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Perceptions, Postures and Pragmatism: India-Pakistan relations down the decades |
Title: The People Next Door -
The Curious History of India-Pakistan Relations
Author: T.C.A.
Raghavan Publisher: Harper Collins Pages: 361 Price: Rs 699
Shifting from cordial and promising to suspicious and hostile (and back again),
regularly overshadowed by history, ideology and perceptions, prone to public
posturing but also quiet, behind-the-scenes pragmatism, Indian-Pakistan
relations possess their own unique and complex logic, which even the eminent
political scientist Hans Morgenthau would find hard to explain.
And these relations can have wide ramifications and resonances -- both in high
international politics but also domestic, as we learn in this book. The first
was seen during the 1965 war, which also left two Southeast Asian nations
engaged in their own spat, or in 1971, when two leading Communist powers
virulently assailed each other at the UN Security Council.
A good example of the second was how the decision of Indira Gandhi to accept the
mandate against her in the 1977 (post-Emergency) general elections was seen in
Pakistan -- which had its own share of political upheavals that year. A small
aside was Mrs Gandhi's tart response to a Pakistani dignitary's invitation to
visit -- but actually aimed at then Foreign Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who
was sitting on the other side.
Beyond these, the Partition, Kashmir, river water sharing, terrorism, the
nuclear arms race and many other facets, including cooperation, make
India-Pakistan ties cover a large and complex canvas, painted and repainted over
for seven decades, leaving those well-versed at one point not as adept later.
But the attempt to decipher it has to be made with the latest effort by former
Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan T.C.A. Raghavan, who admits it is not a
very easy task since "every facet of the relationship has over the decades been
scrutinised and commented upon in detail..." and public knowledge is
"considerable".
Asking "how much more can possibly be written about a relationship which has
been bad in the most conceivable ways" since the countries came into being,
Raghavan, who had two tours of duty in Pakistan, notes that his own experiences
"had been marked by a near-constant discovery of something new about the past".
These, he clarifies, are not "new" facts but a new look at events and their
connections, which gives a more nuanced and more rounded perspective to the
course of ties to "impart a fuller sense of how and why things developed as they
did".
This approach and its considerable scholarship, manifested in both wide ranging
and absorbing minutiae, is what makes the book a usefully incisive and
informative addition to the considerable literature, of all kinds and
approaches, already available.
Raghavan, who begins with showing how issues that would bedevil relations down
the years came within roughly a year of Independence/Partition, also dwells here
on some lesser-known/understood matters such as the first water crisis and the
issue of Kalat (expanding to entire Balochistan down the ages).
Alongside, there is the curious case of Rahmat Ali, who coined the name
"Pakistan" but found no place in it, three case studies of "Muslims who would,
in the the normal course, have been the pillars of the new Pakistan but moved in
the opposite direction", and largely unknown cases of cooperation between the
two nations even as conflict was raging in Kashmir.
And then there are nuggets of interesting trivia like a master criminal who fled
to Pakistan and whose extradition India unsuccessfully demanded (hint: it was
not Dawood Ibrahim)
Raghavan, who follows a chronological approach, also stresses that instead of
trying to be "exhaustive", he aims at bringing a "fuller flavour" in a "more
subjective and selective view of both well- and lesser-known incidents and
individuals in a broad context of the principal ups and downs of the
relationship".
And towards this, he draws upon not only diplomats and politicians, but also
journalists, activists and others to provide a new perspective on prominent
milestones, but also the promise in the late 1950s-60s, in the short Rajiv
Gandhi-Benazir Bhutto era, the early Musharraf years, et al.
Even those who think they know all, will find some new perspective in a book
which, the author notes, deals with "history", not "policy".
Even as he confesses to an Indian perspective of a "divisive and deeply
contested past and present" - Raghavan showcases how, here, it is not what
happened, but what is perceived to have happened -- and remembered -- that is
the key.
It is this legacy we need to understand and overcome for a better future.
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