Distant Futures and Alternative Presents for South Asia
By 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).
[xi] Ibid., p. 21.
[xii] ibid., p. 26.
[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).
[xviii] Ibid., p. 941.
[xix] Sankaran Krishna, “Oppressive Pasts and Desired Futures: Re-Imagining India,” Futures (November 1992).
[xx] Ibid., p. 865.
[xxi] Johan Galtung, “On The Way to Superpower Status: India and the EC Compared,” Futures (November 1992).
[xxii] ibid., p. 928.
[xxiii] Zia Sardar, “On Serpents, Inevitability and the South Asian Imagination,” Futures 24/9 (1992). pp. 942-949.
[xxiv] Ibid,. p. 942.
[xxv] Ibid., p. 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).