EuropaWorld 31/8/2001 Agra on the Hudson

Prompted by no doubt by escalating levels of violence in Kashmir, the period of limbo that followed the Agra Summit is drawing to a close. This week it was officially announced that the next meeting between the leaders of India and Pakistan will take place in New York on September 19th where both men will be attending the UN General Assembly Session. The Times of India reported an External Affairs Ministry spokesperson as saying that the meeting would provide an opportunity for the two leaders to pick up the threads from the discussions at Agra and give guidelines for interaction.

Exactly what lines Prime Minister Vajpayee and President Musharraf will be considering as they brace up to their next encounter remain to be seen. But what would be fatal for the future of the sub-continent would be a solution that balkanised Kashmir argues EuropaWorld correspondent Sitwat Ansari.

Almost sixty years ago, The Communal Triangle in India noted that if partition succeeded two new states would be born in conflict, and would be cursed with dangerous Fifth Columns. Writers Ashoka Mehta and Achut Patwardhan predicted that India and Pakistan would have to spend their substance on military preparations in a climate of ever increasing hostility. Partition would destroy the natural frontiers of India and substitute instead highly vulnerable frontiers which, as history has testified, have constantly shifted. The open frontiers, in a climate of hostility, would be a source of fear and a temptation to aggressive action, they wrote.

It is generally not realized that partition brought the same fate to India from which Europe had suffered and from which India had been completely free since 1858. Since 1848 Europe experienced innumerable wars, and the intervals of peace were haunted by the fear that they could not last for long. Social progress was impeded by the cost of preparing for war. From that terrible experience India had been saved until partition.

Partition threw India back to something like the state she was in after the Moghul Empire had collapsed and before the British Raj replaced it. Since partition the cost of defence against Pakistan has weighed heavily on India because she has been compelled to set up her defences not only against Pakistan but also against Pakistan's allies in the region, i.e., China. India is now facing a situation that Europe faced in the nineteenth century when her territories were being cris-crossed by the fiscal frontiers of jealously competing and hostile States.

India, unlike Europe, did not have to pay the disastrous price of economic nationalism until partition. Once the frame of unity was broken, however, the process of disruption could not stop at the separation of a Moslem state from India. We have, in our time, witnessed the demands for a Sikh state as well as the demands for another Moslem state in Kashmir.

In the North East there are further demands for tribal states carved out of Tripura, Manipur, and Assam. Many Indians might find it inconceivable that after so many years of peaceful progress India could once again relapse into the bloodshed and barbarism of a half forgotten past, but that is what most civilized Europeans thought about Europe a few years ago. Make no mistake about it. The balkanization of India will not stop with Kashmir, Punjab, or the North East. The splitting would continue even after there is very little left to carve out.

It is imperative for the leaders, on both sides of the divide, to reign in this gradual descent into anarchy and chaos that is now starting to gather momentum in both countries. The failure of the Agra summit should not be allowed to fester. This is especially so because of the nuclear implications of a possible conflict between India and Pakistan. New York will offer new opportunity. We can only hope that wise heads will prevail at this critical juncture.