Birth of a nation
The erstwhile internationality of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan is now writ large enough for all the world to see. The message in East Bengal launched on March 25 shriveled the always tenuous load between the two parts of the country just as certainly as it killed the students of Dacca University or the helpless people of Ramna Kali Bari. But what is now starting to burst under the inevitable strains of independence.
The confrontation now under way in the subcontinent has been coming for the past twenty-five years, but not because of the eccentricity of partition. That has played its part certainly but it is not the fundamental cause of the tensions now racking all the people of this teeming area-a seventh of the world’s population. What we are now seeing coming home to root are the illogicalities and uncertainties of a whole generation.
Pakistan was founded out of a sense of grievance, and it has never lost it. The course of events there since independence suggest that in many ways it is its future and has continued to feed on it and keep it alive. It never resembled a democracy as it is understood in the west and the exploitation of Eastern wing by the Punjabs, virtually ensured a continuing threat to the existence of the country.
The Easterners were always a majority and yet their standard of living dropped steadily . Ten years ago there was a disparity of 32 percent between per capita income in the East and the West and by last year this gap had grown to 61 per cent in favor of the Western wing. The East, with three of the people and earning up to three-quarters of the country foreign exchange, got only between one-fifth and one third of the country’s development expenditure and less than a quarter of the private investment.
An official report by the Pakistan Government Planning Commission estimated that twenty years after independence there had been a net transfer of resources of $1,000 millions from East to West. The cost of rice in the East – the staple food-was three times the cost in the West and five times the cost of wheat, the basic food in the Punjab.
But there has always been a ready scapegoat in Pakistan for all the problems and tensions which its internal policies produced…
The conflict with India has always been there to embryo but has never really emerged in its final sense. The fighting over Kashmir was real enough but always had a limited aim: neither country was interested at that time in actually defeating the other, but simply either fending it off or showing its muscles . The climate has changed powerfully in the past few years and Pakistani prophecies may well turn out to be self-fulfilling.
The problem which India has faced since 1947 was that it was washed on it by Gandhi. He was a visionary who saw the emergence of India as a great more to the world high…. The hurly-burly of self-interest that characterized the international scene. The Hindu pro-occupation with pollution, of the body and the soul, underlay both and the soul, underlay both his personal crede and his national aspirations. What he wanted was a force against the evils he saw around him, and India was his instrument. His tactics against the imperial power were always those of morals… and he envisaged a similar role for his country.
It would be a shining light in a naughty world and the policies of Nehru maintained this Ideal. Non-alignment, a readiness to point the finger at transgressors, and cleanliness of attitude and action : these were the underpinnings of the post-independence years.
Another viceroy
But there was a hangover from the Raj which was an essential element in all this – a monolithic governing structure which could dominate the disparate regional groups and ensure that the country remained as a credible whole. For all the constitutional undertakings and the undoubtedly genuine commitment to western-style democracy, Nehru was in essence another victory (albelt by consent). The Congress Party dominated and stiffed the political scene, and Nehru dominated the congress. It was a benign one party state, charged with a sense of mission and looking to its people for a sense of purpose and sacrifice which had moved its founders.
It might not have been found in an industrialized society living in urban concentrations. In a backward agrarian population, with a long history of oppression and no great political sophistication, there was a remarkable response. But the logic of independence was that the rulers had to chip away at the very foundations of their creed. They had to industrialize, they had to create a real rise in the standards of living. So, as the cake got larger, there was a greater readiness to argue about how large a lump everyone should get.
And what we are now seeing is the inevitable transition of India from a moral force to a nation state as we normally understand it. It would be ideal to imagine that it will be achieved without the same sort of upheaval in recent Europe from the fifteenth century onward societies unfortunately. just : don’t evolve peacefully : It is not in the nature of the beast.
In as far as there are ever any plain indicators of social change, they show a definite pattern of breakdown. It is always hard to avoid moral overtones in dealing with social change – the assumption is always that its modifications must be unacceptable since they threaten the existing fabric – but none of these comments is intended to pass any judgment. You might just as well have a point of view about the solar cycle.
Human nature being what it is, one of the first places to look for streets is its reflection in violence. In the past ten years the population of India has risen by 14.3 per cent. The murder rate, according to the latest published statistics, has gone up 35 per cent. Altogether 386233 people were arrested on rioting charges during the year. There are more than 1,000 riots a week, and more than 25 people are killed or maimed as a result of them each week. The weekly number of murder victims is 283.
Money is often another way of assessing the attitudes and expectations of any group, and here again the Indian picture is certainly not one of stability. The whole emphasis since independence has been towards public ownership and the dismantlement of the highly inequitable distribution of wealth within the country. The campaign has only been towards public ownership and the dismantlement of the hugely inequitable distribution of wealth within the county. The campaign has only been marginally successful and Parliament has just passed an amendment to the constitution, with a certain amount of legal dissension, which in effect will allow it to confiscate private property on its own terms. It has given every sort of assurance that it will not use the power in a draconian way, but it has nonetheless removed the legal safeguards. Any government which feels obliged to go beyond the rule of law is plainity under pressure.
What also looms large across the whole Indian scene is a considerable degree of corruption, almost inevitable where you get reflective one-party rule …
Obviously, that is not a field that lends itself to quantification but the backhander is a normal part of anyone’s life at every level.
If you haven’t – and most people haven’t, then it’s five rupees here and twenty rupees there which will pay your way through the inordinate number of small fry who stand between you and whatever bit of paper you may need to do what you want. The credibility of the Government’s stand against private property took a bit of a dent when it emerged that nine Cabinet Ministers between them held 100.000 pounds worth of property in Delhi alone.
The point of all this is not to establish that India is on its knees. That is far from the truth. It is on the verge of becoming self-sufficient in food and it is probably far more united now than in its history. But there are obvious Indications that it is undergoing enormous social and political changes and that its future path is probably quite different from that trodden till now.
It means that we have now hit the predictable point at which the contradictions of India and those of Pakistan have coincided. While the repression in Pakistan has been much more overt and crude that in India has been no less, for all the subtle masking. Both have really been governed…. The catastrophic mistake that Pakistan made was to try to stifle the pressure which was building up. India, at least, has preserved the channels for change.
The result now looks as if it will be that Pakistan will break up while India will remain, though in a state of flux for some time yet. It may go through a period where no one loves it like they did, but that will pass. It is now starting to look around for friends, and has apparently found one in the Soviet Union, though it is an alliance which many Indians regard with great skepticism. It is anxious to come to reasonable terms with China., It would even like to find a modus operandi with Pakistan, believe it or not, so that it can concentrate on its domestic problems.
The process that India is now about to face is another part of the growth into a nation state- how you extricate yourself from a victory in war. At the moment there is an incredible euphoria about Bangladesh and the decision to recognise it and fight a war of liberation on its behalf. This allows no contemplation of the future pattern or relations.
Is the new republic to be a client of India? That will hardly acord with Bengali nationalism. Will it be left to go its own way, with the Russians and Chinese both busily trying to dig themselves into the fabric of this handily placed enclave? If it does, what effect will that have on West Bengal, which is just as ungovernable as its eastern twin?
More immediately there will be the problem of how Indian troops pull out of Bangladesh. The potential for a bloody rampage to avenge the horrors of the past nine months are plainly there. Can India just leave the Bengalis to it or must her army try to impose stability against the will of the people?
The closer you look at the picture the more it seems that Mrs. Gandhi is hiding nothing in the East. It will be a strained period for India and may well spark off its own domestic tensions. But that again is one of the hard lessons of power. It’s nice to have but must be exercised discreetly. There is no such thing as a cheap war, material or moral. What the whole subcontinent will now have to face off the hill for the past quarter century’s extravagantes.
Reference: The Guardian, 11 December, 1971