Animosity at Bay

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title: Animosity at Bay – An Alternative History of the India – Pakistan Relationship, 1947-1952

Author: Pallavi Raghavan

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2020 (First)

ISBN: 9789353572730

Pages: 247

 

India extracted independence from Britain after a protracted struggle, but it came at a great cost. The country was partitioned and a large exchange of populations took place amidst gross violence and murder. Both new nations met in the battlefield of Kashmir and later on in the venues of international summits and conferences. Belligerence and brinkmanship marked the mutual relationship. Never in the history of these nations did the spirit of friendship or fraternity lift up even a bit. While this atmosphere of animosity pervaded everywhere, there was also an element of partnership among the political leaders and bureaucracy, if not the civil society. This book explores the inter-dominion dialogues of India and Pakistan during the first five years of their independent existence. It also charts out the rare avenues of cooperation between the neighbours, the reasoning behind their acts of cooperation and examines the implications of this on how the relationship continues to function. Pallavi Raghavan is an assistant professor of international relations at Ashoka University, Delhi where her research is focused on India's international history and on the global history of partitions. This study of India's early bilateral relations with Pakistan is the expanded version of the author’s PhD dissertation.

 

The interlocutors of the baby states acknowledged the finality and validity of partition as an administrative solution and created frameworks for the viable coexistence of the successor states. Raghavan notes that some Congress politicians who took up important government positions because of their close proximity to Nehru continued to harbour illusions on the inviolability of the erstwhile Indian state which did much damage to the country's interests which clashed with that of Pakistan. Sri Prakasa, the first Indian high commissioner to Pakistan was one such person. Hailing from UP and being close to Nehru, it was quite easy for Sri Prakasa to land safely on a plum job. However, he continued to criticize the two-nation theory while supposedly guarding India’s vital interests in independent Pakistan and messed up things. He falsely claimed that the Pakistani government was trying to do justice to the minorities and had instructed their officials to treat them well while in reality the Hindus and Sikhs were fleeing for their lives to India. Pakistani politicians never returned the favour. While Sri Prakasa was rolling out his wrong assessment, Pakistan's Zafarullah Khan was forcefully denouncing India in the UN over alleged discriminatory policies towards Muslims. However, the bureaucratic policy was clear and distinct. Far from questioning the soundness of reasons for partition, bureaucrats in both states’ services eagerly embraced the opportunities for success in the making and consolidation of the states.

 

The author keeps a moderate voice in the narrative as befits academia, but this makes the book rather boring. She has failed to identify the Nehru-Liaquat Pact of 1950 as a U-turn in Nehru’s earlier stance of repudiating the two-nation theory. This pact committed both governments to be accountable to each other on the issue of the protection of minority rights. In other words, this obligated India to be accountable to Pakistan for the welfare of Indian Muslims who are Indian citizens! This is another clear instance of Nehru's spineless yielding to Pakistan in the face of their pressure tactics and veiled threats to take the issue to international fora. Nehru was mortally afraid of international public opinion. However, the author claims the pact to be an accommodative piece of writing. Naturally, the pact collapsed after it ceased to serve Pakistan's interests in just a few months since its inception. During the consultations leading to it, Nehru was doubly careful not to antagonize Pakistan. He instructed Indian officials posted in East Bengal not to get too far involved with the problems of minorities there (p.61). If the author is to be believed, the pact stabilized the flow of migrants across the Bengal delta for the time being and helped avoid the break out of war between the countries over the refugee problem. But the nation was shocked by the return of J N Mandal, a Hindu leader who had migrated to Pakistan in 1947, within a few months of the pact’s existence. He resigned his position as law minister of Pakistan, accusing them of treating the pact as a mere scrap of paper and that the future of Hindus in East Bengal had become absolutely hopeless.

 

Settlement of evacuee property was another issue in which Nehru’s haphazard policies did lasting damage to the country and the interests of the minorities who had evacuated from West Punjab. The accepted practice was hugely skewed in Pakistan’s favour as there existed a large asymmetry in the value of immovable properties left behind by minorities fleeing both countries. Hindu and Sikh urban evacuee property in West Pakistan was worth Rs. 525 crores and Muslim urban evacuee property in India was worth only Rs. 125 crores. Attempt to reach a No War Pact was another exercise that was so dear to Nehru's heart, but ended up in wasting valuable bureaucratic time. Nehru wanted to boost his image as an international statesman by signing a pact with his neighbour that renounced aggression as an instrument of state policy and sought to use arbitration and negotiation to settle disputes. This assumption is quite naive in international statecraft, but Nehru followed it up in some detail. The Pakistanis were quick to see their chance and listed five subjects that needed arbitration: evacuee property, canal waters of Punjab, division of assets, Junagadh and Kashmir. They wanted specific bodies of arbitrators for these issues whose decisions would be binding and the establishment of a timeframe within which these could be settled. Nehru modelled the No War Pact on the Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928 on similar lines between France and Germany. The fact that it had failed miserably in the Second World War did not enlighten Nehru of the futility of such attempts. However Sardar Patel vehemently opposed it, arguing that it would only help Pakistan by prejudicing the advantages India already possessed on most of the outstanding issues.

 

The Indus Waters Treaty does not come inside the time period of study in the book, as it was signed only in 1960. Raghavan has not gone into the details of the treaty, but spells out the events that led to a World Bank-orchestrated mechanism that was instrumental in devising a treaty. Here also, we see Nehru's inept handling of the issue that ended up with a huge loss of India's rights of the Indus waters. It is indeed impossible to deny Pakistan the life-giving waters of the Indus river system and it is equally untenable to negate their legal rights on it. While this is so, there was no compulsion on India to conclude a treaty in the shortest possible time because it was the upper riparian party that itself conferred a great advantage. India could have obtained what it wanted simply by extending the negotiations under some pretext to gain time. But Nehru agreed to a formula that was a sell out by relinquishing claims on all rivers that flowed through Kashmir. The author is, of course, silent on all these aspects but serves an oblique reference by reproducing Pakistani President Ayub Khan’s entry in his memoirs. Khan wrote: “Even though it might be second best, we stood to lose everything otherwise. While there was no cause for rejoicing at the signing of the treaty, there was certainly cause for satisfaction that a positively very ugly situation has been averted” (p.136).

 

The book retains its unattractiveness due to its origin as an academic research paper. Every point that is described in the main text is repeated in an introduction and a conclusion. The arguments also do not seem to be having any political rigour. The author’s assumption that India was the weaker party that tried to exhibit its power as a full-fledged state because it had no proper justification for existence is shocking and totally off the mark. The author argues that India's emphasis on its territorial integrity stemmed from an anxiety about the lack of any other unifying principle. In terms of language or religion or ethnicity or even a foolproof basis of claims to citizenship the Indian Union offered no unifying, cohesive principle for a diverse population (p.185). After seven decades, it would be good if the author takes a look back at the history of the subcontinent and see for herself which country had stood unified while facing several threats on its integrity.

 

The book is recommended only to serious readers of political history of South Asia.

 

Rating: 2 Star