India and Pakistan’s 70 years of Independence: A look back at how destiny set the midnight’s children apart.
India and Pakistan mark their 70th year of existence on 14 and 15 August. Seventy years ago, both nations stared at an uncertain future after the tumultuous episode of Partition, which killed more than a million people on either side of the new border.
As Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah were addressing their respective Constituent Assemblies, they knew the task ahead was not going to be easy. Both nations lacked the institutions that could sustain the test of time. Democracy was an alien concept in both countries — more so in Pakistan. A model of governance had to be institutionalised through a written Constitution. Moreover, both nation-states had a myriad of socio-political issues to resolve — ethnic and linguistic sub-nationalism, role of religion in state affairs, devolution of power to constituents and implementing land reforms.
While both countries faced similar socio-economic issues, India had the advantage of being the successor state of the British Raj. In 1947, India was home to about a quarter of the world population and ranked among the top five industrialised nations in the world. Pakistan, on the other hand, was nothing more than an amputated piece of land without a coherent industrial base or even a capital city.
In the backdrop of such challenges, Nehru and Jinnah came up with impressive inaugural speeches. While Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” speech set the tone for India’s future role as a responsible voice of the third world, Jinnah’s “secular State” speech sought to position Pakistan as a country where every citizen, irrespective of his religion will be treated equally.
Although, Jinnah’s speech sounded an antithesis of the very concept of Pakistan – a state for the Muslims of India. However, both leaders would not have had the slightest of idea on how the destinies of their countries would pan out in the next seven decades.
Lord Louis Mountbatten decided on the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent on 3 June 1947.
The sheer power of personalities
India had Jawaharlal Nehru at the helm of affairs till his death in May 1964, while Jinnah lost his battle against tuberculosis within 13 months of Pakistan’s creation as a separate homeland for the Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent.
Strong personalities have often shaped the early destinies of countries. Kemal Pasha Ataturk ruled modern-day Turkey from 1923 to 1938, transforming the Islamic Caliphate into a modern secular republic. Similarly, George Washington, the founding father of the United States, led the world’s first oldest democracy, first as a military leader and then as its inaugural president, in the process creating an edifice by which the country still stands by – more or less.
Despite all his flaws, Nehru was an institution builder, creating and nurturing several institutions that have endured the test of time. The Election Commission – arguably the best-run State institution — is perhaps the single biggest contribution of Nehru.
Whether every Nehruvian institution was effective is still debatable, but nevertheless, Nehru turned his vision of a socialist, democratic and secular India into reality before he passed away on 27 May 1964.
Nehru’s impact on India’s early history can be gauged by the fact that it was a young Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who had paid the richest tribute to his dear “Panditji“ in the Rajya Sabha:
“A dream has remained half-fulfilled, a song has become silent, and a flame has banished into the Unknown. The dream was of a world free of fear and hunger; the song a great epic resonant with the spirit of the Bhagwad Gita and as fragrant as a rose, the flame a candle which burnt all night long, showing us the way. Mother India’s beloved prince has gone to sleep.”
Jinnah died too soon to turn his vision of a Turkey-like Pakistan into reality. However, historians still debate whether Pakistan could have become South Asia’s Turkey had Jinnah lived long enough to fulfil his dream of emulating his idol Ataturk.
But history is the saga of many ifs and buts.
The reticent Jinnah never developed a second generation of leadership in the Muslim League. When asked who all he thought helped him achieve Pakistan, Jinnah remarked “I, my secretary and his typewriter”.
Jinnah’s death created a huge void in the national leadership, which could never really be filled. Pakistan struggled with political instability, the Constitution took nine years to take shape, while the idea of democracy failed in the nascent nation-state.
India’s first education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad predicted the rise of army in Pakistan.
India’s Damocles Swords
In 1958, General (later field marshal) Ayub Khan took over the reins of the country. Since then, the military has shaped the destiny of Pakistan, either directly or indirectly.
Towards the end of 1960s, Ayub had strengthened the military’s hold over the State machinery and inaugurated a Constitution establishing a presidential form of government, elected by “basic electors” – a concept which was as vague as it sounds.
Meanwhile, India had begun to take baby steps into the world of democracy. Proving critics wrong, India successfully held four general elections. The Centre, aided by several states, also introduced legislations to implement land reforms, albeit with limited success.
Between mid-1950s and 1960s, India witnessed the climax in two major issues: official language and language-based statehood.
Nehru for the record was opposed to idea of creating states based on languages, fearing the rise of sub-nationalism. While Nehru’s fears might have been true to some extent, the move ultimately helped India to enrich the edifice of federalism – an idea which was already enshrined in the Constitution.
The federalism debate was compounded by linguistic zeal in non-Hindi parts of India. While the federalism debate was being settled, the issue of a common language propped up. With none of the languages being spoken by the majority, the question was always expected to be the Damocles Sword for the Centre.
As the Centre’s deadline of 31 January, 1965 — the day Hindi would become the sole official language — approached, Tamil Nadu erupted against the decision. Other non-Hindi speaking states like West Bengal too voiced their dissent. It took days of rioting in Tamil Nadu for the Centre to scrap the idea.
In 1967, the Union government amended the Official Languages Act, 1963 to allow English to continue as a link language until the Parliament passes a resolution to reverse the decision. The Constitution had already accorded the status of official language to 14 (now 22) languages through the VIIIth Schedule of the Constitution.
Thus, India was saved from possible Balkanisation. Although debatable, one can say that India could take such decisions, partly due to its perceived commitment to socialist and pluralistic ideals along with the strong leadership provided by the Congress party.
But the language issue turned out to be the death knell for the “two nation theory” in Pakistan.
Muhammad Zia ul Haq, a Jalandhar-born Punjabi, visited India in 1987.
A farce called ‘two-nation theory’
Pakistan was the product of the “two-nation theory” – a belief that Hindus and Muslims had always been separate nationalities within India. It did not matter whether Indian Muslims came from different cultures and ethnicity. The proponents of the theory believed that religion will be the glue to stick every Indian Muslim.
However, the theory proved to be farcical from 1950s onwards, when ethnic sentiments emerged in East Bengal over the alleged economic and cultural indifference by Pakistan’s western wing.
Separated from each other by over a thousand miles, religion was the only common factor between the two wings of the country.
The obsession with the theory meant that ethnic and language issue was never given serious consideration.
Since the establishment of Pakistan, it was amply made clear that Urdu would continue to be the national language of the newly-carved nation-state. This is what Jinnah said in a speech at Dhaka:
“Let me make it clear to you that the State language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead is merely the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function. Look at the history of other countries. Therefore, so far as the State language is concerned, Pakistan’s language should be Urdu; but, as I have said, it will come in time.”
Nevertheless, Bengali was made an “official language” along with Urdu, but it remained so only on paper. Bengali, as conventional wisdom suggested, was always considered a “Hindu language”, while Urdu came to be signified as the symbol of Islam in the Subcontinent.
Federalism as an idea never took off in Pakistan.
In 1955, four provinces of the western wing – Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – were unified under the One Unit scheme to bring “parity” between the two wings of Pakistan. The plan also nullified the numerical advantage of the Bengalis, ending up alienating the eastern wing. The controversial scheme was ultimately scrapped in 1970.
The Anti-Bengali sentiment transgressed the economic realm too. The eastern wing was discriminated in the allocation of central funds, with western wing receiving 70 percent of the funds between 1950 and 1970.
All these factors forced Awami leader Mujibur Rahman to seek more autonomy in the 1960s. However, Pakistan’s military dictatorship brooked no dissent as Mujibur and fellow leaders were jailed for their demands.
Things reached the nadir, when Bengali nationalists declared independence in March 1971. Nine months later, Bangladesh was born.
After the liberation of Bangladesh, India signed a friendship treaty with the newly independent country.
‘Bhuttoism’ and ‘Indira’s India’
Nine months before India entered the 13-day war with Pakistan which created Bangladesh, Indira Gandhi comprehensively won the fifth general elections. But Indira’s ascendancy also sowed the seed for her ultimate ouster.
With a mammoth parliamentary majority and control over most of India’s state governments, Indira wielded absolute power. But as John Dalberg-Acton once said, “Power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Indira’s new found absolute power soon came under Opposition’s fire.
The anti-Indira sentiment reached its zenith when the Centre declared Emergency in June 1975. In the next 18 months, Opposition was suppressed, media was silenced, lakhs were forcefully sterilized and a 20-point economic programme was enforced: all this only because she was convicted for electoral malpractice.
While “Indira’s India” was flirting with authoritarianism, a truncated Pakistan finally saw the dawn of democracy under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In 1973, Bhutto became Pakistan’s first democratically elected leader after drafting the country’s third Constitution.
For the first time in Pakistan’s political history, a government pursued an ideology-based policy. Bhutto embarked on a socialist sojourn, nationalising heavy industries, addressing labour issues, implementing two phases of land reforms – with limited success and improving ties with the Warsaw Pact countries. In the process, Bhutto created a political ideology called “Bhuttoism”.
It was probably the only time in subcontinent’s history when both countries seemed to be on the same page on the question of economy.
Vajpayee made a historic trip to Pakistan in February 1999, where he and his Pakistani counterpart signed the Lahore Declaration.
1977: watershed year in the Subcontinent
If 1947 was the year both countries won their Independence, 1977 was the year when the destinies of two countries took completely opposite turns.
After the Emergency was lifted in March 1977, Indira was booted out and the hodgepodge coalition Janata Party led by Morarji Desai came to power. Although the coalition collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, the Janata experiment proved for the first time that the hegemonic Congress could be defeated.
While India applied the break on authoritarianism, Pakistan applied reverse gear to return to dictatorship.
On 5 July, 1977, General Muhammad Zia ul Haq overthrew the democratically elected Bhutto government. The racoon-eyed Zia cruelly put his former boss Bhutto to death in an obscure murder case and went on to rule for 11 years. Lacking a constituency of his own, Zia introduced Sharia law in a bid to gain the approval of Islamists. While reneging on his promise to hold elections till 1985, Zia consolidated the military as part of Operation Cyclone – the covert US plan to back Mujahideens in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.
Zia’s policies created the mullah-military complex – a byword for rabid Islamisation of the State machinery. The dominant moderate voices were sidelined while Islamism gained ground in Pakistan.
The general was also single-handedly responsible for the rise of Pakistan as the “motherboard of terrorism”.
When Zia was planning a non-party election in 1985, Rajiv Gandhi had just won the largest ever mandate in India’s history. India’s youngest prime minister brought about many reforms in India’s democratic system such as penalising defections to bring long-term political stability, and reducing the voting age from 21 to 18.
Rajiv also gave the initial impetus to empowering India’s urban and rural local bodies. In 1992, his idea took form of the 11th and 12th Schedule of the Constitution.
The contrast between Zia and Rajiv administrations could not be starker than this: when Rajiv was overhauling the education system through the 1986 National Education Policy, Zia regime was busy promoting “Jinn sciences” with Saudi Arabia’s backing.
Pervez Musharraf first took power as a military ruler in 1999. He continued in power as president until 2008.
Going nuclear amid uncertainty
India and Pakistan were again at the cross-roads of destiny in the mid-90s.
India had three prime ministers – HD Deve Gowda, IK Gujral and Vajpayee – between 1996 and 1999. Coalition politics seemed to be failing once again after the Janata Party and National Front debacles.
While India was struggling with coalition politics in its 50th year of Independence, Pakistan had elected its most powerful government. In the February 1997 elections, Nawaz Sharif secured his second term as prime minister with a two-third majority.
If 1977 was politically significant in Subcontinent’s history, 1998 will go down in history as the year that changed the strategic balance of the region.
India conducted its first thermonuclear tests — Shakti I and II — on 11 and 13 May while Pakistan followed up with its own tests codenamed Chagai I and II on 28 and 30 May.
While many argued that the threat of nuclear war loomed after 1998, experts like Sumit Ganguly believed that the nuclear power has brought about a deterred both countries from going for an all-out war fearing MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). However, in his book, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia, Ganguly also added that Pakistan would indulge in more unconventional warfare, emboldened by its nuclear capabilities.
In less than a year, however, the political situation in the nuclear-armed neighbourhood changed; that too in a matter of less than 48 hours in October 1999.
A day before Vajpayee was to take oath as the leader of the first majority-enjoying coalition government in India’s history, General Pervez Musharraf disposed Sharif on the night of 12 October 1999. And the reason for Vajpayee’s ascendency to power and Sharif’s downfall was the same: Kargil War.
Vajpayee went on to become the father of modern coalition politics. The UPA I and II governments that followed NDA I, as well as the current NDA II regime have proved the power of “coalition dharma”.
Narendra Modi is the first Indian prime minister from the Right-wing to enjoy a parliamentary majority.
Time to re-route our destinies in the 21st Century?
In the 21st Century, both India and Pakistan have been victims of Islamist terror. Although, in Pakistan’s case, it was more of its own doing. While the bane of terrorism binds us, Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism sets us apart.
In 2013, Pakistan saw a democratic transition of power for the first time – a significant event in the country’s chequered democracy. However, no Pakistan prime minister has ever completed a full five-year term. The one who was expected to break the jinx – Sharif – was recently dismissed by the Pakistan Supreme Court on corruption charges.
Our neighbour is yet again passing through a phase of political uncertainty. But the army does not seem to be taking over the reins of the country. When Pakistan goes to polls in early 2018, it will be the first time since Independence that two consecutive governments would have completed their full terms. This will be a good sign for democracy in the country.
Meanwhile, India under Narendra Modi – arguably the strongest prime minister after Indira – is witnessing the resurgence of the right-wing, the gradual repudiation of the Nehruvian legacy and the restructuring of India’s governance model.
There is however one question that needs to be asked.
Will there be any period in future when both nations would simultaneously be moving on the path of stability?
Nobody can answer the question right now. Only time will tell whether destiny will keep the two nation-states moving on opposite directions or help bring them closer at some point.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.