Samir Kumar Das

This essay seeks to offer some very tentative and provisional hypotheses by way of establishing the inter-connections amongst such phenomena as war, population movement and formation of state system in South Asia. While individual studies focusing on any one of these phenomena are available, studies articulating them into a common frame of reference are not only rare, but almost non-existent. The importance of such a common frame can hardly be denied: On the one hand, it draws our attention to the necessity of appreciating them in their combination rather then in isolation from each other and makes them an indispensable part of contemporary political inquiry. On the other hand, it also serves as a convenient point of departure for many of the future researches that might be interested in working on the hypotheses enumerated here. Viewed in this light, the present essay is only a preliminary attempt at deciphering their inter-connections within a common frame of reference.

The task is not easy; for one thing there is no simple and foreordained way of understanding their inter-connections. The commonplace belief that modern wars are of such a scale and magnitude that they necessarily result in massive demographic displacements whether within the country or across it does not exactly hold true in a region like South Asia. Or even if it does, it certainly does not in the same manner, as is the case in other parts of the world. Contrary to popular expectations, large-scale population movements from one country to another especially after partition could not give birth to demographically homogeneous nations either in India or in Pakistan. Now with the benefit of hindsight and of course at great cost, we are slowly realizing that no amount of population movement - however gigantic and long-drawn that be, would ever contribute to such homogeneous and seamless nations and cleanse them of ethnic minorities. For another, we have also to recognize that any understanding of how these phenomena are inter-connected requires to be qualified by what I would call, an among-other-things rider. Thus, when we argue that the connection between war and population movement is so complex that the former sometimes follows the latter instead of preceding and catalysing it - as was the case in 1971 war, we have to take account of a plethora of factors which in conjunction with that of population movement presumably due to a prolonged spell of civil war in the then East Pakistan, had triggered off the Indo-Pak war and led to the liberation of Bangladesh.

War and War-like Situations

Before we make any further headway, it may be instructive to sound at least two methodologically important caveats.

First, wars, especially those of South Asia, give unto themselves not just one but many "histories". As one raises this issue, one obviously reminds oneself of how the "official" history of Pakistan interprets them and how it is - to understate the point, at variance with its Indian counterpart. Besides, there is no reason to accept that the official history of whatever country is the only available uncontested history within the country - that can throw all other narratives from out of existence. What is authenticated as the official history of war is seen to be constantly engaged in a war of attrition with a multiplicity of histories that narrate the wars in their own characteristic ways. By way of engaging with the official history, they tend to assert their right to be different from it. The point has two implications. The first implication is that, these little narratives influence population movements as much as they are influenced by official histories. While exploring the possibility of writing an alternative history of two Bengals, Sudhir Chakrabarty in his inimitable style noted how the space of the Lalan (a famous Sufi saint of the nineteenth century) cult in central Bengal cut across the international boundaries drawn as a result of partition. About ten followers of the same cult belonging to Betai village of the district of Nadia now in West Bengal decided to cross the international boundary in 1955 without of course the valid papers that were and are still needed to cross it, in order to visit the holy samadhi (burial site) of the great saint located in the-then East Pakistan. They were subsequently arrested and taken into custody by the Pakistani authorities for having tried to violate the international boundary. This is an instance of how the notion of an alternative space runs parallel to the internationally defined space of nation-states and force the latter to compete with it.[1] The second implication is that, we may say that the role of little narratives in the formation of state-system can hardly be underestimated. It is for instance suggested that the formation of a state implies the appropriation and in its wake complete obliteration of the little narratives under reference. This "fundamentally imperial structure" of the state ideology in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, "never described the actual political practice in India where religious idioms and imagination had always been strongly present".[2] To my mind, the problem is much more complicated than what the scholars of state formation would have us believe. It has to do with the larger question of allowing the state to come to terms with and if necessary, to accommodate these little narratives. The unities of the state discourse are now ruptured in a way that they have lent to the little narratives a hitherto unprecedented freedom of playing a critical role in constructing the official narrative and in bringing them to bear on it. State's discourse is more a constellation of these forces than their complete obliteration. It is as we shall have occasion to see, much more porous and loose-ended than what the prevalent theories of state formation take it to be.

Secondly, histories of war and histories of peace are not separate or for that matter separable. They are deeply inter-woven in the sense that there seems to be a vast twilight zone comprising what may be called, war-like situations that cannot be clubbed together with either of the two above-mentioned categories. It is necessary to introduce this category into our frame of reference for they play an important role - much more important than that of war in setting off population movements in South Asia. Both the irreducibility of little narratives and the problematic nature of war and peace make it imperative on our part to decipher the inter-connections among war, population movement and state formation in a primarily interpretative way rather than in any strictly empirical way. Where the world of wars is constituted in a problematic manner and gives unto itself many histories than one, we can only hope to make sense of them with the help of our own interpretation, that is to say, with our own way of `worlding' the world of wars. The exercise cannot but be interpretative.

While wars in history have attracted a good number of philosophers starting from Thucydides down to let us say, Chris Hables Gray whose Post-Modern Wars has created a sensation since its publication in 1997, Clausewitz's definition of it still serves as the only viable point of entry into the subject. As he points out: "War is...an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will".[3] Viewed in this perspective, wars and war-like situations are divergent from each other on at least three major counts: First, the force employed in times of war is self-spiralling in character. Clausewitz for instance argues: "If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand. That will force the other to follow suit; each will drive its opponent toward extreme, and the only limiting factors are the counter-reprisals inherent in war."[4] In war-like situations also, one definitely compels another "to do one's will" given that there is a unitary will of the sort that Clausewitz has in mind, without "driving another to the extreme". A country while inciting and perpetuating war-like situations in another chooses not to "drive another to the extreme" because it is not willing to risk the reprisals for interests which in its perceptions are not too fundamental to warrant a full-blown war. Or it may be that the interests are considered to be fundamental but war-like situations are preferred to wars as a means for attaining them. Sumit Ganguly for instance makes the point that even in times of hot Indo-Pak wars, mutual understanding and diplomatic communication were never lost.[5] That a country is not willing to push its adversary to the extreme and is intent on keeping the exercise of violence within a tolerable threshold does not mean that war-like situations are less effective instruments of a country's foreign policy. In fact, such wars as Chris Hables Gray argues, have in a large measure been successful in calling the triumphalism of the West into question ("What makes this war so important is that it reversed the hundreds of European victories")[6], and establishing the superiority of oriental technologies like, people's war to western technologies and cyber-war.

War according to Clausewitz, is a conflictual engagement between two "whole" communities with respective "wills" pitted against each other. One wonders whether such fully formed, homogeneous communities with their fragments knit into seamless wholes, with their wills sharply different from each other ever exist - or to say the least, pre-exist the outbreak of wars even in advanced western democracies. For wars in South Asia have also been principal vehicles of organizing peoples into fairly homogeneous nations. As Ainslie Embree informs us, "The 1962 war with China was a turning point in defining India as a nation. Nehru spoke of it as a blessing in disguise because internal disunity had been swept aside by the Chinese threat and the new mood could be used to achieve industrial advances as well as military preparedness."[7]  War-like situations on the contrary imply that there may remain some fragments within what the state claims to be parts of its national body that simply refuse to be regarded as its constituent parts and join the state's preparations for coping with them. Such fragments reflect the limits of a state's nationhood and are seen to act at times at the behest of the enemy country. Hence, while coping with war-like situations, a state has to wage a war with its fragments.[8] Classical political theory also tells us that a citizen's attachment to the national body particularly in times of war is to be regarded more as an end in itself than a means to an end. Machiavelli for instance, contended that wise princes would prefer to "lose battles with their own forces than win them with others in the belief that no victory is possible with alien arms".[9] That is why, his Prince underlines time and again the importance of the natives in the army structure who are likely to fight wars unto the last without asking why and whose obeisance to the nation is both unflinching and unwavering. On the other hand, a nation during war-like situations especially in South Asia reportedly includes many fragments whose attachment to it hardly contains any intrinsic worth. They consider themselves to be a part of the nation only so long as their attachment fulfils certain interests particular, if not peculiar to themselves. While referring to the "border people" who have migrated to West Bengal from Bangladesh, Ranabir Samaddar argues that for them, citizenship is very like an ordinary commodity that is freely bought and sold, in one word, transacted without any sense of moral piety, depending on the mutual interests of the parties involved in it in a world that according to him, is completely demoralized: "Citizenship has come to such a state, it means not membership of a political community, but one end of a transactional relation".[10]

Thirdly, Clausewitz makes a clear distinction between force and political will. Although it is true that force at times especially during wars has a tendency to "usurp" political will, ideally it should be employed in order to implement the latter rather than anything else. Clausewitz's definition not only contains a strong rationalist tinge whereby force is made subordinate to will but also in the same vein sensitizes us to such situations where wars might verge on the irrational and use of force might look senseless with no apparent political will to be implemented. War-like situations serve as glaring instances where the Clausewitzean distinction between force and political will is blurred - if not already vanished, for in this case there seems to be no political will other than and independent of the use of force. A country that is keen on imposing such situation on another becomes successful and fulfils its objective the moment it imposes it, for it thereby secures a certain disarming of its enemy - one of the chief objectives of war, by way of compelling it to keep a substantial part of its armed troops busy with maintaining law and order inside the country. According to one conservative estimate, India had committed a quarter million of its armed troops to quelling armed insurrections in the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. War-like situations are like self-evident truths in the sense that there is no hidden truth beyond what is self-evident to us.

Several imageries of war are in currency to refer to war-like situations. Some of them are - proxy wars, (un-)civil wars and low-intensity conflicts. Conversely, India has engaged in four wars of varying degrees of intensity since 1947 - three of which have been with Pakistan. As Sumit Ganguly, widely acclaimed as an expert on Indo-Pak wars, maintains, "While many people quibble over definitions of war, it is safe to say that by any reasonable standard there were three wars between India and Pakistan between 1947 and 1971".[11] Wars are episodic or to borrow a Clausewitzean expression "single-short blows", but war-like situations are embedded in the state's regime of the normal.[12]

War-like Situations and Population Movements

None of the wars mentioned above, has resulted in any major trans-border population movement. None of the twelve major bilateral population movements outlined in Myron Weiner's study published in 1993 - excepting only one, "the flight of Bangladeshis to India" had to do directly with war - precisely, the Indo-Pak wars.[13] In this case too, war did not precede but followed the massive population influx from the-then East Pakistan to India, though of course there was a considerable return migration immediately after the war which helped India in securing at least the semblance of a demographic balance within a short while. 

At this juncture, we must make a distinction - albeit of conceptual nature, between two kinds of population movements - one induced by war and the other by prolonged spell of war-like situations. First of all, the probability of return migration is as we have already noted, always higher in cases of war than in that of war-like situations. Since the latter often masquerade as the normal, they are of enduring nature and do not seem to create an atmosphere conducive to the migrants' forthwith return to their homes.  Secondly, the country that receives the immigrants in times of war usually keeps a close watch on their movements, scrupulously counts their numbers as far as practicable, sometimes recognizes them as refugees in need of some special treatment, seeks to herd them together in sufficiently secluded camps so that they do not disappear into the faceless and lonely crowd called, nation, that it claims to enclose and represent and most importantly, garner international support in their favour with of course a varying degree of success. During Bangladesh crisis for instance, other countries assumed nearly one-fourth of the estimated costs of supporting the refugees in camps and virtually none of the costs for the larger number who had found sanctuaries outside the camps. The figure reached 9.8 million at its peak and out of it approximately 3 million did not choose to go the state-run relief camps.  Richard Sisson and Leo Rose, have argued that in spite of state's attempts at isolating them and re-locating them to some  far-off parts of the north-east, they posed a major burden to the nation's exchequer and to the economy as a whole.[14] But whatever the state does as part of its humanitarian programme concerning the refugees, it never allows the distinction between its citizens and foreigners to be blurred and obliterated.  The making and maintaining of such distinction is always considered to be crucial to the state's nation-building project. But since much of the immigration that takes place during war-like situations are of illegal and clandestine nature, it goes on undetected and at times it becomes difficult - if not impossible on the part of the receiving country to see to it that they do not get mixed up with the faceless multitude of the nation.[15]  State's failure in making and maintaining the distinction has sparked off at least two mutually opposite kinds of social reactions. On the one hand, there are attempts on peoples' part (as was the case during the Assam movement of 1979-1985) at making the state do what it does not otherwise do, that is to say, build the nation.  What the state might do is not to keep a watch on the illegal entrants from across the borders for that is quite impossible, but to keep a count on its own citizens and thereby lend to the nation a face that has hitherto remained faceless and anonymous. Voters' identity cards and citizenship certificates are some of the markers that are meant for separating the citizens from the foreigners. A modern state cannot do without "enumerating" its people into a closely-knit and measurable nation.[16]  On the other hand, the state's insistence on making and maintaining this distinction creates panic in the minds of some communities whose identity as Indian citizens is to say the least, ambiguous.  The movement of the Gorkha National Liberation Front under the leadership of Mr. Subash Ghisingh in Darjeeling (West Bengal) for their certification as Indians serves as a case in point.

Thirdly, wars in South Asia have invariably centred on the territorial question.  In other words, they were fought with motives other than dumping a country's surplus population on another country.  In none of the four wars excepting that of 1971, have the population movements been too significant to cause an alarm. Conversely, war-like situations are sometimes created and perpetrated with the motive of conveniently dumping the excess population on another with the advantage of remaining unrecognised by the receiving country. It is for instance argued that the civil war in pre-war East Pakistan was a means, resorted to by the Pakistani state, of making section of its people mostly consisting of the Bengali Hindus leave the country and easing out the excess population constantly posing a danger to the country's economy and "Islamic" culture.  Indeed, a theory of lebensraum though expressly denied by the Bangladesh state, is catching fast the imagination of the Bangladeshi intelligentsia. For instance, an eminent professor of Dhaka University has reportedly argued that tremendous population pressure is bound to take the country to the road to inevitable disaster in near future and unless the people of Bangladesh are permitted to spread out to such vast and of course sparsely populated tracts of land that just lie across her north-eastern and south-eastern borders comprising a substantial part of north-eastern India and the Arakan Hills of Myanmar, Bangladesh would not be able to withstand the imminent disaster.[17]

State System and State Discourse

The term state-system may be used in two relatively distinguishable senses.  In the macro sense, it may be understood to mean the complex web of inter-linkages amongst different nation-states of South Asia and the inter-linkages are so intimate that "each acknowledges and to some extent guarantees others' existence". The closest approximation to such a system is the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). In the strict sense, one wonders whether SAARC can be taken as an illustration of such a system for one notices here nations that acknowledge and guarantee - only grudgingly, if at all, each other's existence. The survival of Pakistan as a sovereign state depends on an explicit negation of the principles that lay down the foundations of the Indian state. The reverse is also true. In the micro sense, it refers to a process whereby a state with its intricately woven network of political institutions gets itself formed.  Charles Tilly's The Formation of National States in Western Europe is still regarded as an excellent exposition of formation of state systems in Western Europe. The opening essay underlines four diverse processes implicit in the project of state formation - territorial consolidation, centralization, differentiation and monopolization of the legitimate means of force and coercion. It means over and above, the establishment of a central political authority that is sufficiently differentiated from the prevailing social groups - ethnic and non-ethnic, enjoys a virtual monopoly over the legitimate instruments of coercion and the writ of which extends over the entire territory that it lays claim to.  While Tilly's definition has a strong institutional bias, it does not adequately maks us sensitive to the discourse that informs and under-girds whatever the state does by way of institutionalising itself.

The concept of state discourse has at least four significant implications that may be discussed at this point. First, what it does is to privilege those who adhere to it and to incorporate them into the national body as its "natural" constituents.  By the same token, it also excludes those who do not or may be, who refuse to acquiesce to the discourse and urges them - not always implicitly, to vacate the territory that it claims to consolidate into a nation or to stay in it as ethnic minorities with an attendant denial of their rights which they consider to be fundamental to their survival as distinct cultural communities. The state discourse thereby facilitates the process of "natural" selection.[18] Partition and in its wake the birth of two nation-states in South Asia have given the people an opportunity of being "naturally" enclosed by either of the two state discourses antagonistic to each other.  The opportunity also conferred on them an obligation - of making up their minds. They could not do without joining either of the two nation-states.  Political geography of modern nation-states hardly leaves room for those who would like to be identified with units - larger or smaller than those of the nation-states. Hiranmoy Bandyopadhyay in a book written in an intimate, semi-autobiographical style has cited more than a dozen instances where Bengali-speaking Muslims of post-partition West Bengal thought it unethical on their part to stay on even after the birth of a separate Muslim state.[19]  When state discourse grips the masses, it does not have to exercise force in order to make the territory homogeneous. The more it rules by discourse, the less it feels the necessity of resorting to force and coercion.

In this connection, it may be pointed out that citizens' attachment to a state may be either of the two polar types or any combination of them: transactional and natural.  In the first case, people who are to be incorporated into the national body are first of all assumed as outsiders whose entry into it depends on a bargain that they have to strike with the concerned state or vice versa.  The relationship between the state and its people in this instance is evidently of contractual or transactional nature. The state normally does not quite encourage people to enter into a relationship of this sort partly because it is expensive as the state has to deliver what Packenham once called, "political goods" like, law and order, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness etc., and partly because peoples' loyalty to the state in this case is of fragile and vacillating nature. As soon as the state stops for whatever reasons, delivering the goods, loyalty is or at least is threatened to be withdrawn.  It is for this reason that the state always chooses to translate the first kind into the second one. In this instance, peoples' association with the state is taken to be too tacit to be actively demonstrated.  This as we will see later, lends to the discourse an element of unchallengeability.  M.J. Akbar's India - The Siege Within may be regarded as a text that accepts Kashmir's inclusion in India as an accomplished and irreversible fact and thereby keeps the question beyond the realm of negotiation. This text helps in sanitizing the issue and robs it of its problematic character.  At the same time, it is a classic illustration of a paranoid text that accuses Pakistan and other vested interests of problematizing the issue and transforming it into a question.

Secondly, our emphasis on the state discourse enables us to appreciate its distinction from the otherwise widely used term - nationalist discourse.  The post-modernist critique has called the state's claim to enclose and represent a nation into question and has drawn our attention to the challenges that it faces while building the nation both from within and also from without. Some of the fragments the state considers to be organic to the national body are increasingly questioning the assumptions that aim at assimilating them into it and depriving them of the right to retain their cultural identities.  Similarly, alongside these sub-national fragments, there are also trans-national centres of power - sometimes represented by other sovereign states which not only context the particular state's unilateral claim over the national body but stake their own claims over it.  When both these forces work together, they pose a potent threat to the state. The nation in other words, has become a contested site.  In that sense, the concept of state discourse confines our attention to what the state does and thereby frees us from the obligation of characterizing its activities as necessarily nationalist.  Thirdly, our distinction between state formation and state discourse instructs us to keep the opposition to the latter clearly distinct from the cases where the institutional prerequisites of the state are under attack. Such a distinction is necessary for "the new revolutionaries are concerned not so much about the political structure of the nation-state as they are about political ideology that under-girds it".[20]  It is for this reason that the concept of state discourse has acquired some prominence in recent years.

Fourthly, the concept is inseparably connected with that of modernity.  We may even say that they advent of modernity has bestowed on the state the responsibility of holding on to and elaborating a discourse. A brief comparison of the process of state formation in modern India with that in pre-modern times may be instructive at this point.  Since a plurality of states existed within a more or less culturally contiguous geographic space, any expansion, contraction or even annihilation of state's borders did not necessarily lead to any significant migration of population from one place to another in pre-modern India.[21]  This does not mean that there was no migration whatsoever in pre-modern India. Migration to be precise was sparked off by factors other than the modification and transformation of political boundaries. Peasant migration within the larger Gangetic plains of undivided Bengal was a very common feature even during the colonial rule. In other words, the state did not have to elaborate a discourse; it was in the words of Rudolph and Rudolph, "an instrument for upholding and protecting the society and its values'"[22] As a consequence, the cultural order of the society was not severely disrupted and the people did not feel it imperative to move over from place to place once the changes in state's boundaries came into effect.  In sum, political changes would hardly touch upon the society and its values. As modernity encourages the states to organize their territories into culturally enclosed spaces and enumerate their peoples into tightly-knit, homogeneous nations, it also feels the necessity of clinging to and elaborating a discourse that as we have already argued, facilitates "natural" selection.  That people are migrating from Bangladesh to the bordering states of India reveals that they could not qualify the process that the Bangladeshi state has set for its nation. Increasing Islamization, sharply deteriorating economic conditions, frequent military interventions along with many other factors  have made their lives difficult in Bangladesh and push them as it were, to flee the country where they have been living for generations.[23]  They are in Myron Weiner's language, "rejected" people.

War, War-like Situation and the State Discourse

The prevailing literature on Indo-Pak wars looks upon them essentially as conflicts between two "patently antagonistic models" or state discourses as we have termed them.  Partha S. Ghosh for instance observes,

These two models (those of India and Pakistan) have not only been mutually incompatible, but having been professed in two contiguous countries with the same socio-historic experience, with no mutual boundaries, and with a record of conflictual relationship that developed immediately after independence over Kashmir, they have become patently antagonistic threatening each one's basic principles of state policy...Islamic Pakistan and secular India became anathema to each other for the simple reason that the very survival of the states depended on an assertion on precisely those theories which had resulted in the partition, namely, the two-nation theory based on religion versus the one-nation theory based on territorial and historical concept of "Mother India".[24]

Such a view to my mind, suffers from many shortcomings two of which deserve a special mention at this point. First, it not only exaggerates the mutual antagonism between these two countries, but wrongly assumes that the discourses are fully formed and elaborated well before they take on and confront each other. It also presupposes that the strategies that the adversaries employ against each other in times of war are issued from the discourses that are both given and immutable. According to this view, the Indo-Pak wars fought almost at regular intervals till 1971 have not seemingly played any role in bringing into existence, elaborating, modifying and even transforming their respective discourses. Secondly, and as corollary to the first, this view freezes the discourses at a given point of their evolution - in our case at the point when the subcontinent was partitioned into two sovereign states and is unable to account for the changes that the discourses have undergone since then while adapting themselves to the changing requirements of time. In that sense, both the state discourses had to strive hard for negotiating with the "patent models" or stereotypes which have been generously used to characterize them - "the two-nation theory based on religion" and "the one-nation theory based on territorial and historical concept of Mother India". Such stereotypes also fix up the limits to states' spheres of action and negotiation. I propose to illustrate these points with reference to the elaboration of the discourse of the Indian state in course of the three major wars with Pakistan between 1974 and 1971.

The first Indo-Pak war that took place immediately after independence may be conceived of as the moment of contingency in its elaboration: First, India continued to interpret the Kashmir imbroglio with the terms that were directly derived from what is popularly known as, the nationalist discourse crystallized during the struggle against colonial rule since the last century. It was seen primarily - if not exclusively, as an extension of the colonial policy of dividing the Indians and "weakening the new nation and preventing her from becoming a powerful factor in Asia" through the creation of Pakistan. It is interesting to note that Great Britain continued to remain India's point of negative reference. India took time to recognize Pakistan as her principal adversary. Besides as investigative reports point out, she was not seriously interested in committing herself to any kind of long-term involvement in Kashmir: "If in the normal course, Kashmir had acceded to Pakistan, few in India would have been upset about it...To many in India, the tribal raid was an instance of Pakistan's arrogance, similar to that displayed by the Muslims before independence, which, if not challenged immediately, would manifest itself even more blatantly in the years to come. What seemed important then...was not the acquisition of territory by India but stopping Pakistan from enlarging its boundaries".[25] As a counter-factual argument, it has been suggested that had Sheikh Abdullah not asked for India's military assistance at that crucial hour in fighting the raiders, India in all probability would not have been involved in what ultimately turned out to be an endless war. But once she committed herself, there was no going back and her discourse bore the imprints of the involvement in a way that proved to be inerasable. What was then dismissed as too contingent a factor to engage our sustained attention came to occupy a central position in the State's scheme of things and became the be-all-and-end-all of our national identity.

The war of 1965 may be interpreted as the moment of trial not of course in the ordinary sense of "the one-nation theory based on territorial and historical concept of Mother India" being pitted against "the two-nation theory based on religion", but in the deeper sense that the Indian state found it extraordinarily difficult to remain steadfast to what it had decided to embrace - "the one-nation theory" itself. The war had conferred on the state the special responsibility of holding it accountable to a theory that admittedly transcended the religious and communal differences and was believed to have consolidated its citizens into the generic community of Indian nation. The depreciation of this theory was so blatant and spectacular in the everyday political practice that the state was not only busy with confronting an external enemy on the warfront but grappling with the responsibility that the rhetoric of one-nation theory has assigned to it. The Indian state was passing as it were through a particularly schizophrenic state in which more than being engaged in a war with an external enemy, it had to come to terms with what it held to be its true moral self. The transformation of "a low-key, amorphous, tolerant and peculiarly consensual nationalism" into a highly monochromatic form which was out to throttle and emasculate the cultural diversities and steamroll them into one homogeneous type at about the same time had turned the discourse by its head and constantly reminded us that no amount of political reconstruction would be able to bring the discourse to the line of actual political practice and vice versa. The state was caught up in a terrible political dilemma: It could neither discard nor stand up to the rhetoric of one-nation theory. Besides, the minorities' natural concern for their communities located just across the borders was stigmatised as flagrantly anti-national. As Ayesha Jalal writes, "Indian Muslims have had to distance themselves from any display of concern about their predicament across the border".[26] Even M.J. Akbar notes that with Nehru's demise, "the communal Hindu element in the power structure could not be kept under control".[27] He makes a particular reference to the anti-Sikh agitation in which several communal organizations came together and joined their hands in forcing the state to assume a monochromatic form.

According to Sumit Ganguly, the war of 1965 proved beyond any doubt that "there was no ground swell of support for Pakistan's claim on Kashmir amongst the Muslim population of the state".[28] It is interesting to see how in spite of the two wars, the state discourse of India could retain its popularity even amongst the Muslims of the state. It was the promise of "secularism and socialism"' held out by the discourse rather than the actual political practice, that played a key role in attracting the Sheikh and his people to veer towards India. As Sheikh Abdullah is reported to have said, "...We have joined India because of its ideal - secularism and socialism. India wanted to build a state where humanism would prevail. So long as India sticks to these ideals, our people have a place nowhere else but in India".[29] It seems that they were still prepared to give India what in juridical language may be called, a benefit of doubt and more significantly a chance to prove before the world as well as herself that her political practice was worthy of the promise embedded in the discourse.

The war of 1971 may be characterized as a moment of unchallengeability in the evolution of the discourse of the Indian state. It is so not because it established its unchallengeability vis-a-vis that of the Pakistani state, but because it succeeded in keeping its nationalism claims out of contention with the later. The realm of contention is defined as a common site where one discourse challenges and in turn, is challenged by another. It is like a boxing bout where two states share a common ring. But what if the terms of discourse are fashioned in a way that they invest it with an element of certainty? This may not have (and as we know, did not) pre-empted the challenges, but it obviously frees it of the obligation of answering back and responding to them. In that sense, the state discourse during this period seems to have been situated outside the realm of contention underlying the war. As a result, nationalist claims were instantly read as nationalist credentials and never subjected to the test of what Ranabir Samaddar designates as "permanent plebiscite", that is to say, the test that seeks to establish the nationalist credentials of a state. This is how the discourse during this time acquired a sanitized and unproblematic character. In this connection, we may confine ourselves to an analysis of two complimentary processes through which the discourse could sanitize and de-problematize itself: One, the nationalist character of the Indian state is too taken for granted to remain open to contestation and challenges. It is accepted as an accomplished fact - too "accomplished" to be demonstrated or constantly "displayed and presented". As Sudipta Kaviraj puts it: "This encouraged a massive pretence on the part of a national movement and later by the national state that the question of cultural construction of the nation was left behind in the past, rather than still lying in future. It made Indians believe that the imagining of the nation was an accomplished and irreversible fact: it did not have to be constantly presented and justified".[30] Thus, it is argued that the coincidence of the Indian state which the Indian nation had achieved in the past and interestingly in a past that remains not only unverified but unverifiable with the effect that the possibilities are effectively neutralized. While this coincidence is held to be pivotal to the question of state's legitimacy, effective de-problematization and sanitization were also the prerequisites for resolving successfully the question of state's legitimacy.[31] Two, another way through which it could be achieved was to take the battle to the enemy camp and to accuse it of having failed in the task of harmonizing the state with the nation or better say, in trying to make possible what essentially is impossible. The making the Pakistani state is such an impossible event in history and history will take its own course by way of unmaking it. Hence what happened was not history and it would assert itself by taking revenge. In other words, Indo-Pak war of 1965 was more a war of Pakistan with history than with India. While the Indian state was relieved of the responsibility of building the nation on the ground that the latter was an "accomplished fact", for Pakistan the task was not only unaccomplished, but simply un-accomplishable. Sumit Ganguly for instance has written, "As Pakistan came apart, its claim on Kashmir also eroded, in a major way. The inability of the West Pakistanis to convince their brethren in the East to remain in the same polity, made it exceedingly difficult for the Pakistani leadership to lay claim on the basis of religious composition. Naturally India took advantage of the discrepancy between fact and theory."[32] While Indian state has sought to de-problematize its own nationalist claims, it also in the same measure problematized those of the Pakistani state. Both these processes went hand in hand with each other.

To re-state our arguments very briefly: First, our analysis shows that the state discourses in South Asia are neither inflexible nor incompatible with each other, though of course frequent wars have sought to define them in patently antagonistic terms. The first Indo-Pak war serves as a classic illustration of this point. It shows how the contingent factors left their mark on the articulation of the discourse of the Indian state. Second, elaboration of the discourse on the part of the state has set forth certain limits to its nature and range of operations. The war of 1965 for instance, points out how the forces were increasingly going out of India's control and her political practice fell far short of what the rhetoric of one-nation theory demanded from her. The 1971 war on the other hand, illustrates how the state sought to master the forces through what Kaviraj calls, "massive pretence", that is to say, by way of keeping it out of the realm of contention.

Let us now see what bearing the war-like situations have on the formation and elaboration of state discourses. As an offending strategy, they are meant to subvert the terms of another state discourse. One may look at the problem in either of the two ways or even a combination of them: First, war-like situations may arise when the fragments that the state claims to represent and articulate into its nationhood may refuse to be assimilated into it and sometimes choose to act at the behest of a country that has been held responsible for the conflagration of the war-like situations. We are painfully aware of a number of nationalities strewn all over India starting from Kashmir in the north to the Nagas in the north-east that play host to such war-like situations. The anti-statism of the United Liberation Front of Assam springs not so much from the fact that Assam has been subjected to "the internal colonialism" of New Delhi but very much from the fact that "she has never been part of India" and the Indian state has no authority whatsoever to convert her into one of its constituent units.[33] It also happens that sometimes the fragments that according to a state lie beyond its national corpus and therefore need to be excluded from it show an excessive eagerness to be encapsulated within it. It is true that in state's perceptions, their exclusion is constitutive of the nation it claims to represent; but they do not share the same perceptions.

War-like situations may also be used as a defensive strategy in the sense that the state while employing it may be interested in restoring to itself the discourse that is apparently under attack from an offending country. The reports published by such human rights organizations as Committee for Initiative on Kashmir, Peoples' Union for Democratic Rights, Peoples' Union for Civil Liberties and Amnesty International are increasingly drawing our attention to the role of the Indian state in inciting, fomenting or for that matter, perpetrating war-like situations in Kashmir. Thus to cite an instance, a Lokshahi Hakk Sangathana report has identified as many as eight militant organizations including Muslim Liberation Front and Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon which have been planted by the Intelligence agencies with an eye to drive a wedge in militant ranks and divide the Kashmiri people. [34] Such a role of the Indian state helps it recapture its control over the discourse that faces attack from others. It seeks first, to prove that the Kashmiris are too heterogeneous to be called a nation and that the eagerness to be included in the national body may acquire an equally militant form with the implication that militancy is no monopoly of secessionism, War-like situations in other words, may be a means through which a state chooses to negotiate its terms with the little narratives or histories of the fragments which pose a potent threat to the prevailing state discourse. That negotiation is a continuous process only establishes that the state discourse is not too strong to appropriate and completely obliterate them. These narratives and fragmentary histories are simply irreducible.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lecture at the first South Asian Peace Studies Orientation Course held by the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Calcutta, October 1997

Notes and Reference

Borders as Unsettled Markers - The Sino-Indian Border

Paula Banerjee

It was the age of the Great Game and Lord Curzon was at the helm of British affairs in India.  In his now famous observation, he revealed the problem that confronted the British not just in India, but in the entire "modern" world.  Frontiers, he said were indeed the razor's edge on which hung modern issues of war and peace.[1]  How could the British then bring back their 10,000 troops, deployed in Chitral, Tochi Valley, Landi Kotal, and Khyber Pass? Following Curzon's principles, they could not afford to give up Quetta or any of the frontier posts. Ultimately the British constructed strategic railways up to Dargai, Jamrud and Thal, and frontiers were left to tribal levies. The borders became a problem.

Many years later, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the great patron of Pakistan's nuclear programme, wrote,

…Geography continues to remain the most important single factor iin the formulation of a country's foreign policy...Territorial disputes...are the most important of all the disputes.[2]

Borders, as markers of territoriality, have reared their ugly heads once again in South Asia.  Are borders then a continuous problem in this region?  This article seeks to examine the issue by taking up the Sino-Indian border as a case. The argument here is that borders are basically human constructs that become problematic at different historical junctures; the rationale behind this problem needs to be sought in the wider political context.  Human history provides eloquent testimony to how trouble-free borders suddenly become troublesome, such as the Tacna-Africa in the Attacama in the nineteenth century, or the border between the two Koreas, or even the Malvinas Islands in South Atlantic in 1983.  South Asia is no exception to this general axiom. But the crucial question is what political conditions make borders problematic in postcolonial South Asia?  And how do borders, in turn, influence the politics of the region?

Background

As with most other postcolonial constructs the origin of South Asian borders can be traced to the British.  Their frontier policy between 1880 and 1920 resulted in the acquisition of a large area in South Asia, inhabited by numerous indigenous populations, without any clear-cut boundaries that separated one territory from the other. Speaking of Africa, Lord Salisbury had once made a telling comment about the principles that the British followed in general while constructing markers around territories all over the world, he said:

We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man's foot has ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindred by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.[3]

Symptomatic of the British way of drawing borders was the Durand Line named after Sir Mortimer Durand, who negotiated it with the Amir of Afghanistan in 1893.  The Durand Line was based neither on any clear physical feature nor on any distinct political organization.[4]  In the foothills of the Afghan Plateau, there was nothing to suggest that one watershed could be a better boundary than the other, especially when the main rivers flowed transverse the direction the boundary followed.  The small tribal communities that inhabited the area were fiercely independent.[5]  The boundary that Durand had negotiated with the Amir was demarcated with extreme difficulty by May 1896, with the exception of a section around the Khyber Pass, which was finally settled after the third Afghan war in 1921.

In the north, the British negotiated a satisfactory boundary with Nepal that was flanked by two areas in the Himalayas where they were unable to persuade China to settle for any boundary. The border remained contested. In the east, Britain persuaded China to settle for a line marking the limits of Burma, but entirely failed to prevent France from establishing posts in the headwaters of Mekong valley. With Tibet, the border issue was settled by the Treaty of Lhasa (1904).  For India, perhaps the most serious British failure was their inability to persuade China to agree to any boundaries in northern Assam, east of Nepal, and the Aksai Chin.  In northern Assam, India at present relies on the McMahon line, which was a product of British attempts after 1904 to limit Chinese expansion and define the precise area of British responsibility in the Himalayas.  There are two versions of the McMahon line and China considers neither mandatory. The Chinese maintain that the Simla Convention is not binding on them since they never ratified it.  Both India and China agree that there is traditional boundary in Aksai Chin but disagree on its location.  China at times even rejects the claim that a boundary was drawn at all.[6]  Unlike the Indo-Pakistan border, there is a lot more unanimity of "national sentiment" as far as the Sino-Indian border is concerned. From time to time we glibly tend to portray the Chinese as bad guys and forget the greater problem - the border issue. 

The end of the empire created a new set of boundaries and borders, but old problems persisted.  Partition, which was supposed to resolve all territorial issues rationally, turned out to be an edifice of complete irrationality.  The governments in the region largely emulated their colonial predecessors not only in methods of governing but also in rationalizing territorial issues.  The new boundary lines created political compulsions of their own resulting in a remorseless hunt for that spatial claim which would serve the political demands of sovereignty. The Great Game was not over; it was only converted into a number of smaller games waiting to erupt at any given movement.[7]  The terrain where the game was played remained disputed. The great actors disappeared from the stage, but the acted upon remained confronting new specificities with outmoded methods.

The Case of the Sino-Indian Border

The border dispute between India and China epitomizes the politics of borders in South Asia. It is not a product of partition but a relic of the days of the colonial times.  It may not have the same emotional appeal as the Pakistani-Indian border, but it has defied solution at any level.  It is a remnant of the Great Game and yet it is at the same time a postcolonial political construction.  According to the Indian view, the Sino-Indian border ran along the main crest of the Himalayas. The southern slopes of its ridges, including the independent kingdom of Nepal and the protectorates of Sikkim and Bhutan, constituted the Indian side. In the west, the boundary started from the Karakoram Pass along the watershed between the Shyok and the Yarkand, ran through the Oara Tag Pass, ascended on the Kuen Lun mountains, left the main crest along 80⁰ 21^' east, and descended in a south westerly direction.[8] According to the Chinese, in the middle and the east their territory extended to the southern side of the Himalayan ridges.  In the west, Chinese territory included an area of about 15,000 square miles from Lahul, the Spiti area, the Shepki pass, the Nilang, Jhadang, and Barahoti areas, while in the east it covered the whole of the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) covering about 35,000 square miles. As for NEFA, though the Chinese did not accept the McMahon Line, the precise extent of their claim was never made clear. The Chinese refused to accept that the line was in any way legal.[9]

There are some geographical problems with the Indian claims, but the political problems seem to be more serious.[10]  The western fringes of the British Empire, Aksai Chin, Kashmir and the northern borders of British India were territories that became bones of contention among three contenders - the British, the Russians and the Chinese.[11]  China was the weakest of the three contenders, extremely insecure about British and Russian designs on its frontiers. The Chinese were also traditionally the most interested in creating territorial markers and the contested area was not just a colony for them. The British were apprehensive of Russia's new colonial interests on the western fringes of their empire. The more they doubted the impregnability of the Herat, Farah, Kandhar and Bolan routes, the more intransigent became their policies towards the North-West frontiers. By the time Captain Gromchevsky reached Hunza through a small route between the Pamirs and Xinjiang, as Mortimer Durand commented, the Great Game had already begun.[12]  Then onwards, aggressive designs of retaining a large empire kept all the players in a scramble for more land and creation of buffers beyond boundaries.  And the Great Game continued until the Great War changed the politics of territoriality.

Partition brought border questions back to the centre stage of South Asian politics.  Apparently partition left the Sino-Indian borders untouched, but it created new identities bringing in its wake new principles of nationalizing the peripheries that would leave their mark on all the borders of South Asia.  China, from a weak third of the 1890s, emerged as a strong first in the regional power structure by the late 1940s, with a traumatic memory of encroachments on its national frontiers; and the mighty British India was severely weakened by partition. Serious disagreements with India, however, did not surface until the late 1950s. This does not mean that the Chinese were reconciled to their borders.

Official Chinese maps after 1949 continued to ignore the boundaries of the Simla Convention. The international border with India in the eastern sector was shown as lying at the Himalayan foothills. In the western sector, there were wide differences between Chinese and Indian border demarcations. China claimed a huge portion of land both in the eastern and Indian border demarcations.  China claimed a huge portion of land both in the eastern and western sectors - around 32,000 square miles and 10,000 to 14,000 square miles respectively - which India considered her own; in the central sector, the Chinese claim ran into a few hundred square miles.  During discussions preceding the 1945 Agreement between India and China, neither side raised the frontier question nor did the Agreement specifically refer to the Sino-Indian frontier.[13]  That the Chinese were serious about their border claims became apparent the same year when they protested against what they termed as the intrusion of Indian troops beyond Niti Pass into Wu-ze.  Even after repeated requests from the Indian Government, they did not change their maps nor did they accept the boundaries given by the British. The Indians did not seriously question Chinese actions even after they abrogated the Tibet-Nepal treaty in 1956.[14]

In 1957, India first heard on Chinese Radio that China had built a road connecting Sinkiang and Tibet. Seeing the road demarcated on a Chinese map, questions were raised in India and the Indian Government sent two search parties to find out the details.  One party was taken prisoner by the Chinese and the other returned. Indians protested against the Chinese construction of a road that ran through Indian territory. In spite of these objections, China continued to advance in Ladakh and built more roads. In 1958, negotiations between India and China over border issues collapsed amid mutual recriminations.  In 1959, the Chinese claimed the disputed territory.  The controversy culminated in the 1962 Sino-Indian border war. India came close to fighting another war with China after 1965.  Then in 1987, once again the border dispute came to the fore - this time the crisis began over the question of control of Sumdorong Chu in the Thagla Ridge.

Border Politics

How did a region located 17,000 to 20,000 feet above sea level acquire such significance in 1962?  If the region had such strategic merit then why did the Indian leadership wait until the late 1950s to bring it within its political agenda? Perhaps the answer lies in the changing perception of borders in the 1950s and 1960s.  During the euphoric post-Independence Nehru era, India bolstered by its own "giantism", considered itself a world power.[15]  India was confident of withstanding external pressures from the Super Powers in shaping its own foreign policy.  In fact, Super Power rivalry led Nehru to conclude that India's position was secure as:

It may be that some covet her, but the master desire will be to prevent any other possessing India ... If any power was incautious enough to make the attempt, all others will combine to trounce the intruder. The mutual rivalry would in itself be the surest guarantee against all attacks on India.[16]

However, India could not remain blind to the fact that it was flanked by a hostile Pakistan and an uncertain China. It sought to neutralize regional insecurities by acquiring the garb of a world power.  Such a state of affairs called for political flexibility in the region, so that the borders could remain flexible. Nehru's whole thinking and strategy at the regional level was to seek political solutions to conflict situations.  "For him there was no alternative for a country like his own which, in his view, should have the ambition of playing an important role in the international system".[17] This is clearly reflected in all his actions at the regional level.

India's decision to take the Kashmir question to the United Nations illustrates its approach to the Indo-Pakistani conflict. Further, Indian openness to dialogue with Pakistan over strategic issues is also a case in point. In contrast, the Chinese "trespass" in Bara Hoti in 1954 evoked no stronger reaction than a note to the Chinese Embassy.  The following year when there was intrusion in the Dam-Zan area, the "Indian Foreign Office sent a mild note of protest saying that the unauthorized presence of Chinese soldiers ...amounted to trespass".[18]  Even as late as 1956, Nehru instructed the Uttar Pradesh government not to adopt an aggressive attitude towards China for disagreements between the two countries were being settled in conferences and "there was no major border issue".[19]  One notices a similar attitude and approach with regard to the Tibet question.  On Chinese actions in Tibet, India maintained benevolent neutrality. One reviewer has described India's attitude vis-a-vis China as the "doctrine of defence by friendship".[20]  Coupled with this were Indian efforts to assume leadership of the newly independent Asian and African countries with the vision of developing the Nonaligned Movement. Even the Super Powers believed that Nehru was the leader of the Asian and African countries.  Thus the United States first sounded India for an alliance and moved towards Pakistan only after it was made clear that India was unavailable.  In 1953, Nixon advised the National Security Council to bolster Pakistan in an effort to neutralize Indian leadership of the Asian and African "block".[21]  Nehru's involvement in the Korean peace process further enhanced this leadership role.

In the 1950s India's hopes of becoming a world power faced serious challenges.  The increasing interest of Super Powers in South Asia and their "more intimate consultations" with other South Asian powers, deepening economic crisis in India, and finally the emergence of China as a great power led to recognition of the fact that India at best could be a regional power. In the post-Bandung era, India realized that its self-avowed leadership of the Nonaligned Movement would not go unchallenged.  The Indian leadership then began to look inwards towards the region. This led to a reconsideration of the Indian political, military and strategic situation, and a concomitant interest in good fences.  With this heightened interest in borders Indian leadership responded to the increasing assertion of Chinese military presence on the border.  As in the nineteenth century, a border game began as a result of regional insecurity, but unlike in the nineteenth century, India was on the defensive as far as its northern frontiers were concerned.  The increased number of border patrols and the constitution of a special board to complete the building of roads in these areas reflected growing interest in safe borders.  The Indian leadership felt that India had to acquire regional hegemony to deal with China.  The situation was further complicated by western propaganda that India had to compete with China "for the leadership of the East, for the respect of all Asia".[22]  The realization that India's goal of national security could not be met effectively through only political means led to a reorientation of Indian policies towards its neighbours in the end 1950s.  An important outcome of this policy reorientation was the Indian occupation of Goa by force.  It was a bold signal that on territorial questions India would no longer be flexible.

Indian preoccupation with its borders was reflected in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha debates of the period.  From 1959 onwards Nehru constantly reasserted in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha that India was not open to any discussion regarding its borders and that the borders had become a problem.[23]  Indian leadership became intransigent not only about Sino-Indian borders but also about Indo-Pakistani borders.  There were indications that Ayub Khan was eager to reach a settlement with India on the border issue in the East Pakistan sector that Nehru disregarded.  Evidence of this changed attitude towards borders was that instead of treating exchanges with the Chinese Government as confidential, the Indian leadership decided to place the entire correspondence before Parliament. The White Papers I-III also gave ample testimony to this changed Indian attitude.  Primier Zhou's letter of 17 December 1959 carried an offer to the effect that both sides should meet and discuss the boundary question.[24]  Nehru showed total unwillingness to negotiate the boundary in its entirely.  His attitude is summed up by his official biographer as "a willingness to talk but an unwillingness to negotiate on the major question of the boundary as a whole, a strengthening of the Indian position in the border areas".[25]  It was not just the Chinese attitude then that had made the border a problem.

Indian military leaders knew that India was in no position to defend its borders against the Chinese.  General Thimayya had publicly indicated two months before the outbreak of Sino-Indian hostilities that he could not, even as a soldier, envisage India taking on China in an open conflict on its own.[26]  General P.N. Thapar too had "categorically pointed out to the Government the inability of India's forces to take on the Chinese and the inadvisability of such a step in NEFA and the possible repercussions in Ladakh, but Krishna Menon ignored what Thapar said". General B.M. Kaul had also advised against fighting the Chinese either in the Dhola or the Thagla region.[27]  That the Indian army was pessimistic about the situation is also clear from such other sources as John Kenneth Galbraith's secret memorandum to the US Secretary of State.[28] But the Indian political leadership decided that India's "traditional boundary" and its vital strategic interests were at stake and, therefore, needed to be defended.  The results of the war of 1962 are well known.  India suffered a severe strategic defeat and could do nothing to stop the Chinese onslaught.  Coming as a terrible jolt, this military humiliation acted as a catalyst and generated a new mood for evaluating India's concept of national security.  Such an evaluation further enhanced the importance of an impregnable border if India wished to retain its regional hegemony; and in that sense the 1962 defeat made Indian leadership even more inflexible. From then onwards, the, issue of borders became a significant input in shaping India's foreign policy within the region.

Throughout 1963, most of the Lok Sabha debates on foreign policy centred on the border issue.  Naturally there were clarion calls to "intensify our defensive preparations to resist any further threat to our territorial integrity", which was hardly surprising.[29]  What was surprising, however, was the extent to which the leadership was prepared to go for defence preparedness.  In a confidential letter addressed to the Prime Minister, which T.T. Krishnamachari clearly stated was "intended purely for you [Nehru] to read and to be killed thereafter", he discussed plan to keep sixteen divisions ready on the borders at all times and urged the Prime Minister not to slacken defence preparedness because of the Chinese ceasefire.[30]  The priority that Nehru attached to the letter was apparent in that he answered it the same day.  In his reply, Nehru wrote,

China, I think, is going to be our foe or adversary for a considerable time to come...we should…concentrate on strengthening our defence position. I think there is not much likelihood of China attacking us militarily...Even so...we have to strengthen ourselves to meet the Chinese menance.[31]

These letters, if nothing else, are markers of the pervasiveness of the national security lobby and the extent to which border disputes would dominate the government's policies in the 1960s and 1970s.  It was argued that the only way to exercise a strong centralized control over the borders was by increasing India's military clout in the region.  This was highlighted by the then Indian Defence Minister, Y.B. Chavan.  During his address to the Lok Sabha on 9 September 1963, Chavan declared,

There has not only been appreciable increase in the total quantum of Chinese forces in Tibet, all along our Northern borders, but the build [up] of these forces is concentrated at strategic points closer to our borders than they have ever done before...Although leaders of Pakistan are well aware that our defensive preparations are meant to safeguard security against the threat from our Northern borders they are carrying on baseless propaganda that these defensive preparations are a threat to the security of Pakistan.  We have also learnt recently about certain deployment of Pakistani troops on Assam and East Pakistani border... In the current climate of hostility and tension...we have...to take necessary measures for defence [of] our territorial integrity against any aggressive threat...The first programme of our defence preparedness is, one of expansion of our Armed Forces.[32]

The unresolved border disputes of the nineteenth century thus continued well into the present century and thereby initiated the political milieu of the South Asian region. In our times, the continuing insecurities over the borders led to the increasing importance and ultimate institutionalization of the role of the national security lobby. The innocuous Defence Committee changed into the Emergency Committee in 1962 and eventually became the Political Affairs Committee with the expanded task of looking after both internal and external security matters. India adjusted itself to "continuous tension along the border."[33] Henceforth, any border dispute was to be incessantly contested. Even the Colombo Proposals, which Nehru accepted as equitable, did not go unchallenged.[34]

The Pakistani entente cordiale with China heightened India's sense of insecurity about its borders and made its posture even more rigid.  Kashmir became non-negotiable.[35]  Even within India, there were criticisms about this changed Indian attitude.  Jai Prakash Narayan's speeches are typical of such criticism.  He criticized this change in Indian attitude towards Kashmir in the late 1950s as well as the so-called "legal integration" of Kashmir that began in the wake of the border disputes.[36]  India was prepared to discuss the Kashmir issue even in 1962-63, but by 1965 India shifted to the stand that Kashmir could not even be on the agenda.  In a discussion with Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister of Soviet Union, the then Indian Finance Minister stated, "We have always held the view that Kashmir is not a matter for discussion except in regard to aggression committed by Pakistan."[37]

India's war with Pakistan may have been the result, at least to some extent, of this Indian rigidity over the border question. Even a seemingly undisputed stretch of land between Sind and Kutch that formed the international boundary between India and Pakistan was severely contested.  India and Pakistan had differing views about the location of that boundary through the Great Rann of Kutch.  It was agreed that the boundary extended from the mouth of Sir Creek in the west to the eastern terminus at the tri-junction of Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Hyderabad.  Further, they agreed that the western sector had been defined along Sir Creek to latitude 23^o 58' north and then eastward to its intersection with meridian 68^o 41' east.  This segment of the boundary was disputed.  India maintained that it was a proper boundary and that it was only necessary to draw the boundary between the northern terminus of this extension and the eastern tri-junction.  Indian authorities proposed that the northern edge of the Rann - which is a salt-impregnated alluvial tract - would be a convenient and direct boundary.  Pakistan recommended a boundary that connected the meridian with the eastern tri-junction via the middle of the Rann.  The two countries were completely unwilling and unable to resolve the dispute and it was settled only by arbitration in 1968 much to their mutual dissatisfaction.[38]  That was one of the last settlements of border disputes by arbitration, since from 1965 onward, Indian attitude towards third party mediation became extremely negative.

The connection between the Great Game and border disputes of the 1960s is borne out by the Sino-Pakistani entente.  In October 1967, China and Pakistan signed an unpublished agreement to open the ancient silk route by building an all weather road over 500 miles from Xinjiang to Gilgit and Hunza in Pakistan occupied Kashmir.  The road ran through the Mintaka Pass and the Khunjerab Pass, from where another Chinese road led to Lhasa in Tibet.  India perceived this activity as a threat to its security and an infringement of its legal borders.  It lodged a strong protest against the Chinese actions.  Despite this, the road was formally inaugurated in 1971.[39]  The unresolved Great Game thus, left the field open for smaller games.  But these smaller games had logic of their own.  Regional hegemonic compulsions reactivated the border issue that fostered national insecurities resulting in the growing importance of national security lobbies in the region. These lobbies could justify their existence and substance so long as the borders remained unstable. Thus there emerged vested interest groups who saw to it that border disputes were kept alive and borders remained in a constant state of flux.

There was another effect of this militarization of borders and India's northeastern border is a case in point.  This region is linked to India by a narrow 70 km stretch between Bhutan and Bangladesh and shares an uninterrupted border of over 37,000 km with Bhutan, China and Bangladesh.  The majority of the population here belongs to Mongoloid groups with strong linkages with China, South and South East Asia.  The border is porous with a long history of movements and exchanges between people, cultures, beliefs, ideas, and customs.  Conviction about the sanctity of the border is weaker here than elsewhere.  Such shared ecology, geography, and culture have given rise to linkages between tribes and communities on both sides of the border.[40]  In fact, many of these tribes feel they have more in common with each other than with the nation-state of which they form a distant appendage.  There is a growing feeling among the inhabitants that the entire Far Eastern Himalayas is peopled by marginalized communities that are peripheral groups, far away from the levers of Central Government.  These areas have a long history of neglect by the rest of the country. Their demands for autonomy and independence can be traced back to the time of India's Independence. Enough evidence exists on the meaningful ties that most of the ethnic groups have established with neighbouring countries such as China, Burma, and what was then the East Pakistan.  The corporatist ideology of nation-states as articulated by the ruling elites failed either to counter the endemic in the development of the centre/periphery syndrome. To counter insurgency movements in the region, ruling elites made the borders even more rigid. Here again, border disputes became an excuse for the national security lobby to militarize the entire region so that the area could become manageable. This is especially difficult in the Indian context as the colonial process created largely artificial borders in the region.  Same ethnic groups inhabit both sides of the border with close cultural affinities. This has not only created porous borders but has also given rise to conflicting claims of control over bordering regions.  Such militarization merely destabilized the area even further and ensured that the disputes continue to fester.

The irony of the Sino-Indian border dispute of 1962 is that it was born out of political compulsions that disregarded military clout leading to its complete domination of regional politics.  In South Asia, regional politics had to address the issue of borders because unstable borders created their own politics.  There was no clear regional arbiter who could dictate borders and so it had to be negotiated at every step.  Once in the agenda, borders began to dominate the politics of the entire region. The situation continued until the early 1970s when India decisively emerged as the regional hegemon in South Asia. From 1969 onwards China became engrossed in another border issue - the Sino-Soviet border along the Ussuri River.  India endorsed the Soviet position as a way out to resolve differences over the interpretation of the Sino-Soviet border.  India also signed a treaty with the Soviet Union.  China's rapprochement with the United States on the basis of the principle "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" changed the political and strategic co-relation of forces not only in the region but also in the entire world. The Chinese and Indian nuclear programmes further altered the situation.  The politics of borders continued, but in a different format, so different that it has to be recounted in another essay.

Conclusion

The above analysis argues that Sino-Indian relations did not create border problems.  On the contrary the existence of the Aksai Chin and the McMahon lines constructed Sino-Indian relations. Whether India gave asylum to the Dalai Lama or not, the compulsions of the borders drew India and China inexorably into the vortex of a crisis.  Chinese leadership understood that long before Indian leadership could.  Nehru tried to wish away the border problem, but he could not do so.

The Great Game had created the situation that India and China faced later.  However, the position from which they confronted it was completely different from that which their predecessors had faced.  During the Great Game, the actors scrambled for more land, but during the smaller games of the 1950s and 1960s, they tried to defend the border that they considered "historically" given. But any border, either in the nineteenth century or even today is an deliberate political and psychological construct.  Otherwise how can one justify the incessant contests over either the Siachen glacier where the border dispute caused the sacrifice of about 300 men during 1996 or the Durand Line because as geographical borders they are both unfeasible and untenable?  Even the northern terrains where the war of 1962 was fought are not easily accessible from either the Chinese or the Indian side.  And yet, it has had enormous influence on the politics of the region.

Rigid borders in South Asia are geographically not viable, and so any policy of total demarcation is very difficult to implement.  A change in the political situation carries within it a potential for change of the border situation and vice versa.  The borders are active agents of politics in South Asia and the way the British demarcated and constructed borders, mostly on the diplomatic table, has kept the issue fraught with potential conflict.  Today we speak of Sino-Indian rapprochement, a thaw that has taken place since the late 1980s.  Regarding the Sino-Indian talks of 1991, it was stated, "bilateral talks became possible at all because the two sides put border dispute on hold".[41]  Instead of saying that the border issue has been put on hold, it is no longer crucial for regional stability and cooperation.  Borders once again constructed the relation, but this time by their absence as a problem.  This does not mean that borders have become non-issues in South Asian politics today.  The politics of border is visible in other forms and in other kinds of relations, and the people within the region negotiate it everyday.

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Published in International Studies, Volume 35, No 2, 1998, pp.

Women Across Borders in Kashmir - The Continuum of Violence

Asha Hans

In recent years, an inquiry into the place of women in the nationalist discourse of a Partitioned India has emerged (Menon and Bhasin; Butalia; Aiyar).  This partial filling-in of a vacuum in Indian history has been an important step in our understanding of women's history in the subcontinent.  More specifically, both Menon and Bhasin, and Butalia, who spoke to women who crossed borders from the newly-formed state of Pakistan to India during Partition in 1947, have brought to light memories long suppressed.  These memories needed to be revealed so that the language of the nationalist discourse would not continue to be exclusive and misleading where women's national identity is concerned.  As this discourse is not static and is linked to a political language that is ever changing, their excellent work enables us to understand both the continuity and the present discourse in India.¹ I would like to use this backdrop of history to understand women's position in the border areas of India relating to the Kashmir conflict.

In recent feminist interpretations of Partition and women on the borders, Kashmir has found little space.  Butalia, confines herself to the Punjabi odyssey while Menon and Bhasin make only one mention in regard to Azad Kashmir.  One cannot blame them, as Kashmir has long been one of the intricate questions confronting history, which has defied every attempt at resolution.  The latest conflict in 1999 is a part of the history of turbulence in the state.²  

Understanding women's position in the history of Kashmir

Fours wars have been fought between Indian and Pakistan (1948, 1965, 1971 and 1999) where Kashmir has been a significant even if not a direct causal factor.  In the process Kashmir has been dismembered into three parts, and borders shifted.  Today the northern part is known as Azad Kashmir and is under Pakistani control, the southern part, the State of Jammu and Kashmir, is under Indian control, and the eastern in China.  In each change and conflict the civilians have suffered, yet the written histories only document the national hostilities and negotiations and bargains between states (Gupta, 1966; Jha; Schofield) Male-centered narratives have no place for feminist action and evaluation.  This absence of a feminist viewpoint is not surprising.  Women's exclusion from historical chronicling is universal.  Combined with a male construction of female roles, it has made the task of a feminist historiography difficult.

Recounting the yester-years

Among the well-known female rulers in India is Queen Didda of Kashmir.  The following passage is reflective of the current male-oriented historical analyses.  Dhar, chronicling Kashmiri history, writes:

In 950, Khemgupta ascended the throne of Kashmir, a man of mediocre ability who married pricess Didda.  Queen Didda was the de-facto ruler of the state, as she was very dominating and exercised immense influence over her husband.  In 980 AD Didda ascended the throne after the death of her husband.  Before her, two other queens had ruled Kashmir namely Yashovati and Sugandha.  Didda was a very unscrupulous and wilful lady and led a very informal life.  But in spite of these drawbacks, she was an able ruler, who firmly ruled the valley.  She died in 1003 AD [emphasis added]. (19)

In the documenting of ruler's in Kashmir's history, women are mentioned only in this one paragraph.   Dhar notes two other female rulers besides Didda, but no narrative of their lives exists.  Above all, in Dhar's analysis, Didda's immorality precedes her ability as a ruler.  Women's power here is not perceived as power.  Furthermore, universal sexual ethics are not applicable to women.  Didda’s sexuality is a barrier to her finding a place in history equal to male sovereigns of the period.

Nationalist interests have perceived women as objects to be controlled.  Nevertheless, we have to recognize that different historical understandings have produced different constructions of female roles.  Dhar implies that Queen Didda transgressed the role circumscribed to females and, therefore, presents her as a target of contempt and ridicule.  As the historiography of pre-independence years in India from a feminist point of view has yet to be explored, for a more authentic rendering, older histories would need to be examined.  This exercise is essential for understanding not only the past but, also for understanding our identity (Sen).³  The exclusion of women from these shared memories of history influences women’s place in the current nationalist discourse.

Partition and shifting identities

During Partition, Kashmiri women suffered along with other women of a Partitioned India.  Menon and Bhasin explain this with a story from Azad Kashmir.  In October 1947, tribal intruders who forced all Hindus to leave invaded Muzzafarabad (now across the border from India and the capital of Pakistani-occupied Azad (free) Kashmir.  The medical assistant distributed poison to all the women who feared sexual assault at the hands of the invaders.  Many women took the poison and died.  The rest jumped over a bridge into the river.  Those who did not take their own lives were raped.  When a woman chose to commit suicide, often her husband and/or brother helped her.  If they were not able to strangle her, they threw her into the river (52).  Menon and Bhasin’s story from Azad Kashmir is one of the many covered-up stories of mass rapes, sucides, abductions, sales, and honour killings.  Most are of women who have become refugees twice over, once in 1947-48 and then again in 1990.  During Partition, the women were considered sexual objects and of no use to the Qwam (the nation) if they lost their purity.  Their purity had to be protected even if it meant death.  The Partition drew a red bloodline of violence in women’s lives.  Women’s vulnerability relegated her to a lower place in this Qwam.

[During Partition, the women were considered sexual objects and of no use of the Qwam (the nation) if they lost their purity.  Their purity had to be protected even if it meant death]

The history of wars and negotiations after independence relating to Kashmir, therefore, make no mention of women.  Women were invisible factors in the negotiations that took place between India and Pakistan either on a bilateral or at the international level.  Women were only given a critical place in the political mosaic of Kashmiri history, which was documented after 1989, when the current state of conflict started.  As in all conflicts, even here, it is women’s sexuality that has taken centre stage, whether from the angle of the state security forces or the mujahideen (a guerrilla group, whose members believe themselves to be the true defenders of Islam and wage a war to please God).

To understand the post-Partition phase, it is important to understand the ethnic composition of the state.  Jammu and Kashmir, the constituent part of Kashmir, which is Indian, is not Muslim as is generally indicated.  The State is currently divided into four largely loose religious groups and sub-groups.  The majority of the Buddhists are confined to Leh and Ladhak, Hindus to Jammu, Shia Muslims to Kargil, and Sunni Muslims to the Valley.  The history of these ethnic divisions and subdivisions is long.  Kashmir was a Hindu state from the second millennium BC.  Part of it converted to Buddhism in the third century BC.  A resurgent Shiavite Hinduism ended Buddhism in Kashmir as it did in other parts of India.

Central Asian incursions introduced Islam.  Islam changed in the twelfth century as it began to be related to the Sufi school of Persia (modern-day Iran).  In the Valley, the 700-year-old kashmiriat-tradition blended Sufi Islam’s egalitarian spirit with a more liberal Hinduism.  An easy relationship existed between Buddhists, Muslims, and the Hindus.  The Mughal rulers 400 years ago did not replace this culture with the practice of a strict Islam as they had done in other parts of India.  Therefore, it remained a liberal Islam different from the proselytizing of fundamentalist Islam (Kumar 21).  It gave relatively greater freedom to Muslim women, as triple talaq (an Islamic practice which gives Muslim men the right to divorce a wife in the form of three repudiations used by saying the word talaq  three times to formalize a divorce) and the practice of four wives were not adopted.  Widow remarriage has been common.  Today, the non-violence and secular ideals of kashmiriat  have been  destroyed in Kashmir and replaced with a newly-imported Islamic order which has no place for Hinduism or Buddism, and which has a strictly circumscribed code of conduct for women.

“My green valley has turned khaki”

The present Kashmir problem started on January 19, 1990.  Half-a-million Hindu families were displaced after loudspeakers broadcasting from mosques asked them to leave the Valley within three days or face dire consequences.  The majority of the Hindus in the Sunni-dominated valley were forced to live in camps in non-Muslim areas of the state and in other parts of the country.  Women left all that is familiar had secure to adapt to a new life of uncertainty.  There is no safety even in other areas of Kashmir, outside the Valley, as conflict has entered Kashmiri lives in every part of the state.  Women, wherever they are, remain targets of militancy and state controlled force (Bhatay et al.).

Since 1990s the violence and its consequent effects on the lives of Kashmiri women are comparable to those women have experienced in any other global conflict situation.  Conflict, displacement, and the new and fundamentalist character of Islam have changed not only social but also physical structures.  The Line of Control (LoC), a boundary dividing Kashmir, and agreed to by both India and Pakistan by the Simla Agree ment of 1972, has again become a centre of conflict creating a new Hindu-Islam divide.  The Valley is, thus, demanding freedom from the state of India.  Hindus who lived in peace with their neighbours since the second millennium BC have been forced to vacate the Valley.  This shifting of the LOC, though physical, has created new boundaries in women’s lives.  A Kashmiri-Hindu woman, displaced by the conflict, questions the “freedom” – a freedom in which women pay the cost by being restricted to play a role of the outsider or spectator – as well as her own and her community’s position in this search for a new national identity.

Azadi (Freedom) 1989-1995

What nation

Does not have a dream

Like that?

History is a nightmare

From which we cannot wake:

We cannot arise.

I have heard a house to house

Searches for young men with beautiful

Hair who hide frightful weapons

In their sister’s hope chests.

To the women who love them

They tell nothing except that

One day Azadi will arrive

At everyone’s doorstep.

Life will become prettier, more

Honourable, more pious.

Who are these men?

I would like to ask you.

I would like to know

Why theirdream of Azadi

Excludes me (and my people).

-          Pandit, June 30, 1999

Hindu women find themselves completely excluded from this quest for a new Kashmiri national identity.  This search for freedom is only perceived in the context of Islamic vs. non-Islamic positioning.  As Hindu women are extraneous to this search we are compelled to confine ourselves in this article to women restrained by Islamic boundaries.

In the late 1980s, clerics coming from outside Kashmir pushed strict Islamic schools for children, the wearing of veils for girls and women, undermining the liberal Sufi ethos.  The veil is a new phenomena introduced by the strict codes of Islam and imposed by the new Islamic leaders with links to Pakistan and Iran (Marquand). Women’s lives have been inevitably affected, as they are perceived to be the representatives and emissaries of culture.  The politics of culture and the presence of Border Security as well as the Armed Forces have had had a profound effect on the lives of women in Kashmir.  For example, Kunaan Poshpora in Kupwara, near the border, has come to be known as the “raped village.”  On the night of February 22-23, 1991, over 30 women and children were supposed to have been gang-raped by the soldiers of the Fifth Rajputana Rifles.  This village, like many other villages, has lost its  honour.  All its women remain unmarried and are shunned by the community (recounted during a visit in 1882).

Present-day Kashmiri nationalism traces it origins to the political-cultural interventions of Islam.  Those excluded from the search for a “new” Kashmiri identity try to negotiate with the Indian State to counter the strategies of their rejection from mainstream Kashmiri politics.  This maneuvering for ending the politics of exclusion has not worked.  The state is unable to support their pleas or even prevent the further dismembering of its own body.  Pandit, in her poems, poignantly chastizes the policy-makers for the plight of the Kashmiri diaspora:

            Kings and king-makers play dice,

            Bet on their moder, not the wife.

-          Pandit, May 30, 1998

In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, Draupadi, the common wife of the Pandavas, was lost in a game of dice in a political battle for a kingdom.  When Duryodhan, the Kaurav price, ordered her stripping in public, she was saved by divine intervention in the form of Krishna, the incarnation of Vishnu. The "betting" was then on the wife and, in the Hindu social order; it remains so toady.  In any nationalist debate it is the "mother" as nation whose honour has to be protected and during Partition it was a major strategy employed by the state.⁴ This strategy, however, did not work as Partition has dismembered the "mother" (Bose, 1998; 51).  This cry of a patriarchal system, signifying the preservation of the purity of the national order at all costs, returns at the heightening of tensions between the two nations but remains as unsuccessful now as it was then.

In her work, Pandit reveals a significant shift as she perceives the rulers and policy-makers of a modern India staking their "mother" in a battle.  The enemy is not responsible for the dismembering; the rulers themselves have created the shifting borders.  The "mother's" purity and sacred identity becomes a victim of state intertia and the moral corruption of the public sphere.  What Pandit does not see, however, is that "womanhood" in her poems is all inclusive as neither mother nor wife escapes the violence of the state.  All women, including the "mother" figure, find themselves caught within a continuum of violence.  This change takes place in the political strategic field and, therefore, has political connotations.

To date, there has been little scope for academic work in the politics of violence.  The curtain around Kashmir is dense and very little information escapes except what the state, or the militants, desire.  What is indisputable is that the onset of violence a decade ago in Kashmir has engulfed the entire community of Kashmiri women.

Two rare studies provide insight into women's situation in Kashmir today (Women's Initiative; Kashmir University).  In the first, the Women's Centre of Bombay University spoke to women in Kashmir in 1994 and the consequent report highlighted the abuse of women during conflict (Women's Initiative).  The report documented large-scale rape and other forms of gender-specific violence that took place over the years as a result of the conflict.  Consequently, the mosques, traditional centres of male power and dominance, have become centres of women's collective (Women's Initiative).  Women have sought assistance from a fundamentalist Islam, an exploitative agency, to create solidarity.  This step takes them within the cloisters of conservatism where they have had to sacrifice the limited freedom they enjoyed under Sufism in order to protect themselves from violence.

The canons of the new Islamic order demand the continuation of progeny.  Injunctions of the new regime require that remarriage of widows continue.  It is common, even for widows who already have children, to remarry and leave their children with their former husband's family (Women's Initiative).  The militants positing family planning as un-Islamic have threatened doctors who practise in the field of reproductive and child health (RCH) care.  Abortion is not allowed even in cases when the pregnancy has occurred as a result of rape by security forces.

Women though questioning the ban, cannot act against the militants, but do question their different positions towards sterilization and rape.  While sterilization is considered as un-Islamic and banned, no such action is taken as far as rape is concerned.  Resentment exists particularly in areas where the militants are trained in Pakistan - where reproductive health services including famility planning is allowed - while the trained militants in Kashmir refuse RCH services to their own women (Bhatia).  Women's health has, thus, become a major casualty of the conflict (Women's Initiative).

Contextualizing women's position in the Kargil conflict

The Kashmir crisis is a complex issue that has defied solutions over the past 50 years.  This complexity is clearly discernible in the approximately 100 kilometers of the disputed border areas covering the Kargil, Drass, and Batalik sectors on the Line of Control, which form the nucleus of the latest conflict.  Like Kashmir in general, the Kargil region in which the conflict initiated does not have a homogenous ethic composition.  There are five ethnic communities: the Balti, Ladhaki, Zanzkari, Purki, and Dard Shin.  In Drass the people are mainly of the Dard stock, an Aryan race believed to have originally migrated to the high valleys of the Western Himalayas from the Central Asian steppes.  The speak Shina which, unlike the Tibetan-originated Ladakhi dialects spoken elsewhere in Ladakh region, belongs to the Indo-European linguistic family.  One of the "Minaros" (or Brokpas), tribal inhabitants said to be descended from the army of Alexander of Macedonia, is an endogamous tribe that continues to practice its own ancient rites and rituals.

In 1948, during the post-Partition conflict, Kargil and Drass were captured by Pakistan, but were regained by Indian forces (Misra).  As Pakistan retained the surrounding area between 1948 to 1965, the Kargil area was specifically targeted by Pakistani artillery fire from the overlooking peaks.  In 1965, Indian forces gained control of the hills aroung Kargil, but these were returned to Pakistan as part of the Tashkent peace process brokered by the former Soviet Union.  The firing on Kargil continued and in 1971, the hills overlooking Kargil were taken from Pakistan peace came to the region for a short time with the demarcation of the LoC in 1972 between the two countries.  As militancy in the Sunni-dominated Valley increased, and Shi'ite Kargil did not support the militants, and Pakistani forces resorted to increased shelling (Akbar).  Civilian casualties in Kargil over the years have resulted in the relocation of numerous people to Buddhist-dominated Leh (Akbar).  Ethnic conflict has increased in this peaceful region as Buddhists resent this encroachment on their cultural and territorial homogeneity (Hindu).

In February 1999, India initiated a new diplomatic process to end the conflict with Pakistan.⁵  The peace process did not last long, as in May 1999, while the diplomatic initiative was still underway, hundreds of new posts had been set up by armed raiders on the Indian side of the LOC.  The borders are porous and it has been easy for armed combatants to cross them.  The issue is complicated as the intruders are a combination of mercenaries, Afghan and Pakistani Mujahideen as well as Pakistani army regulars.⁶ Kargil was not a civil insurgency but a bi-lateral conflict.  The border war intensified on May 26^th, 1999, when a full-fledged Indian army action took its place on the LOC.  By the third day, India had deployed more troops to the Kargil region bringing the total to an estimated 30,000.  India launched air strikes in Kashmir for the first time in twenty years.  By July 11, 1999, a pullout was agreed upon and there was a subsequent reduction in the level of intensity in the conflict, although, it did not end.

The multiethnic and multinational composition of the border represents a unique political identity not shared by the rest of the state.  Villages lie on both sides of the LOC.  Here it is culture that mediates relations within the borders and outside them.  For instance, a confusing situation exists in a village called Hundermann.  Situated directly on the LOC, it is sometimes in Pakistan and sometimes in India.  In 1948 it was part of Pakistan.  In 1971, the Pakistanis destroyed the village and the Indian army occupied it, and overnight the villagers became Indians ("A Village Between Two Nations").  Since then, the people of Hundermann have had to live with intermittent shelling.  The physical violence of bombing and the multi-psychological situational pressures, make the life of women in this village and many others in Kargil constantly traumatic.

As the war-like situation never actually ceases, violence in the lives of these people is a continuous oppressive component that decreases and increases at will.  When the conflict intensifies, the boundaries of the LoC are extended to include all women who come into contact with it - the women living on the LoC, those crossing it, and those distanced by physical space but located in the centre by virtue of their very identity.  The LoC transforms these women's lives during heightened tension by the use of different systems of control.  Control is exerted through the use of language and over women's movements, and therefore there identities and sometimes their economies are affected.  For the women who live on these borders, as well as the women who have never seen the LOC because of its physical distance but are nevertheless tied to it, the LOC embodies an all-pervasive identity, which they can neither denounce nor adopt.

The war has affected women's lives in these villages profoundly, as their location on the borders has enclosed them in different nationalisms at different stages of their lives.  Conflict creates in the life of all these women a new language of nationalism, which acts as a control mechanism.  Their autonomies and agencies are both objectified in the larger national cause.  Fortunately not all women associated with the LOC are completely subsumed by the male ideological order.  Some manage to discover windows left open where they can pursue avenues of empowerment and personal or group autonomy.

Female combatants from across the border and a reception by houris

The Line of Control, in a feminist context, provides not only the demarcating of a political boundary but it also engenders a language of its own.  This language uses women's bodies in the nationalist dialogue.  For instance, in the Tuloling assault in the Drass Sector, three-storied bunkers were found with the bodies of four women who had been armed, same as the men.  An Indian army captain who found the bodies, interviewed by the media, was asked what women were doing at this high altitude.  He replied: "Well, probably to look after their personal adam (administration), he said with a wink" (Sawant).  Who were these four women?  Insurgents, mercenaries, or women recruited by the Pakistani armed forces?  What was their role in the Kargil conflict?  The answers may never come.  Indian soldiers in some posts have spotted women as well as found the bodies of women killed during air strikes.  Some have suggested that the Afghan mercenaries have brought in women (Akbar).  There is no proof that this information is true and the women's identity remains hazy.⁷

What is relevant here is the male adversary's perception of their roles.  The female crossing of borders symbolizes the violation of not only political but also social and cultural boundaries.  The adversary's construction of the insurgent woman's identity is being called into question.

The female representation of the enemy becomes a symbol of the body politic.  These women kept faith with the male martyrs and opted for death rather than capture.  Their reconstructed identity, however, transforms the female warrior into a powerless sexual object, denying her full status as fighter/soldier.  As, there is no one to uphold her community honour, the language pursued in the cultural context acquires violence and the "line of control" becomes a line of violence - an attempt to violate their bodies through this control.  It is certain that women in nationalist struggles do not achieve the status of their male counterparts.  Whoever these women holding rifles are, the response of their male adversaries is to attack them through the undermining of their national "honour."

When male combatants cross borders they provoke a different response, even as adversaries.  For instance, another view presented of women's role in this conflict is that of houri - women sent by the God's to tempt mortals.  Pakistani soldiers are seen as being tempted by tantalizing, nubile nymphets waiting for them on the Indian side of the border, promising them entry to God's own "dancing hall."  By all accounts, as an Indian newspaper correspondent suggests, our forces are firmly set on the path to a glorious victory, matched by the boundless ignominy of the Pakis who have been foolish enough to believe that the barren Kargil hills are crawling with houris.  It is a tribute to the Indian soldiers that they did not mow down the fleeing enemy - that is not the style of this side of the line that divides Hindu civilization from Islamic barbarism (Gupta 1999).

The difference evident in the two examples presented above lies in the construction of "theirs" and "ours."  "Theirs" are sexual objects - whether as houris of a sexual fantasy or insurgents that administer to men's sexual gratification - while "ours," by default, are not.  Women are seen as objects of sexual fantasy or mundane providers of sexual favours.  Through the women, the purity and cultural inferiority of the other nation is attacked.

Controlling the "identity": displacement and the violence of conflict

With resurgence of the conflict each time, victims of Partition settled on many parts of the border are faced with displacement and fear of being uprooted once again.  Control over mobility of populations is an inevitable part of war.  In this context, people living on the Line of Control have lived under the shadow of the guns since Partition and, with each conflict, have shifted to safer places.  The Partition and the new boundaries have meant an extended violence, which has become a routine and inescapable part of daily life.  In the Kargil conflict the number of persons rendered homeless are somewhere in the region of 2,78,601 and the majority who have moved are women and children (Government of India).  The displaced are from Kargil, Drass, Batalik, and the border areas of Punjab and west Jammu and Kashmir.  Kargil has a very low-density population and, even if the conflict is in Kashmir, most of the displaced are from the Punjab sector of the border.

The displaced in Kashmir have resettled in places such as Kupwar, Uri, Gurez in Kashmir and Pura, Akhnoor, Poonch and Rajouri in Jammu and Pallanwala.  Most women and children have left their homes to find safer places on their own.  In neighbouring Himachal Pradesh in the Chham region more people have joined the exodus for safety (Hindu).  The most unsettled are the people on the Punjab border.  Inspector General (border) of Punjab Police, J.P. Birdi, estimates that over a quarter-of-a-million people left their homes on the Punjab border.  The numbers given out by the Indian Government and Birdi are different, as here as in most refugee situations, due to incessant movement enumeration is difficult.  It was noted by Birdi that, the worst affected areas are the Khem Karan and Khalra sectors. Most of the people from these sectors have moved to Taran Taran, Amritsar, and other places.  People living in these sectors suffered heavily in the 1965 and 1971 conflicts because they had to vacate their lands and homes in a hurry which were looted when the fell into enemy hands.  This time around they were prepared and the women and children moved to distant and safer places (Birdi).  Often, in these areas the man will stay back to look after his house and fields.  Since Partition, the violence associated with displacement has not diminished.  While the majority of women in this region have been forced to move in with friends and family during the war. On the LOC where there are army operations the women face complete dislocation and exclusion.

In Kargil, Drass, and Batalik it has not only been the shelling from the Pakistani side which has forced people to leave their homes, but also the occupation of villages by the Indian army which has temporarily inducted men into the army while shifting women and children to "safe places."  For reasons of "security" women and children of villages on the LOC have been loaded into small trucks and "relocated to safer areas."  As the army moves into the village, the men are inducted as temporary workers in the armed forces specifically to carry heavy guns up into the mountains.  The women already removed to "safer" places are moved again, this time to unknown places.  The men are not told where the women are, and at the end of their forced servitude in the army, the men move from village to village searching for their once-united families.

Toko, a small village with a population of about a little over hundred and about 500 meters from the Srinagar-Leh road towards the Line of Control in Kashmir, is a ghost town as the Indo-Pak artillery exchanges have caused large-scale migration (Shreedharan).   Many women and children have been relocated to Somat.  The village of Chaukyal, is another village from where people have been moved to "safter areas."  Gagangeer, on the Srinagar-Leh road, has been host to an increasing number of displaced (Indian Express).  All the displaced in Gagangeer are from Pandrass, a village near Drass and ethnically close to Baltistan.  Families live in tin sheds provided by the government each measuring 1800 square feet and each housing approximately 20 families (Bose 1999).  The 400 displaced, mostly women and children, live without adequate cooking facilities and clothing.  As the army trucks, which brought them here, were too small and too few to carry their belongings, they arrived without clothing, bedding, or cooking utensils.  The government provided only some rice and cooking oil.  With temperatures falling below five degrees Celsius, the coming winter threatens their very survival.

In Kargil, Drass, and Batalik the state has been responsible for the dislocation of the family life of its citizens as well as the loss of honour of the male.  Men lose not only their homes but also their rights as citizen as they are forced to become unpaid slaves in the army.  This loss of autonomy as a head of family, in the eyes of their communities, is a loss of honour.  Simultaneously, by keeping the women in their families out, these men have also lost control over their homes and personal lives.  For the women, it is a dispossession of their ownership of goods and the autonomy they exercised within their own homes. Unlike other women on the border, the women on the LOC have been removed not only from their homes, but also from their family and communities, and find themselves without any support.  The women of Kargil live in a vacuum with no links to anyone else in the country.  Unwanted, unheard, and disregarded they are excluded from the nationalist undertakings, and their nationalism always remains suspect.

Though unheard and isolated by the state, many women have however managed to support themselves and their children in the unknown places where they have been relocated.  They learn to network with local communities in an attempt to solidarity.  They master the art of negotiating with local bureaucracies, and in a very short time, strive to position themselves within the mainstream.

Widows of freedom and the iconization of social displacement

The LOC controls all women who encounter it - the women on the borders, those who have crossed over, and those whose husbands are stationed there as soldiers.  War treats all women alike whether they are of suspect nationalities or not.  This war in India eulogized only the wives and mothers of "martyrs."  This group has been used by the state to create war hysteria and gain sanction and sympathy for its war-like actions.  The symbolism of honour and the war widow as victim, projected by the state, challenges the autonomy of the war widow and sends her back to a privatized existence within the family.

At the funeral of Squadron Leader Ajay Ahuja, his widow Alka, clutching her fidgety child, presented a perfect picture of bereavement and sacrifice.  The government promised her a house, pension, and compensation.  This was the beginning of a process where the state manipulated the image of the war widow as sacrificing herself at the altar of the nation.  The colonization of women's bodies for exploitation is a historical tradition and women are at the mercy of the subjugator and their supporters.  In this case, it is the dominant authority of the state that exploits them, assisted by the community, which carries out its directives.  The imperatives of colonialism require that these women be iconized as widows of freedom.  Their bodies, in the process, are used to further the cause of the nation.  As most of the men who died were between the ages of 19 to 35 (Akbar), war widows are usually young and find themselves manipulated by both the state and their families.

A soldier's death leaves behind a windfall and a divided family.  At stake are a compensation of usually 2-3,000 rupees (about US $ 75 – large sum when spend in Indian currency), a job, a gas agency, and a plot of land provided by the state.  The money meant for the widow rarely reaches her.  Most women have to hand over the money to other men in the family for safekeeping and proper use.  Some have been brutally beaten for not agreeing to the demands of a dead husband’s family.  This matter is further complicated by the fact that, for most part, widows in the villages are illiterate.  They are not aware of the financial assistance that is owed to them.  They are not aware of the financial assistance that is owed to them.  They do not know where to go, nor do they know how to complete any necessary forms.  Some husbands’ ’families have even been known to force a widow not to sign the official papers so that she does not get the money, as it will provide her freedom to marry someone else.  In many cases where there are male relations, force is used to marry her off to them, so that the money remains within the family (Patnaik).  The lump sum paid out at the time of a husband’s death and the monthly pension belongs to the soldier’s widow, but widows are too often victimized, blackmailed, and exploited, their attempts at empowerment are threatened as they remain dependent on their husbands’ families.

As money is collected by the state from public contributions in the name of the war widows, political parties are not left behind, making promises that “we will look after our own.”  The media recounts earlier stories of war widows to feed temporary war hysteria.  Soon these stories of Kargil war widows will be buried in oblivion like Major Batra’s wife whose husband died in the 1971 conflict.  A park and a road were named after Major Batra, but his widows today is homeless.  Another 1971 war widow, Indra Sood’s gas agency in Agra was revoked.  Mohini Giri, former Chairperson of the National Commission for Women found a war widow crying outside a private school as the child born after husband’s death was denied admission (Sarkar).  In Bihar, a flat and land promised to war widow Balamdina Ekka, as well as land to another widow, Jeera Devi, are yet to materialize (Prasad).  Only 20 per cent of widows actually benefit as a result of bureaucratic obstructions (Akbar).  The war widows of 1971 have lived with years of financial uncertainty, social ostracism, and daily needs that remain unmet.  They know the nation has a short memory.

The war widow becomes the longest suffering casualty of war.⁸ The systemic banishment of these women to the outskirts of society begins from their own homes.  Upon widowhood, tradition demands that the woman’s mangalsutra (a gold and black bead chain worn as a sign of marriage) be removed.  Her bangles are broken, her bindi  (red dot on forehead signifying auspiciousness) is wiped off, and she is obliged to dress in white.  She remains in white dress, a symbol of purity, for the rest of her life.  She is inauspicious, barred from wearing coloured clothes and ornaments.  To be a true “Indian woman” one must be a Sati Savitri, a mythical character whose husband died but was pulled back from hands of Yama, the God of death, by her love and dedication, thus saving her from widowhood.  Savitri is the epitome of a sacrificing womanhood and not Sati (self-immolation) as usually represented.  Savitri is willing to sacrifice herself (by going with Yama).  To escape this public shame of widowhood, a woman must die before her husband.

The state, and sometimes the society, temporarily suspends this tradition of inauspiciousness, especially during war, by allowing a widow to remarry.  However, despite the newly defined national identity of Indian womanhood, the patriarchal order remains entrenched.  A war hero’s death bequeaths his widow with deprivation and societal discrimination.  A 15-year-old widow, Ranjita, the wife of Jyoti Kumar, cries for the death of a husband she barely knew.  Her marriage is the result of a marriage conducted during a one-day leave granted to the soldier.  The marriage is unconsummated as her husband was summoned away by a call of duty.  She cries not for her husband, but for her fate – a widow trapped in a hostile environment.  She will have to spend a lifetime suppressing her sexuality.  It will be a life robbed of any vestige of self-esteem under the guise of sympathy (Giri and Khanna).

Some attempt to challenge the Hindu constructions of widowhood, which bars their participation from social life, has been made. There are a few stories of empowerment and acceptance, where a mother of a slain son accepts her daughter-in-law as a daughter and treats her as a son (Akbar).  In a patriarchal society this is an achievement of the highest order that a daughter-in-law can hope for, and that a mother-in-law can bestow.  In Punjab, the custom of marrying a dead husband’s younger brother still exists, and this makes it easy to control the widows.  As women try to break these barriers, excuses are made that the objective is to protect their honour, which becomes tainted especially when they are living in a joint family with other males.  Usually, however, these marriages ensure that compensation stays within the family.  Twenty-two-year-old Sunita, pregnant and barely widowed for 15 days, is expected to marry her 18-year-old brother-in-law.  She wants to find a job and look after her child.  Her mother-in-law disapproves and feels that if she uses force, Sunita may call in the Panchayat (local elected leadership), creating a rift in the family structure (Iyer).  The potential empowerment of women is seen as a threatening force that will break the traditional forms of control.

The widows therefore, become similar to the women living on the LOC and those crossing it victims of conflict.

Conclusion: women across borders and the nationalist discourse

I began with the nationalist discourse of a partitioned India, situating Kashmir in the context of the borders and boundaries in peoples lives created by the state.  Considering that nationalism has a language of its own, and that this language is gendered, one can assume that it is reconstructed with each change in the political structures.  To uncover the journey of nationalist discourse in Kashmir, it is important to question of nationalist discourse is the sum total of a people’s perceptions, views, and concepts, or is it something more?  Does it include women?

We realize that the nationalist discourse in Kashmir today cannot be discussed in a homogenous setting of territorial space and gender.  Women across contested borders are in zone of a nowhere land.  In this vacuum, the production of gender in the discourses and practices of nationalism, as elsewhere, constructs women as subordinate to men (Maunaguru).  The answer to Enloe’s questions of whether nationalism has sprung from a “masculinized memory” (3) is affirmative.  In the history of the Kashmiri “nation,” it is the men who have constructed not only the ideology of freedom but also women’s space (and place) within it.

Women remain on the sidelines, dominated by men, whether in exile, or as widows, or as women living on the LOC.  Since 1947, nothing has changed in terms of Kashmiri women’s rights, responsibilities, and equality, frozen in a time warp at the borders of two nations.  The widow of Kargil symbolizes the dignity, the sacrifice of the nation, and the hourie of attaining the non-achievable.  The widow’s place in the nationalist discourse is related to the government’s use of methods to retain ascendancy of power, and remaining within the cultural strategy of the party.

Women’s most significant attributes have been seen as signifiers of ethnic differences and in the reconstruction of the Kashmiri ethnic national category.  Veena Das’s questioning of the commitment to cultural rights which leads to empowering the community against the state, but in which the individual is totally engulfed by the community, applies to Kashmiri women.  The nationalist discourse acquires great significance in the shifting of identities and of cultures.⁹  The women in the Kargil war are currently positioned between the state and community, their identities merged in one or the other as necessitated.  The Kargil conflict has confirmed the pattern of Kashmir in general where what counts are class, caste, and ethnicity, but what cuts across all these factors is the marginalization of women in Kashmiri politics.

In the Kargil conflict, the Kashmiri narrative of nationalism has little meaning, as the historical origins of the two are different. Where do the women of Kargil stand in this widespread narrative of violence for the achievement of a Kashmiri nation?  We find that they neither fit into the Hindustan, land of the Hindus, Pakistan of the Sunni Muslims, or Ladhak of the Tibetan Buddhists.  Ideologically closer to Iran (Khomeini’s) of the Shia Muslims, they are nevertheless physically distanced from them.¹⁰ Linking their nationalism with Iran fulfils Benedict Anderson’s conception of a nation belonging to “a kinship” or religion rather than an ideology (5), but one is tempted to ask whether the hanging of Khomeini’s photographs in their houses does not contradict this understanding of nationalism.  Only in assuming that adherence to Khomeini’s thoughts is not ideology but religion, can one understand Khomeinism as a religious cult that fulfils these people’s needs for a barrier against Sunni nationalism on the other side of the border, where the jihad is not only against the Hindu or Buddhist, but also the Shia. I would argue that perhaps it would be better to understand them, as Perry Anderson has perceived them – that theirs is a nationalism, which is yet not born, because it has not been opposed.  Presently we can assume that this nationalist space is filled by the nations on both sides of the border, which are the “other” and, therefore, incompatible with their feelings of nationalism.  Khomeini, thus, fills the space until they discover their own identity.

Ultimately the rise of religious or cultural nationalism is a cause of concern for women but unsettled borders question the very belonging of women. To borrow from Menon and Bhasin’s observation, the first can be explained in terms of a tendency to impose an idealized notion of womanhood.  Their second observation of women across borders is much more complicated as it is related to women’s identity in a volatile situation of continuing wars and violence.  Women’s emergence as full-fledged citizens of any country is countered by their very being on a border that is not acknowledged and a genered-national boundary in which they are not provided a space.

For women living on the LOC, attaining a national identity is not easy.  For instance, in 1971, most of the village women and children afraid of the war moved deeper into Pakistani and Indian territories.  Zebunissa, from a small village on the LOC, was originally from Pakistan and married to an Indian.  Borders did not mean anything to her.  Her perception of nationhood has been mediated by kinship relationships.  An outsider from across the border, she has lived under the shadow for fear.  At rist is her body, which the Border Security Force can occupy at any time.  A Shia in a Sunni-dominated country, she is also at risk in her former homeland of Pakistan.  Do women on borders share in nationalism/national projects?  Zebunissa has no answer.  For her, nationalism is gendered and she has a role to play only if the male order of the state and the socie4ty allow her to.  Border areas have little room for parliamentary democracy.  Zebunissa, a Pakistani national, is today an India.  What is her nationality?  She has no passport, and her name is not in the voting list.

Women across borders have a difficult role to play.  The duality of women’s role can be assessed from the Pakistani side, which constructed them as freedom fighters, and from the Indian side, which interprets their role as objects of sexuality.  A woman of Kargil, steeped in poverty and a Shia Islam, replies that nationalism for her means stability in her life.  It means keeping the mullahs away from her domain.  It means freedom to education and health services.  It means that nationalism is mundane and steeped in the everyday life.

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Published in Canadian Women's Studies 19 (4), Winter 2000

Notes

1.       I would use the nationalist discourse in Kashmir as part of an India discourse going by Sumantra Bose’s description that the conflict in Kashmir is not of a Muslim-majority state against a predominantly Hindu state, but of a people against the brutally coercive power of the state as a whole (1998: 144).  From a feminist perspective, where women are at the receiving end of state-controlled and militant induced crime, this paradigm is useful.

2.       The complexity of Kashmir’s history has been documented mostly from a political angle.  The best book written to date is by Sisir Gupta who provides a detailed analysis of the post-Partition phase in an objective manner.  Later writings have included Jha: Puri; and Bose (1996) who have tried to provide unbiased views but the Indian perspective is more detailed.  Schofield provides a Pakistani perspective.  Hasan (1993); Hasan (1997); and Rai, in gereral have analyzed Partition extremely well.  There is some reference to abduction and sale of Kashmiri women by the raiders of 1948, in Menon’s history on the integration of Indian states (cited in Misra).

2.                   Amartya Sen argues that in India, the limits of national identity can be compared with the identities associated with first, the more restricted boundaries of community and groups within a nation, and second, the more inclusive coverage of broader categories.  The latter, for instance, could be an Asian or even that belonging to the human race.  Some identities, he argues, can go beyond the nation, and yet within the nation define a part of it.  For instance, the identity of a woman as a Muslim, which is clearly not confined to the limits of a nation, and yet exists within a nation (such as India), will be a correspondingly circumscribed identity (such as being an Indian woman, or an Indian Muslim) (10-11).

3.                   The Partition had little legitimacy in the eyes of the majority Hindu state.  The dismemberment of the body of “Mother India” was an attack at its honour.  The Indian war cry as projected by the soldier remains Dharti ma ki kasam (Hindi: I swear in the name of the mother earth) for Madre watan (Urdu: mother nation).  The Hindus state becomes significant today as the ruling party, the BJP, has been very closely linked ideologically to the RSS, a rightwing Hindu nationalist party which has refused to accept the Partition and the orgins of an Islamic state carved out of Indian territory.

4.                   The Prime Minister of India with a large group of officials drove across the border in a bus into Pakistan to meet Nawaz Sharif and his colleagues.  This diplomatic initiative, after nuclear testing by both states, was seen as the beginning of a peace initiative.

5.                   The two major groups are Lashkar-e-Toyeba made up of non-Kashmiri Sunnis, and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen which is composed mainly of Afghans, Pakistanis, and even some Arabs.

6.                   There are some other views as provided by army sources that these women are porters forced to bring in weapons and other essential items because, unlike men, they would face less of a threat from Indian armed forces then men.

7.                   A World of Widows by Margaret Owen provides an incisive analysis of the status of widows of South Asia. 

8.                   I take the nationalist discourse here as Kaviraj refers it – an intellectual process through which the conception of an India (read Kashmiri) nation is gradually formed and the discourse that forms it is in favour of it and gives it historical shape (301).

9.                   Khomeini in 1980 ordered Hijab (curtain) Law and ordered women working in the state sector to veil.  In Kargil, the women always covered their heads but the veil was never in practice.  The Mullahs took up Khomeini’s diktat though their power to implement the law was limited.

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Nationalities, Ethnic Processes and Violence in India’s Northeast

Monirul Hussain

The Northeast is a generic term, which includes seven Indian states, that is, Arunachal, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. These seven states are also commonly called 'Seven Sisters'. Except for the former princely states of Manipur and Tripura, all other states were parts of British colonial Assam. The political map of Northeast/Assam transformed very significantly during the post-colonial period. In this process of transformation - the post-colonial Indian state, nationalism and ethnicity played very decisive role. It affected all the communities and propelled modification in the structure, identity, self-definition and the definition of the 'Other'. Admittedly, the nationality question and in a wider sense the ethnic question is very complex in India's Northeast. We have tried to comprehend this question elsewhere in more details.1 The Northeast is a very distinctive geopolitical entity in India having an area of 255083 square kilometers with more than 31million population as per the Census of India 1991. The Northeast accounts for 7.7 per cent of India's total area and 3.73 per cent India's vast population. The objective of this paper is to report the national and ethnic question and its resultant conflicts in India's Northeast in general and Assam in particular. Though the objective looks simple, the reporting is unlikely to be so as the phenomena involved here are very complex, wide, heterogeneous, uneven, subtle and sensitive.

Geographically speaking, this region has both hills and valleys. The hill areas cover nearly 70 percent and the plains cover the remaining 30 per cent of the total area of Northeast. Apart from hills, Assam has two valleys - the Brahmaputra and the Barak. These two valleys are divided by the Barail rang of hills in which two of Assam's remaining hill districts (Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills) are located. Manipur has a small valley called the Imphal valley. The remaining areas of the entire Northeast are covered by hills. The peculiar topography of Northeast has been favourable for various insurgent outfits that have been fighting for secession from the Indian Union. Needless to say the valleys are densely populated and the hills are sparsely populated. Whereas in the hills, the indigenous tribal people are in majority and in the valleys the non-tribal population is in majority. Out of seven states of the region, four states are predominantly tribal and the remaining three states too have substantial scheduled tribe population. Arunachal Pradesh has more tribal population than it has been shown in the census data if we include the non-indigenous tribal groups particularly the Chakmas and the Hajongs who have been living there since 1964. In fact tribal population in Assam is much higher than it has been shown because non indigenous tribal people such as like the Santhals, Orans and Mundas etc. living in Assam have not been 'Scheduled' in Assam unlike West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh etc. Besides, quite a few 'Other Backward Classes' are demanding for scheduling of their community into 'official' tribal category. In addition to tribals, the Ahom, Koch-Rajbongshis and Chutiyas etc. belong to South Asia, the culture complex of the entire region has significant elements of South-East Asian region. Distinctively, like South East Asia, the large majority of population of Northeast racially belongs to the Mongoloid groups. A perceptive journalist observes vividly:

The girls of Imphal in Manipur who ride cycles and scooters, resemble their Thai and Lao counterparts. They could easily be placed either in Bangkok or Vietnam. The seductively swaying Manipuri dances are similar to the gentle rhythms of the Khmers and Laotians as well as the Thais and Indonesians. The distinctive shawls of Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram each colourful strand proclaiming a tribe, a lifestyle and identity, share a commonality with communities across the borders of Mynmar and Thailand.2

It would be pertinent to point out that society in Northeast is fundamentally a multi-religious and its religious composition is relatively different from the rest of India. In terms of religion, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland are Christian majority states wherein most of the tribals have been Christianized. However, in tribal majority Arunachal Pradesh, most of the inhabitants follow their traditional tribal religion and others follow either Tibetan or Mynmarese variety of Buddhism. Though in Assam majority of the people belong to Hinduism of two different sects (Shaktas and Vaisnavas), here the caste is practised in a very loose form. Manipur and Tripura are also Hindu majority states with a substantial Muslim, Buddhist, Christian and other population. Assam has a substantial Muslim population i.e. 28 per cent of the total population of the state. In terms of percentage of Muslim population among the Indian states, Assam stands only next to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Besides, the linguistic composition of Northeast is also very complex and different from the mainland India. Apart from three non-tribal scheduled languages such as, the Asamiya, Bengali and Manipuri, the people of Northeast use more than 200 languages and dialects.

Contrast to valley's settled agriculture, the dominant mode of agriculture in the hills is jhum - the slash-and-burn method of agriculture. In the wake of penetration of capitalist mode of production in agriculture since early seventies, many parts of India experienced the 'Green Revolution' but the hills of Northeast are still trapped viciously in the primitive mode of agricultural production. The slash-and-burn method even cannot generate the bare minimal subsistence level of the community involved in such practice. Even the areas where settled agriculture is dominant, for example, the Brahmaputra valley, its agricultural production is far below the demand of the valley. It is estimated that Assam has to pay Rs.1000 crores annually to import food grains. All this demonstrates the precariousness of agricultural production in Northeast and its weak position in India's growing agricultural economy.

During the post-colonial period some regions/states in India have developed very rapidly for example Punjab, Haryana, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Western Uttar Pradesh and the Capital Region of Delhi. Here, we must note that the entire Northeast has remained economically backward even by Indian standard with severe unevenness among seven states and various communities living therein. It virtually lacks industries to boost its economy. Besides, the region has remained demographically the fastest growing and most heterogeneous in India, culturally diverse, politically very sensitive and volatile, socially highly plural and located away from the mainland India in its northeast. Obviously, its location has its own strategic importance. This region is surrounded by China, Mynmar, Bhutan and Bangladesh. No region in India other than the Northeast is surrounded by four foreign countries. The Northeast is connected with the mainland India through a narrow corridor between southeast of Nepal and south of Bhutan and north of Bangladesh.

We conceptualize the Northeast as a periphery within a larger periphery (India) in the global context. The Northeast suffers from being both far from the centre and decisively dependent on it. Consequently, this region's integration with the post-colonial Indian nation-state has remained problematic. Several aberrations have already strained the process of integration with India. It has been questioned and at times challenged from the below against the dominant discourse of national integration. The popular consciousness and culture of Northeast today posits significantly away from India's cowbelt/Aryavarta/Akhand Bharat.

Historically speaking, substantial parts of this region, particularly its hill areas, were neither a part of pre-colonial Assam nor of pre-colonial India. Even the Brahmaputra valley stood at the periphery of the Indian economy and polity till the British colonized it. The colonial incorporation of the Northeast took place much later than the rest of the Indian subcontinent. Significantly, the British took much more time, stretching from the second quarter of the 19th century to the end of it, to complete the region's colonization process. While pre-colonial (Ahom) Assam was annexed in 1826, its neighbouring Bengal had been annexed as early as 1763. The colonial rulers had to wait until 1873 to bring the Garo tribal population under their control, while the annexation of the Naga hills was completed only in 1889.

Similarly, though the British rulers established their control over the Mizos, then known as Lushais, between 1871-89, they could form the Lushai Hills district only in 1898. Amlendu Guha3 has rightly pointed out that "The boundaries of the British power in North East India were in fact always moving, always in flux right up to its last days in India". Neverthless, the British province that came to be known as Assam took shape more or less by 1873.

It is pertinent to point out that the pre-colonial society in Assam was fundamentally semi-tribal and semi-feudal in nature, with a mix of more than one classical mode of production. It generated a very limited surplus and obviously had a very limited market. Although an oppressive system - even by Mughal standards - with its resultant backwardness, it must be admitted that its economy was largely self-sufficient, enabling it to maintain its distance from India. This, together with its geographical factors, help us in explaining the perpetuation of Ahom rule for as long as 600 years, beginning from 1228 and ending in 1826, when it was annexed by the British. The Asamiyas as a nation or nationality did not emerge in pre-colonial Assam. However, it should be noted that the Asamiya language and literature developed substantially in a myriad-tongued society. Even the ruling Ahom clan gave up its Tai/Thai language and accepted Asamiya, as did the Hindus and the Muslims who came from northern India/Bengal. The art of writing was known in Assam since the 6th century AD and the present Asamiya script had taken shape by the 12th century AD. The development of the Asamiya language and literature and performing arts, particularly with the emergence of Vaisnavism, and the resistance by the people of Assam, irrespective of religion and race, against the Mughal, substantially contributed in cementing the unity and stability of the Asamiyas as a pre-national collectivity in pre-colonial Assam.

The colonization gradually broke the isolation of Assam by linking it with the colonial capitalist world economy, a break that was historically very significant for Assam and the Asamiyas. Initially, Assam was made a new division of Bengal. However, in 1874, it became a new province of British India. Very significantly, this new province included the thickly populated Sylhet region, which historically and ethnically belonged to Bengal. This arangement ended only with the partitioning of the country in 1947, when Sylhet opted to join East Pakistan. The creation of the new province was obviously designed to weaken both the Asamiyas and the Bengalis and to pave the way for Asamiya-Bengali competition and conflict under the colonial aegis. Nearly at the hill areas of the Northeast with their innumerable tribal groups, as well as the Cachar areas, became part of colonial Assam, in addition to what was traditionally Asamiya homeland which the Asamiyas had been sharing with many autochthon tribals like the Bodos, Mishings, Rabhas, Lalungs and Deuris, as well as other Mongoloid groups like the Morans, Motaks, Ahoms, Borahis and Chutiyas. Though the province was named Assam, it was in fact "an amalgam of Asamiya-speaking, Bengali-speaking and myriad-tongued hill tribal areas in which Asamiya was claimed the mothertongue of less than a quarter and Bengali of more than 40 per cent of population".4

The size of pre-colonial Assam swelled significantly in colonial Assam wherein the Asamiyas became a minority and the second largest group after the Bengalis. However, they remained demographically strong in Assam proper i.e., the Brahmaputra valley. The drastic changes in its territory, the new political situation and colonial economy opened the floodgates of social and demographic transformation of the hitherto stagnant and unchanging Assam with serious social implications.

We know that nations are products of historical development covering long periods of time beginning with the decline of feudalism and the emergence of capitalism. In the Indian context, however, neither the decline of feudalism nor the emergence of capitalism from within played a decisive role in the rise of Indian nationalism Rather, it was the penetration of British colonialism and the response of the Indian people to this colonialism/imperialism that gave birth to Indian nationalism. Although the process of nationality formation among the Asamiyas under the colonial situation started late in the Indian sub-continental context, it would be improper to isolate it from the operative trend of general Indian nationalism. In India, since the beginning of the 19th century,

Nationalism has been developing at two levels - one all India on the basis of pan-Indian homogeneities and an anti-imperialism shared in common; and another regional (Bengaliu, Marathi, Asamiya, etc.) on the basis of regional cultural homogeneities. From the very outset, the two nationalisms are found interwined and dovetailed. Traditionally, an average Indian identifies himself with both the nationalisms except in some peripheral areas (e.g., Nagaland and Mizoram) untouched by the railways and by the Indian national movement.5

In fact, in the context of the Northeast, the Asamiyas were the first group to integrate with the rest of India economically, politically, culturally and emotionally. Guha6 has rightly pointed out that like an average Indian, an Asamiya, too, is simultaneously aware of both his regional and Indian identities.

By Asamiya we very specifically mean the people who have accepted the Asamiya language as their mother tongue. Needless to say, the term also includes neo-Asamiyas such as Na-Asamiya Muslims, assimilated autochthon tribals of the Brahmaputra valley and the black tribals who have accepted the Asamiya language and nationality. We would also like to clarify why we are calling the Asamiyas a nationality and not a nation. Though it is very difficult to strictly separate nationality from a nation, even then, we have preferred to call Asamiya a nationality mainly because it has not grown fully and it is still growing. Besides, it is relatively small in size compared to major nations like the Bengalis, the Marathis, the Tamils of the multi-national Indian society.

Both the trends - the pan-Indian nationalism and the regional nationalism are largely secular in content and spirit. In Northeast, the Asamiyas are the largest national group with a state of their own, the second being the Bengalis living in the region. However, after Independence, in the absence of an all powerful 'colonialism' regional nationalism has sharpened - a Tamil became more Tamil, an Asamiya became more Asamiya, though in the context of post-colonial nation-state he remained an Indian at the same time. Besides certain subaltern groups at the margin of the Indian society and history, for example the various tribal groups of Northeast experienced ethnic nationalism during the post-colonial period. This in other words may be called nationalism of national minorities of India. When we talk of ethnicity here in this paper we are in fact referring specifically to the ethnicity of tribal groups living in North-East/Assam.

Colonial transformation

Though Assam had a rich tradition of Buranjis (chronicles) since the arrival of the Ahoms in 1228 AD, the pre-colonial aristocracy had neither the knowledge nor experience of keeping written and formal administrative and land records. As a consequence, it did not fit into the new system based on the colonial bureaucratic principles of maintaining written and formal records of administration, justice and land revenue, etc. Besides, western education became a pre-condition for obtaining jobs in the new colonial administration. The colonial state had no intention of educating/training the Asamiyas so soon after colonization. This led to a decline of the pre-colonial Asamiyas in colonial Assam. This also explains the colonial rationale of importing Bengali babu to man colonial bureaucracy.

We have already noted that the British had colonized Bengal much earlier than Assam. As a result, a new, western educated middle class emerged from among the high caste Bengali Hindus, and consolidated its position in the Bengal Presidency.7 It was thus possible for the colonial rulers to avoid investment in western education in Assam, and avail instead of the services of the already surplus, educated-unemployed persons from Bengal Presidency.8 In the absence of an indigenous Asamiya middle class for a long period of time, the Bengalis virtually monopolized nearly all the jobs in the colonial administration. In addition, many more Bengalis came to Assam as lawyers, teachers, private doctors, shopkeepers, jewellers, traders, tailors and so on. Not surprisingly, they became very conspicuous in the colonial administration and emerging urban centres of Assam.

Besides the Bengalis, the Nepalis also came to Assam as part of the colonial army.9  Many Biharis came in as labourers. In the absence of an indigenous business caste or class, the migrant Marwaris filled up the vacuum in business, trade and banking. Apart from Sylhet, Assam is a naturally rich though thinly populated province. The colonial rulers therefore openly encouraged massive migration of various groups into Assam in order to augment their land revenue by bringing more land under cultivation and habitation. In order to avoid the dual oppression of colonialism and feudalism in East Bengal, many poor peasants migrated to the Brahmaputra valley. Again, in the absence of a local labour force, the colonial state patronized and created conditions for massive migration of tribal population, mainly from the Jharkhand areas, to meet the growing demands of cheap labour for the British-owned tea plantations in Assam. In order words, the colonial situation propelled massive migration into Assam and, in the process, changed its demographic structure radically. The colonial state provoked and patronized the Asamiya-non-Asamiya conflict in colonial Assam though colonialism itself created the conditions of massive migration to Assam. It did not allow the Asamiya nationality to grow and hindered the assimilation process of various groups. It encouraged national hostility and exclusiveness in Assam.

By and large, education was badly neglected in colonial Assam. The response to western education among the Asamiyas was crippled by the colonial suppression of the Asamiya language from 1837 to 1874. It took more than a decade to reintroduce Asamiya as the language of school and courts in the Brahmaputra valley. The colonial suppression of Asamiya in its own homeland and its replacement by another language of a neighbouring province, Bengali, created the conditions for reactionary conflict between the speakers of the two sister languages. Thus, while the suppression of Asamiya to a large extent delayed the popular urge for western education, the existence of an already large number of educated unemployed in Bengal meant that the colonial rulers could well afford to ignore the expansion of education in Assam.

The first and the second high schools in Assam were started in as late as 1835 and 1841 respectively. Bengal got its first university (of Calcutta) in 1857, but Assam had to wait for a university until after the collapse of colonial rule: the first university (Guwahati) of Assam was officially started only in 1948. Even the first college of the Brahmaputra valley was established only at the beginning of the 20th century. All these factors point to the belated development of education in Assam and its relative educational backwardness compared to Bengal.

However despite such colonial constraints, a new Calcutta-oriented Asamiya middle class gradually emerged in the late 19th century. Obviously, it was a weak and very small middle class located in the colonial hinterland. This incipient Asamiya middle class composed of high castes like Brahmins, Kayasthas, Kalitas and a few Asamiya Muslims, took special interest in developing the Asamiya language and literature. Gradually, the language became an important and perhaps the most sensitive symbol of the Asamiya middle class and nationality.

The colonial situation imposed on the Asamiya middle class stiff competition from the migrant Bengali middle class. Initially, this class responded by collaborating with the colonial rulers. However, with the emergence and consolidation of the national movement for freedom, the growing popularity of the Congress party and the consolidation of the Asamiya middle class in the 20th century, a large section of this class could gradually outgrow its collaborative role. This Assam Association, which was the first valley-wide political organization, helped mould the Asamiya national consciousness. And with the merger of the Assam Association with the Indian National Congress in 1920, the Asamiya middle class in particular and the Asamiya masses in general became part of the pan-Indian nationalism with a distinct regional identity. However, a section of the Muslim middle class was attracted towards the Muslim League. They formed the provincial government for five times within a period of seven years 1938-45). This contributed significantly in the growth of anti-Muslim feeling among the Asamiya Hindu middle class. Significantly, many middle class Muslims such as Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed (who became the fifth President of India) and Maulana Tyabullah. were among the top ranking Congress leaders.10 The colonial Assam witnessed both secular and communal political mobilizations.

Compared to the Brahmaputra valley, the hill areas of present-day states as Nagaland, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, became part of colonial India much later. By and large, the colonial state maintained a policy of status quo and isolation for the tribal people of the Northeast virtually insulating them from the plainsmen and the national movement for freedom. The enforcement of an 'Inner Line' system in 1873 in most of the hill areas reflected their policy. In addition, the Government of India Act of 1935 made most of the hill areas of the Northeast 'excluded areas', wherein provincial legislature had no jurisdiction. A.C. Bhagabati 11 pertinently pointed out that the  '...tribal communities of this region thus remained virtually isolated from social and political developments taking place elsewhere in the country. There was little scope for the hill tribal people's participation in the electoral processes which commenced elsewhere well before independence.' However, we must note that though the colonial state took an apparently non-interfering line, its ally, the Christian missions, penetrated the hill tribal population and succeeded in converting a good number of them to Christianity. It is the missionaries who introduced them to modern medicine and western education.

However, the situation in the Brahmaputra valley was different. The tribal people of the plains like the Bodos, Rabhas, Sonowals, Lalungs, Mishings and Deuris were well integrated with both pan-Indian as well as Asamiya nationalism. They, too, participated in the freedom movement. Significantly, most of the plains were Hinduised long before Assam was colonised. We have noted earlier that racially, the majority of the people of Assam belonged to various Mongoloid groups. The Ahoms, Koch-Rajbongshis, Chutiyas, Morans, Motaks, Borahis, etcetera, who came from Mongoloid stock, integrated well with the Asamiya nationality and pan-Indian nationalism.

So did the high caste, minority Hindus - Asamiya Brahmins, Grahabipras, Kayasthas, Kalitas and Keots - and other low caste Asamiyas and Asamiya Muslims comprising the Syeds, Goria, Moria and Julahas. However, two large migrant groups - the black tribals engaged as plantation labour and the oppressed Muslim peasants who came from East Bengal - were not well integrated with the Asamiya nationality in colonial Assam. By the time India attained independence, the Asamiyas were the most advanced nationality in the Northeast and among the Asamiyas, the high castes were the most advanced group in an economically backward, multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-class and multi-lingual regional society.

Post Colonial Transformation

India attained independence and British colonialism collapsed in the subcontinent in 1947. However, the neo-colonial/imperial hegemony continued through its control over the oil and tea industries. As a result of independence and partition, Assam lost its Muslim and Bengali dominated and thickly populated Sylhet district to East Pakistan. This substantially reduced the number and percentage of both Muslims and Bangalis in post-colonial Assam.  However, the predominantly Bengali speaking Cachar district in Barak Valley remained with Assam. Except for NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh), Manipur and Tripura, the entire hill region of the Northeast remained with Assam, in addition to Assam proper, i.e., the Brahmaputra valley.

Independence and partition thus made the Asamiyas numerically and politically stronger in post-colonial Assam. For the first time, they became the single largest group in Assam. The Bengalis declined and gradually lost their dominance. The Muslims, who were enthusiastically involved in Muslim League's divisive politics in Assam, also lost their political relevance. The tribal groups, both in the hill and the plains, remained largely backward, as did all other non-caste Mongoloid groups like the Ahoms, Koch-Rajbongshis, Chutiyas, Morans, Motaks and Borahis. In such a situation, the Asamiya middle class composed mainly of Asamiya high caste Hindus consolidated their position. They started dominating state politics, exercising their hegemony over the Asamiyas, the neo-Asamiyas and non-Asamiya groups in post-colonial Assam. The exertion of this hegemony, and the response to it of various groups, together with the nature of socio-economic and cultural development, very significantly determined the nationality and ethnic question in the hills and plains of Assam during the post-colonial period.

The nature of the political system and the composition of the ruling class were transformed after independence. It is therefore necessary to understand the nature and composition of the Indian ruling class and its role in resolving and accentuating the nationality question. The Indian ruling classes are composed of the bourgeoisie and landlords. Obviously, the big Indian bourgeoisie plays the most dominant role in the coalition of these two classes. Recently, Rudra 12 has argued very forcefully that the intelligentsia too has become a partner of the Indian ruling class. In a country like India with federal structure, there are also state-level depositories of power.13 The ruling class in India obviously operates at two levels - the all-India and the state/regional levels. Though the ruling class at the state level is a part of the Indian ruling class, at times it tries to assert its limited autonomy/identity at the state/regional level in order to wrest some concessions to ensure its survival, growth and power.

Assam, too, has its state-level ruling class. The Asamiya ruling class has been playing a very significant role in determining and influencing the national question in the Northeast together with the Indian ruling class. Obviously the Asamiya ruling class includes a very small and weak Asamiya bourgeoisie composed of a few tea-planters, owners of powerful regional presses, transport operators, contractors, professionals, the middle class and the rural gentry. The majority of them belong to Asamiya high caste groups. They plunder the state in their private interest and exert their hegemony over the entire regional society. It is true that the Asamiya ruling class in not bourgeois in a clearly productive sense, but it inclines towards it ideologically and culturally.

Without a clear role in production and in a weaker position vis-a-vis the Indian ruling class, it is forced by the objective situation to enforce its hegemony through its control over the government apparatus in the state. Because of its caste and class limitations, the Asamiya ruling class has always been very reluctant to share power and benefits even with other oppressed sections of the same nationality, leave alone non-Asamiyas. It has been fairly successful in projecting its own class interest as the interest of the Asamiya nationality or of the people of Assam. It has also been able to pass off its own identity crisis as the crisis of the Asamiya nationality or of Assam as a whole.

In order to exploit its natural resources and markets more profitably, the Indian ruling class needs an ally in Assam and for this it is prepared to grant some concession to the Asamiya ruling class. This class in its turn neither led nor participated in any movement for Assam's economic development. However, this class very enthusiastically participated and led the Assam movement 1979-85.14 Because of its class interest and very sectarian approach, it even failed to reach the goals of the movement. Like other ruling class movements, this movement also encouraged national exclusiveness and hostility, oppression, violence and riots forcing the common Asamiyas, Na-Asamiyas and non-Asamiyas living in Assam to suffer immensely. This movement created conditions for the emergence of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) - an insurgent outfit to challenge the integration of Assam with India.

Despite this, the horizon of the Asamiya nationality expanded significantly after independence. Notwithstanding the massive migration during the colonial and post-colonial period, the Asamiyas have not lost their identity. Significantly, most of the oppressed migrant groups, particularly the black tribals, Santhals, Mundas, Orans, etc. who work mainly as tea-plantation labour, and the migrant East Bengal peasants have identified themselves with the Asamiya nationality. Although they have already adopted Asamiya as their mother tongue, they naturally need more time in order to become fully Asamiyased. However, we must point out that the new generation is more Asamiyaised than the earlier generation. The process of Asamiyaisation is thus likely to become more consolidated in the coming years.

Over the years, the Asamiyas have grown faster than any other group in Assam, maintaining their numerical dominance in the state. This shows the historical capacity of the Asamiya nationality to absorb and accept migrant groups into its fold. The Asamiya language too, has firmly consolidated its position. It is both the official language of the state, and the medium of instruction upto graduate level (together with English) in Assam's two universities. It is also the most popular and advanced language backed by a rich literature.

However, the fact remains that a substantial number of people belonging to several groups are yet to merge fully with the Asamiya nationality. In fact, some of the groups who have already been assimilated are now seriously trying to revive their old identity because of their oppressed status and hatred against the Asamiya ruling class. While, at the present stage of political development, the black tribals and the Na-Asamiya Muslims have by and large accepted their own oppressed status and the dominant status of the Asamiya high caste ruling class, the autochothon tribals of Assam are not prepared to do so. This is one of the reasons behind the forceful emergence of tribal movements in Assam immediately after the institutionalisation of the Assam movement of 1985.

Tribals of Brahmaputra valley after independence

We have noted earlier that the plains' tribal populations have been sharing their traditional homeland - the Brahmaputra valley - with the Asamiyas. It is therefore almost impossible to isolate the rich tribal elements from the composite Asamiya society, culture and nationality. According to the last census, the scheduled tribes constituted 13 per cent of the total population of Assam. The Bodos, Mishings, Sonowals, Ravas and Tiwas demographically occupy the first, second, third, fourth and fifth positions respectively. Needless to say, the tribal people were the first natives of Assam's plains and hills. Unlike the hill tribal people, the plains' tribal people own land individually, not communally. They could not make any significant progress in colonial Assam. And while they did make some progress during the post-colonial period, other groups progressed even further, thereby increasing the social distance between them and the plains' tribal population.

In addition, the Asamiya ruling class has successfully kept the plains' tribal people from acquiring even the limited benefits that have accrued to the hill tribal ones. The Indian constitution provides the hill tribal population some autonomy in managing their own society through the provision of the sixth schedule. This was not, however, extended to the plains' tribal population. It would be worthwhile to state that the tribal people are perpetually experiencing the problem of land alienation, poverty, indebtedness, severe unemployment, economic exploitation, and cultural and political oppression. At the time of independence, the plains' tribal dominated areas were classified as 'tribal blocks' and 'tribal belts', ostensibly to protect the tribal population from the penetration of non-tribal population into their areas. The Asamiya ruling class, which was responsible for these schemes, made a mockery of them by allowing non-tribal people to purchase land and property in tribal areas.

In colonial Assam, the tribal dialects/languages remained neglected. During the post-colonial period, however, with the growing consciousness of their identity among the plains' tribal population and the support they have received from the progressive and democratic sections of the non-tribal population, some attention has recently been paid to the development of their dialects/languages. For instance, the Bodos have developed their language in the Devnagri script and it is now the medium of the instruction up to the secondary level in Bodo-dominated areas. The Mishings have adopted the Roman script and it is now the medium of instruction up to the secondary level in Bodo-dominated areas. The Mishings have adopted the Roman script for developing their language that, from 1986, has been the medium of instruction at the primary level in Mishing-dominitated areas. The Deuris, the Tiwas and the Ravas have adopted the Asamiya script for developing their respective languages. It should be pointed out that all these tribes not only stand at uneven levels among themselves in terms of social economic and political development, they also stand unevenly in terms of their assimilation with and exclusion from the Asamiyas. For example, the Sonowal and the Meches of Upper Assam have completely assimilated and identified with the Asamiyas.

In the absence of a well-developed/developing language of their own, the plains' tribal people accepted Asamiya voluntarily as the medium of instruction/education. As a consequence, they were regarded as sub-nationalities within the composite Asamiya nationality. However, the official imposition of the Asamiya language in 1960 had resulted in a severe backlash from the tribals both in the hills and plains. In addition, from the late 60s onward, the plains' tribals became more conscious and articulate about their ethnic identity, using it to gain political power and overcome their socio-economic backwardness and oppression. The problems regarding their right to traditional land, their language and script, identity, culture, economic development, discrimination, exploitation and, more significantly, their demand for political autonomy are yet to be resolved to their satisfaction.

Hill tribal population after independence

By the time India entered the post-colonial phase, a very small but distinguishable group of educated tribal elites emerged among the Nagas, Mizos and Khasis as a result of their exposure to Christianity and western education, largely under the aegis of the Christian missions. This small group acted as motivators of social and political change in their respective societies. They were exceedingly conscious of their distinct ethnic identity, which they vociferously articulated in order to fulfill their political aspirations under the changed situation. They were also acutely conscious of their oppressed status in the Asamiya ruling class-dominated Assam as an integral part of India. Some of them even felt that India should grant them sovereignty and recognize them as friends rather than a part of India. It was this feeling, fuelled by their incomplete integration with India that led to the rise of insurgency in the Naga hills during early '50s and in the Lushai (Mizo) hills during the mid-60s.

Despite severe state oppression on the one hand, and a liberal policy of appeasing and corrupting the tribal elites on the other, insurgency and secessionist tendencies have not died down fully even today. By the time one group comes over-ground, another group goes under. Earlier, one was used to hearing about Naga and Mizo insurgency. Now, several other groups have emerged - the Peoples' Liberation Army (PLA), the Peoples' Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak (PREPAK), the United Liberation Front (of Meiteis), the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN), the Tripura Volunteer Force (TNV) and the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). These organizations do not only represent the frustration of the youth of various ethnic groups; they also represent the failure of the post-colonial Indian state to resolve the nationality/ethnic question in the Northeast.

In order to meet the aspirations of the hill trials, the sixth schedule of the Indian Constitution granted them some autonomy in the form of Autonomous District Council in addition to other protective measures. Accordingly, the major hill tribal groups - Nagas, Mizos, Khasis, Jaintias, Garos, Karbis and Dimasa-Kacharis - got limited autonomy regarding internal matters. However, it was gradually realized that the autonomy granted to them through the statutory provisions was not adequate enough under the Asamiya-dominated state legislature and government. The intransigent language policy of the state government alienated the hill tribal people from the Asamiyas.

It was under such a situation that the question of Assam's reorganization came up. Eventually, the Naga Hills district became Nagaland in 1963, the United Khasi and Jaintia hill and Garo Hills districts together became Meghalaya, an autonomous state within the state of Assam15 which was later elevated to a full-fledged state in 1972. The Lushai Hills became Mizoram, a union territory that later achieved full statehood. Only the Karbi and the Dimasa-Kachari dominated Karbi-Anglong and the North Cachar hill districts decided to stay with Assam. Now, even in these two hill districts, the tribals are agitating for an autonomous state within the state of Assam (for details see ibid). What is important to note is that the separation of hill tribals was largely guided by their hatred of the Asamiya ruling class and their incomplete/weak integration with India along with a consciousness of their identity that sharpened very significantly during the post-colonial phase.

The Mizos have got Mizoram, the Nagas have got Nagaland and the Khasi-Jaintias and the Garos have together got Meghalaya in their traditional homeland. The dominant majority of these tribals are Christians. However, the nature of ethnic coalition in these tribal states differs significantly. Nagaland is fundamentally a state of about a dozen tribal groups with a pan-Naga identity. The same is true of the Mizos in Mizoram. However, it was a political coalition between the Khasi-Jayantias and the Garos who was responsible for the formation of the state of Meghalaya. It is appropriate to point out here that many Naga groups are living outside Nagaland, i.e. in Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Burma. Similarly, there are demands for a unification of ethnically contiguous parts of India, Burma and Bangladesh to create a "Greater Mizoram".

In the same way, there are Khasi and Garo inhabited areas in Assam and Bangladesh. Manipur has a large hill tribal population besides the Meities. There are serious problems of adjustment.

Ethnic conflict and violence: the present situation

Our discussion on the nationality and ethnic process will remain incomplete if we fail to situate the link between these processes and with the emergence of political violence. Sharpening of nationality and ethnic identity has manifested in the emergence of violence. Besides, the state too played a crucial role in creating conditions for violence. Over the years political violence has virtually come to occupy the centre-stage from its fringe. Needless to say violence has been a part of social transformation in Northeast. Both sociology and history point to the fact that traditional and modern societies are less vulnerable to violence and instability than a society in rapid transition like Northeast.

The Nagas were the first to revolt against their integration with the post-colonial nation-state in India. The Indian state too responded violently against a small ethnic group when there were scopes for dialogue. A section of Mizos took up arms in 1966 and state too responded with its arms. The Mizo insurgency ended in 1986 after an accord with the government of India. This was the only successful political accord signed by the leadership of an ethnic-insugent movement and the government of India. But surprisingly, when dominant Mizos gave up arms a minority ethnic group the Hmars took up arms in order to press for their ethnic demands. Today, Mizoram is the only state in the Northeast where a peaceful situation exists.

The Naga insurgency still continues with periodic lull notwithstanding the creation of Nagaland as a state for the Nagas in 1963. The area of operation of Naga insurgents has widened significantly despite security operations. The National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) today operates far beyond Nagaland. Besides, it trains the other insurgent groups of the Northeast - the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the Bodo Security Force (Bd.SF), Peoples Liberation Army etc. It has been able to form an apex body to coordinate the activities of various insurgent groups. The insurgents in Nagaland are virtually running parallel government there. And, now they have started a parallel administration in Assam's North Cachar Hill district too.

In Manipur today, the ethnic situation is very grim. Conflict exists between the Meities and non-Meities. Recently Hindu-Muslim conflicts also surfaced. The perennial Naga-Kuki conflicts have resulted in killing thousands. Besides insurgenc and inter and intra-tribal conflicts, the society in Manipur is threatened by dreaded AIDS. The spread of AIDS in Manipur has its roots in the nexus between insurgents and the drug peddlers.

In Tripura too situation is far from normal. The tribal insurgents have been fighting against the migrant/refugee Bengalis. The violence against the migrants has been continuing in Tripura since the beginning of massacre of Mandai in 1980. The Left Front government in the state tried seriously to end the conflict and provided some autonomy to the indigenous tribal population. However, the Congress government made mess of it by using the insurgency against the Left forces. Again now, the Left Front government is in power and the present Chief Minister of the state is an indigenous tribal. Tripura is an example where the migrants and refugees of East Pakistan i.e. the Bangali Hindus became the majority in the aftermath of partition and the indigenous tribal population became the minority in their traditional homeland.

Meghalaya attained statehood through a remarkably peaceful political movement with a stable coalition of three major tribes, that is, the Khasis, the Jaintias and the Garos. Now the society in Meghalaya is not in peace - the tribal people are now becoming increasingly restive though the tribals run the state government. There exists strong resentment against the Hindu Bengalis who have permanently settled down in Khasi Hills/Shillong. Most of the Bengalis of Shillong came from East Bengal/East Pakistan as migrants/refugees.16 Even here, some of tribal youths have taken up arms for insurgency and violence against the migrants.

In Arunachal Pradesh the situation is peaceful but there exists a serious threat to peace and order. An ethnic movement led by the All Arunachal Pradesh Student's Union (ASPSU) has been demanding the expulsion of Chakma, Hajong and Tibetan refugees/stateless people from the soil of Arunachal Pradesh. The Tibetans came with the Dalai Lama when he fled Tibet to India through Arunachal Pradesh (then NEFA). The Chakmas and the Hajongs numbering 66000 came to India during the mid sixties in the wake of India-Pakistan war of 1965. The government of India settled them in NEFA when it was in deep slumber. With NEFA's transformation into Arunachal Pradesh and growth of ethnicity among the indigenous tribals the Chakmas and the Hajongs who are in fact tribal people of non-indigenous origin became the persona-non-grata in the state.17 

In Assam the situation is much more complex today. During the entire post-colonial period Assam has been experiencing a series of unending social and political movements and its resultant violence repeatedly. Apodictically, the society in Assam has transformed into a notoriously violent one without any tangible sign of abnegation. This has not happened very abruptly - it has a long history of growth and maturity. Apart from the communal violence in the wake of India's partition, particularly in districts of lower Assam, society again experienced violences during the two important movements based on the linguistic and cultural identity of the Asamiyas in 1960 and 1972. Further, since the beginning of Assam Movement  (1979-85), Assam has been churned in the cauldron of communal, ethnic and state violence. Some instances of them are the North Kamrup pogrom18 of 1980 in which a large number of people belonging to the linguistic and religious minorities were massacred.  Similar massacres took place again in 1983 at Chaulkhowa Chapori and Silapathar in 1983. The infamous Nellie massacre of 1983 witnessed the killing of more than 5000 people mostly women and children belonging to a religious minority community. This massacre exposed very brilliantly the nature and hidden goals of the Assam Movement. Everyone in Assam thought that peace had a chance in the aftermath of the Assam movement. But it was not to be. Peace in Assam was disturbed by two subsequent movements i.e. ULFA movement for an independent Assam and the Bodo movement for Bodoland. Both these movements led to killing and counter killings. And this continues unabated.

In early 1993, an accord was signed between the government and the leadership of the Bodo movement, which granted some autonomy to the Bodos in the form of an interim Bodoland Autonomous Council (BAC). But lack of a clear-cut boundary and presence of a significant non-Bodos in the proposed BAC areas created a problem. In order to cleanse the proposed Bodoland areas from the non-Bodos, selective massacres started from 1994. The Bodo militants organized systematic massacres of Na-Asamiya Muslim peasants in Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon and Barpeta districts in 1994.19 In Barpeta district alone about 1000 people were killed, thousands injured and about 60 villages burnt down to ashes. The Barpeta massacre gained limelight mainly because the militants not only killed the innocents in their homes, fields, forests and villages, they even did not spare those who took shelter at the Banhbari relief camp run by the state. Like earlier massacres in Assam, none was punished for such crimes against humanity.

The Bodo militants were again involved in violence, this time against another very oppressed group - the Santhals of Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon districts in May and June 1996 in which about 4000 people have been killed and 2 lakhs rendered homeless. Till the writing of this paper about 1.5 lakhs people were still in the relief camp scared to go back to their home without adequate security. It seems the killing was fundamentally to cleanse the Bodoland area from the non-Bodos. However, unlike the Barpeta massacre, here the Bodo militants equipped with sophisticated arms had to encounter a stiff resistance from the Santhals equipped with their traditional bows and arrows.

During the last two months the ULFA has increased its violent activities and the army in turn has started counter insurgency operations in Upper Assam. The insurgents have also threatened some distinguished Asamiya intellectuals, who neither support their demand for secession nor their violent methods. A young journalist sympathetic to the cause of ULFA was gunned down in broad daylight in Guwahati by a member of Surrendered ULFA (known as SULFA). ULFA's death list included an army officer who was killed at the doorsteps of Assam's famous Kamakhya temple and an IPS Officer of Tinsukia district along with his several bodyguards, an ex-Minister of Hiteswar Saikia's government with his seven Asamiya security guards and two other police Sub-Inspectors. The army in turn gunned down two and the police gunned down one SULFA member in the course of their operations. The situation in Assam is very fluid and grim even if we do not include the routine extortions, kidnappings and threats to life and property.

It seems the post-colonial state in India has not been successful in resolving the nationality and ethnic question of Northeast India and its resultant conflict and violence. The state violence too has affected the ordinary masses. The insurgents become more ruthless once they experience state violence. Anthony Giddens20 has rightly observed "Although the governments oppose the activities of terrorists within their own border, they none the less often encourage guerrilla movements using identical tactics in other regions of the world." This also applies to the South Asian countries. Each country of the region, if involved, should introspect very seriously against aiding and abetting the insurgents across the border. The same moral standard should be applied to both the insurgents from inside and outside the border. The insurgent should also realize that importing secession from a neighbouring country is a historical impossibility.

Out of a very grim situation comes a ray of hope - hope from India's vibrant democracy and results of the last general elections (1996). The new union government has committed itself to solve the problem of Northeast through dialogue. Both parties the state and the insurgent groups, should accept that disputes can be settled only through dialogue. If they keep the plight of the common people in mind and respect for basic humanism - they can solve the problem of any conflict or violence.

One of the causes of ethnic conflict in Northeast is migration. It is impossible to stop migration but it is definitely possible to control it very significantly. The other major cause is desire for economic development of the region. Most insurgents and their supporters in Northeast view their own society or motherland as a colony of Delhi/India. They want to "de-colonize" their society and their dream of de-colonization situates them against the mighty Indian state. Peace package or amnesty aiming at rehabilitating the insurgents/ex-insurgents without removing the present structural conditions that generate conflict and violence in the Northeast can at best give a very temporary respite. Both short term and long term strategy is needed to overcome the impasse and to minimize the conflict and violence. The long-term strategy in the days of globalization/liberalization is going to be very arduous in the wake of the retreat of state in India. The state must address itself to the questions raised by national and ethnic movements of the Northeast. The Indian state should not retreat from its responsibility towards the Northeast. We are sure the alienated people of the Northeast will respond positively if some positive initiative comes from the state. This is the time for the Indian state to come closer to the people of Northeast and try to understand them from below rather than from Delhi or from market situation.

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Published in the Indian Journal of Secularism, Volume 1, No 2, July-September 1997.

Notes and References

1                     Monirul Hussain, "Refugees In The Face of Emerging Ethnicity in North East India", Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1995.

2                     Sanjay Hazarika, Strangers of the Mist: Tales of War and Peace from Indian Northeast (Delhi, 1994).

3                     Amalendu Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam (New Delhi, 1977).

4                     ----, "Little Nationalism Turned Chauvinist: Assam's Anti-foreigners Upsurge", Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XV: 41, 42, 43 and 44, 1980.

5                     Ibid.

6                     Ibid.

7                     B.B. Misra, The Indian Middle Classes: Their Growth in Modern Times (New Delhi, 1961); also see J.H. Broomfield, Elite Conflicts in A Plural Society (California, 1968).

8                     Guha, op.cit, 1977.

9                     Monirul Hussain, "Nepalis in Assam and Asamiya Nationality Question", Mainstream, Vol. XXXVII: 29, 1989.

10                 ---, The Assam Movement: Class, Ideology and Identity (Delhi, 1993).

11                 A.C. Bhagabati, Tribal Transformation in Assam and North-East India: An Appraisal of Emerging Ideological Dimensions (Calcutta, 1988).

12                 Ashok Rudra, "Emergence of Intelligentsia As A Ruling Class in India", Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXIV: 3, 21, January1989.

13                 Ibid.

14                 Hussain, The Assam Movement.

15                  Monirul Hussain, "Tribal Movement for Autonomous State in Assam", Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXI: 32, 1987.

16                 Hussain, op.cit, 1995.

17                 Ibid.

18                 Hussain, op.cit, 1993.

19                 Hussain, op.cit, 1995.

20                 Anthony Giddens, Sociological Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, 1989).

Mohajirs, the Refugees by Choice

Nayan Bose

Mohajirs: the rise......

Defined by the Census of Pakistan, 1951, "A Mohajir is a person who has moved into Pakistan as a result of Partition or for fear of disturbances connected therewith". Those who were lucky to survive the massacres of the partition, streamed into the Punjab and Sindh. In an unprecedented population movement, eight million people migrated to West Pakistan.

East Punjabis were allowed to settle in West Punjab. The language and culture of these refugees, these Mohajirs was identical to that of the indigenous population. The refugees settled in the urban areas as well as the rural areas. Ironically, these were the people who had suffered the terror of Partition, these were the people who best fitted the definition of "Mohajir", yet these are the people who are seldom, if at all, are referred to as such. The government of Punjab made it easier for the refugees to settle. The people had a shared history of violence, shared culture, music, food and spoke a common language. Very quickly, they became and were accepted, in every sense of the word, as Pakistani.

The term Mohajir politically refers to those who came from the rest of India and chose to settle in Sindh. They include the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan. They were the Muslim elite from the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), they were the people who fought the ideological battles for the creation of a separate Muslim state in the Indian heartland. They brought with them the culture of the nawabi courts, also their language, Urdu. They came to their created ‘homeland’ with cultural linkages from the past. Assimilation with the local Sindhi population was and remains a distant after thought. Mohajirs were well educated, were already in finance and business and therefore had little problem in establishing themselves in the new country. Out of 12 industrial houses in the early years following Partition, seven belonged to Mohajirs. Observers have noted that the
transfer of populations had a profound impact on the class structure of west Pakistan as with the exception of some migrants from East Punjab those from other parts of India were predominantly urban and literate. They included the traders, primarily from Gujarat and Bombay, who subsequently constituted the industrial class of Pakistan for two decades.

Politically, the leadership of Pakistan was Mohajir dominated. Urdu became the state language of Pakistan, giving Mohajirs a definite edge for jobs in the public and private sectors. There was no reason for the Mohajirs to give up a lifestyle, culture and a language that they had transported across the border. The Mohajir elite dominated the bureaucracy, business and politics till the coup of Ayub Khan in 1958. Better qualified, better educated and well trained they were cream of business and the civil services. Ideologically, they differed from the indigenous population of Pakistan. The movement for Pakistan though initially founded by nawabs and landlords was quickly taken over by the urban professional classes who organised the Muslim League on democratic lines. Consequently, as Burke has noted in The Continuing Search for Nationhood (1991), following the creation of Pakistan the refugees who had come from the cities of north and central India began to work for some of form of a representative political system. There were other differences too - Mohajirs were secular and desired to have a clear separation between religion and the state, now that the Muslim state had been created. Economically, though Pakistan was largely an agricultural economy, refugees who had come from urban areas had little interest in using public funds in agriculture.

.......... And Fall