680.4 million Baht out of which Japan and Singapore contributed 2,336.3 out of a total outside remittance of 24,297.0 million Baht in 1990 (Tables A2.18–A2.22 in the book). 16. Hasan Gardezi, The Political Economy of International Labor Migration (Lahore: Gautam, 1995); for a general discussion, Alejandrao Portes and John Walton, Labor, Class and the International System (New York: Academic Press, 1981), particularly pp. 25–33. 17. Charles Till, “Transplanted Networks” in Virgina Yans-Mclaughlin (ed.), Immigration Reconsidered-History, Sociology and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 79–95. Stated briefly, the term may be described as an anthropological, economic and sociological notion which suggests that various social networks are transplanted with the arrival of new migrants. These networks in turn become crucial in the formation of defense-mechanisms for the new migrants and in attracting them to the old ones. 18. On this see, for example, Inger Agger’s report, “Abused Refugee Women: Trauma and Testimony,” Refugees, 14 (7), December 1994, pp. 19–22. 19. “Women as Refugees,” report in the Pakistan Human Rights Commission’s quarterly Newsletter, 2 (2), 1991, p. 20; see also the UNICEF report, State of the World Children, 1996 (New York: UN 1997), pp. 40–41. 20. The Canadian Council for Refugees has 12 recommendations on gender persecution that include right of the women refugee claimants to make refugee claims independently of their spouses and the demand that visa offices should allow applications on wellfounded fear of spousal abuse, from which the government of the state of origin is either unwilling or unable to offer protection. Note by David Matas, the president of the council, in Tribune des Droits Humains, Hiver 1993, p. 32. 21. Inger Agger had noted “that for many refugee women, it comes as a surpise that they have any rights at all. They are surprised to discover that the international community has accepted their right to a dignified life. Such revelations may be the first step in a 21/24

consciousness-raising process, or a process of post-traumatic therapy,” Refugees, 14 (7), December 1994, p. 19. 22. See the report by David Levinson, “Ethnic Conflict and Refugees,” Refugees, August 1993, pp. 4–9. 23. For a case study, see, Sharat G. Lin and Madan C. Paul, “Bangladeshi Migrants in Delhi: Social Insecurity, State Power, and Captive Vote Banks,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 27 (1), January–March 1995, pp. 3–20. 24. Sanjoy Hazarika, “Bangladesh and Assam: Land Pressures, Migration and Ethnic Conflict,” Occasional Paper 3, Joint Project of the University of Toronto and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; see, also, J. B. Bhattacharya (ed.), Social Tension in North East India (Calcutta: Research India, 1982). 25. Subir Bhaumik, “Insurgency as Diplomacy in Post Colonial South Asia,” in Ranabir Samaddar (ed.) Cannons into Ploughshares—Militarization and Prospects of Peace in South Asia (New Delhi: Lancer, 1995), pp. 113–132. 26. The Regional Conference on Forced Population Movements and Humanitarian Crisis in South Asia, held in Kathmandu, 29–30 January 1996, declared: 1. The governments of South Asia must redouble efforts to develop their economies so that the mass movement of populations across frontiers is reduced. The humanitarian crisis that exists on such a large scale in South Asia can only be ameliorated by sound and responsible governance. Until such time, population movements will continue to be a source of instability in the region. 2. That the governments must provide humane treatment to populations which are already displaced and living in another country. The right to life and livelihood of these populations must be respected even though they may be on foreign soil. 3. That the felt need to return migrants to their home countries should not be used as a means to get rid of population groups which may already have, by view of their hard work and longevity on a soil, acquired a tight to live on the land. The rigidities of nationality laws must be read in tandem with the need for humanitarian concern of those who will be shifted. 4. That the governments of the region are to be asked to desist from participating in the forced movement of people from their own territories to the territories of adjoining countries or third countries. As there is cause for genuine concern that such movements can be the result of political expediency on the part of the government concerned, any move to send away so-called “foreigners” must only be carried out within the strict bounds of international supervision. 5. As for the populations which have been forced to leave their countries of domicile due to governmental action, the countries concerned are asked to come to a decision under the rules and practices of international laws. On the question of the Bhutanese refugees presently numbering more that 87,000 in the 22/24

UNHCR camps in south-east Nepal, the Conference decided that there were three parties to the affair: Bhutan, as the country of origin; India, as the country of transit and Nepal, as the host country to the refugees. It is clear, therefore, that all three countries have a responsibility to resolve the problem. The first step toward resolving the crisis will be to determine the identity of the refugees and achieve a status quo ante as far as their domicile is concerned. 27. The experience of Africa may be useful. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) Convention on Refugees was signed in 1969. Now observers are pointing out that the classic definition of refugees ignores Africa’s more than 12 million internally displaced and destitute persons wandering across borders and are asking: (a) to what extent the OAU Convention relates to the real problem of Africa’s forced migratory patterns today?; (b) given the fact that Africa’s refugee problem has escalated ever since the adoption of the Convention in 1969, why have some member states of the OAU failed to ratify this important legal instrument?; (c) for those states that have ratified the Convention, what difficulties do they face in implementing the provision?; (d) is there a need therefore to review and update the Convention to reflect the realities of the time? Indeed these questions can be raised regarding the formal legal instruments of the United Nations also particularly the 1951 UN Convention and its 1967 Protocol. See, Chris J. Bakwesegha, “Forced Migration in Africa and the OAU Convention,” in Howard Adeltrwn and John Sorcnson (eds), African Refugees-Development Aid and Repatriation (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994), p. 6. 28. It is noticeable that political scientists discussing population flows in South Asia think only in the dominant framework of security and stability, the political role of the immigrants and the imperatives of an institutional framework that will “contain” and “tackle” the “problem.” Rights do not enter the agenda at all. For example, see, Myron Weiner’s essay, “Rejected Peoples and Unwanted Migrants in South Asia,” Economic and Political Weekly, 1993. 29. The most conspicuous example of the limits of such distinction and its complexities is that of the Muhajirs of Sind. On this, see the essay by Hamza Alavi, “Social Bases of Ethnicity,” in S. Haroon Ahmed (ed.), Contemporary Conflicts (Karachi: Pakistan Psychiatric Society, Sindh Chapter, 1991); Oskar Verkaaik, A People of Migrants Ethnicity, State and Religion in Karachi (Amsterdam: Centre for Asian Studies, 1994); H. Donnan and P. Werbner (eds), Economy and Culture in Pakistan—Migrants and Cities in a Muslim Society (London: Macmillan, 1991). A related issue, on which the dictates of space disallow discussion at length, is the possibility of a people of migrants turning into a nation in South Asia-particularly Muslim migrants who may remember that the Prophet himself was a refugee, a migrant; that the Muslim calendar is dated from his hijru (immigration) to a place of refuge and that those who migrated with him, the Mujhrjirin, became the core and inspiration of the Medina state. But having negated a nation, can they create another? See Ayman Ahwal, “A Nation in Exile-Tackling the

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Problems of Refugees,” in Merryl Wyn Davis and Adrian Khalil Pasha (eds), Beyond Frontiers: Islam and Contemporary Needs (London: Mansell Publishers, 1989), pp. 119–134. 30. For a survey of the literature on migration in the tropical world, see, William H. McNeill, “Human Migration in World Perspective,” Population and Development Review, 10, 1984, pp. 1–18; Philip D. Curtin, “Migration in the Tropical World,” in V. Yans-McLaughlin (ed), Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology and Politics (1992) n. 16, pp. 21–36; Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). 31. The political nature of the decision to migrate is often underplayed in the literature on the subject. But contemporary reports make the political imperatives behind transborder migration of our times clear. See, for example, a report by Elizabeth Bryaru on Haiti, “An Island on the Edge,” The Earth Times, 30 June–14 July, 1996, pp. 7–8.

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The Nation Form 7 Legality, Illegality, and Reasons of State

Transposed Categories I found myself standing baffled, in the early winter dusk of November, on the dusty road that divides the two villages. The half-constructed border road which led to the yetto-come-up fence could be seen through the bushes and the trees. I managed to stray at times onto the other side of the road. It was a village road, nothing more, full of dust with huts lined on either side. Markers had been placed at the distance of a few hands each. The moment I strayed from our side of the road, my companion reminded me gently that I was on Bangladesh’s soil. The middle of the road was supposed to be the dividing line between the two countries. People living in the huts peered out at me— women through the small windows, men in shirt sleeves leaning out of their yards. They had sensed the truth that I was a visitor to the border. I must have looked like an idiot to them or the typical visitor from the town in the spirit of a tourist “doing Malda” or wandering into Kaliachak for “seeing the border.” With men and women staring at me, the alien face of a Border Security Force (BSF) jawan with an intriguing smile accompanying me, and my companion nudging me from behind to point out when was I on their soil and when on ours or as he said on “Indian” ground—I truly was baffled. I looked an idiot. Back in Malda, I had met a high-ranking border security official and had tried to get him to brief me adequately, when he had asked in exasperation if anyone ever knew where exactly the border was. “We have drawn a line on paper,” he said, “but where is that line on the ground?” In the days to come, I was to hear the words “on ground situation,” “on ground reality” repeated incessantly. And now in Charianantapur, I could appreciate the wisdom of the security officer as I tried to see the border, sense it, find it. It would have been difficult to imagine any such thing had it not been for the small BSF border outpost, which remains cut off from the rest of the district for close to three months in an year when it could be reached only by wading through almost knee-deep water or mud and slush. Except for the presence of the BSF nothing could indicate to a visitor that this was part of the “border area,” where a village might come to life only after the sun sets. Border is sometimes, thus, literally invented, as it was being recreated and reenacted when I had reached there to “see” the border. But, then, was there nothing formally visible as the border in Charianantapur? Was it just a line on paper and not one on the ground? As I stood there watching people watching me from the Rajshahi side and again on my way back after the dusk fell, I 1/10

realized how the border had been rendered into a normal thing, in other words, marginalized in the minds of those living close to it. They had resigned themselves to living with it—just another problem to overcome. There was a dramatic increase in human activity after the sunset as cartloads of goods and vegetables began to cross the border (they say, the cross-border trade commences in the evening). Border was nothing exceptional in their lives. Even if it was, they had found ways to tackle it. Border was legal, to cross it or ferry goods without due leave was illegal. But there were ways to normalize such a situation. In other words, the illegal no longer remained exceptional if it could be adapted as part of the normal. The way the people had looked at me that evening just a yard or two away made it clear that I had walked into a twilight zone of legality and illegality, exceptionality, and normality. This should have been a situation with a difference, but ways had been found to make it normal whereby the exceptional, that is, the border had been turned into routine and, thus, marginalized or rendered redundant. It was I, an intruder, who was provoking things; my presence was proving that something was abnormal here. My presence could possibly be resented. If not, it had to be watched curiously at least. As my study on transborder migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal progressed, I realized that ours was a journey into the domain of illegality, insecurity, and evasion. The discursive character of the situation determined the text of our enquiry and the method of our progress. Charianantapur is like any one of the few hundred villages on the border. The presence of the border outpost (BOP) marks it out but nothing else. Charianantapur and Duishatabigha are close; indeed so close as to be almost twin villages. Jaminpur is on the Rajshahi side. Charianantapur is the village panchayat, which has under its jurisdiction one or two other villages like Mahabatpur which is again separated from the Bangladesh village Kiranganj just by another dusty village track. Before I had left for Charianantapur, a district official at the Malda collectorate had named certain villages to me, which would have remained tucked away into the safety of obscurity, but for the border. His list, recited with a half-suppressed smile, had included names like Shahilapur, Naoda Binpara, Sukhnagar, Naldahari, Gopalnagar, Smasani, Mahabatpur, Duishatabigha, Charianantapur, and others. I had beer, told how transborder trade was a routine economic activity in these places and crossing the border, again, a routine movement, and I had been told all this in a tone that made every villager a suspect, every hut a center of border trade, and the entire zone of Kaliachak III an area marked out from main district of Malda by that intriguing thing— the “border.” Walking through the settlement(s), accompanied by the local BSF officerin-charge, a Sikh from the Punjab, I kept my eyes focused on every face—was he a potential migrant or a potential transborder trader? How were they looking at the official’s face? Evidently, his presence too had been “normalized.” He kept on telling me as we walked at times on the Bangladesh side, in that earthy language which only his origins could effect, that this was a different land and that the BSF sentries had to be posted as densely as banana trees to check infiltration. The helplessness of the commandant was evident. The situation was illegal, but not 2/10

unnatural. In this convoluted milieu I soon learnt how fast categories could change. The collectorate official had warned me of abnormality, here it was normal; the illegal meant the routine; infiltration was migration; smuggling was trade; these were less of Indian villages and more of border villages. Evidently, I was faced with a situation of moral economy, whose codes are respected for they hold aloft a political economy. I was trying to break that code and hence was an outsider to that world of the border and of the border villages and the transborder life which it brought into existence. It signified a few more things more. Besides signifying the twilight zone of legality and illegality, it indicated different notions of trade, of inter village relations, affinitive ties like clan linkages, the multiplying effect of the presence of a state agency like the BSF, the consequences of the separation between border areas or villages and others not considered so. In other words, it was a strategic positioning on the “threshold.” It meant trying to discover other existences that might cut across national boundaries, other kinds of ontology besides the national and nationalized ones. The situation ruled out a simple study on migration on which scores of sociological and economic studies must already have appeared. Could we make a few settlement studies in the anthropological manner observing as a participant the lives of the migrants? Yet, it would perhaps be inadequate because the issue at stake was much greater—even if we discount, for the present, the bias inherent in the participant observation technique. How could we get enough legal information on something basically illegal, something “subterranean?” The information we gathered was most likely to be only half the picture—the interlocutor would be inconsistent, the sources often bound to be suspect if not dubious, and any overt attempt to intervene in the form of an enquiry almost certain to drive the situation underground. What comes through as a result is then less of a full mosaic, but more the picture of a broken border—a chiaroscuro of movements of peoples, communities, the labor market, and the play of different eco-agricultural regions. What follows, therefore, is a fragmented picture—an anthology of various existences. The accounts that follow present only the hazy beginnings of a much-needed debate. Yet these various reports, I can only humbly say, will suggest the need for prolonged serious enquiry into the dynamics of nationhood, economy and community life. The disjointed scenarios of population movements are not the quintessential anthropological or economic studies. They are poised as elements for further analysis of the political nation in South Asia.

Reasons of State But let us presently return to the question of legality versus illegality that had permeated and predicated our enquiry, in other words, the question of reasons of state enveloping the social reality or migration. But as I have already suggested, these reasons of state do not exist per se; though they can be dug out and found from official correspondence, statements, enquiries and declared policies as social reality, they remain enmeshed in ways in which people live on the border. 3/10

In other words, if reasons of state predicate people’s lives, the people in no small measure force the state to enunciate its reasons in a particular way. The questions of legality/illegality, therefore, operate in a region away from the life lived on the border. Such a perspective or framework of analysis can only produce a particular type of interpretation and information networks, viz., those known as reasons of state. These reasons signify particular relations that obtain in the over determination of state, territory, and people. When we first discussed the possibilities of such a research, the question most often raised concerned the possibility of gathering adequate data. People did certainly forward the simplistic explanation that politicians encourage infiltration across the border. What for? The answer was always the same: for votes. Hence, it was said that politicians, and specially ruling politicians, would not like such a probe. And they were likely to order the administration officials to remain tightlipped if asked about the problem. What could we do in such a situation? We decided to choose certain areas, consider them as samples, conduct certain enquiries through questionnaires, analyze the information, and set these soft data against some hard data like district/subdivision/thana/mauza population figures, ration card figures, electoral list figures, figures of land sale in a decade, and so on. To be sure, in selecting samples, we would first check the comparative population growth rates within West Bengal of area divisions from district downwards for selecting the relevant samples. Yet again, we would remain cautious regarding representation of a variety of categories like religion, gender, occupation, etc. Only religion could pose a problem since census figures do not record that variable. But with a bit of luck and fortitude, we could solve the problem by looking at primary school enrolment figures where religious identity is noted down and as even the poor send their sons/daughters to primary schools, even if for an year only, we felt confident of overcoming official silence. It is not that this method of generating information on migration, apart from being an intricate statistical exercise, has proved wrong. But we were surprised at the official eagerness to discuss the issue. Rarely were officials reluctant; indeed, they gave their time and assistance in many ways. Security agencies, whose expertise lay in guns and ammunition, wanted information from us and were eager to exchange their information with ours. It was a zero sum situation. Whatever little I would find out and write would enlighten the state puzzled with the nebulous nature of transborder migration. In spite of myself, my enquiry would become a part of the statist project of producing information. Nothing could bring this reality so vividly to my awareness as the day when I managed to visit a sub-jail in West Bengal. I had been informed the previous day that 37 nationals of Bangladesh had been held in that jail for the past three months, that their detention period was over, and they could be handed over to the security forces any day to be “pushed back.” The official in-charge readily agreed to allow me to meet these interns. I was particularly interested in meeting the women since the security officials everywhere had rigidly denied any largescale cross-border trafficking in women to West Bengal and beyond from Bangladesh. I 4/10

also wanted to find out what the detained women knew or thought of the employment opportunities for female labor in the area. It was close to evening, the lock up time when we arrived. We could talk with only six or seven persons, of them two women. The reasons cited by them for coming to India were as many as the number of interviewees. Indeed each cited a different reason. The women were candid. The explanations given ranged from a man’s coming back from Delhi, leaving his family there, to meet his ailing parents in Bogra, to going to Gayadhum on pilgrimage. The women said that they were being sold. But that is another subject which we can recount later. However, the next day, we met the rest again; we found that the diversity in information had totally disappeared. Everyone recited almost the same story—that they had been caught because of petty trading in salt. Even when a jail warder who knew them well, on account of his duty hours in such a small jail, barked out at a particular point that the man in question was not telling the truth, the person concerned insisted on the veracity of his account. Again, even the women were not candid. We found that we had driven the situation underground. The preceding night, they seemed to have decided upon telling nothing beyond the stereotype. The investigation had become a part of the official discourse on migration termed as “infiltration.” A study on migration in the existing milieu had become a study on infiltration and hence they could not cooperate in such a study. We found both Hindus and Muslims unwilling to talk much, though the Hindus could possibly be termed a little more willing. Mr L. K. Advani, the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) leader had on December 8, 1994, staged a huge rally near the Bongaon–Petrapole border protesting against infiltration. That very day we were hundreds of miles away from Bongaon, talking to a community of potters in a small municipal town of north Bengal. The potters had come over during the eighties from Thakurgaon district of Bangladesh and had managed to survive the initial years of hardships. They had not, however, come together as a group. Those who had come first had, after some scouting, selected the site and settled there. Gradually, others of the same or nearby villages came and with the help of their compatriots they too had settled in the area. The village was now a thriving potters’ colony, the skill had survived and the occupation had, thus, been picked up; a local market for clay products been found and the occupation continues. Most of the villagers are voters, some also have ration cards. They are Hindus, yet, almost, each one of them when asked the year of his arrival in India, had mentioned early or mid-seventies. The Indira-Mujib agreement, making 1971 the cut off year for accommodating the migrants of Bangladesh as Indian citizens and also the loose border situation during the Mujib years, had become the marker of security and legality. The migrants could say, therefore, that they had come around mid-seventies at most but they could certainly not mention the eighties. The state had granted legality to migration in a certain period, through an international agreement which in the end became a catalyst for merging the illegal into the legal to gain legitimacy. Thus, reasons of state had produced the convolution. There was a second dimension, which I term as the nationalist lament. The Oxford Dictionary defines “lament” as elegy, dirge, a mourning for some passing (or past) reality, a consciousness of something 5/10

gone. Whatever may be the actual figures of migration across the border, the reality of transborder human flow has been so perennial and persistent and, hence, so overwhelming and real that the state has had to succumb to it. Laws and legal practices have bowed down before this reality. The state realizes that this is not only the territorial border, but the margin of the nation too. The nation cannot be imposed on the villages here—even on bigger areas, it cannot be clamped. Either the glorious nation is today a thing of the past along the border or this is a border village, thana, subdivision, district, and province which does not respect the nation. In the eyes of the state, the border, thus, threateningly expands/shrinks inward and the nation becomes an object of elegy or the subject that laments unto itself.1 This is what I call the nationalist lament pervading the reasons of state. I remember the commandant of a crucial sector who deplored the fact that “people here do not have the feelings of nationalism so that they would point out or tell us who the outsiders are.” The commandant was a graying old man with Spartan habits, who (I was told that he was impeccably honest and exasperatingly kind hearted) looked more like a friar than the commandant of a guntoting force. He felt the need to immediately explain himself, “We have left them (the people on the border) to fend for themselves and now they are doing exactly that.” The commandant was not only justifying himself and the state, but also the people of the border region who suffer from lack of roads, schools, and other means of decent livelihood and, hence, look to transborder communication as a means of support. The government does not exist for them so much as the reality of the border. Hence, “only when they feel threatened (by people on the other side), do they speak out.” The lamentation was more explicit in Hili, the town on the zero line in South Dinajpur district, where the security forces seemed to be keeping our people under guard rather than guarding Hili from infiltrators from across the border. The security personnel guard the market area, crisscrossed with lanes and by-lanes—in almost every lane stands a guard with an impassive face for he expects nothing but animosity, reluctance, or at best indifference from the local inhabitants. As we alighted from a car near the railway track that passes through Hili from Rangpur to Khulna via Kusthia, the security personnel showed us the markers along which the border was to be fenced. The local townsmen sitting under a tree grumbled loudly, saying that they would allow the fence to be constructed, that they would cut it if necessary, even though they be beaten or shot to death for it. The security officer was visibly embarrassed. Initially, he tried to reason with them. The interlocutor shot out During 1971, we had been evacuated to Balurhat [the district town]. Why did the government bring us back here? Throughout these long years we have traded; in Balurhat we could have perhaps learnt something. Now back in Hili, suddenly the government says, the border will be fenced. What shall we do now? The officer present there could not find a suitable reply. Only his lament could he heard as he led us to the car in a huff, “The government has decided on fencing for your own good. You do not understand. None of the two neither the government nor the people seem to understand each other. There is a strange situation in Bengal. Considerations of 6/10

patriotism seem so absolutely absent here.” I was to hear such mournful complaint, again and again. People do not respect security officers; they do not salute the flag flying near the security camps in border villages. Out of this lament has come a reluctant acknowledgement that people on the border cannot be prevented from interacting with each other, that trade will continue, that brutal methods against the migrants will incur severe displeasure on this side. Hence a method other than merely policing the border has to be found to tackle the problem. The state has indeed decided on such a policy; not on one policy, in fact, but three: (a) total demarcation of the border, (b) issuing of photo-identity cards to villagers near the border and (c) border-fencing. Truly, a deadly combination. But I must say, in spite of these decisions, the nationalist lament conveys a sense of acknowledging the inevitable. Had the question involved only migration of Hindus from Bangladesh, an unalloyed fascist sense could have raised the nationalist spirit. But as the figures indicate, Hindu and Muslim migration is almost equal in proportions though different in pattern; more Hindus migrate permanently while the seasonal migration brings more Muslims. Poor Muslims also come to settle down permanently, but most come only seasonally, and thus the state cannot act as the protector of a Hindu nation against a country bent on pushing out its Hindu citizens only. In BOP after BOP we were shown “figures of apprehension and push back” over the years, registers full of records of the addresses and names of those apprehended and their home districts in Bangladesh. The persistent migration of the rural and urban poor irrespective of gender, caste, or religion, forces the security personnel at the border to become more flexible, accept the border as “routine,” and unofficially allow transborder trade and movement only on a “small” scale, but on a continuous basis. These two characteristics of the state’s attitude to migration from Bangladesh create the third dimension of, or to be more precise, the third reason of state. So paramount has become the concern with the number of migrants from across the border that all other important questions about the issue have either vanished or been eclipsed by it. Thus, as we started on our study, the ghost of quantity and numbers decided to follow us doggedly. Officials, jawans, BDOs, election officials, district magistrates, researchers— no category of people was exempt from this—continued to ask us: How many do you think have come across? Do you think it will be one crore (10 million)? Oh, the BSF says nothing. How many do you think is the real figure? Surely, Hindus are coming over, do you find many Muslims amongst the newcomers? The number game, thus, went on, mystifying the whole issue of migration. Ironically, thus, whereas numbers were supposed to demystify the phenomenon, they ended up mystifying it even further, so much so that crucial enquiries regarding the various links between the political, geographic, economic, and sociological aspects that combined to marginalize the nation remained buried beneath the debris of numerical exercises, that is, the number game. Any kind of meaningful dialogue between the two nations on migration is, 7/10

consequently, ruled out. The state of India keeps on calculating, speculating, declaring; the state of Bangladesh keeps denying any unofficial migration, that is, “officially” denying that “unofficially” any coming over is taking place. Invariably, such denial, as I remember the face of a highly placed representative of the state of Bangladesh denying migration in course of a speech, was accompanied by a suppressed smile—the smile conveying recognition and truth of the allegations along with the helplessness in either preventing or admitting migration and the fact that Indians knew it too. This diplomatic game of admission and non-admission by both sides, we must remember, is not without meaning. It serves to keep alive the script of a nationalist dramaturgy despite the script writer being aware all the while that the nation is marginal to those coming over as well as to those on this side who tolerate this coming over, that is, those “on the border.” But why this total obsession with quantity and numbers? One obvious answer is that the Indian State must know, must keep itself informed, of the growth of population, the number of mouths to feed, the number of heads to shelter, the number of bodies to clothe, the number of workers to employ. A little charitable, but we can grant the state its welfare concerns. However, I suspect that beneath the welfare concerns, the state is faced with a no less serious issue—the continuing effects of partition of the subcontinent. Partition through the past 65 years has produced a grotesque reality in the border zone. Village after village on the border on both sides has been transformed from being mixed villages into exclusive Hindu/Muslim solidarities. They are now what the colonial administrator McAlpin (1909) would have called “broken villages.” Caste solidarities have formed anew, like Namasudra villages and settlements coming up in 24 Parganas (North), Nadia, and Chai-Mandal solidarities on the Malda border. Many Muslims who had gone over to “that side” after 1947 have come back or members of the next generation have returned. Around holy places and shrines in places like Basirhat, Ghutiari Shari, Purnea–Islampur, Murshidabad, new settlements have come up along the roads, railway tracks and other villages. Old bustling market towns like Hingalganj in Basirhat subdivision of 24 Parganas (North) have become ghost towns after being delinked from Satkhira (in the erstwhile Khulna district, now a separate district) or new boom centers like Chotomollakhali in Canning circle in 24 Parganas (South) or Hili in south Dinajpur have appeared. People living in the border areas insist on informal border trade, while the security forces are equally insistent on stopping it which often results in unfortunate deaths of villagers and sometimes also of the security personnel. Partition has, thus, produced around the border what Jean Francois Bayart (1993) has called, “the politics of the belly.” And finally, even a district police chief like the superintendent of police (SP) we met in Malda, talks of the unequal levels of social security system like public distribution system (PDS) in border districts of the two sides (like Sathira/24 Parganas [N&S], Rajshahi/Malda, Jhinaidaha/Nadia, Thakurgaon/Uttar Dinajpur) and, thus, admits that water must flow to this die. But if economic compulsions are considered primary, what remains of the legitimacy of partition? Partition must perform the legitimating function in the state system in South Asia. But the relatively nonreligious nature of migration undermines that. Thus, the 8/10

state must know, how many Muslims have come over and how many Hindus. The census does not allow that; so the state has to enquire through other means (like school records, the BSF records, immigration records). Even “radical” researchers fall into the trap by enquiring along these lines. The state finds itself fighting a battle of odds against powerful popular perceptions. It must, thus, remain knowledgeable of the various dimensions of migration. Partition is, thus, recreated again and again and the state has to live with it. What then is the state to do? It knows legality produces illegality; reality produces nationalist lament; quantitative search produces mystery; welfare measures produce even more migration; border produces subversion; and partition produces its illegitimacy. And, ironically, no one more than the state is aware of the strength of popular perceptions, of unofficial linkages across the border, of the inexorable nature of economics, and of the geography of the terrain. In office after office, the security officers spread before me boundary maps of different sectors—I am reminded immediately of one as I write these lines; sheet no. 249 (West Dinajpur sector, India–Bangladesh boundary map, survey 1983–1984)—and then helplessly pointed out how plots of land are interlocked and entangled, somewhere the bazaar is ours, the railway station theirs, a huge water body intervening on an undulating expanse, etc. Geography, not merely in terms of the physical terrain, but in terms of settlements like villages, small towns, transport networks, and roadways, challenge the partition and the state system upholding it. And the state knows geography has only strengthened popular perceptions. In Islampur, Malda, and as far as Cooch Behar, we met migrants, free or in captivity, who want to go to different and faraway places like Delhi, Punjab, Haryana and have come from far off places because Katihar is there. If you can reach Katihar somehow, the world of India is open before you. Those legendary rail tracks can take you afar. Thus, pitted against popular perceptions, built on “accessibility from both sides” and “the psychology of a free border,” the state decides on fencing. Is fencing then more a psychological ploy or the ultimate attempt to stop migration? Seemingly, a mix of both, only the history of fenced territory in Bengal can tell us what it will ultimately be. But I dare say, the outcome will be no less full of tensions, conflicts and as bloody, as guarding the territory has become today. When I raised the fear of such a prospect, I was told again in a resigned tone that the question of fencing involves the question of national security and compared to national security, every other issue is secondary. I could not argue or tell them that the genesis of the fencing program was in the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) agitation in Assam and not in any threat from outside. In any case, the BSF check posts increased, patrolling force per unit of area was enlarged, funds for border roads increased, border was thoroughly delimited except in certain sections, and an enthusiastic central administration leading a reluctant state administration now tries to stop seasonal influx of migrant labor in places like Lalgola, where triple cropping has become common; in Basirhat, where migrant labor forms a major part of the workforce in brickfields and shrimp-cleaning units; in south Bhutan where orchards require labor; in Teesta project area and betel farms in north Bengal and to the great metropolis of Calcutta where if not for any other purpose, for the oldest 9/10

profession in history, female labor finds a place. Fences will go up, but will they be able to stop the return of the native? Will it not add all the more to the mythology of migration—a myth already impenetrable? States in South Asia have gone mad over migration, refugees, exiles, and migrants. The state system is being subverted at will along India–Bangladesh border, Bhutan–India– Nepal border, India–Pakistan border in Kashmir, India–Burma border, and Burma– Bangladesh border. And as I write these lines, news reaches us about the mayhem in Nazirpur, Nadia, where the security forces and villagers are trapped in, as one newspaper puts it, a “dance of death.”2 It is said, whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Notes and References 1. On the function of border in the making of statecraft, see, Roxanne Lynn Doty, “The Double-writing of Statecraft—Exploring State Responses to Illegal Immigration,” Alternative, 21, 1996, p. 18. Also, William Langewiesche, “The Border,” Atlantic Monthly, 269 (5), May 1992, pp. 53–92. 2. “Mayhem at the Border,” The Statesman, February, 10–11, 1995.

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The Nation Form 8 Cartographic Representations and Anxieties

Cartographic Anxiety The contrast in the two attitudes which I have reported in the preceding chapter (on borders–state attitude and the attitude of those on the border), is reflected and represented in a number of issues around the politics of migrants and refugees. Indeed, this contrast points to a deeper issue of representation—the cartographic representation of a nation-state in South Asia, how the body politic to be mapped and, how to retain its inviolability—in a word, “cartographic anxiety”.1 This was an anxiety about which I found one world completely innocent and ignorant, another world immersed, exercised, and restless. Cartographic representation achieves the effacement of alternative identities of individuals, groups and societies and their replacement by one based on the modern sovereign nation-state—that of the citizen. Ironically the “politics of migrants and refugees” does not allow this effacement completely, but turns citizenship into another alternative identity. Thus, the migrant and the refugee do not stick to their social identity only—they need also the political identity of a citizen. Many of the migrants, however, refuse the option of Indian citizenship, for in their own minds they are only “temporary shelter seekers” since they are still Bangladeshis to their own selves. Others, however, clamor for Indian citizenship, for they know, that citizenship is the ultimate passport to a secure identity, which in the universe they belong to sits comfortably with other identities. Production of national identity is therefore a contested process and the struggle to produce and reproduce “pure” citizens out of recalcitrant people accounts for much of what happens at the borderlands of a state. Cartographic representation becomes a crucial element in this process of production of nationality. Throughout the border areas I found cartographic manifestations and metaphors particularly revealing. In the border towns of Malda, Bongaon, Hasnabad, or the zero line towns like Hili, the anxiety surrounding questions of national identity and survival seemed particularly acute. The inside and outside along the borders were being incessantly produced, and they revealed the physical, but even more, the psychological and epistemic violence that accompanies the enterprise of nation-building. “At the same time, people who live along the border (seemed) to regard this latest discursive universe of nationality and territoriality as one more minefield to be navigated safely or better-one to be profited from.”2 The encounters between the state and the people along the borders are suggestive of a contest between two identities. It represents a particular kind of 1/11

postcolonial anxiety—of a society suspended forever in the space between the “former colony” and the “not yet nation.” Everyday life at the border, by bringing into light this cartographic anxiety, becomes thereby a prominent signifier of the postcolony. Cartographic anxiety was evident from the way our nationalist leaders described the “natural frontiers” like impassable mountain ranges, porous frontiers, and the blue seas as gateways to the world.3 Subsequently, accurate representation of the border on maps became crucial. “Unity and integrity of the nation” was the call and concern which made imperative myriad state actions like steps against “alien infiltration,” organization of a blue-water navy to secure the peninsula’s coastline, construction of fences along the borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh covering thousands of miles, the effort to define the borders accurately and in great detail, production of correct maps, identity cards for people living in the 33 border districts of India, and raising new battalions for security forces. In Siachen, India was locked in a grim battle with Pakistan in an effort to preserve territorial integrity. At an altitude of 18,000–22,000 feet, soldiers of both sides were being killed—only 3 per cent died due to enemy fire and 97 per cent succumbed to the “weather and terrain.” The dead soldiers’ bones had to be broken so as to accommodate the body in small Cheeta helicopters.4 Yet the anxiety over “national security” was so deep that even before the plans for identity cards and fences could be executed, newspapers screamed, “Futile and expensive successor to the ration card,” “Live borders of the North East,” “Porous border has to be totally sealed.” The world of surreal violence at obscure border outposts and dizzy mountain heights of unconcerned attitudes in border areas, of threats to immigrant workers in Bombay, and of the jittery atmosphere in security camps and administration posts in marked out areas like Nadia, Murshidabad, Malda, 24 Parganas (North) bears out the truth of de Certeau’s statement: “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.”5 Hence maps remain the representations of a national anxiety. I was to realize that fairly soon. At one of the headquarters of the security forces in North Bengal, I was shown a number of maps which underscored the point being made by the officers that the IndoBangladesh border is no border at all given the terrain, ponds, rivers, small canals and rice fields which remain connected and interlocked. But the moment I asked, in all innocence, why should these maps not be published so that the people could see for themselves how difficult the job of border policing was, the officers shrank back. In fact, raising any question about the maps or asking for a copy of a map raises suspicion. They wanted to know why did I exactly I need it? Then followed the hedging advices, such as, “Oh, you can get that from Calcutta’s X office or Y bureau.” In yet another consultative session, as I again raised the question of maps to show how cartography and social realities violate each other, I was advised to leave the maps out. Maps are a barred subject. They invite suspicion. They essentialize differences, but precisely because they essentialize, they remain sacrosanct, inviolable. They cannot be discussed. Because they represent anxiety, the less discussed they are the better. As a result, maps and the “anxiety” which they represent coexist with the “unconcerned everyday life on the border.” It was easy to feel how the “unconcerned everyday life on 2/11

the border” deepened the cartographic anxiety. People in such border villages as of Cooch Behar or Nadia or a village in Aiho in Malda district could be found talking across the border, keeping each other informed of local politics,6 complaining of exorbitant ghat duty (“toll” tax for illegal entry), taking marriage parties across the border, bartering goods and offering information on employment opportunities; and the more they did it, the deeper became the cartographic anxiety. The government evidently becomes eager in such a situation for devising even more effective border management schemes which can integrate the border areas with the mainland and enlist the help of the border population in the task of the security forces by assigning them monitoring functions.7

Ironic Unconcern I must therefore speak now of the strange coexistence of “cartographic anxiety” and the “ironic unconcern,” which I had found in the riverine areas of Hasnabad–Hingalganj– Shamshernagar section and also in the land border sections of Swarupnagar–Baduria– Basirhat. The Basirhat subdivision has under it all the areas mentioned here. Of the eight police stations (Swarupnagar, Baduria, Basirhat, Haroa, Minakhan, Hasnabad, Sandeshkhali, and Hingalganj), two have land borders with Bangladesh (Swarupnagar and Baduria), and two have river borders (Hasnabad and Hingalganj). With an area of 352 sq. miles, 662 villages, a density of 762 people per sq. mile, and a population of 1,689,282, the subdivision shares a border 210 km long with Bangladesh: of this, land border accounts for 68 km, river border 142 km, and no man’s land from Shamshernagar to Bay of Bengal for another 80 km. In 1961, the total population of the subdivision was 268,146. Thus, the increase in population has been much more than the expected (average) 70 per cent and presents an unbelievable figure of almost 450 per cent. Villages have also increased in number—in 1961 their total number was 473 which have now risen to 662. The increase in population and settlements has been most noticeable in border thanas like Basirhat, Swarupnagar, Baduria, Hingalganj, and Sandeshkhali. This increase ranges from nearly 50,000 in 1981 to 90,000 in 1991. One can get an idea of the increase of population in that area from 1981 to 1991 in a thana-wise break-up;8

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P.S. Basirhat

:

92,476

P.S. Swarupnagar

:

45,284

P.S. Baduria

:

69,764

P.S. Haroa

:

17,974

P.S. Minakhan

:

59,385

P.S. Hasnabad

:

12,150

P.S. Hingalganj

:

49,173

P.S. Sandeshkhali

:

47,761

It was in Swarupnagar that this strange coexistence of cartographic anxiety and the ironic unconcern struck me for the first time. I experienced it later on many occasions during my sojourn in Basirhat subdivision’s riverine areas and elsewhere in Bengal too. Let me relate now the happenings of a day spent in the Ghojadanga area of Swarupnagar. The Itindaghat riverbank dotted with innumerable chimneys of the brickfields could be seen from the Ghojadanga side of the river Ichamati. Downstream the river flowed toward Basirhat and Taki in India, and on the left side Satkhira of Bangladesh. We were alerted in no time that we were in one of the sensitive sectors of the border, one of the most “infiltration prone” zones. It was December, and in the preceding month, in Ghojadanga alone, 67 Bangladeshis had been pushed back (Hindu males 38, Hindu females 4, Hindu male child 1, Hindu female children 3, Muslim males 17, and Muslim female 4), and a total of 136 Bangladeshis apprehended (Hindu males 8, Hindu females 19, Hindu male children 11, Hindu female children 15, Muslim females 43, Muslim male children 13, Muslim female children 6). The Mobile Task Force (MTF) and other security forces had told me how the brickfields on the other side of Ichamati and the cornfields on this side attracted migrant labor relentlessly. We were to discover later that Swarupnagargg–Baduria–Basirhat–Hasnabad was in fact the gateway to entire West Bengal of the deltaic region—Calcutta agglomerate, 24 Parganas (South), Hooghly, Howrah, and other parts of 24 Parganas (North). The apprehension list showed the names of districts from which the migrants were coming over: Khulna, Jessore, Phirojpur, Satkhira, Barisal, and Bagerhat. A group to be “pushed back” the next day told us the same story narrated by migrants elsewhere that Satkhira had gone dry, that they had suffered a bad harvest and with increasing aquaculture, jobs were difficult to come by in Khulna, and land was getting un-arable due to entry of saline water. Moreover, facilities like medical help were practically nonexistent. The apprehended group of eight had both Hindus and Muslims (Hindus 3, Muslims 5). A jawan of the security forces (109th batallion of Calcutta sector, Border Security Force (BSF), 7th company) interjected, “Sir, why do you listen to all these. What can you hope 4/11

to learn which you haven’t heard before? Lajja kitabme sab hai, Sir [Everything can be found in Lajja, the famous though controversial novel of Taslima Nasreen]”. It was a moment of overlapping realities and perceptions. The people, who were to be pushed back, said that they were desperate to go back. An old Hindu woman, a widow, had come three months ago to this side with her grand daughter to consult a doctor about the child’s illness. She had suffered three month’s incarceration. Now she was desperate to return with the child. The immigration officer in the nearby Ghojadanga International Check Post/Immigration Customs Post (ICP) rattled out figures which showed that roughly 800 immigrants overstay over and above the figures for legal immigration through Ghojadanga—this is a monthly count (in other words, about 1,000 people enter Ghojadanga while 200 return per month as per the immigration records).9 But the officer assured us that things had improved of late, as far as border policing was concerned. Previously, bus route number 84 from Ghojadanga to Barasat had been operational due to the regular passenger traffic of legal/illegal migrants. But illegal immigration had been reduced to a trickle due to competent patrolling, so much so, that buses have stopped plying on route number 84. Even goods trafficking had declined to an extent where the traders and shopkeepers in Basirhat town had downed their shutters for a day, only two days prior to our visit, in protest against the “excesses” of the BSF. Narayan Das, the ex-gram pradhan, commented laconically, that the bus route had been now closed for a year and since there was no other bus service the people suffered, but what could they do? Cutting through this cacophony of complaining voices, came the soldier’s voice reflecting the state’s anxiety over illegal immigration, and suggesting that we had to increase our attention and surveillance. He said that he knew about Lajja—he knew also that things were not at all well on the other side, in fact, things were not so quiet there and that bad days might come. But was not Lajja written about communalism rather than national security? Though I refrained from asking, it was clear that Lajja here implied that incidents with serious or communal repercussions do tend to spill over. The soldier must guard the country against the entrance of foul winds. He has to, for his own figures do not allow him to rest peacefully. The Ghojadanga–Bithari area is porous (Tables 8.1 and 8.2). The sharp rise in apprehension figures has not been due to a similar increase in infiltration/migration but evidently due to an increase in policing. Unlike in the case of most other areas, most of the apprehended are Hindus here. Why? For, Muslims find it easier to get shelter and succor because Basirhat subdivision has a sizeable number of Muslim (border) villages. Table 8.3 presents a profile of Bithari sub-sector in terms of religious composition of the border villages of both sides. Table 8.1 Apprehension Figures of Ghojadanga Sub-sector (1993–1994)

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Month

1993

1994

January

75

35

February

130

40

March

155

140

April

146

105

May

98

62

June

71

93

July

120

60

August

132

189

September

125

147

October

79

48

November

65

138

December

154

NA

Source: Home Ministry, GOI. Table 8.2 Apprehension Figures of Bithari Sub-sector (1993–1994)

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Month

1993

1994

January

6

15

February

5

13

March

5

36

April

8

66

May

12

244

June

0

915

July

13

1303

August

3

912

September

3

131

October

32

275

November

64

260

December

32

NA

Source: Home Ministry, GOI. Table 8.3 Religious Profile of Villages on Both Sides in Bithari Sub-sector Source: Home Ministry, GOI. There can be no doubt that the figures certainly tell of a “porous border,” with Muslims pouring in greater numbers here than in Bongaon subdivision. The maps of the area indicate what attracts poor Muslims: brickfields, small canal ways and big river letting in laborers in large numbers, shrimp-cleaning units and mosques. Thus, both municipal and village areas have experienced almost a similar population rise, indicating a range of labor-market activities throughout the subdivision. Table 8.4 shows the break-up of population increase of the thanas of Basirhat subdivision shown both urban and rural population increase. Table 8.4 Popoulation Increase of Basirhat Sub-division (1981–1991)

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P.S.

Population (1981)

Population (1991)

Sandeshkhali

191,298

239,059

Hingalganj

92,788

141,961

Minakhan

77,599

136,984

Gram Panchayat

143,283

150,790

Taki Municipality

25,671

30,420

Gram Panchayat

213,258

285,506

Municipality

80,805

101,083

Haroa

132,991

150,965

Swarupnagar

154,697

199,981

Gram Panchayat

59,468

210,782

Municipality

33,391

41,741

Hasanabad

Basirhat

Baduria

Source: District Census Handbook, 1981: Unpublished district census figures, 1991. The Sonai canal (possibly a small river) flows past Hakimpur–Bithari. The security forces complain that the canal is not wide enough to prevent the migrants from coming across easily. Watch towers have been erected on the bank of Sonai. But the bank is dotted with trees and thick with foliage. We were shown small boats hidden amidst the foliage on the other side. Once the sentry moves on to patrol further they can come over within minutes, particularly after darkness envelops Sonai. Sonai is so small! Sahebkhali downstream from Ichamati is so wide! I remembered having been told a few days back that, Sahebkhali was so wide that it was impossible for the security forces to guard.

Natural and the Naturalized In any case, on the bank of Sonai that evening, engulfed in the world of anxiety, “unconcern” could not but strike us. We had met Mohiuddin Gazi, a Swarupnagar block Congress activist, Mir Ali, a Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]) member of 8/11

local gram panchayat and a gentleman called Ashraf Mia. Why did we want to meet them? We explained that Swarupnagar was part of the border area, and border means people coming and going. But was it, we asked, because they were Muslims that they were so unconcerned about Muslims crossing the border? Not taken aback even for a single minute, they replied that in the matter of immigration, the Hindu/Muslim factor made no sense in Swarupnagar. The naturalness of the situation was so overwhelming that it overrode any other thoughts embedded in the replies of the activists. Yes, they agreed, Hindus do come to India due to discrimination “there” which was really bad and that is why they had never taken exception to Hindus coming over. They pointed out that it was mostly Hindus who stayed back permanently. With some money in hand, many of them scouted for land, managed to acquire it, and then became Indians. It was in this fashion that villages like Madhupara, Uttar Madhupara, Natunpara, and Nirupda have come up. However, Muslims who had earlier gone over to “Pakistan” have also returned to find a permanent shelter. But was that not a testimony to Indian secularism? Then why should the security forces object? Muslim women also come over —they elaborated—as maid servants, as beggars, as laborers, as helpers, as wives, and are sold across the border as destitute. Polygamy is on the rise “there,” so was it not right for them to help? “But these affect the nation’s interests,” one of us interrupted. Mir Ali’s reply left us speechless. He said calmly, “There is nothing called the nation’s interest. Everything should serve the public interest.” It was a reply that showed how the persistence of the old society had taken the modern form of an enlightened argument of liberalism and Marxism to marginalize the nation. Mohiuddin was quick to add that many of the migrants came as seasonal migrant labor and at least 40 per cent of them, almost all Muslims, went back regularly. “Bangladesh does not have any middle class. So who is left there to look after the poor?” In the Amudia land border section, we were told, land prices had shot up; cultivable land was selling at the rate of ;50,000/per bigha. In Hakimpur, similarly, some Muslims had purchased land but the comparatively moneyed were mostly Hindus. From Khulna–Khalispur camp many Bihari Muslims had also come. But at this point, someone interrupted them to ask, “After all Swarupnagar is not a rich area. So, how far can it absorb such a constantly growing population?” Mir Ali had an ironic smile to that. Economics in real life does not work out in terms of such straightforward questions and answers. It was harvest time. The aman paddy field sparkled golden–green in the diffused light of the setting sun. Panchayat leader that he was, Mir Ali drew my eyes to the river lift irrigation machines dotting the fields. The land now yielded three crops an year. About 100,000 rural people labor in the Swarupnagar–Baduria fields. Of this, about 10 per cent almost always comprised migrant labor from across the border. In the equivocal language of politics, he continued If the situation at the border is “good”, less local poor will work in the fields and will resort instead to petty trading across the border. The migrant labor then fills the need. But when the border situation is “tight”, the local labor goes back to its original occupation, thus shutting out the opportunities for migrant labor. 9/11

Mir Ali was quick to add that poor Hindus also came over, for “in an Islamic Bangladesh Hindus get no justice.” In any case, sometimes entire families come over, while at others only a few members or half-the-family do. It is common, in Swarupnagar, for people to say, “okhane chash, ekhane lekhapara” (cultivation there, studies here). The parents stay back while the young ones come over, possibly never to return even after their education is complete. The professions of Hindu migrants change often for worse —college to school teaching, school teaching to private tuitions, agriculture to petty business, petty business to vending, sometimes even to destitution. Hawking in train compartments and driving a cycle van become the most available options. Mir Ali’s long observations confirmed what I had earlier seen in Gaighata–Bongaon area, where selling flowers had become the new profession of many Hindu migrants. I asked Mir whether the local people, many of them being Muslims, helped the Hindu migrants resettle in India. He was candid: “They know that the Hindus cannot return to Bangladesh, where they are considered socially inferior, often abused or terrorized. How can they then force the Hindus to go back?” Did that mean that the better situation in West Bengal in terms of communal tolerance, peace of livelihood, the existence of a Left Front government serve to attract the migrant who having arrived finds the El Dorado gone? For a moment, my interlocutor remained silent. Then, as he rose to leave, he replied softly that the Left Front was of course in power and he was an active worker of CPI(M) and he helps migrants—both Hindus and Muslims–if he can. But he refused to be drawn any further, mumbling that he did not know of the deeper issues of migration. These matters were for us, the social scientists and the higher-ups, to ponder over. “For you it is migration, for them,” his voice trailed off, “the border means coming and going; asha jawa. Isn’t that so?” The world of “ironic unconcern” was, thus, the world of the natural and naturalized. By the time, they had left and we were also preparing to leave, this unconcern had not only become larger than life, it had brought before us the world of sub-alternity, of another universe of values, attitudes and outlook. It is time that I should confess to my readers that this meeting had been taking place in the yard of a half-built camp of the security forces. One or two of them had sat through the hour-long conversation and had put in a word or two from time to time sometimes, had pointed to the Sonai khal and drawn our attention to maps; but their “anxiety” had mellowed down, a more down-to-earth unconcern seemed to engulf all. The two worlds of “cartographic anxiety” and “ironic unconcern”—one of the top, another of below–make up the twilight zone in which the border exists and we by our presence were trying to disturb that. Mir Ali’s ironic eyes never left us, the visitors, till we had departed. His concern and anxiety could not but betray the “unconcern.” Irony was the sign that day. Notes and References

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1. Sankaran Krishna titles his essay on the theme of mapping the body politic in India as “Cartographic Anxiety,” Alternatives, 19, 1994, pp. 507–521. I am indebted to Arun Deb for pointing out this essay. 2. Ibid., p. 508. 3. For example, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1946) opens with such an account. 4. W. P. S. Sidhu and Promod Pushkarna, “Siachen: The Forgotten War,” India Today, 31 May 1992, pp. 58–71. 5. Cited by Sankaran Krishna from Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) in Sankaran, n. 1 Sankaran Krishna further cites de Certeau, … the map, a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form the tableau of a “state” of geographical knowledge, pushes away into its prehistory or into its posterity, as if into the wings, the operations of which it is the result or the necessary condition. It remains alone on the stage. The tour describers have disappeared. (p. 516) 6. The Statesman reported of such exchange of information in Alok Banerjee”s report “Where Two Nations Slip into Each Other”, 29 May 1993. 7. A. V. Siddle, “The Role of Locals in Border Management” in D. V. L. N. Ramakrishna Rao and R. C. Sharma (eds), India’s Borders–Ecology and Security Perspectives (New Delhi: Scholars Publishing Forum, 1990). 8. Unpublished district census figures, 1991; on the length of the border, Home Department sources. 9. All the figures relating to apprehension, pushing back, or immigration have been taken from Home Ministry sources.

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The Nation Form 9 Shefali

An Evening in a Sub-jail She had given her name as Shefali, Shefali Bibi, or Shefali Khatun. We had promised not to take down the names of those that we spoke to, and never had we reneged on our promise. But that evening as I prepared myself to listen for some hours, the compulsive habit drove me into asking the name of the woman who was before us. Immediately, however, I felt contrite and requested her to ignore my question; she need not volunteer her name. She was the first of the few I was to talk to that evening. She merely shrugged and said that it did not really matter now that she was in the hands of “fate.” Yes, she could tell me how she came and if she ever thought of going back to Bangladesh. Did she know that she would be “pushed back” a few days later on the expiry of her jail term as an illegal immigrant? “I have decided to stay here. I am not going back,” was her simple reply. She was from Thakurgaon, village Nahabatghati. When I met her, she could have been of about 20 or 22 years of age. She had been married three or four years ago. Her father had been a poor man, had worked on other people’s land, and had died leaving behind a wife, two sons, and Shefali. All their worldly possessions consisted of their house and homestead in Nahabatghati. The brothers had left for far off places in search of work, and had eventually settled there with families of their own. Shefali and her mother remained behind. Her mother was old, often ill and too weak to find work as housemaid. The old woman sometimes begged, but mostly Shefali’s earnings as maid in baboo’s houses would carry on the two women’s sansar. As a result, Shefali grew up with no (male) one to protect her. She had to be married off to a farmer in a nearby village. But within no time at all, the man brought home another wife, who Shefali said was from a relatively better-off family. For Shefali, the happy days were over. She was often humiliated, beaten, and tortured. She came back to Nahabatghati and resumed her life of a housemaid. One day while she was bathing in a river that separates her land from West Bengal, she says that she was called by a man from the other bank as the river was narrow. She went up to that side. Then as she was talking with the caller, suddenly a Border Security Force (BSF) man appeared on the scene. Her caller fled, but she was apprehended. Her gamcha and key remained on the other side. She was taken to the BSF camp and asked about her whereabouts. An officer took mercy on her, did not lock her up anywhere, but instead took her to a “village leader’s” house nearby—a panchayat leader. Shefali 1/9

remembers the elder as having been kind hearted. It was already evening when she was taken there and she was given shelter for the night. But toward dawn, she woke up to some voices from the adjacent room. She soon realized that she was about to be sold and that the men were only arguing over the price. She fled in the darkness. She had hardly reached the next village, through the paddy field, when an elderly person who had seen her the previous day, being taken to the camp, recognized her. He said, he knew about women being sold from that area, but he could not say anything in public for the dealers were powerful “party-people” in the village. He could keep her in his house for the day and then at night take to her to Siliguri to his relative’s house. She might get shelter, food, and with a little bit of luck, some work. Shefali, thus, found herself in the bustling town of Siliguri in the house of a carpenter, who she said, went by the name of Muhammad Azim. Once again, Azim proved to be kind hearted and managed to find “some work” for Shefali. Azim did not marry her. He had a wife who would not allow him to have a second wife. Shefali remained with them and when Azim’s wife started making things difficult for her, she entreated him to let her only remain under his protection. She said that she did not mind if he could not marry her since “didi” was there but, she cried, “Remain a tree unto me” (gach hoia thako, which is almost untranslatable in English but draws upon the image of a tender creeper being supported and sustained by a strong tree). The neighbors and the police, however, got scent of the fact that she was an illegal immigr Azim’s wife threatened one day to drag her to the police station. Shefali fled again. After a few months of “wandering and working here and there,” finally Shefali reached an old Mussalman’s house near Kishanganj. There once again she found shelter. The old man did not marry her. But she had to nurse him and help the household with odd jobs. The man, however, died suddenly and Shefali found herself on the roads again. It was at this juncture of her life that she was apprehended by the police, tried for illegal stay and sentenced to jail. And after being “pushed back” to Bangladesh, she said that she would flee once again and come back to India. Even then, that evening, as I listened to Shefali, the gaps in her story were obvious. But I took them for granted, and on some implicit knowledge had asked her at the end of her narration whether she would consent to be sold again. All she wanted, she repeated, was security. She had to come back; how could she stay in Nahabatghati after all that she had been through? Men would take her to be some easily available woman. She would have to beg soon. Here, now she knows securely, some work can be found; she may get some shelter, some family and hopefully a marriage. If in the process, somewhere in between someone gets some money, what can she do about that? She said before going back to the zenana ward that she depended on destiny; she had to depend on the “play of fate.”

Consent to Be Sold? It is very difficult to guess how many Shefalis are sold across the border or how many 2/9

Shefalis consent to such sale of their persons in search for security and livelihood. With immiserization among a section of population in the border districts, unemployment due to expansion of shrimp cultivation at the expense of rice cultivation, rising domestic violence, polygamy, and lumpenization among the under classes, more and more woman are pushed out on the streets and if many of them go to Dhaka in search of security, many cross the border in the same journey. Women from Tangail or Mymensing have reached West Bengal via Dhaka’s garment industry, where low pay and staggering work conditions goaded them to proceed beyond Dhaka after a two to three year long stint of hard labor as garment workers.1 In fact, as one commentator has noted, in the South Asian region, the situation in Bangladesh and Nepal remains particularly acute because women and children from these countries are taken out in the largest number to be sold into forced prostitution, organ trade, and for slave labor. Though Indian women also suffer from such crimes, India as a country has become the recipient to trafficked women in the brothels of Bombay, and Delhi, and also acts as the transit point for trafficking overseas to Europe, and America. Pakistan is reported to have received over 200,000 Bangladeshi women for slave trade and prostitution. Every day, more than 50 women and children are reported to be taken out of the country across the land border of the country. Estimates suggest that over 5,000 Bangladeshi women and children are becoming the victims of trafficking-in-human beings with false promises of jobs, marriage and other forms of security.2 Women’s groups in Nepal have reported that 100,000–160,000 Nepalese girls are forced to work as prostitutes in different brothels of India alone. About 5,000 to 7,000 young Nepalese girls are trafficked to India every day. About 45,000 Nepalese girls are in the brothels of Bombay and 40,000 in Calcutta. Women among the poorer communities are offered better jobs, and marriage, and thereby allured to go “voluntarily” with the agents of the trafficking network. Children in the middle-class families also face kidnapping from schools, and end up being trafficked to countries of the Middle East. Trafficking as a business is flourishing, and has become a means toward acquiring easy money. Women and children are not only trafficked within South Asia, they are trafficked to other Asian countries and to Europe and America. The increasing trend of buying organs of the women and children for various medical purposes in Europe is now a well-known fact. 3 Trafficking in Bangladeshi women and children is now a known phenomenon. Nari pachar or the trafficking in women is linked to regional and international trafficking networks. It is not new, and the police records contain specific accounts of trafficking dated back to 1979. According to an estimate of the human rights organizations in Pakistan, where most of the trafficked women are sold, there are about 1,500 Bengali women in jail and about 200,000 women and children have been trapped in the slave trade. According to another report, there are 200,000 such women in different Middle East countries. Another 500 women are in different jails in India.4 How does the “voluntary” decision to accept the offers happen? The trafficking through

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the borders has become easier because till the girls reach their final destination, or till they are in transit in India, they do not know what is happening to them. They retain the hope of jobs and a good marriage. The families having problems in marrying their daughters due to demands for dowry become an easy prey to such offers. Therefore, girls are vulnerable at the hands of their parents because they are seen as a burden after a certain age. The poor parents, being unable to put together a dowry for their daughters voluntarily hand them over to the unknown groom, even when he is proposing to take her to India. The offer of marriage is mostly acceptable in case of a girl who could not be married due to lack of dowry, or who had come back from her husband’s house immediately after marriage, again because her father could not meet continuous dowry demands. Another factor, which is quite disturbing in all available reports, is that the uncles (maternal or paternal uncles, known as mama or chacha) persuade the parents to give their daughters away to these grooms. In fact, some of these uncles are paid by the brokers to carry out the job of persuasion. The innocent and simple-hearted parents believe them.5 One map, published in Bangladesh, has located the points from where the women are collected and from where they are taken out of the country. In the majority of cases (in the absence of proper statistics on this) it can be assumed that 99 per cent of the women are taken out of the country through land routes along the border areas of Bangladesh and India. But since Calcutta is one of the important transit points for the traffickers for Bombay and Pakistan, the border areas of Jessore, Satkhira, and Rajshahi are also used for crossing the border. Within Bangladesh, the collection points of women are usually far from the border points. For example, women rescued in Dinajpur (north) were from Cox’s Bazar (south). The map tries to locate the areas where the rescued girls came from; and it is usually from the southern part of Bangladesh that girls are taken to the northern borders. So far, the newspaper reports in Bangladesh have not shown any particular incidence of trafficking of women from the border districts, although poverty is quite rampant in those areas too. In Kushtia area, however, some villages are used as stations for the traffickers where they come and stay for a while. Then they marry the young girls and later still take them to the other side of the border. But it is also reported that the people living close to the border have become aware of this trafficking and, therefore, the traffickers are less interested in girls from these areas. Rajshahi borders of Bidirpur and Premtali were used mostly because there were fewer check posts. Jessore border is very active in this trade. Some hotels and godowns in Jessore town are used to keep the girls brought from different parts of the country. In 1990, a newspaper report 6 mentioned that at least 13 women were trafficked every day. The police sources reported that in eight months they could rescue only 28 women who were being trafficked and arrested 38 traffickers. Usually the traffickers do not accompany the women while crossing the border. It, therefore, becomes difficult to apprehend them. Many women and children were rescued from Narayanganj and Barisal areas who were being taken “somewhere” by boat. Police had some information about them and could consequently rescue them. The middle points of Narayanganj and Barisal (of the riverine routes) are very interesting. These need further investigation. It is reported that women and children are taken from the launch and 7

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steamer ghats also.7 Thus, not surprisingly, newspaper reports in Dhaka abound with cases of trafficking: Hundred men and women rescued and two traffickers arrested by the police in Barisal.8 Eighteen women and children rescued from the traffickers as they were being sold for the Pakistan market via India.9 “Three young girl’s rescued from Jessore.” 10 Kusthia border: New routes, new tricks for trafficking women to India. 11 Where do they go and how much do they cost? The traders have disclosed that India is used as a transit place, from where they are sent to Pakistan and Middle East. The younger girls are their favourite, they are used by the buyers profusely and when the charm is lost they are sold as prostitutes. Furthermore, they are supplied to hotels and bars. It is also learnt that some Christians also bought children and gradually converted them. They also reported that in Pakistan one Bengali gentleman is involved in the business. They are also helped by some wealthy persons both in India and Pakistan. The price of women varies from Tk. 10,000 to Tk. 15,000 and children are also sold at the same price. The transportation cost of the clients is also borne by the brokers.12

Gender Dimensions in Labor Migration Yet, these reports fail to capture the situation of transborder flow of women in its entirety. Many seem to have escaped the fate of Shefali. Many young women, indeed girls, have successfully crossed the border and have taken up jobs of helping the coolies in road repairs, in big bazaars of Calcutta, in paddy transplantation work in the fields, as housemaids and particularly work in brickfields and shrimp-cleaning units dotting the area around the metropolis. I do not intend to imply that women once sold, or those willingly crossing over, are invariably drawn into the morass of the flesh trade from which they cannot escape. Many have successfully built new lives and homes with acquaintances acquired on this side of the border. The life of rejection and deprivation is a closed, though not forgotten chapter, for them, and the migrant women workers often try to get on with their new lives. Indeed, a survey report covering three settlements near Ghutiari Sharif, built by the refugees driven back from Marichjhanpi and new migrants from Bangladesh focuses on the activist role played by the women of the families and the community in determinedly pushing from one place to another, never losing perseverance, in selecting the site and fashioning new settlements, in taking up occupations outside the domain of domestic work to maintain families. Twenty-seven per cent of the wives in the families, the said survey showed, had taken up jobs outside their homes though only seven per cent of the daughters had been allowed to do the same. Most of these families were from Khulna, Jessore, Barisal, Noakhali, Dhaka, Pabna, Faridpur, and Chattagram (76 per cent of the total number of families) and had often to shift residence, being forced to move from one habitat to another. Thirty-one per cent of the families had had to change places twice, 16 per cent thrice 5/9

and 14 per cent four times. Seventy-six per cent of these families belong to the Namasudra community and in 121 out of 521 cases, women had a say in selecting the new sites, in 154 cases they helped in designing the houses and in 200 cases they shared labor in setting up the structures that is erecting the houses.13 There is overwhelming evidence that women are not just compelled subjects in the flow of population, mere victims of the flesh trade or the voiceless followers of the migrant male head of a family; many indeed take independent decisions to migrate. count crucially in family or group decisions to move and they often migrate. They count crucially in family or group decision to move and they often migrate, sometimes in groups, running away from their families. Yet in studies of migration, women remain the shadowy followers. Indeed, given the type of jobs the migrants get on arrival, it becomes important to differentiate the gender of the migrants and also those who stay behind. The preference for the nimble fingers of girls in peeling shrimps,14 in making bundles of sugarcane, in assisting in a wide range of jobs, and finally in making up the family so essential in undertaking group or collective labor like bidi binding where families can work together points to a particular gender structure of migration. It is also a grim picture of sexual exploitation. The large-scale participation of women in the transborder population flow occasions a return to the question about the labor equilibrium model. Labor productivity has certainly not been zero in areas which have sent out migrant labor from Bangladesh and certainly West Bengal has not always been a case of fast-growing capitalist urban scenario with higher wages. The element of “power” has been instead of critical factor, women often decide to migrate to resist insults, torture and an enslaved life. Jan Breman has remarked that there is often no wage to compare with the new expected wage and hence the question of income differential is inconsequential.15 But he could have added that in such situations, the decision to resist takes the form of a decision to migrate. Migration becomes a form of self-empowerment for countless women in Bangladesh. Even in family/group/kin decision to migrate, as our meetings and few hundred interviews, the findings of the survey cited before and the phenomenon of increasing proletarianization of women of immigrant families show, women become the decisive factor. In this sense, Malavika Karlekar’s suggestion that Thadani-Todaro’s notion of “autonomous female migration” should be substituted with the notion of survival migration remains unclear as imperatives to survive may lead to desires for autonomy, and “power,” therefore, retains considerable importance in any appreciation of the dynamics of population flow.16 The depositions of immigrant women workers we met show that besides the decision to attain autonomy, a keen and sharp perception of the ecological disasters also leads to a decision to emigrate. If men alluded in a vague way to poverty, communal discrimination, inadequate educational opportunities for children as reasons for migration, women often cited directly some ecological disaster, and pointed to insecurity of their girl children whom they wanted to marry off safely and, hence, decided to migrate to a safer area. Ecological disasters like flood or famine appear as the 6/9

destroyers of “home” and to the women therefore, they act not only as metaphors but as harsh reality. “The decision to migrate made jointly with men and based on the premise that women would find it easier to get work” has been crucial to the women we met, for whereas to men it is only wandering from one place of work to another, to women it has been often a resolve to begin “a new, an unaccustomed, an unfamiliar life”—hence the decisions of the migrant women in Bangladesh are parts of both “a definite survival strategy” as well as “a strategy to gain autonomy.” Such a combined strategy has implied a tacit acceptance of new hazards—low wages, new insecurities, initial uncertainties in settling, harassment, and sexual exploitation. The constant flow of young women across the border, now struggling for survival, ensures that many of them would end their journey in the brothels of the metropolis; also it ensures “a bottomless supply of cheap labor” suffering wage discrimination, exploitation of the vulnerable migrant child, and sometimes the destruction of “culture, kin networks and social relations.” The nation which to the immigrant woman had appeared in the form of family, village, and kin networks, and had later on become a problem of identity once the crucial ties were severed, now recedes into marginality. She is now set to negotiate a new social and political space marked by crude transaction relationships. Not surprisingly, then, Shefali had promised to come back. Being sold and retaining autonomy shared a twilight zone in the consciousness of a woman who had resigned herself to the fate of a continuous struggle against destiny. Notes and References 1. A home ministry report on apprehended women from Bangladesh and depositions of Hasina Begum, Lata, Rubina, Shid-ur-Rehman, Md. Nur Alam, Faruk, kausar, and Qazi Alam; Hasnabad, 17.1.95. A relevant AFP report from Dhaka dated September 1, 1996, says: Some 200,000 Bangladeshi women have been smuggled abroad by traffickers during the past 10 years and sold into prostitution, the mass circulation Daily Janakantha newspaper reported on Sunday.

Quoting a study by a civil rights organisation, the Bangladesh Women’s Lawyers Association, the paper said the main destinations are Pakistan and the Middle East.

The highest known price for one Bangladeshi woman was reported from Karachi’s Rajpath area’s “human bazaar” was $4,700 at current rates, the paper said. It did not say when the incident occurred.

Social workers have repeatedly said that women and children were being smuggled abroad for prostitution and to become camel jockeys. 7/9

Laws have been enacted to curb the human trafficking, but reports alleged that they have not been enforced adequately.

Bangladesh recently signed a convention against child abuse and prostitution in Sweden. 2. Farida Akhter, “An Urgent Appeal to the SAARC Ministerial Meeting–Dhaka Resolution Must Commit to Stop Trafficking in Women and Children,” Daily Star, 30 July 1995. 3. On the trafficking of Nepali girls and women to Indian brothels, see Human Rights Watch/Asia report, Rape for Profit (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1995). 4. Sangbad (Dhaka edition), December 28 and 30, 1992. 5. Farida Akhter, Trafficking in Women and Children: The Case of Bangladesh (Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana, 1995), pp. 17–18. 6. Ittefaq (Dhaka edition), October 15, 1990. 7. Ibid. pp. 18–20. 8. The Ittefaq (Dhaka edition), December 15, 1993. 9. The Bhorer Kagaj (Dhaka edition), November 1993. 10. The Ittefaq (Dhaka edition), 7 March 1993. 11. The Sangbad (Dhaka edition), 31 July 1994. 12. Sunil Banerjee, Bichitra (a report) cited in a survey on women and girl trafficking (Bangladesh: UBINIG, 1995). 13. An Unnayan report, Sabuj Prithivi–Sramajibi Udbastuder Sangramer Katha (Calcutta, 1995), pp. 33–48. 14. J. Saradamoni, “Crisis in the Fishing Industry and Women’s Migration–The Case of Kerala,” in Lose Schenk-Sandbergen (ed.), Women and Seasonal Labour Migration (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1995), pp. 155–209. 15. J. Breman, Of Peasants, Migrants and Paupers: Rural Labour Circulation and Capitalist Production in Western India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). 16. Malavika Karlekar, “Gender Dimensions in Labour Migration: An Overview,” in Schenk-Sandbergen (ed.), Women and Seasonal Labour Migration (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1995), pp. 31–34, n 7.

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The Nation Form 10 The Ineluctable Logic of Geopolitics

Enmeshed Histories I narrate here the strange case of a line that refused to freeze. The line of control (LOC) in Kashmir has not only not stabilized it has also subsumed within its geopolitical history all other dimensions of the situation of the land, virtually partitioned by this line, including its internal ethno-linguistic variety. Deeply lodged in the quagmire of the geopolitics of postcolonialism, the history of the LOC is a history that has pursued other histories of Kashmir as the unrelenting shadow, particularly the histories of the ethnolines of which Sumantra Bose has written so vividly in a recent essay.1 Sumantra Bose’s essay makes compelling reading because he draws our attention to two Kashmirs—one of guns, bombs, suicidal attacks, jehadi, security forces, and the other, the lived experiences of the people. He notes that while the first has dominated public consciousness outside Kashmir and has monopolized the discourse on Kashmir due to all kinds of reasons relating to authoritarian security, which I shall summarize as reasons of state, the analysts have ignored the second, which he thinks is crucial for finding out the path to peace. He also shows how a study of the second Kashmir, that is the lived experiences of the people, leads one to a multilayered conception, with nuances, of the land and the problematic, necessary for such an understanding. In this context, he points out an absolute retardation of democratic institutionalization in Kashmir as a result of the disjuncture between the pluralism in the politics and society of Jammu and Kashmir and what he terms the “anti-plural institutional space.” In short, Bose is suggesting here the need for a turn in security thinking. But in order to appreciate the need for such a turn in thinking, it is necessary to probe in the first place, how plurality is eaten up and a partitioning line overwhelms all other realities. Then we shall realize that partitioning strategies generated from reasons of state and authoritarian security cannot free us from the geopolitical compulsions of conflict and enable us to switch from revenge to reconciliation, monolithic peace process to plural peace process, dialogue to plural conversation, and thus, retributive justice to restorative justice. In presenting two narratives—partition and plurality and democracy —in a single narrative of a cartographic line, I am actually referring to two possible forms of the nation—its war-like, conflictual form, and its accommodative, inclusive form. These forms may not be and often are not exclusive. In any case, we find involved here three fundamental questions relevant to this issue. The first question to ponder over is, why and how did the ethno-lingual lines in Kashmir and the layers of the society there collapse into one and the internal lines 1/31

reflecting the plurality of the land submerge in a very monochromatic conflict scenario? Every conflict situation has within it the dual process of “transvaluation and focalization”, whereby all features of a situation except one get lost and only one aspect of a conflict-situation becomes the focal point with harmful consequences for its solution. I try to show in this connection, how contrary to the common idea that political entities make borders, borders sometimes make and solidify a state, in the process erasing many of the internal varieties related to accommodation and coexistence. The second issue calling for our attention is that this process of transvaluation and focalization helps a regime of control and expanse to strike roots in conditions of globalization. Borders being fundamentally linear forms of controls soon generate a power of their own. And as a modular form they multiply so that they can become a model. In this way they attain the power to defy at times their creators to become masters of their own career. Third, in the resultant shrinkage of space for plurality, the issue is, can democracy resist the fatal attraction of geopolitics, foster respect for accommodation, and overcome its own deficit? In short, partitioning lines often acquire a kind of autonomy. The precise question is, what are those complexities, such as are often ignored in administrative–juridical decisions on borders; and what are the dynamics in the history of the LOC which while allowing it to appear as amenable to political wills and decisions of its masters, make it in reality autonomous to an extent where it becomes able to engulf other histories? If Sir Cyril Radcliffe had ignored this fact in the great boundary-demarcation operation in 1947, the leaders of the two states, India and Pakistan along with the international community, also had not anticipated the intractability of the problems that a clumsy line in Kashmir agreed upon by the two states would create.2 Consequently, the LOC arrived at the conclusion of cease-fire in the first Kashmir war has time and again invited revision. Both the states—Pakistan and India—have attempted to give the line the nature of a permanent marker, with India trying to lend it the nature of an international border, Pakistan using the line as a marker of its unaccomplished mission to change the border. The wars of 1965 and 1971, the Shimla agreement, the dispute in the Siachen area and the undeclared war in the snowfields, the persistent intrusion/infiltration/homecoming, and then the 1999 war on the heights in Kargil show the brittleness of the agenda of settling politics though partitioning lines. Yet if the agenda is brittle, why the persistence with the agenda? Here is the importance of the three issues mentioned earlier. As persistently lines produce instability, the States also keep on trying to stabilize them. In the time of globalization there is hardly any better way to have dividends from conflicts than to have local wars over borders that make the milieu global and, therefore, make the political returns for the state high. Borders and quarrels over lines fetch rich dividends in politics of the region. Borders as lines have the capacity to keep a war local, in fact they can keep it unannounced, yet they make the politics of lines vocal and global. The history of border conflicts and wars in Africa, Balkans, Caucasus, West Asia shows that as a political technique, a border war is one of the best methods to consolidate the State. Its risks are low, returns are high. The truth is that even after the lines have been institutionalized and given the form of a 2/31

border, lines remain lines. The prehistory of the border is the line, and the history of the line looms large on the later day history of borders, war, and peace.3 Even dialogues over borders seemingly to stabilize borders unwittingly become part of the strategy of control and expanse in the current age of global politics.

Chronicle of a Geopolitical Destiny In October 1947, a force of invading Pathan tribesmen, with some help from the Pakistani army crossed from the northwest frontier and invaded the Kashmir valley. The Hindu Maharaja of this Muslim majority state signed a deed of accession with India to gain India’s help in repelling the invaders. Before accepting this accession, Pandit Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, sought permission from the leader of the National Conference, which was the strongest political party of the state. The next day Indian troops landed in Srinagar and within a short time this escalated into open warfare between India and Pakistan. The problem reached the international community when India decided to take the question of Kashmir to the United Nations on January 1, 1948. A cease-fire line (CFL) was drawn under the auspices of the UN on the same date next year. The line left Pakistan in control of Gilgit, Baltistan, and a narrow strip of the western part of an area, which had the Vale of Kashmir, Poonch and Jammu that along with Ladakh remained in India’s possession. The CFL, instead of being only a line of cessation of hostilities, demarcated areas of possession, put the stamp of acceptability and finality of mutual areas of control, and led to four wars and more than two nearwar situations between the two countries of India and Pakistan. Pakistan continued to consider the line as provisional; India desired to treat it as permanent. The flexibility initially exhibited by both countries was soon over.4 The two states solidified their respective positions on Kashmir, and the line signified that the core of the two nationalisms has hardened. In the first few years, when the CFL was evolving that would in effect divide Jammu and Kashmir and leave the two countries in possession of two parts, Pandit Nehru consistently upheld the temporary nature of this line. He had reiterated on a number of occasions his desire to refer the issue to the people of Kashmir. On October 30, 1947, he sent a telegram to the Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan stating, “Our assurance that we shall withdraw our troops from Kashmir as soon as peace and order are restored and leave the decision about the future of the State to the people of the State is not merely a pledge to your Government but also to the people of Kashmir and to the world.”5 Then through a radio broadcast on November 2, same year, he declared that the people of Kashmir would decide their political future through a plebiscite, which could be held under the auspices of the United Nations.6 We need not go here along the tired path of arguments and counterarguments over whether India by reneging on its commitment to hold plebiscite was right or wrong. But in the context of our discussion, considerations about the earlier flexibility deserve attention. The earlier flexibility had given rise to the hope about the ability of the CFL to hold and about its capacity to lead to necessary following steps for a solution of the issue. This resulted in greater flexibility also toward the question of mediation regarding the CFL in the early 3/31

periods of the dispute. The feature of the CFL was that none of the three involved actors, India, Pakistan, and the United Nations, envisaged a continued international policing of the line as the instrument to find a solution of the Kashmir problem and through it a settlement of the issue of a permanent border between the two countries. The United Nations stand was most moderate—India oscillated between the two positions, sometimes upholding both, at other times stressing the need to find a solution or saying that since the accession was final there was no problem left; and Pakistan treated it ad tempore. As a line that signified essentially a bilateral issue, whether in the pledge to hold plebiscite, or in prospecting possibilities of mediation, the CFL remained true to its history of a line of partition. We can speak here of three such features to make clear the ironies and paradoxes inherent in the situation. First, the line had been established with the intention of keeping the two contending states apart and thereby providing the space to find a solution of the Kashmir problem through political means. But the line itself provided impetus to both parties for adding military strength. Therefore, it should not surprise us to find that both states in direct contravention of the resolution of the Security Council (April 21, 1948, S/726) treated the CFL as the new element in further strategizing. The resolution had enjoined upon Pakistan (vide A/1/a) to “put into operation in consultation with the Commission a plan for withdrawing their own forces from Jammu and Kashmir and reducing them progressively to the minimum strength required for the support of the civil power in the maintenance of law and order” when the tribesmen had withdrawn and cessation of fighting had become effective, to ensure (vide A/2/c/i) that “the presence of troops should not afford any intimidation to the inhabitants of the State” and to initiate steps toward establishing a “plebiscite administration” to which “such powers as the latter considers necessary for holding a fair and impartial plebiscite” (vide B/8). Clearly there was a vision of a political solution accepted by all the actors, and the CFL was not to be part of that solution. Yet in face of developments brought to life by the line, it proved to be only a liberal dream in a situation marked by postcolonial identities and collisions. Second, the CFL was not to become a commentary on the dispute. The United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) resolution of August 13, 1948, had enjoined (vide Part 3) that the Government of India and the Government of Pakistan reaffirm their wish that the future status of the State of Jammu and Kashmir shall be determined in accordance with the will of the people and to that end, upon acceptance of the truce agreement, both Governments agree to enter into consultations with the Commission to determine fair and equitable conditions whereby such free expression will be assured. The subsequent resolution of the UNCIP of January 5, 1949, also made the CFL unambiguously only the beginning of a policy whose chief instrument was intended to be something else. In this resolution (vide 6/a, 7/a, b, c, d, & e) the UNCIP envisaged a liberal solution based on restoration of civil liberties, protection of minorities, 4/31

demilitarization, in short, condition of peace. But the line itself was the agent provocateur. The line had signified control, and the political situation in the valley itself marked by rising nationalism followed by a rethinking among the nationalist leadership in Kashmir, the increasing hardening of the Indian government’s stand, the dismissal of the Sheikh Abdullah ministry, and the reneging of the political commitment of the Indian State to the people of Jammu and Kashmir resulted in making the UNCIP resolutions stand on their heads. Instead of the CFL being the subservient to a political arrangement, the line now dictated what the subsequent arrangements would turn out to be in later periods. Third, the CFL was meant to be a local line, but with the onset of the Cold War it became a part of a global line. Thus, notwithstanding the apparent softness of Nehru’s policies and the occasional reasonableness, global alignments prevented this “softness” and “reasonableness” being meaningful. When Pakistan accepted the role of a trusted ally of the United States by signing the Baghdad Pact, and becoming a member of Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO), the prime minister of India made an offer to the Pakistani leaders in 1955. He asked that international boundary be stabilized at the CFL and stated that India had no desire to take “the part of Kashmir which is under you” (that is Pakistan), by fighting.7 India began to increasingly refuse a change in the status quo in Kashmir following the establishment and the consolidation of the CFL. With the change of government in Pakistan and the usurpation of power by military dictatorship, the line in Kashmir became an even more protagonist of global entanglements. Ayub Khan signed a treaty with the United States which agreed to provide Pakistan with nonconventional weapons and construct launching sites for missile. Nehru’s official biographer is of the opinion that such a treaty completely changed Indian posture toward Pakistan. What he does not say, however, is that this was also the time of the emergence of China as a great power. The global politics of bipolarity had pitted India against China. India’s self-avowed leadership of the Afro-Asian nations came into direct collision course with China’s position. This was also the time of growing border dispute with China and the exacerbation of dispute toward the end of fifties and the beginning of sixties. This shift in Indian policies reflected in the hardening of the Indian stand not just regarding the Indo-Pakistan border but also regarding the Sino-Indian border, particularly in the climate of reverses against China in the border war of 1962. In such a situation, defence and security again came to occupy a priority higher to that of political solution. Even the efforts of the Kashmiri nationalists for another Indo-Pakistani dialogue failed in such atmosphere. The global milieu in which these two countries had been decolonized and had been left to sort out the political issues of sovereignty among themselves had within ten years come home to roost. As a line, the CFL, thus, not only evolved into one that effectively divided Jammu and Kashmir and left the two states in possession of two parts, it has remained till date true to its history of erasing all other aspects of the dispute including grievances of the people into a territorial one, giving birth in the process to the doctrine of bilateralism. The war of 1965 was to bring out the precarious nature of the line more clearly. 5/31

Contrary to the idea that the Nehru epoch was one of a pursuit of a liberal policy and political solution, the war of 1965 was a not a discontinuity, but a logical outcome of the preceding fifteen years. The second Pakistan–India war, that is the war of 1965 over Kashmir, lasted for 22 days. It started with incursions across the CFL from the Pakistan side and went on to becoming a full-fledged war. A cease-fire was arranged once again under the auspices of the United Nations. Once again a war had started with incursions by tribesmen from the Pakistan side of the CFL and Pakistan was soon involved in a full-scale war, whether it had wanted it or not. But it did not succeed in forcing a change of the status quo. The Indian strategy on Kashmir to maintain the CFL as strongly as possible, make it the kingpin of its strategy, and devise other policies appropriately was clear for the first time and successfully reinforced now. If Pakistan had so long criticized India of reneging on her commitment on plebiscite, India could now argue with equal vehemence that Pakistan was violating the international arrangement for maintaining peace in the disputed area. The war had closed the circle. Like being attached to the ghostly other, internationalization has always brought back local particular realities, in this case bilateralism. The more global factors cast their shadow, the more could a country argue that bilateralism was the only way for a sane solution to the imbroglio. The war of 1965 and the following pact in Tashkent established the dialectic of globalization and bilateralism that continues to haunt the fate of the borderline and along with that the fate of the disputed land and her people. The nationalist agenda that the state of Pakistan could not concretize in the first decade of its existence could now be firmly put in place. India could no longer hope to be a world power but could assert herself as a regional giant. The policy of treating the line as a political solution became even more confirmed as the line itself went on to become more unsettled.8 The discussions at Tashkent resulted in the Tashkent Declaration of January 10, 1966. It was agreed that the two powers would withdraw their forces to pre August 5, 1965, position. Thus status quo was maintained. The joint communiqué issued at the end of talks noted that “the Pakistan side pointed out the special importance of reaching a settlement of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute.” It signified that Pakistan had given notice that Kashmir still remained a disputed territory notwithstanding the Tashkent pact, while India would continue to maintain that its sovereignty over Kashmir was nonnegotiable and that this sovereignty was at most predicated by the conditions achieved through the establishment of the CFL.9 The Tashkent accord enjoined upon both the countries to withdraw to positions they held prior to August 5, 1965 (Article 2), to observe cease-fire terms (Article 2), to follow the principle of “noninterference in the internal affairs of each other” (Article 3), to “continue meetings at highest and other levels on matters of direct concern to both countries” (Article 9), and to “set up joint Indo-Pakistan bodies which will report to their governments in order to decide what further steps should be taken” (Article 9). Even at that time one could see that 1948 was only being reenacted. What constituted “internal affairs,” and did that include Kashmir? What was joint effort, and if that meant bilateralism as the declaration seemed to suggest, did the withdrawal signify only a status quo ante bellum or a lead to new effort 6/31

to conflict resolution? Finally, and this follows from the earlier two posers, was the declaration a ratification by the two countries only of the cease-fire arranged by the United Nations (vide Security Council resolution of September 20, 1995) or a declaration on the Kashmir dispute? All these indicate that the declaration was a continuity of the muddled times that was characterized by the liberal hope of a solution and a simultaneous militarization of the issue. The clearest evidence of the muddled thinking was in Article 1 of the declaration, which said that “in the background” of the interests of peace in the region and the interests of the people of India and Pakistan, “Jammu and Kashmir was discussed, and each of the sides put forth its respective position.” Was then there a Kashmir dispute? Or, was it a border (that is to say a territorial) dispute? India felt that its stand had been vindicated. The Pakistani leadership was no less Nehruvian in evasion. Its President Ayub Khan in a statement of January 14, 1966, defended the declaration much in the same way as Bhutto defended the Shimla pact five years later, with the words: “This Declaration will open new avenue for the settlement of the Kashmir issue.”10 Bhutto later on made much too of the issue by criticizing the former President that whereas in the Tashkent declaration the phrase “in the background” had been used, in the Shimla statement the words were, “pending the final settlement”.11 But such substitution proved of not much significance as the geopolitics of borders had proved insurmountable in the path of a political solution in both 1965 and 1972. And the hope that this could be done is what we term as the muddled hope of the times, the historical destiny of postcolonial liberal vision of building a full sovereign statehood without having to face the harsh options posed by the geopolitics of the age. The existence of such measures as a demilitarized zone (DMZ) along the CFL or hotline between the director-generals of military operations (DGMOs) also would not have meant much because this was not a case of border dispute, or a case of maintaining a line to separate two armed countries or camps (we have to only think of the DMZ in Korea or the wall in Berlin), but one where the real was always indicating an other, the line was indicating a territory, and the territory was indicating the line.12 We have to only think in this context the terms of the agreement of January 25, 1966, on the withdrawal of troops from occupied areas. The agreement not only entailed withdrawal of troops, but also virtually tried to lay down the dynamics of the beginning of a demilitarized zone. It spoke of removal of mines (Article 5/a), use of unarmed military personnel for lifting of mines and dismantling of all other defence works and complete ban on use of civilian or civil labor for this purpose (Article 7), continuing the agreement affecting restriction on flights of aircraft (Article 10), and other measures for civilianizing the occupied areas. It may be argued that this was intended to facilitate the withdrawal process only, and that therefore nothing more should be read into this. But the question is precisely there; why after thinking of such details for the reduction of tension in Rajasthan/Sind, Amritsar/Lahore, Jammu/Sialkot, and Akhnur/Chhamb (from river Chenub NW 8061 to Mawa Wali Khad NW 7770) sectors, could not the agreement proceed toward the obvious, that is the creation of a demilitarized zone? Therefore, contrary to the poser whether such a measure would have worked, the 7/31

question is why did not the instability along the CFL lead to such a measure? We are indeed confronting here the dilemma of Holmes that the point is not what would have happened if the dog had barked, but why the dog had not barked at all. We know that the war in 1971 had started on a different issue, but as surely as ever it again ended with the efforts to stabilize the divide in Kashmir. India had supported the independence movement of the Bengalis in East Pakistan. Such support came in the wake of large-scale atrocities of the Pakistan army on the people of East Pakistan, and the massive flow of refugees in the country across the border. The Indian policy of finishing the “eastern question” was so successful that Pakistan declared war on India. At the end of the war Bangladesh was liberated and according to the Ministry of Defence India held 479.96 square miles of territory across the 1948 CFL in Jammu and Kashmir. The Shimla agreement of 1972 put in even more sharper focus the by now set course of the strategy of the parties in the dispute—the respective parts of the disputed territory would be recognized as being areas under control and possession of the two states, in one case (India) it implied reinforcing sovereignty, in the other (Pakistan) reinforcing control. The most far-reaching part of the Shimla declaration was that the two countries had “resolved to settle their differences by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by any other peaceful means mutually agreed upon between them.” This, of course, immediately became a subject of widely differing interpretations. On the basis of this statement, the Indian government contended that the issue should be settled bilaterally and not through third party mediation. Such a strategy had considerable advantage for a regional power that was wary of the internationalization of the issue due to various reasons such as, the China factor, Cold War considerations, the unfinished businesses of state consolidation in the region, as well as internal complications in the valley itself. But where the Indian state failed was in converting the divide in Kashmir into a border. About the divide the agreement stated: In Jammu and Kashmir, the line of control, resulting from the ceasefire of December 17, 1971, shall be respected by both sides without prejudice to the recognized position of either side. Neither side shall seek to alter it unilaterally, irrespective of mutual differences and legal interpretations. Both sides further undertake to refrain from the threat or the use of force in violation of this line. (Para IV/Article 1) India’s possession of some 354 square miles north and west of the CFL to the LOC was, thus, confirmed by Pakistan. This included strategically important points in the Tithwal region and at Kargil, which were to be severely contested later. The dispute over the divide was recognized as a bilateral issue as a result of which Pakistan was robbed of its ability to pressurize India through its alliances, but India also failed to stabilize the line though it was recognized as “an LOC.” It remained merely a line of control functioning as a border, yet lacking its sanctity. The difference from an international border was made more apparent because in the text the clause on the LOC followed immediately that on the international border (Para IV/Article 1). Therefore, control remained the accepted justification for the divide in Kashmir. Theoretically then at least, if a country failed to control a line, the line could be altered as it was in 1972. Although there was the 8/31

clause against unilateral alteration of the line by either of the countries, this did not reflect in any way on the likely results in case of a revolt within the territory in control of one of the two countries. Shimla could thus at best buy a 15-year peace, whence the logic of the line would reappear with greater intensity, for the next war would be not on Kashmir but on the line. In this context, Bhutto’s formal position of leaving it to the people of Kashmir to work out their own destiny acquires special significance.13 No wonder that after the Shimla agreement that upheld bilateralism, and reinforced the CFL by turning it into an LOC, the Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto defended the principle of bilateralism against his domestic critics with these words: We said, “pending the final settlement” and only after that did we mention respect for territorial sovereignty… Then we had said that Indian and Pakistani forces would be withdrawn to their sides of the international border first. Next “in Jammu and Kashmir the line of control, resulting from the ceasefire of 17 December 1971 shall be respected by both sides without prejudice to the recognized position of either side. Neither side shall seek to alter it unilaterally irrespective of mutual differences and legal interpretations. Both sides further undertake to refrain from the threat or use of force in violation of this line.” Now here again you will see that because we believe the dispute of Jammu and Kashmir exists, we did not discuss it only in the background of a peaceful settlement between India and Pakistan. We have de-linked the international border from the Jammu and Kashmir dispute…. This is important…. Let me now come to the next point. It has been said that the doors of our United Nations have been closed on us and that we are going to settle our problems by bilateral means. As a matter of fact, we have been pleading for bilateralism for a long time. It is not that India compelled us to accept bilateral procedures. Bilateralism has its own benefits … It certainly does not draw a curtain on the rest of the world … I had, in 1966, written a book, not as well known as a book of a former President, but nevertheless a book in which I had clearly stated that it is in our best interest of Pakistan to have a foreign policy based on bilateralism and that we must give bilateralism a chance as far as relations between India and Pakistan are concerned…. With due respect to the United Nations, I should say that it has not yet been able to deal with the Kashmir problem effectively. On the contrary, with the passage of time the United Nations’ position on this dispute has weakened…. There is nothing in the Shimla document, which says that we shall not go to the United Nations…. We have to go stepby-step to tackle each and every problem gradually, seeing the results consolidated and then moving to the next step. This step-by-step approach always advocated by Pakistan was accepted by India.14 The ramifications of the Shimla agreement, though not immediately apparent, were therefore far-flung. Efforts to stabilize the LOC contained within it roots of further instability. Henceforth, there would not be a Kashmir war, but constant incursions across the LOC. Also there would be undeclared war wherever the line would be found 9/31

un-demarcated and vanishing in the deep snow of the Himalayas. Shimla ushered in the age of low intensity conflicts over the LOC. Both states would henceforth continue with the policy of integration with India taking the most pronounced step with an accord with Sheikh Abdullah. The Shimla agreement, thus, symbolized the territorialization of the issue. The CFL, transformed into the LOC, signaled that the line was the best instrument for the unfinished businesses of state consolidation in the region. The fact that the LOC could not become the border showed that the line remained merely a line of control functioning as a border, yet lacking its sanctity. Therefore, control remained the accepted justification for the divide in Kashmir. On the legitimacy of control India’s ability to tackle popular protests and militancy and present itself as a moral power depended. Although there was a clause against unilateral alteration of the line by either of the countries, this did not reflect in any way on the likely results in case of a revolt within the territory in control of one of the two countries. Shimla could thus at best buy an 18-year peace.15 Moreover, as the historian of India’s borders points out, the policy of treating the line as permanent was reconfirmed in the context of a policy that accorded highest priority to borders.16 It began in the late sixties in an atmosphere marked by the new emphasis on “security, territory, and prestige,” and an increased concern for acquiring military power. The desire to become militarily strong by buying sophisticated instruments from abroad led to keeping the nuclear option open while conducting the first Pokhran test in May 1974, and launching in space orbit an indigenously designed and built 35 kg satellite. Acts like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1956) got its final shape in 1972 when it was amended. This Act was imposed on so-called disturbed areas, which were largely the bordering states.17 Then followed the National Security Act (1980), and after that the Terrorist Affected Area Ordinance (1984). The national security lobby took a definite shape and came to influence external affairs of the country in a decisive manner.18 This was the milieu in which concern over line overrode all other concerns, most significantly concern for democracy. At different international gatherings the two countries continued to express concern for peace, but the border policies of the two postcolonial states reflected the fatal attraction of geopolitics. The failure to stabilize the line became revealing with the continuing inability to reach an agreement on Siachen. Siachen has been the world’s most strategically absurd highaltitude war over an nondemarcated border beyond a point known as NJ-9842, fought at elevations exceeding 6,000 meters, costing India 3 men and 50,000,000 a 19 day, thousands of soldiers being exposed to frostbite, hypoxia, and severe mental stress. Siachen, contrary to the starry-eyed journalists and defence reporters, became a proof not of anyone’s bravery, but of the expendability and low value of Indian and Pakistani lives toward defending a cartographic act. India claimed that Pakistan had planned to occupy the area. Pakistan had in turn claimed the LOC ran east to the Karakoram pass and declared that it had been in occupation of the area. This decision to extend the LOC was unilateral. So was unilateral India’s action to airlift soldiers and, thus militarize the dispute. The bilateralism of the Shimla agreement proved of no value notwithstanding the five rounds of talks between 1986 and 1989. And when after the 10/31

fifth round, agreement seemed round the corner, the understanding proved fruitless in the tense atmosphere around the Babri Masjid. Thus, secretaries, military experts, and advisers could not firmly propose any measure. Nor could the political leadership of the two countries resolve on sensible steps like withdrawal of unilateral extension of the LOC, establishment of a de-militarized zone, and joint delimitation of a line from NJ9842 northwards to the border with China, formulation of ground rules to govern future operations and finally redeployment of forces to mutually agreed positions. Instead, only a cease-fire, prior to talks on other “modalities,” was proposed. To Pakistan, this meant, in effect, that the Indian government was not ready to leave the advantage of having its troops at elevations 2,000 feet above the Pakistani positions on the Saltoro Ridge, no matter what the cost and how little the strategic advantage. Everything now firmly anchored to “security,” and in this case security around a glacier far from the Karakoram highway with no direct access to it through a major road from any direction, to the two negotiating states therefore it seemed, nothing constituted “unacceptable damage” and so there could be no question of thinking how to avoid it. The armies stood, rather crouched in snow-covered bunkers in most of the area, opposite to each other along a 70 km-LOC, 110 km Actual Ground Position Line (AGPL), 10 km International Boundary (IB), and a 70 km Unnamed Boundary (UB) opposite the Shaksgam valley. The Siachen glacier, 76 km long, served as a crucial wedge between Pakistan and China, otherwise linked by the Shaksgan valley of 5,160 km that was ceded to China by Pakistan in 1963.20 The impasse showed that the line had the capacity to create self-locked positions, and in such situation the language of conflict-resolution remained fragile. Thus, nothing came out of the Siachen negotiations. As Nehru had laid down the line years ago, no one was to expect anything “substantial … out of a discussion of Kashmir issue on official level. The only possibility was the noting (down of) the various lines of approach without commitment.”21 Thus, Siachen negotiations that began in January 1986 about 20 months after fighting began on the heights of the glacier were discontinued in November 1992 without any agreement reached. The parties could not agree on the major points—Pakistan did not agree to a cessation of “cartographic expansion” of the LOC from the agreed terminus point of NJ 9842 to the Karakoram pass on the border with China. India did not agree to the immediate establishment of a DMZ (de-militarized zone) at the glacier. The two parties could not exchange authenticated maps showing current military ground dispositions, as that would have tied them to the notified level of deployment of forces. The delimitation of boundary northward to the border with China proved obviously difficult in such total lack of trust. Ground rules could not be formulated to govern and/or prevent future military operations in that area, a fact that was demonstrated with Pakistan’s enactment of a Siachen on India in the form of Kargil war. With all these failures, an agreed redeployment of forces was out of question.22 Added to this policy of reasserting lines was the milieu in the eighties of the last century, when the drive for power and resources transformed the tango to a threesome game of India, Pakistan and China.23 The situation was a pointer for the future, because it made obvious how an assertive policy regarding the markers of territoriality could trap a country’s policies into the morass of territorialism and territorial politics.24 But from 11/31

the point of democracy, the result could be only harmful. A pronounced policy toward the borders and militarization of areas around the borders led to a sense of alienation among the people living in the area. In 1989, Kashmir witnessed the strongest outbreak of nationalist movement clearly articulated in secessionist terms. It shattered the illusion that by demarcating the LOC, the Kashmir problem had been solved. Pakistan began to provide diplomatic, moral, and other forms of support to the Kashmiri movement to which the line was nothing or meant “Indian control,” and that Pakistan might provide covert material support to the Kashmiri secessionists was apparent from the time of the Shimla agreement. In its signifying function, the line now signified the blurring of the distinction of the proxy war, the Kashmiri war of nationalism, and the India’s war against secessionists in Kashmir and against Pakistan providing support to the Kashmiris. Hitherto, the divide in Kashmir represented a sort of an ethnic divide. When Pakistan had tried to foment ethnic tensions earlier in 1965, it had failed and Kashmiriyat seemed as strong as ever. But in 1989, Kashmiriyat could not save the day for India and, therefore, by strengthening the LOC India could not arrest destabilization in Kashmir. Enough has been written already on the civil war in Kashmir. We need not repeat the accounts here, but can only ask, what else fate could visit a politics that had relapsed into geopolitics fully and unconditionally? In the wake of the civil war in Kashmir, the line became not only the border between the two countries, but it had developed into an impregnable line in order to control and suppress the rebellion in the valley. India wanted to fence the international border in the Akhnoor sector in 1996 by raising a barbed wire. Pakistani rangers raised objections to such fencing of what they called a “working boundary.”25 Apparently in a protest note in 1993, Pakistan had referred to the same area as the international border. It was also said that the Pakistani protests were due to “fears about a possible Indian nuclear test or the deployment of India’s short-range Prithvi missiles on the Pakistan border.” 26 The area, popularly known as the chicken’s neck, was the one of fierce contest between the forces of the two countries in the 1971 war. With the Siachen war continuing, it was a sign that armed conflict around the line would soon recommence. The Kargil war was thus within the logic of this highly illogical situation. India had got part of the area when the CFL had been stabilized into the LOC in 1971. It was therefore not ironic that incursions would occur here. But, at the same time, the border war in 1999 with the line’s past fifty years of entangled history was to show that beneath the ineluctable logic of geopolitics, there was the irony of representation. Line of control, control of line—this was all a matter of representation, the cartographic representation of the many issues of postcolonial state formation. When the undeclared war broke out in Kargil in 1999, Pakistani officials defended their actions by saying that the LOC was “not intended to become a permanent line of division in opposition to the wishes of the people of J & K.”27 Pakistani Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz repeated his country’s traditional stand that the LOC was not acceptable to his country as an international border. It was merely a temporary line in a “disputed territory.” He further said that the divide was not acceptable also to the people of Kashmir. A member of the Indian National Security Council Advisory Board in a 12/31

plaintive tone added that an attack across the LOC “would not constitute an attack on the sovereignty of either nation.”28 Pakistan complained that India had earlier violated the LOC thrice in 1984, 1986, and 1988.29 Indian reactions ranged from acrimony, blaming “the malign character of a hostile neighbour which defines its very identity in anti-Indian terms” to more sentimental theories of stab on the back.30 The Indian prime minister stated in a press conference that the “LOC is defined and identified in the maps of the two countries which are sealed and bear signatures of representative from both the sides. In this light, any change in the LOC is not negotiable.”31 He also stated that India was always open to talks but if the purpose of these was to alter the LOC then “the proposed talks would end before they begun.”32 In other words, there could be negotiation only on and by maintaining the status quo. One retired Foreign Service official however in an exasperated tone declared, that Pakistan should not be allowed any position near the Srinagar–Leh road for “line of control border(ed) on the impossible.”33 But, ironically within less than a year, the army was telling that the line was not settled, telling that the campaign in the media that the army had a lost a peak in Kargil heights to Pakistan was a “smear campaign” because Point 5353 was never in Indian possession. One newspaper not unnaturally screamed exactly one year after the border war had ended, “Post-conflict, LOC Course Changes, Jockeying for Peaks On.”34 In spite of the claim that the LOC was settled, the fact became clear that the LOC in that area followed an imaginary line connecting high points such as points 5070, 5108, 5245, 5353, and 5608, the numerals being the altitude of the high points in the mountain range depicted in meters. Who would like to control what part of this imaginary line depended on the inter-visibility exercises by the two armies on their detailed contour maps to have a command of the range and the roads and the valley below. The Kargil border war put the final seal on the conversion of the Kashmir problem from a political one into a security one. Even as late as the early nineties, there was an understanding among the Indians that Kashmir was a political problem. According to one commentator: Until 1994–95 emphasis was on alienation of the people (erosion of internal autonomy, corruption, rigged elections, repression) and Pakistan’s moral and material support for militancy was read within this context…Today alienation, popular aspirations, and need for democratic solution find no reference in any official pronouncement.35 It was pointed out that rigging in the 1987 elections led to disenchantment with the electoral process among the Kashmiris and triggered armed militancy. In most newspaper reports of 1995, for example, it was argued that the problem in Kashmir was a problem of reinstating democracy as “Article 370 has been battered beyond repair … Electoral fraud for four decades largely accounts for the people’s alienation and suggests the need for an accord which will render such fraud, violation’s of Kashmir’s autonomy and suppression of its people’s aspirations impossible.”36 The transformation of a political problem to a security problem that Kargil border war symbolized accompanied huge increase in defence expenditure. Between 1989 and 1999, military expenditure in India rose by 27 per cent, i.e., from US$7.8 billion to US$9.8 37

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billion.37 This was apart from the money spent on the Border Security Forces (BSF), who fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Home Affairs and on building and maintenance of roads in border areas. Besides the region was now characterized by deployment of nuclear or near nuclear weapons. Although it is difficult to compute costs of going nuclear, the Human Development Report for 1999 noted that India and Pakistan would spend over US$15 billion on nuclear arms over a 10-year period.38 Such increased arms expenditure led to a concomitant increase in the number of security personnel in Kashmir—one soldier for every 14 Kashmiris, and all this while Kashmiris went without such basic necessities such as electricity and food. In Kashmir throughout the last decade electricity was unavailable for seven to nine hours even in the winter months.39 As for food it is impossible to grow anything in the region during winter. Particularly Kargil district, spread over 14,036 km, is generally devoid of any natural vegetation and has barren rocky mountain all around. The fields around the LOC became the killing fields. Some of the typical media reports in 1999 were such as the following. On June 17, two women were killed and another suffered serious wounds in an unprovoked and ceaseless firing by Indian troops from across the LOC in different villages of Neelum valley and sources claimed that the Indian troops were targeting almost all the villages in the upper and lower belts of the Neelum valley. 40 On June 30 Indian troops recaptured two major heights on Jubar Hills, some 2 km from the Line of Control in the Dras sub sector … These two heights and the recapture of Point 4700 and Black Rock yesterday cost the Indian Army heavily. As many as 26 army personnel, including three officers killed in the operations. The Indian toll in the Operation Vijay has mounted to 201 killed, 384 wounded and nine missing.41 On June 2, “information on the number of intruders killed was being gathered but it was estimated 400 has been accounted for.”42 On June 20, “two persons were killed and four injured in Pakistani mortar shells and firing along the Line of Control (LOC) in Poonch and Jammu sectors … official sources said here today.”43 In Surankote, Poonch, on June 29, “in a gruesome incident, militants massacred 15 members of three families including three women and three minor girls and set ablaze their houses at village Morcha Bachchai.”44 But this was about who died. What happened to the living? Again many news reports appeared such as the one that in Kargil on June 3: “Like the people in Dras and Kargil, almost all the residents of Batalik have moved out. Civilian movement has been banned in the area.”45 Or, on June 15, “Families were moved from about 300 villages along a 72—kilometre stretch of the border after the evacuation was announced over mosque loudspeakers.”46 This paradoxical history of a line—its reassertion and fragility—poses a challenge to the conventional practice of peace building. In a context wherein the territorial line’s fate was mixed up with those of two more lines—the line psychologically separating Kashmir and India, and the various demarcating lines within Kashmir—how could a monolithic peace policy hope to succeed? A de jure bifurcation 50 years ago risking ethnic 14/31

cleansing; grant of azadi through a roundtable, intervention by other countries; turning the CFL into a permanent border; imposition of a sizeable multinational army to police the CFL and preside over a DMZ; a permanent Kashmir commission— whichever way one chooses to look at the likely scenario, it is extremely difficult to disentangle the issue of priority—the line or the political future of the contested land whose people also from time to time have gone on contesting the position that others have the right to involve in a contest over their own land? Or, eliminating the rebels by killing them one by one, so that it is one less rebel to confront or ethnic cleansing or ethnic dilution—the bizarre solutions that the Indian state with the rebels copying Indian strategy seem to follow at times? All solutions from the time when Sir Robert Owen as the United Nations mediator in September 1950 had mooted his scheme of solution have been based on the idea of partitioning Kashmir (limited or extensive). Proposals for territorial adjustments or exchanges, multifeatured autonomy package for the valley, the maintenance of soft borders (customs-free) for travel, trade, and in a more radical version binational employment have as their core territorial partition. And such proposals have now led the Indian state (ironically the rebels also) to find out who are the ethnic Kashmiris? That search is as much of a quicksand as is the answer, namely that the overwhelming Kashmiri-speaking valley Muslims are the ethnic Kashmiris. In such context, any Trieste-type solution would involve re-partition of the region inside. In the 1954 agreement on Trieste between Italy and Yugoslavia, it was agreed that the city would have access to both sides of the partition line, thus doing away with most of the disabilities of partition while laying the foundation stone for future cooperation. The inner lines of Kashmir are against such solution here. Bilateral, multilateral, confederal, co-sovereignty based—all proposals are based on one line or the other, while Kashmir remains bound with several lines with three competing realities clamoring for highest attention—the dividing line between India and Pakistan, that is the LOC, the line dividing the two Kashmirs, and the Intifada in Kashmir (that has reempha-sized other lines in Kashmir). The central tenet of the paradigm of peace building is the assumption that it is a step by step strategy, a phased policy by which the capacity to hold peace increases, and a multilateral custody of the process ensures the supply of the political substance of the restoration exercise. Thus restoration of peace is linked to restoration of polity, state, and politics. The history of the LOC in Kashmir shows the limits of such strategy for where the conflict is built on political linkages, how does restoration of politics sidestepping the politics of plurality that linkages are all about help?47 Indeed a manual for early warning will tell us that watching how a conflict develops is a question of policy, of politics. Such a manual tells that first step is understanding the context (factors, location, history, actors, framework); then identifying conflict indicators (political, economic, sociocultural, institutional; also indicators such as structural, triggers, accelerators); then identifying opportunities of peace (initiating events, mediators, facilitators, options, agenda items, peace building capacity); and steps for response development (instruments for conflict prevention, analyzing potential peace actors and institutions).48 The strangest part of the history of the conflict in Kashmir is that there was never a system installed for early warning and early response; hence, 15/31

there is no attempt to disentangle the issue. Consequently we find a closed circle of determination of line, conflict, cease-fire, reinforcement of the line, conflict, and ceasefire. The gradualism and the multilateral strategy inherent in the policy of peace building, as exemplified in Kashmir through strengthening security of the line, is only an edition of supply side economics for here too the approach is to supply the inputs of peace, to concentrate on the problems of supply.

Geopolitics and the Democratic Deficit The Kargil border war over the LOC signaled that the line’s greatest function has been to symbolize a double metamorphosis. We have already spoken of the first metamorphosis, the transition of a political problem into a security problem. The second metamorphosis has been also equally critical. It showed the symbolic role of the border in the collapse of all internal variations in the society and politics of Jammu and Kashmir in an un-variegated single whole—either the polity came to be known as Jammu and Kashmir on the Indian side or Azad Kashmir on the Pakistani side. Therefore, obvious factors such as that 50 per cent of population of Jammu and Kashmir live in Jammu and about 3.5 million residents of Azad Kashmir and the Gilgit region have little in common with the people of the valley were ignored. Or, was ignored the fact that about 80 per cent of the 2 million people in Azad Kashmir hailed from traditional Rajput ancestry and formed part of the cultural, linguistic and ethnic constituency of the erstwhile Jammu province. More fundamentally, the ethno-linguistic variations within the entire region were glossed over in the perennial search for ways to stabilize the line and thereby the region. The line in that sense built upon a surreal existence of two homogenous blocks (Indian Kashmir and Pakistani Kashmir) that suppressed the reality of an amazing variety of existences within the erstwhile region known as the state of Jammu and Kashmir. After all it is well to remember the most often forgotten fact that the region consists of three distinct sub-regions. Divided into six districts (Baramulla and Kupwara in the north, Srinagar and Badgam in the central part, and Anantnag and Pulwama in the south), the valley with about 4.5 million population, is overwhelmingly Muslim, primarily Sunni Muslim, with a sizeable Shia minority and is overwhelming Kashmirispeaking. Jammu lying south of the valley is considerably larger and socially much more heterogeneous. It has also six districts—in the northern and western parts Poonch, Rajouri and Doda, and in the east and south, Jammu, Udhampur and Kathua. Doda district has a Kashmiri-speaking Muslim majority and Hindus constitute 40 per cent of Doda’s population. Similarly Muslim-majority populations are in Rajouri (65 per cent) and Poonch (85 per cent), but there are Gujjars, Bakerwals, Rajputs and other small communities with the main language being Pahadi, a dialect of Punjabi. The line that separates Jammu from Pakistan is both de jure (with Pakistan Punjab) and de facto (with Azad Kashmir) borders. Rajouri and Poonch formed part of a common linguistic– cultural and economic zone with Mirpur and Muzaffarabad on the western side, the western Punjab districts of Rawalpindi, Jhelum and Mianwali, and the North-West 16/31

Frontier Province districts of Abbottabad and Mansehra. Within these two districts the towns of Rajouri and Poonch are centers of administration, trade and commerce, and education with the majority being Hindus and Sikhs. The Gujjars are a nomadic people, herdsmen living in mountain areas. Among the Hindus of Jammu also who are the majority of its population (65 per cent), there are varieties of caste, location, language and to complicate matters more three of its six Jammu districts are Muslim majority areas with significant minorities. Conversely, one of the Jammu region’s three Hindudominated districts, Udhampur has a similar sizeable Muslim minority of about 30 per cent, including both Kashmiris and Gujjars. It is like peeling an onion. The LOC, as we can see it now, began not only as a line of cease-fire but also as a partitioning line, and like all other lines of partition has now the tendency to reproduce itself. In a situation as the present time, as Sumantra Bose has rightly pointed out in the essay referred to at the outset, partition proposals are always an easy temptation for rulers who are far removed from the democratic imperative of dialogue to deal with social diversity, and plurality. Such temptations are now increasingly in evidence. Some want to trifurcate the region into three separate units, Hindu-majority Jammu, Muslimmajority Kashmir, and Buddhist Ladakh, though as was shown in the preceding lines that there is neither a pure Hindu Jammu, nor a pure Buddhist Ladakh, nor even a pure Sunni Muslim Kashmir. Some therefore have a counter proposal to trifurcate the Jammu region instead, effectively separating its Muslim-majority areas from the Hindumajority areas. Some again are proposing that the valley with some more areas (from the other side and from Jammu) be considered as de facto autonomous (sovereign) with powers of high protection remaining with the Indian state. We may not be far off from the time when we shall again witness bloodbath, a spiral of reciprocal sectarian violence, expulsions of people belonging to other communities from numerous locales in purifying homelands and hordes of stranded minorities. We must remember in this context also that the line impacted on Pakistan as well. From a state born with the declared purpose of providing the Muslims of the sub-continent their nation, it became an Islamic state. From a liberal notion of Sunni Islam the spirit of the nation turned to an unending edition of orthodox Islam that even the founder of the Jamat-i-Islami, Maulana Maududi, were he to be alive now would not have approved of today. The theology of Jihad reemerged in a controversial form to break the sanctity of the line, for this seemed to be the principal obstacle to liberate the land. Schools to train religious warriors proliferated to supply the insurgent groups with human resources, while transnational Islamic foundations and the state of Pakistan took care of the financial resources. As the infatuation with the line grew and it became the focal point of the political class of Pakistan, its security establishment, the social, political fabric, even its economy, arrived at times at point of virtual disintegration. In such a convoluted milieu on both sides of the line, naturally the patience of the rulers and the elite is wearing thin. “Some sort of settlement through some sort of partition that will give rise to some sort of new entities that will bury the hatchet” is now the dominant thinking. And when that comes through partitions in the guise, it will be the final gift of the line to the subcontinent. Indeed as the origin of the Dixon plan shows, proposals of internal partitions 17/31

always went hand in hand with the strategy of stabilizing the Kashmir dispute with an LOC. With the fictive internal homogeneity of the two entities gone, the rationale for the line would be no more. All this discussion leads to one fundamental issue that we can anticipate. The issue is: how much has democracy in the way it has been received in South Asia been relevant to the process of a “democratic negotiation of the conflicts?” In the context of the shrinking space for plurality, the issue is, why could not Indian democracy resist the fatal attraction of geopolitics, foster respect for plurality, and help the process of a democratic negotiation of the Kashmir question? By posing this question we not only reflect on the liberal theories of international relations, but on the more fundamental problematic of democratic deficit. Parliamentary democracy in India was intent upon building a nation that could not have been built without building a fictive ethnic core based on a certain geopolitical imagination. This explains why the democratic nation in India adopted a dual, apparently paradoxical, strategy. On one hand, the nation in India claimed that retention of Kashmir, made safe by the CFL/LOC, was required to distinguish India from “ethnocracies” (a term made famous by the Oren Yiftachel), to show that there was no dividing line between the minorities and the homogenous Hindu majority; on the other hand, this very democracy needed the CFL/LOC as a dividing line between secular India and Muslim Pakistan. Thus, on one hand went on the policy of integrating Kashmir with India (culminating with the accord with Sheikh Abdullah), on the other hand went on imagining a Kashmir which had a similar fictive core, the valley, to the extent of neglecting the plurality of Kashmir society and politics. On this basis appeared a monolithic peace process—India and the Sheikh, just as earlier it had been India and the Raja Hari Singh whose accession was considered to have laid the ground for unity of Kashmir with democratic India. Democracy reduced to geopolitical containing of masses cannot but become organic. Thus, what began as a CFL quickly became a partitioning line, and like all other partitions has now the tendency to reproduce itself. But more important from the point of the politics of democracy is that riding high on a republican spirit, democracy does not tolerate pluralism. As Michael Mann puts it, there is a dark side of democracy, and liberal democracy has not been able to keep the dark side hidden.49 Democracy often operates in the name of the people, periodically constitutes the others outside the people, and makes conflict with them the mainstay of democracy. 50 The effort to make democracy organic makes it incapable of accommodating and hence intolerant of various political forms of existence. Democracy becomes increasingly ethnic. If this is true of India, it is so regarding the “democratically elected” political leadership of the valley also, namely Farooq Abdullah and his wagon. Parliamentary democracy does not necessarily appreciate social, political, and cultural demands of plurality; and the fact that expansion of political forms and flexibility in the notion of citizenship is essential for a renewal of democracy; and that such expansion and flexibility implies not only 18/31

more political and juridical individual rights, but also a capacity to address collective demands through imagining newer political forms including forms of shared sovereignty.51 Indian democracy forgot that that these demands when ignored rapidly resulted in violence. This failure has also carried a lesson that expansion of political forms and flexibility in the notion of citizenship was essential for a renewal of democracy, and that such expansion and flexibility implied not only more political and juridical individual rights, but also a capacity to address collective demands.52 As against such a development, democracies have tended to be organic. With the birth of organicism, mass murders started. It began with cleansing. Democracies have shown the capacity that this can end in genocide. The question about the supposed efficacy of democracy to reconcile with others is bound to arise as experiences of democracies converge with those of non-democracies of various types. The Calvinistic urge of democracies to bring others to submission has proved to be extreme, which is why today there is a revival of interest in the first 10–15 years in the life of the line, in a review of the performance of political democracy in handling the dispute, in short interest in a genealogical exercise.53 One reason of this incapacity is because democracy relates basically to the question of representation of will. How is the will of the people of Kashmir to be represented? How much? How durably? Will it be represented through a constitution? But as the fate of Article 370 in the Indian Constitution shows, a constitutional provision based on an accord cannot suppress the plurality that was the basis of the article itself. Will it be in that case represented through an election? But election, as we know, leaves out so many wills, and legitimates “organicism.” Or is the will to be represented by fresh accords? But as most of the peace accords in India shows, the spirit of reconciliation is soon overwhelmed by constitutionalism, which reinforces only the older forms of power. Therefore in the task of democracy to redefine itself through a process of delinking it from its nation form, and enable it procedurally to foster reconciliation, the fundamental challenge comes from conservative geopolitics. The incapacity of an organic democracy to undertake the procedural culture of dialogue comes not only from deep-rooted geopolitical reasoning, almost a “geopolitical common sense”, it comes from the way in which democracy acquires an organic character. Take for example, how we came to know of the last border war in Kashmir, in other words how the war was represented to us. With satellites beaming onto the readers and viewers, reports of war were made of battle reports, profiles of families of dead soldiers, political reviews, military sketches, geopolitical analysis, diplomatic evaluations of the implications of the war, and also the definitions of patriotism. With so much to feed the media, there was a continuous selection of what to feed and what to leave aside or suppress. The media called for holy war, consensus for waging the war, fixing those who refused to fall in line, and focalized the issue that the war over the LOC was the essence of all conflicts for the past half century in the country. With velvet and now with heavy hand, the democracy knew how to deal with others.54 So we were not only being 19/31

informed about the war, or rather you were being very little informed of the actual war, but of political issues that were fed as war reports and comments. Thus, the media formulated what was the line, and why was the war over control of the line. It spoke of the exodus and why in spite of repeated shelling from both sides and the massive displacement of people on the border, the line was an LOC and not a line marking out a killing field; why the war had to be publicized in all its glory; why the war had to be waged both hot and cold, that is to say with guns and letters, gestures, meetings, and visits. We were also told what would be the definition of patriotism, and therefore who were patriots and the scoundrels. We were told besides, how a particular religion was susceptible to fanaticism, how political parties should behave, how the financial impact of the war would not be significant, and even if it were, the nation had to bear it, and finally, how this was a local war but the country stood to gain globally from this. In brief, the war over the line represented all the political issues that this democracy faced in the most congealed form. As we say, for life unto death. Without democracy, without the presence of interest groups such as security lobby or the media lobby this was inconceivable. Without media, a global armament industry, new espionage techniques, rapid communications, and quick political mobilization, the war could not be fought and then peace could not be attained. With political democracy mobilized for war in this way, dialogues could not but become part of the battles over control. The border war of 1999 stood not on the ruins of earlier accords, but on their succession.55 To understand in the backdrop of focalization, in the form of a line, of all issues on Kashmir, and the tragedy this brought in its wake, we must probe little more into how geopolitical reasoning becomes organic to democracies and thus transforms into almost a “geopolitical common sense.” Sankaran Krishna in discussing postcolonial insecurities speaks of “hegemony as spectacle” and refers to Clifford Geertz in showing the spectacular aspects of statecraft in South Asia.56 Geertz had written of the theatre state of Bali, where the state while condensing within it three layers of meaning of its existence as state—status, pomp and governance—was a “theatre state” in which rulers were impresarios, priests the directors, the rest including the peasantry the supporting cast, crew, and the audience. He wrote of the stupendous ceremonies, sacrifices, dedications, mobilizations, and amassment and display of wealth that were not a means to rule, but the essence of rule, “not means to political ends: they were the ends to themselves, they were what the state was for.” In this theatre state, “power served pomp, not pomp power.”57 It is wrong to think, Sankaran Krishna reminds us in the vein of Geertz that while modern state politics seems to effect a recession of the spectacular aspects and an elevation of the aspect of governance, this recession is at the level of appearance only. The combination of diminished attention to pomp and status and the continuing importance that nations give to performance is a sign of the modern.58 In Kashmir, the postcolonial state got all the opportunities of display of its pomp and authority. That Kashmir needed on the part of the Indian state efficient governance, development, honesty, and above all trust in the accord with independence-minded politics there, humility, and continuing efforts to reconcile was not difficult to realize, and certainly did not need the hordes of policy advisers that the 20/31

Indian state mobilized from time to time. That it needed a rapprochement with Pakistan, diminution of state power and sovereignty there, was also certainly within comprehension there. Instead, what happened was, and continues to be, an unending series of spectacles from the famous horse rides of the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, in Gulmarg to the regalia and the vast cantonments of armed forces in the valley. A democratically elected parliament could not but think of Kashmir in geopolitical terms not because it had rationally decided, at least there is no evidence to that, to “keep the valley” at all costs on considerations of political and territorial security, but ceremonial imperatives of a big state demanded that India would and could follow nothing else. This explains, why there was never any Kashmir policy as such; that it evolved as it responded to its spectacular self and to similar acts of its feuding blood brother, Pakistan; and why territory, religion, the land, all helped make geopolitics a part of democratic common sense. After all, keeping Kashmir the way it was conceived was crucial for keeping India the way it was conceived when the nation was born, that is to say, a liberal democratic constitutional state protected by a huge army and paramilitary forces and buoyed by big power ambitions, coexisting with poverty, exploitation, continuing western and neo-colonial domination, big business led industrialization with the state acting as the midwife, and selected measures of devolution and decentralization of power and administration. Boundaries in this context made the space of postcolonial democracies sacred, and elevated the truth of territory to divinity, while at the same time marginalizing other truths as fable. The failure to keep Kashmir was inconceivable to this sense that had guided the national polity from its beginning. This also explains besides the incapacity of democracies, particularly postcolonial democracies, to resolve issues of geopolitics.59 The issue of procedural capacity of a democracy to dialogue assumes significance when states think that by declaring ceasefires militancy can be contained and borders protected. India while declaring that it would not talk with dictators, declared a unilateral cease-fire during the month of Ramadan on November 19, 2000. This was hailed by many as the first positive step in the direction of peace after the collapse of the August 2000 peace initiative of the Hizbul Mujahideen, which had also declared a unilateral cease-fire, by ordering its armed forces on the LOC to exercise “maximum restraint” to “strengthen and stabilize” the ceasefire in “occupied Kashmir.” Pakistan reciprocated Indian unilateral move. However, the failures of the earlier attempts show that a Camp David-style peace process cannot work in South Asia. A formalist exercise in conflict resolution that does not go into the basics of the status quo is bound to be stillborn. The hallmark of the American Administration’s policy of “waging peace” in West Asia has been not to disturb the status quo (for example, ignoring the fundamental issues of Palestinian displacement and Jewish settlements). The fact that the intent of the Lahore declaration could not be translated into policy is significant in itself, for the peace process remained singular and refused to take into account the plural character of the issue and the process. The terms of the unilateral cease-fire indicate that India is still not willing to talk to Pakistan. A refusal to accept the plurality of the process of 21/31

peace will not lead cease-fires toward a larger peace. South Asia will remain bogged down in a Camp David-like process where ostrichlike negotiators bury their heads in the sand. A cease-fire is generally achieved through negotiations. Steps before and after lead cease-fires to peace. Pakistan and India, particularly India, can turn the current cease-fire into an opportunity for opening up for a fresh peace process by immediately initiating steps to restore rule of law in the valley, initiating de-militarization, ordering its forces to respect rights of the people, and beginning dialogue at various levels. India can simultaneously lift all restrictions against peaceful public activities there. This will enable the people to discuss their social and political problems and their future in a democratic manner. As Kashmiri civil society recaptures its lost space, the vexing question, “Whom do we talk to in Kashmir?” will lose its relevance. A vibrant Kashmiri civil society will provide the answers. Not that the political class in Indian democracy did not know that even after the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) had rested arms, the security forces pursued its cadres and most of its political cadres were killed. Or, the Hejbul Mujahideen wanted dialogue. 60 Or, the Hurriyat notwithstanding its notorious vacillation welcomed talks. Or, voices have been present against the proposal to trifurcate Jammu and Kashmir along communal lines. Or, plurality that liberal thinkers celebrate is being misused at this very time to foment ethnic enclave making, exactly as was done in India’s northeast to such harmful consequences. Or, that the Sikhs in Kashmir even after the Chattesinghpura massacre have refused to leave Kashmir. Or, there has been a rebirth of civil society organizations such as Mothers of the Disappeared, the Jammu Kashmir Forum of Civil Society Organizations, and the initiatives of the Pakistan–India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy. Hence is the required twofold inquiry: Will nationalist democracy, organic as it is, be capable of generating an outlook that will encourage restoration of dignity, compromise, and reconciliation on the basis of minimal justice? And, can the democracy we inhered as gift of de-colonization procedurally promote dialogue? Unfortunately, a policy of peace based on conservative geopolitical reasoning has shown itself often as part of the politics of war. Such geopolitical policy of peace has been attempted to wear out the foe, to create a stalemate, to exasperate him, to choke the agenda of reconciliation and peace with which the adversary has come forward due to fatigue or desire for minimal justice. Geopolitical settlement de-linked from the agenda of a “democratic peace,” that is, the participatory route of wide-range dialogue, is typical of a policy of authoritarian security where the state thinks that by talking to the leader of the adversarial camp, a tête-à-tête between two leaders, peace is achieved. Such thinking divorces the condition and feelings of people, and their desire for justice and activism for peace from the process of peace. To embark on a path of plural dialogue and plural peace process, we must first understand that the pursuit of a monolithic peace process is not congruent with flexible arrangements, new forms of political accommodation, and an imaginative geopolitics. The challenge before democracy is if it will be able to recover from the clutches of the older forms of geopolitics with which the Westminster model of decolonization had triumphed in South Asia. 22/31

The line, that divides Pakistan and India in that region, also divides the two parts of Kashmir, indeed in several parts. That line has been replicated already within the country, dividing how many times, how many entities, and in how many forms, historians will find out someday.61 Visible and invisible frontiers have been created. The feature of these nouvelle frontiers is that they are being produced internally; they are not vertical lines separating two spaces, but concentric circles continuously dividing and then locating these to rejoin them in the universe of the nation. Law, citizenship, rights, obligation, morality all are caught in this universe of concentric circles. In a situation where geopolitics has imprisoned democracy, the agenda for democracy begins with a realization that the reproduction of frontiers as a disciplining tool is not a condition of normalcy. Taking that as normal indicates lack of acknowledgement of plurality—critical to note here—plurality of peace constituencies. After all, any policy of reconciliation in Kashmir will have to begin with a recognition of that specific history of Kashmiriyat which tells us of its internal forms of accommodation (between tenantry and the middle classes, between several sub-regions, between communities, between Kashmir and rest of the sub-continent, between religion and tolerance) as it tells of similar internal fault-lines, and the contingent character of the Kashmiriyat. Democratic politics will have to begin with a refusal to accept a revision of this past, if it is to free itself from the lure of imperial forms of nation and geopolitics, and think of reconciliation, justice and accommodation. The dividing lines in Kashmir still the time of the nation, at the same time lend it a form, indeed many forms—of nationalism, postcolonial politics, neighborhood, enmity, identity, and finally the institutional form of political discipline. Power unless given spatial form remains in limbo, as if the national power is grievously weakened because it lacks focus, it has no source. Geopolitics not merely supplies the nation form this focus, it also creates what Foucault calls the heterotopy— a site of more than one social and political existence, several spatial settings combined in one—a multiplicity of locative spaces in one site, in this case the line. The significance of the border—the dividing line—has only increased in this way in the wake of conflicts, rather that diminishing. In a perceptive essay on the “fence/border problematic” in Israel-Palestine peace question, an Israeli peace researcher Tamar Hermann has argued that both the historical legacy and the present political preferences of Israel’s leadership and public make an implementation of the separation option far more likely than the integrative option, while ruling out the coexistence option. A recently published book, she says, dedicated from cover to cover to promoting the idea of separation, eruditely summarizes the “objective” need for separation. Integration, it maintains, implies six dangers to the State of Israel: if Israel fails to separate from the Palestinians, its political and moral responsibility for the well-being of the latter’s millions will overburden its welfare system to the point of collapse; only strict separation can prevent the influx of millions of Arab immigrants into Israel—a process which will result in far-reaching demographic transformations to a point where the Arab vote will determine the features of Israel’s political map, jeopardizing Israel’s economic achievements and modernization prospects; immediate relations between the more affluent Israeli Jewish society and the impoverished Arab societies are bound to 23/31

lead to a destabilization and “relative deprivation” in the latter, thereby adding a class struggle aspect to the already grave national conflict; if indeed the borders are opened, the influx of Arab immigrants will lead to the collapse of Israel’s sub-structural systems such as transportation, water, sewage, etc. Moreover, if the barriers are lifted, a sharp increase in crime and corruption inside Israel is anticipated, in light of the profound normative and behavioral differences between the Jewish and the Arab societies and their respective control systems; last but not least, integration will expose Israel’s “soft underbelly” to Arab insurgency and terror attacks.62 Tamar further argues that this suggests that the pre-Oslo combination of the zero-sum definition of the conflict with the greater Israel vision, based on security or religious–national grounds or both, seems paradoxically to have served well the colonialist mode of relations as it sustained the integrative spatial policy imposed by Israel on the Palestinians between 1967 and 1992. During these 25 years of occupation, the Green Line, which separated the West Bank and Gaza from Israel before the 1967 war, was practically erased, making de facto the entire Land of Israel/Palestine west of the Jordan river into one entity, albeit internally torn apart and discriminatory. This practical spatial integration seems incapable of surviving the post-Oslo combination of the still predominant definition of Israeli– Palestinian relations as fundamentally antagonistic with the Israeli sober assessment that withdrawal from the territories is a sine qua non for management of the conflict, and now provides fertile ground to nourish the idea of separation. The post-Oslo conceptual combination now accords the Israelis full self-legitimacy to confine “them” (the Palestinians) to the territories on the one side of the fortified border, while “we” (Israelis) alone reside on the other. The similarity does not end here. A second Palestinian uprising is on, involving a great deal violence on both sides. Israeli chauvinism is now at its hardened most, reminding one of the situations of the sixties and seventies, causing setbacks in almost every sphere of joint activity as well as a resurgence of all the old, negative stereotypes. There are plans for all kinds of unilateral solution, without seeking or obtaining Palestinian consent thereto. The “fence policy” has again become tempting. The issue of future boundaries has not become irrelevant; on the contrary—it is being dealt with incessantly, both formally and informally, even while the talks are suspended, and is continuously debated by experts, crisis managers, and political figures in Israel. And with this the theoretical and practical problems of a politics of reconciliation are now before a politics of peace. An acknowledgement of this, Tamar says, does not mean questioning the relevance of the current discussions on reconciliation that have contributed considerably to our understanding of the causes, components, and dynamics of various sorts of conflict, as well as the conditions for their resolution. But it implies certainly the need to take into account specific issues, problems, and practices of negotiating borders and boundaries leading to conflict and reproduced on an extended scale by the conflict.63 In the context of the geopolitical realities that have thrust themselves upon the politics of Kashmir, the counter politics of dialogue has to probably turn them on their head. Thus while there has to be a recognition that the conversion of LOC into an 24/31

international border cannot be the solution, there has to be also a recognition that the line cannot be abolished overnight and it will remain in place and will be respected at least temporarily. At the same time, the line would be transcended by the institution of “soft borders” for facilitating flow of goods, services, and people toward restoration of a shared life. Accompanying this process there has to be dialogue on making Kashmir on both sides “autonomous” again through de-militarization, withdrawal of all intervening powers, dismantling of the ruthless summary power structure, initiation of a new constitution-making in Kashmir, which will be observed by a dialogic group of interlocutors, and guaranteed by both countries who among themselves can work out a joint defence council buttressed by a series of agreements and treaties. Similarly the lines that divide Jammu and Kashmir from within have to be similarly turned on their heads by making Jammu, Ladakh, and the northern areas “mandated territories” whose autonomy will be guaranteed not only by the two countries, but the autonomous body governing Kashmir also, and which will be administered by autonomous councils of these areas. And all these dialogues and guarantees will be predicated by a supervening guarantee of protection of minorities and their rights that will have a place from the beginning in any plan of restoration of peace and freedom in Kashmir. Autonomy, to summarize, does not have a once for all form of existence; it deepens and must be allowed to assume thereby variegated and simultaneous forms. I do not intend hereby to suggest solutions. But these ideas and their possibilities broached and appreciated in various forms show that the connecting links between geopolitics and democracy cannot be wished away, rather they have to be appreciated. These links also suggest that dialogue has to be plural, because issues, constituencies, histories, disputes, and unities are also plural. Here is then the agenda for democracy, as one philosopher has asked: “How to assure that this non- democratic institution (border) per excellence, which is never collectively mentioned, but serves to monitor individuals and populations, becomes a stake in politics whose modalities of use and transformations can be negotiated?” 64 In such a question we have the beginning of a realization of how the political class in a democracy becomes incapable of coping with the torment of the inside/outside of the nation form— democracy that appears as an internal problem and geopolitics that appears as a problem related with the outside. Notes and References 1. Sumantra Bose, “Kashmir at the Crossroads—Problems and Possibilities,” Security Dialogue, 32 (1), March 2001. 2. There are several accounts on the indication of future complications in the Gurudaspur award that made land link between Kashmir and rest of India possible. Of them see, Nicholas Mansergh and Penderlal Moon (eds), The Transfer of Power, 1942– 47, Vol. X (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1981); H. V. Hodson, The Great Divide (London: Hutchinson, 1970); Lord Birdwood, Two Nations and Kashmir (London: Hale, 1956); M. J. Akbar, Nehru (London: Viking, 1988); Latif Ahmed Sherwani, The Partition of India and Mountbatten (Karachi: Council for Pakistan

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Studies, 1986). On the clumsy partition in the east, the best till date is Joya Chatterjee, “The Fashioning of a Frontier—The Radcliffe Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape, 1947–52,” Modern Asian Studies, 33 (1), 1999, pp. 183–242. 3. Discussions on links between internal and interstate conflicts sometimes fail to take into account the catalytic role of borders in forging the links. See in this context, David Carment and Patrick James, “Internal Constraints and Internal Ethnic Conflict: Towards A Crisis-based Assessment of Irredentism,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 39 (1), March 1995, pp. 82–109. 4. On the flexibility of the early Indian stand we write below. On a similar flexibility in early Pakistan policy, see Mehrunnisa Ali, “Jinnah’s Perception of Pakistan’s Foreign Policy and the Kashmir Issue,” Pakistan Horizon, 43 (2), 1990, pp. 57–70. 5. Quoted in K. Sarwar Hasan (ed.), Documents on the Foreign Relations of Pakistan: The Kashmir Question (Karachi: Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, 1966), p. 71. 6. Ibid., p. 75. 7. S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography , Vol. 3, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 86. 8. For these insights I am indebted to Paula Banerjee’s detailed essay based on archival work, “The Tenuous Control over the Line of Control,” in Helmut Reifeld and R. Samaddar (eds), Peace as Process (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2002). 9. Hasan, The Kashmir Question, p. 31. 10. President Ayub Khan’s Statement on January 14, 1966, reprinted in Pakistan Horizon, 43(2), 1990, pp. 120–124. 11. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s speech, Pakistan Horizon, 1990, p. 138. 12. Also noted by Sumit Ganguly, “Past Attempts at Mediation and Conflict Prevention in South Asia: Would CSBMs Have Made a Difference?” in S. Ganguly and Ted Green (eds), Mending Fences: Confidence and Security Building Measures in South Asia (Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1997). 13. Bhutto, Pakistan Times, July 19, 1972, p. 1. 14. Address delivered at the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, Karachi on July 31, 1972, published in Pakistan Horizon, 1990. 15. Years later after Z. Bhutto had made the statement, the Pakistan President, General Pervez Musharraf, said on the eve of his visit to India for the Agra summit on July 14– 16, 2001, “I will be flexible on Kashmir—LOC is the problem, not the solution,” Outlook,

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July 23, 2001; also reported in The Telegraph in a report by Drees Bakhtiar on July 7, 2001, “Pervez Rules out LOC Solution” of saying, “LOC was at the core of the (Kashmir) problem and could not be seen as a solution to the dispute.” 16. “The Tenuous Control over the Line of Control.” 17. On the history of this infamous act, the single most insistent research has been done by Gautam Navlakha; from his many writings, see for example, “Armed Forces Special Powers Act,” Economic and Political Weekly, 32 (6), February 8, 1997. 18. According to one observer: “The growing power of the Indian military-bureaucratic complex has also greatly contributed to the expansion of India’s military clout. India’s intervention in East Pakistan in 1971, compounded with other military interventions … has given the armed forces the appropriate bases to constitute themselves into a powerful lobby.” Harsh Kapur, India’s Foreign Policy—1947–92: Shadows and Substance (New Delhi/Thousand Oaks/London: SAGE Publications, 1994). 19. This figure of financial cost is old, a more recent figure (that too three years old) is US$1 million a day. See Patwant Singh, “Too Many Chinks in the Armour,” Asian Age, January 29, 2001, p. 6. 20. “Battle in Siachen Is of Survival,” The Times of India, January 15, 2001, p. 4. 21. Nehru to the cabinet secretary, April 6, 1953, cited in A. G. Noorani, “Kashmir’s Woe: I,” The Statesman, February 13, 1995; also see, “Poll in J & K—I: A Record of Fraud,” The Statesman, April 13, 1995. 22. On Siachen negotiations, see Robert G. Wirsing, India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir Dispute (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 195–216. 23. Jean Luc Racine, “The Uncertain Triangle: India, China and Pakistan—The Regional and International Dimensions,” unpublished essay. I am grateful to Racine for allowing me access to this essay. 24. On this period see, Kanti Bajpai, “CBMs: Contexts, Achievements, Functions,” in D. Banerjee (ed.), Confidence Building Measures in South Asia (Colombo: Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, 1999); on the “China factor” see Gary Klintworth, “Chinese Perspectives on India as a Great Power,” in R. Babbage and Sandy Gordon (eds), India’s Strategic Future: Regional State or Global Power (New York, 1992); on Operation Brasstacks, see K. Bajpai, P. R. Chari, Parvaiz Cheema, 5. Ganguly, and S. P. Cohen, Brasstacks and Beyond: Perception and Management of Crisis (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1995). On the compulsions to look at the Kashmir question from a geopolitical perspective, see Robert W. Bradnock, “Regional Geopolitics in a Globalising World—Kashmir in a Geopolitical Perspective,” Geopolitics, 3 (2), Autumn 1998, pp. 1– 29.

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25. Pakistani foreign minister, Aseef Ahmed Ali’s complaint to the UN General Assembly on October 5, 1994, reported in The Statesman (Delhi edition), October 6, 1994. 26. The Statesman (Mumbai edition), February 2, 1996. 27. Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, Pakistan ambassador to India, in an interview to PTI, and quoted in The Hindu (Kolkata), August 9, 1999. 28. Bharat Karnad to The Telegraph, June 20, 1999. 29. The Nation, July 8, 1999. 30. The Telegraph, (Kolkata edition), June 17, 1999. 31. The Indian Express (Kolkata edition), June 12, 1999. 32. The Times of India (Kolkata), June 8, 1999. 33. J. N. Dixit quoted in “Line of Control: Bordering on the Impossible”, The Outlook, July 12, 1999. 34. Indian Express, September 6, 2000, p. 5 35. Gautum Navlakha, “Kashmir: An Idea Which Cannot Be Suppressed,” Economic and Political Weekly, January 29, 2000, pp. 253–255. 36. A. G. Noorani, “Poll in J & K—I: A Record of Fraud,” The Statesman, April 13, 1995; see also Sisir Gupta’s report, The Statesman, January 21–23, 1995; Noorani, “Kashmir’s Woe—I,” The Statesman, February 13, 1995; M. L. Chibber, “Indo–Pak Ties: Need to Create Public Opinion,” The Statesman, April 24, 1995. 37. P. R. Chari, “India’s Defence Expenditure: Can It Be Reduced,” Defence Expenditure In South Asia: India and Pakistan, RCSS Policy Studies, June 12, 2000. 38. Report released on August 17, 1999, www.meadev.gov.in/govt//indnucld.htm (accessed on 14 January 2003), pp. 18–19. 39. Gautum Navlakha, “Kashmir: An Idea Which Cannot Be Suppressed,” p. 253. 40. “Two Women Killed in Indian Firing,” Dawn (Delhi edition), June 18, 1999, p. 1. 41. “Two Peaks on Jubar Hills Recaptured,” Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition), June 30, 1999. 42. “IAF Carries Out Fresh Strikes in Kargil, UNI Report (Kolkata edition), June 2, 1999.

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43. “2 Killed, 4 Injured in Pak Shelling in Jammu Region,” UNI Report (Colombo edition), June 21, 1999. 44. “Army Called Out in Surankote Following Protests,” Daily Excelsior, June 30, 1999, www.dailyexcelsior.com/99june30/news.html (accessed on 14 January 2003). 45. “An Uphill Task Against Intruders,” The Hindu (Mumbai edition), June 4, 1999. 46. “Villagers Shifting from Areas near Border,” Dawn, June 16, 1999. The estimated number of displaced people was put as nearly 150,000; the newspapers reported that some of these were displaced for more six months, and even the war would be over due to snow-covered road at that altitude, people would not be able to return to their homes in Drass and other areas. For details of displacement, see the special issue of Refugee Watch on displacements in Kargil war, No. 7–8, 1999. 47. See in this context Roland Paris, “Peace Building and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism,” International Security, 22 (2), Fall, 1997, pp. 54–89. 48. See for example the Manual for Early Warning and Early Response, issued by FEWER (Forum for Early Warning and Early Response), London, 1998. 49. Michael Mann, “The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing,” New Left Review, 235, May–June 1999. 50. Muzamil Jaleel, the correspondent of the Indian Express reported how most Kashmiris felt alienated from the Kargil war, though the war was fought in their name. In his words, “the war exposed both India and Pakistan in the valley.” Muzamil Jaleel, “It Was Not Our War,” in Sankarshan Thakur and others, Guns and Yellow Roses: Essays on the Kargil War (New Delhi: Viking, 1999), pp. 63–94. 51. See for a pertinent discussion, Etienne Balibar, “Is European Citizenship Possible,” Public Culture, 8 (2), Winter, 1996, pp. 355–376, later on published in James Holston (ed.), Cities and Citizenship (Durham, 1999), pp. 195–214. 52. Balibar, “Is European Citizenship Possible?” 53. In this exercise, in recent years the interest has been on to finding out how democracy integrated Kashmir with India. On this, apart from the books and articles mentioned above, see Prem Sankar Jha, Kashmir 1947: Rival Versions of History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Vernon Hewitt, Reclaiming the Past: The Search for Political and Cultural Unity in Contemporary Jammu and Kashmir (London, 1995); Stanley Wolpert, Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan: His Life and Times (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); R. Grover (ed.), The Story of Kashmir: Yesterday and Today (Delhi: South Asia Books, 1995); Sumit Ganguly, Origins of War in South Asia: Indo–Pakistani Conflicts since 1947 (Boulder: Westview, 1986), Sumit Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sumantra Bose and Victoria Schofield, “Kashmir in Conflict.” 29/31

54. For the role of media in the war, see the detailed dossier prepared by the South Asia Forum for Human Rights, The Ten Week War in Kargil: A Dossier, SAFHR Papers 6, Kathmandu, 2000; also Geeta Seshu, “Media and Kargil: Information Blitz with Dummy Missiles,” Economic and Political Weekly, 9 October 1999, pp. 217–219; also the collection of essays by some notable journalists, Sankarshan Thakur et al., Guns and Yellow Roses; on a general level, Tim Allen and Jean Seaton (eds), The Media of Conflict: War Reporting and Representations of Ethnic Violence (London: Zed Books, 1999); Jean Seaton, “Why Do We Think the Serbs Do It? The New Ethnic Wars and the Media,” Political Quarterly, Summer, 1999, pp. 254–270. 55. Readers interested in this must read the collection of media reports in the The Ten Week War in Kargil: A Dossier. 56. Sankaran Krishna, Postcolonial Insecurities—India, Sri Lanka, and the Question of Nationhood (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), Chapter 5, “Hegemony as Spectacle—The Theater of Postcolonial Politics,” pp. 129–165. 57. Clifford Geertz, Negara—The Theater State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 13. 58. Postcolonial Insecurities, p. 130. 59. In this context, one may see Richard K. Ashley, “The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space—Towards a Critical Theory of International Politics,” Alternatives, 12, 1987, pp. 403–434. 60. On this see the revealing interview by the Hezbul chief, “What’s the Use of Hurriyat Visit to Pakistan, Asks Hizb Chief,” The Times of India, 16 January 2001. 61. Peter Radan refers to the mimetic situation in a significant essay “Yugoslavia’s Internal Borders as International Borders—A Question of Appropriateness,” East European Quarterly, 33 (2), Summer 1999, pp. 137–155; see also P. Diehl and G. Goertz, “Territorial Changes and Militarized Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 32, March 1998, pp. 103–122. 62. Dan Schueftan, Disengagement: Israel and the Palestinian Entity (Tel Aviv: Schoken, 1999, pp. 23–24, [Hebrew]), cited by Tamar Hermann, “Reconstituting Boundaries as a means of Peacemaking: The Israeli-Palestinian Case,” unpublished paper, February 2001; I am grateful to Tamar for allowing me access to her work on the Middle East peace process. 63. Tamar Hermann, “Reconstituting Boundaries as a Means of Peacemaking,” unpublished paper. I am grateful to Tamar for allowing me access to this essay. 64. Etienne Balibar, “Algeria, France: One nation or Two?” in Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin (eds), Giving Ground—The Politics of Propinquity (London, 1999), p. 171. See also his “The Borders of Europe,” in Pheng Chea and Bruce Robbins (eds), 30/31

Cosmopolitics—Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis, 1998).

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The Nation Form 11 The Autonomous Spaces within the Nation

Autonomy: The Symbol of Emerging Political Spaces The nation’s space is not homogeneous. It is heterogeneous. Particularly in this age when political thinking is caught between neo-liberal thinking that concentrates on the limits of state responsibilities and functions on one hand and on the other hand the seemingly overwhelming reality of governmental power, functions, and actions turning people into administrable population groups; it is absolutely essential to give proper attention on the visible and half-visible autonomies of the new societies if we want to trace the emerging patterns of the form of the nation. Resistance to the power of the state and an overwhelming reality of moving the nation homogeneous are often found in the form of demand for autonomy, and it is visible today among various sections of society such as women, ethnicities, classes, and so forth. Michel Foucault would probably have read the phenomenon of autonomy as a signature of governmentality. Here, however, I explore the phenomenon of autonomy as a symbol of the emerging patterns of new spaces in politics, spaces that speak of rights and justice, and the plank needed for these rights. The analytics of government are concerned with the “how” of governmental practices, including the practices of self-government. The concern is with how these practices form, increase, and intensify governmental relations between individuals and groups, and how issues of life and truth become deeply marked by governmental relations. Seen from this perspective, politics is governmental politics, a specific form of power existing in micro form at every level of social life, helping each individual to regulate and control her/his body, and the soul. Seen, however, from the angle of those who are being ruled, that is, the subjects of governmental relations, politics means the agenda of creating autonomous spaces defying the “iron” laws of governmentality and claiming autonomies in life, in particular political life. “Politics of the governed,” to recall the well-known phrase of a political scientist1 is not politics modeled and bound by governmentality, but politics that in the face of the seemingly overwhelming nature of governmental power can claim autonomy for itself. It is only in this way that the capability of the individual and the collectives to be autonomous increases, and power relations intensify. The enhanced capacity to reflect on how governmental practices regulate our political existence and eat up the autonomous spaces results in new autonomies, by which I mean thinking on autonomy beyond the conventional question

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of the self, and perching it on the crucial concatenation of circumstances that create the political subject that forms the self through political practices, whose hermeneutics can be understood only in the context of collective actions and contentious politics. In short, autonomy indicates the autonomous practices that give birth to the political subject whose existence is in contra distinction to the existence of the governmental realities of this world. An analytic of autonomy goes beyond the analysis of governmental rationalities or of relations between freedom and power or forms of domination. It reflects, to be precise, on the kinds and relations of power that propel the emergence of autonomous spaces. In this way it helps us to understand the emergence of the political subject who claims autonomy and defines itself against the dominant from of relation. I am suggesting, therefore, that autonomy is the Other of governmentality; it is a stake that marks the existence of the political subject today. It is different from freedom, because freedom is essentially a value, while autonomy is essentially a category of power. It is different from self-government because while self-government focuses on the ability of the individual or the collective individual to govern oneself, autonomy always points toward the supplement that remains after (the task of) government has been accomplished. The various forms of autonomy that we witness today indicate the way which politics in the future may take, the new forms of contestations and the new possibility of disentangling democratic theory from its close association with the dominant organization of power that may emerge. Autonomous practices in sum indicate the way society can be reorganized, the dialogic zone that can be created where autonomies may be negotiated, the responsibilities that autonomies may have to bear in order to converse among themselves—a situation that can be described as the daily plebiscite of a democratic personhood. Come to think of it, autonomous practices point to the principle of “autonomy of the autonomies,” to borrow a term from Sanjay Chaturvedi—beyond governmentality and the calculated behavior of the governed. In my earlier work on issues such as peace accords as the basis of autonomous arrangements, the public policy of conducting dialogue with rebels to arrive at regulatory arrangements of a quasi-autonomous nature, and the various successes, semi-successes, and failures of such actions, I tried to show three things: (a) there is a close relation of link and contest between governmentality and autonomy; (b) the autonomous space is a dialogic form toward ensuring “minimal justice”; and (c) there is a consequent re-negotiation of the democratic question in the autonomous spaces.2 Yet that work threw less light on the way autonomous spaces emerge than on autonomy as a form of self-determination. In the last few years, however, it has become clear that the environment of governmental relations clouds the principle of self-determination everywhere. So we need to study autonomous practices in the light of this reality and find out how the autonomous spaces are being retrieved and recreated today, and how these spaces disturb the agenda of creating a homogeneous form of the nation.

Autonomy and Government 2/16

In order to trace the significance of autonomy against the backdrop of a theory of governmentality, we should first note that Michel Foucault in discussing the notion of “governmentality” never uttered a word on autonomy.3 He speaks of the “conduct of conducts,” of the “self acting on the self,” of the rules by which self-government is thus learnt, of the way social management is “governmentalised”, of governmental rationality being a significant aspect of “bio politics” in which governing the body becomes a critical task of government, and the “government that makes the state possible.” It seems that Foucault had in mind the failure of the welfare states in the West and also the early signs of neo-liberalism that argues for a contraction of the state, particularly welfare functions of the governments, and the imprisonment of democracy in these twin developments.4 We cannot of course be certain about this explanation, because his later writings suggest that the roots of the theory of governmentality lay deeper. He, as we know, strove to explain the technologies of politics in terms of “technologies of the self,” and wanted to show that the realities of the art of governing went back to the early days when the political class learnt to dialogue, determined the conditions under which the members of the political class could dialogue and the forms of the contests in the conversation, and the rules that men must make in taking care of the body, because it was in bodily reality that the art of politics lay. Therefore, for Foucault, governmentality did not mean only governing others or relations of governance or even the tools and practices of governing people that turn the latter into objects, or that field of relations or dynamics that make every relation a relation of government; it also meant governing the self, controlling the self, a politics that builds upon this extensive art of managing the self learnt through centuries of rule and government. With this understanding in the background, the question will be—how do we differentiate between the two concepts of self-government and self-determination, and self-government and autonomy? This is important if we remember that no discussion on the nation is ever complete without a discussion on self-determination. Yet, governing the self comes before governing others. As I have pointed out, the theory of governmentality was never discussed from the angle of the autonomy of the political subject. Foucault explicitly brings in his discussion the late middle age phenomenon of composing advice to the princes of how to rule. There was then no outside morality in the science of ruling; the science had to be learnt to tackle the triple issues of security, population, and government. Government connects security and the people. Selfgovernment, on the other hand, connects with morality, while governing the family connects with economy, and governing the state connects with politics. This selfgovernment has nothing to do, we should note here, with political autonomy. It rather connects with what Foucault would later term as certain “ethical practices”—of how to write, speak, converse, keep the body healthy, address, make judgments, etc. Foucault makes the sense of governmentality further clear when he stresses the connection between a government and the economy in the perspective of the relation between family and economy. As he says: To govern a state will mean, therefore, to apply economy, to set up an economy at the 3/16

level of the entire state, which means exercising toward its inhabitants, and the wealth and behaviour of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods.5 Government, besides indicating processes of governing which its association with economy reveals, also means the right disposition of things. Once again it is being indicated by the term that there is a field of “intervention through a series of complex processes, which are absolutely fundamental to our history,” and this field also means a right disposition, that is arrangement, of things and men. Because, men governed means men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with things that are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility and so on, men in their relation with those other things that are customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking, and so on; and finally men in their relation to those still other things that might be accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, and so on … government concerns things understood in this way, this imbrication of men and things.6 To govern means then to govern things and to stretch the point a little governing men by turning them into things. One can see that Foucault reads the origins of the government quite narrowly. It is almost a utilitarian reading of the task of governing that has little to do with the tasks of ruling or suppression, or negotiating the facts of mutiny, revolt, refusal to pay rents and taxes, or say for instance meeting the need for optimization of the colonial practices of an empire, the need to maintain an army, to guard the extraction of resources and revenues, and most important, the need to negotiate the parallel and often underground language of rights, autonomy, and illegality. If one origin of the idea of governmentality is the utilitarian task of governing, the other origin is sovereignty, once again the explanation arriving from the top. Foucault says that sovereignty may not be enough for ruling, for in case of sovereignty obedience to laws is indisposable, and law and sovereignty are inseparable, “for government it is not a case of imposing law, but disposing things.” Governmental rationality extends beyond law, it “uses law like tactics,” “it is statistics,” and the art of government could expand in peace time after frequent and long drawn-out wars are over. The framework of sovereignty is too large, abstract, and rigid; while the theory of government relied on a model that was initially weak, and the art of government escaped the difficulty by inventing functions that were related to economy, expansion of demography, and appropriateness of scale. Technical developments aided the proliferation of governmental activities, and the knowledge of governing related to the larger process of economy led to the transition from the art of governing to the science of governing, called the political science. Foucault concludes the discussion by saying two things, which have implications for our discussion on autonomy. First, he says that the ensemble of institutions, procedures, calculations, tactics, etc., 4/16

known as government is aimed at a population and its basis is the knowledge of political economy. It soon overshadows state, sovereignty, etc., so much so that even the state is governmentalized with increases in the knowledge of government. Second, this phenomenon draws initially on archaic models, drawing support from military models and techniques, and grows with the growth of knowledge of policing and managing, the dual practices being subsumed within the single term governing. We can now see that we cannot progress with our ideas and discussions on autonomy without coming to an understanding of two posers, namely, do governmental rationalities apply to the principle and practices of autonomy? And can we equate selfgovernment with autonomy? I think if we leave aside the point that governing began with self-governing, and therefore the self is the ultimate (or the first?) object of government, it is true however that the practice of autonomy can internalize many of the governmental rationalities, and can become limited or fictive. Also we can admit that governmental rationalities such as management of economy, quantifying objects of governing thereby turning them into “things,” and complex institutional processes backed by knowledge of the science of governing (much like what Max Weber commented on bureaucracy)7 have become essential for politics. Autonomous movements and political practices for autonomy are infected or invested with these rationalities. Yet movement after movement for self-determination, and more significantly new spaces in society claiming autonomy, show the limits of governmentality. Peace talks do not end violence, nor do they produce devotion to the Constitution. Indeed Constitution provokes autonomy of the street. Indigenous people demand autonomy. Spaces in society clamor for legal pluralism, which is the other word for autonomy of other forms of legal thinking than the centralized modern legal system, and the sovereignty of the basic law. Women claim autonomy, and increasingly feminism is used as a resource for generating and enriching autonomy of spaces. Indeed, as Paula Banerjee makes the explicit point in one of her recent studies on women’s movements, using the phrase, “Acts and Facts of Women’s Justice,”8 each time the women’s movement made some progress in ensuring justice for women, law was able to cloud the progress with a governmental form of justice; yet again that never satisfied the feminist movements in India. The movements progressed to the extent of giving birth to autonomous women’s organizations whose purpose, dynamics, and style of functioning today defy any governmental straightjacket. Similarly, as the failure of so-called peace accords and autonomy packages demonstrates, either these governmental packages fail to satisfy discontent and rouse more desire for a share of sovereignty (the recurrent Bodo and Tripura accords illustrate this) or they incite imagination for an enriched form of autonomy that would redefine the two principles of justice and democracy. Thus, beyond the boutique variety of multiculturalism, autonomy has become one of the fundamental principles of reorganizing society. Indeed, today’s political society stands on two related recognitions: (a) politics is autonomous, and it is not always going to listen to economic wisdom; and (b) that political existences or spaces must have some degree of autonomy

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in order to coexist with others and make politics meaningful. In event after event, it is clear that raising the demand for autonomy is the most effective way of countering constitutional essentialism, and forcing the agenda of dialogue to come out in the front. We can say in that sense there is a dramatic transformation in the significance of the word “autonomy.” As in all other cases, here too signs function in a group, and with the entire field of political actions changing, the signs too are changing in their signifying functions. Locality, difference, modes of sharing sovereignty, street politics, mechanisms of dialogue, new forms of collective actions, and the persistence of the raw physical forms of politics, such as “terror,” have made a great change in the field of politics, so much so that achieving governmental efficiency and rationality has become the most tenacious but elusive dream of governmental managers trying to discipline wild societies and runaway politics. Politics produces agents; agents claim and produce autonomy. We can now come to the insight provided by the above discussion. Governmental science admittedly produces multiplicities; yet the irony is that it wants to handle this multiplicity on a homogenous scale, by a homogenous standard, at a homogenous level. Yet autonomy is produced from heteronomy. Heteronomy comes from difference, distance, and inequality. Difference, distance, and inequality are not only signs of multiplicities; they are essential to this heteronomic world. Deleuze tells us, We would be criticized for having included all differences in kind within intensity, thereby inflating with everything that normally belongs to quality. Equally we could be criticized for having included within distances what normally belongs to extensive quantities. To us these criticisms do not appear well founded. It is true that in being developed in extension, difference becomes simple difference of degree and no longer has its reason in itself…. In short, there would no more be qualitative differences or differences in kind than there would be quantitative differences or differences of degree, if intensity were not capable of constituting the former in qualities and the latter in extensity, even at the risk of appearing to extinguish itself in both.9 In other words, difference is autonomous. Difference is essential, and it owes its fundamental existence to such physical factors existing at the micro level such as distance, degree, and inequality. Weberian rationality or Foucault’s governmentality cannot suppress differences that propel autonomy. Distinct physical realities of politics defeat Weberian rationality. Autonomy springs from this physicality of politics Finally, we can say, governmentality produces difference from the top; autonomy is the mark of negotiating difference from below. Autonomy is, therefore, not an exceptional principle of democracy conceded to some belligerent section of society or some areas or groups of population, such as frontier populations insistent on autonomy. Autonomy is the organizing principle of the emerging political society, autonomies in perpetual dialogue among themselves and linked by respective responsibilities to retain the autonomous places in a dialogic universe. 6/16

The Paradox of Autonomy in India The fact that autonomy is a meeting ground of governmentalization and difference and the fact that autonomy too can be governmentalized or be another governmental product, yet again the fact that the salient feature of today’s politics is that the political agency claims autonomy from governmental modes and forms (be it statehood or the given form of territory, law, or sovereignty, or the gendered form of politics, or going beyond parliamentary modes of politics, etc.), it should not be surprising that the Indian experiences of autonomy present a paradox, unexplained by the liberal theory of autonomy, or for that matter the neo-liberal theory of govern-mentality. In order to understand the paradox, we should begin with what the political theory of autonomy fails to indicate. As is commonly understood, the notion of autonomy is seen as belonging to nature, which is to say it is the source or the basis of political morality: claims and obligations. In the political context, individuals or communities as political actors should possess independent self-governing and self-legislative authority. Immanuel Kant thought of rational actors who could be lawgivers or legislators to themselves, and therefore responsible for their modes of behavior.10 This was to him a universal principle that required that one could set one’s own ends only within a framework that was based on acceptance by all other such beings. Autonomy, the categorical principle, was to lead therefore to harmony and not discord Autonomy was the property of the will by which it (was) a law to its own self (independently of any property of the objects of volition), subject only to laws given by him, but still universal. One should notice here that Kant in describing autonomy as “property of the will” was integrally linking it to will. By the same token however, autonomy was different from freedom, because, as Locke11 thought, freedom was the condition of a person to think or not to think; to move or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind; autonomy implied on the contrary responsibility, legality, universality, and morality. To be sure, the long liberal thinking of autonomy never came to terms with freedom, will, and the political realities of coercion and management of orders connected with will. Is there then a hierarchy of values involved in this uneasy relation between autonomy and the other values of freedom and will? Can we say then that a person is autonomous with respect to a desire if s/he is not moved by it or s/he has not identified with it or if s/he does not want to be so autonomous? In an autonomous move the actor directs and governs the action. But what explains this autonomous move? Free will? Reason? We can already see the contours of the paradox. If we say, reason governs my life and is thus the source of my autonomy, the problem is, what do we say of the actor who is guided by passion and claims to be autonomous? Clearly the unease that surfaces the moment we think along that line indicates a confusion here—autonomy suggests freedom, yet it suggests regulation, direction, or to be precise, self-regulation, self-direction, and self-governance. Autonomy is, thus, only one subject in the empire of

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conditions. These conditions of management, rule, governance, and admissible forms of politics are so basic and intensely physical or material, that issues of autonomy affect and involve even the body. The Indian experiences of course suggest that there is more to the paradox that I have just suggested above. In the construction of a political society, people or the actors continually face the principle of several autonomies. These autonomies (horizontal, vertical, political, fiscal, cultural) mark the contentions and engagements that make a political society. In this political society, what we term as public sphere is on the one hand regarded as the “habitus” of democracy, and on the other shows itself to be singularly incapable of coping with what I call the “politics of autonomy.” One reason which I do not have the occasion here to discuss at length is the fact that modern democratic polities with their celebrated public sphere are not all dialogic, therefore they understand freedom much more and are ready to be guided by wills, but cannot cope with autonomies, perched as they are on the old juridical notions of sovereignty. All that these polities can accommodate is a sort of “boutique multiculturalism.” The situation is indeed worse, and even by Habermas’ standards, defies the capacity of “communicative rationality”12 to be set right. The South Asian experiences of Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, or the experiences of Basque, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, all point to the incapacity of democracies to appreciate the paradox and tensions with the politics of autonomy and imagine new forms of political society. In India the political struggles of autonomy led to a wide variety of constitutional forms, in the introduction of which the colonial administrative practices too had an equal hand. Indeed, the Indian experience is the most instructive because of its diversity and range, the extent of colonial innovations, multiple forms of autonomy, the complex path of constitutionalism, a wide variety of accords, the persistent demands for selfdetermination in various forms, and an unyielding and innovative state determined to keep the destined nation intact while keeping others from gaining nationhood. It is also important to recall in this context the political and constitutional ways in which the minorities have been negotiated by the Indian State by granting mainly religious minorities limited form of autonomy in personal laws and cultural autonomy, a process discussed in detail in one of my earlier work, The Materiality of Politics.13 The Constitution provides for special status for certain states such as Jammu and Kashmir, Nagaland, Sikkim, Assam, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh in Articles 370 to 371H. The constitution also embodies the principle of nondiscrimination in Articles 14, 15, 16, 19, and 29. It assures freedom of conscience in Article 25 and freedom to manage religious affairs in Article 26. Article 30 ensures right of minorities to establish and administer their own educational institutions. Under the special protection clause in Article 371, tribal customary laws, procedures, and land rights are protected. Part XVI ensures special provisions for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward classes. There are arrangements for zone councils. The States Reorganization Commission ensured statehood for major linguistic groups. There is provision for

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autonomous district councils in scheduled tribe dominated districts. The 73rd and 74th Amendments to the constitution ensured devolution of powers at village and town level. Similarly the constitution arranged for financial autonomy of the states through constitutionally prescribed division of resources and the National Finance Commission. Apart from creating new states (some very recently created) and autonomy for some states in particular, a range of accords and unilateral measures on Darjeeling, Bodoland, Leh, North Cachar Hills, Karbi-Anglong district, Khasi district, Jaintia Hills district, Tripura Tribal Areas district, Chakma, Mara, and La districts in Mizoram, created autonomous areas and district councils under the fifth and sixth schedules. The pattern of combining nationhood with exceptional autonomies is significant. Is autonomy a part of the basic features of the Constitution that the Parliament should not touch? There is no clear answer whether the provisions of autonomy are inviolable or not in the context of the erosion of Article 370 providing for autonomy of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The apex court never had autonomy in mind when commenting upon the violability or the inviolability of the basic features that primarily meant fundamental rights, which have only one among it dealing with autonomy.14 In the constitutional thinking, the democratic language is one of rights and not autonomy. Thus, provisions such as Articles 14–16 (again combining exceptional discrimination on positive grounds), Articles 22–23, Article 25 (combining exceptional right), Article 29, Articles 38–39 define common welfare, secure common good, and indeed lay down the constitutional basis of a welfare state; Articles 46–47 and Articles under Part IX (the panchayats) intend to create a polity that can be said to be based on republicanism— that is, one nation, one people—while allowing autonomies as exceptional measures. It is not surprising, therefore, that even though provisions such as Article 244 (administration of scheduled areas—fifth and sixth schedules) form part of the Constitution they are inadequate to counter the wave of majoritarianism that draws legitimacy from the republican ideology of homogeneity. There is more to this unequal coexistence of nationalism and autonomy. For example, there is no uniform civil law. There are, on the contrary, a variety of personal laws and linguistic autonomy in some measure. Indian constitutional and political system has evolved through at least a seventy year long history of a range of autonomies— administrative, cultural, religious, fiscal, and legal-juridical. Yet, demands for right to self-determination ranging from more autonomy to secession have risen frequently. If some have mellowed, others have persisted and have grown insistent notwithstanding massive state suppression and loss of lives. It began with the Muslim demand for selfdetermination in the pre-independence time and continues in various forms and at various levels still today. The constituent states have said that their legislative, administrative and financial autonomy is inadequate or has diminished. Kashmir says its autonomy is fictive. Insurgents in the north-east have said that grant of statehood is a ploy to subsume them in Indian polity. Religious minorities say that they are under unprecedented attack from the fascist communal forces belonging to the majority community backed by the state. The scheduled castes and tribes say that their deprivation, poverty and disempowerment have only grown. The legal-administrative 9/16

measures for protection of autonomy such as the Minorities Commission, Human Rights Commission, Women’s Commission, are severely limited in their powers. These national commissions have their state counterparts even more limited in powers and functions. In short, we have in the Indian instance the most extraordinary juxtaposition of measures of autonomy and a relentless centralization. Seen from another angle, we have here the most relentless constitutionalism and governmentalization of the principle of autonomy and the most insistent demand of the political subject to gain recognition. It is also a narrative of how and when a group refuses to accept at some historical moment the identity of a minority and claims the status of a people, a nation. The paradox of governmentality and autonomy inherent in the emergence of the political subject in India has been evident in the tortuous history of legal negotiation with the notion of autonomy on the basis of certain constitutional principles, which have not been adequate for that purpose. Marc Galanter had commented thirty years ago: The modern legal system has transformed the way in which the interests and concerns of the component groups within Indian society are accommodated and find expression. In traditional India, many groups (castes, guilds, villages, sects) enjoyed a broad sphere of legal autonomy, and where disputes involving them came before public authorities, the latter were obliged to apply the rules of that group. That is, groups generated and carried their own law and enjoyed some assurance that it would be applied to them. In modern India we find a new dispensation—the component groups within society have lost their former autonomy and isolation. Now groups find expression by influence in the political sphere, by putting forth claims in terms of general rules applicable to the whole society. The legal system, then, provides a forum in which the aspirations of India’s governing modernized western-educated elite confront the ambitions and concerns of the component groups in Indian society. In this forum the law as a living tradition of normative learning encounters and monitors other traditions of prescriptive learning and normative practice.15 It is of course true that nationalism and democracy have broadened the public sphere and the disadvantaged within the group has now access to justice previously denied to them. Also Galanter is concerned here with only one kind of autonomy. Primarily concerned with battles within “Hindu” society for legal justice, he neglected the issue of autonomy of other kinds of groups. The main issue is: Can we have a differential system of justice in place of an equal system of public justice with one or the other group dominating the public and turning its norm into its favor? Can the democratic legal system accommodate legal pluralism in the widest possible sense retaining justice as the standard? The question that follows as a corollary to the above is, if we have a differential system, will it be competitive or cooperative? Since a modern constitution is based on the republican system of an equal public sphere that sees autonomy as an exception, how will such a basic law inhere autonomy as an integral principle of democracy? Also important is the question, how will that equality be pursued on the ground in a society largely committed to the value of hierarchy? Finally, one can take the case of caste as an example of the impossible politics of a

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constitution producing an enduring form of autonomy in India. Though the Constitution finally did not include the series of draft enunciations relating to lower castes and tribes that aimed at defining them as minorities and suggested that an entire separate part for this be kept in the Constitution, clearly the text as we find it today aims to define the place of caste in Indian life and the role of law in regulating it. The Constitution takes a dim view of the place of caste in Indian life. Formally, it is unconcerned with the institution of caste because it considers the phenomenon of ascriptive ties to be outside its domain. But it views itself as the fundamental instrument to ensure that these ascriptions do not lead to hierarchy, inequality, and invidious treatment in public life. Caste therefore with its own internal order and rules promulgating powers and functions may continue as an autonomous association, but this autonomy is supervised so that this does not spill over into public politics. Doctrine, ritual, and culture—all three remain outside juridical bounds till these affect the constitutional mission of promoting equality. If they do, the courts and the law become active. In such a perspective, caste becomes both a religious body in the sense that its own prerogative on such matters such as marital rituals, devotional methods, or representation to bodies like relevant commissions is allowed, and a nonreligious body in the sense that the Constitution tries to detach it from the wider perspective of the Hindu society and determine its character (advantages and disadvantages) among Muslims and Christians as well. But in the institution of caste securely tied to the “Hindu world,” few can opt out of a caste fold and receive protection. The entire controversy over the right to be converted to another faith shows the limits of the Constitution in upholding the autonomy of an individual or a group to choose faith.16 For instance, Indian law permits different family laws on religious lines, even different public laws according to different religions in matters like religious trusts, permits compensatory discrimination in favor of disadvantaged groups, and is sometimes extremely solicitous to religious sensibilities. The broad regulative powers that the state has (“subject to public order, morality and health” vide Article 25.1, and Article 25.2a) are rarely comprehensively enforced. The result is a paradox—we have on the one hand a publicly equal system with broad state powers to regulate practices of separate identity so that they do not go against equality as well as differential provisions to help the disadvantaged. On the other hand, we have a public system accessible to a group determined to impose its values in a large or total measure thereby making the public and group interest almost identical. In such a situation, the stress on the judiciary is excessive. The political failure is sought to be compensated by judicial activism to the extent where a judge is compelled to define “who is a Hindu” or the boundaries of faiths. In short, as I explained in my earlier work on autonomy and autonomous arrangements as the dialogic form of political existence, the Indian instance in an acute manner shows the South Asian experience, namely that modern law is not a self-fulfilling prophecy working toward the satisfaction of the political subject. Faced with asymmetries of power it can manage at best the coexistence of various normative orders; at worst become a willing accomplice to the manipulation of the public principles by a particular group. It also shows that beyond the given territorial form of autonomy, South Asia by and large has not been able to discover other forms of autonomy that will combine both 11/16

spatial and spiritual dimensions. The resultant situation displays the existence of two political idioms. There is a liberal republican idiom of democracy originating in the constitutional exercises of 1946–1949 in India (elsewhere in this region at different times) that tolerates autonomy and dissent to a defined extent. There is also a politics of recognition fundamentally expressed in territorial form, pre-existing and now reinforced by the same liberal idiom, which threatens to break out, and indeed sometimes breaks out, of the imposed confines, resulting in a renewed phase of constitutional frenzy. These two are the quarrelsome duo, one not quite being able to displace the other. Together they have produced the uneasy reality of accommodation, which is not tolerance, but an accommodation of competing realities till one succeeds in pushing the other out of existence. This creates a situation of “democratic closure,” in fact an aporia, and the situation can be summarized briefly as follows: Autonomy hangs as a categorical principle between freedom and regulation and, likewise, between reason and passion. Autonomy being subject to rules and regulations is an event in the field of governmentality, where freedom and life become subject to governing codes and rules reflected in the “will to power.” Yet, autonomy indicates the desire of politics to escape these rules and regulations and find new forms of federal and confederal political existence. Autonomy is struck between a republican legal code and a hierarchical order, and is yet to achieve a satisfactory regime of legal pluralism. The juridical theory of sovereignty is strengthened by autonomy as a regulative principle, while in contrast to this, the political theory of autonomy requires as its fulfillment “autonomy of the autonomies.” The success of autonomy depends on the effectiveness of a dialogic order, while autonomy has to depend on the strengthening and the relentless invocation of constitutionalism, which marginalizes the dialogic spirit. Though the history of autonomy seems in a typically Hegelian glass the progressive realization of a democratic spirit, its conditions is marked by a combination of geopolitics and ethno-politics, which go far beyond the twin problematic of territory and identity and summon the very ingredients of the particular mode of power on which modern politics is based. The experiences of the Indian nation form bear out the closure I am speaking of here.

Dialogic Politics as the Third Dimension of Autonomy As in all situations of closure, we need as a way out a third dimension here, which is latent but mostly shut out by the contending forces and pulls. Dialogic politics that emerges from the quest for minimal justice is the third dimension or the third way. Important from the point of view of a dialogic order is the shift implied in the politics of autonomy itself that springs historically from what I term as the quest for minimal justice. The success, semi-success, and failure stories of autonomy are actually narratives of minimal justice. 12/16

Minimal justice, however, is not an abstract principle only. Its rules products of the experiences mentioned above, and will remain historically conditioned. Minimal justice is “minimal,” not only because it does not make claim to redress all wrongs, but accepts the fact that justice is always historically produced and therefore contingent. These principles require a dialogic order at an increasing scale because, besides other reasons, in this age of globalization they require international guarantee and flexibility of forms of accommodation. This becomes possible when the state is irreversibly linked to an order that propels such an evolution of forms of shared sovereignty. We can also say that minimal justice is “minimal” because the liberal order does not allow justice to play out its possibilities to the maximum. All that minimal justice does is to lend a critical edge to politics that is attempting to come out of the closure placed before the masses in the form of the imperial theory of nationhood, dramatically evident since the miraculous year of 1989. It may very well be that with economic integration helping the recolonization of the “excluded” areas through autonomy packages and devolution and with the historic growth of a political class that sees the merits and more importantly the possibility of a revision of rules of governance, these principles will be in practice in many parts of the world, and the chronicle of the success and semi-success stories of autonomy will be seen as one of a phase of revision of liberal political rule worldwide. For after all, the theory and the reality of the juridical form of sovereignty in the form of a territorial democratic state exist as a “state of nature” whence all things follow and to which all things return. It is this immanent significance of the dialogic form of justice, which I term as “minimal justice.” It helps autonomy to come out of the governmental bind and the conceptual illusions of a liberal order. In as much in political–historical studies of democracy least attention has been given to the claims and forms of sharing sovereignty, the theory of justice too has been ignored in whatever little we have as studies of the claims for autonomy. Because some of these claims are pronouncedly territorial, our thinking on autonomy too has been largely confined to territorial arguments, form, and solutions. Yet the conflict-ridden history of autonomy in India demonstrates two things. First, the non territorial forms of autonomy are as important as the territorial forms of autonomy (gender, fiscal, etc.). Second, the reorganization along territorial–autonomous lines can be effective only when these claims of autonomy have the scope to position themselves in a dialogic space and certain standards of justice are available for the dialogue to be meaningful. I have shown elsewhere how population flows in different parts of the country, most pronouncedly in the north-east, have provoked demands for homelands—a demand whose only official or governmental form of expression is autonomy.17 The borders of these “homelands” can be as murderous and conflictive as borders and boundaries of the nations are—they can be as effective lines of partition as real national partitions have been. They can produce xenophobia and mass murders in the same way nationstate formations have produced. Yet we cannot ignore the democratic aspirations in these demands for autonomy and the claims for territorial guarantees for autonomy that these claims have led to. How can democracy settle those claims without the “final solution” of partition? It is situation like this in which norms of justice are the only 13/16

means to institute the dialogic space where autonomies can emerge. Such a dialogic space gathers strength on two realizations. First, the language of rights is inadequate in such circumstance and hence must be conditioned by the accompanying language of justice. Second, this dialogic space cannot emerge through the Westminster model of representative democracy which runs by numbers, and in which a representative has to create a “mass” which will send him/her to the parliament, and therefore can easily become the catalyst of mixing communalism, anti-migrant hysteria, and majoritarianism with democracy. The geopolitics and the ethno-politics of autonomy form the inflammable material for the politics of autonomy. In the solar universe of sovereignty everything—autonomy, self-determination, nationhood, minority rights, devolution—moves in a confusing circle, at times losing their distinctive positions even, but never losing their vocation of circling around sovereignty. Dialogic justice, which is the route to ensure minimal justice, assumes even greater significance in this context. The six principles of autonomy as the site of minimal justice are: First, all stories of autonomy reflect the requirement of the principle of recognition of injustice. Second, they reflect the need for compensation for past injustices, wrongs, and gestures on behalf of the national state to convince the Other of its desire to continue with the principle of compensation. Third, they tell us of the need for the principle of supervision. This means deciding on the right and agreeable way to supervise the introduction of autonomy. Fourth, they suggest the principle of custodianship, which is crucial to settle the balance between the territorial sovereignty of the state and the autonomy of the dissenting community. Fifth, and this follows from the preceding principle, the principle of guarantee against future erosion of autonomy and of a mechanism for continuous conversation, 18 is very important. Sixth, there is the principle of innovation of autonomous practices along non-territorial lines toward federalizing the political society. Notes and References 1. Partha Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). 2. Ranabir Samaddar, The Politics of Dialogue (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), Chapters 5 and 6. 3. Though in several of his fragmentary writings and speeches in later years Michel Foucault spoke of governmentality, for my purpose here I shall in the main rely on his essay, “Governmentality” presented as part of a course on “Security, Territory, and 14/16

Population” given in 1977–1978 at the College de France, and later published in Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 3, James Faubion (ed.), and translated by Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1994), pp. 201–222. 4. This is the explanation that broadly emerges from Mitchell Dean, Governmentality— Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: SAGE Publications, 1999); the first wave of discussions of course is created by G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect—Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); later comes A. Barry, T. Osborne, and N. Rose (eds), Foucault and Political Reason— Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and the Rationalities of Government (London: UCL Press, 1996). 5. Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 3, p. 207. 6. Ibid, pp. 208–209. 7. Weber noted the technical superiority of bureaucratic organization over administration by notables, and attributed this superiority to factors like speed, precision, knowledge of the files, reduction of material and personal costs etc. He also noted that legal reorganization had to precede or accompany such rise of bureaucratic structures and that statutes became more effective than grace and gratitude. Administration became administration of rational laws and rational procedures. See Max Weber, Economy and Society—An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (eds) (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), pp. 973–975. 8. Paula Banerjee, “Debates over Women’s Autonomy,” Policies and Practices, 4, CRG Paper Series, Kolkata, 2005. 9. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 238–239. 10. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (1948, London: Routledge, 1991). 11. On the relevant ideas of Locke see, John Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” http://www.constitution.org/jl/tolerati.htm (accessed on January 26, 2012) and “The Second Treatise of Government,” particularly Chapter 9, http://constitution.org/jl/2ndtr09.htm (accessed on January 26, 2006). 12. J. Habermas, “The Theory of Communicative Action,” Volume 1, Reason and Rationalisation of Society, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984). 13. Ranabir Samaddar, The Materiality of Politics, Technologies of Rule (London and Delhi: Anthem Press, 2007), pp. 133–188; also, see, Chapters 5 and 7 of The Politics of Dialogue. 14. The “basic features” of the Constitution cannot be amended by exercising the power 15/16

of amendment under Article 368. The Constitution 42nd Amendment Act, 1976, had inserted in Article 368 (5) a provision that there was no limitation on the constituent power of the Parliament to amend the Constitution. Though the Supreme Court invalidated this, ambiguity still remains. See Keshavananda Bharati v. State of India (AIR 1973 SC 1461), Minerva Mills v. Union of India (AIR 1980 SC 1789), and Srinivasa v. State of Karnataka (AIR 1987 SC 1518). 15. Marc Galanter, “Hinduism, Secularism, and the Indian Judiciary,” Philosophy East and West, 21(4), October 1971, reprinted in Marc Galanter, Law and Society in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 237–238. 16. On the legal complexities arising out of the position that caste occupies in public life, see, D. E. Smith (ed.), South Asian Politics and Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966); Marc Galanter, “Law and Caste in Modern India,” Asian Survey, 3, 1963, pp. 544–559; F. G. Bailey, Caste and the Economic Frontier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957). 17. Ranabir Samaddar, “The Insecure Nation,” in R. Samaddar and P. Banerjee, Migration and Circles of Insecurity (Delhi: Rupa, 2010); Sanjib Baruah has analyzed the situation with exceptional clarity and perspicacity in “Citizens and Denizens— Ethnicity, Homelands, and the Crisis of Displacement,” in S. Baruah, Durable Disorder —Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), Chapter 9, pp. 183–208. 18. The importance of this principle is evident from the way in which Kashmir’s autonomy was eroded; see in this connection text of T. Muivah’s interview with Karan Thapar in the BBC programme, Hard Talk India.

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The Nation Form Index Keyword All Indian Kisan Sabha (AIKS), 59 ancien regime, and nationalist predicament, 54–57 anti-Muslim riots, 56 Appadorai, 23 Arab nationalism, 12–13 Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 208 Article 11 (1), of International Covenant of Social and Economic Rights, 133 Asian Drama (Myrdal), 16 Asian leftism, 28 Asian nationalism, x, 3, 6–7, 29–30. See also nationalism in Asia Asian radicalism, surge of, 26–28 Asian Relations Conference (ARC), 23 Asian Relations Organization (ARO), 23 Asian revolutionism, 26 autonomy, 234–236 dialogic politics and, 250–253 and government, 236–242 paradox of, in India, 242–250 Azad Kashmir, 216 Aziz, Sartaj, 211 Baghdad Pact, 200 Balibar, Etienne, xix 1/14

Bandung Conference, 25 Bangladesh, transborder migration from, 153 study on, 160–172 Bangladesh Overseas Employment Services Limited (BOESL), 145 Bargadars Bill, 67 Bayart, Jean Francois, 4 Bengal, middle peasantry in, 58–69 Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha (BPKS), 59, 64, 66 Bengal Spectator, 61 Bengal youth, 72–74 Bhave, Vinobha, 100 Bhutanese refugee problem, 133–134 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 206 Bihar in seventies, 93–96 agrarian mass mobilization in, 102–106 nationality in, development of, 106–108 political mobilizations in, 96–102 bilateralism, principle of, 205, 206 A Biography of the Indian Nation, xi, xvi Blue Mutiny, 60, 61 border war, 197 Bose, Sumantra, 195 bourgeois politics, 9 boutique multiculturalism, 244 capitalism, 118 cartographic anxiety, 173–176 2/14

and ironic unconcern, 176–184 cease-fire line (CFL), 198–200, 205, 214 civil war in Kashmir and, 210 and dispute between Pakistan and India, 200–201 and 1965 Pakistan–India war, 201–202 Pandit Nehru on, 198–199 transformed into LOC, 207 Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO), 200 Chatterjee, Partha, 110–111 Chhatra Sangharsh Samitis, 100 chicken’s neck, 211 children, in trafficking network, 188 civil religion, 38 civil war in Kashmir, 210 Cohn-Bandit, Daniel, 76 communal violence, 36 and displacement, 134 communism, in Asia, 20–21 Communist Party of India (CPI), in Bihar, 100–101 competitiveness, in political system, 12 “conceptual map of Europe”, idea of, 5–6 Constitution of India, autonomy and, 244–245 Continental compartmentalism, 21 continental nationalism, interrelationships between various dimensions of, 7 core–periphery concept, 7 Council of Europe, 6 3/14

Demilitarized zone (DMZ), 203, 209, 214 democracy, xiii and geopolitics, 219–229 organic, 220 parliamentary, 218–219 in postcolonial Asian nation-states, 26 principle of justice in, 125–126 redefining of, 114–115 democratic desire, 112 developmental measures, and homelessness, 135 direct rule, xiv divide in Kashmir, 205 Emigration Act, India, 145 environmental factors, and migration, 135 ethnic Kashmiris, 214 fencing, 171–172 Flaming Fields, 104 Foucault, Michel, 234, 236, xvi Galanter, Marc, 246–247 Gandhi, Rajiv, 24 Gardezi, Hassan, 145 Geertz, Clifford, 222 global capitalism, 84 global line, 200 governability crisis, 113–114 Gramsci, Antonio, xii, 92 4/14

Habermas, Jurgen, 47 Hermann, Tamar, 226 Hindu Patriot, 61 Hobsbawm, Eric, 54 human rights abuse, refugees and, 141 illegal immigration. See also migrants in search for security and livelihood, 185–187 state’s anxiety over, 178–179 indentured labor, 137 Indian People’s Front (IPF), 107 Indira–Mujib agreement, 166 indirect rule, xiv Indonesia, nationalism and communism in, 20 infiltration, 162, 166 protest against, 166 for votes, 164 insurgency crossfire, 150 Integrated Rural Development Program (IRDP), 68 Jammu, 216, 217 Jan Sangharsh Samitis, 100 Janus-faced independence, 43 Japanese nationalism, 5 Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), 107 justice, naturalization of, 124–125 Kant, Immanuel, 242 Kargil war, 211–212 and defence expenditure, 212–213 5/14

and Kashmir problem, 212 Kashmir, history of LOC in, 215. See also line of control (LOC) Kashmiri movement, Pakistan support to, 210 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 109–110 Khan, Ayub, 203 killing fields, 213 kingdoms and republics, difference between, 46 kisan (farmer) movement, in UP, 93–94 Krishak Praja Party, 64 Labor Code, Philippines, 144–145 labor export, legislations on, 144–145 labor migration, 143–147 gender dimensions in, 191–193 labor rights, 149–150 Lajja, 178 liberal democracy, 122 liminality, 50 line of control (LOC), 95, 197, 205, 211, 213, 216–218, 228. See also cease-fire line (CFL) linguistic reorganization of states, 55, 56 local settlement, strategy of, 141 Majdur Kisan Sangharsh Samiti (MKSS), 107 Maniruzzaman, Talukder, 28–29 maps and national anxiety, 175 The Marginal Nation, xi, xix market culture, 117 market reforms, 115 6/14

by state, in public interest, 120–125 The Materiality of Politics, 244 McNamara, Robert, 75 memory, recovery of, 40 Menon, Krishna, 21 middle class, representation of, in nation, 70. See also student movement migrants, 136–139, 151 and Indian citizenship option, 173 institutionalization of rights of, 151 labor, 143–147, 150 reasons for moving, 132 in slums, 131–132 as vote banks, 131, 132 women, 147–149 migration, 149, 152–153. See also migrants Bangladeshi women and, 192–193 and reasons of state, 164–172 migration patterns, in South Asia, 133, 135 Mills, C. Wright, 80, 83 minimal justice, 250–253 minority categories, partition and, 43–44 minority niche, 149 modernization of new Asia, 12 Narayan, Jayaprakash, 98–100, 105–106 Narmada dam project, 135 nation, birth of, 34–36. See also partition 7/14

nationalism, 1, 2 in Asia, 11–12, 17, 23–24 “changed problematic,” notion of, 15 in eighties, 29 Menon on, 21–22 Nehru on, 18–21 perceptions on, 13–14 postcoloniality with modernity in, 25–26 pragmatism in, 16, 20–21 in sixties, 16 wars, and arousal of, 14–15 in Bangladesh, history of, 4 nationalist consensus, against radical change, 92–93 nationalist lament, 166–167 nationalist predicament, 57 national revolutionism, 29 National Rural Employment Program (NREP), 68 National Security Act (1980), 208 nation form, XIII nations, 3. See also partition emergence of, colonial powers and, 4 Nav Nirman Andolan, Gujarat, 98 Naxalbari movement, 86–88 Naxalism in the Plains of Bihar, 104 Nehru, Pandit, 18–20, 198 neo-liberal politics, 122–124 Nepalese girls, in trafficking network, 188 8/14

Netrakona session, of AIKS, 65 The New Asia, 12 New Left of India, 85 non-party mobilization, in Bihar, 99 non-state persons, 142 On Alien Rule and Self-Government (Plamenatz), 11 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 6 organ trade, 188 Oriental Despotism (Wittfogel), 11 Overseas Employment Administration Office, Thailand, 145 Owen, Sir Robert, 214 Pabna Riots, 60, 61 Pakistan–India war 1965, 201–202 1971, 204 panchayat, 68 Pannikar, K.M., 25 Parsonian scheme of functionalism, 5 partition, 44, 48–50 and birth of nation, 33, 44–45 and building nation, 43 decolonization by, 41 differences produced by, 37 elite politics of communalism and, 37–38 history of, 42 Left on, 33–34 and loss of home, 41 official position on, 36 9/14

political history of, 39–40 and populist right, 44 rationalist explanation of, 36 and regionalization of South Asia, 42 silencing of counter voices, 50–51 and territorial consciousness, 47–48 transformations by, 37 partitioning lines, 196–197 passive revolution, 89, 111–112, 127 Antonio Gramsci’s concept of, 92 democratic desires and, 112–119 dynamics of, 92 readings of, 108–111 pastness, representations of, 40 peasant movement. See also Bengal middle peasantry in in Bengal, 58 during colonial times, 58 middle-class leadership of, 58–59 peasant struggles, armed, 86 Pokhran test, 207 political democracy, 115–116 political left, rise of, 70 political mobilization, 96 political region, emergence of, 4 politics of elites, 37 10/14

Polyani, Karl, 117–118 population movements, across borders, 139–140 populist right, 44 porous border, 134 Portelli, Alessandro, 40 “post-philosophical culture,”xv Praja movement, 63 Prasad, Rajendra, 94 protection of minorities, 149 public goods, 121 public sector programs, 120 public utilities, 121 Radcliffe, Sir Cyril, 196 radicalism of middle classes, 57 radical paradoxes, 84–89 reflexive nationalism, in South Asia, 134 refugees problems, 140–141 rights of, 141–142 representative political systems, 45 rights, origin of, xii rights of refugees, 150–152 Rokkan, Stein, 5, 6 Rorty, Richard, xv ruling blocs, strategy of, 109 Rural Labour Employment Guarantee Program (RLEGP), 68 11/14

Rushdie, Salman, 45 Samukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD), 95 sangharsh, in Bihar, 100–101 sangharsh bahinis, 101, 107 seasonal mobility, 136 self-regulated economy, 117–118 semi-periphery, notion of, 8–9 Shimla agreement of 1972, 204–207 Siachen agreement on, 208–209 battle in, 174–175 Siachen glacier, 209 Sino-Indian border dispute, 201 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Moore), xii social welfarism, 84 South Asian nationalism, 9 spring thunder, 86 States Reorganization Commission, 244 student movement. See also youth fate of, 74–75. on international issues, 81 throughout world, 80–81 student power, 823 Tanaka, Stephen, 5 Tashkent Declaration, 202–203 Taylor, Peter, 1 Tebhaga movement, 65, 66 12/14

Telengana revolt, 55 territorial integrity, 56 territorialism, problem of, 47–48 territoriality, 1 identity and, link between, 1 and nation-state, 3–4 territoriality of nationalism hierarchical notion of, 2, 3 three-tiered structure of, 1–2 Terrorist Affected Area Ordinance (1984), 208 third-world nationalism, 4, 9 Tibetan refugees, Indian handling of, 150 Tilly, Charles, x total revolution, in Bihar, 101 trafficking, 188 in Bangladeshi women and children, 188–190 through borders, 189 transborder migration, 40, 147, 152–154 study on, 160–163 transitional politics, model of, 12 Turkish nationalism, 12 United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, 132 United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) resolution, 200 UP Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act, 94 Vietnam liberation struggle, 80 violence, and population movements, 136 13/14

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 7–8 women, 188 in forced prostitution, 185–187 illegal immigrant, in search for security and livelihood, 187 migrant, 147–149 trafficking in, 188–190 transborder flow of, 191–193 women’s issues, in Bihar, 107 youth in Bengal, 72–74 middle class educated, 75–76 of mid-sixties, 71–72 rebels, 78 and violence, 76–78

About the Author Ranabir Samaddar belongs to the critical school of thinking. His much-acclaimed The Politics of Dialogue was the culmination of his long work on justice, rights, and peace. His research has been on migration and refugee studies, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and postcolonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labor control. His recent political writings published in the form of a two-volume account, The Materiality of Politics (2007) and The Emergence of the Political Subject (2009), have challenged some of the prevailing accounts of the birth of nationalism and the nation-state, and have signaled a new turn in critical postcolonial thinking. He is currently the Director of the Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, India.

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