India and Pakistan are sliding toward war. Perhaps we should not be surprised. There has been bad blood between the two kindred nations since they came semi-conjoined into existence in 1947. Indeed, the sanguinary circumstances of their birth defined their future enmity.
What with everything else going on, we have been slow to wake up to the danger of conflict between the two nuclear states. They have fought at least three, arguably four, wars before, but never with the Bomb.
The current tensions were sparked by last month’s terrorist murder of 26 Indian tourists in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir. Delhi accuses Islamabad of being behind the attacks. Islamabad angrily rejects the accusation. The two countries have cut diplomatic links, shut their borders, and denied each other their airspace. India has announced the cancellation of a water-sharing agreement that had survived all the previous wars — a threat that Pakistan considers existential.
Why did things escalate so quickly? Part of the answer has to do with personalities. India’s leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been accused before of deliberately stoking tensions with Pakistan for political gain, and there was outrage when he canceled Kashmir’s autonomy in 2019.
Pakistan, for its part, is run in reality by a military junta. The civilian politician who would sweep to power tomorrow in a free poll, Imran Khan, is being kept in prison to stop him from contesting elections. The Armed Forces feel their legitimacy is in doubt.
None of this would be a problem if there were not a deep-rooted antagonism between the two states. That antagonism cannot be divorced from the atrocities that accompanied their partition as they became independent from Britain.
I read some eyewitness accounts of the 1947 intercommunal violence when I was younger, and I can barely bring myself to think about, let alone write about, what happened.
Nirad Chaudhuri was one of the most expressive authors of his generation, but he could find no language for what he had witnessed:
“I have weighed nearly all the words and phrases which the murderous ferocity of man, as distinct from his warlike ferocity, has contributed to the vocabulary of European peoples: massacre, pogrom, lynching, fusillade, noyade, St. Bartholomew, Sicilian Vespers, Bloodbath of Stockholm, Bulgarian atrocities, Armenian massacres, Belsen, genocide, etc., etc., but find them all inadequate.”
Chaudhuri was talking about what he saw in Delhi, where the bloodshed was relatively contained. What happened along the new borderline was unimaginable.
Men, women and children were tortured, mutilated, raped, burned alive, blinded with acid or chilli powder, boiled in cauldrons, and hacked to pieces. Bands of goondas slaughtered patients in their hospital beds, children in their classrooms, and worshippers in their mosques and temples.
The grisliest massacres took place on the trains that carried refugees across the new border. They would pull in at their destinations with gore dripping from every aperture, and not a single passenger still breathing. Sometimes, a message would have been chalked on the side: “A present from India” or “A present from Pakistan.”
The remarkable thing, to me, is not the continuing tension between the two states after that but that it did not follow their diaspora communities in North America, the Gulf, and elsewhere.
This is especially true of Britain, where migrants from South Asia came largely from the provinces that were most scarred by the atrocities — Gujarat, Kashmir, Bengal, and above all, Punjab. Children of the perpetrators and of the victims managed to live in the same towns, the same streets, leaving their quarrels behind them.
I have asked Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu friends whether they ever discuss this among themselves (obviously, you need to get to know someone before you can ask such a thing). Almost always, the response is a look of polite bewilderment and a remark along the lines of “Why the hell would anyone want to drag all that up?”
This unremarked and rather beautiful fact is a tribute to the individualist morality that dominated the Anglosphere when the migrations happened. In contrast to most cultures, it left no space for notions of vendetta. We were responsible for our own actions.
TRUMP IS SINGLEHANDEDLY DESTROYING GLOBAL CONSERVATISM
What worries me is that, in the present age of identity politics, we are returning to pre-modern notions of communal or tribal categorization. We teach our children to pursue inherited grievances. We define people by whether their ancestors were slaves or slave-owners. Unsurprisingly, this has led to more intercommunal tension among British South Asian communities than in the past despite their greater distance from the conflict.
That, though, is the least of it. Unless it is checked, identity politics won’t just lead to Balkanization. It will lead to the end of our open societies.