Kashmir and great power geopolitics
http://www.hindu.com/br/2010/06/29/stor ... 161500.htm
PRAVEEN SWAMI
The book argues that great power geopolitics incentivised and entrenched Pakistani intransigence over J&K
KASHMIR CRISIS — Unholy Anglo-Pak Nexus: Saroja Sundararajan; Kalpaz Publications, C-30, Satyawati Nagar, New Delhi-110052. Rs. 850.
“We have had a thousand years of hostility, you know,” Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto told the British Broadcasting Corporation in a 1973 interview. “There has been no confrontation which,” he went on, “is as old as the confrontation between India and Pakistan, neither between Carthage and Rome, between Britain and France, nor between the Russians and Americans, nor between the Arabs and Israelis. Ours is the oldest confrontation.”
West on J&K
For decades, western scholarship on Jammu and Kashmir has — with some honourable exceptions — cast the conflict as the outcome of collisions involving Indian ultra-nationalism, Pakistani existential concerns, and a long-suppressed Kashmiri aspiration to self-determination (mostly seen as untainted by the chauvinist barbarities which scarred the rest of the subcontinent). The United Kingdom and the United States are represented as neutral bystanders, watching south Asia with a concerned but dispassionate eye.
Saroja Sundararajan adds to a growing corpus of Indian scholarship, which challenges the last of these positions — among them, D.N. Panigrahi's Jammu and Kashmir, the Cold War and the West and Chandrashekhar Dasgupta's magisterial work War and Diplomacy in Kashmir: 1947-48. Like Panigrahi and Dasgupta, Sundararajan contends that the intractability of the India-Pakistan conflict over Jammu and Kashmir is founded not on primordial hostility but on great power geopolitics.
Kashmir Crisis argues that great power geopolitics incentivised and entrenched Pakistani intransigence over J&K. She says the U.K. was, from the onset of the first India-Pakistan war of 1947-1948, determined to assist Pakistan.
Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin warned his Prime Minister: “With the Palestine position so critical, we simply could not afford to put Pakistan against us and so have the whole of Islam against us.” British diplomat Philip Noel-Baker went one step further, telling Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah that “he was satisfied that Pakistan had no hand at all in the invasion of Kashmir.”
In 1951, the U.S. and the U.K. moved a resolution calling for, among other things, the deployment of foreign forces in J&K, and two years later the U.S. began to funnel aid into Pakistan. British geostrategic thinking had placed Pakistan, even before its realisation as a state, at the centre of its vision for south Asia.
From the memoirs of Francis Tucker, the last-General Officer-Commanding of the British Indian Eastern Command, we know that the imperial military was “for the introduction of a new Muslim power supported by the science of Britain.”
Fearing that Hinduism, “to a great extent one of superstition and formalism,” would be displaced by “a material philosophy such as Communism,” imperial strategists deemed it “very necessary to place Islam between Russian Communism and Hindustan.”
Weighty responsibility
More work is needed on the cultural genesis of some these ideas. There has long been a British tradition of finding meaning in distant nationalist projects. In his 1908 memoirs, the great imperialist adventurer Francis Younghusband observed: “a weighty responsibility lies also on the British government that it should guide their [the Kashmiris'] destinies aright.”
Last year, former British foreign secretary David Miliband became the latest in a long procession of U.K. politicians to voice this ‘weighty responsibility.' In an article authored on the eve of a visit to New Delhi, Miliband argued that a “resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms.”
A language that would have been wholly familiar to Bevan suffuses modern British commentary on J&K. In 2008, historian William Dalrymple asserted that the terrorists who attacked Mumbai in 2008 “were not poor, madrasah-educated Pakistanis from the villages, brainwashed by mullahs, but angry and well-educated, middle-class kids furious at the gross injustice they perceive being done to Muslims by Israel, the U.S., the U.K., and India in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir respectively.” But the fact is that all of the known attackers were poor, from village backgrounds and, if their own manifesto can be trusted, not especially concerned with these causes.
Sundararajan's work is, without doubt, partisan — as any work responding to a fashionable received wisdom is likely to be — but rich in empirical detail and persuasive in its argument. Given that Jammu and Kashmir has again become an element in global politics — this time, as a prize some in the west imagine will help them placate that great imaginary entity they call “the Muslim world” — her work deserves reading.