Partition and Pragmatism in India-Pakistan Relations

In this edition of Sambandh Scholars Speak, Constantino Xavier interviews Pallavi Raghavan, Assistant Professor of International Relations at Ashoka University, on her book “Animosity at Bay: An Alternative History of the India–Pakistan Relationship, 1947–1952” published by HarperCollins, 2020.

How does a history of India-Pakistan cooperation seventy years ago matter to foreign policy today? Pallavi Raghavan’s book is anchored in a central, counterintuitive finding: she explains how despite the violent partition of 1947 forged through animosity and war, the two states also worked together, from protecting minorities and evacuee properties to managing cross-border rivers and trade.

Even today, despite extreme rhetoric and a new low in India-Pakistan relations, this history matters: In 2020, Delhi and Islamabad exchanged information on a devastating locust infestation to protect their farmers; their health experts met to cooperate against the COVID-19 pandemic; and their diplomats agreed to establish the cross-border Kartarpur corridor for Sikh pilgrims.

Using a formidable range of new archival materials up to the early 1950s, Dr. Raghavan corrects the biased histories that have portrayed partition as having been driven irrationally by Kashmir, ideology, or religion. Even in a context of political hostility and conflict, her book shows how both sides also engaged in pragmatic dialogue. Indian and Pakistani leaders mobilised different identity groups through inflammatory rhetoric, but their bureaucrats and technocrats cooperated to find policy solutions that were politically acceptable.

“Animosity at Bay” is an invaluable contribution to India’s new diplomatic histories and to understand how the drama of ideological politics can obfuscate the silent scenes of pragmatic policymaking. It also shows how the ghosts of the 1947 partition still shape contemporary South Asia and the multiple national fault lines that fragment the subcontinent.

Constantino Xavier: Your book describes the hostile but also mutually constitutive state-making processes of India and Pakistan in the first years after independence. 75 years later, do you still see both countries depending on each other as a nemesis to foster their distinctiveness? 

Pallavi Raghavan: The mutually constitutive aspect of India-Pakistan relations is a permanent feature: but the question is what direction it takes. What you’ve got with India and Pakistan are two nation-states that are the product of artificially drawn colonial boundary lines; tense equations of centre-province relations because of a weak nation-state project; and two state structures that are attempting to entrench themselves more securely into a complex society, often competing with different, older traditions of governance. In the face of this kind of uncertainty, there will always be a willingness to cooperate if it offers dividends for a more finalised nation-state project; or, conversely, a willingness to raise the rhetoric against the other, if they face more threats to their already fragile existence.

You’ve got two governments that will only cooperate if it gives a stronger face to their own centralising tendencies. Achieving this, as anyone who has looked at the last few years’ worth of headlines will know, is a bloody, bleak, and ultimately deeply unfair project.

But while in the 1950s there was a greater willingness to cooperate in favour of a more imaginative translation of the nation-state project, which was more conciliatory toward a provincially defined identity, I think now this tendency is changing. So you’ve got two governments that will only cooperate if it gives a stronger face to their own centralising tendencies. Achieving this, as anyone who has looked at the last few years’ worth of headlines will know, is a bloody, bleak, and ultimately deeply unfair project.

I also think there is a danger that the ideology of this government poses in thinking about civilisational rather than state-based terms, which affects the nature of decision-making on foreign policy. Many would agree that this government has come closer to pushing these limits than any before. I think the more the sentiment of a ‘Hindu first’ ideology is allowed to drive decision-making in foreign relations, the further the elements of the bargain that was struck in 1947—and 1950—will erode.

CX: In parallel to post-independence political tensions and violence, you describe how Indian and Pakistani bureaucrats silently worked in the background to cooperate on cross-border flows, from refugees to water and trade. In the following decades, and even today, why has the manoeuvring space for diplomatic and technocratic engagement reduced?  

PR: I guess to some extent we should remember that the space for manoeuvring on cross-border flows has not entirely disappeared: fields such as water and trade do see a relatively sustained interest in dialogue, even if not always successful. I also think the nature of the environmental and health related crisis to South Asian populations will propel both governments, howsoever unwillingly, into a halting process of cross-border consultation and dialogue.

The argument increasingly offered by the government in the past two decades to reject provincial levels of cross border contact (as, for instance, the case of the oxygen supply to Punjab from Pakistan) is often based on the grounds that the national self-interest is better served if we don’t commit to ad hoc cross-border provincial agreements. In the book, for instance, I argued that it was the engineers of Eastern Punjab who really willed the contours of the agreement forward. Whether they would have the same space for decision-making on the national level at the present moment is less clear. What we’re looking at, therefore, is the diminishing space of the province to offer inputs on cross- border relations. The debates of the 50s are relevant because they help us to probe the question: How and by whom is the national interest constituted, and is this the only way it can be defined? And are other conceptualisations of national interest and security possible, which were relatively more conducive to cross border partnerships and exchange?

CX: Your book leaves out the Kashmir dispute, which you argue has received disproportionate attention in the literature and is overrated as a determinant of India-Pakistan hostility.  Am I right to assume that you see Kashmir more as a symptom of, rather than the primary cause for differences and conflict between both countries?

PR: Well, I would hesitate to go that far: I think the question of Kashmir has provoked many serious differences, and to merely call it a ‘symptom’ of the overall framework of the bilateral relationship reduces its seriousness. But I think a better way of thinking about this is to say that the Kashmir issue is also a symptom of the weaknesses of the nation-state framework in South Asia as a whole. What we’re also seeing in this discussion is a contestation of different people’s versions of what the ideals of nation-statehood ought to be.

The limitations of India’s and Pakistan’s nation-state project is, in a sense, the deeper cause of the Kashmir dispute. What has happened at the current moment is a combination of the challenges of decolonisation—which is that post-colonial states tend to consolidate around their majorities and artificial boundary lines with the help of authoritarian rulers who use the apparatus of the colonial state to their advantage. Secondly, there is a corresponding discarding of old regionalist frameworks when dealing with the challenges of the India-Pakistan question. While what the fifties had reflected in some ways were leaders who were willing to adapt and innovate methods of nation- statehood in South Asia, the 2000s are about losing that attempt at innovation.

What the fifties had reflected in some ways were leaders who were willing to adapt and innovate methods of nation- statehood in South Asia, the 2000s are about losing that attempt at innovation.

CX: You teach at Ashoka University: based on your interactions with your students, how do you observe younger Indians engaging with the history of partition? Is there more pragmatism now to work on regional cooperation and integration in South Asia, or are new generations paradoxically even more emotional and nationalist?

PR: As it happens, this past semester, I taught a course on the Global History of Partition: We compared the experiences of Partition in Ireland, India, and Palestine. This threw up a variety of fascinating questions about the processes by which ‘nation-making’ is done; and how the idea of the nation is, in a sense, manufactured rather than being an immutable, fixed truth.

I think there is a greater willingness and curiosity amongst undergraduate students to probe the myth-making around partition experiences further: to not accept at face value the links that are drawn between the ‘wrongs’ of partition, and the nature of the nation-state today. Instead, they are willing to probe the sleights-of-hand that goes into the shaping of the idea of the nation.

As the scholarship on the historical nature of the shaping of India’s region starts taking on more volume, I think students will examine the worth of regional networks in South Asia further. They will ask, more critically: Has the nation- state framework provided us with sufficient benefits or not? And, given the way in which it’s often conjured on the basis of an artificial equation, should we also examine other, more grounded, stronger frameworks which may be able to provide better answers?

CX: There are recent indications of new backchannel discussions and a possible thaw in India-Pakistan relations. Looking back at the 1947-1951 period you studied, what advice would you give to each side today, to increase the prospects of a successful normalisation between both countries?

PR: What made the 1950s more successful as a phase in the India-Pakistan relationship was an attempt at engaging with and accommodating regional identities, rather than their forcible silencing: the latter spells danger, not only to their relationship, but also to what holds together national integration. I’m not denying that this government has made its own attempt at reaching a better equation with Pakistan—the recent ceasefire agreements is a good example of this. But the question to be asked is: with the degree of coerced centralization that is in play these days, a stable outcome of bilateral talks more or less likely?

Obviously, the world that India and Pakistan are looking at the moment seems more divisive than the 1950s: for one thing, the question of the very real dangers posed to the territory of India from China didn’t have to be grappled with in as concrete ways as compared to today; or the exact distribution of the spoils of Afghanistan because of the American withdrawal wasn’t up for discussion in 1949. The ceasefire arrangements of the past couple of months are a clear demonstration that both governments do have the capacity to reach surprising accommodations in the face of threats to the national self- interest.

But I think real normalization comes with a settlement that all stakeholders can say they’ve signed up for. The stable equilibrium that actors in the 50s were seeking with regard to bilateral relations, by finding arrangements that guaranteed the interests of minorities: that kind of balance is conspicuously absent in this government. In a sense, what this also implies is that a broader agenda to the cross- border relationship beyond that or merely ‘security issues’ must be part of the mainstream dialogue. In many ways these kinds of issues were thrashed out in the greatest detail in the aftermath of partition.

CX: Your book is based on new archival materials. Looking at those historical sources, as well as other methodologies, what other aspects of India-Pakistan relations deserve closer study today?

PR: This is an exciting time to be engaged in the history of South Asia’s internationalist history, which has thrown up a wealth of brilliant insights about how and why an archivally grounded study of decision- making in South Asia leads to a slightly differentiated diagnoses of its international relations that what would have otherwise been the case. One particularly exciting new area of interest in South Asia’s diplomatic history is the analysis of how the mix of the personal, with the ideological, and structural, shapes the making of different world-views, and their contribution to the shaping of India’s internationalist thinking: Vineet Thakur’s new book is an excellent example of this.

I’ve also found it useful to engage with the wealth of exciting new research into the contingencies in the process of border making, and the differences in the meanings they acquire for imperial and post- colonial governments. Good examples of this also include Sanjib Baruah’s recent book about the interconnections between the ‘frontier’ identity of the North East, and the making of the Indian nation-state; and the work of Elisabeth Leake, and Martin Bayly. Lastly, I also think it’s important to have a clear understanding of how and why different provincial actors have a stake in shaping the relationship; indeed, the relationship can even be a product of provincial identities, rather than national ones. For example, Ilyas Chatta’s book on cross-border trade in Punjab, or Uttara Shahani’s work on Sindhi linguistic movements would provide us with greater insights into the elements that constitute the relationship. I think they serve to further flesh out the question: what exactly does the ‘national’ consist of, and why?

Pallavi Raghavan is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Ashoka University. Her book, ‘Animosity at Bay: An Alternative History of the India- Pakistan Relationship’ was published in 2020.

Email: pallavi.raghavan@ashoka.edu.in