(Speech by Raj Mishra at Johns Hopkins University on August 3, 2002; edited for publication)

August 14 and 15, 2002 mark the 55th anniversary of the division of colonial India into India and Pakistan amidst a horrific communal carnage. The current state of the two countries and of their peoples, both those living inside or outside can be traced to that false start. 

The low indices of human development that South Asia sports, its newly earned status as the “most dangerous place” on earth, and the bottomless pit of sectarian and state violence that the region has come to symbolize are the outcome of the division that took place and the transformation to the political and economic system that did not take place.  Its legacy is ours to endure. The responsibility to transcend that legacy is also ours to discharge. This is the subject matter I want to discuss with you, the new generation of the youth pursuing higher education in the US, in the hope that you acquire a social consciousness commensurate with your conditions and that you discharge the social responsibility that will make you proud.

Main Question:
The first point I want to discuss, in the spirit of the academic environment you are in, is if it is possible to develop South Asia into a prosperous, democratic and peaceful land out of what was engendered in the birth of India and Pakistan in 1947.  In general terms, a new beginning engenders certain possibilities, and one strives to realize all that which is engendered in that origin. When all the possibilities are exhausted, one either moves on to establish a new beginning, containing a new set of possibilities, a new set of opportunities that have become available, or one gets enmeshed in endless incongruities with no way out. With the former, life flourishes, and with the latter, rot sets in. This is a philosophical view of growth, development and motion. 

In the Indian philosophical tradition this will be called sunyabad where zero is not nothing and one, two, three etc., owe their existence to zero. If no zero is established where various possibilities are engendered, no one, two, three can come out of it. In European, especially the Greek philosophical tradition, this is equivalent to a qualitative change giving rise to quantitative change and in turn creating new qualitative changes. In historical context, the rise and fall of empires and civilizations are examples of how societies develop, grow and decline in quality and quantity. In this light, the question that arises is whether it is possible to end the present quagmire of sectarian and state violence, the threat of war, or grinding poverty on the basis of the economic and political system established for colonial exploitation, and subsequently passed on to India and Pakistan?

Historical Background:
The economic history of India in the last 300 years is one of decline, both in relative and in absolute terms.  At one point, India was the destination of European traders and merchants to buy fine goods paid for in gold and silver because Europe had nothing of quality and value that could be sold in India.  It was the land to that every Englishman and European wanted to find riches go to get rich.  Today that land has been transformed to a land filled with deprived and subjugated people longing to travel to Europe and America to escape oppression or to seek a livelihood. 

India’s colonial rulers established an economic system that suited their aim of extracting the maximum out of the resources of India and the hard labour of her peoples. The British created new property ownership rules, remuneration rules, trade rules, rules governing distribution, etc. by destroying what existed or that was evolving indigenously in India. Their aim was to transform India into a supplier of resources and labour for their industries and as a secure market for their products. They established a political system to administer those rules and used various methods, including divide and rule, brute force, corruption and bribery, as well as a limited political franchise, to maintain that political system. 

The new economic system was a complete break from whatever India had created until then, especially in the way property ownership existed and the way the economy met the needs of the people. The political system was also a complete break from what Indians had created through the centuries, one that had the aim of providing security and prosperity to the people. The new economic and political systems together were presented as an advancement, but in reality, the alien political rule took away any semblance of security people enjoyed and the new economic system took away any control people had under the old mode of production and distribution. Gradually, more and more people were alienated from their land and were displaced to the cities and to other countries.  If indentured laborers were leaving India for Trinidad in the 19th century, its counterpart today is the emigrations of professionals to Europe and North America in the late-20th century. The country’s natural resources were put up for plunder and the human resources, for exploitation as the state took the new aim of overseeing these processes - a recipe for relative and absolute economic decline. 

This new political and economic system engendered very definite possibilities for the new property owners and those latent possibilities remain the only ones that can play themselves out.  Britain’s granting formal independence to India was the definitive proof that those possibilities had been exhausted, and there was nothing left in them for the colonialists to grow into. There was an objective need to establish a new beginning, a new zero without which a rot was bound to set in irrespective of whether colonialism continued or not. There was no possibility of further advancement as long as that system remained. My thesis is that because the colonial economic and political system remained in tact in 1947, it is not possible to create anything else out of the formal independence other than more division, more poverty, more violence, less unity, less prosperity, less democracy, less peace. 

It is necessary to deliberate on the need to create a new paradigm, a new basis, a new beginning for South Asia so that this new beginning can grow into prosperity, democratic rights, peace, harmony etc. for the people. This question has presented itself for discussion.

The Present haunted by the Past:
I want to spend a little time in elaborating how all the developments since 1947, including the most recent carnage in Gujarat, the threat of war between India and Pakistan and the rise of terrorist violence in Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta etc. are not aberrations but the logical consequences of not discarding the economic and political system established by the colonialists.  These are the curses of the legacy of division that was formalized in 1947.

The British built the present political-economic system step by step, and within this, there were both beneficiaries and victims.  The history of colonial India is a history of rebellions and uprisings of the people who were the victims, and a history of their repression and suppression by the beneficiaries. The British recognized early on in their rule that they could not do in India what they had done in North America to the natives – i. e. a summary annihilation.  Instead, they deliberately inculcated a class of loyalists in whose interests it would be to perpetuate their rule. In political terms, the loyalists were those social forces who felt threatened by the popular uprisings and owed their existence to the patronage of the colonial rulers, providing legitimacy to the colonial rule in return. The zamindars or landlords of India as a group belong to this category. The group of traders and merchants of India who arose after the East India Company had decimated the indigenous class of traders and merchants of the pre-colonial India also belong to this category. They formed an alliance with the British to further their narrow aims and sided with the British in suppressing the rebellions. 

Many of these loyalist forces nurtured their own ambitions and donned the robes of nationalism to put themselves at the head of mass struggles to extract concessions for themselves from the British. The history of the anti-colonial struggle is filled with chapters of how the struggle for freedom was hijacked and turned into one for self-rule, modeled after what the British themselves were practicing. The alliance of merchants, zamindars and the British-trained intelligentsia was gradually accommodated into the economic and political system with each concession the British made in response to mass revolts. The biggest concession of all was the transfer of power when these collaborators agreed to the British formula for partition and independence. The power from the British crown passed to the hands of this alliance that had perfected the art of subverting the interests of the fighting masses. 

When the British stepped aside in 1947, this alliance took control of the state apparatus and wielded it to safeguard the economic interests of the colonial corporations as well as domestic business houses and landlords from the hands of the mass of workers, peasants and tribal peoples of India. That was what the independence and division of 1947engendered and that is exactly what has been playing out for the past 55 years. The landlords and business houses have grown as a whole and some new houses have joined their ranks, but the majority is still awaiting the fruits of independence to reach them.

For 40 years after formal independence, the “independent” rulers of India developed an economy which they called a “socialistic pattern of society” but which in actual fact charged the taxpayer to develop the state sector of economy as a subsidy for the private corporations by providing them with raw metals and steel, energy, chemicals etc. at cheap rates. They developed a political culture that thrived on the vote bank divisions of castes, religions, languages etc., and used the state apparatus to keep the divisions alive by showering privileges on those who behaved and punishing those who did not.   The tools of the colonial state such as riots, massacres, assassinations etc., were perfected and used with increasing frequency to keep people disunited and incapable of making the claim to participate in the governance of India. 

The declaration of National Emergency in 1975 was the clearest indication that when threatened with mass opposition to the governance by the business houses and landlords, the people had little protection of their rights through the Constitution imposed on them in 1950. Independent India’s state apparatus was responsible for more bloodshed in India in the first 30 years than what the British colonial state had inflicted on India in the previous 90 years (i. e. 1857-1947).   By the early 1980s, a new standard was established in the level of violence and division the state was willing to use to maintain its grip on power with Operation Blue Star and the Delhi massacres of November 1984.  It was then only a matter of time before the Babri Masjid demolition and the Mumbai riots would take place. The killers of Delhi 1984 and the of Mumbai in 1992-1993 were never tried and punished, and that precedent set the stage for the carnage of Gujarat in 2002, which has surpassed all other such episodes in its brazenness, brutality and criminality. The recent speculation that the Gujarat carnage has created favourable electoral prospects for one of the parties in the next assembly election the logical outcome of what was engendered in the political system established in 1947. 

Mother of All Divisions:
1947 began with the enduring division of three of the nations of South Asia – the Punjab, Bengal and Kashmir. These divisions have ensured that the unity of the peoples remains elusive not just in India but also in Pakistan and in Bangladesh. All other divisions that exist in South Asia are secondary to these national divisions. 

These days, one hears a lot about how the problems of Punjab, Kashmir or Bengal are easily traced to religious divisions. But a little reflection will show that it is the national division which is the bedrock on which those other divisions continue to fester even though no one speaks about it. There is a great pressure on all the peoples of South Asia to shy away from posing the problem of negating the national divisions and uniting the divided nations. Various political forces are encouraged to focus on religious, linguistic, caste and other divisions, which, I must emphasize, are very serious problems.  But the net result of such distortion is that there have been more divisions because of such practices and more are yet to follow. For example, the Kashmir crisis has thrown up talk of the trifurcation of Kashmir –instead of posing the problem of its unification. The same is the case with Bengal and there is a proposal to further divide West Bengal. East Punjab has already been split into Punjab and Haryana and more division may yet follow. Other nations of India face similar pressures.

The point to recognize is that national aspirations for self-determination are objective and self-determination is a right of any nation – something that belongs to it, that cannot be given or wished away. This right belongs to nations of Kashmir, Punjab, Bengal and so on and these nations will attempt to affirm that right until it is realized. The example of the Quebec nation in Canada is an example of how the striving for national self-determination cannot be wished away.  To deliberately deny the right of nations of South Asia for self-determination by imposing endless divisions on them is to inflict deep wounds on those nations and set the stage for future tragedies. Kashmir is a living example of this tragic process. Furthermore, the problem is not limited to Kashmir but affects all other nations, inside both India and Pakistan.  It affects national minorities from South Asia living in far off places – be it Fiji, Britain, Canada or the US.  Dealing with the problem of national division may hold the key to the solution of the problem of political unity among the peoples of South Asia.

Imperial Ambitions and Kashmir:
Developments in Kashmir also show something much worse and much more sinister that is playing itself out in front of our eyes. The division of Kashmir in 1947-49 had set the stage for the new rulers of both India and Pakistan to fight over the territory under one other’s control. These rulers, imbued with the colonial outlook, nursed ambitions to become imperial powers like their British patrons and vied for their own spheres of influence.  The use of war and annexation to exert control over large spheres of influence were colonial-era tools, and they similarly became the tools of the new rulers of Pakistan and India.  India and Pakistan have fought wars over Kashmir. They have built up their military machines, developed new weapon systems and purchased armaments from the big powers of the world by playing up the threats by each other on the basis of the division of Kashmir. 

This policy has suited the colonialists well as this has given them an opening for interference and possible intervention in the name of “maintaining peace”.  The US, Soviet Union and China have used the Kashmir issue not to unify the Kashmir nation, but to build their relationships with India and Pakistan. Afghanistan had appeared as a zone of contention between India and Pakistan by the mid-1990s. When the US intervened into Afghanistan in 2001 by accusing it of aiding and abetting terrorism, the fight for control of Afghanistan acquired an international scope.  The Kashmir and Afghanistan problems have merged into one at this time and it is no longer only India and Pakistan that are contenders for control for the region.  The old colonial power Britain and new powers like the US are now also well enmeshed in that contention. The latest rise in tension at the Indo-Pak border and the nuclear threats are thus directly traceable to the division that was imposed in 1947.  It is providing the basis for American-European intervention in Asia which could effectively negate the independence of 1947. As I said earlier, if the new basis is not established when needed, endless congruities become the norm and this is what we may be witnessing in these latest developments.

During the entire Cold War period, the US position on Kashmir called for a UN mandated to resolve the issue.  But just recently, the US has suggested that elections in Kashmir (not a plebiscite) would suffice in ascertaining the wishes of the people.  I can say that elections have been taking place all over India for many decades - but the suggestion that they amount to ascertaining the wishes of the people for their governance would be erroneous. There is nothing magical about the Kashmir elections now. If anything, they will legitimise more division and state violence on the one hand and increase Indo-Pak tensions on the other - because those are the possibilities engendered in the arrangements of 1947.  The right to self-determination of Kashmir is not engendered in the 1947 arrangements and it is futile to suggest that this can happen through the upcoming state assembly elections. 

A Plan to Intervene:
The second point I want to raise is a relatively simple one. It has to do with each one of us separately and together asking the question, what should and could we do under the conditions.  It is apparent that we have a problem in the country of our origin, in the part of the world where a quarter of all humanity lives.  It is not acceptable that this section of humanity remains marginalized in the world for no fault of their own or that we remain marginalized and be treated as second class citizens because our origins lie in that part of the world. But do we have an outlook that is commensurate with the requirements of ending this state of affairs?

The yoke put on India and South Asia some 300 hundred years ago by European colonial expansion has not been lifted fully with the formal independence of 1947 and of late,  that yoke is becoming heavier. Just within the last year, the developments in the region following the 9/11 attacks have made India and Pakistan more vulnerable to outside interference, war, terrorist violence and so on. If independence was meant to lighten the yoke of foreign interference, the trend has been opposite that in the past year.  We, who are living abroad, feel the effects of those developments in our own lives but there is nothing out there that is helping us to find our bearings. For example, it is constantly suggested in the US that Indians and Pakistanis are less responsible in exercising the nuclear option than their western counterparts, or that the people of South Asia are religious fanatics. We are being called upon to defend the infamies committed in India and Pakistan and to take sides. The need to fight such a pressure and to transcend the Eurocentrist outlook on India and Pakistan is an urgent one, integrally connected with our fight to end the hierarchical treatment of our status here in the US. It is an integral part of acquiring a coherent outlook on India, on our position in the US and the world.

We need to build a movement here to tell the truth about what ails South Asia. The existing body of knowledge on South Asia is one that either laments or seeks justification for the poverty and strife of South Asia. It is the same Eurocentrist notion of Europeans taking civilization to the colonial peoples that this scholarship perpetuates. This is what we have to refute. It cannot be done by taking cheap shots here and there but requires serious theorizing and summation. It is necessary to create this body of knowledge and also to create the mechanisms to disseminate that knowledge. We need to think about building professional institution to oversee this work.

The new scholarship must tell the truth about India’s conditions and the underlying reasons. By definition, it has to challenge the lies coming from visiting personalities, home grown scholars and experts who never tire of explaining away all the misfortunes of the people as products of “ancient hatreds”, or of blaming the victims themselves for their suffering. The task is to develop our own work here in the form of research, analysis, study, discussion etc., and disseminate that body of information to the broader audience of South Asians and non-South Asians alike. There will be others who will follow, but there is no one who is systematically carrying out such work at this time. 

The aim of such work is to place the need for a paradigm shift on the agenda of India and the world.  This work belongs to all those who are concerned about the future of South Asia and South Asians, but the generation of youth with links to South Asian nations have the special responsibility to take the lead in this work and shape their future as citizens of this country without giving up their nationality. 

What you will find as you take up this work is that this idea of creating a paradigm shift in India is not a peculiar thing for India alone but applies to the entire world. The need for paradigm shift is valid for the economic and political system of the US, Canada, Britain and so on because the economic and political systems in these countries also do not serve the needs of their peoples. Nowhere do the institutions of the past centuries work. The definitions and theories that were formulated to defend particular property relations of the past are still in vogue even though the need today is to defend human dignity which the old property relations have come to violate. No cost is too high for the well being of the people, no individual, community or country is disposable, no culture or language is second rate. But this is how things stand at this time and they need all-round renewal.

To conclude, the proposal I am making here today is thus not merely a proposal to do something about India or South Asia but really a proposal to deal with our own conditions and our own future. This is connected with the affirmation of our human personality, as thinking people who can consciously create a future for our own as we see fit. The new century has begun with Corporations and multinationals having an upper hand and imposing their dictate over the peoples in this country and in other countries, but this is bound to end with people gaining an upper hand. The writing is on the wall and on this occasion of getting together to mark the 55th anniversary of formal independence and division of India, we should resolve to negate the legacy that has been handed down to us. 

Thank you.