Of a new New Delhi myth and the success of the University of Hawaii 1986-1992 Pakistan project (with 2015 Postscript)
November 15, 2008 — drsubrotoroy
A leading Indian commentator says in this morning’s paper (November 15 2008) about Manmohan Singh:
“His formulation on Kashmir (“I have no mandate to change borders, but we can make borders irrelevant”), became the obvious solution once he articulated it.”
Such may be how modern New Delhi’s myths and self-delusions get born — since in fact there is no evidence that Manmohan Singh or any of his acolytes had anything to do with originating the Pakistan-India peace process in recent decades, just as there has not been that Manmohan Singh or any of his acolytes had anything to do with originating the Congress Party’s new economic thinking in 1990-1991.
(Lest I be misunderstood I should add at the outset that I have the highest personal regard for Dr Singh, he has been in decades past a friend of my father’s, he at my father’s request consented to discuss economics with me in Paris in 1973 when I was a callow lad of 18, he himself has not claimed the originality that has been frequently mis-attributed to him by others for whatever reason, etc.)
The origins of the idea about India-Pakistan and J&K expressed by Manmohan Singh’s words are to be found in the last paragraph of the Introduction by the Editors of a book which arose from the University of Hawaii’s 1986-1992 Pakistan project, which read:
“Kashmir… must be demilitarised and unified by both countries sooner or later, and it must be done without force. There has been enough needless bloodshed on the subcontinent… Modern Pakistanis and Indians are free peoples who can voluntarily agree in their own interests to alter the terms set hurriedly by Attlee or Mountbatten in the Indian Independence Act 1947. Nobody but we ourselves keeps us prisoners of superficial definitions of who we are or might be. The subcontinent could evolve its political identity over a period of time on the pattern of Western Europe, with open borders and (common) tariffs to the outside world, with the free movement of people, capital, ideas and culture. Large armed forces could be reduced and transformed in a manner that would enhance the security of each nation. The real and peaceful economic revolution of the masses of the subcontinent would then be able to begin.”
The University of Hawaii’s Pakistan project, involving Pakistani and other scholars, including one Indian, led to the volume Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s published in Karachi, New Delhi and elsewhere. The book reached Nawaz Sharif and the Islamabad elite, including the most hawkish of Islamabad’s hawks, and Pervez Musharraf’s 2006 proposal on J&K, endorsed warmly by the US State Department, may have grown from that paragraph. The Editors of the book, as economists themselves, decried the waste of resources involved in the Pakistan-India confrontation, saying it had
“greatly impoverished the general budgets of both Pakistan and India. If it has benefited important sections of the political and military elites of both countries, it has done so only at the expense of the general welfare of the masses.”
Such words were impossibly bold in the late 1980s-early 1990s. However, as stated in a special editorial article “What to tell Musharraf” in The Statesman of December 16 2006, they seemed in recent years incomplete and rather naïve even to their author, who was myself, the only Indian in that project and the one who had conceived it. Most significantly, the position in international law in the context of historical facts had been wholly neglected. So had been the manifest nature of the Pakistani state (as it had become prior to the splendid 2008 elections).
The Hawaii project had involved top Pakistani economists, political scientists and other commentators but had deliberately chosen to keep the military and the religious clergy out of its chapters. And it was the military and religious clergy who in fact came to dominate Pakistan’s agenda in the 1990s, at least until the 9/11 attacks in America indirectly altered the political direction of the country.
The peaceful and mundane economic agenda outlined for Pakistan in the Hawaii project has come into its own by way of relevance ever since. A few weeks ago, the first trucks filled with fruit, woolens and many other goods traversed across the “Line of Control” in J&K for the first time in sixty years. The Pakistan project that James and I led at the University of Hawaii in the late 1980s may be now declared a success. Among other things, our book explained to Indians that there does exist a Pakistani point of view and perhaps explained to Pakistanis that there does exist an Indian point of view. That is something that had not existed before our book.
Postscript 18 Nov 2015: I have made clear at Twitter that I find the K.M. Kasuri book promoted and publicized in India by MS Aiyar, S Kulkarni, B Dutt and others in Delhi and Mumbai is mendacious where it is not merely self-serving. Its clear intent is to get India to accept the (false) ISI/Hurriyat narratives about 1947, Kashmir, Bangladesh, terrorism etc. Its purported ideas of demilitarisation and a borderless Kashmir are essentially lifted from my earlier 1980s work in America cited above — which I myself have rejected as naive since the Pakistani aggression in Kargil in 1999. More anon.
I find Dr. Roy’s work heartening — the pertinence of this long time-frame, from creation and publication of the study to fruition of some part of its recommendations, is sharp for the American context. The dominance of the Military Industrial Complex is often considered an absolute bar to progress. In America, finding a way forward out of this domination will of course be a long task. But the fact that India and Pakistan have found some hope for reconciliation — and with that, a slight overturning of the status quo in which military intransigence and budget domination were the rule — reinforces the optimism that our own change of administration in Washington engenders.
I am most grateful for Mr Somerville’s kind comment. I have to add that my own view on Pakistan, India-Pakistan relations and Jammu & Kashmir, has matured much since the University of Hawaii Pakistan project two decades ago. This may be found in the following works, published in The Statesman and elsewhere in recent years and available easily at this site. In alphabetical order, the titles are: “America’s Pakistan-India Policy”; “History of Jammu & Kashmir”; “India and Her Neighbours”; “India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh Merchandise Exports”; “Iqbal & Jinnah vs Rehmat Ali in Pakistan’s Creation”; “Is Balochistan Doomed?”; “Justice & Afzal”; “Lal Masjid ≠ Golden Temple”; “Law, Justice and J&K”; “On Hindus and Muslims”; “Pakistan’s Allies”; “Pakistan’s Kashmir obsession”; “Racism New and Old”; “Saving Pakistan”; “Separation of Powers: India, the USA, Pakistan”; “Solving Kashmir: On an Application of Reason”; “The Greatest Pashtun: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan”; “Two cheers for Pakistan”; “Understanding Pakistan”; “What To Tell Musharraf”.
The search engine above should locate any article by its title; the Index and Archives may be used as well.
Readers are welcome to quote from my work under the normal “fair use” rule, but please try to quote me by name and indicate the place of original publication in case of work being republished here. I am at Twitter @subyroy, see my latest tweets above