Uneasy Neighbors

India, Pakistan and US Foreign Policy

Kanishkan Sathasivam

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351876827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume represents a comprehensive and detailed case study of the long-running conflict between India and Pakistan - primarily over the contested territory of Kashmir, and the involvement of the United States within that conflict. The book details the history of 'Partition', the critical event in the modern history of the subcontinent and the fundamental catalyst for the enduring rivalry between India and Pakistan. It provides a summary description and analysis of the characteristics - demographic, social-cultural, political, economic and military - of the three primary actors that are party to the conflict: the sovereign states of India and Pakistan and the territory of Kashmir. It explains the history of US policy toward India and Pakistan as individual countries as well as US policy toward the conflict between them, particularly in light of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of 1998 and events since September 11, 2001. In addition, the volume also describes and analyzes the involvement of three other major extra-regional actors.

Chapter 1
The Origins of Conflict Between India and Pakistan: A Brief Review of History

The fifty-years story of India and Pakistan since these neighboring states obtained their independence from British colonial rule in 1947 has largely been one of enmity and war. The intensity of emotion with which both sides perpetuate this enduring rivalry is especially tragic given the millennia of shared history and common culture between the peoples of the two states. Although there is much that divides the two neighbors, the final political status of the disputed territory of Kashmir arguably lies at the heart of this enduring rivalry. Both states view the territorial status quo that resulted from the First Kashmir War (1947-48) with great dissatisfaction, and this dissatisfaction is considerably exacerbated by the continuing feelings of bitterness resulting from the 1947 Partition of British India into two separate states.¹

The End of the British Raj

As a part of the decolonization of the British Empire, British India was partitioned in 1947 into two independent states. This partition occurred on the basis of religion, thereby resulting in the formation of the mostly-Hindu but secular state of India and the Islamic state of Pakistan. The idea of a separate Muslim state within the boundaries of British India was a relatively new idea, raised within official circles only in the early 1930s. Indian demands upon their British rulers for governmental reforms and political representation, however, dated as far back as the 1880s—especially following the formation of the Indian National Congress (typically referred to simply as Congress) in 1885. Congress considered itself to be representative of all Indians without regard to communal identities, and indeed across most of its history it did draw its membership from all of India’s communal groupings—including some Muslims. Therefore, as a non-communal political movement, Congress envisioned its struggle for eventual Indian independence from British rule to result in the birth of a secular, inclusive, united India.

Despite Congress’s attempts to portray itself as a national, secular umbrella organization, its upper echelons were devoid of meaningful Muslim representation. For many of India’s Muslim elites, therefore, Congress represented Hindu political domination. Moreover, many Indian Muslims were actually quite supportive of continued British rule in India, believing that only British rule could guarantee the rights of Muslims. As such, many Muslims were decidedly cool to the anti-British core of Congress’s ideology, even while sharing with Congress the goals of popular political representation and local self-government. Given these Muslim fears of Congress’s political agenda, Muslim elites founded the All-India Muslim League (typically referred to simply as the Muslim League) in 1906. At its founding, the Muslim League harbored no ambitions for a secular agenda, and promoted itself as the protector of Muslim political rights and the faithful representative of the needs and aspirations of India’s Muslims. Most importantly, the Muslim League also promoted Muslim loyalty to British rule in exchange for political concessions.

In the period between 1911 and 1919, however, Indian Muslims began to rethink their loyalty towards the British Crown as a result of actions undertaken by the British that were deemed detrimental to the political aspirations of Muslims. In particular, many Muslims became disgruntled with British rule following the British annulment of the partition of Bengal province into Muslim-majority and non-Muslim territories. By 1916, Congress and the Muslim League began working jointly to further their mutual political demands made upon the British. It was during this period that Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the man who would eventually become the ‘father’ of Pakistan, emerged as a key figure in the independence movement. Jinnah was a British-educated secular liberal and one of the very few prominent Muslims with membership in Congress. In 1913 Jinnah joined the Muslim League even while maintaining his membership in Congress, and maintained his dual membership in both organizations until relinquishing his membership in Congress in 1919. During this dual membership period, from 1913 to 1919, Jinnah became widely known and respected as the epitome of Hindu-Muslim cooperation and unity.

By 1919, however, the pact between Congress and the Muslim League began to unravel, ironically largely because of the increasingly religious overtones of Congress’s public appeals. In response to British attempts to suppress political opposition and dissent, and restrict freedoms of the press and movement, the Hindu leaders of Congress and the Muslim leaders of such entities as the Deoband and Aligarh movements began resorting to mobilizing the masses for campaigns of protest and civil disobedience against British rule. Politicizing the masses, however, came at the cost of the more secular politics that the elites had previously pursued since the use of religious symbols and exhortations became a necessary part of mass politicization. Thus, even as the self-government movement transitioned from being an elites-centered movement to being a mass movement, it also transitioned from being a secular, liberal movement to being a sectarian movement. Instead of promoting Indian national unity, the self-government movement was now actually aggravating the Hindu-Muslim divide within Indian society by promoting communal rivalry over the ‘spoils’ of self-government.

By the late 1920s, Muslims in India increasingly began to believe that they could not expect to live as equals with Hindus in a united independent India. Thus far, Muslim political demands had been limited to the desire for weighted proportional representation in all national and local legislative councils—known as a system of ‘separate electorates.’ Under such a system, Muslims would be represented only by Muslim representatives, and Hindus by Hindu representatives. The British had finally come around to accepting separate electorates and were proceeding towards implementing such a system of self-government. For Congress, however, separate electorates was entirely unacceptable since such a system would clearly weaken the political power of the majority, a Hindu majority in most parts of India. Furthermore, a system of separate electorates struck at the very heart of the national, secular, non-communal ideology of Congress’s leaders. In an attempt to forge a common set of demands to forward to the British Crown, Pandit Motilal Nehru, the leader of Congress, convened an all-party conference in 1929 at which Jinnah asserted that only the retention of separate electorates or the establishment of some other system of safeguards against the emergence of a Hindu-dominated legislature would satisfy Muslim political aspirations. Jinnah’s proposals were rejected by a majority of the delegates, and thus began the road to Partition.

The ‘Two Nations Theory’ and Partition

The first formal step towards Partition was taken by a prominent Muslim scholar and poet named Mohammad Iqbal who, when addressing the Muslim League in 1930, put forth the key idea that the basis for popular identity within the Indian subcontinent was not geography, but rather religious community.² If such a conceptualization of a people’s identity were accepted, Iqbal argued, then British India was composed not of a single people—i.e. Indians, nor of a multiplicity of peoples—i.e. Bengalis, Gujaratis, Punjabis, etc., but of precisely two peoples defined by the two major religions of twentieth century India—Hinduism and Islam. These two peoples, then, constituted two distinct, separate nations, each unified by history and culture. Iqbal proposed a confederated India composed of a Hindu state and a Muslim state, the Muslim state being the union of the northwestern provinces of Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and the North-West Frontier. Although Iqbal proposed a confederacy as the practical manifestation of his Two Nations Theory, other Muslim elites who embraced the theory were less enthusiastic about a single country in any form. For them, the Two Nations Theory meant nothing less than Partition along religious lines.

When Jinnah regained the leadership of the Muslim League in 1934, he found the movement to be fractious and lacking in purpose. The Two Nations Theory of Mohammad Iqbal offered the perfect vessel through which to return unity and purpose to the Muslim League, and events in India in the period from 1937 to 1940 provided additional support for the idea underlying the theory. Elections were held for provincial legislative assemblies in 1937, and Congress performed exceedingly well, garnering controlling majorities in seven of the eleven provinces. By contrast, the Muslim League performed very poorly, even in the Muslim-majority provinces like Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province. However, Congress’s behavior in the provinces it controlled further alienated Muslims. Instead of reassuring the Muslim minorities in those provinces by providing them with some voice and representation within the provincial governments, Congress chose to take a rather heavy-handed approach guided by the mindset that since Congress had won the majority of the seats, it was entitled to all available political power within those provincial governments. This behavior only served to reinforce the fears of many Muslims that Muslims would have no voice at all in a united India given their overall minority status.

The alienation of India’s Muslims from the rest of India was formally sealed on 23 March 1940 when, at its annual meeting in Lahore, the Muslim League under Jinnah’s leadership resolved to demand that an independent state be established in the Muslim areas of northwestern and eastern India. The Lahore Declaration further resolved that federation with Hindu India was no longer acceptable, and that any British plan for India’s independence that did not include a provision for a sovereign Muslim state would be rejected by the Muslim League.

In the years between 1940 and 1945, as Britain struggled to maintain control over its increasingly rebellious Indian dependency even while fighting a world war, it became increasingly clear to the British government that it had no other recourse but to offer independence to India. The mechanism through which a transfer of sovereignty could occur, however, had yet to be agreed upon by the three sides—Britain, Congress, and the Muslim League. On the one hand, the British government was sympathetic to the demands of the Muslim league given its cordial relations with that body. The Muslim League had offered cooperation rather than confrontation to the British during the trying years of the Second World War, and the British greatly appreciated the battlefield contributions of the British Indian Army composed largely of Punjabi Muslims (and Sikhs, but not very many Hindus). By contrast, Congress had taken the opportunity of British weakness during the war to directly challenge British rule in India—especially from 1942 onwards after Gandhi launched his ‘Quit India’ movement of mass civil disobedience. On the other hand, the British government wanted to avoid Partition if at all possible, for a variety of political, economic, and administrative reasons.

As a result of these considerations, the British government proposed fresh elections in 1946 for the provincial and central government legislatures, and submitted a proposal for a federal form of government for an independent India that would consist of three political ‘zones’: a zone in the northeast (northeastern Bengal and Assam) with a slight Muslim majority, a zone in the northwest (Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and the North-West Frontier Province) with a solid Muslim majority, and the rest of British India as a third zone with a clear Hindu majority. The central government would hold limited powers (in such areas as national defense, foreign affairs, currency, etc.) while substantial powers would be accorded to the provincial governments.

The elections of 1946 was a watershed event in the road to Partition. Unlike in the elections of 1937, the Muslim League emerged from the 1946 elections as a legitimate player in the politics of British India, winning some ninety percent of the seats in Muslim-majority districts. It was now quite clear to the British that negotiations regarding the future of British India would have to be three-way negotiations involving the British viceroy, Congress, and Jinnah’s Muslim League. Since both Congress and the Muslim League had tentatively agreed to the post-independence plan offered by Britain for a loosely federal India, Britain moved quickly to try and form an interim government that would include both Congress and the Muslim League, to which Britain could then transfer sovereignty. The national assembly that had been generated by the 1946 elections would then write a new constitution that reflected the ‘three-zones’ federal plan that had been accepted by both parties.

Thus, by mid-1946, a relatively-peaceful end to India’s long struggle for independence from British rule seemed almost at hand, but it was not to be. Both sides carry their share of the blame for the tragedy that followed. Congress, and in particular Nehru, in an act of blindness, declared that it did not consider itself to be bound by any agreements it reached with the departing British government. Effectively, Congress declared that it would use its majority in the new national assembly to write a post-independence constitution that conformed to its vision for India. Given the well-established knowledge that Congress’s vision for India was a secular, unitary state governed by absolute majority-rule and with no special provisions for minority representation, and given that this vision for an independent India had already been unequivocally rejected by many of India’s Muslims, Nehru’s declaration was a catastrophic blunder.

Jinnah further exacerbated the situation by demanding that the interim government be equally divided between Congress and the Muslim League, effectively demanding absolute political equality between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority. This demand was categorically rejected by both Congress and the British viceroy, and Jinnah then withheld the participation of the Muslim League in the interim government. As the viceroy subsequently attempted to move forward with the establishment of the interim government without the participation of the Muslim League, Jinnah exhorted Muslims all over India to engage in mass protests against the viceroy’s actions. These mass protests in turn triggered communal violence on a truly massive scale, with conservative estimates of hundreds of thousands of lives lost and millions driven from their homes. The communal violence lasted well into 1947, and the Muslim League finally joined the interim government in an effort to keep the country from collapsing into outright civil war.

By this time it was abundantly clear to all sides that Partition was the only feasible solution. On 14 July 1947, the British House of Commons passed the India Independence Act authorizing the establishment of two sovereign states on the territories of British India. Those territories directly administered by Britain were divided between the two states according to their communal makeup. Thus, Sindh, Balochistan, and the North-West Frontier Province were given to Pakistan in their entirety, along with the Muslim-majority districts of Punjab and Bengal and a single district of Assam. The British viceroy also established guidelines for the accession of the more than five-hundred so-called ‘princely states’ to either India or Pakistan.

In addition to partitioning territory, other state assets were also partitioned on the basis of the proportionality of the respective populations of the two states. These assets included monetary, industrial, and military assets. Where assets could not be moved—factories, for example—monetary compensation was assessed. The immensity of this Partition, coupled with the speed with which it was being undertaken, meant that the rule of law virtually disintegrated across large sections of the country and especially in the north. The final months leading to Partition bore witness to unbridled communal savagery, with entire villages and towns emptied of their minority communities on both sides of the anticipated border. On 14 August 1947, British rule ended in India, and the dominions of India and Pakistan became independent states on the next day, 15 August 1947, with Nehru and Jinnah as their respective leaders.

The Accession of the ‘Princely States’ and the First Kashmir War

In addition to the partitioning of Punjab and Bengal and the demarcation of borders, the equitable division of state assets, and dealing with the orgy of communal violence sweeping both new states and the massive numbers of refugees resulting from this violence, one further issue also remained to be resolved—the accession of the so-called ‘princely states’ to either India or Pakistan.

With regard to the legal administration of its empire in India, Britain had over the years settled into a two-tiered administrative system. On the one hand, large swaths of British India were administered directly by the British government, governing authority extending from Parliament to the Secretary of State for India and then on to the viceroy. This form of British ‘direct rule’ extended to just over fifty percent of the overall Raj. The remainder of British India actually consisted of a very large number of autonomous ‘princely states.’ There is considerable disagreement within the literature as to the precise number of these autonomous states, but the consensus ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The Origins of Conflict Between India and Pakistan: A Brief Review of History
• 2 Portraits of South Asia
• 3 India and US Foreign Policy
• 4 Pakistan and US Foreign Policy
• 5 Strategic Instability in South Asia: Why Kashmir May Be the Most Dangerous Place in the World
• 6 Conclusion: India, Pakistan, and the Future of US Foreign Policy
• Bibliography
• Index