Books
THE SECOND PARTITION: Fault-Lines in India’s Democracy
by Patwant Singh. Hay House India, Delhi, 2007.The Second Partition: Fault-Lines in India’s Democracy attempts to analyze why sixty years after Independence, India is still a country peopled with hungry, poor, illiterate, homeless, thirsty, people (to employ his chapter headings as descriptive categories). Singh chooses his target deliberately and places the blame squarely on the inefficiency, indifference and corruption of the state machinery and the political class. What Singh misses is that public policy is not about the actions, or inactions of individuals. His refusal to understand the state as a complex formation with class interests of its own, which are often allied in intricate ways with those of global capital and its Indian representatives, dogs much of Singh’s analysis. Hence the problems he identifies as being essentially moral and/or procedural are in fact structural and political.
Though Singh rails against the state and the political class through much of this work for its indifference, corruption and lack of concern for the poor, he is essentially wedded to the same paradigm of development, progress and technological growth. This means that he cannot, for instance, see state policy as itself being implicated in unequal social relations. A case in point is his chapter on homelessness where he notes the failure of the state to provide adequate housing and decent living conditions for its people. He also notes the destruction of night shelters set up by Ahshray Abhigyan for women and children by the NDMC without any regard for the vicissitudes of Delhi’s winter.
However, the large-scale demolition of working class habitations and the ‘cleansing’ of city spaces to free land for malls, shopping centres and parks is a direct fallout of the ‘good governance’ paradigm which Singh hails. Elsewhere he notes with approval the actions of ‘demolition man’ S.R. Rao of Surat, who in the face of widespread public and political opposition, single-handedly cleared ‘300,000 sq ft’ of unauthorized construction. In the past three years, a similar initiative in Delhi has resulted in the demolition of the Yamuna Pushta Basti, Nangla Macchi Basti, and habitations in the Jama Masjid and Bhatti Mines areas, to name just a few. Millions of poor people have lost their homes. The point is not, of course, of a quibble between ‘authorized’ and ‘unauthorized’ construction; rather of a nuanced understanding of the social relations within which the discourse of master-planning produces such divisions – an understanding notably absent in Singh’s analysis.
Again even when he identifies a problem accurately, his solutions often fall within the same paradigm which he set out to critique. Thus, his sharp and welcome polemic against the appalling position of women in society is undercut by his identification of the ‘unchecked growth’ of population as a serious social problem and exhortations to the state to devise an ‘intelligent family planning policy’. Singh here ignores feminist writing which draws attention to the patriarchal relations of power in which women’s bodies are identified and produced as sites of intervention in the interests of larger developmentalist agendas.
A similar set of analytical problems colour his discussion of agriculture where Singh tends to miss the deeper structural affinities between seemingly disparate processes. The industrialization of agriculture and cash crop farming, and the failure of any government to seriously address the issue of redistribution of land, of which the green revolution is an early precursor, is the prehistory of the terrible devastation rife in the rural countryside today. His discussion of the green revolution in purely laudatory terms, reflects neither on the environmental consequences of unchecked fertilizer use, nor on the relationship between a mode of farming and unequal land relations in the countryside.
Surprisingly, caste, as an analytical category, finds no place in Singh’s writing except as part of a larger chapter on religion and ritual. This is a significant oversight as the inequalities accruing from class, gender and religious location are underpinned by caste.
Singh is at his best when he collates and discusses information with which he has an obvious familiarity. His chapter on water has a perspicacious analysis of the confusing shibboleths through which the privatization and commoditization of water is being attempted in Indian cities. He lucidly unpacks the modes by which the state is retreating from its responsibility of providing safe drinking water to citizens by selling off water resources to transnational water management companies such as Vivendi, Suez and Ondeo Degremont. Similarly his chapter on the militarization of the Indian state has an interesting section on the various arms deals, defence contracts and arms acquisitions of successive governments through which he shows that the military industrial complex is very much part of the Indian state’s technologies of rule.
This is a book written by someone who clearly loves this country. In that sense Singh’s politics is located within the ambit of Nehruvian secular democratic liberalism which quails at the complete marginalization of the vast majority of India from the visions and imagination of the political class. This is its strength and also its failing. While it often leads him to place undue faith in the constitution and judiciary without a sufficiently reflexive understanding of their implication in social relations, it also enables him to take an uncompromisingly humanist position which consistently speaks truth to power. In these days of hyper-nationalist hysteria fuelled by nine per cent growth rates, cricketer auctions and world class cities, an expression of undiluted moral outrage at the enormous social inequity upon which the new futures of the country are being planned is more than welcome and of great value. While he eschews analysis in favour of a more hard-hitting style of prose, Singh’s work is a good distillation of the strange paradoxes of excess and deprivation which make up our contemporary realities.
Aarti Sethi
ASIAN DIPLOMACY: The Foreign Ministries of China, India, Japan, Singapore, and Thailand by Kishan S. Rana. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007.
NATIONS have been called janus-faced. Like Janus, their behaviour is schizoid. Nationalists, or those willing to accept the nation as the unit of the real world, have repeatedly ascribed genders to nations, but to no avail. Nations continue to disregard their gender roles. They are often dressed up as Mother Russia one day and the next day appear imagined around the karate-trained body of President Putin. In short, nations have ambiguous imageries – in engendered thoughts, in worldly roles, and in their moral attitude. They talk of disarmament and non-violence from UN’s platforms while brutally dealing with enemies both inside and outside territorial confines.
Starting from such miasmic sources, nations have so far charted a code of behaviour among their community. How a nation behaves with its contemporaries has been defined as international relations. Note the hyphen between inter and national. Much more than a bridge between two unwilling sections, the hyphen signifies that despite their best efforts, non-national elements continue to exercise influence though it is the national that remains foregrounded in the pecking order of global human arrangement.
The language of international relations is diplomacy. In that sense diplomacy is cultural, nation is historic. Nations come with their date of manufacture written all over them; sometimes nations crumble unannounced shocking many like in the case of the USSR, which was a model of what happens when many nations join together to form something like a ‘mother of all nations’. Nations are temporal whereas diplomacy is timeless. An exemplar of preferred cultural styles of engaging with the ‘other’, diplomacy in Asia like its counter part in Europe, precedes the formation of modern nation states. Unfortunately, this dense heritage of Asian diplomacy was forgotten by the postcolonial states like China, India, Thailand and Japan. Decolonization meant that the leaders of the new mid-20th century Asia saw their continent as more of a brotherhood and less as an ancient people playing a new game according to pre-existing laws. This innocence did not last long. A series of bilateral wars proved that the romance of decolonization was not strong enough to contain ancient, non-national elements lurking behind the façade of anti-colonial nationalism. Thankfully, there has not been any trans-Asia war so far involving all the major powers in the region.
There is a basic difference between European diplomacy and the Asian version. The Napoleonic wars and 1815’s Concert of Vienna sprang from the rise of the modern nation after centuries of internecine conflict. Modern international diplomacy in early 19th century Europe somehow managed to shed the hyphenated identities that would dog it later in the 20th and 21st centuries. Comparatively, Asian diplomacy has been forced to handle the national and the non-national questions simultaneously from the moment of their birth. So in case of South Asia, along with modern nations were born congenital questions of religious and sectarian identity; in case of South-East Asia there were unresolved questions of ethno-religious minority; and China was born into a world of denial and derecognition that spawned a series of deadly domestic repression.
When such complexly created nations interact, expect more chaos. Asian diplomacy is, therefore, more complex than any classical West-centric perspectives of diplomacy. Asian diplomacy is a composite, non-monolithic cultural construct. Kishan S. Rana’s book, a first of its kind in the field, is a useful aid to understand Asian diplomacy. Rana elaborates the structures of foreign offices of China, India, Japan, Singapore, and Thailand. Though a timely effort given the fact that there is little available on the institutional aspects of diplomacy, this book is plagued by the contradiction that begins with its title. As against the promise of exploring diplomacy, Rana only succeeds in providing an interesting overview of the institutional making of foreign policy. In this he misses out on the opportunity to address the question: ‘What is Asian diplomacy?’ in a theoretical manner, a distinct loss since Indian scholarship in this field has been particularly slow to emerge. Books on foreign policy were regarded with utmost scholarly disregard during the pre-1998 days, seen primarily as serving civil service aspirants. Thankfully, that is changing. But India, of all important developing countries, is yet to produce scholars exclusively dedicated to foreign policy. In fact Rana is an example of the problem and the privilege. He is a former foreign service official who delved into scholarship at the end of his career. That foreign policy continues to remain a subject of few is a sign of its poverty and not its strength.
Asian diplomacy is certainly mired in poverty of thoughts. Though Rana goes into the structures and processes of foreign policy-making in Asia, he fails to produce a composite theory that might hold the disparate institutions together. This reflects the usual complaints of lack of theorization of IR in the Asian context. Despite a few first rate articles, there is little effort to understand international relations from the Indian theoretical vantage point. As a former career foreign office staff, Rana also has the predictable ‘inside’ stories to cater to the reader.
But Rana more than makes up for the shortfalls in theory with his insights on the institutions of foreign policy-making. At the same time, his book throws up, as an unintended idea, the shortage of original thinking in Asian foreign policy making. As Asian nations like China, India and the rest emerge out of the economic underbelly of the world, they are also increasingly trapped in their new problems. We will not learn about and understand the emerging character of Asian foreign policy unless some original theorization is dedicated to that cause. In particular, we need to comprehend the tensions created by the gaps between the national and the non-national in international relations. It is these gaps that need to be filled theoretically and their role in Asian diplomacy explained. A janus-faced nation can best be understood by works that combine compartments rather by compartmentalized scholarship.
Kallol Bhattacherjee
SOUTH ASIAN COOPERATION AND THE ROLE OF THE PUNJABS by Tridivesh Singh Maini. Siddharth Publications, New Delhi, 2007.
THE troubled history of relations between India and Pakistan has often been seen as the most serious obstacle to improved cooperation within South Asia. Bilaterally too, despite recent efforts, there has been little change on the ground. Though traffic and trade has seen some growth and there has been a prolonged ceasefire on the border, the trust between India and Pakistan continues to be in deficit. Apart from old issues such as India’s active role in dismembering of Pakistan in 1971, which produced suspicion about intentions of the ‘big neighbour’, the main source of conflict between the two countries remains Kashmir, the site of the greatest tension and conflict. A viable solution to the Kashmir problem has, therefore, often been seen as an imperative to improved Indo-Pak relations, which in turn is also likely to boost South Asian cooperation.
It is to this widely held commonsense that Tridivesh Singh Maini’s book proposes an alternative. This alternative, according to Maini, lies in shifting our focus from Kashmir to Punjab. Kashmir, he argues, ‘was not the root cause of partition. Not one person died in Kashmir in 1947.’ The ill effects of partition were felt most in the Punjab where a large number of people were killed and uprooted from their homes on both sides of the newly drawn international border. It is here that the desire for change is most perceptible today. The people of Punjab are most excited about the peace process, are willing to forgive and forget the past and are eagerly looking forward to rebuilding broken bridges. Nowhere has the talk about peace between India and Pakistan been received with so much enthusiasm as amongst Punjabis in the two countries.
He recognizes the fact that the relative positions of the two Punjabs in the respective countries of which they are part differ considerably. The Indian Punjab, for example, occupies a very small proportion of the land area of the country while the Pakistan Punjab is not only the country’s largest province, the Punjabis dominate Pakistan. Yet, despite these differences, the two contexts have a lot in common – common history, culture and agrarian economy. Opening up of the international border for trade would immensely benefit the economies of the two regions. More importantly, cultural excitement among people of the two regions could become a source of a new energy for cooperation and friendship between the two countries, which would eventually help South Asian cooperation.
The author also refers to the steps taken by the two provincial governments and the new-found bonhomie between them. He lauds in particular the initiatives taken by Amrinder Singh, the former chief minister of Indian Punjab, and his counterpart in Pakistani Punjab which are expected to play a positive role in building economic and cultural ties between the two regions. This, however, can go further only when it gets support from the national governments. Maini thus offers several recommendations and suggestions that would help in this process of building the larger South Asian community of nations into a viable effective economic and political block through the goodwill of Punjabis.
The book, however, does not take us very far and ends up merely articulating a sentiment. The idea of Punjabiat is much too weak and fragile to further the peace process. History and political processes have fractured much of what appears to be common cultural ground between the two Punjabs. We will thus need to go deeper into history and undertake serious anthropological research on the varieties of cultural traditions of the region to identify factors that bring them together or push them apart. We will also have to critically re-think the contemporary realities of the two Punjabs to take us beyond nostalgia and help identify the real sources of energy and motivation for peace and larger unity of the region. Only then can we think of the possibilities of recovering the larger Punjabi identity.
Surinder S. Jodhka
BECOMING INDIA by Aniket Alam. Foundation Books, Delhi, 2007.
THE book under review is a study of the Simla Hill States during the colonial period. These states, which consisted of Kullu, Mandi, Bushahar, Suket, Bilaspur, Nalagarh, Dhami, Keothal, Jubbal and Sirmaur, were not under formal control of the British, but were administered by the Rajas. One of the main arguments of the book is that the colonial encounter in this region was non-cataclysmic. Though in this sense it departs from the standard nationalist historiography, Alam does not want his book to be read as an apologia for colonialism. He suggests that this departure may be better read as an aspect of the specificity of this region – the Western Himalayas – in the form of exceptionalism.
The first chapter is devoted to outlining the specificity of this region in terms of its mountainous topography. Though he focuses on the valley of the Sutlej, he emphasizes the importance of linking it to the other sub-regions – the Tibetan trans-Himalaya and the plains below. The western Himalayan pre-modern political economy was structured by its geography and unlike the position of agricultural communities of the plains the agrarian economy of the hills was vulnerable. Since no single productive process was self-sufficient, the agriculturists had to supplement their production with pastoralism and foraging in forests and wastelands. These hill agricultural communities were linked to pastoralist groups such as the Gaddis and the Gujjars. The trans-Himalayan trade connected pastoral groups and agriculturists in a system of mutual exchange. Thus, two types of pastoralism – that of the agricultural communities and also that of pastoralist groups – were integrated into the political economy of these Himalayan states.
The political structures that emerged in this economy were characterized by low division of labour and drew on two distinct forms of political authority. The first was based on control of filliative lineages and the other on control of territory. The lineage was formed around the worship of a deity whose will was expressed by the oracle and other functionaries. Clan leaders also exercised authority through the Khumri as elected heads and were in-charge of all resources within the domain of the deity. Yet the states that emerged from the eighth century onwards were based more on control over the region and territory rather than on lineages. These states were able to sustain themselves by either linking themselves to the local deity or by a process of elaborate ritual separation. The function of the hill state, it would appear, was to regulate the various economic units in a particular territory beyond agricultural communities.
This state system was based upon processes and institutions of surplus appropriation which were non-monetized and therefore relied on the appropriation of goods and labour services. Begar or labour services were of two kinds; one was the regular demand for agricultural labour the other was for porterage and labour for festive occasions. Some commodities were available for circulation but their prices were fixed without any consideration of supply and demand. The major contradiction in this pre-modern economy and society was therefore a conflict between King and deity, a contradiction resolved by the advent of British Rule.
The British conquest of this region was fostered by a desire to extend British rule to natural limits, to control trade with Central Asia and China and to curtail Sikh activities. The defeat of the Sikhs by 1849 and problems with the trans-Himalayan trade made the British realize that it would be best to let the Rajas continue. The revenue settlements of the 1850s, however, mark the first major intervention by the British. British rule made ‘the political position of the Ruler unassailable and converted national resources like forests into inherently cashable commodities under the sole ownership of the hill states’ (p. 85). Revenue settlements also effected another major transformation by granting rights of cultivation to the peasantry – ‘The ruler as the political owner of the land and peasant as the unquestioned possessor of its cultivation became the foundation of all British Settlement.’ This meant that the rule of the deity was relegated to the domain of culture and excluded from the formal exercise of power.
Alam argues that over the 19th century an increasing monetization was effected not only by the land revenue settlement but also by the growing presence of the British who now settled the new towns as hill stations. This meant an increase of commercial networks and emergence of markets for food, fuel, wood and labour. The growing commercial exploitation of the forest hastened and accentuated this shift.
The changing relationship of the Western Himalayan peasantry with the Rajas and British rule is also explored in this book. Three phases of change are identified – the first, from conquest to the 1850s culminated in resistance by the peasants to the revenue demand. The peasant agitation was against high revenue demand in cash and took the form of traditional peasant agitation known as Dumh. However, with the settlements finally in place, the possibility of Dumh receded by the end of the 19th century because negotiations about revenue were no longer possible.
In the second phase, with the stabilization of colonial rule, the British started mapping the forests and establishing hill towns. These changes meant growing demands for labour by the state in the form of Begar and paid services. By the third decade of the 20th century, peasant rebellions emerged to resist these encroachments on their lives.
In the third phase, i.e. by the 1930s, the impact of world wars had transformed the economy and also the self-conception of the hill people. This period witnessed the crystallization of peasant politics in the form of Praja Mandals linked with the All India Peoples State Conference, and supported by organizations like the Simla Congress Committee. Peasant grievances were now about high land revenue, the demarcation of reserved forests, denial of civil liberties and absence of judicial institutions. They also questioned the nexus of the Rajas with the colonial authorities. In this period, new entrants into the peasant groups such as the Dalits also expressed their resistance and refused to pay labour services.
Yet the integration of the Western Himalayas into the colonial system not only affected institutions of state and surplus appropriation but also influenced the self-perceptions of the people as documented in the chapter on ‘Social Movements During British Rule’. This delineates a process of change, which ‘eventually expressed itself in an indigenous desire to reform and recast themselves in the likeness of the people of the plains,’ (p. 213). This was manifest in the ‘conquest’ by an agricultural deity Mahasu, oriented towards social practices of the plains. Mahasu not only displaced other clan deities, but also eroded and suppressed the power of the pastoralist gods. The practice of polyandrous marriages was also modified and transformed. Linked to polyandry was also the custom of bride price and reet marriages. The new intelligentsia was extremely unhappy with these practices because they interpreted this as sale of women. Alam traces this understanding to the ‘greater interaction between the population of the Western Himalayas with Europeans and Indians from outside …and the increasing gap between the traditional profession and their principal means of livelihood.’
The last chapter, ‘After Independence’, follows the politics of peasant groups in Himachal Pradesh and their linkages with the Indian National Congress. Though other peasant groups were critical of the Indian National Congress, but then clearly Himachal has now ‘become’ India. Becoming India is able to document the process of integration of the hill states to the colonial economy and their emergence as Himachal Pradesh. This book fills an important gap in our understanding of colonialism and will be of interest to economists, historians and ethnographers.
Vasudha Pande
CONTESTED COASTLINES: Fisherfolk, Nations and Borders in South Asia by Charu Gupta and Mukul Sharma. Routledge, Delhi, 2008.
IN examining the troubled and tragic journeys of South Asian coastal fisherfolk, victims of defined and undefined boundaries and borders in the seas, arrested and kept in jails by various countries for having entered each other’s territorial waters, Charu Gupta and Mukul Sharma bring to surface an uncharted and under-explored aspect of our nascent project of nation state formation. Modern nation states are difficult to imagine without clearly demarcated and fixed borders, an ability to differentiate between us and them, what is ours and theirs. Rarely is it realized that unlike land where it is easier to draw lines, open seas make such exercises more fluid. And none more so than for peoples who harvest prey which do not respect man-made boundaries. No wonder in a region where borders have acquired a new sanctity, they are seen as creating grave instability and routinely become both the cause and victims of conflict.
Equally, the book invites us to rethink questions of peace and security in the context of people, environment and resources, more so since so much of strife is directly related to environmental degradation and struggle over natural resources. More than in the past where groups of fisherfolk episodically clashed over catch, resource depletion forces them into previously unclaimed territories. This, in a situation where states claim exclusive jurisdiction over one-time open seas, invariably results in punitive action which can easily escalate into wider conflict. The tragedy is not only that fisherfolk unaccustomed to new restrictions get caught in the middle but equally that their countries force new divisions between them by foregrounding differences of new identity markers – nationality, ethnicity and religion. In the process, fisherfolk become pawns in the larger battle between states of the region. The plethora of stories about fisherfolk arrested, boats and equipment destroyed, the increasing involvement of navies and coastguard to patrol and protect territorial waters are testimony to the growing flash-points in our regional waters.
What makes this book interesting, and instructive, is the attempt to focus on the everyday life and travails of coastal fisherfolk. Rather than detail the cumbersome negotiation process to demarcate national territorial waters, we learn more about the problems of survival of marginal folk caught in battles not of their own making. More specifically, in the context of South Asia where it is otherwise difficult to differentiate between South Indian and Sri Lankan fishermen, those from the Gujarat coast and from Pakistan, or the Bengali from the Bangladeshi, the imposition of new rules and regulations only serve to further divide peoples.
In the process, rather than collective regional action to safeguard both the ecology of the seas and the lives and livelihoods of peoples, our respective states and their actions exacerbate conflict in an already troubled region. Clearly, despite recognition that many of these problems are not amenable to uniquely national solutions, our regimes and policy-makers continue to remain trapped in games of upmanship.
To read these conflicts as exclusively or even primarily induced by environmental degradation would, as the authors point out, be missing the point. Central to the story is the impact of the new technologies of fishing, the impact of coastal development and resultant pollution which affects fishery resources, and the entry of corporate players who seek to displace traditional fishing communities. It is finally the growth of unequal distribution of wealth and capitalist relations in coastal areas, the political relations between the countries and the exaggerated anxieties of security and border preservation which help us understand the increased conflicts within and between groups of fisherfolk – small-scale and mechanized, boat owners and workers, between one region and another and between nations.
How does all this square with what are seen as ‘legitimate’ anxieties of nations – in particular to secure borders against intruders, raiders, smugglers and now, terrorists. There is also the struggle over control of deep-sea resources, particularly hydrocarbon, the need to secure trade routes through naval bases and so on. There is concern that a failure to lay claim over a region might give differential advantage to the neighbouring country. So permitting ‘foreign’ fisherfolk to operate in an area might result in ceding control.
Charu Gupta and Mukul Sharma do not dismiss these concerns. However, their nuanced ethnographic detailing of what happens to different groups of fisherfolk from all the countries of the region who become unwitting pawns in the larger game of national rivalries does force us to look for other ways to address these problems. We need to ask whether increasing surveillance and control help and whether artificially created boundaries both on land and sea do not enhance anxiety and conflict. Above all, does not the routinised use of coercion and harassment contribute to more rigid and inward-looking identities that run against the grain of more fluid life and existence?
Finally, more than providing a rich and nuanced discussion of marine resources and peoples in our regions, Contested Coastlines urges us to re-imagine our current models of nation state making and nationalism. Just as our inability to understand that the ‘problems’ of the North East cannot be resolved without loosening the borders and initiating greater cooperation with Bangladesh, Myanmar and China, a case that Sanjib Baruah makes eloquently, the continuing conflicts in our near seas are unlikely to diminish unless all the states of the region move beyond the logic of a narrow nationalism. A failure to do so will only increase strife in the neighbourhood, something that our borderland communities experience on a daily basis.
Harsh Sethi
