[sacw] SACW Dispatch 4 Oct 00

[aiindex@mnet.fr]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch
4 October 2000
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

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#1. Vajpayee buries Nehru's ghost (by Praful Bidwai)
#2. India Pakistan Partition Book review (by Yogindar Sikand)
#3. Website of Labour Party of Pakistan

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#1.

Praful Bidwai Column - 2 October 2000

The 'Right Side Of History'?

Vajpayee buries Nehru's ghost

By Praful Bidwai

=AB India and America stand on the right side of history =BB
declared Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee on September 17 at a glittering White
House dinner. President Bill Clinton was no less effusive in his
response: 'Together India and America can change the world.'
This announcement of a new Indo-U.S. 'natural alliance' or
'partnership', the 'most mature' in history, has been
hailed as the fruition of a major Indian foreign policy shift that began
with the 1998 nuclear tests. It has been taken to signify India's
heightened relevance in world affairs today which combines 'national
security, economics and the clout of the Indian diaspora.' The key,
we are told, is Mr Vajpayee's =AB junking =BB of India's
=AB archaic Nehruvian baggage =BB

As atmospherics go, this proposition is incontestable. Never before has
an Indian Prime Minister been received in Washington with such
fanfare--irrespective of his/her stature or statesmanship. And never
before could a U.S. President have said: 'It's inconceivable to me
that we can build the kind of world we want over the next 10 to 20 years
unless there is a very strong partnership between the U.S. and
India.' Mr Clinton has clearly been in a pro-India overdrive. Not
only did he have a memorable visit to 'exotic' India. He has
recently been exposed richly to the other, 'endemic' or
'indigenous' India--Silicon Valley and Indian food. He
probably believes he should be remembered in history as the President who
opened America to India, as Mr Nixon did to China. Nothing else can
explain his recent fraternising with so many Indians--added by the fact
that 85 of the 700 guests at his state dinner had made a contribution to
Ms Hillary Clinton's election funds.

However, do India and America agree on 'the kind of world' they
want 'over the next 10 to 20 years'? Or on the nature of the
'strong partnership' that Mr Clinton mentioned? The honest
answer can at best be ambiguous and qualified. On the one hand, New Delhi
did consolidate its new 'partnership' with the U.S.--to some
extent, at the expense of Pakistan. It also got Washington to somewhat
soften its stance on the nuclear issue and Kashmir: there was no
reference in the Clinton-Vajpayee joint statement to either. And India's
moratorium on nuclear tests 'until the CTBT comes into effect'
still remains subject to 'its supreme national interests'. So
India conceded little, and gained something. Officially, Indo-U.S. mutual
comfort levels have risen.

However, differences and sources of friction remain, apart from the
fundamental asymmetry or disproportion between the two in ambition, power
and reach, as well as in interests and priorities. The U.S. is the leader
of the advanced capitalist countries or the First World. India will
remain a Third World country for long years even with nine percent GDP
growth. U.S. business, which dominates American foreign policy, wants a
neo-liberal 'free market' global order where capital has total
freedom and no accountability. India's true agenda lies in reshaping the
unequal and skewed world order. The U.S. seeks to bully the UN and turn
conflict zones into its own protectorates. India's best bet lies in an
orderly world where the use of force is minimised. American lifestyles
are fundamentally unsustainable. Any attempt to globalise them will
destroy the world. Indian austerity has much to offer the globe.
Mainstream American culture is based on atomisation and extreme
individualisation. Indian culture is plural and open.

America's Asian priorities have to do with securing access to oil and
mineral wealth, keeping sea-lanes open, and penetrating large markets
(e.g. China), besides exploiting its own technological superiority.
India's ambitions and potential are necessarily more inward-looking and
modest. America can play around with many regional powers in many ways:
e.g. trade with China, build strategic alliances with India, South Korea
or Taiwan, and contain the further rise of Japanese power. India has few
such options.

Clearly, India and America are in different leagues, on different sides
of many global divides, in fact of history. So precisely what explains
the new bonhomie? Three things have changed in the recent past. First,
New Delhi has abandoned even the semblance of a non-aligned, autonomous,
foreign policy, and entered into a new entente or partnership with
Washington. What stands consolidated is a new relationship of strategic
proximity and business-to-business collaboration, which is also unequal
and asymmetrical. From India's side, the impetus to move into the Western
camp comes from a rightward shift in society, culture and economy in the
nineties, and the consolidation of a consumerist elite wedded to
globalised capitalism. The elite is totally alienated from the Indian
people.

The new entente also involves a shift (a pro-India 'tilt') in
Washington's stance towards South Asia and a reordering of its priorities
in the Asian region. In the 1980s, Pakistan became important as a U.S.
'frontline' state with the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.
The ground-reality changed with the Soviet pullout: U.S. policy has now
caught up. This change is further reinforced by Pakistan's recent
economic and political crisis. It is seen as a 'failing' state
which cannot offer a bridge to Central and Southwest Asia. Sinophobic
perceptions in Washington have further raised India's weight as a
potential counterfoil to China, America's strongest Asian rival.

Further, the Vajpayee government has opened up India to predatory
globalisation with unprecedented zeal, favouring U.S. agribusiness,
energy and financial interests. Just before Mr Clinton's visit last
March, India unilaterally lifted import restrictions on 1,400
commodities, including grain and milk products. And just before leaving
for the U.S., Mr Vajpayee announced the opening up of India's
international telephony--two years ahead of schedule. U.S. multinationals
are salivating as they find a market of one billion people
'freed'. They have also warmly embraced the 'other
India', American NRIs.

The second change is Washington's bestowal of respectability upon the
BJP, a Hindu-communal right-wing party not very different from Georg
Haider's deceptively named Freedom Party in Austria, which attracted
stiff sanctions from the European Union. But note the praise showered on
Mr Vajpayee. Vice-President Al Gore told him:  'As a poet, you
have inspired the imagination of your people with your eloquence'
and '... challenged your people to... create a shared vision for a
united, prosperous and peaceful India...' One may have differences
over how mediocre a poet Mr Vajpayee is. But no Indian can claim he has
'inspired the imagination' of the people with his poetry.

Even more staggering was Mr Clinton's hyperbole: 'Prime Minister
Vajpayee, in your speeches you talk of India's ability to cherish its own
marvellous diversity. In your poetry you write... that people of many
faiths can have one dream... in America too, we have a dream of unity
amidst our diversity...' Surely, Mr Vajpayee's politics militates
against that very diversity. What is Hindutva about if not asserting the
primacy of one community and denying the composite culture of Indian
society? Mr Clinton was full of admiration for Gandhi's leadership of
India's great struggle for independence. Little did he know that the BJP
belongs to a political current which was not part of that struggle, and
which provided the ideological inspiration behind Gandhi's assassination.
Washington has mollycoddled the Vajpayee government to the point of
turning a blind eye to growing attacks on India's Christians.

The third major change is the ascendancy of American NRIs. These are the
U.S.'s richest ethnic minority with remarkable business successes as in
Silicon Valley (e.g. Hotmail). This community commands money and,
increasingly, votes. Clearly, the Clintons are dazzled by
Indian-Americans. On September 23, a mere 26 NRIs collected close to a
million dollars in a single afternoon for them. (In July, they raised
$800,000.) NRIs are the most successful emulators of American lifestyles.
Among the 16 Indians in the Forbes list of 400 world billionaires, seven
are NRIs. Total Indian-American buying power is of the order of $20
billion--enormous for a 1.5 million-strong community. The community's
size is likely to triple over a decade with liberalised H-1B visas. That
would represent awesome strength--and a strong rightward pull. This is
bound to make itself felt in India, especially under dual
citizenship.

These three deeply conservative trends can offer no solace to secular
liberals. Seemingly 'friendlier' Indo-U.S. relations could
create further imbalances and narrow India's diplomatic options, as is
happening in Iraq, where New Delhi dare not support France, Russia or
China on diluting sanctions. India isn't wise to have moved so close to a
hegemonic power with a dual face. The U.S., on the one hand, is a
democracy. On the other, its international role has been largely
negative: it leads an unjust global order and has supported a range of
dictatorships. Ultimately, India's claim to global respect will be
settled not by alliances with hegemonic powers, but by its own social
development indices and an independent foreign policy. That's where Mr
Vajpayee may have inflicted the gravest damage--by discarding
independence in the name of jettisoning 'Nehruvian'
non-alignment, and by pursuing socially negative policies.--end--

--------

#2.

Himal
October 2000

Book review by Yogindar Sikand

People's history of Partition

Pakistan came into being not simply beause of Muslim communalism.

More than half a century af ter the single most violent and traumatic
event in Indian history, the wounds of Partition are yet to fully heal.
Much has been written about Partition and the events preceding and
following it. Yet, as Mushirul Hasan notes in his prologue to this book,
almost all the literature available on the subject deals with the realm of
high politics, of the protracted, and ultimately futile, negotiations
between the Congress, the Muslim League and the British. What is missing
from most accounts of Partition are the voices of ordinary people whose
fates were decided by politicians in Delhi, Shimla and London. This book
seeks to draw out these ignored, margina-lised voices, to illustrate the
meanings of the Partition event for those common people affected by it, and
to portray the element of immense human suffering that it brought in its
trail.

In his introduction to the volume, Hasan writes that the commonplace
perception of Partition as simply an outcome of Muslim communalism needs to
be debunked. Like the Hindus and, indeed, all other communities, the
Muslims of India were (are) not one homogenous whole. They were divided on
the lines of caste, ethnicity, sect, region as well as social class, and
thus exhibited a considerable diversity in terms of political positions and
views. It would clearly be fallacious to take the Muslim League's "two
-nation" theory as having been acceptable to all Muslims.

As the author points out, groups like the 'low' caste Momin weavers of
Bihar, many Shias and sections of the ulama were vehemently opposed to the
Pakistan demand. The creation of Pakistan, he says, needs to be seen in the
wider socio-economic context, and an unwholesome obsession with a political
explanation is unwarranted. Social discrimination and economic backwardness
made many Muslims amenable to the idea of a separate state. Adding to this
was the threat posed by the rising tide of caste Hindu chauvinism, both
within as well as outside the Congress, which made the promise of a Muslim
land even more attractive to many, more than it ordinarily would have.

If the Muslim League came up with the "two-nation" theory in 1940, prior
to which Jinnah had been an ardent advocate of Indian unity, we would do
well to remember that long before this the Hindu Mahasabha under Savarkar
and others had already come to the conclusion that Hindus and Muslims
represented two different, indeed antagonistic, nations.

Inventing Boundaries is divided into three broad sections. The first
consists of essays written in the 1940s on the merits or otherwise of the
Pakistan scheme. Dr. Ambedkar's piece, "Thoughts on Pakistan", extracted
from his tome, Pakistan or the Partition of India, is included in this
section. While Ambedkar could have been expected to have taken a somewhat
balanced position in the debate on Partition, being neither a Muslim nor a
Hindu, he seems to fall into the trap of communal stereotypes that Hasan
warns readers against in his introductory essay. Thus, Hindus and Muslims
are spoken of as neatly divided and homogenous categories, ignoring the
considerable degree of religious syncretism that bind Hindu and Muslim
groups at the local level. By speaking of Hindus and Muslims as monolithic
groups, Ambedkar seems unmindful of the considerable diversity within each
of them. As he sees it, there is no possibility of any inter-religious
dialogue or understanding between Hindus and Muslims, and thus Pakistan
emerges as a logical conclusion.

Two essays by Muslim League ideologues, Kazi Saiduddin Ahmad and
Jamiluddin Ahmad, advocate the establishment of a separate state for the
Muslims on the grounds that, allegedly, the Hindus and the Muslims are so
opposed to each other, that a united India is an impossible proposition. As
against this, an essay by Radha Kamal Mukerjee, penned in 1944, argues that
Pakistan would be an economic disaster, being set up in the most backward
parts of the Subcontinent. He argues passionately for a union of workers of
all religions against feudal and capitalist structures as the only way out
of the communal tangle.

A piece by the noted communist activist Sajjad Zaheer, published by the
communist party in the same year, is also reproduced here. Zaheer, in line
with the position of his party, sees the Pakistan demand as reflecting the
legitimate right to self-determination of the Muslim nationalities of the
north-west and north-east of India, but, as the title of his essay, "A Case
For Congress-League Unity", suggests, he sees the possibility of the Muslim
League and the Congress coming to an agreement which could satisfy all
communities.

The second section consists of analysis of hitherto neglected voices in
the whole event. Ordinary students had a leading role to play in promoting
the Pakistan project, particularly in Muslim-minority provinces, as Hasan
shows in his essay on the changing profile of the Aligarh Muslim
University. Set up by Sir Sayyed Ahmad Khan in the 1880s and intended to be
the training ground for a class of Muslim elite allied to the colonial
administration, by the 1920s, Aligarh, Hasan points out, had been swept by
the tide of Indian politics and, with the Khilafat movement, soon turned
into a major centre of anti-British, pro-independence activists. Soon, even
groups such as the Congress and the communists began establishing a
presence in its precincts. However, as Indian independence drew closer,
fears of caste Hindu domination grew increasingly real, and Aligarh soon
emerged as the epicentre of the Pakistan movement.
On the other hand, as Yohannan Friedmann shows in his article on the
Jamiat-ul Ulama-i-Hind (The Union of the Ulama of India), crucial sections
of the Muslim public remained vociferously opposed to Partition till the
very end. The ulama or Muslim divines of the Jamiat opposed the Pakistan
demand, visualising, instead, a common Indian nationhood (muttahida
qaumiyat), citing as precedent the treaty entered into by the Prophet
Mohammed with the Jewish tribes of Medina, considering the Jews and the
Muslims to be members of one nation (qaum). In addition, the 'ulama were
opposed to the Muslim League for what they saw as the un-Islamic ways of
its leaders, and for creating a climate of anti-Muslim feeling in the
country which would militate against Islamic missionary work among
non-Muslims.

Although women are inevitably the worst hit in rioting and communal
violence, their stories are rarely told in dominant narratives about
Partition. Two essays, one by Urvashi Butalia (author of The Other Side of
Silence, Himal review, Dec. 1998) and the other jointly written by Kamla
Bhasin and Ritu Menon (Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition,
Himal review, Dec. 1998), deal with the trauma of the women victims of
Partition violence. They show how at such times, women's bodies come to be
seen as markers of community 'honour'. A raped woman thus comes to
symbolise the castration of the other community, as well as a sign of
'impurity', which can be removed by her being abandoned by her community or
even by her having to commit suicide in desperation. Some 50,000 Muslim
women and an estimated 35,000 Hindu and Sikh women are believed to have
been abducted during the Partition turmoil.
In his essay on "Businessmen and the Partition of India", Claude Markovits
says that economic factors played a crucial role in leading to Partition.
On the one hand, the fledgling Muslim bourgeoise, faced with its much
stronger caste Hindu counterpart, feared a Hindu-dominated united India.
Hence, a separate state, Pakistan, was seen as an attractive economic
proposition to them, as it indeed was to large sections of educated middle
class government servants in Muslim-minority provinces, particularly Bihar
and the UP.

On the other hand, Markovits points out that important sections of the
caste Hindu bourgeoise, too, went along with the Partition demand, fearing
that if an agreement were reached between the Muslim League and the
Congress based on a loose federation, their economic interests, which
called for a strong centre, would be badly affected. He quotes, to prove
his point, Gandhi's close ally, the Calcutta-based Marwari industrialist
G.D.Birla, as writing as early as in 1942 to Gandhi's secretary that, "I am
in favour of separation and I do not think it is impracticable or against
the interests of Hindus or of India".

The third part deals with fictional representations of the violent times
that accompanied Partition. Included here are stories by noted Urdu writers
Saadat Hasan Manto and Intizar Husain. In addition are an essay by Dipesh
Chakraborty on representations in Bengali Hindu accounts of the violence in
East Bengal, an analysis of progressive Hindi literature in the immediate
post-Partition period and the ways in which the theme of Partition and
Hindu-Muslim relations is tackled therein, as well as a thought-provoking
interview with writer Bhisham Sahni, best known for his portrayal of the
orgy of violence in his novel Tamas.
This book makes a valuable advance in our understanding of the Partition
event and, at the same time, persuasively argues a case for a refashioning
of the ways in which the history of inter-community relations in South Asia
must be written. No longer will monocausal explanations at the level of
high politics suffice. What is needed is a genuine people's history, which
foregrounds ordinary people at the centre of any historical discourse.

--------

#3.

Labour Party Pakistan articles and campaigns are now available on their
web-site. Please visit the following address.

http://www.labourpakistan.org

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