Pakistan-India Rivalry: An Analytical Perspective of Balance of Power

Division of British India culminated into two new states of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. However, both Pakistan and India remained hostile since their inception. Multiple factors are responsible for their rivalry, such as the disputed Kashmir, water issues, communal riots, and assets distribution, etc. This affected the South Asian politics and invited the major powers to play their political game by influencing Indian and Pakistan's positions. The paper analyzes the bilateral conflict of India and Pakistan, their techniques to maintain the balance of power, and the role of major powers. The study also examines the foreign policies of India and Pakistan and their due positions since independence. The theory of balance of power has been applied to this study to explore the various aspects and prerequisites of BOP. The paper relies on qualitative methods of research to describe the positions of India and Pakistan in their strategies of the balance of power.

DISPLACED ROHINGYA SETTLEMENT AND SECURITY CONCERN IN BANGLADESH

In Myanmar’s post-independence history, the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities have been in conflict with the Rangoon based central government. It is commonly alleged that the Rohingya are involved with separatist movements that threaten Myanmar’s sovereignty. The ethnic minority Rohingya were faced with sub-violent confrontation after the military took over State power and later, and most critically, they became de jure stateless in Myanmar. The situation changed dramatically after the 2012 Buddhist-Muslim communal riots. Lastly, the quasi-civilian government launched ‘operation clearance’ against Rohingya civilians using the pretext of terrorist attacks on August, 2017. Since that operation, nearly a million terrorized Rohingya people crossed the border and sought shelter in Bangladesh. Almost three years on, after escaping the violence of the military in Myanmar, the refugees still live in uncertainty. This paper examines the conditions of displaced Rohingya living in different camps in Bangladesh and the extent that the Rohingya pose a security risk for host country. The Government of Bangladesh and international humanitarian agencies have been successfully handling the refugee exodus. But despite progress, it is clear that the Rohingya remain in a precarious situation. After intensive field work, it is concluded that a small minority refugees are involved with anti-social activities in Bangladesh whereas the large majority of Rohingya is innocent. Nevertheless, the refugees’ long presence in border areas of Bangladesh is creating socio-economic pressure and environmental hazards on Bangladesh’s limited resources.

Recovered and Restored? Abducted Women in 1947 Partition Narratives

During the Partition of India in 1947, communal riots triggered unspeakable acts of horror against women of rival communities. A large number of women were abducted; some were later recovered and returned to their families. The trauma suffered by these abducted women and survivors extends all proportions. This paper analyses the dislocation, pain and trauma of abducted women, as depicted in two short stories: The Lost Ribbon by Shobha Rao (2016) and Banished (1998) by Jamila Hashmi originally published in Urdu as Banbas (exile) in Aap-Beeti, Jag-Beeti (1969). I consider the abducted women’s plight in view of the distinction Giorgio Agamben made of zoè (bare life) and bios (political life as a citizen) in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) and The Use of Bodies (2015). I analyse how Partition reduced women to bare life, despite offering them hopes of life as a citizen of their respective independent countries. In this regard, I discuss their sufferings and trauma due to double dislocation, first stemming from rape, abduction and captivity in the wake of communal violence, and second due to the nature of the states’ intervention in their recovery and rehabilitation. My analysis also shows that recovery of abducted women should not be taken as synonymous with restoration because restoration of a traumatised human being to her pre-abduction state of mind and life is not possible.

Between ‘Everyday’ and ‘Extraordinary’: Partition, violence and the communal riots of 1946 in Bihar

The year 1937 saw the establishment of Congress Ministries in eight of the eleven provinces in which the provincial elections had been held, Bihar being one of them. The resounding victory of the Congress which secured a clear majority in the province of Bihar and the dismal performance of the Muslim League seemed at the time to depict the mood of the people in general. It was taken as a clear rejection of the politics of communalism and separatism and as an expression of faith in the secular credentials of the Indian National Congress. However, less than a decade later, the province was gripped by severe communal tensions and had become one of the most prominent parts of India from where the movement for Pakistan drew support. This article thus explores the nature of the communal violence that occurred in Bihar in 1946 against the backdrop of the ‘escalating’ communal tensions during the late 1930s and early 1940s. It seeks to problematise the dichotomy that exists in literature on communal violence between moments of what have been called ‘extraordinary’ violence (such as riots) and the everyday structures of (what Gyanendra Pandey has called) ‘routine violence’. Through its analysis of contemporary material produced by the Muslim League, the Congress Ministry and the provincial British administration to explain the causes of the 1946 riots in Bihar, it argues that it is in the moments of rupture presented by riots that everyday structures of violence are trivialised or normalised through processes of ‘dichotomisation’, ‘dehumanisation’ and ‘denial’.

“Sacred Duty”

Ismat Chughtai, an Indian writer in the 20th Century was influential in the Urdu literary scene for her role in furthering the women’s cause. This paper focuses on her translated short story “Sacred Duty” in which the sanctity of ‘secularism’ is questioned by addressing interfaith marriages in order to polarise religious orthodoxy of older generations with that of the flippancy of the youth. It unfurls the pseudo-fraternal form of coexistence of the middle and upper class ‘progressives’ that was practiced to appease their own sense of modernity. By contextualising this within the communal riots of post-partition India, a seeming anxiety is noticed within the newer generations in contending with their ‘duty’ to the nation and religion. Offsetting this against the postcolonial scholarship by Partha Chatterjee based on Benedict Anderson’s notion of an “imagined community,” this story remarks on the strength of that argument in view of the religious boundaries that consecrate such a nation. The married couple Samina and Tashar’s stance heralds a crucial question about the possibility of climbing over this wall drawn out by Hindus and Muslims and escaping this ‘community’ altogether. Through this analysis, the restricted nature of Indian secularism post-Independence is highlighted as propagating divisionist ideology.

Dalit Question and Communalism in Uttar Pradesh in the 2000s

After widespread violent riots following the Ram Janma Bhoomi Babri Masjid (RJBBM) Movement and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, there were no major riots in Uttar Pradesh (UP) in the second half of the 1990s. Political parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), attempted to use the Ram Mandir issue during elections in the late 1990s but did not get a response. However, during the 2000s, the state witnessed a new ‘saffron wave’. Riots took place in the eastern districts of Mau in 2005, Gorakhpur in 2007 and there was a spurt of communal tension in some western districts from 2011 leading to violent riots in Muzaffarnagar and surrounding districts in September 2013. Based on a study of the communal riots mentioned earlier (Pai & Kumar, 2018, Everyday Communalism: Riots in Contemporary Uttar Pradesh, New Delhi: Oxford University Press), it is argued that during the 2000s, UP experienced a post-Ayodhya phase of communalism, markedly different from the earlier phase during the RJBBM period. Our study points to a clear shift in the theory and praxis of Hindutva and thereby, from older forms of communalism to newer ones, more suited to the contemporary socio-economic and political context. The riots enabled the BJP to create deep-seated communal polarisation, consolidate the Hindu vote and win elections, at the centre and later in UP. In this article, the focus is on one significant aspect of the riots in eastern and western UP, which differentiates it from earlier riots––the Dalit Question, its relationship to communalism and the part played by dalits. Election studies and data suggest that some sections of the dalits––who do not form a homogeneous group––supported the BJP during the 2014 and 2017 elections in UP simultaneously a section were co-opted into the ambit of the larger identity of Hindu. The BJP leadership reworked their ideology and strategies of Hindutva to mobilise dalits in order to gain their support and win power. Yet, paradoxically from 2015, and more stridently in 2018, we find large sections of dalits opposing the BJP.

Communal Mobilization and Riots in Eastern Uttar Pradesh

Chapter 3 based on fieldwork in Mau and Gorakhpur provides a rich description of everyday communalism and communal riots in 2005 and 2007, respectively. In Mau, incidents of everyday communalism have a distinct socio-cultural form visible in the confrontation around the Bharat-Milap ceremony. But, fieldwork revealed that the reasons lie in underlying tensions from the desire to protect religio-cultural practices, economic distress due to decline of the weaving industry, heightened political consciousness, and the role of the mafia within the Hindu and Muslim community, which the BJP has been able to exploit and engineer the 2005 riots. In Gorakhpur, communalism has a more distinctly political colour, the result of sustained religion-based mobilization by Yogi Adityanath and his HYV responsible for creating communal polarization, tension, and incidents culminating in the 2007 riots. In both towns a characteristic is mobilization to saffronize the Dalits taking them away from the BSP.

Introduction

Examining the resurgence of communal riots, the authors argue that UP is experiencing in the 2000s a post-Ayodhya phase different from the early 1990s. To understand this new phenomenon, they move beyond riots and offer a model of institutionalized everyday communalism whose defining features are: shift of riots from earlier classic/endemic sites to new ones, recruitment of local BJP-RSS cadres/leaders who carry out sustained, everyday grassroots mobilization using local, mundane issues and imaginary threats, and spread of communalism and riots into villages. Also, a second round of experimentation with ‘non-Brahminical Hindutva’ incorporating lower castes to consolidate a Maha-Hindu identity. The aim is to create a bias against the Muslim among the Hindus rendering them the ‘other’. Fusion of rising cultural aspirations and deep economic anxieties in an economically backward state, where a deepening agrarian crisis, unemployment and inequalities are widespread, has created fertile ground for a new kind of communalism.