Handcuffed to
History and Chained to the Future
Distant
Futures and Alternative Presents for South Asia
Sohail
Inayatullah
In
Search of Truths
A saffron robed monk trudges up the mountains of Nepal in search of a
great guru.[i]
He finally reaches the enlightened One only to find the room full of
other seekers. He patiently
waits his turn until he is invited up to the rostrum. There the guru
tells him about the future. India's
future is bright but there will be a period of great difficulty.
First, Pakistan will attack India, possibly with nuclear weapons.
China, seeing its opportunity, will follow suit.
To the rescue will be first, Russia, and then, the United States.
The lesson is not that we have been given privileged information--the
future is far more mysterious than what mystics or technocrats can
imagine--but how the dominant model of international relations,
neo-realism, can shape our understanding of current and future events.
Not only are we handcuffed to the past, but we are also chained
to the future. Breaking free of these temporal boundaries is not an easy
task. Our language, our
theories of the real, our understanding of daily events constantly force
us into a fabricated present. To
begin to undo this tapestry of reality, we first develop a working model
of the South Asian theory of knowledge and then by moving into the
future --through preferred and probable scenarios of South Asia-— we
make the present remarkable, that is, we allow it to be seen as a
functioning discourse instead of an essentialized reality.[ii]
We develop visions and scenarios, not with the concern of predicting the
future but with creating the possibility of another space, and thus to
open up the present.
The future then becomes a tool to rethink the present.
The future also allows discussion since our identification with a
possible future is less intense; we are less likely to hold onto
positions and will be more concerned with negotiating possible
realities. Finally, in this quest to distance ourselves from the present
--that is, to see ourselves from an epistemological site outside of the
immediate-- we analyze South Asia using the exemplar of present day
Yugoslavia, particularly focusing on the problematique of Kashmir.
By moving into the future and moving comparatively in
international space, our intention is to undo the chains that create our
configurations of South Asia today; chains that, we argue, are complicit
in creating war, poverty, and stultifying bureaucracy: state and
military.
The
Epistemological Boundaries
To begin with, we need to deconstruct the eyes from which we see South
Asia, the knowledge frame of reference, the modern episteme from which
South Asia makes sense to us today.
As shown by the above allegedly divinely-inspired intuitive forecast,
our arena of reference creates the categories from which we know
reality. Thus, even as the
mystic is far above reality, his upbringing represents conventional
views of international relations in India with Pakistan and China as
enemies, Russia as a lifetime friend, and the US --now that India is
potentially moving into semi-periphery status-- as the new friend to be.
Moreover, the future is not given to us through spiritual
categories of reality (categories focused on service, justice,
consciousness and compassion), but from a vision which reinforces States
and the territories they occupy. What
is important then is what States do (security and economic development)
and not how humans act or how ideas can transform history.
Within this State-oriented framework, the essential category is power,
framed as a zero-sum game, that is essentially coercive.
Reality is the battle between States, and it exists in the
relationships between States. Strategy
is defined in technical rationalist terms with the future seen as a
useful arena of study if it can help predict the behavior of other
States, and if it can lead to instrumental advantage for a particular
State. The future as a site for transformation, for reconceptualizing
who we are, how we live, and what we can be is rarely investigated.
The dominance of neo-realism and the loss of mutual trust can be
explained by external variables as well. The most important of them is
the event of partition --the alleged break from colonialism-- that has
dominated intellectual efforts. With more than a generation of mistrust,
hate and fear, creating alternative futures, new utopias and eutopias
not dominated by the partition discourse has been nearly impossible[iii].
The trauma of partition is both used as justification for the
strength of this particular accounting of reality but also used as
revisionist history; for example, to argue that Pakistan, Kashmir,
Bangladesh or even India have existed eternally as nation-states.
States then occupy real territory not imagined social spaces.
This territory is metaphorically related to the body. Thus for
Pakistanis, losing Kashmir is like death, and for Indians, it is only
amputation.
Central to discussions of partition are colonial categories of thought
(again, largely nation-state, bureaucracy oriented, with power as
essentially administrative and military). Conceptual travel outside of
British influence is difficult and cultural, economic, military and
psychological colonialism and categories of thought remain in South
Asian internal structures and representations of the self.
Knowledge from this perspective is then expert knowledge; it is
not critical, rather it is based on the famous five year plan.
Knowledge practices that are more critical of historical
categories appear by and large as unnatural acts as they remove the
control of knowledge from experts and make problematic the official
"one nation, one leader, one path" view of the future. Neither
feudal lords, civil service administrators, military strategists nor
religious leaders find alternative critical renderings of history,
present or future, of great utility since they do not help maintain a
coherent center, and have little instrumentalist value.
Being handcuffed to the future means that one ascribes to a view that is
expert-based (bureaucracy-driven) in terms of knowledge, state-oriented
in terms of the parameters of what is real, and realpolitik-driven in
terms of the possibilities of what can happen.
Alternative rendering of the real by peoples and organizations
that exist outside State formations (local, national, regional and
global), different accounts of power
--spiritual,
women's, critical, visionary, for example-- are all seen as escapist,
idealist, and impractical since they do not conform to the vision of the
state planner or his academic counterpart, the Harvard or Oxford-trained
economist. Of course, the viewpoint of groups outside of the State nexus
is that State power and epistemology imprisons us in a limited view of
the world, while those at the periphery --by understanding the dominant
view and their own view-- have a broader as well as emancipatory view of
knowledge.[iv]
Statecraft then from a women's view is merely Mancraft, creating a world
where only functionaries and bureaucrats matter, where the value of
women and future generations are diminished if not erased.
The South Asian academic discourse has thus remained focused on
historical investigations and mired in feudal social relations.
The future, in particular, has become fugitive and, when
apprehended, it is made trivial as in the case with the five year plan.
Again, this is largely because of the style, content and
structure of South Asian colonial and post-colonial intellectual/State
relations. This has been by
and large administered by the civil service wherein appeasing the chief
minister is far more important than independent intellectual inquiry. It
is the State that gives academic discourse legitimacy since it is the
State that has captured civil society.
The paucity of socioeconomic and political resources for the
Academy exacerbates, if not causes, this situation.
The South Asian intellectual style is strong on philosophical inquiry
(debates over the various schools of Indian philosophy, for example), on
history (the dynastic rise and fall of leaders) and commentary (on
religious texts and the works of others) but weak at social sciences
(hypothesis development, correlation, causation and critical debate) and
futures studies (as well as peace studies, ecological studies and women
studies). Creativity, as might be expected, is also a non-process in
educational sites; memorization of facts (with little attention paid to
the social, historical and epistemological context which creates these
"facts"), and memorization of particular texts (The Quran or
the Vedas) is more important than the meaning that these facts and texts
embody. Their literal memorization does not allow their
internalization, thus keeping power in the hands of authority,
traditionally the mullah or Brahmin and more recently, the bureaucrat or
technocrat.
While most believe that it is the myths of religion that bind the
creative and independent mind, the mythology of Statecraft and dynastic
oriented colonial history are equally damaging. This colonial history has produced an overarching paradigm
--of neo-realism and developmentalism--that even the interpreters of the
hadith and Vedanta must relinquish their authority to. Caught in a battle of ego expansion and self-interest,
nations function like self-interested egoistic individuals. Economic
development can only take place at the national level with communities
(and thus the traditional ecology of ethnic and religious groups) absent
from participation. Only
real politics with hidden motives behind every actor and action makes
sense in this neo-realist discourse. The task then is explaining the
actions of a nation or of functionaries of the State.
Envisioning other possibilities for "nation" or
"state" and their interrelationships, that is, the assumptions
that define what is considered eligible for academic discourse, remains
unattempted. Structural
analysis such as center/periphery theory (a step beyond conspiracy
theory) is intelligible but only with respect to the West not with
respect to internal structures or with respect to how minorities within
each South Asian nation are brutally suppressed. Attempts to recreate
the paradigm of international relations, strategic studies and
development theory through women studies, world system research,
historical social change analysis, peace studies, participatory action
research or the social movements are considered naive and too
idealistic. We are
truly chained to the past, present and future. Our categories of the
real and their representation in the world of politics make sure of our
imprisonment.
Yet idealism does exist, but, in the quest for modernity it has been
marginalized. Visions
remain limited to evening prayer or meditation or personal peace, and
they have no place in politics or structural peace, except at the level
of the State which uses religious practices to buttress its own power
and control over competing classes.
The State appropriates visions into its own strategic discourse.
When non-modernist visions do enter politics, they enter in
modernist frameworks creating "mullahism" and syndicated
"hinduism," thereby once again reducing the plurality of
thought and action.
Finally, because of the dominance of the international relations and
national development models of the social, only two types of legitimate
texts are possible in the South Asian discourse. The first is the
definitive history that explains partition or independence (in India,
texts of India's ancient history are also acceptable); the second is the
text that explains the causes of economic underdevelopment.
In Pakistan, doctoral dissertations must travel along the path of
national integration, asking the same tired questions: Is Pakistan an
eternal state or is it recent? Why has national integration been so
problematic? It is the text that defines Pakistani politics and academic
life; all other texts remain within its contours.
Those writing in a more technical manner (economics or
development) must write on the causes of underdevelopment.
A book on the future, unless it is framed by realist strategic
politics or development policies, would be unfamiliar.
To break out of our handcuffs, among other exercises we need to
disturb power relations and official representations (and loyal
critiques) of the real as reinforced in official and educational texts.
An epistemic change is needed.
The disappointment of post-colonial society has already worn heavy on
the South Asian psyche. Betrayals
by leaders and calls for more sacrifices from the people for yet another
promised plan are unlikely to transform the weight of the past and the
abyss of the present. But
to unchain the future from past and present, visions must not only be
able to reconcile the past with the future, but they must also be able
to point out the structural limits of change while allowing for the
possibility of radical transformation.
Visions must be contextual even as they challenge the context
they emerge from; they must spring from metaphor and deconstruct their
metaphorical basis. The future, that is liberated, must be a continuous
process; it must neither give into cynicism nor succumb to simplistic
positive thinking.
Visions
of the Future
Fortunately, there are alternative visions for South Asia[v]
outside of conventional categories as we show by summarizing the
perspectives of various South Asian futurists.
Q. K. Ahmed[vi], for instance, envisions a
South Asia based on sustainable development model with economic equity
and people's participation --especially, women, youth and NGOs-- in
creating indigenous knowledge and action models.
This vision includes increased power for communities and villages
as well as basic rights: a right to peace, to work, to education, to
housing, to technology, to health services, to information, and to a
clean and safe environment. For
Ahmed, political and economic power must be democratized.
If not, we can anticipate continued violence from the unemployed
and from ethnic minorities whose voices are not heard, who must be
forcibly integrated into the nation-state. Rights, Ahmed argues, should not be given in "a
patronizing sense of providing ordinary income earning opportunities
through certain governmental and non-governmental programs, leaving
aside the question that they are in reality the source of all
power."[vii]
Other writers have continued this vein but focused primarily on the
environment. For example, Barun Gurung[viii]
believes that the Himalayan region’s already fragile ecosystem will be
ruined by commercialization, development interventions and the resultant
population growth. This
will in turn lead to further destruction of Bangladesh as well as
northern India. However, Gurung believes that through a radical Buddhism
an ecological ethic could develop. The future is not pre-determined and
individuals can transform the trends.
For Gurung and others such as Ashis Nandy, it is not religion
that is the problem; in fact, it is the secular state in its commitment
to develop individuals and regions that has created a violent State.[ix]
What is needed then is a critical traditionalism; a new balance
between the secular and the religious, one where the State is fair to
all parties and does not privilege the Secular.
Sri Lankan community activist A. T. Ariyaratne[x]
envisions a future that links the spiritual and the material.
Ariyaratne sees development as an awakening process that takes
place in socioeconomic and individual realms. Individuals remain caught
in the State and Developmentalist paradigm and become cynical of what is
possible because power remains in the hands of the national and
international elites. Ariyaratne's way out of the present is through
social movements focused on community development, self-reliance, and
cultural strength. "A simple lifestyle is particularly relevant
when the limits to the planet's capacity to sustain an extravagant
materially affluence lifestyle has become clear."[xi]
As with Gandhi, Ariyaratne's vision of the future then is a global
community of villages marked by full participation and the welfare of
all. "Millions of
self-governing communities will emerge and to a large extent they will
be self-sustaining."[xii]
In this context of awakening, the need for coercive governments will
disappear. Political
parties will not attempt to use violence to stay in power and reduce the
electoral territory of others.
In Pakistan, for example, there are at least five possibilities.[xiii]
The first is a "Disciplined Capitalist Society" in which the
military and a strong centrist civil service create the conditions for
the development of a national bourgeoisie.[xiv]
The second scenario is "Islamic Socialism" in which
basic needs are met through State control of the economy but not State
control of cultural and religious life--these remain syncretic and
personal. While populist
and egalitarian, this view is still industrial, demanding sacrifices
from the people so as to create rich developed nation.
The third scenario is the "Return of the Ideal," the original
intention of Pakistan as a land of the pure and the search for the ideal
Islamic polity that existed at the time of the Prophet. While this has
remained the ideal, the cognitive dissonance between the Ideal and the
reality of vicious politics, ethnic violence, and political corruption
has led to a deep cynicism. Part
of the problem has been the nature of the Islamic State. The search for
perfection and its unattainability is of course the central problem of
Islamic political theory. Muslims
believe that they did have a perfect State and society, and to recover
just that becomes the present task. Instead of rethinking the impossible
ideal, or developing structures to balance one-man power, advice is
given on how to tolerate tyranny. The
result has been an overdeveloped (too much power) State and an
underdeveloped civil society (not enough public participation).
Modernity has added to this duality by making the cynicism even
more pervasive.
The fourth scenario is the "End of Sovereignty" through
military intervention by India, cultural intervention from the U.S., and
internal breakdown of the nation into many states. This fearful perception often leads to extremist renderings
of reality, where local culture is saved at the expense of basic human
freedoms. The fifth scenario is "No Change" or the
continuation of the grand disillusionment, the general malaise, with
escape from South Asia as the only rational response.
The poor and middle class travel to the Middle-East while the
rich flee to the United States. The
problem is fundamentally moral: how to live with one's own moral failure
when morality is central to personal and social valuation?
Ways out of these particular chains in Pakistan and South Asia might
revolve around three vectors; (1) an acceptance of differences instead
of a forced unity, (2) decentralization of power and economy, and (3)
social design of the future, that is futures where identity and social
purpose are reimagined. The
challenge is to create a culture of tolerance, where politics is about
negotiating desired futures instead of efforts to paint the Other as the
national enemy, as less than pure.
Once the Other becomes the enemy, then the chains of history, of
difference, become a noose that daily tightens until all others are the
enemy, until no one is quite Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist enough.
But even as we create new visions, the day to day reality is structural
constraints imposed by external world authorities. World Bank enforced privatization, for example, argues B.M.
Sinha[xv]
only make the chaos of India's present worse. What is needed are futures
focused on social movements that are committed to developing
cooperatives, women's rights, animal rights, and protection for the
environment. Without dramatic changes such as limits to land and wealth
ownership, new models of growth and distribution, and a balance between
spiritual and material life, India will plunge into a massive chaotic
and violent revolution. Sinha
looks to new social movements and ideologies, such as P.R. Sarkar's
Progressive Utilization Theory and his samaj (or cultural and
bioregional) movements for the answers to the future.
He argues that the city Ananda Nagar, designed by Sarkar, is one
example of appropriate ecological and social development, of economic
democracy.
However, while these visions offer us hope and inspiration, we need to
remember that more than other group it is women who are handcuffed,
often by governmental power. Most visions of the future do not recognize
how women know the world, their categories of reality, their particular
histories, or their alternative visions of the future.
For example, activist Nandini Joshi[xvi]
reminds us that it is women who have suffered the most in South Asia.
While changing social attitudes are important it is productive
employment for them that would lead to their liberation--to economic
security, social status and individual dignity. Without empowering South
Asian women, South Asia's future is bleak.
Joshi's particular future is Gandhian, specifically she calls for
the local manufacturing of cloth in small scale hut industries.
By remaining in the village and recovering traditional local
economies, the family can be maintained and women seen as Goddesses not
as commodities.
But we do not need to be committed to her particular view of women,
which some might argue is Orientalist.
Womanist writer Shivani Banerjee Chakravorty[xvii]
believes that a return to a village economy is too simple a solution as
it denies the pervasiveness of modernity.
Moreover, the village community does not necessarily guarantee a
better future for women as it too is male dominated and vertically
structured. Merely weaving
cloth will not create a new future for India or South Asia, more
dramatic steps are necessary. Among
them, a reconstitution of women in South Asian thought outside of the
nationalist discourse (as in "Mother" India) is a necessary
first step. For Chakravorty, women must confront modernity and in
collaboration with men create new social structures where women are
neither commodified nor deified. "This
is a society where women have not lost the depth and strength of their
cultural heritage, but have been able to acquire new strengths from the
process of development and are able effectively to transform their quest
for gender justice into establishing gender justice with the cooperation
... of men."[xviii]
This means seeing women as real people not as archetypes existing
primarily in myth. At the
same time, this requires men to find their own place. However, given
that South Asia is in a disadvantaged position in the world capitalist
economy, meaning unemployment is rampant, it is often easier to blame
and abuse those that are the most defenseless--women and children.
Gender and power must be reconceptualized in neither modernist nor
traditional frames of meaning.
Sensitive to postmodern articulations of power/knowledge, men/women,
secular/religious, Sankaran Krishna[xix]
has argued for an alternative approach to the task of imaging the future
of South Asia, particularly India.
For him, we need to imagine other structural possibilities rather
than the peculiar nation-state divisions that presently exist.
However, Krishna does not call for a particular vision rather he
seeks to open up conceptual space for a range of new South Asias.
He does however criticize the nationalist discourse. For Krishna
continued efforts to protect national sovereignty at the cost of endless
human lives is clearly not a preferred future. In the name of national
security and identity--most recently in Kashmir--all sorts of violence
are committed. We thus need
to radically redefine security and sovereignty and create a world where
dissidents can safely walk the streets.
However, this effort is often literally laughed out of course
since "national security is serious business ... best left to the
hard headed, amoral, rational and ever-watchful realists.[xx]
Being called idealist is one thing, but often the charge against those
who create a counter discourse to national security is that they are
traitorous. Charged such,
the debate ends and the discourse of nationalism continues.
But while postmodern visions provide us with theoretical comfort, we
cannot forget the visions of war ahead, as in the Yugoslavia exemplar we
develop below. For example,
peace researcher, Johan Galtung[xxi]
has compared South Asia, particularly India, to the emerging European
Community. This intriguing
perspective gives some distance and allows unexpected similarities to
emerge. Both have a memory
of past glories, both have a social structure that can carry this mantle
and both have a national culture which can provide legitimacy for
leadership. Galtung thus sees the future of South Asia as strongly India
dominated with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal as peripheries.
Galtung however does not stay in the International Relations
discourse as he reminds us that as with all rises to superpower status,
the decline is not too far way either. The
cost of the rise, however, will be untold suffering for many and glory
for the few as territorial or economic expansion always comes at a cost.
While the structural and cosmological reasons for this scenario are
evident, certainly this projection of South Asia's future is one that
only center elites would prefer. Galtung
asks, "Does that drama ... that prison ... have to be enacted
again? Why don't we ever learn?"[xxii]
For Zia Sardar,[xxiii]
South Asia is trapped by its past.
Its imagination fitted into an imitative mould.
But equally dangerous is an active and instrumental modernity.
South Asia "does not know which way to turn: all roads to the
future, it appears, pass through the valley of death ... the Indian
subcontinent is in the imminent danger of being killed by its own
progeny."[xxiv]
Both traditional ideology as well as modernist rationalist fabrications
of identity and State must be dealt with. Doing so would unleash the
creative imagination that sustains the mythologies of the culture that
is South Asia. The first
step in doing needs to be some sort of partnership between South Asian
nations and traditions. They must find a place to meet, to transform
their recent past and recreate their present. Sardar's concludes his
essay with two words: "come together."[xxv]
Scenarios
To break out of the past and present, we first need to rid ourselves the
socialist state/collective centered model and the market
nation/individual centered model as well as the ideologization of
religion and tradition. In
terms of alternatives, we have a range of possibilities, as described in
the nine scenarios below. These
scenarios should be seen not as predictions but as points of discussion,
as reflections on what might happen given various historical trends, and
as calls for transformation. They serve as points of possibility and
points of warning.
The first is continued chaos and collapse--ethnic violence
(and possible fission into many small nations), war, poverty, and
powerlessness. This is the Yugoslav situation with ethnicities finding
themselves in intractable wars. Kashmir,
for example, has been constructed by all parties as necessary for their
national survival, without which national identity is at stake.
The second is hegemony by one actor (India) or by one
gender (men) or by one model of economy (market industrialization), and
one form of politics (bureaucracy-led with various levels of military
intervention).
The third is a return to a communitarian form of life:
based on universal spiritual values; local knowledge and endogenous
models of development; local forms of economic exchange, and the
safeguarding of the environment.
Each culture is able to find spiritual values from their own
traditions and use it to recover an ecology of tolerance, of meeting
basic needs.
The fourth is some type of dramatic transformation or
rupture, whether through a new confederation of South Asia, a new
identity, or a new theory of growth/distribution, knowledge/science, and
history/future. In this scenario, it is not merely a return to an
imagined past, but a creation of a new future. This means that both
realism and history must be challenged.
The above visions above are different from the present optimistic mood
held by governments, which believe that South Asia will become one the
new tigers. In this fifth
scenario, through free trade, smaller more efficient governments,
exports will rise and a new South Asian middle class will emerge.[xxvi]
This growth leads to an economic confederation (an expanded SAARC), the
only way South Asia can survive economically (against the EC, Nafta,
APEC) and forth. It is
business with its economic incentives that reduces the power of national
identity, thus weakening the link between self, nation and territory.
This could lead to the peripheralization of the smaller nations
or could lead to positive lock-ins and increasing returns and growth for
all areas: a positive cycle of growth.
Thus a bourgeois revolution would help create a new class more
committed material comforts and educational opportunities than tired
historical mythologies. At
the same time, such a revolution, while creating a middle class, would
further erode the conditions of peasants and proletariat.
Environmental degradation would worsen, and as in the West, the
future would be robbed from future generations.
A sixth scenario is that of nuclear war.
This is given great attention to in Western texts[xxvii],
although far less in South Asian texts since nuclear weapons occupy
privileged nationalistic space. But
to argue against nuclear weapons is to locate oneself as a traitor; one
who has betrayed independence, even if going nuclear is certainly the
road to economic bankruptcy[xxviii] (As Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto promised and accurately predicted: Pakistanis will eat grass to
gain nuclear power).
A seventh scenario that is perhaps more creative, certainly less
bounded to historical experience, is a Village high-tech model.
In this model, modernity is bypassed and South Asia enters the
post-industrial society through computer intelligence, genetic
engineering and other sorts of dazzling but miniature new
"appropriate" technologies.
Further negative affects of modern industrialism are then
minimized. Not only does a
bourgeois revolution occur but it does so without the traditional costs
of development--the loss of community.
A related but not as dramatic eighth scenario is focused less on
economic or political factors and more on the ability of culture
to both destroy and recreate the traditional.[xxix]
In this scenario, cultural intertwining through television, videos,
connections of South Asian overseas, a type of cultural renaissance from
Hong Kong to Abu Dubai led perhaps by Asian VTV and Star Television all
create a fundamentally new Asian culture.
This might mean a loss of cultural uniqueness, a loss of cultural
integrity, and the commodification of religious and tribal culture but
it also might lead to innovativeness and new types of cultural forms
such as Bangra Rap, leading to intensified economic activity (for
example, new wave, punk, rock and rap are billion dollar industries for
the US and England).
In our final ninth scenario, we anticipate a breakdown of South
Asia from its present national structures into numerous states.
Each nation within itself would become more of a federation,
allowing more rights for minorities. This is different than the first scenario in that the tension
between the local and global is peacefully resolved; economy, culture
and polity becoming decentralized but rights becoming more universal.
An independent Kashmir or Khalistan or the division of Sri Lanka
might begin such a trend, forcing nations to address the concerns of
minorities.
Unfortunately while visions help us out of the present, we are often too
soon returned to the national. The
emphasis on mutual hate and fear of the Other continues to dominate
discourses on the future and make efforts at critical thought to merely
appear as idealistic words, fine for poets and philosophers but
inappropriate for the important task of politics.
But our concern is not so much in creating scenarios for their
theoretical or aesthetic elegance but in finding ways in which South
Asians can increase intimacy among themselves, that is, to create a
personal ecology wherein many histories and many futures can co-exist
(and thus challenge the nationalist "monology" of unity and
fear as the co-drivers of South Asian personal and community identity).
Scenarios are neither true nor false but points of departure
which should help us reframe the present.[xxx]
The first step in creating an Other is in imagining its possibility. Can
we imagine an alternative South Asia where we do not live in such a
situation of heightened epistemological distance?
The tragedy remains that Pakistanis and Indians continue to ask
each other what does the other look like?
Our effort above has been suggestive, in creating possible pathways out
of the present. To return
to intimacy, we can either unlock the handcuffs in history, that is
return back in time, or we can go forward in time, to an alternative
future.
The question to ask is what might each scenario mean across different
variables--how would it affect the State's coercive power, how would
family relations change, how would tradition and culture be transformed?
And more importantly if we believed in a particular vision, if we
believed that a scenario could transform reality, we could ask how would
that change one's policy prescriptions, one's day to day actions?
Finally, we could assume a particular scenario had occurred and then
backcast into the present, conjecturing on what trends, events, and
movements allowed for the victory of one particular discourse. Backcasting, while useful, in filling events and trends that
shape the future, also has an empowering utility, as it helps
individuals see that the impossible is often possible.
Spatial
Distance
Another way out of the straitjacket of historical and realist discourse
is to not move temporally but to move spatially. We can ask, for example, what can South Asian learn from the
breakup of Yugoslavia? In
many ways, Yugoslavia's present is South Asia's past: ethnic cleansing,
the break-up of a larger State, continued violence between segments of
the former State, and extensive outside interference were realities and
continue to be concerns for most South Asians since independence from
the British. Yugoslavia can
perhaps best learn from the failure--as evidenced by continued violence,
poverty cycles, and betrayal of the peoples by the leadership--of South
Asian political structures. But
there are important lessons for South Asia as well, particularly with
respect to Kashmir, which remains contested cultural, geographical and
identity terrain for Pakistan and India as well as Kashmir itself.
To draw out these lessons, we need to first examine the
similarities between the two.
Both nations were constructed by outside forces, Western Europeans.
Both regions are cultural diverse, multi-civilizational,
multi-religious. Both have an ancient sense of history but many of their
ethnic problems are recent, created by political parties in search of
nations rather than nations in search of a State, as the case with
indigenous movements such as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.
While certainly one can take a historical view to understand
primordial ethnic urges, often is local political leaders who use the
politics of ethnicity, of difference, most easily noticeable in
ethnicity, to gain their own political power.
In underdeveloped polities gaining State power means gaining
economic power, military power and identity power.
Creating ethnic consciousness then is the first step towards
political victory (and eventual suicide) as Milosovic in Yugoslavia and
untold many in South Asia have found out.
Ethnic consciousness is further conflated with religion, once
again with easily recognizable difference. History is used to create a
pure mythology of greatness that others cannot enter: the myth of the
Orthodox Serbian people (who resisted the Other of Turkey) or of
Pakistan as the purest land of Muslims.
If we examine the present crises in both areas, we see a loose
structural correlation. Croatia, it can be argued, is similar to
Pakistan, as both are carved out from the larger and more powerful
nation, India and Serbia. Both
have sordid pasts: Croatia's collusion with the Nazis during the second
world war and Pakistan's despicable actions against Bangladesh during
the 1971 war.
Using this analogy, Kashmir and Bosnia are both isomorphic. In both
cases, the majority are Muslim but there are real minorities.
The Croation bosnians are similar to Kashmiris who want to join
with the Pakistanis and the Kashmiri hindus are like the Bosnian serbs
who want to join with the mother land, India and Serbia.
That these similarities emerge is not accidental: the politics of
nation-state formation, the artificial boundaries created among
ethnicities, the playing of religious groups for power by politicians,
the interference by external powers, all join to create isomorphisms.
The brutality of the Serbs towards the Bosnian muslims and the Indians
towards the Kashmiri muslims is similar. And as can be expected, both justify their actions by arguing
that they are merely trying to keep their rightful boundaries in tact;
they do not want to lose their land, their nation-state, their sovereign
state. Serbian leader
Milosevic did not want a confederation because he feared a breakdown of
Yugoslavia. The Indian
argument is the same as was Pakistan's when East Pakistan wanted more
provincial autonomy. And
yet, paradoxically and perhaps causally, each group is intimate with the
other (Bosnian muslims with Serb orthodox and Croat catholics in the
former Yugoslavia and Muslims with Hindus in India) and each has lived
for periods in a peaceful and thriving local ecology. The enemy is both
intimate and distant: love and violence stand in proximity to each
other--with often only the fragility of civil society, of cultural
power, of an ethos of a larger humanity allowing the former to remain.
Finally, many of the problems of these two regions have been externally
created by centuries of colonialism, of the external creation of
difference. Turkish rule
over Yugoslavia and British rule over South Asia helped create many of
these ethnic and religious differences.
Yugoslavia at its independence, however, attempted to create a
federation of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians while India's independence
immediately led to the breakdown of the Indian State into the new State
of Pakistan (and then Bangladesh).
Each group as well has a history of believing it is oppressed. Serbs
believe they were oppressed by Turkish muslims and now by the world
community. Hindus believe
they were oppressed by Mogul muslims and then by the British. Both Serbs
and Hindus have looked to outside powers for safety: Serbs and Hindus
with Russia (and the breakaway states have forged alliances with the
traditional rivals of these powers; Pakistan with the USA and Croatia
with Germany).
There are fundamental differences as well and thus we should not push
this analysis too far. For example, Pakistan is far more similar to
Bosnia, as both are intended states, whose identity has been recently
invented, unlike Croatia, Serbia, and India, who have much longer
"national" histories.
Clearly, these are different regions, with different histories, and much
of the similarity is correlation not causation based, albeit
given the history of nation-state and the suppression of ethnicities in
this development, and given both nations location in an asymmetrical
world-economy, we should not be surprised to see so many isomorphisms.
In any case, the purpose of this analysis is to open up possibilities of
new frameworks not become bogged down in a search for similitude nor to
develop a comparative theory of nation building and nation failing.
Futures
and Kashmir
Given these structural similarities what can we deduce about possible
policies with respect to the peace in the regions' future? That is, what
can we learn from the breakdown of the Yugoslav state in understanding
and potentially diffusing the current crisis in Kashmir.
Kashmir is important, particularly for Pakistan and India, in
that it is the symptom of perpetual crisis, the rallying cry used to
gain weapons of horror, of diverting funds from education to war, of
creating a syndicated Hinduism and an extremist, hard Islam.
Solving the problem of Kashmir would then begin a process of
reconciliation, of peace, and thus the creation of positive cycles of
trust, cultural exchange, and economic interdependence. What follows are a series of policy prescriptions that might
aid in minimizing the loss of human life and help in keeping the future
open in Kashmir in particular and in the region in general.
(1)
Early recognition without peacekeeping forces is a mistake. The
world community should not recognize an independent Kashmir without
strategically located peace forces. Recognition will invite a
free-for-all far worse than the present battle between Pakistan and
India. As with the Yugoslav
case, it will increase violence and almost certainly lead to a prolonged
three or four nation war. However,
if there are enough reasons for recognition then peace forces must be
first activated.
(2)
But before peace forces can be activated one needs peace
building. Much of the
violence in Yugoslavia could have been averted if people's
organizations, women's groups, and other social movements were stronger.
We need to encourage transnational peace groups, women's groups, human
rights groups, spiritual groups and others outside the nation-state
fabric to build bridges, to create possibilities for intimacy within
Kashmir and between India and Pakistan. Doing so would allow for
alternative futures then present. However, one might argue that it is
already too late given the escalation of violence. Certainly this is
largely the case, but the question remains: is it possible to build
peace through people's organizations not wedded to state-centered
solutions that deny women, labor, child and human rights as an
explanatory framework and as a basis for policy formulation in Kashmir?
Certainly Statist solutions merely expand the crisis: from Kashmir to
Sindh, for example in Pakistan. Military solutions merely strengthen the
military bureaucracy creating a discourse from which escapeways continue
to narrow.[xxxi]
(3)
At the level of theory development, we need to remember that
ethnicity and religion are not Platonic categories but categories used
by political parties to gain electoral power. In this sense they are
recent. Milosevic was
victorious because he promised that Serbs would never again be
oppressed. He used ancient
Serb identity--suppressed by Tito's communism--to increase his own power
(as with the BJP, for example). These
efforts must be intellectually resisted and we must create alternative
renderings of history that see ethnicity as politically and socially
created. Localism in the form of economic incentives for local groups
to, for example, resist international capital and the drainage of wealth
and ideas that follow needs to be encouraged. But localism must be based
on a larger universalism, committed to enhancing material benefits.
(4)
Finally, U.N. economic sanctions against any of the parties is a
mistake. In case Indian brutality increases, sanctions should not occur.
They only reproduce nation (uniting India against the outside Other and
hardening positions that might previously have been negotiable) and
ethnicity and succeed in only destroying the power base of the local
opposition Party (since it is now seen as counter to national interest).
The main economic result is the impoverishment of the elderly,
women and the middle class and the creation of a new class of
international smugglers. Sanctions represent a failure in developing
creative solutions to the problem of aggression against minorities and
against other States. We
need to find other forms of "sticks" and "carrots"
examining not only military and economic power but people's and cultural
power. We also need to understand that leadership in most states is not
representative of the "will" of the people.
Elections are often fraudulent and coercive measures are used by
the ruling Party so it can stay in power--Milosevic and Saddam Hussain
are prime examples. Sanctions do not create help in dislodging an
unpopular ruler; they merely lead to more extreme positions, creating a
psychosis of fear.
The policy and theoretical task is both to keep the past
and future open and be cognizant how both can be used by various
political forces for their own gain.
Opening up past, present and future allow for a more negotiable
future, however, it also allows for fictions of natural superiority to
pollute the discourse. The opening of temporality must be done in the
context of a humanistic ethics, of understanding the categories and
reality of the Other.
We thus need to find ways to keep the future open in
Kashmir and South Asia in general.
Part of this is a struggle of
developing competing understandings of the real: of the
problematic nature of ethnicity, representation and democracy, and of
finding ways of legitimating alternative histories and futures into
popular discourse.
Conclusion
Given the visions, scenarios, and comparative analysis
above, can we narrow our prognosis? Are there chances for positive peace
ahead?
For South Asia, economic and cultural confederation based
on sustainable development and rights for all minorities is
preferred--since it promises peace and cultural interaction--but given
the present paradigm: how national identity is structured, how history
is taught, and the dominance of the language of statecraft, it is
unlikely.
At the same time, cultural history (an agreed upon
origin) and cultural authenticity is far more problematic with
sovereignty threatened from above and below. Thus, while there are
strong reasons for the continuation of the present, the breakdown of
history and culture, from the globalizing forces of technology (modern
technologies and postmodern ones such as genetics, virtual reality, and
robotics) and capitalist development make the present problematic,
indeed, unlikely.
Globalization can lead to another possibility for the
entire region: a fundamentalist future.[xxxii]
Fundamentalism occurs when change is too quick, when religious
authorities lose their traditional place in society, when knowledge is
no longer hierarchical, that is, when the place of traditional experts
in society is dislodged. However
we have had twenty years of this in Pakistan and few years of this
process in India. In Pakistan's case, the bourgeois forces may prove much
stronger than fundamentalist or feudal forces as the brief success of
Moin Querishi hinted at. While
India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh have not been as fortunate to have a
South Asian leader who had a career outside national political power,
who was in power to leave official power, similar forces are operating
there. However, this is not to argue that these States will continue
along a simplistic Western modeled secular path, rather a new
configuration of the religious and the secular has to be forged--this
will be an indigenous good that has some transcendental appeal much as
Western democracy, i.e. the separation of the civil and the religious,
has had in the last few hundred years.
Creative futures for South Asia will depend on that type of
alternative political and social theory.
Without these visions, with the present unlikely and the trends
towards peace difficult, if we are not careful then continued war will
be our future.
Our purpose has been to make past and present more
porous, to use the future to rethink the past and the present. There are
always many pasts, many presents and many futures.
We need to find ways in which we can peacefully negotiate them.
But it will be difficult to break from history and conventional images
of the future. Deep
animosities exist among South Asians.
Just as the Serbs feel that Bosnian muslims are double traitors,
since they converted to Islam and now to a new State, Indians have the
same perception of Pakistanis. At
some time in history, muslims left some hindu sect and then finally left
the nation itself. This feeling of betrayal takes time to heal and understand.
For Pakistanis, far more important than national
integration is the need to place faith on human rights, economic
justice, on differences between themselves instead of using India as an
enemy to create national unity. This type of unifying strategy is only
successful for the short run. In
the long run it creates an inner enemy, an inner demon, that destroys
one's mind and heart leading to the deep betrayal of civil society; a
betrayal India and Sri Lanka are now discovering.
Hopefully by looking forward and by looking around we can avoid
this type of future and instead create one based on difference and
unity, on creative renderings of history and of the local and the
universal.
This means committing ourselves to the needs and concerns
of future generations, of taking policy steps, of finding theoretical
frames that allow for more open pluralistic futures; futures that can
then be enjoyed by our children and their children, whether Pakistani,
Indian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, or Bhutanese. Whatever the
local identity of future generations, let us hope that they are first of
all humans who happen to live in South Asia and act in ways to preserve
and expand our essential humanity.
NOTES
[i] This
story was told to me through e-mail by Acharya Prasidananda
Avadhuta, who has with all such stories, heard it from another monk. E-mail transmission, 1993.
[ii] See
Sohail Inayatullah, "Deconstructing and Reconstructing the
Future," Futures (March 1990).
[iii] As
one Pakistani professor born in the 1930's commented: "We are
the lost generation, with no hope or vision, only the inhumanity of
a world war, the bitterness of partition and the mockery of
post-colonial society. We cannot create the future."
[iv] Joyce McCarl Nielsen,
“Introduction” in Joyce McCarl Nielsen, ed. Feminist Research
Methods. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1990. P.
10.
[v] These
are based on a special issue of Futures (November 1992) guest
edited by Sohail Inayatullah. See, Sohail Inayatullah,
"Introducing the Futures of South Asia," Futures
(November 1992).
[vi] Q.K.
Ahmed, "Policies and Strategies for sustainable development in
Bangladesh," Futures (November 1992).
[vii] Q.K.
Ahmad, "South Asia: Economic Growth and Human Development with
Equity, Security and Sustainability--National and Regional
Perspectives," 15 in Sohail Inayatullah, Alternative Futures
for South Asia (forthcoming).
[viii] Barun
Gurung, "Towards Sustainable Development: A Case in the Eastern
Himalayas," Futures (November 1992).
[ix] Ashis
Nandy, ed., Science, Hegemony and Violence. Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1990.
[x] A.
T. Ariyaratne, "A Society Based on Eternal Laws," in
Sohail Inayatullah, ed., Alternative Futures for South Asia
(forthcoming).
[xiii] Sohail
Inayatullah, "Images of Pakistan's Future," Futures
(November 1992).
[xiv] "Born
to Rule," The Herald (June 1991), pp. 31-33.
[xv] B.M.
Sinha, "India Towards a Social Revolution," Futures
(November 1992).
[xvi] Nandini
Joshi, "Women Can Change the Future" Futures
(November 1992).
[xvii] Shivani
Banerjee Chakravorty, "Can Women Change the Future?" Futures
(November 1992).
[xix] Sankaran
Krishna, "Oppressive Pasts and Desired Futures: Re-Imagining
India," Futures (November 1992).
[xxi]
Johan Galtung, "On The Way
to Superpower Status: India and the EC Compared," Futures
(November 1992).
[xxiii] Zia
Sardar, "On Serpents, Inevitability and the South Asian
Imagination," Futures 24/9 (1992).
pp. 942-949.
[xxvi] Lee
Kuan Yew has made a case for this possibility.
But to achieve this vision there needs to be land reform, and
then technology and investment from an external dynamo (perhaps
south-east asia), complimented with a long term focus on technical
education (and not the hereafter), as well as consensus politics.
See Lee Kuan Yew, "The Vision for Asia," The
Muslim, 20 March 1992, p. 2.
[xxvii] See,
for example, Richard Lamm, Mega-Traumas. Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin, 1985.
[xxviii] See
Dr. Inayatullah, "The Nuclear Arms Race Between Super Powers:
Some Lessons for Pakistan and India,"(Paper Prepared for
Pakistan Social Science Forum, 1993).
[xxix] For
a series of essays that develop this perspective by authors such as
Zia Sardar, Ashis Nandy, and Susantha Goonatilake, see Yogesh Atal
and Eleonora Masini, eds., The Futures of Asian Cultures.
Bangkok: UNESCO, 1994.
[xxx] For
further analysis of this position, see Sohail Inayatullah,
"From Who am I to When am I" Futures (May 1990).
[xxxi] Dr.
Inayatullah, "Creating Order Without Law and Justice: An
Elusive Chase," (Paper Prepared for the Pakistan Social Science
Forum, 1992).
[xxxii] For
more on this, see Sohail Inayatullah, "Why Khomeni Wants
Rushdie Dead: Understanding the Postmodern World," Third
Text (Summer 1992).