Peace and Conflict Studies: Perspectives from South Asia 9780367538309, 9780367540401, 9781003084167

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PEACE AND CONFLICT STUDIES

This volume explores how we theorize, politicize and practice peace and conflict discourses in the social sciences. As concepts, peace and conflict are intricately interwoven into a web of com­ plementary discourses where states and other actors are able to negotiate, deliberate and arbitrate their differences short of the overt and covert use of physical violence. The essays in this volume reflect this eclecticism: they reflect on concerns of con­ temporary conflicts in world politics; the dissection of the ideas of peace and power; the way peace studies join with global agencies; peace and conflict in connection to geopolitics and identity; the domestic basis of conflict in India and the South Asian theatre including class, social cleavages and gender. Further they also process elements like globalization, media, communication and films that help us engage with the popular tropes and discursive construction of the reality that play critical roles in how peace and violence are articulated and acted upon by the elites and the masses in societies. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of political sci­ ence, international relations theory, peace and conflict studies, public policy and area studies. It will also be a key resource for bureaucrats, policy makers, think tanks and practitioners working in the field of international relations. Anindya Jyoti Majumdar is Professor at the Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Shibashis Chatterjee is Professor at the Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH

Series editors: Rajat Acharyya and Nandan Bhattacharya, UGCHuman Resource Development Centre, Jadavpur University, India Contemporary Issues in Social Science Research is a series dedicated to the advancement of academic research and practice on emerging 21st century social and cultural themes. It explores fresh perspectives on a legion of interdisciplinary social science themes connecting subject areas that have hitherto been unexplored, underdeveloped or overlooked. This series aims to provide scholars, researchers and students a ready reference for the new and developing in social science academia which has come into the fore as focal points of debate and discussion today.

Research Methodology for Social Sciences Edited by Rajat Acharyya and Nandan Bhattacharya Peace and Conflict Studies: Perspectives from South Asia Edited by Anindya Jyoti Majumdar and Shibashis Chatterjee

For more information about this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/ Contemporary-Issues-in-Social-Science-Research/book-series/CISSC

PEACE AND CONFLICT STUDIES Perspectives from South Asia

Edited by Anindya Jyoti Majumdar and Shibashis Chatterjee

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Anindya Jyoti Majumdar and Shibashis Chatterjee; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Anindya Jyoti Majumdar and Shibashis Chatterjee to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-53830-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-54040-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08416-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

List of illustrations List of contributors Introduction

vii viii 1

1 Peace and conflict studies: A prolegomenon Rakhahari Chatterji

10

2 Peace as power, power of peace Samir Kumar Das

22

3 Mediated reality in peace and conflict: A conceptual navigation Dipankar Sinha

35

4 Conflicts in contemporary International Relations: Management and resolution Arun Kumar Banerji

49

5 Globalization, income inequality and conflict Rajat Acharyya

67

6 Geopolitics, conflicts and peace Anindya Jyoti Majumdar and Sohini Bose

83

7 Identity, conflicts and security Shibashis Chatterjee and Sulagna Maitra

97

8 Armed conflicts and protection of civilians Omprakash Mishra

120

vi Contents

9 Towards sustaining peace: A transformative UN approach Priyankar Upadhyaya

135

10 Social conflict and caste: A security challenge Debi Chatterjee

149

11 The Maoist movement: ‘India’s gravest internal security threat’ Partha Pratim Basu

161

12 Expanding the WPS agenda: Experiences from Nepal and north-east India Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya

178

13 Bollywood on the no-man’s land: Bajrangi Bhaijaan Sudeshna Banerjee

195

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

Kuznets Curve Short run and long run effects of trade on income inequality Income inequality in Anglo-Saxon countries Income inequality in emerging countries

71 71 72 73

Tables

5.1 Average annual growth rate (1990–2010) of select authoritarian and democratic regimes 5.2 Percentage of the population living below the national poverty line average (1995–2010) 12.1 Representation of women in Nepal’s elections 12.2 North-east peace accords

79 80 181 185

CONTRIBUTORS

Anindya Jyoti Majumdar is Professor of Strategic Studies in the Department of International Relations at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. A recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship, Professor Majumdar has attended a number of national and international academic schedules at home and abroad and has authored and edited several books. He is at present the editor of the Jadavpur Journal of International Relations. Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya is Professor of Political Science and Adjunct Professor of Peace Studies at the Banaras Hindu University, India. She has been Director (Research) at INCORE, and also a scholar-in-residence at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, DC. Anjoo’s research interests have been in women and peace, ethnicity, conflict resolution, gender and development, on which she has published and lectured extensively nationally and internationally. Arun Kumar Banerji is former Professor of International Relations and Dean Faculty of Arts, Jadavpur University, India. He graduated from Presidency College, received an MA Degree in Political Science from Calcutta University and was awarded a PhD degree in International Relations by the University of London. He was a Fulbright-ACLS Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania (1983–84). Author and editor of a number of publications, he has contributed a large number of articles to books and journals, published in India and abroad and is also a regular contributor to leading newspapers. Debi Chatterjee is Retired Professor, Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She has taught in the Departments of Human Rights and Human Development, and Political Science at Rabindra Bharati Uni­ versity, as also in the Sociology Department and the Human Rights Programme of

List of contributors ix

the Anthropology Department at Calcutta University. She has authored several books on Indian social problems and is the founder editor of the journal Contemporary Voice of Dalit. Dipankar Sinha is Professor of Political Science and Director, Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Calcutta, India. He is also Honorary Associate of the Centre for Media History, Macquarie University, Sydney, and a Nominated Member of the Association of Global South Studies, USA. Sinha’s most recent book, The Information Game in Democracy, was published by Routledge in 2018. Omprakash Mishra is Professor of International Relations at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, and the current Head of the Department. He is former Pro Vice Chancellor, Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi (2007–2010). He is also the Founder-Coordinator of the Centre for Refugee Studies. He was Member, National Security Advisory Board in 2004–2006. Professor Mishra’s interest and expertise straddles many areas in international relations, foreign policy and national security. He serves in different capacities on various committees, expert groups and is regularly consulted on policy and governance issues by a number of government departments, academic and research institutes and non-governmental organizations across the country. Partha Pratim Basu is Professor of International Relations at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. His teaching and research interests pertain to South Asia, especially India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. He has also served as editor for Jadavpur Journal of International Relations; Coordinator, One-year PG Diploma Course on Human Rights; and Director, School of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University. His recent publications include West Bengal under the Left: 1977–2011 (co-edited, Routledge, UK, 2019). Priyankar Upadhyaya (PhD) has served the Banaras Hindu University for over four decades in different faculty positions. He holds the UNESCO Chair for Peace at the University. He also serves as the Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Professor Upadhyaya has worked extensively with various UN agencies and entities. His chapter draws from his research project that led to the publication of Long Walk of Peace towards Conflict Prevention (UNESCO, 2018). Rajat Acharyya is a Professor of Economics, Jadavpur University, India. Professor Acharyya received his MSc (Economics) degree from Calcutta University in 1990 and PhD (Economics) degree from Jadavpur University in 1996. He was a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Rochester University, New York, USA, during 1997–98. Professor Acharyya has written five books and published more than 60 articles in journals and edited volumes. He was awarded the EXIM Bank Interna­ tional Trade Research Award in 1997, Global Development Network

x List of contributors

(Washington, DC) Research Medal in 2003, the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal in 2006 and Shikhsaratna (Best University Teacher) Award by the Government of West Bengal in 2016. Rakhahari Chatterji is Adviser at the Kolkata Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, India. Formerly, Professor of Political Science and Dean of Arts, Cal­ cutta University, Chatterji was also Visiting Fellow in Political Science and Associate, Committee on South Asian Studies, University of Chicago; Visiting Fellow at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), University of Virginia (Char­ lottesville); and Emeritus Fellow, UGC. His recent publications are West Bengal under the Left (Co-edited, Routledge, 2019) and “Rethinking Regionalism: The Idea of China-South Asia Trans-Himalayan Regional Cooperation”, ORF Occasional Paper, December 2019. Samir Kumar Das is Professor of Political Science and Director, Institute of Foreign Policy Studies, at the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India. He specializes in and writes on issues of ethnicity, identity, security, migration, rights and justice. His latest book Migrations, Identities and Democratic Practices in India was published by Routledge in 2018. Shibashis Chatterjee is Professor at the Department of International Relations, and Director, School of International Relations and Strategic Studies at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India. His areas of interest are international relations theory, Indian foreign policy, and South Asian politics. A recipient of the Fulbright Nehru Professional Excellence Award twice, he is the author of India’s Spatial Imaginations of South Asia (2019) and Nuclear Non-Proliferation and the Problem of Threshold States (1999). Sohini Bose is a Junior Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Kolkata, India working with the Strategic Studies programme. Her research primarily focuses on geo-politics, strategic and security studies, maritime connectivity and disaster man­ agement. She is presently also a doctoral research scholar at the Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University. Sudeshna Banerjee, currently an associate professor of History at Jadavpur Uni­ versity, India, did her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, UK. Using a social history perspective, Banerjee focuses on South Asia and critically engages with notions of nationhood, politics of gender, urbanity, human displace­ ment and cultural politics of globalization. Widely published in Indian and inter­ national platforms, she has created a SEPHIS-funded digital, cross-border archive of the people’s experience of Partition of India. She is currently engaged in creat­ ing a number of other archives. She received awards like the Commonwealth Academic Staff Scholarship (1993–97), Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellow­ ship (tenable at Brown University, USA in 2012–13) and the ICCR Short-term

List of contributors xi

Rotating Chair Professorship (tenable at the Institute for South Asia Studies, Humboldt University in 2015). Sulagna Maitra is Assistant Professor in Humanitarian Action and Director of NOHA Joint Masters in International Humanitarian Action. Sulagna joined the UCD Humanitarian Action Programme in 2010 as a doctoral researcher and aca­ demic coordinator of the NOHA Masters programme. Sulagna received her PhD from UCD in 2013. She has a Masters in International Humanitarian Assistance (NOHA) from Uppsala University, Sweden and a Masters in International Relations from Jadavpur University, India. Sulagna received Erasmus Mundus Scholarships and the Sasakawa Young Leaders’ Fellowship respectively for her Masters.

INTRODUCTION

The perennial quest for peace amidst recurrent conflicts has marked human exis­ tence for centuries and the efforts to situate the role of intellect over instinct con­ tinue to comprise a crucial component of policy-making and academic discourse. Interestingly, however, although India’s domestic politics and foreign relations have witnessed a considerable degree of violence since independence, the academic analysis of peace and conflict has failed to emerge as a major thrust area. Although peace studies and geopolitics have spawned a few specialized programmes and engendered a corpus of writings, there has been little systematic effort to trace the parallel trends in peace and conflict literature by Indian scholars. In other words, the tendency has been to invest either in peace studies scholarship that has often refused to interrogate the war and conflict literature or to pursue research in war and conflict studies that does not look into adjacent fields at all. While academic professionalism and gate-keeping practices associated with disciplines largely account for this unfortunate divergence of sorts, this is neither desirable nor pro­ ductive in terms of helping scholars understand peace and conflict in their dialectical relationship. A second problem that has impoverished the field is the strict binary of the inside and the outside, with International Relations (IR) scholarship investing in peace and conflict studies refusing often to seriously engage with domestic sources of both violence and conciliation, no matter whether these triggers are social, political or economic in nature. This point is significant as it is not about mapping the domestic sources and consequences of inter-state violence or peace; it under­ scores the larger sociological matrix to any discussion of how individuals and col­ lectives relate to each other whether in peace or in violent relationships. The ‘domestic’ looms large in any understanding of peace and war among states and societies. This volume has, therefore, attempted to address these two easily dis­ cernible shortcomings of a dialectically constituted field of knowledge that has

2 Introduction

stubbornly and unfortunately refused to realize its mutual co-constitution and produced fractured discourses under disparate research cultures. This volume is the collection of a few selected expositions meant for the parti­ cipants of a Refresher Course on ‘Conflict and Peace Studies’ that was planned to straddle diverse fields and overcome disciplinary barriers to the extent we could. The essays included in this volume show significant eclecticism: they reflect on concerns of contemporary conflicts in world politics; the dissection of the ideas of peace and power; the way peace studies join with global agencies; peace and con­ flict in connection to geopolitics and identity; the domestic basis of conflict in India and the South Asian theatre including class, social cleavages and gender; and process elements like globalization, media, communication and films that help us engage with the popular tropes and discursive construction of the reality that play critically important roles in how peace and violence are articulated and acted upon by the elites and the masses in societies. The wide range of perspectives showcased in the volume does not come at the cost of continuity and binding. As practitioners of IR, our disciplinary training has been pivotal in organizing the volume. While there is no one theoretical lens or conceptual basis to this volume, the papers look at discrete states and societies as units of analyses and have mostly reflected on issues that are politically salient. The simple working hypothesis that guides us is that peace and conflict are processes that impact on human lives at all levels of collective existence. Of these, this volume has looked into processes that are closely associated with the institutions of the nation-state and domestic societies. This does not mean that there are no independent global drivers of conflict and peace. Neither does this exhaust the investigation of causes of war and peace. As with most conceivable volumes, we have discriminated relevance by emphasizing the processes that we find more sali­ ent to the problem at hand: the focus on states and societies and their potential to cause violence and amity is, therefore, a deliberate one. There remains considerable debate over the meaning of peace. The popular view among pacifists and theologians in the West sees peace as an absence of dissension, violence or war. This seems an absolutist view that prioritizes peace over all forms of violence. Needless to say, the Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist and Confucian under­ standing of peace is not exactly the same. In other words, peace is not a cultureneutral absolute and there are multiple perspectives to peace, war and violence across religions and cultures. The idea of peace as concord, or harmony and tran­ quillity, as Rummel puts it, is more popular in non-Western cultures (Rummel 1981). The idea of peace also varies by political ideologies, with liberals, socialists, anarchists, fascists, feminists and environmentalists espousing a wide variety of per­ spectives. These ideologies are also not united within these groups and partisans hold on to different variants of the concept. Peace and conflict are dynamic force fields. They adapt and respond to macro and micro transformations all the time. In other words, like other political ideas, peace is also an essentially contested concept. For students of IR, peace cannot be separated from conflict. Most scholars, in fact, view peace as a stage of conflict, where states and other actors are able to

Introduction 3

negotiate, deliberate and arbitrate their differences short of the overt and covert use of physical violence. The discipline has broadly three perspectives, namely, the realist view of peace as the absence of war and deterrence; the liberal views that build on transactions and externalization of democratic norms; and the commu­ nitarian view that underscores the social basis to peace.1 Most IR scholars hold onto a narrow and minimalist conception of peace, though this view is not uni­ versally preferred by the students of IR. Sadly, in the absence of any agreement on the substantive concerns, dimensions, processes and parameters of peace, the minimalist understanding has become the more dominant one. Yet, this volume is a reminder of a much more nuanced and richer understanding of peace than what the mainstream dictates. As, Samir Das would argue in his paper: Across the world, the expressions for peace are infused with deep-rooted values and associations, as different from the contemporary term peace, which has been stripped to a mini­ malistic ‘absence of violence’. Indeed it is desirable to promote the idea of world peace as a plural of ‘many peace/s’, and that peace should be perceived as a plur­ ality in which there are many versions of peace that can be sought. The paradigm of ‘many peace/s’ challenges the universally projected conceptualization of peace as a singular and uniform idea, which negates its wide-ranging patterns in diverse cultural, social, economic, and political conditions. This volume captures the variety of meanings and perspectives underlying peace and conflict studies rather than putting together papers that would tell a familiar narrative of hegemonic and minimalist peace locked up in a world of unending violence. Yet, the image and discourses of geopolitical underpinnings in a world where nations and people fight over territories, resources, identities and cosmolo­ gies are not lost on us. This volume, therefore, is not conceived as a compendium of utopian assertions of peace. Care has been taken to discuss hard economic and political conflicts both between and within states (mostly India) that showcase both the many meaning/s of peace and conflict that the stakeholders possess and how material and ideational concerns are crucial to social actors either engaging in violence or negotiating for peace. A brief note on conceptual meanings is pertinent here. The more ambitious and substantive concept/s of peace have at least two distinctive sources. The first of these is the distinction between the negative and positive peace that Johan Galtung famously drew.2 The positive variant sees peace as development. Or, peace denotes a condition where every human being can realize his/her latent potential regardless of the variations of the underlying circumstances. The other source unites peace with freedom and justice. This, however, is controversial. Justice may require removal of impediments, unfair practices and unfair norms. Such removal may invariably require violence as the status quoist forces may not yield to changes peacefully. Freedom also requires relational constraints that may not be agreed upon by all social forces. For some, peace is one of the many fundamentals like independence, justice, prosperity and freedom and peace for the sake of peace may require sacrifice of other fundamentals.

4 Introduction

Without getting into deeper debates on ‘meanings’, it seems rather obvious that positive peace requires a much wider orientation, where violence does not only connote something physical; but it is also social, symbolic and representational. Peace here implies political equality in terms of participation and capacity for decision making, wellbeing and equitable life chances, a guaranteed livelihood and an access to a life without the threats of disease, malnutrition, poverty, cultural domination and with full recourse to dignity. We can see how such variety of meanings affect the modalities of peace and conflict through the pages of these essays in this volume. Rakhahari Chatterji argues that peace and conflict studies, conceived as a discipline, is centred on a value position: one that prioritizes peace over conflict. He traces this to the unprecedented destruction wrought by the two World Wars and the development of weapons of mass destruction during the course of the last century that made peace the most urgent issue in international politics. Yet the meaning of peace and the interrelationship of peace and conflict, when looked at from different levels of our existence, appear very complex and demand much greater understanding than we presently have. An audit of the domestic sources of peace and conflict requires a separate volume. This book rather looks into a few volatile domestic issues that plague politics and society in India. The ethnic conflicts of the north-east are surveyed by Samir Das who makes use of a series of ethnographies to explore the ‘art of peace’ and the multiple meanings of peace and peace-building in this region long marked by endemic conflicts of communities against the state and among themselves. Das views peace in relation to power and explains the distinction between the fragile and durable versions of peace in a nuanced essay that also reflects on the idea of peace science. As he argues, peace achieved mainly through pacification, that is to say, without any resolution of conflicts, is constantly haunted by the spectre of war. Thus, it is possible to make a distinction between peace that is fragile and is con­ stantly haunted by the spectre of war and peace that is durable in the sense that it seeks to address the triadic concerns of rights, justice and democracy while resolving conflicts. As against a monolithic and certain science of peace, Das posits the ‘art of peace’ that is experimenting and flexible, without offering a definite recipe and ‘drawing its vitality through art, action and practice’. However, the art of peace is not an abstraction; the essay shows the art of peace rather than a science of peace makes a far more credible reading of the many conflicts of India’s fraught north-eastern region. This volume is equally open ended when it comes to methodological pre­ suppositions. Thus, most essays are predicated on the distinction of the subject and the object though none of the essays self-consciously betrays any unconditional preference for a positivistic and empiricist science of peace and conflict studies. Nearly all the essays are critical in nature. However, if there is no peculiar cele­ bration of positivism as a method here, there is no fundamental denunciation of ‘science’ either. Two essays, however, stand in a slight contrast to others as these

Introduction 5

are more given to imaginations, perceptions and the discursive constructions of the reality. These two papers by Dipankar Sinha and Sudeshna Banerjee are uncon­ ventional entries in a standard manual on peace and conflict studies inasmuch as they argue not so much about structures of conflict or recipes of peace but tell us how the conflict/peace realities are articulated and how subjectivities inform our choices of meanings, agency and practices. Thus Sinha complains against the reductive nature of peace and conflict studies when it comes to media and com­ munication. What explains this neglect? The author makes us ponder: This is despite the fact that communication of numerous formats lie at the base of the ‘reality’ concerning peacebuilding, and conflict generation and resolution. While it is true that in recent times the role of media as a prime actor in the process is being taken into consideration in PACS (peace and conflict studies) there is still scope for further academic navigation in terms of the foundational task of media – mediation. The conceptual focus of this essay is on the complex process of mediated reality. Deconstructing the sources and nature of various act(s) of mediation and subjecting the ongoing debates on the role of media as a pro-active actor in peace and conflict under a critical microscope the essay attempts to answer the question: Is media overplaying its role in its effort to construct reality in its own way? The essay shows how we must engage with the mediated reality that creates complex relations between peace and conflict rather than being satisfied with standard solutions to known puzzles. In an essay that looks into many conflict scenarios in contemporary times, Arun K. Banerji draws attention to the rich tradition of conflict studies. He argues that if conflicts are endemic to human society, it is impossible to abolish them altogether, although specific conflicts may be resolved. ‘International conflicts’ may be defined as a sub-set of the ‘genus-world’ of conflicts and may emerge as conflicts between two or more states due to a variety of reasons: ideological conflicts, contesting territorial claims, desire for dominance either over the neighbouring State(s) or globally, religious extremism, and revanchist policies followed by States as hap­ pened in the case of post-World War I Germany. The roots of most contemporary international conflicts may be traced to the domestic policies of States that spill over into the international arenas within IR. The essay draws attention to two particularly important points. First, it shows why conflict-typologies are essential to understand global political conflicts. Sec­ ondly, the essay points out the vital role domestic factors play in inducing, manipulating and sustaining violent conflicts across and within states. Rajat Acharyya rivets attention to the many facets of inequality as triggers of conflict. His essay argues, that globalization and trade liberalization aggravates conflict situation by causing income inequalities – among workers and capital owners as well as among workers with different skills and capabilities – to grow phenomenally and almost universally across the globe. The paper makes use of various political-economic theories to show why income inequalities in democracies, though they may appear to be less alarming compared to that in autocracies, may not cease.

6 Introduction

The two joint essays penned by the editors are more discipline-centric. Anindya Jyoti Majumdar and Sohini Bose dwell on the continued relevance of classical geopolitics despite major material and cognitive transformations in global politics over many decades. While space may be organized variously, with their con­ comitant implications for imageries of war and peace, the fact that geography is the product of contests ‘to occupy, organize and administer space’ is still relevant in the cotemporary days and as a result geopolitics is inherently intertwined with conflicts and peace. They show how, contrary to the optimism of the ‘end of history’ thesis, the new world draws sustenance from traditional geopolitical perceptions. The chapter not only discusses the traditional concerns of contemporary geopolitics, but also reflects on the new threats like climate change, displacement and migration, epidemics and the like – each having the element of conflict ingrained in it – and also instigates intense competition over physical connectivity on the ground; developing roads, railways, ports and infrastructure to pursue prosperity, influence and dominance. It explains the making of the dominant geopolitical narratives of the day, surveys the conventional understanding of the world’s geopolitical struc­ ture and traces the evolution of the idea of geopolitics from its imperialist origin through various phases till the present age of globalization with major attention on environmental geopolitics. Reflecting on the new school/s of Critical Geopolitics the authors find that a dynamic combination of the forces of geopolitics and ‘anti-geopolitics’ shapes the patterns of international politics today. Shibashis Chatterjee and Sulagna Maitra attempt a survey of select tracts on identity to drive home its significance as a central cognitive category explaining international conflicts and intra-state violence. Starting with a general survey of the many meanings of identity and reflecting on select tracts of identity and culture in IR, including a critical take on Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis, and culminating with a general survey of a variety of literature on ethnic conflicts, the aim here is to drive home the pivotal significance of identity’s role in political and societal conflicts in the contemporary world. We recognize a wealth of nonWestern sources that might enrich a paper on identity. However, this essay is self­ consciously based on established canons of Western scholarship and primarily dis­ cusses how identity matters in the academic discourses of disciplines like IR theory and Political Science. Protection of civilians in times of war has been one major component of conflict and peace studies. Traditional war involved combat between the armed forces of the belligerents. Modern warfare increasingly involves civilians as the target of armed action both in terms of casualty and other consequences. The ‘new war’, whether intra-national or international, irrespective of being a low intensity con­ flict or a high pitched battle, marks the end of traditional distinctions between combatants and civilians and calls for improving the current strategies to protect the civilian population. Omprakash Mishra draws attention to the inadequacy of the existing protective measures and argues that the world needs new mechanisms to deal with armed conflicts. It is necessary to build up on the emerging norms of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and ‘responsibility to protect’. The paper details the

Introduction 7

nature of the challenges involved, charts out the existing protection principles and analyzes the emerging norms. Priyankar Upadhyaya contextualizes the major trends and landmarks in the dynamic evolution of the UN approach to peace, ranging from the narrower concerns of peace during the Cold War era to the evolving expanse of positive peace, and the more recent holistic visions of ‘sustaining peace’ embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The study highlights the resurgent fra­ mework of ‘sustaining peace’, as a transformative trajectory of peace-building which links up organically with preventive diplomacy and peacemaking. He argues “that ‘sustaining peace’ represents a highpoint in the continued expansion of peace discourses from its state-centric focus to larger societal concerns including social justice, poverty alleviation, women and youth empowerment”. Four essays explore the challenges of peace in the context of four kinds of marginality – ethnicity, lower castes, tribes and gender in conflict/post-conflict societies and in their own ways advance the plurality thesis. There is no one peace and conflict studies as there is neither ‘a peace’ nor ‘a conflict’ that can be stream­ lined, generalized and synthesized for a neat ‘social science’. Debi Chatterjee’s essay takes us to caste conflicts in India, perhaps the most resilient and covert form of social violence that one witnesses in the sub-continent. She argues that: Within the parameters of the Brahminical cultural perspective, the culture of the upper castes was projected as superior, or to put it in a different way, upper caste people were said to be ‘cultured’, whilst others were the ‘uncultured’ folk. A wide-ranging variety of tools, ranging from religious jargon and educational formulations to overt exercises of violence, were systematically used for the purpose of propagation and sustenance of the Brahminical notion. The essay shows how constitutional engineering and the politics of social reforms have only partially resolved the tyrannical and violent operations of caste cleavages, and ultimately, led to a politics of recognition-cum-redistribution through the idioms of ‘Dalit’ assertion that is as much a battle for justice and social dignity as a search for substantive peace. Partha Pratim Basu’s essay explains why peace has eluded the tribal heartland of India marked for well over two decades by endemic Maoist violence. The author claims that the Maoist movement, drawing on the Naxalite ideology and reinvi­ gorated by the merger of the splinter groups since the 1990s, emerged as a belli­ gerent champion of the rights and interests – often blatantly disregarded by the powers that be – of the poor tribal populace dependent on agriculture and forest resources, posed a lethal challenge to the Indian state and, arguably, turned stronger with successive governments’ heavy handed counter insurgency measures as well as persistent lack of development in the tribal belts of India. The chapter shows, once again, the dialectical constitution of peace as develop­ ment/justice that the post-colonial state with its commitment to liberal/neo-liberal development refuses to address. The chapter makes one think harder on peace as security versus peace as development paradigms in a complex post-colonial society like India.

8 Introduction

Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya in her paper expatiates upon the efficacy of the idea of Women, Peace and Security (WPS) regimes and the concomitant impact they make on local peace processes taking case studies of two post-conflict regions of South Asia, namely, India’s north-eastern region and the state of Nepal. The basis for such a comparison is the vulnerability that women suffer in protracted intra­ state armed conflicts that are variously negotiated by both the state and a surfeit of non-state actors including international organizations. This chapter is a useful proxy to test some of the familiar hypotheses and concerns that have long bedevilled the field of gender, peace and conflict. In the concluding chapter, Sudeshna Banerjee bridges the abstraction of the mediated reality by the concreteness of illustrations drawn from the world of popular Hindi films that not only portray narratives of war and conflict but also offer new meanings to what negotiation, mitigation, manipulation and peace might mean in times of transformed realities through tropes that often position us politi­ cally over a wide range of issues that are existentially meaningful to such categories. While the essay focuses on a number of iconic films, it is essentially a paper that shows how the statist narratives of border and territory are negotiated, ignored and often transcended by the ordinary people. As the author suggests, this citizen’s difference with the state’s perception and priorities ties up with the right of the citizens on either side to assess the social and psychological costs that they bear as a consequence of a hostile border situation, particularly in a historical terrain that facilitates majoritarian narratives on either side to conflate the enmity invoked at a border with a hostile otherisation of the minority community. Bajrangi Bhaijaan or Manto’s Toba Tek Singh are metaphors of a much larger narrative. It shows the dagger drawn into the heart of peace and conflict studies by highlighting the alternative universes populated by two different imaginations, the statist narrative harping on “adult rationality, intelligence, and hyper-masculinity of state-produced border” and the counter-narrative invoking the tropes of childlike innocence, irrationality and femininity as implicit counterpoise to the rhetoric of hostile borders. While films do not necessary make war or peace, their repre­ sentations create powerful political allegories that draw attention to the fact that there are always multiple realties in people’s lives and, therefore, it is an error to reduce and then reify this innate complexity to easily available categories. The volume attempts to blend concepts and empirics related to peace and con­ flict studies with a particular focus on India and South Asia. However, this is not a typical peace studies primer. The attempt here has been to emphasize the var­ iegated and eclectic nature of the field, look into politics, society and political economy of peace and violence, underline both the material and mediated realities that structure our discourses, and straddle both the international and domestic dimensions of peace and conflict. We hope that the essays included in the volume shall appeal to critical readership and thereby contribute to further the debates on eternally contested ideas like peace, conflict, development, freedom and war. We also hope that this volume will contribute positively to the nascent field of peace and conflict studies, a genuinely multi-disciplinary endeavour, and encourage

Introduction 9

scholars, policy-makers, journalists and anyone with a healthy interest in the making of a peaceful and just world to engage with the perennial complexities of collective living in a reflective way.

Notes 1 There are very a large number of excellent texts on the subject. For details, see Michael W. Doyle. (1997) Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism, New York, NY: W. W. Norton. 2 Galtung is undoubtedly the most canonical theorist of peace and in many ways has done most to turn peace studies into a disciplinary quest (Gaultung 1996; Galtung, Jacobsen and Brand-Jacobsen 2002).

References Doyle, Michael W. (1997). Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Galtung, Johan, Carl G. Jacobsen, and Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen (2002). Searching for Peace: The Road to TRANSCEND. London: Pluto Press. Galtung, Johan (1996). Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civiliza­ tion. Vol. 14. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rummel, R.J. (1981). The Just Peace. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

1 PEACE AND CONFLICT STUDIES A prolegomenon Rakhahari Chatterji

War is as old as human history and so also is the search for peace. Two of our ancient historiographers wrote chronicles of war: Herodotus writing about the wars between Greece and Persia and Thucydides writing about the Peloponnesian war. They did so because they found wars so devastating and caused by human folly. As Thucydides explicitly pointed out the purpose of his work at the outset, if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time. (Thucydides, 1951) That is to say, if his work could help future generations understand war so they can avoid mistakes made by their predecessors, he would consider amply rewarded (Allison, 2017). Learning from past mistakes is perhaps the most difficult thing in life, individual or collective, which is why we go through ups and downs in life and nations rise and fall. After the two tragic wars of the past century and the discovery of the terrible nuclear weapons, we as humans wanted to do better. To prevent the recurrence of past tragedies we thought we needed to delve deeper and deeper into the causes of war in order to enhance the possibilities of peace. War is a particular form of conflict; its extreme, most violent and devastating form. Although sometimes euphemistically we say ‘individuals/families at war against each other’ or two teaching departments of a university are ‘at war’, basically the referent of war is the violent conflict between two collectivities, the most common form of which in our times is the state/nation-state. Similarly and relatedly, peace also has

Peace and conflict studies 11

meant primarily peace between or among states/nation-states. As a result, the central focus for peace and conflict studies has also been the arena of international politics.

Philosophical background Philosophically, the idea of peace and conflict studies goes back to Immanuel Kant who in his celebrated tract, Perpetual Peace (1795), dealt with the question of how global peace could be achieved. His answer was if republican government could be the universal model all over the world then peace would be secured for if a republication government goes to war it must receive the people’s consent and that consent is unlikely to come easily as war would require a lot of sacrifice from the people. “A major cause of war over history, in Kant’s view, is that states going to war has generally been determined by princes for whom war does not entail much in the way of sacrifice” (Bennett, 2016). A whole body of literature on democratic peace theory, also known as “mutual democratic pacifism” or “inter-democracy non-aggression hypothesis”, which argues that liberal democracies do not go to war against each other, has, in fact, been rooted in Kant’s idea of republican peace. It does not mean that democracies are inherently peaceful; it means that established liberal democracies share some common values and commitments to their own people which make them less likely to fight against each other. This theory proliferated during the 1960s and 1970s with considerable debate on whether democracy leads to peace or peace to democracy. Peace research scholars such as J. David Singer found some truth in democratic peace theory but could not find any significant statistical relation, whereas realists like John Mearsheimer argued that the number of democratic states were too insignificant during the past two centuries to permit discovery of any significant relation (Bremer, 1993; Doyle, 1983; Small and Singer, 1976; Mearsheimer, 1990). European or western attitude to war and peace came under critical examination after World War I and peace came to be prioritized through the establishment of the League of Nations. Yet till the end of World War II war was regarded as a legal right of states, which is why governments could still unashamedly maintain departments of war. It was only after World War II that, with the establishment of the UN illegalising war by individual states, departments of war were transited to departments of defence.

Institutional and intellectual foundations If philosophically peace and conflict studies goes back to Immanuel Kant, institu­ tionally, if a date has to be mentioned, it started from 1959 with the founding of the Peace Research Institute at Oslo followed by Peace Science Society(1973), International Peace Research Association (1964), Peace and Justice Studies Asso­ ciation (2001), and Institute of Economics and Peace (2007). These associations

12 Rakharari Chatterji

also started to publish a number of specialized journals such as the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Conflict Management and Peace Science, International Interactions, International Security etc. The Institute for Economics and Peace constructed a Global Peace Index for developing metrics to analyze peace and to quantify its economic value. Started by Australian technology entrepreneur Steve Killelea in 2007, it measures countries by peacefulness by “developing global and national indices, calculating the eco­ nomic cost of violence, analyzing country level risk and understanding positive peace” (Global Peace Index: Wikipedia). In its 2018 report, it measured 163 countries on peacefulness (Institute for Economics and Peace, 2018). Like these specialized institutions, some scholars also came to be identified with peace research. If the Norwegian academic Johan Galtung is considered as the father of contemporary peace and conflict studies, several other scholars like Ken­ neth Boulding, Anatol Rapoport, J. David Singer, David Mitrany, Edward Azar and John Burton also came to be closely associated with promoting this field of study and research. Presently, the area/field of peace and conflict studies is pursued both as a peda­ gogical activity and as research activity. Pedagogically, teachers teach students to transmit knowledge of the past, present and future of peace and conflict and the appropriate methodology of understanding and analyzing them; as research activity, scholars try to generate new knowledge about peace and conflict and try to disseminate that in the community of scholars and also among state actors for influencing public policy. It may be mentioned here that the first undergraduate academic programme in peace studies in the United States was developed in 1948 by Gladdys Muir at Manchester University, a liberal arts college at North Manchester, Indiana (Peace and Conflict Studies: Wikipedia). But it was in the late 1960s with a heightened student concern and protest about the United States’ increasing involvement in the Vietnam War that many more colleges and universities in the USA as well as in Western Europe started offering courses in peace studies either as a separate dis­ cipline or within an existing field of study. It continued with its focus on interna­ tional conflict/war through the 1980s in the face of continued threat of a nuclear confrontation between the Super-powers. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, however, the focus of peace and conflict studies shifted from negative peace (prevention of war) to positive peace (conflict resolu­ tion and sustainable peace) on the one hand, and from international conflict to various sources of internal strife and broadly conceived human rights issues. As a natural corollary to these changes in focus, what we find is that, on the one hand, peace and conflict studies which had a natural association with political sci­ ence and international relations and was regarded as a branch of these well-estab­ lished disciplines is now being mainstreamed into the social sciences as a separate discipline by its own merit. On the other hand, almost every other social science discipline is now paying some attention to the issues raised by peace and conflict studies from its own disciplinary perspective. Ho-Won Jeong’s book, Peace and Conflict Studies: An Introduction, is a very good example of the expanding scope of

Peace and conflict studies 13

this area of research and teaching. Drawing attention to this new direction, the book makes the point that while concern with prevention of war remains a basic theme for peace studies, during the last two decades it has accommodated themes emerging from the search for an alternative global order which emphasizes sus­ tainable development and the promotion of human rights. Ho-Won Jeong believes that “today’s peace research interests lie in uncovering the relationship between inequality, injustice and power asymmetry on the one hand and violence on the other” (Jeong, 2000). Reflecting Jeong’s understanding, Chadwick F. Alger, in his contribution to the volume edited by Charles Webel and Johan Galtung, says, “we decided that it would be most useful to provide the reader with concrete examples of the vast range of human involvements in activities that have an impact on peace and conflict conditions” (Alger, 2007). Taking Johan Galtung’s distinction between ‘negative peace’ and ‘positive peace’ as his point of departure (Galtung, 1969), Alger elaborates various dimensions of conflict prevention and peace building, and the thoughts and institutions behind them. He finds in Louis Kriesberg (1998) a very productive elaboration of Gal­ tung’s distinction. Kriesberg has argued for “an empirically grounded under­ standing of how people prevent or stop destructive conflicts but instead wage relatively constructive conflicts”(Kriesberg, 1998). Extending this position, Alger advances the pregnant argument that it “is necessary to seek the termination of some conflicts, but, in the interest of long-term peace, others should be converted into constructive conflicts” (Kriesberg, 1998).

Peace at any cost? There are peace warriors who take a value position, with peace given the highest value. They tend to prioritize peace above everything and often say peace at any cost. Given the context of post-World War II international politics, where an increasing number of states are producing an increasing number of nuclear weap­ ons keeping alive the possibility of limitless destruction, prioritizing peace appears as the most sensible, as well as moral course. None other than Albert Einstein, as far back as the 1930s, had warned us that the technical advances of our times have turned this ethical postulate [i.e., peace] into a matter of life and death for civilized mankind today, and made the taking of an active part in the solution to the problem of peace a moral duty which no conscious man can shirk. (cited in Webel, 2007, 3) While without doubt this moral position is unexceptionable especially when we are looking at peace as an alternative to war, it is also necessary to remember that between the ‘war–peace’ binary it is possible to tease out several other situations such as conflict with violence short of war, conflict without violence and con­ structive conflict. Different forms of conflict may vary in terms of their peace

14 Rakharari Chatterji

potential. Therefore, what is important is not that we must root out all conflicts; the important thing is to transform a potentially violent conflict into one with a window for peaceful resolution. As Galtung says, “Contradictions, conflicts should be welcomed, not avoided. They are challenges to expand our spaces …”. He looks at conflict as containing both crisis and opportunity. The task, according to him, is transformation through transcendence. This is at the core of his ‘Transcend model’ (Galtung, 2007).

Multidimensionality of peace and conflict An expanded version of peace and conflict therefore does not confine them to the international plane nor merely to the behaviour of states or to international actors. In this perspective, peace is not contrasted only with a single type of conflict, namely, war; rather, various gradations of peace and conflict are identified and explored. Admittedly, both peace and conflict are multi-dimensional. The choice simply is not between perfect peace and all-out war. These aspects are better understood if we try to decipher the content of peace. One way is to look at peace like Johan Galtung has done, i.e., in terms of its negativity and positivity. Charles Webel, in his search for a philosophy of peace, has started with its dictionary meaning. Following Webster, he has distinguished three meanings of peace: personal and interpersonal peace, public or societal peace and inter-nation or inter-state peace (Webel, 2007). Following on from here we can look at peace in different arenas of our existence. First, peace can be conceived as inner peace, meaning peace within (equivalent to personal/interpersonal peace); for example, when we refer to a person as being at peace with herself or enjoying inner peace. Here we are thinking of peace in terms of an individual and her psycho-biological state. It can be disturbed by some physical/biological ailment or disturbance to the mind. Secondly, we can conceptualize peace in the outer sphere (equivalent to public peace) when we look at social collectivities. In this sense a group of friends can interact peacefully, a family can live peacefully, a neighbourhood or a community can be peaceful. Or any or all of them may suffer from conflicts or violence. Finally, peace can be thought of in terms of the global or international sphere. We can identify phases in history when peace has been more prevalent globally or regionally: i.e., the period after the Congress of Vienna, post the Napoleonic wars, when Europe enjoyed almost 100 years of relative peace. There is a saying that peace is indivisible; that is to say, peace cannot be sepa­ rated or divided. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru once said that “Without peace all other dreams vanish and are reduced to ashes”(One India, 2016). It is indeed true that if there is no peace, there cannot be any development, individual or collective. This is basically a Hobbesian proposition. Yet it is also true, as per common sense, that the three levels or spheres of peace mentioned above cannot all be achieved at the same time or to the same degree. Even when the global system is peaceful, there can be numerous individuals in the world with a disquiet mind and or disturbed

Peace and conflict studies 15

body. Similarly, a peaceful community and a violence-prone community may exist in different places at the same time. Thought there are quarrelsome families, it does not follow that all families are quarrelsome. That is to say, peace in one sphere does not guarantee peace in all other spheres. Equally, absence of peace in one place need not deter us from seeking peace in another place. Ideally peace should be indivisible, but in practice we may have to settle for divided peace and be incremental in our approach to it. As Webel says, “‘peace on earth’ might in fact be unachievable, at least for a sustained period of time. That does not invali­ date the struggle to achieve a world with greater justice and equity and without violence, or at least with significantly less violence, injustice and inequity…” (Webel, 2007).

Relationship between peace and conflict This brings us to recognize another aspect of peace: that is, the complex relation­ ship between peace and conflict. Humanity’s preference for peace does not neces­ sarily delegitimize all forms of conflict. As a matter of fact, peace or non-conflict/ even non-violence, while they are invaluable values, are not always and every­ where desirable. A very high level of conflict and even violence has been histori­ cally justified when committed during people’s revolutions against oppressive regimes, or during struggles for independence or national liberation against colo­ nial/imperial powers (O’Brien, 1996). Similarly, war was justified against Nazism/ Fascism. In such cases violence is usually looked upon as harbinger of peace which is why World War II has been called, controversially though, a “good war”. Indeed, there was nothing good about the war, yet it seemed to be a lesser evil than what would happen if it was not resorted to. In the ancient Indian text, Manusmriti, historian Upinder Singh informs us, there is a distinction between “what appears to be violence and what is true violence”. The distinction is based on a means–end relation. As Singh elaborates, “(I)n contexts where injuring or killing another can be established as necessary, meaningful, or even beneficial, it should not be considered violence at all. So words and ideas related to violence and non­ violence can be understood only through a contextual analysis…” (Singh, 2017, 8–9, original emphasis). Singh has gone on to establish through textual and inscriptional evidence that contrary to common understanding of ancient India as a generally peaceful society espousing principles of non-violence, there was lot of conflict and violence within and between ancient Indian states. There have been violent successions through revolutions, assassinations and patricides. Considering the cultural/ideological tra­ ditions of ancient India, she finds non-violence had no centrality in the Vedic tra­ dition. (Singh, 2017, 25) Although Buddhism and Jainism, as distinctly different from the Vedic tradition, “united and raised the relationship between kingship, renunciation and non-violence to a new level”, later Jaina texts argued for mini­ mizing (rather than eliminating) violence, “weighing violent acts against their outcomes and benefits” and the Buddhist tradition “recognized the difficulty – in

16 Rakharari Chatterji

fact the impossibility – of a king ruling without the use of force” (Singh, 2017, 28–30, 38–40). Although contemporary India has drawn upon the great king Ashoka to rein­ force its commitment to peace, Ashoka himself, although renouncing warfare after the Kalinga war, “did not rule out the use of force against recalcitrant people who lived on the borders or in the forests” (Singh, 2017, 48–50). Both Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, were texts replete with violence and warfare where not even the rules of engagement were fairly observed by the heroes. The two epics abound in “contradictory statements about violence and non-violence” (Singh, 2017, 74). In the Mahabharata, Krishna was an arch propo­ nent of necessary violence; even Bhishma admonished Yudhisthira for his “pre­ dilection for non-violence” (Singh, 2017, 74–76). Additionally, the ancient Sanskrit treatise the Arthashastra and the Arthashastra tradition looked upon the state as a “perpetrator, controller as well as target of violence” (Singh, 2017, 119). Contemporary experience as well as past history or legends thus point in one direction: it is good that one should not want to perpetrate violence or encourage conflicts, yet sometimes conditions could be such that the choice is between living in humiliation or resorting to (violent) conflict. That is to say, one may not want to engage in conflict but conflict could be thrust upon one. For instance, in the Mahabharata, several diplomatic attempts by Krishna failed to persuade Duryadhan to settle for compromise and to concede to the minimum demands of the Pandavas, leaving the latter no option other than going for war. Even though the Pan­ davas were not seeking war, war sought them out as Duryadhan refused to yield. Diffidence was not enough to avoid conflict. As Hobbes would have argued, “instrumentally rational actors (states) seeking merely to survive may be drawn into conflict, despite benign intent or shared interests” (Abizadeh, 2011). Not without reason did M. K. Gandhi say he would prefer the violence of the brave to the non­ violence of the coward: “Where there are cowards there will always be bullies … But I … am more ashamed of … cowardice than I am angry at … bullying” (Hingorani, 1942). If the king or the state cannot avoid conflict and violence, for the individual it is also true that conflict cannot be avoided under all circumstances. The “con­ scientious objector” refusing military service is as old as the year 295 when Max­ imilianus (later St. Maximilian) refused to be conscripted into the Roman army on grounds of religious convictions which brought him into conflict with the Roman state. He had to die a violent death at the hands of the state through execution (Conscientious Objector: Wikipedia). There are many such examples of conflict between an individual and the state that has ended in violence. The most famous case of “conscientious objector” in our own times was that of world boxing champion Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) when he refused to be drafted by the US army in the Vietnam War. In his case, however, the matter was settled peacefully through legal means when the US Supreme Court decided to uphold Ali’s claim (The Washington Post, 2018).

Peace and conflict studies 17

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion within political theory concerning an individual’s freedom and the community’s (or state’s) claims in the context of communitarianism and multiculturalism (Sandel, 1996, 1998; Tam, 1998; Sen, 2006). The issue has been whether the individual is absolutely encumbered by her community’s claims upon her or whether she remains unencumbered, having a degree of freedom with regard to determining how much to surrender and when defiance will be within her rights. But in addition to the individual unavoidably coming into conflict with her community or state on such issues, she may come into conflict with herself. Here we are treading into the most delicate area of ‘inner peace’ that everyone aspires for but which is susceptible to disturbances from “unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious thoughts, impulses, needs, desires and perceptions…” (Webel, 2007). To elaborate the point, delving into literary characters would be rewarding. A good example could be Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. In that well-known story when Oedipus is just about to discover the secret of his birth and parentage, his wife Jocasta (also his mother), probably sensing the coming calamity, says, I beg you – do not hunt this out – I beg you, If you have any care for your own life. What I am suffering is enough. But the inner conflict Oedipus was going through was too compelling for him to avoid facing the truth. So he insists, I will not be persuaded to let be The chance of finding out the whole thing clearly. As nemesis takes over and Jocasta hangs herself, Oedipus comes, He tore the brooches – The gold chased brooches fastening her robe – Away from her and lifting them up high Dashed them on his own eyeballs …. There could be no inner peace for Oedipus for the rest of his life. He could have gone by Jocasta’s warning and lived a most mundane life. But the blinding truth, which he alone had insisted to seek out, had torn his life into smithereens. Both the inner conflict and self-inflicting violence Sophocles found unavoidable if the character was to achieve nobility (Grene and Lattimore, 1960a).

Peace and justice Yet another difficult issue is the complex relation between peace and justice. If there is injustice or a strong perception of injustice, can peace prevail? In fact, the rationale for the recent expansion of the subject of peace and conflict studies, as we have pointed out above, is the well-founded realization that the contemporary world suffers from injustices arising out of innumerable inequities and inequalities

18 Rakharari Chatterji

and denial of basic human rights in multiple arenas of our life. This is not always a family issue or community issue or country issue. It is more than all these and globally omnipresent. Look at any country – big or small, rich or poor, capitalist or communist – and we will find them. How can peaceful societies or peaceful human relations be possible? Let us again go back to another of Sophocles’ plays to highlight the point –Electra. The play is about Electra’s determination to avenge the death of her father at the hands of a usurper who, having killed him, married his widow and assumed the throne. She instigates her brother, Orestes, to take revenge. The chorus sings: men long dead draw from their killers blood to answer blood. And Orestes, before striking, utters Justice shall be taken directly on all who act above the law – justice by killing. (Grene and Lattimore, 1960b) Is it retribution in the name of justice or justice in the form of retribution? That is, how do we know on which side is justice? In well-organized states where constitutionalism and rule of law prevail, we can expect an institutionalized system for delivery of justice. It is to the credit of the US constitutional system that Muhammad Ali’s defiance of what he felt as the state’s unjust dictate was resolved peacefully through judicial process. But then there are few countries in the world where rule of law operates, and even where it does operate it does so with many imperfections. In the global society, in inter-state relations rule of law has no place and still only self-interest matters. The dilemma then is: however much we struggle for peace, we cannot rule out conflict or violence; yet we cannot always say when it is morally acceptable and to what degree and when it is not. Besides, establishing peace is not enough; what is more important is to see that the peace once estab­ lished becomes sustainable and does not turn out to be a contributory factor to the next round of conflict.

In conclusion The path of peace research is then quite thorny. Our desire for peace does not ensure peace. We can possibly promote the prospect of peace by trying to under­ stand the sources of conflict and to find out the best ways to respond to them with achievement of sustainable peace as our goal.1 Some general principles or some theoretical framework could be of help. But each case of conflict will have some unique features born out of its specific context which will demand careful handling. Societally speaking, in the contemporary world ideology, interest and identity have been major sources of conflict. Yet these are negotiable conflicts in the sense

Peace and conflict studies 19

that given the willingness (or the compulsion arising from the threat of nuclear holocaust), conflicting parties can create a non-zero-sum possibility for conflict resolution. That is to say, there could be opportunities for dialogue. Of these three, conflicts of identity could be stickier and more resistant to solution, yet structural rearrangements – such as introducing a federal structure, granting larger autonomy to the federating units in an existing federal system, or a ‘velvet-gloved handshake’, i.e., peaceful separation – can go a long way in resolving identity conflicts. But there can be more enduring psychological/emotional forces behind conflict and violence. Whether between individuals or communities, or between states, hatred is possibly the most enduring source for conflict and violence. The presence of hatred eliminates the possibility of dialogue or civic engagement. Aristotle famously made a distinction between anger and hate in his Rhetoric: anger “wishes that the person with whom he is angry should suffer in return” but hate “wishes that he should cease to exist”(Konstan, 2018; Leighton, 1982). Conflict is inevi­ table and has to be accepted and transcended through understanding, education, dialogue, empathy and forgiveness. But when conflict is an outgrowth of hate can it mitigated? Can we ever make people give up hatred? The problem is neither education nor reason can be an adequate deterrence to violence when the emotional wellspring of hate roils up. M. K. Gandhi, who made the achievement of communal unity in India the sole purpose of his public life, felt only true human love could be the antidote to hate. Such true human love would be devoid of sexuality and founded on the idea of human unity in the true sense of the term (Chatterji, 2015–16). This indeed is a tall order in the contemporary world. It would require mis­ sionaries of peace working all over the world for an infinite period of time for the removal of hatred wherever it is found. In distinguishing between a security approach and a peace approach, Johan Galtung admits the foundational importance of human unity for peace (Galtung, 2007). Yet, for the short run and assuming the continuity of our present imperfect world, possibly avenues should be explored for structural and cultural changes conducive to the promotion of peace. And this possibly should constitute the essence of peace and conflict studies for the present.

Note 1 “This is why peace researchers like J. David Singer have devoted much of their scholarly life in studying war and exploring its causes by collecting hard data on militarized con­ flicts and war (for instance, Singer and his associates’ in the Correlates of War project at the University of Michigan).” For details, see Jones, Bremer and Singer (1996).

References Abizadeh, Arash (2011) “Hobbes on the Causes of War: A Disagreement Theory,” American Political Science Review, 105(2): 298. Alger, Chadwick F. (2007) “Peace Studies as a Transdisciplinary Project,” in Charles Webel and Johan Galtung (eds), Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies (p. 300). London: Routledge.

20 Rakharari Chatterji

Allison, Graham (2017) Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (p. 28). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Bennett, Zachary (2016) “Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” Clas­ sics of Strategy and Diplomacy, January 19, 2016. Accessed September 15, 2018. http:// www.classicsofstrategy.com/2016/01/kant-perpetual-peace-1795.html Bremer, Stuart (1993) “Democracy and Interstate Militarized Conflict: 1816–1965,” International Interactions, 18(3): 231–249. Chatterji, Rakhahari (2016) “Gandhi, Non-violence and Communal Unity: A Freudian Perspective,” Gandhi Marg, 37(3–4): 505–518. “Conscientious Objector”, Wikipedia. Accessed September 25, 2018. https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Conscientious_objector Doyle, Michael W. (1983) “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy and Foreign Affairs, 12(4): 323–353. “Finest Quotes: Jawaharlal Nehru on Freedom, Democracy and Much More”, One India, November 14, 2016. Accessed September 29, 2018. https://www.oneindia.com/india/ finest-quotes-jawaharlal-nehru-on-freedom-democracy-peace-2261197.html Galtung, Johan (1969) “Violence, Peace and Peace Research,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 6(3): 167–191. Galtung, Johan (2007) “Peace by Peaceful Transformation – the TRANSCEND Approach,” in Charles Webel and Johan Galtung (eds), Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies (pp. 14–19). London: Routledge. “Global Peace Index”, Wikipedia. Accessed September 18, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Global_Peace_Index Grene, David and Lattimore, Richmond (eds) (1960a)Greek Tragedies, Version I (pp. 157, 166). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Grene, David and Lattimore, Richmond (eds) (1960b)Greek Tragedies, Version II (pp. 105, 109). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Hingorani, Anand T. (ed.) (1942) To the Hindus and Muslims (p. 110). Karachi: Author. Institute for Economics and Peace (2018) Global Peace Index 2018: Measuring Peace in a Complex World. IEP Report 58. Retrieved from http://visionofhumanity.org/app/uploa ds/2018/06/Global-Peace-Index-2018-2.pdf Jeong, Ho-Won (2000) Peace and Conflict Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Jones, Daniel M., Bremer, Stuart A., and Singer, J. David (1996) “Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1815–1992: Rationale, Coding Rules, and Empirical Patterns,” Conflict Management and Peace Science, 15: 163–213. Kriesberg, Louis (1998) Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution (p. 312). Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield. Konstan, David (2005) “The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Psychologia, 48: 232. Leighton, Stephen R. (1982) “Aristotle and Emotions,” Phronesis, 27(2): 144–174. Mearsheimer, John (1990) “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War,” International Security, 15(1): 5–56. O’Brien, Conor Cruise (1996) The Long Affair. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. “Peace and Conflict Studies”, Wikipedia. Accessed September 16, 2018. http://en.wikip edia.org/wiki/Peace_and_conflict_studies Sandel, Michael J. (1996) Democracy’s Discontent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sandel, Michael J. (1998) Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sen, Amartya (2006) Identity and Violence. London: Allen Lane.

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Singh, Upinder (2017) Political Violence in Ancient India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. “Shoot Them for What? How Muhammad Ali Won His Greatest Fight,” The Washington Post. Accessed on September 25, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retrop olis/wp Small, Melvin and Singer, J. David (1976) “The War Proneness of Democratic Regimes: 1816–1965,” Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, 1(1): 50–69; Tam, Henry (1998) Communitarianism: A New Agenda for Politics and Citizenship. London: Macmillan. Thucydides (1951) The Complete Writings of Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War, trans. R. Crawley (pp. 14–15). New York, NY: The Modern Library. Webel, Charles (2007) “Towards a Philosophy and Metapsychology of Peace,” in Charles Webel and Johan Galtung (eds), Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies (pp. 6–7). London: Routledge.

2 PEACE AS POWER, POWER OF PEACE1 Samir Kumar Das

This chapter, based on a series of recently conducted ethnographies, seeks to argue that peace as value based on the triadic principles of rights, justice and democracy finds it difficult – though not impossible – to realize itself. For peace has a tendency of turning into power itself. The journey from peace as power to peace as value is neither smooth nor seamless. This chapter reflects on the roadblocks in the journey and finds out how peace as value wields its power under the most difficult cir­ cumstances. The chapter is accordingly divided into two parts: While the first part dwells on how peace turns into power, the second part points to the modalities of the power of peace. The battle between peace as power and power of peace, as we will conclude, is uneven and asymmetric.

Peace as power In a press statement, Kiren Rijiju – then the newly sworn-in Minister of State for Home in charge of the Northeast (NE) Division, Government of India – called upon the militants and insurgent groups of India’s Northeast to ‘shun violence’, ‘surrender’ arms and enter into peace talks with the Government. Though ‘sur­ render’ was expected to bring in its wake ‘ceasefire’ or ‘suspension of operations’, the Minister emphasized that he and his interlocutors had been equipped by the new Government with hitherto unprecedented power to conduct negotiations and take independent decisions without having to refer matters to the higher authority at every instance. That he spoke the language of power is clear from his unilateral call that ‘surrender’ of arms and ‘shunning’ of violence were a precondition for peace talks and negotiations. Power asymmetry in this instance is the gateway to peace. Once these groups ‘shun violence’, ‘surrender’ arms and peace returns to the region, the Minister “want[ed] solutions, not drag on the talks forever”. In this

Peace as power, power of peace 23

connection, he underlined the need for “working together for the development of the long-neglected NE states”. An effort would be made to liberate the region from its presently land-locked status by slowly softening – but not completely eliminating – the ‘restrictions’ imposed on the movement of the outsiders, parti­ cularly the tourists from outside, and opening the region to the ‘powerhouse’ economies of Southeast Asia. Viewed in these terms, the development envisaged by the new Minister falls in line with the popularly known ‘Look East Policy’ (LEP) followed by the earlier Governments since the early 1990s. The course of development, it may be noted, has already been scripted for the region as well as its insurgents – there is hardly anything that the insurgents can contribute to the peace negotiations excepting meekly following the script. If they do not acquiesce to the development path charted in these officially adopted policies, they must perish. As the Minister puts it, this is their ‘best chance’. Development is what is likely to trump such political questions as identity, autonomy, self-determination and sovereignty and subsume all of them. If ‘shunning of violence’ and ‘surrender’ of arms are a precondition of peace, peace is the precondition of development and progress.2 The relatively more powerful insurgent groups like the anti-talks faction (also known as the ‘Independence’ faction) of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isaac-Muivah) (NSCN (I­ M) continue to harbour their demand for “sovereignty and independence of Assam” and “special federal relations with India”, respectively. Interestingly, the Minister acknowledges that the Government has “some differences” with these two organizations “that will be sorted out in due course”. One must remember the Indo–Naga negotiations that started in 1997 still continue without any ‘solution’ in sight in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile the ‘Framework Agreement’ was signed by the Government of India with NSCN (I-M) back in August 2015. These groups in other words have some power still left with them to leverage the Government. India’s Northeast in general and Assam in particular are now in a peace mode, particularly since the late 1990s. The incidence of violence in terms of both the number of incidents as well as the loss of human lives and property has diminished significantly in the first decade of the new millennium compared with what it was, let us say, in the 1990s. These figures have reduced even further towards the close of the second decade. The Government of Assam has already announced suspen­ sion of operations against various insurgent groups including the United People’s Democratic Solidarity (UPDS), Black Widow (BW), Dima Hasao Daoga (N), Adivasi Cobra Force (ACF), Birsa Commando Force (BCF), Karbi Longri North Cachar Hills Liberation Front (KLNLF), Pro-Talks Factions of National Demo­ cratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) and the ULFA led by its ‘chairman’ Arabinda Rajkhowa. The Anti-Talks Faction of National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) has however announced a unilateral ceasefire. As recently as 24 January 2012, 676 cadres belonging to eight rebel organizations3 ‘laid down’ their arms in Guwahati. Peace is believed to have ‘arrived’ in Assam and the Northeast. In the dominant understanding of the concept, peace is always defined as a function of power whereby two conflicting parties reach peace only when either

24 Samir Kumar Das

(a) one is too powerful in that it can comprehensively defeat the enemy and thus impose ‘peace’ on the other, or (b) there is a kind of uneasy yet stable balance of power between the two parties that makes them realize the mutually hurting nature of the conflict and restrains them from continuing with it. Viewed in this light, peace is a ‘science’ that reflects the relative ‘power’ of the conflicting parties. Peace itself has no power – it depends on the relative power of those involved in a conflict. In either of these two cases, peace implies pacification and certainly not the resolution of conflicts. Peace achieved through pacification is constantly haunted by the spectre of conflict and war. The story of arms surrender mentioned above, albeit widely showcased and celebrated in public – particularly in official circles – needs also to be demystified. The number of arms surrendered on the eve of the Republic Day in 2012 is only 201 – all of which are said to be ‘locally made’.4 Some of the outfits are reported to have ‘laid down’ their arms for the second time after they had done the same a few years back – implying thereby that they make it a ritual to be observed at regular intervals with much fanfare. Surrender of arms thus turns into a public spectacle. Being watched by one and all and surrounded by the dig­ nitaries greeting them with garlands and gifts add to an insurgent’s sense of honour and prestige. Many of the rebel leaders threatened to go back to the jungles if their demands are not met, although it may not be an easy proposition. Hefty peace packages are announced to lure away the insurgents from the path of violence and a cash award is provided against every gun being surrendered to the security forces. Many of the ex-insurgents refuse to go back to the jungles and resume war even when their leaders want it and a sense of fatigue grips them as they have for years lived in the designated camps with all the amenities of modern living. Peace pays its own dividends. One has to take note of the fact that there are different kinds of peace5 and peace achieved through pacification by way of bringing relative power of the conflicting parties to bear on it and peace based on some durable solution to conflicts, respecting the triadic principles of rights, justice and democracy are certainly not the same. In fact, as we will argue later, peace as power often acts as a stumbling block to the accomplishment of what I describe as the triadic principles. If peace is regarded as science,6 it is the science of power – the special knowledge that helps establish complex permutations and combinations in the power correlations between the conflicting parties and peace. For instance, Vadlamannati’s work, in his own words, offers a “first cut exploration into the causes of some of the oldest unresolved armed conflicts of the world” that take place in the Northeast (Vadlamannati 2011: 616). Knowledge of these ‘causes’, as he reminds us, is likely to provide us with a key to the resolution of conflicts. In all these formulations, power is what informs our ‘knowledge’ of establishing ‘peace’. Peace is ‘science’ only in this sense and a whole lot of complex game-theoretic formulations have been set as a tribute to its scientific character. The question is: Does peace as a value in itself keyed to the objective of realizing the triadic principles have any chance in this world where peace has become a source of power? While there is no denying that the post-conflict peace in the

Peace as power, power of peace 25

Northeast has pushed such principles as rights, justice and democracy into oblivion, we are as it were resigned to a state in which peace increasingly becomes an obstacle to the realization of these principles. I describe it as a peace impasse. Our recent writings, I must admit, are marked by a sense of pessimism. Peace as value in itself does not necessarily have power. How does the value of peace engage with peace as power? How does the value of peace wage war on peace as power?7 Does peace as value have power? What kind of power is it? Does this call for any rede­ finition of power? This chapter, in short, seeks to find out answers to some of these questions.

Had peace had the power! On 6 December 1992, the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya (Uttar Pradesh) was pulled down and the destruction of the historic mosque was followed by an almost unending spiral of communal violence of varying intensity all over India. Even Kolkata – the city that boasts of having pioneered what almost euphorically is called ‘Bengal Renaissance’ in the early nineteenth century – was not spared, although the toll when measured in terms of human lives was incomparably much less than what it was in the other metro cities of India. Fear did not take time to build up as the news of wanton destruction and pillage reached different parts of the city, frilled as it was with all kinds of rumours at an incredibly fast and furious pace. At that time I was stranded in a Kolkata neighbourhood which is closer to that imaginary borderline that – if officially recognized – would have partitioned the two communities of the Hindus and the Muslims even in the second decade of the new millennium. The imaginary borderline is real in every other sense of the term in that it is widely shared by one and all across the communities, excepting that it is not officially recognized. The borderline on either side is inhabited by the relatively poorer families, mostly those of the dispossessed and the underclass and on one side there are families who were once uprooted from erstwhile East Paki­ stan but still nurturing the horrid memories of Partition (1947) and now living in a slum. As screams and war cries ranted the air on 8 December 1992 and fireballs lit up the night sky, I found, from a distance, hordes of people – mostly women and children – running away from the borderline towards the more densely populated and ‘secure’ Hindu localities in search of shelter and protection. It was an overcast morning after the dreadful night. The smell of burnt shanties and charred utensils refused to blow away. I saw to my utter disbelief a band of young men (a few of them who I knew were very highly educated and some amongst them were professionals) had collected in front of a tailoring shop and were making preparations for burning it. Incidentally, the man who owned the newly set up tailoring shop against hefty bank loan had been unemployed for a long time till he received the loan and established the shop. The shop was closed at that time and the mob was about to set it on fire which they thought would be an act of revenge on another community. I am sure incidents of this nature must have happened on the other side. I tried to argue with them but none of them was in a

26 Samir Kumar Das

mood to listen. In fact, I was humiliated for not being sufficiently loyal to my community I belong to, by the accident of my birth. I felt absolutely powerless and helpless. With the benefit of hindsight, I ask myself if the anecdote could offer any lesson to us. What do you do at a point of crisis when (a) there is no popularly agreed threshold of what we ought to tolerate and what we ought not; and (b) we sin­ gularly lack both popular and institutional support from the State to defend any peace initiative that we have reasons to value. A group of historians and social scientists call for gradually marshalling popular support around peace as value. But that takes time. What does one do in the interim? Besides, while popular support, according to them, is a form of power, it per se does not provide any ethical traction to peace initiatives and interventions. Gandhi perhaps realized the dilemma more than anyone else of his time. John Locke would have considered the crisis as political, more than being ethi­ cal. For he was keen on putting in place institutional guarantee against any breach or threat of breach to the ‘civil government’ that he thought as necessary for the protection of our “right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”. Insofar as the civil government fails in doing its duty, we have a right to rebel against it – of course under certain conditions. Locke wrote a series of essays on toleration between 1667 and 1675. One of the running themes of these essays is that men left to themselves will not tolerate each other as long as they are tied to a state of nature. It was Voltaire who wrote, about a century later in 1763, on the importance of tolera­ tion, independently of the institutional guarantee and the quid pro quo of peace informed by “the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” against our alle­ giance to the civil government. In the absence of any institutional guarantee, people are unlikely to tolerate each other. As Locke argues in his famous “An Essay Concerning Toleration”: For if men could live peaceably and quietly together without uniting under certain laws and growing into a commonwealth, there would be no need at all of magistrates or polities, which were only made to preserve men in this world from the fraud and violence of one another, so that what was the end of erecting of government, ought alone to be the measure of its proceeding. (Locke 2010: 89). What does one do immediately, in the short run, when the necessary popular and institutional support is either absent or flagging? People’s ethical actions are not necessarily bound by either of these considerations. Evidently there is a grave danger involved in this act of expressing dissent and refusal to tolerate what one thinks one should not tolerate but is unable to absorb the consequences of what one chooses to do. For there is the fear of reprisal. The literature that has hitherto developed in the field under review hardly ever addresses the ethical dilemma of peace we are talking about. It takes on either of the two trajectories: One, there is the historical-philosophical trajectory that seeks

Peace as power, power of peace 27

to argue that the traditions of tolerance are deeply embedded in what may for want of a better term be called ‘Indian heterodoxies’. Perhaps the first example of these heterodoxies is Buddhism in India. Similarly, we may refer to Vaishnavism and other sects both within Hinduism and Islam. It is also important to see how the otherwise rebellious heterodoxies were also gradually re-appropriated by and dis­ solved into Brahmanical orthodoxy. Thus, to cite only an example, most of the current writings on the Vaishnavite Satras (monasteries) of Majuli (the world’s lar­ gest inhabited, riverine island on the Brahmaputra in Assam) point out how some of the once liberal and heterodoxical Satras have become purveyors of NeoBrahmanism and more orthodox forces in Majuli. Two, there is also the anthro­ pological trajectory that reflects on how social life in a country like India calls for toleration without necessarily being preceded by the framing of religious, ethnicist or for that matter any exclusivist perspective. In fact our social practices, according to a section of anthropologists, are framed into a grandiose perspective only as an afterthought and not the other way round. Anthropological literature also draws our attention to the imperatives of toleration that the very art of living in an irre­ ducibly plural society demands from all of us (Das 2009: 12–14; 2014: 1–17). Correspondingly little – if anything – is written on the importance of under­ standing the limits of toleration and most importantly the salience of such limits to the functioning of democracy in a multi-ethnic and plural country like India and of determining both ethically and politically how much to tolerate and how much not to and with what effects. After the demolition of the mosque in 1992, Sunil Gangopadhyay – an eminent Bengali litterateur – termed our continuing failure in refusing to tolerate the violence of post 1992 demolition as ‘the intolerable tolerance’ (asahya ei sahyashakti). If being ethical and being powerful are not seen to go hand in hand, one solu­ tion to resolve the dilemma is to suspend the pursuit of being ethical till one wields the power to vindicate, defend and sustain one’s ethical commitment to peace as value in itself. Ethics is thus made subordinate to politics. Had peace had the power, it would have ceased to remain peace as value and relapsed into pacifica­ tion. For, the powerful are more likely to be intolerant as much as the tolerant are more likely to lack power. Insofar as the attempts at refusal to tolerate are backed by the will to power, they are likely to be appropriated by and absorbed into the normal by being conveniently cleansed of their ethical concerns. As Derrida – while debating with Habermas – warns: “[T]here is no more responsibility when there are norms. … [I]f one wants to normalize, to norm the ethical overload, it is finished, there is no more ethics. There is ethics precisely where I am in performative powerlessness” (Derrida in Thomassen 2006: 113). What are the alternative courses of ethical action under conditions of ‘perfor­ mative powerlessness’? For one thing, one may have to succumb to and tolerate against one’s will what one thinks one should not tolerate, although one admit­ tedly is unable to bring oneself to approve one’s action. The other alternative is to persuade and enter into an argumentation with those whom we do not want to tolerate. In the above instance, I felt humiliated as I started persuading the potential

28 Samir Kumar Das

attackers. I felt lucky that my life was spared by the irate mob. Situations of ethnic and communal violence by virtue of being what they are represent a condition in which to be good is as good as being lost. Persuasion may be ethically plausible, but politically dangerous. While the first course is ethically implausible, the second is politically unsustainable. How can one make both ends meet?

Power of peace We refer to three moments of refusal and refer to a few of our ethnographies while trying to illustrate them. The first is what Bataille would have called the ‘sovereign’ moment in which one is able to overcome the future agonies and anxieties of reprisal and death and thus become ‘sovereign’. Secondly, assuming that the fear of reprisal or even death is what makes one tolerate what one reckons as intolerable, one’s refusal under such circumstances expresses itself through the very act of living life dangerously. We describe it as the moment of danger. Borrowing from Butler, the third may be called the ‘performative’ moment. While the role one plays embeds one in the society and thus contributes to the reproduction of the existing power relations, one often redefines the role and makes a difference to it while enacting it and thus implicitly attempts to bring about changes in the existing power relations. These changes more often than not are both slow and imperceptible.

Peace as sovereign power We came to know of a gynaecologist, who had supervised the birth of a baby born to an allegedly Bangladeshi undertrial woman held in Raiganj (in north of West Bengal) prison lockup in 2004. Her Bangladeshi identity is still in dispute as the long saga of litigation has not yet come to an end. The doctor was subjected to severe forms of reprisal and social ostracism for having done something which his neighbours and even close relatives considered as ‘anti-national’. He did not act ‘in the interest of our nation’, rebutted one of his neighbours who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. As he and his family were denied almost all the essential social services (like those of barbers and laundry etc.) and the vendors in the local market refused to sell vegetables and other provisions to them, daily life became unusually difficult for this family. These are the services that make life in the society possible. He had to travel all the way to distant markets to stock up the provisions. The children of his locality refused to play with his three daughters. The doctor on condition of anonymity told me: “I have done whatever I thought was necessary for me to do at that moment; let others think of the nation and its future”.8 As a matter of fact, he had to suffer all this because of his personal con­ victions and his sovereign refusal to be bound by the future concerns. He is not a politically connected man – neither a member of any political group nor an enthusiastic voter; nor is he popularly known for his overtly radical views. He lived for the present, not for the future.

Peace as power, power of peace 29

It reminds me of Bataille’s contribution that to my mind lies in effectively dis­ entangling the concept of sovereignty from the usual suspects in Political Theory – the State and its rulers. For sovereignty, according to him, consists in one’s ability to live in the present and accordingly free oneself from the knowledge and con­ cerns of the future: “thought subordinated to some result, completely enslaved, ceases to be in being sovereign, that the only un-knowing is sovereign” (Bataille in Botting and Wilson 1997: 308). The knowledge of the future brings in its wake the agonies and anxieties – the ultimate of which are concerned with death. One who fears death not only thinks of the future but is incapable of taking peace initiatives under conditions of ‘performative powerlessness’. There can be no greater anxiety than that of death. The sovereign is one who is at peace with her­ self insofar as she lives in the present without caring for and anticipating the future. It is only in the present that our gynaecologist resolved to live. Had he been fearful of the travails that might follow upon him in future that he could have cared to anticipate in advance, he would not have supervised the childbirth in the first place. His life could have been peaceful. He did not allow his present to be marred by the concerns for his future.

Peace as the power of truth-telling Not all of us are afraid of telling what we consider as truth, knowing fully well that the act of telling it under conditions of ‘performative powerlessness’ is dangerous. Drawing on the Greek philosophy of Parrhesia, Foucault describes it as ‘fearless speech’: “You risk death to tell the truth instead of reposing in the security of a life where the truth goes unspoken … he prefers himself as a truth-teller rather than as a living being who is false to himself” (Foucault 2001: 17). One is certainly not sovereign as one anticipates the future danger and resolves to embrace it without fear. This is another way of becoming ethical under difficult conditions. The dis­ tinction between the first and the second moments is too subtle to the point of being ignored at times. As one reads through the pages of Republic of Reason: Words They Could Not Kill. Selected Writings of Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, Lankesh (2018), one gets at first the impression that each one of them was aware of the danger they were facing and yet all of them preferred to write in their respective regional languages and were “working principally outside the stratosphere of English-speakers in Delhi and other metros” (The Republic 2018: 7, Preface) in order presumably to reach out to a wider readership. Secondly, all of them share a chilling similarity. As Ramachandra Guha puts it: perhaps for the first time in our history as an independent nation, serious, well-respected writers are murdered, physically eliminated for their views … . All … were murdered because of their atheistic and rationalist views, their critical and sceptical understanding of the Hindu tradition. (Guha 2016: 39)

30 Samir Kumar Das

In other words, their “ideas, information and perspectives” were “so dangerous that they had to be snuffed out” (The Republic 2018: 8, Preface). While welcoming tolerance of “ideas, information and perspectives” as an inherent value of a demo­ cratic social order – a prerequisite for peace – Dabholkar cautions that all of them will have to be “put to the test of the fire of truth” (The Republic 2018: 29). In other words, there is assumed to be a Universal Truth against which everything will have to be ‘tested’. The unsaid part is significant: tolerating what does not stand what he calls ‘the test of truth’ cannot be regarded as a value. This ‘test of truth’, according to him, is Universal insofar as every other idea, information or perspective will be made subject to this test in order to be counted as truth. As he illustrates: Fear and lure are two drives that weaken a human being’s determination. For example, you believe in your religion. Your faith is strong and deep. Now some one asks you, ‘come on, I will give you 20 lakh9 rupees, cash down, will you change your faith?’ It is likely that you first make sure that nobody is around within the hearing distance and ask him, ‘will you really give me that much money?’ Then may be I need not fuss over my religion and do as you ask me to do. Similarly, if someone puts a sword to your or your child’s throat and threatens, ‘either you change your religion or you (or your child)are dead’, how will you react? You will certainly think ‘let me extricate my neck first, and then think what to do next. I can change my hat any number of times only if my head remains intact on my shoulder.’ You will then tell him, ‘my life is worth millions. I am prepared to change my religion as you wish.’ You also quietly contemplate, ‘Eventually as the situation improves I will be back into my fold again.’ This you may call a wise decision but you are certainly not faithful to your religion. In both these cases it is not the faith but lure and fear that drive you to action against your faith. (Dabholkar 2018: 30) Invoking the legendary example of Socrates, he also maintains: When one tells a scientific truth of which he is convinced, he becomes the victim of the anger of the upholders of the prevailing system. In such a situa­ tion whether you can tell the truth, of which you are convinced, fearlessly or not, is put to test… . When you are out in search of truth, you ought to be unafraid of the consequences; you should be ready to pay the price of your search, whatever it be. (Dabholkar 2018: 38) He knew the inevitable tragedy that a ‘rationalist’ faces in a society which is not, to say the least, entirely ‘rationalist’: “Advising people to abide by moral values in an atmosphere far from conducive to such behaviour is like a cry in the wilderness”

Peace as power, power of peace 31

(Dabholkar 2018: 51). The life of all of them was cut short by their murder between 2013 and 2017. Kalburgi also reiterates the point when he argues that a researcher is a tragic and solitary being at the end of the day, for his “honesty in his real (day-to-day) life as well as writings obliges him to lead a life of displeasure to others” (Kalburgi 2018: 108). He also explains: “Great souls who were crucified for speaking the truth they realised, or were put to death or were made to consume poison are instances of a researcher’s courage” (Kalburgi 2018: 109).

Performative power It is close to 40 years now since the Assam movement began in 1979. Widely considered as the longest popular movement (1979–1985) that Independent India has ever witnessed till today – an editorial in Dainik Asom once likened it to the Gandhian civil disobedience movement of 1942 in colonial India. There is no doubt that the movement was emblematic of the immensely popular reaction against the foreigners/immigrants settled in Assam. The ever-bulging alarmist lit­ erature points to the history of almost incessant influx mostly – though not exclu­ sively – of the Bengali-speaking migrants from outside Assam assuming intractable proportions over the years and how it (i) threatens to establish the rule of ‘for­ eigners’ in many of the electoral constituencies of Assam where they have allegedly turned into a numerical majority in recent decades; (ii) causes alienation of land hitherto owned by the natives or the indigenous population; (iii) cuts into the employment opportunities that could otherwise have gone to the ‘sons of the soil’; and most importantly (iv) jeopardizes the language and culture of the native Assa­ mese population. The movement opposed as it was to albeit an ambiguously defined body of foreigners-cum-immigrants was keyed to the demand of three D’s – their detection, disenfranchisement and deportation. Prafulla Kumar Mahanta – then the President of the All-Assam Students’ Union (AASU) spear­ heading the movement and who subsequently became the chief minister of Assam marking the end of the 6-year long movement – describes the movement as a “tussle” between the citizens and the foreigners which is aptly captioned in the title of the book he wrote in 1986 on the Assam movement: The problem which is agitating the minds of the peoples of the North-East region is the problem of influx of foreigners from neighbouring countries, particularly from Bangladesh and Nepal. The influx of foreign nationals into Assam is not a recent phenomenon. It exists from the days of independence. The problem has become so alarming that the very existence of the indigen­ ous population is under threat. (Mahanta 1986: 84) While not all immigrants were foreigners and the Constitution of India guarantees the right to move about and settle in any part of India to every Indian citizen, many Bengali-speaking citizens migrating to and settled in Assam had to bear the

32 Samir Kumar Das

brunt of the movement whether by paying with their lives or with their wealth and assets or both. Nirupama Bargohain – the famous Assamese litterateur – is also known for her writings against the atrocities committed against the victims. At the peak of the Assam movement when hundreds of people were rendered homeless and took shelter in the relief camps, a delegation of medical students visited only those camps which housed the Assamese-speaking victims. On being asked why they had not visited the Nalbari camp housing the Bengali-speaking victims, they told that they had no desire to go to ‘the Bangladeshi camps’ to render service there. Bargohain reminded them of what she calls, ‘daktoror dharma’ (doctor’s ethic) in these terms: “You are doctors, you are respected, to render service to the affected people is your religion; you should therefore make no discrimination …” (Bargohain 1998: 26). At a time when the society was sharply polarized thanks to the heightened ethnic conflicts, such an advocacy surely fell on deaf ears. She describes the boy who humiliated her (‘pierced her heart’ as she puts it) by using a very insulting word “in the presence of a bus full of passengers” as one “of the age of my eldest son”. The self that seems to assert it in this instance is that of an essential mother for whom there is no humiliation greater than the one done by her son. The essential mother in her does not like to be insulted by her son as much as it does not discriminate between her own sons and daughters and those of others. Her role as an essential mother, according to Pradipta Bagohain, has prompted her to persistently hold the ‘flag of dissent’ aloft, while others have remained ‘safely indifferent’ (Bargohain in Agragaminee 1998: 155). Was she performing her role of a mother as she was asking the children of her son’s age to learn an essentially non-discriminatory professional ethic of a doctor? In her performance of the role of a mother, she subtly changed the role from a biological mother with an abiding – if not selfish – concern for her family and community to an essential mother who does not discriminate between the Assa­ mese and the Bangladeshi sons and daughters and cares for any child in distress regardless of its ethnicity, nationality or any other identity. While performing her role in the above instance, she is more of a mother than a member of her com­ munity. Performative power, as Judith Butler argues, is the power that one retains as the indissoluble remainder of one’s subjectivity while ‘impersonating’ a social role (in this instance that of a mother) – without ‘inhabiting’ it. Bargohain’s understanding of a mother is that of an essential or universal mother and not a biological mother. As she transgresses the boundaries of biological motherhood, she is rudely reminded by the group of medical students of the ‘precarity’ that her performativity entails. Precarity is linked not so much with the norms associated with the role of the mother, as much as it is with the very way she performs it. For the way she performs it is significantly at variance with the way it is performed by others and most certainly with the way the young doctors wanted it to be per­ formed by a mother. Butler also reminds us that “those who do not live their roles in intelligible ways are at heightened risk for harassment and violence” (Butler 2009: ii). But Nirupama Bargohain does it at grave risk without the accompanying conditions that would have otherwise made it possible for her to perform the role

Peace as power, power of peace 33

in the way she did it. But she performed it simply by asserting it without waiting for the accompanying conditions to become conducive and caring for her security and safety. She exercised her freedom of playing the role without waiting for these conditions to mature. Assertion of the role and exercise of freedom thus are not two chronological stages in the sequence of performativity – but are implicated in one another. In the words of Judith Butler, “There is no freedom that is not its exercise; freedom is not a potential that waits for its exercise. It comes into being through its exercise” (Butler 2009: vi–vii). The above ethnographies focus on the three main moments of how peace as value can wield power: by becoming sovereign, through the art of truth-telling and finally through performativity. Each of these moments represents how peace as value can take on peace as power. The battle between power of peace and peace as power is nevertheless asymmetric. Left to itself, power of peace is unlikely to establish its unbridled hegemony, if at all, over peace as power. Power of peace, as we have seen in each of these instances, is the power of what Foucault calls ‘interrupting’ the flow and circulation of peace as power and serves as its ‘perma­ nent limit’ (Foucault 1982: 794). That it serves as a ‘permanent limit’ does not mean that it is effective and successful in every instance. Borrowing from Foucault, one may say that peace as power “owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it” (Foucault 1980: 82). But ‘harshness’ could hardly tie them down. Such is the power of peace.

Notes 1 Two earlier versions of this paper with the titles ‘Peace as Power or Power of Peace: Preface to a Possible “Anti-Science” of Peace’ and ‘On the Limits of Tolerance’ were presented to two seminars organized by Presidency University and Scottish Church College in Kolkata (India) on 4 July 2014 and 23 November 2017, respectively. I am thankful to the colleagues and participants who extensively commented on these two drafts. Needless to say, I am alone responsible for the lapses, if there are any. All translations from non-English sources are mine. 2 All excerpts in the text are taken from “Peace key …” (2014: 6). 3 These eight organizations are: Adivasi People’s Army (APA), All-Adivasi National Lib­ eration Army (AANLA), Santhal Tiger Force (STF), Adivasi Cobra Militant Army (ACMA), United Kukigam Defence Army (UKDA), Kuki Revolutionary Army (KRA), Kuki Liberation Army (KLA) and Hmar People’s Convention (Democratic). 4 A report telecast on the Frontier TV channel based in Guwahati (Assam, India) on 24 January 2012 mentions this. 5 For a theoretical review of various kinds of peace, see Das (2004: 19–31). 6 Manas Chatterji and his associates across the world have for long been associated with the project of developing ‘Peace Science’. 7 I used the verb ‘to wage’ in my lecture on ‘Theories of Peace and Understanding’ orga­ nized by the South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR) in Kathmandu on 8 Feb­ ruary 2000. Late Professor Rajni Kothari took strong objection to my use of the verb to describe peace-as-value initiatives. For him, on the other hand, such initiatives must shun power altogether. While paying tribute to his memory, I respectfully critique this proposition of powerless peace. 8 Interview in Raiganj, North Bengal (West Bengal, India) taken on 24 July 2004. 9 Indian count of one lakh is equal to 100,000 or one hundred thousand.

34 Samir Kumar Das

References Bargohain, Nirupama (1998). Swapna-Duswapna (in Assamese), [Dreams-Nightmares]. Guwahati: Jyoti Prakashan. Bargohain, Pradipta (1998). ‘Paribrajika mor maa Nirupama Bargohain’ (in Assamese), [My wandering mother Nirupama Bargohain]. In Agragaminee (ed.), Nirupama Bargohainr Jiban aru Sahitya (in Assamese) [The Life and Literature of Nirupama Bargohain]. Guwahati: Jyoti Prakashan. Botting, Fred and Scott Wilson (eds) (1997). The Bataille Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Butler, Judith (2009). ‘Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics’. AIBR. Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 4(3): i–xiii. Madrid: Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red. www.aibr.org Dabholkar, Narendra (2018). ‘Ethics and Eradication of Superstition’. In The Republic of Reason: Words They Could Not Kill. Selected Writings of Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, Lankesh (pp. 45– 51). New Delhi: SAHMAT with The Raza Foundation. First published 2015. Dabholkar, Narendra (2018). ‘Faith and The Republic of Reason’. In The Republic of Reason: Words They Could Not Kill. Selected Writings of Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, Lankesh (pp. 15–31). New Delhi: SAHMAT with The Raza Foundation. First published 2015. Dabholkar, Narendra (2018). ‘Scientific Outlook’. In The Republic of Reason: Words They Could Not Kill. Selected Writings of Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, Lankesh (pp. 32–39). New Delhi: SAHMAT with The Raza Foundation. First published 2015. Das, Samir Kumar (2014). ‘Peacemaking and the “Unofficial” Peace Process in India’s East and the Northeast’. Jadavpur Journal of International Relations 18(2): 1–17. Das, Samir Kumar (2009). ‘Civil Society as a Moral Moment’. InfoAgenda, issue 17: 12–14. Das, Samir Kumar (2004). ‘Defining Peace Studies’. In Ranabir Samaddar (ed.), Peace Stu­ dies: An Introduction to the Concept, Scope, and Themes. South Asian Peace Studies I. New Delhi: Sage. Derrida, Jacques (2006). ‘Performative Powerlessness – A Response to Simon Critchley’. In Lasse Thomassen (ed.), The Derrida–Habermas Reader (pp. 111–114). Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Foucault, Michel (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (pp. 78–108). Colin Gordon (ed.). New York, NY: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel (1982). ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry 8(4): 777–795. Foucault, Michel (2001). Fearless Speech. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Guha, Ramachandra (2016). Democrats and Dissenters. Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India. Kalburgi, M. M. (2018). ‘The Structure of Research’. In The Republic of Reason: Words They Could Not Kill. Selected Writings of Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, Lankesh (pp. 107–125). New Delhi: SAHMAT with The Raza Foundation. First published 2015. Locke, John (2010). A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings. Edited and with an Introduction by Mark Goldie. Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund. Mahanta, Prafulla Kumar (1986). The Tussle Between the Foreigners and Citizens in Assam. New Delhi: Vikas. SAHMAT with The Raza Foundation (2018). The Republic of Reason: Words They Could Not Kill. Selected Writings of Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, Lankesh. New Delhi: SAHMAT with The Raza Foundation. First published 2015. Preface, pp. 6–8. The Times of India (2014). ‘Peace Key to Ensuring Progress in NE: Rijiju’. The Times of India (Kolkata), 30 June 2014. Vadlamannati, Krishna Chaitanya (2011). ‘Why Indian Men Rebel? Exploring Armed Rebellion in the Northeastern States of India, 1970–2007’. Journal of Peace Research 48(5): 604–619.

3 MEDIATED REALITY IN PEACE AND CONFLICT A conceptual navigation Dipankar Sinha

Being situated in these contemporary times, often publicised as the Information Age, one finds that media of all genres – print, electronic, audio, visual, audio­ visual, digital and so forth – are taking part in transforming time and space to varying degrees. By having so much power the media is being instrumental in fomenting conflict and violence, and also in effecting conflict management, conflict resolution and peace. Even a casual observer of the role of the mainstream media, which is the major concern in this chapter, would not fail to notice its increasing intervention in the arenas of peace and conflict. This development of mediasourced mediation by itself constitutes a vital issue in the process of international relations but it has been accorded less importance as a theme in the mainstream discipline of International Relations (IR). In a modest attempt to address the hitherto existing gap the discussion here seeks to provide some clues to certain conceptual dimensions, issues and categories – all integral parts of filtering the reality by the media. The idea here is not to make a jump-start with a study of the mediated reality vis-à-vis IR and Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS). Rather the effort is to present a tentative template, with the basic assumption that it may be useful to develop more coherent and overarching theoretical frameworks in understanding the ‘reality’ pertaining to peace and conflict. Therein lies the rationale of the act of ‘navigation’.

Why mediation To flag a point at the very outset, detaching the media from the act of mediation is a self-defeating venture and it is equally true in the study of peace and conflict. Media is a site of meaning production as well as a site of communication – with bewildering degrees and layers of intersubjectivity. Media’s existence and inter­ vening role are inseparable from the act of mediation. Mediation breathes life into

36 Dipankar Sinha

media and generates its power to define reality in its terms. It results in creation, circulation, neutralization and destruction of meanings, depending on the context. Mediation lies at the core of the media of any genre notwithstanding their varying objectives and functions. Media’s role amidst the complexity of the contemporary world is sourced from the multifaceted process of mediation of meanings. Media in the earlier times was mostly viewed as an agency of technical transmission from the sender to be decoded by the receiver, through some channels of encoded messages (Berlo 1960). This is not to argue that in those earlier times the reality was simple enough to be encapsulated and explained by the Transmission model. But it was comparatively less complex than what it is now. One of the earliest and most prominent proponents of political communication, Harold Lasswell (1948, 37–51), had identified three prime media functions of the media: (i) surveillance of envir­ onment (news coverage); (ii) correlation of the parts of society (interpretation of news and information); and (iii) transmission of culture (history, values and so forth). The schema dominated for long the theory-world of communication and media. But the problem is that it lacked any scope for feedback and its ‘engineering spirit’ conceptualized the media audiences in an inflexible manner. Nor did it invest much effort in alerting us about the dysfunctional role of the media. In the millennial world of rapid changes, which in a major way combines media’s prolific growth, huge reach, near-ubiquitous presence and relentless intervention, such deficiencies are no longer tenable. With numerous modes and nodes of communication in-between and across individuals, communities, localities, regions and nations, what becomes extremely significant for conceptualizing the existential reality in contemporary times is who speak/s for whom. The unavoidable task in understanding the ‘mediaspeak’ is to trace the nature of ownership and management of the media organizations. The Western oligopolistic control and proprietorship of the global media agencies has been a concern for a fairly long time, and since the declaration of the War on Terror it has acquired a shriller voice. With ‘terrorism’ at the forefront, a new wave of patriotism mixed with an intense sense of insecurity has been designed and promoted by the global media. It provides a new twist to the modus operandi of the media. It encourages one to think of a possible collaboration between the media and the state, an evident consequence of which is the rise of securocratic discourse from which both gain in their respective ways. The bonhomie of the American media and the American state vis-à-vis the War on Terror is funda­ mentally different from the days of the Vietnam War of 1970s when the two were on most occasions at loggerheads. While these points are important in understanding the current positioning of the global media, there is a need to go still deeper into the problem. The con­ temporary media, as I have extensively analyzed elsewhere (Sinha 2018, 153–187), involves itself in ‘reality creation’, a major function of the state-of-the-art millen­ nial informational capitalism. It makes highly intensive but subtle efforts to shape our thought-process and conduct. The conventional wisdom in media studies suggests that the state-owned media and the corporate media think and (re)act

Mediated reality in peace and conflict 37

differently as they belong to two different genres. But in the highly dynamic and somewhat deceptive scenarios of peace and conflict it may happen that in times of conflict, and even in times of reconciliation and peace, there is collaboration, open or tacit, between the state-run media and corporate media in the ‘national interest’. One can in this context refer to the respective roles of the mainstream media in Indian and Pakistan, in which media is more at ease with conflict generation with jingoistic rhetoric than in peacemaking. In some cases, it has been observed (Nohrstedt and Ottosen 2014, 14–15) that the lack of legal competence of the journalists is used by the states to utilise media in promoting illegal war and to trivialise genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes. Going beyond the familiar analytical framework of the role of the media as either supporter or critic of war, Thussu and Freedman (2003, 7) observe, in the backdrop of what they see as the media–military collaboration, that media constitutes the spaces in which wars are fought and experienced by audiences. Thus, while the task of exploring the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of the mediated reality in peace and conflict in contemporary times is inescapable, the task itself involves dissecting the role of media in escalation, deescalation and termination of conflict, and also in post-conflict resolution and reconciliation. A more nuanced interpretation of the media and its act of mediation reveals a number of layers beyond what is apparent. Thus, in matters of peace and conflict media represents and mediates the differences between the concerned parties. But such parties, be they in conflictual relations or in conciliatory relations, may be fragmented. They involve such social categories as nation, race, colour, class, reli­ gion, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and age. The process of mediation also involves a complex mix of consensus, distortion, ideology, hegemony and bias in terms of media’s involvement with its audiences (Nicholls 2007, 2923–2928). The com­ munication frame of mediated reality includes message, audience, messengers, medium, images, context and higher-level moral and conceptual frames. As we shall see now, mediated reality is far more subtle, deceptive and complex than mere production of disinformation and misinformation. Mediation of time and space as the dimensions of reality by the media should, as one observer suggests (Tsatsu 2009, 11–32), give scope to focus more on how these dimensions are mediated, remediated, defined and restructured, which in turn requires continuous and insightful reconceptualization.

Mediated reality: The missing link With the ever-increasing importance of media, mediated reality has acquired a new avatar. There is hardly any doubt that the media trajectory has become excessively dynamic with the rapid rise of ‘electronic mediation’ in the last three decades, and the subsequent growth of the Internet, social media and blogs providing up-to-the­ minute information and allowing multimedia functions and real-time interactivity to vast audiences. The spectacular ascendance of digital media has led to the claim that the world is coming under the spell of Reality 2.0, in which the gap between

38 Dipankar Sinha

the physical reality and the digital reality is becoming narrower. Yet, despite all these developments, there are simultaneous claims that we are now living in a world of fake news and, more broadly, of post-truth. This predicament necessitates engagement with the question whether the reality is based on facts or on the interplay of imageries. This brings us to the epistemic dimension of media power, which is often missed by the technocratic, monochromatic interpretations of the media. The generic power of the media emanates from both material and symbolic sources. The mutual positioning of the two can be at the same time com­ plementary and oppositional. One can go to the extent of arguing that in the contemporary world, with the media becoming a major actor, the symbolic often surpasses the material, the latter often being obfuscated by the flood of images. Scholars such as Boorstin (1961) explain how events are turned into pseudo-events by the manipulating strategies of the media. He makes a distinction between pro­ paganda and pseudo-events by arguing that while the former seeks to hide the truth from the people by taking recourse to various strategies, pseudo-events as more meticulously constructed and carefully scripted artificial non-existent ‘facts’, are presented and promoted through media coverage as ‘real and important’. Pseudo-events include advertisements, speeches and statements made in press con­ ferences, but irrespective of their forms and formats they are designed to lead to a ‘lack of clarity’. Boorstin’s pseudo-event attained a more provocative and mature form in the conceptualization of hyper reality by Jean Baudrillard. Pointing out the blurred distinction between reality and simulation, Baudrillard in The Gulf War Did Not Exist (1995) viewed the first war in the history of human civilization telecast live as a media spectacle enacted for public viewing. In no uncertain terms he described the war as a “media constructed event” (31) in which the media promoted the war as much as the war promoted the media. His major contention was that the media representations of the war created a situation in which the barrage of mediasimulated images made it impossible to discern what actually happened in the conflict. Baudrillard also shook the foundation of ‘reality’ by generating a sceptical outlook about information itself. He would provocatively argue (81) that one need not be too perturbed by the Gulf War not being a war because the information about it was not information per se. Baudrillard’s arguments produced many cri­ tiques but there is no denying the fact that he has done away with a simplistic understanding of the nature of reality in general and the mediated reality in particular. Insofar as PACS is concerned it is continuously marked by various kinds of introspections and interrogations. This makes it inter-/multi-/cross-/trans-dis­ ciplinary in nature and enhances its potential to deal with certain specific events and processes which are anything but monocausal and monochromatic in lived experience. But it is perplexing that when both peace and conflict are intertwined with numerous developments of diverse nature, the PACS pedagogy generally prefers to steer away from the crucial but delicate question of how communication manoeuvring feeds both conflict and peace. Media finds some space in PACS but

Mediated reality in peace and conflict 39

mostly as an appendage rather than as a pro-active agent which fosters, as the case may be, conflict, conflict management, conflict resolution and peacemaking. Even when mediation is accorded some importance it is mainly perceived, as Byrne and Senehi (2006, 10–11) observe, in terms of some specific actors and/or communities and/or organizations being involved in a “future-oriented problem-solving inter­ vention process that encourages the empowerment, mutual recognition, and autonomy of conflictual parties”. But even in their co-edited volume, titled Critical Issues in Peace and Conflict Studies: Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy (Matyók, Senehi and Byrne 2011), ‘media’ has no place in the index. In some cases, even when communication is linked to the incidence of mediation, the discussion is basically confined to interpersonal communication and not media as such. Eytan Gilboa’s (2009, 88–89) observation is worth mentioning here: Despite the critical significance of the roles played by media in conflict and conflict resolution, this area has been relatively neglected by both scholars and practitioners. Most existing studies focus on the often negative contributions of the media to the escalation and violence phases of conflict. Very few studies deal with the actual or potential media contributions to conflict resolution and reconciliation … . The paucity of research and analysis of the media’s role in conflict resolution may be attributed to the difficulties inherent in multi­ disciplinary research and the absence of adequate tools, models, and frame­ works for analysis. There are serious gaps between theoreticians and practitioners in the fields of conflict resolution, communication, and journal­ ism. Gaps also exist between theoreticians and practitioners within each of these groups. One way to reduce these gaps is to construct a multidisciplinary framework for analysis and practice. Interestingly, scholars of Communication Studies are now being engaged in understanding the communicative dimensions of peace and conflict from new and emerging vantage points. In one such study, Communicating Differences: Culture, Media, Peace and Conflict Negotiation (Roy and Shaw 2006, 1), the editors begin with this observation: Society is undergoing rapid changes due to forces of globalization, mobility of people, technological evolution, and the media’s ubiquitous presence in all facets of life. As a result, the essence of how we communicate in relationships, between and across cultures … and in moments of conflict and crisis, is undergoing multi-faceted transformation. Media has in recent times gained some prominence in studies relating conflict, peace and journalism but as I shall subsequently argue it too has its own limitations. Media’s playing field in the globalizing world is local/national/regional/inter­ national/global, or all in simultaneity. Media’s meteoric ascent in these times is graphically expressed in the following words (Hjarvard 2013, 3):

40 Dipankar Sinha

A significant proportion of the influence that the media exert arises out of the double-sided development in which they have become an integral part of other institutions’ operations, while also achieving a degree of self-determina­ tion and authority that forces other institutions, to greater or lesser degrees, to submit to their logic … . Thus, traditional questions about media use and media effects need to take account of the circumstance that culture and society have become mediatized. It may also be added that the media’s ambitious role in influencing the political and governance agenda, with the back-up of new technology, has led to aggressive media dynamics. However, there is no easy way to analyze the role of media in peace and conflict. Thus, two major questions that confront scholars involved in the study of media from the vantage point of political communication are: (i) is media playing the role of a peacemaker or of a generator of conflict? and (ii) is media an amplifier of the people’s voice or a tool of political establishment? It would have been nice if the media could be slotted into one of the categories in a binary way but the problem is that its role in most cases, perhaps more so in peace and conflict, is too complex to put us in a comfortable position with that kind of reductivism. It is to be noted that such questions nudge the analysts to discard the long surviving but rather simplistic idea that media is a ‘mirror’ of the reality. Moving them away from the assumption that the media is the ‘depicting’ agent of reality such questions induce them to explore to what extent media indulges in the distortion of reality, and even further, to what extent it constructs the reality itself. To reiterate, the mediated reality is very complex when it concerns conflict and peace, say, in as different places as in Palestine, Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda and Northern Ireland – just to mention some most frequently cited cases in con­ temporary PACS. Kempf (2007, 1–9) pinpoints the inherent complexity in theorizing the reality of conflict. He writes: Conflict is an interactive process, and like all human actions it involves (at least) three different kinds of reality. There is one party’s subjective reality and the subjective reality of an opponent. While both these realities can only be assessed from within the respective party’s perspective, the third kind of reality can only be assessed from an external perspective and shows how subjective realities interact with each other. Also, how one perceives reality generated by ‘embedded journalism’ is a difficult question. If the Gulf War was covered by a contingent of more than 1500 jour­ nalists, in the case of reporting on the NATO forces in the bombing of Kosovo the number was more than 2500. As such, the so-called post-truth world is backed up by infotainment, spectacularization and commodification of anything worth mar­ keting. Peace and conflict are also vulnerable to the same processes, which is most frequently evident in the media-sponsored spectacularization of human suffering and trauma in conflict-ridden areas. In a way, it is a win–win situation for the

Mediated reality in peace and conflict 41

media. Because the demand and need for information remains undiminished and reaches its peak in conflict situations, it is the media to which people turn to. The media is not only structurally robust in this world, it also sustains its power from a popular belief in its positive role, wherein it is supposed to be ‘objective and neu­ tral’. But corporatization of media results in a huge gap between media’s role expectation and role performance. Taking advantage of its expected positive role, media’s mediation becomes steeply unilateral, foreclosing, as Baudrillard shows in “Requiem for the Media” (1981, 164–184), the possibility of response and reci­ procity. It is to be mentioned here that the Gulf War itself has resulted in what is known as the CNN Effect, in which it has been shown (Robinson 1999, 301–309) that television coverage forces policymakers to adopt strategies and take actions which they otherwise would not have. Incidentally, Somalia is yet another important topic in establishing the credibility of the CNN Effect. Even a strong critic like Gilboa (2002, 1–33) acknowledges that it does present evidence and analysis of other significant effects on various phases and dimensions of policymaking. This goes against the main contention of the Manufacturing Consent thesis (Herman and Chomsky 1988) that the (news) media is mobilized and manipulated in supporting government policies. In the days of media dominance, for tactical and strategic reasons media may in some cases follow and publicise policies of the government, but that too has to have the share of media’s own interest and profit motive. Baudrillard is important in this discussion for yet another reason. His contentious arguments also facilitate a better understanding of a concept – mediatized reality – which is now gaining wide currency in media and communication studies. The intensification and expansion of mediated reality, with the unhindered growth of media, gives rise to the phenomenon of mediatization, which has lot of potential in understanding what peace and conflict are all about. But I would adopt a slightly different stance with regard to mediatization by arguing that overemphasizing it runs the risk of undermining the umbilical cord that it shares with mediation. When scholars like Hepp (2012, 3) consider mediatization as a more progressive concept and research agenda than mediation on the grounds that the latter moves “the focus of interest from the particular instances of mediated communication to the structural transformations of the media in contemporary culture and society”, the logic itself rests on a truncated definition of mediation. It is because mediation is a much more encompassing act not only confined to specific instances of com­ munication situated in time and space. It is perhaps better to keep in mind that mediatization is a more aggressive form of media-centrism, seeking to influence, if not overwhelm, the constitutive and operational logics of other institutions by media logic, with its foundational basis in the act of mediation. Significantly, in a co-authored write-up with Nick Couldry, Hepp is more considerate in tracing a link between mediation and mediatization with the observation that the latter “reflects how the overall consequences of multiple processes of mediation have changed with the emergence of different kinds of media” (Couldry and Hepp 2013, 197).

42 Dipankar Sinha

Select modes, approaches and models It is important to note that the most evident achievement of media’s intense mediation is that despite not being a monolithic entity it has been able to project itself as such in popular perception. This mystifies the mediated reality. There is a wide range of modes, approaches and models by which the mediated reality may be demystified. Here is an illustrative scenario based on only three major modes (Weaver 2007, 142–147; Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007, 9–20). Agenda-setting is a foremost manoeuvring mode utilised by the media. It concerns the propagation of some salient features as important. There can be a hierarchy of such important events but the main point is that their degree of importance is to be determined by the media. In deliberate acts of inclusion or exclusion, and in selection and privi­ leging of events, Agenda-setting counters the idea that media reflects the reality. Another major mode is Framing, an interpretive scheme based on a certain ‘thought structure’ with simplified and slanted viewpoints. While strategically pla­ cing some information in the field of meaning, rather than providing information or news or presenting events in an abrupt way, it seeks to draw attention to some specific problems, with inherent bias. Framing is not necessarily negative in nature. It can also have a positive influence. With an abiding goal of influencing audience perception it can reinstate or reverse existing ideas, opinions and attitudes but it has weak effect on those who are knowledgeable or opinionated and partisan. Framing may include particular definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation. Thus, the media in the case of a conflict may com­ pletely erase its long history and present information in some specific ways to provide the impression that it was a sudden development. Paradoxically, the pro­ cess of contextualization can itself lead to decontextualization. In the case of the third major mode, Priming, a setting is constructed by selecting and privileging some segments of the reality and making them important as issues, themes and views. Priming has a normative orientation in the sense that it communicates whether some event is good or bad and whether it should have or should not have taken place. These three major modes have their own variants, and their existence across the spectrum of the media provides a challenging but fascinating exploratory exercise for analysts of peace and conflict. Three major approaches (Schuetz 2009, 757–61) may be useful for the enhanced understanding, reflections and interpretations of the mediated reality in peace and conflict. First, there is the Social Construction approach, which propounds how reality is created by using and reflecting on symbols in numerous social interactions. It seeks to focus on the contents as developed and exposed through verbal, written, visual and aural messages. In putting symbols at the centre stage, the approach categorises them as Referential Symbols, which are objective and data-based, and as Condensation Symbols, which are evocative and based on emotional reactions. The approach also provides importance to myths and rituals, which often become part of the constructed discourse of peace and conflict. The second approach is that of Message Effects. It focuses on top-down communication from the media and

Mediated reality in peace and conflict 43

the audience’s dependence on it. It has two key categories to further qualify the mediated communication. One, (i) Elaboration Likelihood, has two components: (a) Central Processing, a sort of critical processing of information based on one’s own political knowledge, experience and plan for action and (b) Peripheral Pro­ cessing, in which there is little attention to content and relevance and the reliance is more on emotional cues, attractiveness of sources, memorable themes, indirect connections, personal feelings. The other, (ii) Social Judgment, relates to pre­ existing beliefs and social connections of social reference groups, under the influ­ ence of which acceptance, rejection and non-commitment are expressed. The third approach is Media Effects, which in direct contrast to the Transmission model mentioned earlier, emphasises the growing role of the ‘personal’ in forming poli­ tical attitudes and opinions. It highlights how information is gathered from the media and opinions are shared with others through interpersonal and group inter­ action. It also focuses on a multi-step process of modalities and impact of communication through social media. In the specific context of news, which constitutes the mainstay of conflict communication and peace communication, Arno (2009, 38–50) presents the Civic or Rational Consensus News Scenario model and the Conflict Discourse Systems News Scenario model. The former is an ideal type which emphasises the function of providing full and accurate information by which one can act appropriately – personally and politically – to deal with problems. The assumption is that “indivi­ duals need all the information possible about issues of public concern such as law and order, and each reader can make up his or her own mind about the individual or group action that is appropriate” (42). The second model is more conflictoriented and places greater stress on the idea that communities are essentially het­ erogenous, composed of distinct subcategories of people who are continuously involved in conflict within and across category and subgroup lines. To Arno, news as a social process plays the vital role of rationalizing conflicts and keeping them in manageable proportions. While he argues that the two models are not detached, Arno has preference for the second one. The miscellany of modes, approaches and models briefly stated here are based on complex interlinkages, which create mediated reality. Scholars exploring the dynamics and dialectics of peace and conflict can enrich their knowledge base by being acquainted with them. Conflict is an important item in analyzing the medi­ ated reality because in times of conflict media becomes most active as there occurs huge demand for information, news, reportage, commentaries and analyses. All these shape the nature of debates and public opinion. But the mediated reality needs critical scrutiny from scholars because the ‘information game’ is as much based on incomplete information, misinformation, wrong information, biased information and missing information as it is on true information. Then again, the prime procedures of conflict management and/or resolution and peacemaking require negotiation, (actor-led) mediation, bargaining and diplomacy, which are also based on various kinds of communication. The more intense the conflict, the more newsworthy it is. War or genocide (the most publicised case of the latter

44 Dipankar Sinha

being Rwanda in the first half of 1990s) fits the bill perfectly. Conflict is exciting and it raises lot of passion, and thus it can be ‘sold’ more easily. Violence, oppres­ sion, repression and brutality being forms of conflict have enhanced ‘market values’. In the corporate world of media the dramatization of conflict – delineation of various phases of escalation and mitigation, polarization effected by the hostile and irreconcilable acts of parties and lead actors, the mutually antagonistic highpitch rhetoric and so forth – are perfect material for gaining greater strength in Agenda-setting, Framing and Priming. Violence has a cultural foundation as well when it comes to the media. It may also be mentioned here that media at times contributes in a major way to cultural violence – with the invocation of ideology, religion, ethnicity, gender, colour, and race, which are invisible but no less intense in raising hostility and hatred – to justify and legitimate structural or systemic vio­ lence (Galtung 1990, 291–305). In recent times the rise of social media, blog posts and tweets in their darker side reinforces cultural violence through intensification of biased information and hate speech. This trend has given rise to ‘online conflicts’ amidst social media’s positive role in enhancing online democratization and parti­ cipation (Liu and Weber n.d.). Cultural violence can also be facilitated in an apparently innocuous manner by promoting legends and myths of a community to denigrate members of other communities. Hitler and the German media of his times did this in the most despicable way to repress and annihilate the Jews by invoking the Aryan myth. It seems that without conflict and violence the main­ stream media feels insecure. A study (Carter, Thomas and Ross 2011, 456–473) has shown that in the context of friendly and non-violent relations between the USA and Mexico in the year 2006, the news coverage in The New York Times would leave no stone unturned to create a gulf between the neighbouring countries and to set the stage for future violence involving the two. This obviously is not the sole instance in the world. Peacebuilding is apparently less dramatic but it involves no less complicated strategies of communication as the path of reconciliation rests to a lesser degree on emotional reflexes than that of hostility.

War/peace journalism: scratching the surface? Mediated reality has come closer to PACS in a roundabout way with narratives on the ethics of journalistic practice, resonated especially in the intense debate on war journalism versus peace journalism and on bystanders’ journalism versus journalism of attachment (JoA). Initially the academic discourse revolved around war journal­ ism and peace journalism. Gradually, the debate developed a strong normative tone with regard to how war and other conflicts should or should not be covered by journalists. The stage was set by Martin Bell (1997, 7–16), who challenged the long-held notion of media neutrality and elevated JoA to a higher moral pedestal. Writing in the specific context of television as a “war reporter of some antiquity” (1997, 7) he advances the argument that JoA (which is his term for engaged jour­ nalism), being strongly aware of its responsibilities, not only sheds the so-called neutrality of bystanders’ journalism in being more people-centric in orientation and

Mediated reality in peace and conflict 45

motives by considering both the perpetrators and the victims, but it also takes a clear uncompromising stance in favour of the latter to defend what is ‘good’ and ‘right’ and fight the ‘evil’ and ‘wrong’. As Bell (1997, 8) elaborates, the main point about the role of the journalists: This is not to back one side or faction or people against exercise a certain influence and we have to know that. The influence may be for the better or for the worse, but we have to know that too. By disturbing the treasured tenet of watchdog journalism Bell was destined to generate virulent critiques of his stance. The ardent advocates of the neutrality thesis would instantly dismiss his argument as ‘garbage’ and ‘dangerous’ on the grounds that journalists are not supposed to take sides and are duty-bound to report the viewpoints of all sides. The obvious implication of such critiques is that journalists in conflict situations have no business to transform themselves into political or social activists and/or to issue judgments on the events being covered by them. In the backdrop of such debate, which brings to the fore some very significant questions, my contention is that while it offers numerous instances of the role of media in peace and conflict it treats the journalists as stand-alone actors and mis­ leadingly overemphasises their power as mediators. In its overwhelming concern with the genres of journalism the debate misses the point that it is not the jour­ nalists per se but the media barons who pull the strings from behind. For the media barons such neat categories of journalism may not be very attractive. It is extremely difficult to say how in situations of conflict and also in those of peacebuilding the roles of ‘bystanders’ would be mixed and/reshuffled with those of ‘activists’, or what kind of strategic moves would facilitate or hinder the practice of war jour­ nalism and peace journalism. Gary Wolfsfeld (2004, 1) hits this point directly in discussing the role reversal of media in peacemaking when he states: The news media can play a central role in the promotion of peace. They can emphasize the benefits that peace can bring, they can raise the legitimacy of groups or leaders working for peace, and they can help transform images of the enemy. The media, however, can also serve as destructive agents in the process. They can emphasize the risks and dangers associated with compro­ mise, raise the legitimacy of those opposed to concessions, and reinforce negative stereotypes of the enemy. He shows how media mainly played a destructive role in the Oslo peace process and how its role was more constructive during the Israel–Jordan peace process and in Northern Ireland. On the complicated issue of why media is more comfortable with conflict than with peace, Wolfsfeld observes (2004, 2):

46 Dipankar Sinha

Simply put, it is a hell of a lot easier to promote conflict … than peace. While conflict can be considered the sine qua non of news, peace and news make for awkward bedfellows. A successful peace process requires patience, and the news media demand immediacy. Peace is most likely to develop within a calm environment and the media have an obsessive interest in threats and violence. Peace building is a complex process and the news media deal with simple events. Progress towards peace requires at least a minimal understanding of the needs of the other side, but the news media reinforce ethnocentrism and hostility towards adversaries. His observations buttress the well-intentioned, humanist, anti-militaristic, anti-jin­ goistic but highly idealistic thesis of peace journalism of a pioneering scholar like Galtung (2000, 162–167; 2002, 260–80), or of his worthy successor, Jake Lynch (2002), who would consider the journalists-in-the-field as facilitators of peace. Analysts like David Loyn (2007, 1–5) pick up the same case studies taken up by Lynch to discuss peace journalism as exclusionary, divisive and non-robust and, in a more ruthless fashion, describe it as an alternative to ‘good journalism’. Rather than taking a rigid stance and dismissing it lock, stock and barrel I wish to adopt a more moderate but no less decisive stance. While acknowledging that both Galtung and Lynch, and a host of scholars advocating peace journalism, meticulously analyze the negative attributes of war journalism and are aware of the structural and cultural constrains and challenges involved in it at the same time, the twists and turns in the mediated reality seem to leave much scope for further exploration of the degree of alterity of the ‘best’ alternative they ultimately suggest. It is quite possible that the bottom-up process of peacebuilding, which lies at the heart of peace journalism, becomes an effective tool of enhancing media’s own power and serves its ambition to achieve top-down unilateral agenda-setting.

Conclusion The world without the media, no doubt, will be a worst place to live in. This is because media is supposed to provide us with information to weigh our options and reach a decision ‘of/on our own’. But the scenario as depicted above is not that simple and smooth. While certain segments of the existential reality trigger the media to indulge in mediation, a kind of constructivist impulse also creeps in by which the media tends to promote itself as the sole agent of determining and interpreting the ‘reality’ itself. To reiterate, in the nooks and crannies of peace and conflict in the world today the media with all its manoeuvring skill and manip­ ulating strategy has far surpassed its role as the ‘reflector’ of reality and has steadily assumed the role of the co-creator of the same. Yet, apart from the fact that it is not a homogenous entity, media operates in an eco-system, which nurtures numerous intersections of political, economic, social and cultural conditions and coexists with other actors too. For those inclined to study the mediated reality in the contemporary world order, much of it is in a state of flux and a theoretical

Mediated reality in peace and conflict 47

framework has to be constructed keeping in mind the grey areas, discarding ste­ reotypical concepts and approaches. It is also the duty of responsible scholarship in both IR and PACS to tell the plain truth to the media that it has its limits too and it cannot dictate how the audiences should think about issues such as conflict and peace. The media certainly poses a stiff challenge to scholars who decide to discern what motive/s and interest/s it has in the carefully orchestrated representations of ‘reality’ in peace and conflict. The challenge nevertheless is fascinating and it has lot of potential to inject greater criticality in social science research in general.

References Arno, Andrew (2009). Alarming Reports: Communicating Conflict in the Daily News, New York, NY: Berghahn. Baudrillard, Jean (1981). For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated by Charles Levin. Saint Louis, MO: Telos Press, 164–184. Baudrillard, Jean (1995). The Gulf War Did Not Exist. Translated by Paul Patton. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Bell, Martin (1997). “TV News: How Far Should We Go?”, British Journalism Review 8(1): 7–16. Berlo, D. K. (1960). The Process of Communication, New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. Boorstin, Daniel J. (1961). Images: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, New York, NY: Vintage. Byrne, Sean and Jessica Senehi (2006). “Conflict Analysis and Resolution as Multidiscipline: A Work in Progress”. In Dennis J. D. Sandole, Sean Byrne, Ingrid Sandole Staroste and Jessica Senehieds (eds), The Handbook of Conflict Resolution, London and New York, NY: Routledge, 10–11. Carter, Diane L., Ryan J. Thomas and Susan Dente Ross (2011). “You are not a Friend: Media Conflict in Times of Peace”, Journalism Studies 12(4): 456–473. Couldry, Nick and Andreas Hepp (2013). “Conceptualizing Mediatization: Concepts, Traditions, Arguments”, Communication Theory 23: 191–202. Galtung, Johan (1990). “Cultural Violence”, Journal of Peace Research 27(3): 291–305. Galtung, Johan (2000). “The Task of Peace Journalism”, Ethical Perspectives 7(2): 162–167. Galtung, Johan (2002). “Peace Journalism – A Challenge”. In W. Kempf et al. (eds), Jour­ nalism and the New World Order, Vol. 2. Studying the War and the Media, Gothenburg: Nordicom, 260–280. Gilboa, Eytan (2002). The Global News Networks and US Policymaking in Defense and Foreign Affairs, Harvard, MA: The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University, 1–33. Gilboa, Eytan (2009). “Media and Conflict Resolution: A Framework for Analysis”, Marquette Law Review 87: 87–110. Hepp, Andreas (2012). Cultures of Mediatization, Cambridge: Polity. Herman, Edward and Noam Chomsky (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York, NY: Pantheon. Hjarvard, Stig (2013). The Mediatization of Culture and Society, London and New York, NY: Routledge. Kempf, Wilheim (2007). “Peace Journalism: A Tightrope Walk between Advocacy Jour­ nalism and Constructive Conflict Coverage”, Conflict & Communication Online 6(2): 1–9. http://www.cco.regener-online.de/2007_2/pdf/kempf.pdf (accessed 15 December 2016).

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Lasswell, Harold D. (1948). “The Structure and Function of Communication in Society”. In Lyman Bryson (ed.), The Communication of Ideas, New York, NY: Harper & Bros., 37–51. Liu, Ziu and Ingmar Weber (n.d.). “Is Twitter a Public Sphere for Online Conflicts? A Cross-Ideological and Cross-Hierarchical Look”. http://www.pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ 6516/50ced701e0d808d6a092c8348c3be30615e1.pdf (accessed 15 December 2017). Loyn, David (2007). “Good Journalism or Peace Journalism? – Counterplea”, Conflict & Communication Online 6(2): 1–5. http://www.cco.regener-online.de/2007_2/pdf/loyn_ reply.pdf (accessed 3 January 2017). Lynch, Jack (2002). “Using Conflict Analysis in Reporting the Peace Journalism”. www.tra nscend.org/files/article193.html (accessed 19 May 2018). Matyók, Thomas, Jessica Senehi and Sean Byrne (eds) (2011). Critical Issues in Peace and Conflict Studies: Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Nicholls, Brett (2007). “Mediation”. In George Ritzer ed., Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Malden: Blackwell, 2923–2928. Nohrstedt, Stig A. and Rune Ottosen (2014). New Wars, New Media and New War Journalism: Professional and Legal Challenges in Conflict Reporting, Oslo: Nordicom, 14–15. Robinson, Piers (1999). “The CNN Effect: Can the News Media Drive Foreign Policy?”, Review of International Studies 25: 301–309. Roy, Sudeshna and Ibrahim Seaga Shaw (eds) (2006). Communicating Differences: Culture, Media, Peace and Conflict Negotiation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Scheufele, Dietram A. and David Tewksbury (2007). “Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models”, Journal of Communication 57(1): 9–20. Schuetz, Janice (2009). “Political Communication Theories”. In Stephen W. Littlejohn and Karen Foss (eds), Encyclopedia of Communication Theory, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 757– 761. Sinha, Dipankar (2018). The Information Game in Democracy, New Delhi/London and New York, NY: Routledge. Thussu, Daya Kishan and Des Freedman (2003). War and the Media, London: Sage. Tsatsu, Panayiota (2009). “Reconceptualising ‘Time’ and “Space’ in the Era of Electronic Media and Communications”, Platform: Journal of Media and Communication 1, July: 11–32. Weaver, David H. (2007). “Thoughts on Agenda Setting, Framing, and Priming”, Journal of Communication 57, March: 142–147. Wolfsfeld, Gary (2004). Media and the Path to Pace, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4 CONFLICTS IN CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Management and resolution Arun Kumar Banerji

In common parlance the term ‘conflict’ connotes a dispute in which two or more parties are involved who are seeking to pursue goals that are (or, are perceived to be) incompatible by resorting to violence. The goals may vary from the basic goal of self preservation to the other extreme of defeat or annihilation of the adversary. Defined in this sense a conflict situation necessarily implies use of physical violence, although it is now generally recognised that conflicts may also involve psycholo­ gical violence to weaken the determination of the adversary. Anatol Rapoport distinguished between three different types of conflict: ‘fights’, in which the selfcontrol and mutual control of actors over their actions rapidly decline; ‘games’ that are rational conflicts characterised by strategic moves; and ‘debates’ that involve attempts by adversaries to change each other’s values or cognitive images.1 Conflicts, therefore, involve two or more parties and are not confined to states alone.2 In fact, one may think of conflicts at different levels – between and among individuals, social groups, communities and organisations, and between states – and these may vary in intensity, depending on the nature of conflicts. Sociologists argue that conflicts are a reality in human existence and therefore it is necessary to understand the reasons behind the emergence of conflicts in particular situations and to seek the means for management and resolution of the same. While ‘man­ agement’ of a conflict implies its de-escalation so that its intensity does not cross a threshold and may be kept within reasonable limits, ‘resolution’ of a conflict indi­ cates its final settlement through reconciliation of differences. It is also important to recognise that not all conflicts are dysfunctional; in many instances conflict situa­ tions may act as catalytic agents for change by forcing the parties to explore alter­ native means for resolving disputes that recognise the divergent views/interests of both parties and seek to bring about reconciliation. In case of international armed conflicts, for example, this may happen when both sides develop a war-weariness and agree to seek a resolution through negotiations.

50 Arun Kumar Banerji

In international relations, conflicts may emerge due to a variety of reasons: (i) ideological differences, as happened during the Cold War years between the USA and its NATO allies on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact Members on the other; (ii) divergent territorial claims, say, of India and China along the Himalayan border, particularly in the eastern sector and in the Aksai Chin area, or, of China and its neighbours in the South China Sea area; and (iii) the desire for global domination, or domination in a particular region of the world for gaining geo-strategic advantages.

Intra-state conflicts, international conflicts and conflict clusters Intra-state conflicts refer to conflicts that emerge within the geographical bound­ aries of states (say between religious groups/communities, between ethnic or caste groups, or, between political formations/parties aspiring to control political power); while inter-state conflicts are those conflicts that may develop between two or more states for a variety of reasons, as noted earlier. For analytical purposes it may be possible to distinguish between these two types of conflicts but, in reality, many of the drawn out intra-state conflicts get externalised because of the involvement of external agencies – both state and non-state actors – and turn to international conflicts. Conflicts in contemporary West Asia, South Asia or Africa offer examples of the same. The domestic conflicts in Syria spilled over to the international arena because of involvement of third parties in support of one or the other groups involved in the domestic conflict, for geo-strategic/political gains, and the situation has been complicated further by the involvement of non-state actors (such as the ISIS, Al-Qaeda or the Kurdish pesmarga fighters who, incidentally, have been bombed by the Turkish air force for Turkey’s own political gains). The domestic conflict in Yemen offers another example of externalisation of conflicts because of the involvement of the two regional adversaries – Iran, and Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies. The conflicts in Sri Lanka between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minorities spilled over to India leading to Indian intervention in the Sri Lankan domestic conflict during the 1980s, while the conflicts in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir have been exacerbated further by Pakistani interventions both direct and indirect, perhaps in retaliation against India’s role – in the aftermath of the military crackdown in erstwhile East Pakistan, leading to the exodus of 10 million refugees to India – that resulted in the break-up of Pakistan. Similar examples may also be cited from Africa (for example, the Rwandan conflict) and Europe (the Bosnian conflict, which was one of the bloodiest conflicts in post-War Europe). The differentiation between domestic and international conflicts, however, does not give a clear idea about the nature and provenance of most of the protracted conflicts in the contemporary world. A better way of understanding these conflicts is to recognise that they are not necessarily binary; a key to their understanding may be provided by the concept of ‘conflict clusters’ – meaning a number of conflicts in a particular region of the world that are inter-related and, sometimes

Conflicts in contemporary IR 51

even over-lapping, making conflict resolution that much more difficult. In a con­ flict situation, the adversaries may also cooperate against a third party if it suits their interests, as apparently happened in Sri Lanka. It is alleged that Ranasinghe Pre­ madasa, after assuming office as President, turned against India and secretly aided the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) against the Indian peacekeepers. This was possibly because he had opposed the signing of the India–Sri Lanka accord earlier when he was Prime Minister of the Jayawardane government. The end of the Cold War and disintegration of the Soviet Union did not bring to an end all conflicts; rather there was a shift in the axis of conflict – from those between the two superpowers to more diffused conflicts in different parts of the world. Long dormant ethnic and religious conflicts erupted with renewed vigour threatening the very existence of the nation-states, particularly in the post-colonial states of Asia, Africa and even in Europe – in the new states emerging out of the ‘ruins’ of the former Soviet Union and its imperial domain. An attempt will be made here to analyse the roots of some of these conflicts in South Asia, and the means of resolving the same.

The ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka Sri Lanka has a long history of ethnic conflicts. Although Sri Lanka gained inde­ pendence through peaceful means, its history since independence has been marked by ethnic unrest resulting from the discriminatory policies pursued by the succes­ sive Sinhala-dominated governments against the minority Tamils that included both the Sri Lankan Tamils and the plantation Tamils (also known as Indian Tamils). The post-independence government in Sri Lanka under the United National Party (UNP), through enactment of three pieces of legislation during 1948–49, disenfranchised the Indian Tamils and made them virtually stateless. Surprisingly, the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC) representing the Sri Lankan Tamils at the time supported this move which split the party, with S.J.V. Chelva­ nayagam forming the new Federal Party (FP). In subsequent years, the FP played a prominent role in Sri Lankan ethnic politics. The problem of stateless Tamils was a matter of concern for India and was resolved through negotiations between the Indian government and the govern­ ment of Sri Lanka in two phases. This led to the Lal Bahadur Shastri – Sirimavo Bandarnaike Agreement (in 1964) and the Indira Gandhi – Sirimavo Bandarnaike Agreement (in 1974) (Phadnis 1978: 582–588). But the problem of discrimination against the Tamils in Sri Lanka remained unresolved. Despite the political pressure from the politicians in Tamil Nadu, New Delhi was not prepared to make any overt move that might create tensions in India–Sri Lanka relations. In Sri Lanka, on the other hand, there was a competition between the two principal political parties – the UNP and the Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP) – to enlist the support of the majority Sinhalas for electoral gains. In 1956, the SLFP government, under the leadership of S.W.R.D. Bandarnaike, made Sinhala the official language, instead of the existing two-language policy (Tamil and Sinhala),

52 Arun Kumar Banerji

through the enactment of the ‘Sinhala Only’ Act to fulfill his election promise. Naturally, this created resentment among the minority Tamils, and to assuage their feelings the government responded by signing the Bandarnaike–Chelvanayagam Pact in July 1957; it was, however, unilaterally abrogated later in the face of pro­ tests by the Buddhist clergy. The inter-communal riots that had broken out during 1956–57 resulted in the death of about 350 people. The situation for the Tamils worsened further during the 1970s after adoption of the First Republican Con­ stitution that virtually ensured Sinhala-Buddhist domination in Sri Lanka. The political struggle of the Tamils for equality of opportunity in matters of education and employment that began in the 1950s was now turning towards the demand for self-determination, by dismemberment of the state that was unresponsive to the legitimate demands of its own citizens, and as the frustrated Tamil Youths took to militancy the government responded by unleashing terror. Matters were made worse by the inability of the moderate Tamil leaders such as Chelvanayagam – of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), born out of the former FP – to pro­ vide leadership to the embattled Tamils. By the end of the 1970s insurgency had broken out and at its height there were nearly 30 militant groups operating in Sri Lanka.3 The most prominent among these were the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Tamil Eelam Liberation Movement (TELO), and the Peoples’ Liberation Organisation of Tami Eelam (PLOTE). Supposedly, the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka was between the two parties – the Sri Lankan government and the militant Tamils – but the reality was different. In the name of maintaining security of the state, the government forces unleashed unprecedented terror, violating the human rights of innocent Tamil citizens who were caught between state-sponsored terrorism and the violence perpetrated by the terrorist groups, especially the LTTE. While all these militant groups had one common aim of liberating the Tamils from the Sri Lankan (Sinhala-Buddhist) oppressive regime by creating an independent Tamil state, there were also serious differences among them. The non-LTTE militant leaders were not averse to the idea of setting up of ‘Union of Regions’ with greater autonomy for the regional Councils, whereas the LTTE was not interested in this. The LTTE claimed to represent the interests of all the Tamils and therefore did not hesitate to fight other militant Tamil groups for gaining supre­ macy; inter-group conflicts among the militants thus added a new dimension to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and the occasional fights among these groups, operating from Tamil Nadu, became a cause of concern for the government in New Delhi. There were also other important causes for New Delhi’s concern. Because the outbreak of ethnic violence in Sri Lanka had led to an unprecedented exodus of refugees to Tamil Nadu creating a serious problem for the local government, the humanitarian aspects of the problem merited immediate attention. It also created a latent conflict between the Congress government in New Delhi and the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) leaders in Tamil Nadu, particularly Karunanidhi (and the Marumalarchi DMK leader Vaiko), who wanted to gain electoral advan­ tages by acting as staunch supporters of the LTTE and its leader V. Prabhakaran. The DMK leaders wanted New Delhi to take a tough stand vis-à-vis the Sri

Conflicts in contemporary IR 53

Lankan government, but the government of India’s position, as articulated by Mrs. Indira Gandhi, was to maintain Sri Lanka’s territorial integrity while trying to act as a peace-maker by offering proposals to Colombo, based on extensive consultations with the various stake-holders that were held in Madras and Colombo.4 In a mediatory effort the Indian government even called a meeting of the warring sides in Thimpu, Bhutan, in the early 1980s, to find a formula for the settlement of the conflict. However, when that failed, in a Machiavellian move, India started training the militant groups in which the RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) was heavily involved despite the fact that it was still involved in the peace-making efforts (Mishra 2011). What was the reason behind this? As a former LTTE leader Kumaran Padmanthan (KP) – who was then in Sri Lankan custody – told V. K. Sashi Kumar, it was Mrs. Gandhi’s idea at the time to bolster the LTTE’s armed struggle to use it as a negotiating leverage to settle the Tamil issue in a peaceful way. After her assassination in 1984, Rajiv continued the same policy. The most important aspect of India’s mediatory role was to emphasise Sri Lanka’s territorial integrity while ensuring that the Tamils could enjoy a degree of autonomy in a single Tamil linguistic unit. These provisions were there in the India–Sri Lanka Accord (1987), and Rajiv Gandhi thought that given India’s role as a (secret) supporter of the LTTE and other militant groups, he could persuade them to disarm and accept such a solution. But the LTTE had other plans. India sent the Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF) to Sri Lanka under the provisions of the India–Sri Lanka Accord in July 1988 to maintain peace, but peace-keeping operations soon turned to blood-letting as the LTTE turned its forces against the Indian peace keepers; the IPKF returned to India after 32 months, frustrated and disgraced. India’s gamble in Sri Lanka did not pay off and it is now contended that his decision to send the IPKF to Sri Lanka was taken without a nod from the Cabinet. India’s intervention in the Sri Lankan domestic conflict did not solve the pro­ blem; it was ultimately resolved through a no-holds-barred assault on the Sri Lankan militant forces by the Army in which it did not hesitate to use air power. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed during three decades of the civil war in which the Army and the LTTE tried to outbid each other in committing crimes against humanity, through torture, kidnapping and murder for which they were roundly condemned by human rights groups and the UN. In September 2015, Sri Lanka co-sponsored a United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Reso­ lution which made it committed to take a number of measures for protection of human rights, ensure accountability and transitional justice. However, after the victory of Gotabaya Rajapaksha – the ‘terminator’, as he was called by his critics – in the presidential elections in November 2019, Sri Lanka’s commitment to the September 2015 UNHRC Resolution remains uncertain. (The Statesman, 18 November 2019). India, incidentally was also a party to the Resolution. What lessons may be drawn from the Sri Lankan experience? The first and foremost important lesson is that social/political conflicts are caused by the persis­ tently discriminatory policies followed by the government which results in the alienation of a segment of the population that feels discriminated. Secondly, intra­

54 Arun Kumar Banerji

state conflicts cannot be resolved through third party intervention unless all the disputants willingly accept it; this did not happen in the case of India’s intervention in the Sri Lankan civil war and was one of the reasons for its failure. The end of the civil war did not bring to an end social intolerance as may be seen from the sudden spurt in violence against the Muslim minority in Sri Lanka in March 2018 that prompted the government to impose a state of emergency across the island – the first since 2011 – indicating its determination to stop the spread of violence. Finally, obduracy of the LTTE leadership, of Prabhakaran in particular, and the refusal to accept any form of international mediation – particularly from the Nor­ wegians – ultimately led to its decimation, at a time when the new world order was “firmly against any separatist struggles”.5

Ethnic conflicts in India: The Northeast Ethnic conflicts have been a bane of Indian polity. The Northeast region comprises the ‘seven sisters’ – Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura – and Sikkim. It is marked by cultural, linguistic, religious and ethnic diversities as may be seen in the rest of India. It is a densely forested mountainous region inhabited by tribes of Tibeto-Mongoloid origin, though there are considerable differences among these States in terms of demographic composi­ tion. Of the eight States in the Northeast, four – Assam, Manipur, Sikkim and Tripura – are not tribal States, although each one has a substantial tribal population. Historical backgrounds of these States are not similar either. Whereas Manipur and Tripura were formerly Princely States, Arunachal Pradesh was once the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), and Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland were carved out of Assam. Sikkim, was merged with India in 1975, and became a part of the Northeast after joining the North Eastern Council in 2002. Another feature of the Northeast region is that it has long international borders – with China in the north, Myanmar in the east, Bangladesh in the south and Bhutan in the north-west, while it is linked to the rest of India through a narrow corridor passing through Siliguri (in the Darjeeling District), in West Bengal. In the initial years after independence, this ‘insularity’ from the mainland had created a psychological distance between the people living in this region and the rest of India because of the lack of commu­ nication facilities – both intra-regional, and with rest of India – leading to the development of ‘stereotypes’ that still exist as may be seen from the attack on the citizens from the Northeast in such cosmopolitan cities as Bengaluru or even New Delhi. On the other hand, many of the tribal population living in Arunachal Pra­ desh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram have their kin living across the border in Myanmar. This, and the support the insurgents received from the neighbouring countries, especially China and Pakistan (operating through East Bengal, and sub­ sequently from Bangladesh under the BNP regime), in terms of sanctuary, military training and arms supplies, helped the growth of insurgency in Northeast India. The conflicts in the Northeast have multiple dimensions: (i) intra-State ethnic conflicts (for example, between the Assamese and the Bengalis in Assam, between

Conflicts in contemporary IR 55

the Nagas and the Kukis in Manipur, or between the Mizos and the Brus in Mizoram); (ii) inter-State territorial disputes (say between Manipur and Nagaland); and (iii) the conflicts between the Centre and the States, particularly over the question of the nature and extent of autonomy that may be enjoyed by the dif­ ferent ethno-centric geographical entities (organised as States within the Indian federal structure). Almost since India’s independence, the region has been shaken by a number of conflicts in the region, in the form of both insurgency movements and ethnic conflicts; and the central government responded by declaring it a ‘dis­ turbed area’ and by enacting the dreaded Assam Rifles and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958, which through subsequent amendments became the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) – a virtual legacy from the British Raj. The security-oriented approach led to the militarisation of the region, because in the name of security, the armed forces, specially the Assam Rifles and the Army, were given almost carte blanche in dealing with situations that were deemed as constituting threats to national security. Though designated as a para-military force, the Assam Rifles is under the operational control of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and led by an officer from the Indian Army. Besides these paramilitary forces, there are others such as the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the Border Security Force (BSF) operating in the region alongside the State police forces. One consequence of this militarisation of the region has been the alienation of the people towards the government because of the excesses committed by the armed forces, with scant regard for human rights. Insurgencies, rampant corruption in a segment of the political and bureaucratic elite and lack of infrastructure have also affected economic development of the region compared with other parts of India. The root causes of insurgencies in the Northeast may be traced to the process of State formation in post-colonial India. Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura have been the most affected by insurgencies; however, the other States in the region, except Sikkim, have not been free from conflicts either. Under British rule, the hilly terrains in the fringe areas of Assam along the India–Myanmar border were inhabited by hill tribes who had their own system of governance, principally by a council of elders nominated by their clans; however, this was loosely orga­ nised. After launching punitive military expeditions and subduing the tribes, who often harassed the British, the areas were integrated with the British Indian territory (and added to Assam). But the colonial rulers refrained from bringing them under a centralised system of administration. Post-colonial India’s policy of extending a centralised system of bureaucratic administration to these areas as a part of statebuilding efforts created problems as the people living in these areas refused to follow it. This explains the basis of the Naga problem. Nagas have a long history of insurgency. The first signs were there in August 1947 when a section of the Naga National Council (NNC) under the leadership of Angami Zapu Phizo revolted against the moderate leadership that had signed the Nine Point Agreement with the Governor of Assam, and declared independence. In 1951 the Nagas boycotted India’s first parliamentary elections and, in 1953, the

56 Arun Kumar Banerji

Naga insurgents declared the establishment of the Peoples’ Sovereign Republic of Nagaland. India responded by launching military operations against the rebels. Although a separate State of Nagaland was created in 1963, insurgent activities continued for several years after that. However, in a bid to contain insurgent activities, secret negotiations were also initiated with the insurgent groups and direct confrontation between the armed forces and the insurgents declined after the conclusion of Cease-fire Agreements with two factions of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) led by Isak-Muivah (IM) and Khaplang (K), signed respectively in August 1997 and December 1998. Since then the Ceasefire Agree­ ment with the former group has been renewed periodically, and a ‘Framework Peace Agreement’ was signed in 2015 to which the NSCN (K) is, however, not a party. Nor does the NSCN (IM) want the Indian government to hold any nego­ tiations with that group, although the government succeeded in conducting negotiations with some other smaller insurgent outfits. The details of the Frame­ work Peace Agreement with the NSCN (IM) have not yet been made public which has caused apprehension among other States in the region – particularly Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh – that have a substantial Naga population. This is because the NSCN (IM) has not yet given up its demands for Nagalim, meaning a larger Naga State comprising all the Naga-inhabited areas in the neighbouring States. Moreover because of the Naga–Kuki clashes in Manipur, the Kukis in Manipur are also apprehensive of the ‘Framework Agreement’ as it may adversely affect them if the Nagalim demand is accepted (Kipgen 2018). Apart from the Naga insurgency, Assam has also been affected by violent con­ flicts. The ethnic conflicts in Assam, particularly the conflicts between the Assamese and the Bengalis, have their origin during the British Raj. After the independence of India there was large-scale migration of Bengalis from erstwhile East Pakistan to Assam and Tripura (which was basically a State with a tribal majority), raising fears among the Assamese that their cultural identity and educational and employment opportunities would be adversely affected by the presence of such a large Bengali population in Assam – a fear that was fuelled further by the uncontrolled illegal migration from Bangladesh after it was born as an independent state. Illegal immigration from Bangladesh has been a major political issue in Assam, complicated further by ‘vote-bank’ politics. In 1981, the All-Assam-Student Union (AASU) and the All-Assam Ganasangram Parishad (AAGSP) claimed that, in 1961, there were one million illegal immigrants in Assam, and the number rose to 3.5 million in 1979 (Roy 2015: 126). According to their estimate 20 per cent of Assam’s registered voters were illegal ‘foreign’ immigrants. The agitation launched by the AASU and the AAGSP ultimately led to the enactment of the Illegal Migration (Determination by Tribunal) Act (IMDT) to identify illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and deport them. The act was Assam-specific and was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2005. It is against this background that the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) was formed in 1979 with the declared goal of establishing an independent Assam. In 1986 it established contacts with the Kachin Liberation Army and the NSCN in

Conflicts in contemporary IR 57

Myanmar for training and purchase of arms and started the extortion and looting of banks to raise funds. Such criminal activities became a common feature for the dif­ ferent militant/insurgent groups. But in a major army operation in 1990, the ULFA lost much of its strength with the arrest of 400 cadres and 16 camps. Many top leaders of ULFA were also arrested while some others fled to Bangladesh and Bhutan. As well as the ULFA, there were also many other insurgent groups operating in Assam. The National Federation of Bodoland (NDFB) was fighting for a fullfledged Bodoland State (i.e. province) within India, and to meet their demand the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) was set up in 2003 for administering the Bodoland Territorial districts. But this provided only a temporary respite, as a breakaway militant group – NDFB (Songbijit) – renewed militant activities. Containing insurgency is not possible without cooperation of the neighbouring states. After Begam Hasina assumed office as the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, one of her priorities in foreign policy was improvement of relations with India. Keep­ ing that in view, her government decided to deport the ULFA leaders who had fled to Bangladesh and quietly deported them to India, on India’s request. In 2003, the Royal Bhutanese Army, led by the Prince, cracked down on the anti-India ULFA and the Bodo militants; these developments weakened the ULFA and in 2008 the ULFA split between the pro-talk and anti-talk militants. The pro-talk faction favoured negotiations with the government, but the anti-talk faction led by the redoubtable Paresh Barua continued its militant operations. Recent develop­ ments in Assam – the publication of the NRC report and the controversial Citi­ zenship Amendment Bill – have reignited conflicts not only there but also in other States in the Northeast, including Manipur where the BJP is in power. Another cause for concern is the networking among the militant groups in the Northeast. Manipur has also suffered long periods of insurgency. The former Princely State was merged with India in 1949 under controversial circumstances, and that trig­ gered a number of insurgencies in the valley predominantly inhabited by the Meitei people. The Meitei are Hindus (Vaisnavites) whereas the Nagas, Kukis and other tribes inhabiting the hill districts are predominately Christians. Insurgency in Naga-dominated hill areas of the State arose, on the one hand, from the demand of the Nagas for independence in the Naga Hills of undivided Assam. In addition to this, there were also conflicts between the Nagas and the Kukis, the Nagas and the Meitei and conflicts revolving other ethnic communities such as the Hmars. The circumstances under which Manipur was virtually forced to join India explain the reasons for the peoples’ resentment against the central government’s policies, and matters have been made worse by the government’s policy of viewing Manipur’s problems in terms of the Meitei people’s perspective rather than taking a pan-Manipur approach.6 Historically, the political entity of Manipur has always been a single unit, comprising the hills and the valley, and conflicts between the people living in the valley and those living in the hills did not exist in the past. Though historical parallels should not be drawn perfunctorily, nevertheless it may not be entirely wrong to suggest that the situation in Manipur was not dissimilar to what had happened in Jammu and Kashmir.

58 Arun Kumar Banerji

The government of India’s response to the conflict situation in Manipur was determined by considerations of state security as in other parts of the Northeast; it was declared a ‘disturbed area’ and brought under the ambit of the AFSPA in 1980. The role of the armed forces, particularly the Army and the Assam Rifles, was less than glorifying as both these forces were accused of serious violations of human rights – kidnapping, torture, killing and even rape of women on mere suspicion that the victims were militants or their cohorts. By contrast, the government of Tripura, under the Leadership of Manik Sarkar, succeeded in conducting anti-insurgency operations in a humane way. It did not involve the Army or the Assam Rifles; the CRPF and the State’s armed police forces were used to conduct anti-insurgency operations. These forces while con­ ducting raids against the insurgents sought to win over the tribal people in the villages by undertaking some welfare activities such as building roads, improving the condition of dilapidated school buildings, arranging supply of safe drinking water etc. and through coordinating intelligence. It may be said that the success of the Tripura government was to a large extent due to the honest and efficient administration run by Chief Minister Manik Sarkar and the political will to resolve the problem which was apparently lacking in Manipur. Tripura is now a peaceful State. The demand for the withdrawal of the AFSPA has been made for a long time, by civil society groups and others in Manipur and in other parts of Northeast India (as well as in Jammu and Kashmir). Civil rights activist Irom Chanu Sharmila undertook a 16-year fast in protest. But is there any prospect of its withdrawal in the near future? There seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel. The Northeast region has come to acquire an important position in India’s foreign policy, particularly since the adoption of the ‘Act East’ Policy, because it occupies a strategic position in the development of connectivity with the Southeast Asian States, for which the development of infrastructure is essential. It may also play an important role in the development of the architecture of sub-regionalism involving Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal. Over the last two decades the government of India has taken a number of steps, including the setting up of a Ministry to deal with Development of the Northeast Region (DONER). Several investment-triggering initiatives have been taken both by the Centre and the States to enhance production and create employment opportunities so that the Northeast region may emerge as a hub of economic activities. But such developments must be all-inclusive so that the local people may develop a stake in them. The region has long suffered from lack of development for which cessation of hostilities and establishing peace are essential. There has been a decline in militancy in the Northeast region over the last 3–4 years, with Mizoram and Tripura emerging as the most peaceful States. By the end of 2018, the AFSPA was withdrawn from three States – Mizoram, Meghalaya and Tripura – and partially from Arunachal Pradesh. But with the recent spurt in militant activities in Assam, uncertainties remain for the future.

Conflicts in contemporary IR 59

Conflicts in Kashmir Conflicts in Kashmir have been exacerbated in recent years by a number of factors. Militancy in Kashmir has been sustained not only by infiltrators pushed to the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC) by the Pakistani Army/Rangers but also by the financial support the separatists/militants receive from sources across the border, as confirmed by the raids conducted by the NIA and the ED (Enforcement Directorate), and the confessions of some second-rung separatist leaders. Money is channeled through conduits that have links with influential persons in politics, business and administration (The Sunday Statesman, Kolkata, June 4, 2017). Unless serious attempts are made to break these links and stop the flow of foreign funds, terrorism in Kashmir cannot be dealt with effectively. But the Kashmir conflict is not merely an extension of the India–Pakistan con­ flict. It is necessary to recognise that the Kashmir conflict has multiple dimensions. It is a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan with religious overtones. But it is not simply a conflict between these two parties: there are also conflicts between the Centre and the State; between the militants/separatists and the security forces fighting for India’s territorial security and integrity; between the separatists and proIndia mainstream (regional) Political Parties in Jammu and Kashmir such as the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP); and, finally, con­ flicts between the Kashmiri Pandits and the extremists in the valley. These various types of conflicts overlap and influence the nature and course of development of conflicts in Kashmir. The volatile situation that had developed in Kashmir since 2016 was the result of the alienation of the youth. When young boys and girls studying in schools and colleges take to the streets and start pelting stones at the security forces, they do it out of frustration and a sense of alienation, although some of them might have been doing it at the behest of their mentors, who had recruited them for this purpose perhaps on payment of pecuniary benefits. But this would not have been possible without a sense of frustration and alienation born out of the lack of edu­ cational and employment opportunities. The problem has been aggravated by the frequent disruption of normal life by the activities of the separatists/militants and the response of the security forces. But that does not necessarily mean that all of them are anti-India. These stone-pelting youths were born during the turbulent 1990s and have lived through two decades of unrest. Added to this is the lack of economic development due to mismanagement of financial resources and rampant corruption among sections of the political/bureaucratic elite (much like the situation in Manipur). Political leaders in Kashmir have been more interested in capturing power than in serving the people, and because of this the benefits of the financial largesse given by the Centre to the State government by way of budgetary assistance did not trickle down to the poor. However, so far as corruption is concerned, the problem is not a phenomenon unique to Kashmir; it is prevalent in other parts of India as well. But there are many who argue that corruption in Jammu and Kashmir could

60 Arun Kumar Banerji

be thriving because of the special status granted to the State under Article 370 of the Constitution. Kashmiris often claim that the ‘autonomy’ granted to Kashmir through the insertion of Article 370 in the Indian constitution was being eroded continuously. The process began soon after Kashmir’s accession to India in 1947. When Sheikh Abdullah protested against this, he was unceremoniously removed from power and put behind bars in 1953, allegedly because he was toying with the idea of an ‘independent’ Kashmir and refused to follow New Delhi’s diktats. By arresting the chief architect of Kashmir’s accession to India, New Delhi created a great psycho­ logical chasm between the Kashmiris and the rest of India. The removal of Sheikh Abdullah from power was followed by a succession of ‘Prime Ministers’ – as the ‘Chief Minister’ was then called – indirectly chosen by New Delhi because of their proximity to the leaders in New Delhi and for this the Indian government turned a blind eye to their corruption and undemocratic practices. In fact, all the elections held in Kashmir, barring the one in 1977, were rigged and the political opponents who demanded a ‘plebiscite’ to determine Kashmir’s future were prevented from taking part in elections, thus muzzling their voices. It is arguable that had they been allowed to take part in the electoral process, the demand for plebiscite would have lost its sheen. Unfortunately, the democratic process prevailing in the rest of India was never allowed to take root in Kashmir and the Central government’s policy towards the State was determined by the exigencies of the political party in power. An oppor­ tunity to retrieve the situation came in 1975 through the signing of the Indira Gandh – Sheikh Abdullah Accord, but it was lost as differences soon arose between his National Conference Party and the ruling Congress Party at the Centre (Banerji 2017). Matters became worse when the duly elected government of Kashmir, under the leadership of Dr. Farooq Abdullah, was dismissed in 1984 on New Delhi’s machinations and subsequently was followed by an alliance between the National Conference and the Congress that won the election in 1987 which did not go well with the people of the State. The cumulative effect of these develop­ ments resulted in anger and frustration of the people, and a section of the disgruntled population turned to Pakistan for support, both moral and material. An insurgency began in Kashmir during the closing years of the 1980s. It reached its peak in the early 1990s, aided and abetted by Pakistan from where hordes of jihadis belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) Laskar-e-Toyeba (LeT) and sundry other militant organisations infiltrated into Kashmir. In response to the murder, kidnapping and extortion by the militants, the security forces, taking cover under the AFSPA, often resorted to extra-judicial killings through fake encounters, and kept people under detention for long periods, thus violating their human rights. The policy of treating Kashmir as a rebellious province since 1990 has resulted in alienation of the people. According to the US State Department’s country profile on human rights, based on published sources, 2300 were killed in Kashmir in 1991 including 900 civilians, 1300 alleged militants and 155 members of the security forces. Perhaps for the first time in the history of Kashmir since

Conflicts in contemporary IR 61

India’s independence, the Muslims in the valley sided with the separatists and the much talked about Kashmiriyat – the indigenous secular cultural traditions of Kashmir – lost its significance as 50,000 Kashmiri Pandit families had to leave their homes in the valley in search of safety and security; not all of them have yet been able to return, and according to Sanjay Tickoo, President of the Kashmiri Pandits Sangharsh Samity, only 808 Pandit families now live in Kashmir (Bhat 2019). The situation improved a little with the setting up of an elected government under the leadership of Dr. Farooq Abdullah and a semblance of normality returned by the beginning of this century with elections being held to the Assem­ bly peacefully in 2002 and 2008 partly because of improvements in India–Pakistan relations during 2003–2007. But the political class failed to look beyond the immediate gains and some of the basic problems remained unattended. That the fragile peace could be broken any time was demonstrated by the Amarnath land issue in 2008 that pushed Jammu and Kashmir almost to the edge and again in September–October 2014 in the aftermath of the devastating floods that resulted from the skewed development policies pursued by the successive governments. Peoples’ anger intensified because of non-fulfillment of the promises for recon­ struction and rehabilitation, for which they blamed both the Central and the State governments. So, the situation was ripe for further troubles. Outbreak of militancy in Kashmir in the aftermath of the killing of Burhan Wani in July 2016 was thus preceded by the same malaise that had plagued Kash­ mir’s politics for years – lack of good governance and mismanagement of financial resources; there was also support – diplomatic, moral and material – from the neighbouring country in the west. The situation was fast moving and out of con­ trol, with almost the daily killing of young militants. This was paralleled by a sharp deterioration in India–Pakistan relations. The BJP-led NDA government in New Delhi seemed to be clueless about how the militancy could be brought under control. It was keen to curb Kashmir’s autonomy by abolishing Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution that sought to guarantee Kashmir’s internal autonomy and gave the power to the State Assembly (under Article 35A) to define who would be Jammu and Kashmir’s permanent residents. They (the permanent residents) would enjoy the privilege of participating in elections and to get elected, and would be able to own land and other immovable properties, seek employment in government services, and be given preferential treatment in the matter of admission to institutions of higher education such as colleges and universities etc. But abolition of Kashmir’s special status, by itself, could hardly be a solution for controlling militancy. The first and foremost important thing should have been to begin a dialogue with all the stakeholders including the stone-pelting youths, as suggested by Lt. General Hooda with long experience of serving in Kashmir. Former Prime Minister Vajpayee did not hesitate to do this as was pointed out by Mehbooba Mufti, the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir from 2016–2018. Economic development and creation of employment opportunities, along with good governance, may go a long way in reducing militancy in Kashmir. But to succeed in this endeavour, people’s trust has to be won.

62 Arun Kumar Banerji

However, instead of taking measures to reduce the trust-deficit, the government in New Delhi in a virtual ‘surgical strike’ revoked Article 370 of the Constitution, along with Article 35A, on 5 August 2019. It did not stop there and bifurcated the State of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories (UTs) – the UT of Jammu and Kashmir and the UT of Ladakh. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much touted slogan of sabka sath sabka vikas (together with all, development for all) was thrown to the winds as the decision to revoke Article 370 was taken at a time when Kashmir was under President’s rule. So, there was no question of ascertaining people’s wishes; even the report submitted by the government-appointed inter­ locutor was never made public. The decision to abrogate Article 370 had long been in the Agenda of the BJP, and preparations for such a move had been in the making since the appointment of Satya Pal Malik as the Governor of the State, succeeding N.N. Vohra, in August 2018. The return of the BJP – and the NDA – to power in May 2019 with a huge majority provided the spur to act at a time when the Opposition was in total disarray. The revocation of Article 370 and the government’s decision to shut down the State to prevent civil unrest, snap all tel­ ephone and internet connections (ostensibly for security reasons), and arrest/detain thousands of people (10,000 according to one report), including the leaders of mainstream political parties, came as a shock to the Kashmiris (Ahuja 2019). The absence of any official clarification from the government about the number of people arrested only helped the spread of rumours. To ensure ‘peace’ in the State, just before the revocation of Article 370 on 5 August, 8000 more CRPF personnel were deployed, taking the total number of CRPF personnel deployed to 78,000, excluding the local polices force (Bhat 2019). “It is an existential battle now”, said Shah Faesal, the former Kashmiri bureaucrat who joined politics and formed his own party Jammu and Kashmir Peoples’ Movement (JKPM) in 2019 while expressing the fear that the scrapping of Article 370 and the subsequent actions by the government would only lead to ground mobilisation and further alienation of the people (Ratcliffe 2019). Similar feelings were expressed by several other Kashmiris. The government’s action stunned the Kashmiris. For most of them the situation had never been as depressing and hopeless as it became in the aftermath of the revocation of Article 370 (Bhat 2019). It (Article 370) gave them at least a fig-leaf of autonomy, which was more symbolic than real, because prior to the clampdown in August 2019, out of the 97 items in the Central list, the laws passed by the Central government on as many as 94 items were applicable to Jammu and Kash­ mir. The government’s action, taken apparently to integrate Kashmir with the rest of India, has only served to widen the chasm. The Kashmiris feel that the revoca­ tion of Article 370, the bifurcation of the State into two UTs (albeit with the promise of restoring full statehood to J&K once normalcy returns,) and the decision to increase the number of seats in the new uni-cameral legislature of the UT, to be set up under the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act 2019, from 87 (including 4 seats from Ladakh, 46 from the Kashmir Valley and 37 from Jammu, in the previous Assembly), to 104, and ultimately to 114 after the delimitation exercise is completed, will further disempower them both ethnically and politically.

Conflicts in contemporary IR 63

The Indian government’s security-oriented approach did not succeed in the past in dealing with the problems being faced by the Kashmiris, on the contrary it was spurring militancy; nor will it succeed in future unless judicious steps are taken for ameliorating people’s grievances. For example, at least 45 youths joined the ranks of militants in Kashmir during January–May 2018 including an MBA and a PhD scholar. According to security officials, every funeral of a local militant spawned at least two additional militants to the rank of militants. It became almost a bottomless pit. It is difficult to explain the reason for the sudden spurt in the growth of mili­ tancy. But as one army officer explained, it could be the growing influence of panIslamisation and religious indoctrination “in which unemployment emerges as a catalytic agent for a quick reaction to pick up a gun” (The Statesman May 4, 2018). In the aftermath of the lockdown of Kashmir from August 5, there was no marked improvement in the security situation, despite New Delhi’s claims to the contrary. After Imran Khan raised the Kashmir issue in the UN General Assembly in September 2019, the bottled up emotions of the Kashmiris erupted and protests broke out across Kashmir and people even set off fire crackers (Bhat 2019). Nor has there been any let up in violence. As a reporter from the India Today TV reported on October 10, the picture emerging from the internal documents of security forces falsify the government’s claim that the situation in Kashmir was normal; and that since August 5, 2019, 10 militants were killed in encounters and there were over 300 stone pelting cases in which close to 100 security personnel were injured (Sandhu 2019). Thus militants were hitting the streets, despite the tight security; and between October 14 and November 10 at least four local militants who joined the LeT were killed. What was more worrying, they were now targeting migrant labourers in a bid to cripple the economy; and, in October 2019, at least seven migrant workers were killed, including five from West Bengal. From the beginning of October, attempts were made by the government to bring back a semblance of normality to the State with the re-opening of schools and colleges, withdrawal of restrictions on the movement of people and private vehicles, opening of markets and partial restoration of telephone connections; the people’s reaction was, however, lukewarm and their protests against New Delhi’s actions somewhat ‘morphed’ into a civil disobedience movement (Bhat 2019). In the elections for the post of chairman of the Block Development Councils held in October 2019, the Independents won in 217 BDCs compared with BJP’s 81. What is more significant, in the Kashmir Division, Independents were elected in 109 Blocks and the BJP candidates were elected in 18, giving a fitting reply to Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s claim that three out of four people in J&K had supported the abolition of Article 370. The election results are significant also because, except the BJP, none of the mainstream political parties – the N.C., the PDP, the Congress or the CPI(M) – had taken part. What is the way out? The revocation of Article 370 does not seem to have made the people of Jammu and Kashmir happy – not even the Pandits who live in Kashmir – except the Gujjars, one of the worst sufferers of the earlier regime, and the Ladakhis; even in the new UT of Ladakh, the Muslims in the Kargil Division

64 Arun Kumar Banerji

are not happy. The arrest/detention of the mainstream party leaders created a large political void which cannot be filled by the Panchs and Sarpanchs on whom the BJP seemed to have pinned their faith. The decision-makers in New Delhi should have learnt from the experience of the Sri Lankans where the marginalisation of the moderate Tamil leadership gave a field day to the militants. For a long-term settlement of the multi-dimensional Kashmir conflict what is required is restoration of normalcy and resumption of the political process through reduction in the trust-deficit, without which no significant economic development will be possible. Release of political leaders kept under arrest/detention and dialo­ gue with all the stake-holders with the intention of ameliorating their genuine grievances are necessary steps towards that end. Last but not the least, improve­ ments in bilateral relations with Pakistan will be necessary for the settlement of the Kashmir dispute, which may seem to be impossible given Pakistan’s hostile activ­ ities in the recent past. But Pakistanis have now realised that bellicosity towards India has not brought them much benefit in terms of gaining international support. Nevertheless, even the states that have supported India’s contention that revocation of Article 370 is a matter of India’s domestic policy, have urged both India and Pakistan to settle their disputes through bilateral negotiations, which will not only reduce regional tensions but also act as a damage-limitation strategy against Pakistan, vis-à-vis Kashmir.

Conclusion One of the most common causes of social/political conflicts in the contemporary world may be found in the feelings of deprivation/marginalisation, imagined or real, nurtured by segments of society. The Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, for example, was triggered by the discriminatory policies pursued by successive Sinhala-domi­ nated political parties, while the conflicts in Kashmir or in some of the North­ eastern States of India, particularly Nagaland and Manipur, resulted from the quest for maintaining a separate identity which was perceived to be threatened by New Delhi’s policy of ‘integration’. Since conflicts are endemic to human societies, it is not possible to eliminate them altogether. Conflicts in the contemporary world may require development of new techniques for their management and resolution. It is in this context that the peace studies’ programmes conducted by university departments/centres, or by independent research institutes have become important for the study and analysis of the roots of conflicts and their resolution through ‘peace-making and peacebuilding’ efforts. In the Kashmir conflict, for example, efforts of the interlocutors – whether appointed by the government or acting independently – to look deep into the causes of conflict and suggest remedial measures have not been given the attention they deserve; this could have reduced the intensity of the conflict. Peace-making may be facilitated by a number of means: by mediatory efforts as exemplified by the US mediatory efforts in bringing peace to Bosnia (The Dayton Accord) and by establishing channels of communication. It is in this context that

Conflicts in contemporary IR 65

‘Track-II’ diplomacy becomes important. It succeeded in the early years of the present century in reducing tensions in India–Pakistan relations. The Track-II method was also used in developing dialogues with the Naga rebel organisations in India in which civil society organisations also played an important part. Economic development and the development of egalitarian and liberal demo­ cratic societies may go a long way in ensuring stable peace, whereas the quest for dominance and geo-strategic rivalries, religious fanaticism and jingoistic policies may destroy peace as exemplified by contemporary West Asia. Conflict resolution will also be facilitated by the spread of education which will help reduce obscur­ antism, religious fundamentalism and encourage tolerance of conflicting views and perspectives in which civil society leaders may play an important role.

Notes 1 For a discussion on these three basic types of conflicts, see, Deutsch (1989, Ch.11). 2 Throughout this article the word ‘State’ means an Indian province while the word ‘state’ refers to a territorial unit with sovereign power. 3 For a useful analysis of the causes of ethnic violence in Sri Lanka, See, Manoharan (2008, Chap.2). 4 For a brief discussion on these proposals, see, Sahadevan (2001: 15–40). 5 This was the observation of “K.P.”, a former LTTE leader who was in jail custody in Sri Lanka, see, Jagannathan (2011). 6 For a useful discussion on insurgencies in Manipur and in the Northeast in general, see, Subramaniyam 2016. Roy (2015) also discusses these issues albeit from a different perspective.

References Ahuja, Namrata Biji (2019) “Winter will be Long”, The Week, 37(35): 30–35. September 3. Banerji, Arun Kumar (2017) “Kashmir Cauldron I & II”, The Sunday Statesman and The Statesman, Kolkata. July 23–24. Bhat, Tariq (2019) “The ground rumbles”, The Week, 37(44): 22–34. November 3. Deutsch, K.W. (1989) The Analysis of International Relations, New Delhi: Prentice Hall of India. Jagannathan, R. (2011) “LTTE lost the war by refusing to see post-Cold War realities”, Firstpost, May 23. Retrieved from https://www.firstpost.com/politics/ltte-lost-the-wa r-by-refusing-to-see-post-cold-war-realities-13921.html Kipgen, Nehginpao (2018) “Kukis’ demand questions the Naga Framework Agreement”, The Statesman, September 13. Retrieved from https://www.thestatesman.com/opinion/ kukis-demand-questions-the-naga-framework-agreement-1502684018.html (last accessed on 20 March 2020). Manoharan, N. (2008) Democratic Dilemma: Ethnic Violence and Human Rights in Sri Lanka, New Delhi: Samkriti. Mishra, Akshay (2011) “Indira Gandhi helped train Tamil rebels, and reaped whirlwind”, Firstpost, May 23. Retrieved from https://www.firstpost.com/world/indira-gandhi-help ed-train-tamil-rebels-and-reaped-whirlwind-13913.html (last accessed on 20 March 2020). Phadnis, Urmila (1978) “India and Sri Lanka”, International Studies (New Delhi), 17(3–4): 582–588.

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Press Trust of India (2018) “At least 45 youths joined militancy in 2018: Officials”, The Statesman. May 4. Ratcliffe, Rebecca (2019) “Kashmir: Imran Khan says Pakistan ‘will teach India a lesson’”. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/14/kashmir-more-protests-exp ected-as-india-marks-independence (last accessed on 20 March 2020). Roy, Kaushik (2015) Frontiers, Insurgencies and Counter-insurgencies in South Asia: 1820–2013, New Delhi: Routledge. Sahadevan, P. (2001) “Explaining the intractability of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka”, in Arun Kumar Banerji (ed.), Conflict Resolution in the Post-Cold War Era, Kolkata: Minerva. Sandhu, Kamaljit Kaur (2019) “10 militants killed, over 300 stone pelting cases since August 5: Security forces claim situation normal in J&K”. Retrieved from https://www.indiatoday.in/ india/story/10-militants-killed-over-300-stone-pelting-cases-since-aug-5-security-forces-claim -situation-normal-in-j-k-1608064-2019-10-10 (last accessed on 20 March 2020). Subramaniyam, K. (2016) State Policy and Conflict in Northeast India (South Asian Edition), New Delhi: Routledge. The Statesman (2019) “Gotabaya Rajapaksa wins Sri Lankan presidential election”, The Statesman, Kolkata. November 18.

5 GLOBALIZATION, INCOME INEQUALITY AND CONFLICT Rajat Acharyya

1 Introduction Conflicts arise due to many reasons. Inequality is one amongst various sources of conflicts. Inequality essentially means differences in the relative positions of indivi­ duals in terms of access to opportunities that the market and the government – or more generally the institutions – provide, be it health, sanitation, education, employment, or representation, decision making and the like. Inequality also arises from the ability of individuals to exploit opportunities and derive benefits from such opportunities, which of course is largely constrained or determined by differ­ ential access to the opportunities themselves. It does not matter what the source and/or cause of inequality is; because individuals often value their relative positions more than their absolute positions, inequality of different sorts appear as the potential source of conflict. For example, uniformly limited or no access to better health and sanitation is of course a cause for disgruntlement but this is less than the discontent that arises when some can access better health and sanitation facilities whereas others cannot. Similarly, if everyone in a society or economy is poor, this may perhaps be more acceptable to many than when some people get richer whereas others remain poor. The same argument holds from the other side. We enjoy improvement in our absolute positions more when others cannot achieve similar improvements in their relative positions and thus lag behind.1 Sometimes, even a deterioration of our absolute positions appears to be a less bitter pill to swallow if we observe that those at a higher absolute position are experiencing deterioration as well and perhaps more than proportionately.2 Of course, one might say that the valuing of relative positions more than abso­ lute positions is a reflection of extremely self-interested individuals and accordingly altruism may be a counter argument. But it is undeniable that there are limits to altruism. Altruism may be observed among members of a family or a group united

68 Rajat Acharyya

in terms of economic, social or gender characteristics, but is often not beyond the family or group so defined. In such a context of limited altruism, the emphasis on relative positions instead of absolute positions may be apparent once we define individual units as families and/or groups are defined by some similarities of characteristics of its members. Conflicts cause concern when these grow and culminate into social or political backlash. Pre-emption of political backlash through mitigation of conflict arising from growing inequality, however, depends on the political regime. In democ­ racies, the threat of political backlash from inequality is more severe, which often leads to the adoption of policies to mitigate the conflict. At the same time, democracies, being more concerned with mitigating conflicts, are often forced to settle for smaller market and social reforms, which in the long run do do not help in the resolution of conflict. A typical example is that to mitigate conflicts arising from growing income inequality, democratic governments often settle for a smaller rate of growth – known as the Democratic Middle Phenomenon – because, in the short term, a faster rate of growth accentuates income inequality more substantially, thereby posing a bigger threat for the incumbent government. However, a smaller rate of growth, though it might within limits contain income inequality (and conflict) in the short run, constrains the scope of redistribution as a short-term policy and also the scope of improving the skills of the vast majority of working population through public investment in education and technical skills as a long-term policy. Thus, inequality, conflict and political regimes are intertwined. This chapter discusses these inter-relationships. However, inequality comes in many different forms – income inequality, gender inequality, social inequality, to name a few – and for each of these the nature and dimension of conflict would be different. In this essay I confine myself to income inequality and the conflicts arising from it. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. In Section 2, I document rising income inequality, which has become a global phenomenon in the present era of globalization, as a major source of conflict and thus a cause of concern. Section 3 discusses the interrelationship between political regimes and conflicts, and alter­ native arguments as to why we may experience lower but persistent income inequalities and conflict situations in democracies compared with those in auto­ cracies. In Section 4, I present some evidence on the “Democratic Middle” phe­ nomenon and the development paradox that it leads to. Finally, Section 5 provides some concluding remarks.

2 Rising income inequality and conflict potential in the present era of globalization Globalization has many dimensions. Liberalization of trade among countries, and the integration of national markets as a consequence, is one major dimension. The implication of this dimension of globalization for within-country income inequality and consequent conflict potential will be what I shall limit my discussion to. But,

Globalization, income inequality, conflict 69

before documenting how income inequality has been changing since 1980s when most of the countries across the globe, particularly in the developing world, initi­ ated their globalization processes, it would be instructive to discuss how the standard economic theories perceive trade liberalization to affect income inequalities – both within and across countries. Greater international trade affects intra-country income inequality – that is, the earnings of different economic agents or factor owners, like industrial workers, capitalists, land-owners, landless agricultural workers, artisans etc. vis-à-vis each other – in two primary ways. In the short run, increased trade as a consequence of trade liberalization changes the composition of outputs produced and with it changes the demand for different factors of production asymmetrically. Thus, some factor owners gain and some lose. Even among the winners, income gains may be asymmetric. All this results in a change in relative income levels and accordingly a change in income inequality. The direction of such changes – that is, who gains and who loses, and who gains more and who gains less – depends on the nature of goods being exported and imported by a country. For example, in the context of skilled workers, unskilled workers and physical capital as the three factors of pro­ duction, if a country exports unskilled labour-intensive goods like textiles, leather manufacture, food and the like and yet imports capital-intensive and skill-based goods such as transport equipment, pharmaceuticals, office equipment, scientific instruments etc., then it is likely that unskilled wages will go up whereas the income earned by capitalists and the wages earned by skilled workers will fall. As a consequence, income inequality falls because the divide between the rich and the poor narrows; i.e. with such a trade pattern, trade liberalization causes production of unskilled labour-intensive export goods to rise and domestic production of capital-intensive and skill-based import-competing goods to contract. Thus, the composition of aggregate output changes towards unskilled labour-intensive goods, which in turn raises the relative demand for unskilled labour and reduces that for domestic capital and skilled workers. On the contrary, in a country that imports unskilled labour-intensive goods and exports capital-intensive and skill-based goods, the opposite is the case: income inequality becomes worse. Capitalists and skilled workers need not necessarily, however, gain by the same amount, which further compounds the income inequality. Thus, the short-term effect of trade liberalization works through changes in the composition of a country’s basket of goods produced and consequent changes in the relative demand for different fac­ tors of production that are used to produce that basket. However, note that this effect suggests that intra-country income inequality in different trading nations must change asymmetrically since if a set of countries export unskilled labour-intensive goods and import capital-intensive and skill-based goods – such as what most of the poor, lower-income and middle-income developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America do – then the other group of advanced industrialized countries must import those goods. In other words, as a consequence of globalization and trade liberalization, we would expect at least in the short run that income inequality will fall in poor nations and rise in rich nations. But, as we will see, this has not been

70 Rajat Acharyya

the case. Rather income inequality, particularly wage inequality between the skil­ led and unskilled workers, has risen in many parts of the globe, and in both rich and poor nations alike. In the long run, trade liberalization affects income inequality by augmenting the growth of aggregate output. This growth effect depends on a country’s per capita income level. Based on cross country evidence, Simon Kuznets (1955) found that initially income inequality rises with per capita income growth but then declines beyond a threshold level of per capita income. This ‘inverted-U’ relationship between per capita income growth and income inequality has subsequently been known as Kuznets Hypothesis and the relationship as the Kuznets Curve (see Figure 5.1). Growth usually takes place through industrialization, which causes a shift away from agricultural activities and towards industries accompanied by migration of labour displaced from agriculture to urban areas in search for jobs in industries. As perceived by Kuznets, these dislocating effects of the reduction of agricultural activities and increased industrialization would be most unfavourable to the relative position of the low-income groups. Industrialization creates new jobs and offers upward income mobility for the relatively semi-skilled and skilled, but not so much for the urban unskilled or low-skilled workers. On the other hand, the rural unskilled and low-skilled workers who are now displaced because of fewer agricultural activities migrate to urban areas but do not find employment in the industries requiring relatively more skilled workers. There is, thus, both downward and upward income mobility, with the former being more pervasive. Hence, inequality worsens during the initial phase of growth. A similar situation arises when growth is caused by technological invention and innovation in a few manufacturing industries, producing a divide between traditional non-innovating manufacturing and non-traditional innovating manufacturing industries. As resour­ ces are drawn away from non-innovating sectors to sustain the expansion of inno­ vating sectors, people lose jobs in the former whereas others gain jobs in the latter. Again, with downward income mobility for people who lose jobs being larger than upward income mobility for those who gain jobs, at the initial stages of rising per capita income (and growth), the dislocating effects of these transitions worsen income inequality. But in the later stages, as the pace of industrial growth slows down, such unfavourable forces become weaker and the income distribution pat­ tern becomes more equal (Kuznets, 1955, p. 18). This occurs primarily through the growth of sectors ancillary to the innovating sectors; or due to rise in the demand for basic goods, such as food and cloth, produced by the unskilled workers and for basic services provided by them. The Kuznets Curve relationship between per capita income growth and income inequality has some far reaching but asymmetric implications for rich and poor nations. What the Kuznets Curve tells us is that whether income inequality rises or declines with growth depends on if growth takes place from a lower than a threshold per capita level or from a higher level. Thus, we can expect growth that is augmented or caused by trade liberalization to lower income inequality in richer nations but to raise it in poorer nations. That is, the long run growth effect of trade

Globalization, income inequality, conflict 71

FIGURE 5.1

Kuznets Curve

liberalization and globalization may also be asymmetric across nations, though in sharp contrast with the short run asymmetries across nations. These short run and long run mechanisms through which trade liberalization affects income inequality are illustrated in Figure 5.2 below. In contrast to the theoretical predictions, however, the empirical evidence, which primarily focuses on the short run composition effect of trade on income inequality, reveals a growing within-country income inequality in most parts of the globe. For example, Cornia and Kiiski (2001) in their cross-country analysis observed that out of the 77 countries in their sample, accounting for 82 per cent of world population and 95 per cent of world gross domestic product (GDP) at pur­ chasing power parity, the intra-country income inequality increased in 45 countries during the 1990s. These 45 countries together accounted for 77 per cent of the world GDP. With world trade increasing quite significantly during this period of study, one may expect that globalization and trade liberalization had caused such widespread growing intra-country income inequality. Subsequent empirical studies by other researchers also reveal similar inequality trends. Recently, in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty (2014) has provided evidence of growing income inequality in the major rich countries and in selected transition and developing economies, aggregating the results of more than a decade of research carried out by him and his co-authors. Figure 5.3, reproduced

FIGURE 5.2

Short run and long run effects of trade on income inequality

72 Rajat Acharyya

from Piketty (2014), reveals that in what he called Anglo-Saxon countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia – the income share of the top 1 per cent of income earners had decreased steadily from 1910 till the beginning of the 1980s but, thereafter, during the period 1980–2010 – the period during in which globalization and trade liberalization had been most pervasive – such income shares increased quite sharply, with the highest growth being recorded in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom. Similar trends can be observed for emerging developing countries such as Argentina, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, and South Africa (see Figure 5.4). Piketty’s own theoretical explanation for such changes in inequality patterns is that since capital income tends to be more unequally distributed than labour income, an increase of the capital share in the national income of countries would likely increase overall income inequality. A recent study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also confirms that during 1980–2010 inequality in the personal distribution of income increased in most of the economies in the world. More than one-third of advanced economies and half of emerging Europe experienced increases in their Gini values – a standard measure of income inequality – exceeding 3 percentage points. Inequality also rose in most economies in Asia and the Pacific and in the Middle East and North Africa.

FIGURE 5.3 Income inequality in Anglo-Saxon countries Source: Piketty (2014).

Globalization, income inequality, conflict 73

FIGURE 5.4 Income inequality in emerging countries Source: Piketty (2014).

The inequality situation in India is equally worrying. While alternative statistical measures clearly show that income inequality has worsened in India in the last two decades, a recent study published by Oxfam reveals that 73 per cent of the wealth generated in the country in 2017 was concentrated in the richest 1 per cent. In addition, 670 million Indians comprising the population’s poorest half saw their wealth rise by just 1 per cent. The other dimension of the world-wide worsening of within-country income inequality is the inequality between skilled and unskilled workers. Since the 1980s, this growing wage-inequality, or widening of the wage gap, has been observed by many researchers across the globe.3 In the present era of globalization, technologi­ cal changes in the West have raised the demand for more skill-intensive hightechnology goods, such as aerospace, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, scientific instru­ ments, machinery, and data-processing equipment. Thus, in many countries, the composition of exports is biased in favour of services and skill-intensive manu­ facturing. This has increased the demand for skilled labour more than that of unskilled workers, leading to a rise in wage inequality. Outsourcing of more skillintensive production stages from the high-wage to the low-wage countries also has raised the relative demand for skilled labour, and thus has contributed to the growing wage inequality. At the same time, trade liberalization often leads to informalization of the economy. Import competition displaces formal sector jobs

74 Rajat Acharyya

and workers migrate to informal jobs. This creates further inequality among the wage earners. Recent studies on Latin American countries reveal that formal industrial employment has been dismantled as a consequence of trade liberalization, with no alternative sources of formal employment being put in place. This has pushed workers into survival strategies in the informal sectors. A similar trend can be observed in India as well. These evidences suggest that conflict potentials have become greater in the present era of globalization than they were prior to the onslaught of globalization. Discontent about globalization is rising across the globe, and of late, anti-globalization voices are finding prominence in and drawing attention from academia as well as policymakers.4

3 Do political regimes matter in the resolution of conflicts? It is often argued that democracies mitigate conflicts by smoothening income inequality through domestic redistribution policies. Any policy change creates winners and losers, and thus is a source of potential conflict if the losers are not compensated for their losses. Redistribution policies such as taxes and subsidies, or direct transfers to the losers, are essentially motivated and implemented by this principle of compensation and consequently mitigation of potential conflict. Since the political backlash from inequalities and conflict is usually more severe in democracies than in autocracies, such redistribution and/or transfer policies are implemented more often in the former political regimes than in the latter. For example, evidence on effects of trade liberalization on industrial employment in Latin American countries reveals that the destruction of formal employment was more severe and almost no alternative opportunities for livelihood were put in place in those Latin American countries where trade reformers were backed by mostly authoritarian regimes and by recently democratized regimes with weak civil societies. The role of a democratic regime is further emphasized in Acemoglu and Robinson (2002), who argue that the lowest inequality is achieved under a democratic system with taxation and redistribution. Capital accumulation and an increase to the income of the rich would mean an increase in income inequality. In democracies, this increase in income inequality is usually followed by an optimal taxation and redistribution scheme induced by the will of the poor median voters that leads to a subsequent decline in inequalities. However, democratization may not necessarily lead to a decrease in inequality. For example, most democratic regions in Russia suffered from relatively high levels of inequality in the aftermath of privatization in 1992 (Remington, 2011). Among the major political and economic theories that talk about mitigation of conflicts in democracies through redistribution, the political risk theory in the context of a fractionalized society (Velasco, 1997; Annett, 2001), the quality of policymakers affecting the incidence of conflict (Sah and Stiglitz, 1991); and the Political Kuznets Curve are the most relevant ones in the present context. We

Globalization, income inequality, conflict 75

briefly review each of these theories below to understand why one may expect both a lower incidence and a larger mitigation of conflicts in democracies, at least in the short run.

Socio-economic fractionalization and political risk theory In democracies, the incumbent government is primarily concerned with max­ imization of political support, and thus chooses and implements economic policies by taking into account the interests and interactions of pressure groups. Each group is concerned with its own group-interest at the expense of social welfare.5 A polarized society or economy where there are only a few pressure groups of any significant size and influence, gains and losses of political support for the incumbent government due to a policy change are more or less balanced.6 But, greater the socio-economic fractionalization of a country, or a less polarized society, means a larger number of pressure groups with no single group being able to provide enough political support to the incumbent government to continue in power. When inequalities grow very fast amidst such socio-economic conditions, it gen­ erates severe conflicts amongst competing fractions and groups and consequently a larger political backlash against market policies. Fractionalization thus leads inher­ ently to greater levels of political risk of being overthrown and losing any rents from being in power for a government if its policies exclude more groups than they include.7 Hence, in a more fractionalized (or less polarized) society, a demo­ cratic government pacify the excluded groups by increasing the level of its expen­ ditures (or subsidies) to reduce the political risk and conflict situations (such as growing income inequality) arising out of policy changes. Velasco (1997) and Anthony Annett (2001), for example, found strong empirical supports to this basic premise using the indices of ethno-linguistic and religious fractionalization. What this political risk theory suggests is that it is the political risks associated with greater fractionalization of a society or an economy that forces a democratic government to mitigate inequalities and conflicts through redistribution and transfer policies.

Quality of governance, variability in economic performance and incidence of conflict Economic performance of a country varies widely and along with it does conflict potential due both to the number and quality of policies adopted by its govern­ ment, which in turn depend on the quality of governance. When fewer policies are adopted and implemented, chances of bad policies are reduced as well. Moreover, winners and losers are created less frequently from policy changes. On the other hand, if good policies are adopted more often than bad policies, on the whole a larger number of people would be expected to be winners than the number of losers. In either case, conflict potentials would be much less than otherwise. Whether fewer policies are adopted, and/or whether good rather than bad policies

76 Rajat Acharyya

are adopted more often, however, depends on the nature and quality of govern­ ance. This argument was first put forward by Sah and Stiglitz (1991). Good (bad) decision makers have a higher probability of making good (bad) decisions. In an autocracy, if the chief executive is a bad one, more often bad policies will be adopted, which will result in larger conflicts. On the other hand, in a democracy, the chief executive (be it the President or the Prime Minister along with his or her cabinet of ministers) and the Parliament must agree on a particular policy before it is being adopted. Parliament may be of good or bad type, and this may also be true of the chief executive. If types do not match ex ante, more policies proposed by the chief executive will be vetoed by the Parliament. Thus, fewer policies will be adopted – good or bad – and accordingly variability in outcomes and conflict situations will be smaller in a democracy than in an autocracy. On the other hand, if the good types match, good policies will be adopted more often than bad policies, leading again to a lower conflict potential.

Income inequality and the Political Kuznets Curve There is another strand of literature that takes an altogether different approach in explaining the relationship between political regime and income inequality (and conflict). For example, Bourguignon and Verdier (2000) argue that the extension of democracy to the masses may first increase income inequality before it possibly improves it. Public decisions are taken on the basis of majority voting where only the educated, a minority, are allowed to vote. Thus, initially, gains from public action accrue to this minority. Later, the need for skilled workers induces the elite to subsidize education, which, of course, also means loss of political control. More people get educated and participate in public decisions. The larger voting group now votes for further redistribution in terms of education subsidy. Thus, inequality now declines. This non-monotonic relationship between political rights (and the degree of democracy) and inequality is subsequently known as the Political Kuznets Curve. Acemoglu and Robinson (2000), on the other hand, argue that the Kuznets Curve is observed when a society democratizes under social pressure. Indus­ trialization allows the rich to accumulate wealth whereas the poor are not able to invest in human capital. This increases inequality. Once inequality reaches a critical threshold, a threat of revolution intensifies, which forces the elite to extend poli­ tical rights to the masses. This eventually results in increased redistribution and schooling, which allow the poor to accumulate capital. Inequality then starts to decline. However, democratization involves the protection of rights and not just the extension of the franchise. Tam (1999) argues that the degree of redistribution depends on the political investment of the different groups in the political process. Therefore, for any given level of political rights, the degree of redistribution would vary with the degree of changes in political investment. After universal voting rights are attained, further increase in political rights and the consequent increase in

Globalization, income inequality, conflict 77

the degree of democracy due to political investment of the poor tilt redistribution even more in favour of the poor, and inequality therefore declines. Empirical estimates by Alberto Chong (2004) provide evidence for the Political Kuznets Curve hypothesis, both in cross-country and panel data analyses: democ­ racy and income distribution display a non-monotonic relationship. Tam (2008) also found a robust inverted-U relationship between income inequality and political development

4 Democratic Middle and the development paradox It is often argued that the scope of redistribution and mitigation of conflict arising out of growing inequality are limited by the output and income growth of a country. Without growth, any redistribution of national income will necessarily make one group better off and some other worse off. Such redistribution may be equitable and yet may be politically infeasible if the worse off group has larger political power or larger political investment. In such situations, redistribution may itself be a source of conflict. That is, without growth, redistribution policies to mitigate conflict may actually lead to larger conflict potential. Without growth and the consequent large-scale expansion of economic activities and job creation, one cannot hope for any sustained impact on poverty through redistribution either. For example, a redistribution of land works for the poor only when cultivation is affordable, which in turn depends on the availability of fertili­ zers and electricity at lower prices and also on improved irrigation facilities. Public provision of such resources for farmers (and other public resources for the urban poor) can be financed by taxes. But such a financing scheme puts pressure on the limited availability of economic resources at the disposal of the government. This is because if there is no growth in economic activities, then the scope of such taxes is limited as well. Alternatively, the deficit financing to finance such programmes cannot be continued for too long without further consequences like inflation, which hurts the poor and middle-income groups more than the richer people. Yet, the democratic governments mandated by short term political targets often choose redistribution with moderate growth targets because of the political risks involved in the adverse effect of the growth policies on earnings inequality among different economic classes. That is, being concerned with income inequality as a potential source of conflict and thus a threat to political hegemony, democracies often opt for smaller growth rates, or adopt policies that constrain faster growth (with consequent accentuation of inequality being lesser as well). Accordingly, democracies achieve moderate success in mass removal of poverty and reduction in income inequality. This phenomenon, known as the Democratic Middle, poses a development paradox in democracies and a trade-off between political goals and economic performances: political stability is achieved with limited means of economic development and scope for redistribution. Recent evidences reflects these aspects of economic performances and growth prospects of a country being determined largely by its political regime. Przeworski

78 Rajat Acharyya

et al. (2000), for example, observe that the “lists of miracles and disasters are populated almost exclusively by dictatorships”. Varshney (2002), on the other hand, argues that “democracies tend to fall exclusively in the unspectacular but undesirable middle”. Table 5.1 captures this Democratic Middle phenomenon. Both the highest and lowest average annual growth rates in Gross Domestic Pro­ duct (GDP) during 1990–2010 have been registered by the authoritarian regimes; China and Singapore being at the top, and Niger and Mexico at the bottom. On the other hand, with the exception of India, democracies have recorded moderate growth. Table 5.2 reports the success of authoritarian and democratic regimes in reducing income-based poverty, which is measured by the crude index of Head Count Ratio – the percentage of people living below the national poverty lines. The democracies, though having succeeded in pre-empting a consistent deterioration in the welfare of the poor, have not achieved the best results. Even some of the best democratic performers – like India – have achieved smaller reductions in the pov­ erty rates than the moderate authoritarian performers such as Chile and Thailand. Both the political risk theory and quality of governance theory as discussed above can explain such a phenomenon as the Democratic Middle. The two most frequently used indicators of diversity – fractionalization and polarization – can be used as explanations of both internal conflict and economic stagnation in terms political risk theory. There is also the lack of political will for the democracies to invest in public education to resolve the conflicts caused by growing inequality in an effective way since the political returns from this are neither immediate nor substantial. For example, Easterly and Levine (1997) argue that a low level of schooling and poor infrastructure development are closely related to a high level of ethnic diversity. They also find that ethnic fractionalization adversely affects output growth. Varshney (2002), in his background paper for the Human Development Report 2002, on the other hand, observes that If the poor, irrespective of the ethnic groups they come from, were to vote strictly on economic grounds, they would also press the decision-makers to attack poverty a great deal more forcefully. However, at least in multi-ethnic democracies … they often vote via ethnicity not via (economic) class. So stronger poverty alleviation programmes (like faster growth with redistribution) take a back-seat in democracies. As for the quality of governance theory, recall that Sah and Stiglitz (1991) argue that variability in outcomes and conflict situations will be smaller in a democracy than in an autocracy. Though it helps avoid the worst outcomes such as famines or the development horrors of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), it is difficult, if not impossible, for the democracies to scale the heights of South Korea, Taiwan or Singapore. Almeida and Ferreira (2003) find evidence for the theoretical implications in Sah and Stiglitz (1991) both for cross-country and within-country

Globalization, income inequality, conflict 79

TABLE 5.1 Average annual growth rate (1990–2010) of select authoritarian and democratic

regimes Best performers Authoritarian China

Democracies 10.35

Singapore

9.66

Ethiopia

7.86

South Korea

7.50

India

7.74

Moderate performers Authoritarian Chile Thailand Uganda

Democracies 6.61 6.60 6.54

Sri Lanka Botswana Philippines Venezuela, RB

6.44 5.78 5.37 4.59

Costa Rica

4.14

Worst performers Authoritarian

Democracies

Peru

3.97

Honduras

3.94

South Africa

3.90

Senegal

3.55

Guatemala

3.52

Niger

2.56

Mexico

2.55

Source: Author’s compilation from World Development Indicators (World Bank), various issues.

variability in growth rates. They also show that both the best and worst performers in terms of growth rates are more likely to be autocracies.

5 Conclusion Inequality, conflict and political regimes are intertwined. They cause each other in a complex way. Democracies appear to be more sensitive to conflict potentials, and thus more often take pre-emptive measures through redistribution to mitigate the conflicts than do the autocracies. But, at the same time, democracies settle for much smaller growth targets, which in turn limit the scope of redistribution, thereby making the pre-emptive measures self-defeating in the long run.

80 Rajat Acharyya

TABLE 5.2 Percentage of the population living below the national poverty line average

(1995–2010) Best performers Authoritarian

Democracies

China South Korea

6 13

Singapore

negligible

Sri Lanka

14.80

Moderate performers Authoritarian Chile Thailand Uganda South Africa

Democracies 20.20 29.75 32.45 34.50

Botswana Jamaica Costa Rica India

19.3 19.65 21.00 33.50

Worst performers Authoritarian

Democracies

Ivory Coast Peru

40.00 42.25

Ethiopia

45.50

Senegal

48.30

Mexico

50.57

Guatemala

56.00

Honduras

62.73

Venezuela, RB

38.58

Source: Author’s compilation from World Development Indicators (World Bank), various issues.

Notes 1 In the 1980s a particular television brand in India advertised its product as “owner’s pride and neighbour’s envy”, which essentially captures this type of valuation. 2 Arguably, this feeling or valuation became apparent and perhaps mitigated larger opposi­ tion for the government when demonetarization was introduced in India on November 8, 2016. 3 For a survey of these findings one may refer to Acharyya (2017) and Marjit and Acharyya (2003). Readers may also refer to a recent study by Roy and Sinha Roy (2017). 4 Rise in income inequality in the developing world is in large part due to unequal access to education and technical skills for a greater part of the masses, thus reflecting the failure of domestic policies rather than trade liberalization and globalization per se. However, as I shall argue below, such domestic policy failures in providing equal access for all to edu­ cation and skill formation are largely related to political regimes. 5 This reflects no or limited altruism I was talking about. 6 Standard models in international relations, on the other hand, show that whether polar­ ization leads to civil war depends on resource availability at the disposal of the contending groups. Equality of resources might lead to peace instead of conflict as the competing poles are able to deter each other from using force (see, for example, Zagare and Kilgour,

Globalization, income inequality, conflict 81

2001). Hence, though the conflict potential in bipolar societies may be large, such situations may not necessarily lead to an increased number of conflicts. 7 Empirical and theoretical literature on whether fractionalization or polarization maximizes conflict and lead to civil war are, however, mixed. Hegre et al. (2001), for example, find that fractionalization leads to civil war. In contrast, Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2005) have found evidence that ethnic or religious polarization increases the risk of civil war.

References Acemoglu, D. and Robinson, J.A. (2000). “Why did the West extend the franchise? Democracy, inequality and growth in historical perspective”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115: 1167–1200. Acemoglu, D. and Robinson, J.A. (2002). “The political economy of the Kuznets Curve”, Review of Development Economics, 6(2): 183–203. Acharyya, R. (2017). “International trade and widening wage gap: A general equilibrium approach”. In S. Bandyopadhyay, Andre Torre, Paulo Casaca and Tomaz Ponce Den­ tinho (eds), Regional Cooperation in South Asia: Socio-economic, Spatial, Ecological and Institutional Aspects (Chapter 2). Cham: Springer. Almeida, H. and Ferreira, D. (2003). “Democracy and the variability of economic performance”, Economics and Politics, February. Annett, A. (2001). Social Fractionalization, Political Instability and Size of the Government, IMF Working Paper WP/00/82. Bourguignon, F. and Verdier, T. (2000). “Oligarchy, democracy, inequality and growth”, Journal of Development Economics, 62: 285–313. Chong, A. (2004). “Inequality, democracy, and persistence: Is there a Political Kuznets Curve?”, Economics and Politics, 16(2): 189–212. Cornia, G. and Kiiski, S. (2001). Trends in Income Distribution in the Post-World War II Period Evidence and Interpretation, Working Paper # 89, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER), Helsinki. Easterly, W. and Levine, R. (1997). “Africa’s growth tragedy: Policies and ethnic divisions”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112: 1203–1250. Hegre, H., Ellingsen, T., Gates, S., and Gleditsch, N.P. (2001). “Toward a democratic civil peace? Democracy, political change, and civil war, 1816–1992”, American. Political Science Review, 95: 33–48. IMF Policy Paper (2014). Fiscal Policy and Income Inequality, IMF (January). Kuznets, S. (1955). “Economic growth and income inequality”, American Economic Review, 45: 1–28. Marjit, S. and Acharyya, R. (2003). International Trade, Wage Inequality and the Developing Countries: A General Equilibrium Approach. Heidelberg: Physica/Springer Verlag. Montalvo, J.G. and Reynal-Querol, M. (2005). “Ethnic polarization, potential conflict, and civil wars”, American Economic Review, 95: 796–813. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Przeworski, A., Alvarez, M.E., Cheibub, J.A., and Limongi, F. (2000). Democracy and Devel­ opment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Remington, T. (2011). The Politics of Inequality in Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roy, R.P and Sinha Roy, S. (2017). Structural Change, Trade and Inequality: Some CrossCountry Evidence, ADBI Working Paper No. 763. Tokyo: Asian Development Bank Institute.

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Sah, R.K. and Stiglitz, J. (1991). “The quality of managers in centralized versus decentralized organizations”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106(1): 289–295. Tam, H. (1999). “Democratization”. In Taxation, Appropriation and the State (pp. 140–201). Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cam­ bridge, MA. Tam, H. (2008). “An economic or Political Kuznets Curve?”, Public Choice, 134: 367–389. Varshney, A. (2002). Poverty Eradication and Democracy in the Developing World, Occasional Paper (Background Paper for Human Development Report), United Nations. Velasco, A. (1997). A Model of Endogenous Fiscal Deficits and Delayed Fiscal Reforms, NBER Working paper No. 6336. Zagare, F.C. and Kilgour, D.M. (2001). Perfect Deterrence (Cambridge Studies in International Relations). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6 GEOPOLITICS, CONFLICTS AND PEACE Anindya Jyoti Majumdar and Sohini Bose

Geopolitics is an attempt to understand the world’s political relations and possible political behaviour of states based on the geographical lay out and arrangements of lands and seas. Geopolitics presupposes geography’s conditioning influence upon history and politics. However, with time, understanding of geopolitics changed and deterministic laws of classical genre gave way to new interpretations. Instead of seeking out universal principles emanating from the physical geographical realities, constructing narratives that would influence policy-decisions towards attainment of particular objectives became important. Hence, more than being merely physical and a product of nature, geography as the product of contests of narratives in order to establish control over space becomes relevant in contemporary times and as a result geopolitics is inherently intertwined with conflicts and peace. In fact, geo­ politics itself is considered to be a cause for conflicts and as such geopolitics has often been criticized as a dubious concept or an unconvincing field of study. “Few modern ideologies”, according to one analyst, “are as whimsically all-encompass­ ing, as romantically obscure, as intellectually sloppy, and as likely to start a third world war as the theory of ‘geopolitics’” (Clover 1999). The tendency to have a simpler model of the complex world often ignores particularities as areas are branded with specific labels generating corresponding intended identities. The tags and labels attached to the vast tracts of territory ema­ nate from the renewed focus on a particular area at a particular point of time by the dominant powers of a particular epoch. Narratives constructed and used by policymakers in pursuit of national interests lead to imaginative geographies affirming particular political perspectives and legitimizing foreign policy decisions. The interplay of imagined spaces and imposed identities, changing perceptions of emerging geopolitical realities and the continuous attempts to construct and tag new regions suitable to the preferences of the major powers of the day determine the probabilities of conflicts and feasibility of durable peace. “The ‘geo’ in

84 Anindya Jyoti Majumdar and Sohini Bose

geopolitics is never settled” says Chaturvedi, “in the sense that it is the manifesta­ tion of a complex interplay between the ‘facts’ and features of material-physical geographies (location, topography, resources etc.) and the myths and mental maps of symbolic-imagined geographies” (Chaturvedi 2012: 150). In effect, geopolitics is an intriguing concoction of reality and imagination. The ‘end of history’ phase in international politics at the end of the Cold War makes way for the ‘return of geography’ yet again as ideological contests cease to exist and the task of defining the new world draws sustenance from traditional geopolitical perceptions. Contemporary geopolitics, on one hand, includes issues of climate change, displacement and migration, epidemics and the like – each having the element of conflict ingrained in it – and, on the other, instigates intense com­ petition over physical connectivity on the ground; developing roads, railways, ports and infrastructure to pursue prosperity, influence and dominance. This chapter explores the evolution of the idea of geopolitics and the state of contemporary understanding of geopolitical prescriptions and defines how conflicts and peace are dependent on the dominant geopolitical narratives of the day.

The idea of geopolitics Geopolitics began as a study of the geographical layout of the earth; the attributes and advantages of places. Out of this, principles were derived with universal applicability creating a simpler model of the world and geopolitical codes for action. Universal rules and simpler models required imposing strategic values onto certain places and an assessment of how states are positioned in respect to these strategic locations. While physical geographical realities do not change frequently, the interpretations and narratives do alter as political situations change over time. As a result the geopolitical narratives evolve and mutate by highlighting imagined geographical compositions imposing particular identities on the areas as required by a specific narrative of the day. The process therefore involves division of the world into vast areas, with particular labels for each, representing once again a constructed geographical reality. Geopolitics however continues to be most popularly understood as the politics of international relations conditioned by overarching geographical factors. Even in the age of technological innovations, Robert Kaplan maintains that, “A state’s position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing phi­ losophy even” (Kaplan 2012: 28). Therefore, it remains as a ‘recipe for statecraft’. However, over the years, the definition of geopolitics has changed according to contemporary perspectives and the perceptions of those who have used it. It is widely open to interpretation as everyone has a different perception of reality or an alternative narrative. Each country’s geopolitical narrative is coloured by its national interest and is thus a projection of a very subjective reality providing justifications for its policies. Countries may often have the same national objectives, in which case their relations may either be defined by competition or collaboration. Accordingly, their narratives will either promote peace or foster conflict. In cases

Geopolitics, conflicts and peace 85

where national interests are divergent, their narratives may either be contradictory in nature promoting differences or may be indifferent of each other leaving open avenues for cooperation. A noted American scholar, Saul Bernard Cohen, argues that based on the interaction of geography with political forces, geopolitical structures are created. These imaginary constructions are based on patterns and features. The former refer to the physical attributes such as space, size, geographical or human characteristics of the spatial units and the networks that tie them together. The latter refer to factors which lend the area its uniqueness and condition its cohesiveness. Geopo­ litical structures are usually organized along three hierarchically descending spatial levels (Cohen 2009: 33). The topmost level or the geostrategic realm is the largest spatial unit. Cohen describes geostrategic realms as those parts of the world which are large enough to possess characteristics and functions that are globally influen­ cing and that serve the strategic needs of the major powers, states and the region they constitute. “The overriding factor that distinguishes a realm is the degree to which it is shaped by ‘Maritimity’ or ‘Continentality’” (Cohen 2009: 37). The second level refers to geopolitical regions. These regions form integrated spatial units because very often there is a history of common past, migration of people, cultural-social and political exchanges and geographical contiguity. Regions are mostly sub-divisions of realms but often they can be independent of realms or act as a bridge between two realms. As Cohen argues, outside these realms and regions, there may also exist other clusters of states. Depending on the nature of interaction existing in these clusters they may be identified into four categories: Shatterbelts – where the existing tension between the regional powers is intensified by the pressures of extra-regional powers (often belonging to other realms); Compression Zones – as the conflict situation worsens the Shatterbelts transform into Compression Zones where the internal divisions acquire a tone of severity under the influence of neighbouring states; Gateways – these regions serve as bridges between different geo-political regions or realms; and, finally, Con­ vergence Zones – spatial units with undetermined and uncertain status caught at the juncture of realms. Cohen’s analysis provides a framework for framing a geo­ political structure of the world, though the exact composition of various realms and regions may change over time. Lastly, the micro-level is composed of territorial sub-divisions or nation states. These are the lynch-pins of the world’s geopolitical system. However, opinions on their importance vary. One view emphasizes the eternal existence of nation states and their continued drive to secure their national interests through adeptly designed foreign policies which are often built upon geopolitical considerations. The approach is one which highlights the elements of conflict and contradiction in inter-state relations and is most manifested in the Shatterbelt regions of the world. The other point of view argues that the importance of nation states is gradually fading with the rise of regional governmental organizations, globalization and the influ­ ence of non-governmental organizations. This approach thus eulogizes the values of peace and cooperation and finds manifestation in the Gateways or the

86 Anindya Jyoti Majumdar and Sohini Bose

Convergence Zones offering possibilities of their conversion into peace zones. These points of view are very similar to the two dominant schools of thought in international relations: the former belonging to the Realist approach highlighting the competitive and conflictive aspects; and the latter being a component of the Liberal Pluralist approach emphasizing cooperation and collaborative aspects of global politics. It is obvious that geopolitics as a field of study has undergone different treat­ ments in the hands of a great many scholars, and a number of distinctive approa­ ches can therefore be ascertained. For example, Jakub Grygiel believes that geopolitics is the geographic distribution of centres of resources and lines of com­ munication assigning value to locations according to their strategic importance. For him geopolitics is never a constant but a variable that describes the changing geo­ graphic distribution of routes to and of economic and natural resources (Grygiel 2006). Likewise, different scholars have moulded the very concept of geopolitics to suit their constructions of narratives. A brief survey of some of the major exposi­ tions will follow in the next section. However, it can be said that the concepts of conflict and peace are intrinsically intertwined with geopolitics and its narratives. Many such narratives co-exist in human society but some gain more legitimacy than others depending on the political or commercial stature of their origin, on the support rendered by the agencies and stakeholders and their ability to fire the imagination of people in general. Consequently, some geopolitical narratives, despite being subjective and intensely local, attain the status of being almost universally accepted realities. In accordance with national interests some areas become strategically more important than others and are consequently labelled based on their recognized attributes. In due course, the label bestows a specific identity upon the marked region. When maps are redrawn according to these labels they become, as the late British geographer John Brian Harley put it, a “discourse of power” (quoted in Kaplan 2012: 27). Such a pursuit became the dominant paradigm of the first phase in the evolution of modern geopolitics.

The imperialist phase of geopolitics In accordance with the then prevailing spirit of colonization the narratives that emerged were laden with expansionist overtones aimed at fulfilling the imperialistic ambitions of nation states. This brand of expositions thus came to be known as ‘Imperialist Geopolitics’ with marked features of state expansionism, intense nationalism and overseas empire building. The exponents of this phase of geopo­ litics began with Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellén but primarily Alfred Thayer Mahan and Halford Mackinder took the geopolitical narratives to a higher level. Their ideas and perspectives reflected their homeland’s expansionist national interests. Geopolitics offers a reliable guide to the global landscape, as Dodd observes, generating a simple model of the world, usually known as a ‘God’s eye view of the world’, that is used to advise and inform foreign and security policy-making. Going

Geopolitics, conflicts and peace 87

beyond, however, Dodd argues, the focus needs to be on how geopolitics generate particular understandings of places, communities and accompanying identities (Dodd 2007: 4–5). The exponents propagate a ‘God’s eye view’ of the world which implies looking at the map of the world from above and identifying geo­ graphical attributes favourable for forwarding the concerned country’s national interest. The geopolitical doctrines of the initial years were doctrines of power, with the understanding that conflict could be a necessity for the survival of the state. Often regarded as the ‘father’ of political geography, Friedrich Ratzel, true to his profession as a natural scientist, spoke of the state as an organism that derived its spirit from “mankind’s tie to the land”. In his comparative study of states he focused on space and location. Consequently he opined that the political character of groups was characterized by the space they lived in and the location of that space provided its uniqueness. The frontiers of the state were the skin or peripheral of the state organism and thereby reflected either its prosperity or decline. Under a single government states would wield enormous political power. Evidently Ratzel not only put forth an expansionist doctrine but provided his successor geopoliti­ cians with a scientific basis to develop and justify more state expansionist theories. The theory provided a suitable platform for the aspirations of Germany to emerge as an aggressive, capitalist ‘giant state’ years later (Cohen 2009). A student of Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellén adopted the organic theory of state, understanding that political processes were spatially determined and hence even­ tually conceived of the term ‘Geopolitics’. He accepted that Germany’s rise as a great power was inevitable and believed that states especially in Europe could only be expanded through war. Therefore, for Kjellén, geopolitics was a ‘science of state’ and even more a ‘science of war’ (Cohen 2009: 20). Alfred Thayer Mahan, a naval officer of US warships, came up with a treatise which would elucidate the basic principles of naval warfare. Often called the ‘prophet of sea-power’, he believed that the sea is the “great highway” or “wide common” of civilization and therefore ‘command of the sea’ would allow a country to play a decisive role in determining international relations (Banerjee 1998). By this he meant the capacity to protect merchant fleets which were determining factors in global political struggles. Overbearing sea power would thus secure the country against conflicts and attacks. In conceptualizing his narrative, Mahan identified an unbroken chain of oceans and seas in the midst of which was a vast trans-continental landmass, the Russian empire, bordered by the coastal or maritime states of continental Europe and eastern Asia. Then there were the insular maritime states such as the UK and the USA which were detached from the Eurasian landmass. Mahan predicted that as a landlocked state, Russia would try to gain an access and expand into the sea (as in 1979 the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan was perceived). However, the country’s intensions would be curbed by sea powers which included the insular states as well as the maritime states of continental Europe. In the ensuing clash that would take place in the coastal lands, the oceanic coalition would outweigh the land-powers (Banerjee 1998: 26–30). Such a proposition later came to be in the

88 Anindya Jyoti Majumdar and Sohini Bose

guise of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO, the initial purpose of which was to contain the Soviet Union. By 1910, however, Mahan came to consider Germany and not Russia as the prin­ cipal land-power. Keeping the American national interest in mind he thus prescribed that the USA must form an alliance with the UK to counter Germany. USA with its insular geo-strategic location would dominate this alliance. His prescription became a reality in the Second World War when the USA used its geostrategic location not only to send war re-enforcements to its allies but also to build a force in the south of England that would invade Germany. Mahan’s geopolitical narrative thus provided an explanation of how differences in the national objectives of countries belonging to two separate geostrategic realms (the Maritime Realm and ‘Heartlandic’ Russia of the Continental Realm) were a cause for conflict (Cohen 2009). Unlike Mahan, Halford Mackinder was an advocate of land-power until the last few years before his death. He believed that due to an uneven distribution of ‘fertility and strategic opportunities’ as were determined by the configuration of land and seas, every country had developed in various degrees which was the pri­ mary cause of conflict and war. In due course the conflicts would lead to the establishment of a single world empire. He envisaged Eurasia to be the pivot area of world politics. Owing to the development of modern land transport such as railways this area would soon develop into a vast economy on which the sea powers would not be able to exert pressure and hence control over the sea would cease to ensure supremacy. Moreover, once this pivot area expanded into the ‘marginal’ (sea facing) lands of Eurasia it would also gain all the advantages of a maritime power and would therefore acquire the stature of a ‘world empire’. As he asks: “Is not the pivot region of the world’s politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is today about to be covered with a network of railways?” (Mackinder 1904). Developing his thesis further and renaming the pivot region as ‘Heartland’, Mack­ inder gave his maxim: “who controls East Europe commands the Heartland, who rules the Heartland commands the World Island, and who rules the World Island commands the world” (Mackinder 1919). His narratives however varied on who would control this pivot area. Initially he believed that it would be Russia but after the country was defeated in the Russo– Japanese War, he envisioned rising Germany as the future master of the ‘Heart­ land’. As czarist Russia collapsed after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 this faith was further reaffirmed. However, after Germany’s defeat in the First World War, Mackinder’s attention returned once again to Russia. He believed that as the Heartland was the ‘world’s largest natural fortress’, the USSR would soon emerge as the greatest land-power on Earth if it could man/arm the Heartland with a garrison sufficient in number. By 1943 however Mackinder’s conviction in the supremacy of land-power started wavering as he was impressed by the combined resources of the USA and West Europe or the Atlantic community as he called it. Therefore, until his death he remained unsure whether the Heartland or the Atlantic community of maritime nations was the epicentre of world power.

Geopolitics, conflicts and peace 89

Three aspects need to be kept in mind. (a) While most of the geopolitical writers try to make it a natural science with rules applicable universally, Rudolf Kjellén, one of the pioneers of geopolitical studies, made it very clear when he argued that the objective is to find out the advantages/disadvantages of geographical attributes and use those for furthering national interests. (b) It follows, therefore, that very often a geopolitical construction is best suitable to the interests of a state or a group of states especially, to which the writer belongs and as a consequence (c) it is pos­ sible to have a number of geopolitical narratives simultaneously coexisting and the task is to make the narrative acceptable by most of the states to give it legitimacy. No wonder major powers enjoy a definite advantage in this respect. Halford Mackinder’s theory of ‘Heartland’ is a very suitable example. Hailing from Great Britain, Mackinder was concerned about emerging challenges to British naval dominance. Based on his idea of mobility of power, he felt that railways, especially utilized by land powers, could change the global equation of power. Like Mahan, Mackinder’s narrative too provides a geopolitical explanation for conflicts between powers from the two realms. As the years passed the expansionist over­ tones of geopolitics got further aggravated at the hands of Nazi Germany. From serving as a tool for justifying expansionist tendencies, geopolitics acquired an ugly and distorted appearance as a doctrine for promoting war. After the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 stripped Germany of all its resourceful territories and its overseas empires. In such a scenario, Karl Haushofer, an erstwhile military commander turned political geographer, came forth with the dream of rebuilding Germany as a World Power. Adopting Ratzel’s concept of state as an organism, he justified the idea of Germany’s expansion as inevitable to provide the Germans with greater living space or ‘Lebensraum’. Domination over the ‘World Island’ as had been envisaged by Halford Mackinder was therefore a goal of the German geopolitik. Accordingly, the principles of ‘blut und bodem’ (blood and soil) and ‘rasse und raum’ (race and space) were designed to fulfill Germany’s imperialist ambitions and defeat the Soviet Union. As a result, this phase of geopolitics brought in its wake conflict and war, especially in the hands of Hitler who further distorted it into a doctrine for manslaughter. It per­ petuated the Jewish holocaust and was instrumental in plunging the world into the Second World War (Cohen 2009: 22). Apprehensive of such developments in Germany, Nicholas Spykman sought to put USA on its guard. He believed that if Germany succeeded in capturing the Eurasian heartland, it would soon infiltrate other areas by means of ship supremacy and command over naval and air bases around Eurasia. Therefore, through his narrative of the ‘Rimland’, he advocated that only a strong alliance between the Soviet land-power and the Anglo-American sea power could prevent Germany from gaining control of the resource-rich coastal lands of the ‘World Island’. However, though propagated as a preventive measure against expansionist Ger­ many, Spykman’s narrative was also endowed with the potential to escalate into a conflict itself (Banerjee 1998).

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From Cold War to post-Cold War Geopolitics During the Cold War the world was divided into two power blocs based on the ideational conflict between capitalism and communism. Once again, geopolitical narratives were employed to justify policies and thus the study of geopolitics res­ urfaced. Cold War geopolitics consisted of a lot of ‘image engineering’ by which the narratives were devised to provide a positive image of ‘self’ and an inferior or ‘evil’ image of the ‘other’. A number of concepts, such as the ‘domino theory’ of William Bullit, ‘containment’ of George F. Kennan, ‘linkages’ of Henry Kissinger, were introduced. It became obvious during the Cold War period that the resolu­ tion of particular conflicts was dependent on the overall balance of power between the two protagonists. The Cold War narratives of both the USA and the USSR were thus divisive in nature and provocative of conflict. This kind of geopolitics however paid little attention to the plethora of factors conditioning geopolitics which were beyond the control of the superpowers. Indeed, a counter approach in the discourse emerged in the 1960s–1970s as geographers began constructing nar­ ratives based upon universalistic views of the world. This kind of geopolitics was dominated by three approaches. These were a polycentric international power system, a unitary economically based world system and finally an environmental and socially ordered geopolitics. However, these narratives did not appeal to the Cold War practitioners of geopolitics and therefore did not become popular discourses (Cohen 2009: 26). As the Cold War ended, several new approaches to geopolitics came into being where the discord between the First World and the Third World became promi­ nent. Accordingly the contesting narratives between the Continental and Maritime Realms were replaced by contradictory theories between the developed and developing countries or the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’. Along with this transition, the post-Cold War scenario witnessed another unique development where for the first time geopolitical narratives along with ‘competition’ also offered a chance of peace though ‘accommodation’. Consequently the writings of Francis Fukuyama, who portended a ‘universal homogeneous state’; Robert Kaplan, who conceptualised the ‘Last Map’ based on the division of what he called the ‘Rich North’ and the ‘Poor South’ and Samuel Huntington, who propagated a geopoli­ tical theory of the ‘West against the Rest’, came under the bracket of competition. The emergence of the USA as the unipole however signified the beginning of a ‘new world order’ which according to the US narrative would largely be based on accommodation. But, the rise of international terrorism and the consequent war on terror soon got enmeshed with attempts to spread democracy globally and gave birth to the concepts of ‘rogue states’ and ‘regime change’. While the post-Cold War period is transitional in nature and open to diverse geopolitical interpretations, the contesting narratives of climate change and environmental degradation carry with them the hints of potential conflict.

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Environmental geopolitics: A primary cause of future conflicts Robert Kaplan in his article, “The Coming Anarchy” explains how nature is a hostile power and that it is time to understand the environment for what it really is; a national security issue of the twenty-first century (Kaplan 1994:190). Hence the two fundamental consequences of environmental degradation – rapid and unscrupulous exploitation of natural resources and the increase of environmental hazards such as rising sea levels, increasing pollution etc. – are featuring in the security narratives of nation states. In some cases these narratives propagated peace when states decided to jointly counter the trans-national natural calamities. In more cases however the geopolitical narratives justified a hunt for accumulating resources or at least securing access to them in the face of an uncertain future. As each nation tried to secure its future the contesting narratives from the Global North and Global South opened avenues of conflict or ‘resource wars’. At the helm of such a dominant environmental threat narrative, Kaplan argued that without proper resources at their disposal, states will not be able to levy or impose the same level of control on their people. If that prevails over a considerable period of time it will eventually lead to the collapse of the state structure. As a result, this fear very often becomes the core of foreign policy changes (Kaplan 1994: 190). As a natural cor­ ollary it is seen in today’s world that a lot of states are becoming assertive and incorporating a dimension of expansion in their foreign policy formulations in their quest for resources. This latent resource war constitutes one of the key concerns in today’s interna­ tional security scenario which is intertwined with other major trends in the global arena such as, for example, the assertive rise of China especially in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). But China is not the only state securing its energy requirements in the IOR. David Brewster points towards “a remarkable scramble by China, India and now Japan to build new ports, roads, pipelines and railways throughout the region” (Brewster 2014). This frenzy to develop infrastructure in the Bay of Bengal which is rich in non-renewable energy reserves may be seen in the light of securing resources amongst the countries today. China is increasingly expanding its political, economic and military influence in the region by enhancing maritime ties with the Bay littoral countries by sponsoring and promoting infrastructural developments. The Chinese naval strategy of “far sea defence” is designed to provide Beijing with the ability to project its power into the IOR (Kabir and Ahmad 2015: 227). Construction of the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka and the Oil and Gas Pipeline in Myanmar, which runs from Kyaukpyu in Myan­ mar to the Yunnan province in China, and Chinese presence in the Coco Islands off the West coast of Myanmar may be considered in this regard. India on the other hand views China’s activities with concern as it does not perceive the IOR to be within the latter’s legitimate area of influence (Brewster 2015: 16).The resultant competition which has developed into a major potential area of conflict is one of the key concerns of major powers in today’s world.

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China’s effort to secure its energy requirements has also rendered the South China Sea into an unstable area that may degenerate into a ‘Shatterbelt’. In 1986, Phillip L. Kelly observed that A shatterbelt is a geographic region over whose control great powers seriously compete … because they perceive strong interests for doing so and because opportunities are present for establishing alliance footholds with states of the region. Consequently a high potential exists for the escalation of the conflict into a major power war. (Kelly 1986) Significant mineral or agricultural wealth is also attributed to such areas and such regions also possess vital transit routes across their territories. One is reminded of Grygiel’s definition of geopolitics as mentioned earlier. The South China Sea – a maritime space which joins Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific – is home to vast hydrocarbon reserves, especially natural gas. Chinese estimates have been most optimistic of the resource wealth prevalent here and one such assessment estimates the oil reserves to be as high as 213 billion barrels and natural gas reserves to be about 900 trillion cubic feet (Klare 2013: 28). It is also a vital trade passage, as a third of all seaborne commercial goods worldwide and half of all the energy requirements for North-East Asia pass through the area (Kaplan 2012: 214). Additionally, like all Shatterbelts, it reflects a dual layer of conflict; the local layer which is characterized by turmoil between the local (in this case littoral) states and the international layer which is manifested by the interest and involve­ ment of external powers in this local turmoil as it transcends into an international conflict. The dispute here is so intense that there is a strong possibility of it turning into a Compression Zone. Yet another zone of future competition could be the Blue Arctic that would emerge with the ‘meltdown’ of the ice covering the North Pole. Apart from instigating this latent resource war, Kaplan also puts forth that environmental threats have the potential to trigger mass migration and the consequent overflow of environmental refugees will generate a fear of invasion by an alien culture. Thus the host population will come into conflict with the refugees thereby increasing the chances of armed ethnic wars. He further validates his arguments by embellishing it with the narratives of Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington. Fukuyama is of the view that as a result of environmental degradation most people will be stuck in ‘history’ with no water to drink and no soil to till. Only a section of the global population who have managed to quell the environment would move to the ‘post historical phase’. Huntington also prescribes that the ‘clash of civilizations’ will be further aggravated as a lack of resources will lead to a heightened sense of culture consciousness (Huntington 1993). If spatial exclusion is accepted as the key to protect a state from waves of the refugees, President Trump’s idea of erecting walls at the US borders would seem a worthwhile option.

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Following the narratives of the Global South, Vandana Shiva suggests that developing countries, despite their poverty, are not primarily responsible for environmental degradation as has been given to understand by the ‘Northern’ agencies. In fact they were the first proponents of environmental conservation against the imperialist and exploitative policies of the Global North. But their language has now been co-opted and is being used to justify the ‘North’ encroachments in the South. She further states that the North’s ‘Discourse of Danger’ which articulates the environmental security literature is actually a falsifi­ cation wherein the consequences of environmental degradation are linked to pov­ erty as the root cause. It is also a ploy to goad the ‘Global South’ into purchasing expensive alternate means of energy saving technology from the North. In doing so the South has to bear the brunt of the environmental mistakes of the North. Therefore, in a way North has all the rights and no responsibilities and its situation is exactly the opposite of the South. “The global does not represent the universal human interest; it represents a particular local and parochial interest which has been globalized through the scope of its reach” (Shiva 1993). Such contesting narratives of environmental geopolitics, each justifying the contradictory practices of resource politics and environmental conservation of their respective nation states, leave ample room for future conflicts.

Globalization and critical geopolitics The post-Cold War era is also the era of globalization that presupposes that the contemporary world is rapidly being moulded into a shared social space by the impact of dynamic economic and technological forces. The scope, coverage, scale and the accelerated pace of the process outstrip the capacity of national govern­ ments to control, contest and resist the change. As a result, certain terms emerged like ‘the borderless world’ and ‘the Global Village’ that are highly geopolitical in nature. It was presumed that the era of globalization may lead to certain ‘deterri­ torialization’ especially if geopolitics is understood “as a process of linkage and interdependence between territories” (Kliot and Newman 2000: 1). “Deterritor­ ialization is the name given to the problematic of territory losing its significance and power in everyday life” … the territory being … “a regime of practices tri­ angulated between institutionalizations of power, materializations of place and idealisations of ‘the people’”(O’Tuathail 2000: 139–40). Such a phenomenon leads to a discourse on ‘end-of-geography’ heralding symptoms of geopolitical change. However, rise of nationalist and ethnic sentiments and an upsurge of right-wing political parties also indicate a process of ‘reterritorialization’ in the contemporary period. Blouet feels that world finance is intrinsically unstable and global recession, protectionism and desire for self-sufficiency may bring back geopolitics to the fore and geopolitics might rise “from the deathbed” (Blouet 2001:176). To the dominant narratives, resistance and contestations are obvious. The counter-hegemonic narratives, termed as ‘geopolitics from below’ or ‘anti-geopo­ litics’, come from the civil society movements and the dissident intellectuals. Anti­

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geopolitics challenges the material geopolitical power of the state as well as the representations imposed by the political elites by articulating an oppositional con­ sciousness to the dominant and elitist representations. How geopolitical entities are constructed, how different alternative geopolitical arrangements can be imagined and how dissident arguments contest official versions contribute to critical geopo­ litics (O’Tuathail 1996; Dalby 1998: 312). Reference can be made to Michel Foucault’s view of geopolitics as a metaphor for the operation of power in general; or to Yves Lacoste’s idea of geography as a strategic form of knowledge closely linked to a set of political and military practices; even to Edward Said’s views of Orientalism that reveal how knowledge of other cultures are created and disseminated. Geopolitics is a form of power/knowledge (O’Tuathail 1996). Therefore, a distinct set of ideas that focuses upon peace and not power pro­ jections, negotiated settlement of disputes and not use of force, sustainable devel­ opment and not economic inequalities form the crux of the substance of ‘anti­ geopolitics’, opposing the traditional geopolitical assumptions and justifications. While state behaviour sustains and endorses traditional geopolitics, anti-geopolitics is sustained by international networks of groups, organizations, civil society and social movements. It presents a narrative of hope and aspiration against the secur­ ity-centric narratives of fear and frustration. One can always visualize unrestrained flow of goods, services, technologies and investments creating jobs for millions and resulting in mutual economic gains, regional and civilizational harmony leading to absence of inter-state conflicts. However, suspicions and obstructions on the ground prevent any worthwhile movement towards these goals. The counter-nar­ ratives of peace, equality, cooperation and mutual benefit that may pose serious challenges to the entrenched geopolitical ideas are sought to be appropriated by the state as well. These counter-narratives find their expressions at the declaratory level of the state but very little is actually done at the ground level thus creating a mis­ match between what is said and what is done. On the other hand, however, popular geopolitics reinforces the dominant narratives and the masses are socialized in turn through media, cinema and magazines. Cinematic geopolitics develops and constructs the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ and reinforces mental border (Chaturvedi 2012:157). In the context of India–Pakistan relations, Bollywood films have set a trend to which Lakshya (2004) on the Kargil war and Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) are the latest additions. This however is not a recent phenomenon. Haqeeqat (1964) was one such film based on the India–China war of 1962. Geopolitics, it may appear, is less about peace and more about conflicts – actual or potential. While dominant geopolitical constructions are often motivated and biased, they represent the existing patterns of the world order as projected by the major powers of the day. It is the contest between the narratives that determines the turns and twists of history and the propensity of conflicts and feasibility of durable peace. Despite the hope that over time, the impact of geography on state behaviour might not be even important, much less decisive and the flawed research programmes of political geographers would slide further into irrelevance (Fettweis 2015: 248), geopolitics continues to bounce back in different forms. While often

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criticized as misrepresentations that fail the test of empirical analysis, some such geopolitical formulations, like the cultural-geographical model of ‘the Clash of Civilizations’, garner support by appealing to fear psychosis. Paradoxically, however, the very geopolitical fear of ‘coming anarchy’ or the apprehension of yet another bloody century might induce states to adopt antigeopolitics postures in the coming era as they become intertwined to tackle common concerns such as climate change. As mentioned before, a distinct set of ideas that focuses upon peace and not power projections, negotiated settlement of disputes and not use of force, sustainable development and not economic coercion form the substance of anti-geopolitics (Majumdar 2019: 145). Despite the nation­ alist narratives harping on protecting and promoting national interests, common global concerns such as pandemics are fast becoming integrated with national interests. More than the contest between geopolitics and anti-geopolitics, a dynamic combination of the two shapes contemporary global politics; and conflicts and peace remain dependent upon a balanced blend of both.

References Banerjee, Jyotirmoy (1998). Strategic Studies, Kolkata: Allied Publishers. Blouet, Brian W. (2001). Geopolitics and Globalization in the Twentieth Century, London: Reaktion Books. Brewster, David (2014). “The Bay of Bengal: The Scramble for Connectivity”, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Canberra, 4 December; https://www.aspistrategist. org.au/the-bay-of-bengal-the-scramble-for-connectivity/ (accessed 18 September 2017). Brewster, David (2015). China and India at Sea: A Contest of Status and Legitimacy in the Indian Ocean, Carlton VIC: Australia India Institute, University of Melbourne. Chaturvedi, Sanjay (2012). “Geopolitics”, in Chimni, B.S. and Mallavarapu, Siddharth (eds), International Relations: Perspectives from Global South, New Delhi: Pearson. Clover, Charles (1999). “Dreams of the Eurasian Heartland: The Reemergence of Geopolitics”, Foreign Affairs, March–April. Cohen, Saul Bernard (2009). Geopolitics: The Geography of International Relations, 2nd edition, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Dalby, Simon (1998). “Geopolitics, Knowledge and Power at the End of the Century”, in O’Tuathail, Gearoid, Dalby, Simon and Routledge, Paul (eds), The Geopolitics Reader, London: Routledge. Dodd, Klaus (2007). Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Fettweis, Christopher J. (2015). “On Heartlands and Chessboards: Classical Geopolitics, Then and Now”, Orbis, Spring: 233–248. Grygiel, Jakub J. (2006). Great Powers and Geopolitical Change, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University press. Huntington, Samuel P. (1993). “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs, 72: 22–49. Kabir, Mohammad Humayun and Ahmad, Amamah (2015). “The Bay of Bengal: Next Theatre of Strategic Power Play in Asia”, Croatian International Relations Review, 21(72). Kaplan, Robert D. (1994). “The Coming Anarchy”, The Atlantic Monthly, February. Kaplan, Robert D. (2012). The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, New York, NY: Random House.

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Kelly, Phillip L. (1986). “Escalation of Regional Conflict: Testing the Shatterbelt Concept”, Political Geography Quarterly, 5(2): 161–180. Klare, Michael T. (2013). “The Growing Threat of Maritime Conflict”, Current History, January. Kliot, Nurit and Newman, David (eds) (2000). Geopolitics at the End of the Twentieth Century: The Changing World Political Map, London: Frank Cass. Mackinder, Halford J. (1904). “The Geographical Pivot of History”, Geographical Review, 23 (4): 421–437. Excerpt in O’Tuathail, Gearoid, Dalby, Simon and Routledge, Paul (eds), The Geopolitics Reader, London: Routledge. Mackinder, Halford J. (1919). Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Recon­ struction, London: Constable. Majumdar, Anindya Jyoti (2019). “SAARC and the Indian Geopolitical Narrative of Regionalism in South Asia”, in Raju, Adluri Subramanyam (ed.), Rethinking Regionalism in South Asia, New Delhi: Studera Press. O’Tuathail, Gearoid (1996). Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. O’Tuathail, Gearoid (2000). “Borderless Worlds? Problematising Discourses of Deterritor­ ialisation”, in Kliot, Nurit and Newman, David (eds), Geopolitics at the End of the Twentieth Century: The Changing World Political Map, London: Frank Cass. Shiva, Vandana (1993). “The Greening of Global Reach”, in Sachs, Wolfgang (ed.), Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, London: Zed.

7 IDENTITY, CONFLICTS AND SECURITY Shibashis Chatterjee and Sulagna Maitra

We argue in this chapter that identity is a major cause for human conflicts at all levels of collective existence. In fact, collective living requires a sense of together­ ness that also involves a process of separating from other groups. With the end of the Cold War, identity-based conflicts acquired a new lease of life. Ethnicity and religion emerged as major fault lines of conflict both within and between states. Academic work on ethnic and identity related violence also started multiplying and new philosophical currents like postmodernism and post-structuralism justified this predisposition. The emphasis on micro narratives resisted the reductive tendencies to read cultural (ethnic and religious) conflicts invariably as effects of either geo­ political designs or redistributive battles dressed up in symbolic terms. The politics of multiculturalism and its negation by extreme right-wing tendencies provided the political context for strengthening and consolidating the discourses of identity both as political narratives and their academic audits. The debates around the definitions of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ went a long way in rehabilitating culture as a basis for ontological security and providing a much needed epistemic sophistication to scholars engaged in the field. In this chapter, a survey of select tracts on identity is undertaken to drive home its significance as a central cognitive category explaining international conflicts and intra-state violence. The chapter evolves through several sections, beginning with a general discussion of the narratology of identity and reflecting on select tracts of identity and culture in International Relations, including a critical take on Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis, and culminating with a general survey of a variety of literature on ethnic conflicts that seems indispensable for any under­ standing of identity’s role in political and societal conflicts. The chapter is limited in two ways. First, we have only discussed selective tracts of established canons of Western scholarship on the theme. This does not mean that non-Western bodies of scholarship do not exist or are any less significant. A proper analysis of the non­

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Western literature requires an independent treatment. Second, the literature sur­ veyed here are theoretical works. There are many empirical works on identity and conflicts across the world. However, it is impossible to systematize this rich and granular scholarship. Moreover, such empirical works also deploy conceptual cate­ gories in some way or the other. Our assumption is that engaging with the theo­ retical assumptions that structure the field of identity and conflicts is a better way to approach the subject than focusing randomly on a few empirical tracts. The the­ ories and concepts that are discussed are all related to IR theory and Political Sci­ ence. Again, this is a self-imposing limit dictated by both the nature of the enterprise and the readings of the authors. Identity plays a central role in debates in every sub-field of political science, international relations and sociology (Fearon, 1999). The emergence of con­ structivist challenge to dominant realist and neo-realist traditions in security studies sparked an interest in identity. Scholars such as Williams and Krause conceptualize security as a derivative concept meaning that security necessarily presupposes “something to be secured” (Cho, 2017). Identity, according to Walker helps address the question of “what is to be secured or whose security is being assumed” (Walker, 1997). Identity based explanations to security problems focus on identity perception’s effect on security. Solving security problems in a short amount of time requires specific steps for specific cases and elimination of the immediate causes which induce negative identity perceptions. These specific solutions may be strongly correlated to identity perceptions and, whatever the solution, the aim should be to improve identity perceptions as the means to avert security problems (Yorulmaz, 2016). Exploring the relationship between security and identity, however, can be complex and problematic as both the terms identity and security are contested.

Identity: Constituents and contestations Contemporary discussions on identity thrive on the influential works by psychol­ ogist Erik Erikson and John Burton’s ontological needs and image theory (Fearon, 1999; Schafer, 1999). Gleason (1983: 914) however warns that “identity has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign”. Brubaker and Cooper (2000) concur saying that the term has acquired so many contradictory meanings and uses in sociology that it should be purged in favour of more specific terms. The Postmodernists argue that social change has resulted people in losing their sense of belonging or of being rooted in traditional collectivities, such as class, community or the kinship network. Thus, identity has become relatively free floating, detached from the bases of social structure which in the past were seen to constrain it. In spite of detractors, the preoccupation with the term continues and identity has been instrumental in debates in American Politics (on race, gender and sexu­ ality), Comparative Politics (on nationalism and ethnic conflict), International Relations (the idea of state identity is at the heart of the constructivist critique of

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realism and analysis of state sovereignty), Political Theory (arguments on gender, sexuality, nationalist ethnicity, culture in relation to liberalism and its alternatives), Psychology, Psychiatry, Management and so on. Parekh (2008) offers that “the identity of a thing consists in those constitutive features that define it as this thing or this kind of thing rather than some other, and distinguishes it from others”. He immediately adds however, that pointing to the mere differences is not enough and there might be a need to probe more deeply and identify significant, constitutive or identity-determining features that explain others and without which the entity in question would not be what it is (Parekh, 2008).The much-cited work of Abdelal, Herrera, Johnston, and McDermott (2009a) provides a comprehensive overview of the variety of definitions and methodologies for analyzing social identities in diverse contexts. Surveying a vast body of literature on social identity, they define collective identity as a social category that varies along two dimensions – content and contestation (Abdelal, Her­ rera, Johnston, and McDermott, 2009b, Introduction). Content essentially describes the meaning of a collective identity and may take the form of four non-mutually exclusive types: constitutive norms (obligation and social recognition); social purposes (which are specific goals that are shared by members of a group); relational compar­ isons (help define an identity group, especially where those views about the other are a defining part of the identity); and, finally, cognitive models (worldviews or understandings of political and material conditions and interests that are shaped by a particular identity). Identity may indeed shape perceptions about territory and culture, regional economic conditions, legitimate and appropriate material interests, access and rights (Abedal 2009; Fearon 1999)). Contestation refers to the degree of agreement within a group over the content of the shared identity. Individuals continuously shape and propose meanings of the groups to which they belong and this creates discrepancies in whether specific interpretations are widely held or not. This dispute or contestation within one or more of the four types of content might be prompted by difference of understanding over exclusivity of membership, pri­ mordial traits and how much status or legitimacy the identity is believed to have in the eyes of out-groups. The four types of content encompass the variety of meanings in identities, whereas contestation over content addresses the fluidity and contextual nature of identities. Thus, this definition of identity goes beyond ethnic and cultural identifications to include other forms of social and political identifica­ tions. Far from being understood as fixed or unvarying, collective identities, in this conceptualization, vary in the agreement and disagreement about their meanings (Abdelal, Herrera, Johnston, and McDermott, 2009b, Introduction). National identity is one of the most common and pervasive forms of collective identity in the contemporary socio-political and economic system. The concept of a nation state has been variously defined and has evolved over time. However, certain common features of national identity have been delineated by scholars such as: (a) a territory or homeland (in a way similar to the body in personal identity); (b) common historical memories or myths (formative historical experiences including that of its origin and course of development); (c) a shared culture and

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beliefs (deep-seated tendencies, values and ideals that it cherishes and seeks to cul­ tivate amongst its members); (d) ideology and norms (the discursive framework and style of reasoning that characterize its approach to debates and conflict resolution); (e) common political and legal institutions (including a common set of legal rights and duties for its members); and finally (f) a common economy with territorial mobility for its members (Smith, 1991; Miller, 2000; Parekh, 2008). Smith (1991) posited two conceptions of national identity – the Western or Civic model and the Ethnic model. According to him, the former conception characterizes a nation as an entity with (i) a well-defined territory – that is, a ‘historic land’ or homeland; (ii) patria or a community of laws and institutions with a single political will; (iii) a sense of legal equality amongst its members or rights and duties of citizenship; and finally (iv) some degree of common/shared culture, civic ideology, aspirations and sentiments. In this model, the emphasis is on a sense of community built on the basis of a common historic culture which unites if not homogenizes the shared memories and symbols. The alternative conception or the Ethnic model con­ ceptualizes a nation primarily as a community of common descent. Thus, unlike the Western model which focuses on territorial affiliations (e.g. acquired citizen­ ship), the Ethnic model stresses an organic relation between the individual and his/ or her community of birth (almost like a super-family, ties to which cannot be severed). It follows therefore that even in the absence of political mobilization the Ethnic model of state does provide an object of nationalist aspirations. Popular mobilization plays a salient moral and rhetorical role in the Ethnic conception of the nation. Vernacular culture (language and customs) play a central role instead of laws as in the Western civic model. Smith (1991) concludes that this profound dualism is at the heart of every nationalism and may be seen in the nation-forma­ tion process of many communities (such as Asia, Eastern Europe) to this day. He also adds that these rival models of the nation share certain commonalities and in practice co-exist (in varying degrees) within nation states. Huddy (2011) hints at the subjective meanings of identities and the need to analyse it further under social identity theory before applying it to understand political phenomena. Presenting a critique of social identity theory, she effectively makes the point that the existence of identity choice, the subjective meaning of identities, gradations in identity strength and the considerable stability of many political and social identities hinder successful application of social identity theory to political phenomena. She proposes the following directions for research on social and political identities: (1) to expand the scope of social identity research to include several ‘real world’ identities of varied strength; (2) to thoroughly investi­ gate the interrelated processes of identity formation and development; (3) further research on the characteristics of individuals that predispose them to adopt group identities; (4) to understand better the meanings of group identity – attitudes, values and behaviours.

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Identity and conflict Identity in relation to a conflict is complex, multi-dimensional and subject to change (Fisher, Abdi, Ludin, Smith, Williams, and Williams, 2000). Recently, several studies have been undertaken to investigate the links between identity and conflict behaviour. Schafer’s (1999) study on identity and conflictual foreign policy preferences revealed that identity in fact does affect conflict behaviour but only as it is mediated by levels of insecurity. Increased feeling of security leads to more cooperative behaviour. Secondly, higher levels of in-group identity led to more conflictual behaviour but positive or negative image of the other had little influ­ ence on conflict behaviour (Schafer, 1999). Gartzke and Gleditsch (2006) while empirically investigating the relationship between cultural similarities and differ­ ences and international dispute behaviour found results that run counter to con­ ventional understandings of identity and conflict. Significantly, they found little evidence of conflict among states with different cultural affiliations. Interestingly, states with the same cultural affiliations were more likely to engage in conflicts. However, situations where a group is politically privileged in one state but mar­ ginalized in the other tended to be particularly conflict prone. Explaining the transformation of ethnic affiliations in politicized ethnicity, Ghai (2000: 4) says, The important contemporary distinctions are language, race, religion and colour. When these markers cease to be mere means of social distinctions, and become the basis of political identity and claims to a specific role in the political process or power, ethnic distinctions are transformed into ethnicity. Amartya Sen’s (2009) view proposes an avenue to exercise a certain degree of restraint and retain control over one’s plural affiliations and social categories. This takes the discussion to the other dominant strand of literature on identity i.e. the domain of identity, especially ethnic identity conflicts. Identity based explanations to security problems focus on identity perception’s effect on security. Insights from such studies help in crafting policies for long term security solutions. While each case of conflict is specific and no universal solutions exist, the road forward lies on shared similarities; objective, unbiased and proper teaching of history; and the explanation of the con­ struction of social identities, avoiding media stereotypes, propaganda and political nationalistic rhetoric. Thus solving security problems in a short amount of time requires specific steps for specific cases and eliminates the immediate causes which induce negative identity perceptions. These specific solutions may be strongly corre­ lated to identity perceptions and whatever the solution the aim should be to improve identity perceptions as the means to avert security problems (Yorulmaz, 2016).

Role of identity in Wendt’s social theory of IR Wendt’s constructivism hinges ultimately on the idea of identity (Wendt, 1992, 1999). According to Wendt, the “daily life of international politics is an on-going

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process of states taking identities in relation to Others, casting them into corre­ sponding counter-identities, and playing out the result” (Wendt, 1992: 21). In Social Theory of International Politics, Wendt shows how identity is defined and how it changes via interaction. He defines identity (in an earlier work) as “relatively stable, role-specific understandings and expectations about self” (Wendt, 1992: 397). Although the assumption of relative stability of identities is there, it does not prevent the more pressing need to understand change and transformation of “self­ hood”. Wendt says, “identities may be hard to change, but they are not carved in stone” (Wendt, 1992: 21). The definition of identity impacts on security practices and shapes the security environment of states. Identities again provide the basis for interests. Most crucially, for Wendt, identity determines the kind of anarchy that prevails in the international system. How are identities constituted? In order to answer this, Wendt employs the principles of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory (Giddens, 1979, 1984). Wendt’s central contention, following Giddens, is that units do not exist indepen­ dently of the structures around them, but those structures also cannot be under­ stood as independent of the agents, who either reproduce or transform the former. Wendt imputes a certain discursive quality to social structures as being “inseparable from the reasons and self-understandings” of agents. Identity of actors is deter­ mined through interactions (Zehfuss, 2002: 41–42). Wendt, however, identifies ontologically the state before such interactions, and endows it with functions independent of the social context. But beyond this, the identity of actors becomes communicative, repeating and responding to the practices of other agents over time. This allows Wendt to refashion the binary of self and collective identity into a continuum. When states define others in exclusion of themselves, the result is conflict based on the definition of that identity itself. When others are a part of an actor’s definition of the self, cooperation and peace become possible, being predicated again in the qualities of the definition (of identity) itself (Zehfuss, 2002: 40). However, constructivists have generally neglected the crucial question regarding the origin of norms – where do norms come from? It is certainly ironic that themselves being very critical of neo-realists for treating their central concepts as exogenous, constructivists evoke the language of community in revising the con­ ventional meanings of security. By conceptualizing international politics as holding out the possibility of international community through shared identity alone is unlike the neo-liberal institutionalism, which constructs their version of society through institutions and regulative norms to further the mutual interest of self-help states in survival. The similarity also extends to the peace-democracy arguments of a host of liberals who draw their inspiration from Kant. Constructivist peace lit­ erature also defines security community in terms of a level of integration where the members enjoy a real mutual assurance that they will not fight each other physi­ cally to settle their disputes due to mutual sympathy, ‘we feeling’, trust and mutual consideration of interests and needs in the process of decision making. Con­ structivists, in all fairness, do not couple the absence of war to a particular type of state (democratic). Instead, they situate norms alongside the realist assumption of

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force and blend power, interests and pessimism with norms, identity and moderate optimism, and visualize security communities as transnational regions comprised of sovereign states whose people “maintain dependable expectations of peaceful exchange”. Though the basis of alternative security architecture focuses on grow­ ing transnational forces in security practices, it acknowledges that the provision of security rests squarely in the grasp of the state. This state-centrism might seem to be a problematic foundational notion. Is constructivist enterprise consistent with its statism? Wendt is categorical in his self-defene. It is little wonder that the bulk of the problem encountered by Wendt originates in this problematic tying with the state.

Norms, identity, strategic culture and security community A large section of the literature on identity is preoccupied with providing expla­ nations of actions through the notion of identity as an independent variable. In fact, the concept is often used to explain actions that alternative approaches such as rational choice cannot explain. Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein in their seminal work The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics challenge the realist and neorealist hegemony in security studies by arguing that interests of states are not determined by material factors or economic rationalism but rather by international and domestic “cultural environments” which in turn shape the behaviour and identity of states. Thus, identity helps to define agents’ posture when faced with a securitization initiative. By assuming that individual or collective social action is governed by “particularistic self-understandings [of a non-instru­ mental nature] rather than by putatively universal self-interest” (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000), and can hence move social agents to perform actions that transcend their own interest, identity theories provide a heuristic tool to explain actions which are inexplicable for orthodox rational choice theories (Aguiar and de Fran­ cisco, 2009). Fearon (1999) opines that identity can explain actions in two main ways: (a) through membership of social categories and (b) social purposes of groups or individuals subscribing to particular identity groups (to gain respect, to defend one’s dignity etc.). He explains that any interpretation of actions in terms of iden­ tity should offer a full explanation of two things: (i) motivation for following dic­ tates of social identity – it can be in terms of socialization, desire for approval, fear of sanctions, to be able to explain actions to others (out-group members), out of habit or not knowing any other way to act; (ii) choices – here there can be a range of answers from historical accounts to functionalist and rational choice arguments to evolutionary arguments on how and why some norms survive better than others (Fearon, 1999). Building on the Copenhagen School of Securitization Theory scholars such as dos Santos (2018) posit that discussions about self-referential and intersubjective aspects of securitization can be rhetorically mitigated through an emphasis on identity and hegemony (dos Santos, 2018). The application of norms to security issues is one of the most fascinating theo­ retical developments to have happened in the past two decades in security studies.

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Norm analysis is located within the constructivist paradigm and a large number of scholars have expressed their affiliation to the use of constructivism in security affairs. Norms have been used variously by security analysts, of which four deserve special mention. Peter Katzenstein (1996a, 1996b) and his team are dominant in this field and have published extensive surveys on the role of norms, identity and culture in different dimensions of national security. A second tendency (cham­ pioned by Adler and Barnett, 1998; Adler, 1997; Acharya, 1999) has been the use of norms to flesh out the theoretical implications of security community in con­ structive mode(s).The third variety of norm analysis relates to the strategic culture approach, epitomized best by the writings of Alistair Johnston (1995a, 1995b, 1996). The final variant of norm analysis can be called rather loosely critical security studies, with Keith Krause and Michael L. Williams (1997) being leading figures in this field.

Identity in Katzenstein’s conceptualization of security Peter Katzenstein’s central argument is that the security environment of a state is both materially and culturally/institutionally constituted. Further, cultural envir­ onment not only regulates behaviour across issue-areas, it also constitutes the basic character of states, or their identity (Katzenstein, 1996a: 33). These two assump­ tions contrast nicely with the neorealist and neoliberal understanding of security that take actors’ identities as given. Like Wendt, Katzenstein also problematizes the ontological status of the actors, emphasizing their socially contingent character rather than being exogenous to the environment. Third, norms and culture matter to the patterns of cooperation and conflict in international affairs, in the choice of foes and friends, actors’ selection of alliances, and in determination of grounds, neutrals and enemies (Katzenstein, 1990: 34). Significantly, Katzenstein does not rule out the role of material factors behind the choice of security policies. He adds crucial ideational and cultural variables to the mix, arguing in the process that neorealism and neoliberalism are often unable to explain anomalies because of their neglect of these factors. Katzenstein builds on the concepts of norms, identity and culture. Katzenstein defines norms as “collective expectations for the proper behaviour of actors with a given ‘identity’” (Katzenstein, 1996b: 5). Norms are both “constitutive”, that is they help define the “identity of an actor”, and “regulative” in the sense of speci­ fying “standards of proper behavior”. “Thus norms either define (institute) iden­ tities in the first place … or prescribe or proscribe (regulate) behaviour for already constituted identities…” (Katzenstein, 1996b: 54). In IR, identity, is a “shorthand label for varying constructions of nation and statehood” (Katzenstein, 1996b: 6). The third term, culture, gets defined as “ a set of evaluative standards (such as norms and values) and a set of cognitive standards (such as rules and models) that define what actors exist in a social system, how they operate, and how they relate to each other” (Katzenstein, 1996b: 6).

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By summarizing the contributions to the ground-breaking volume The Culture of National Security (1996), Katzenstein identified five crucial functions or effects of norms regarding national security. Thus “cultural and institutional elements of states’ environment shape the national security interests or (directly) the security policies of states”; “shape state identity”; “variations in state identity affect the security interests or policies of states”; “configurations of state identity structures affect interstate normative structures, such as regimes or security communities”; and “state policies both reproduce and reconstruct cultural and institutional structure” (Katzenstein, 1996a: 52–65). In his own pioneering study on the Japanese identity, Katzenstein showed how the island-state’s definition of national security hinges primarily on political and economic dimensions, which provided the key to explaining why Japan’s strategic behaviour has belied the expectations of most realist IR theorists (Katzenstein, 1996b). The Japanese military budget, argues Katzenstein, is not a defence instrument meant to respond to a perceived threat environment; rather, it is a steering devise for attaining domestic economic and technological aims (Katzenstein, 1996b: 124). The very discourse of defence expenditure is articulated in economic in contrast to strategic terms (Katzenstein, 1996b: 114). Katzenstein takes the discourses underlying Japan’s domestic norms as the key to understanding its defence or security policy. Japan’s strategic action has evolved as a natural corollary of its domestic imperative to acquire technological advantages through a process of political contestation that accounts for the enactment of norms (Katzenstein, 1996b: 134; Hopf, 1999/2002). Stephen Walt (1985), responding to critique inhering norms introduced the concept of ‘balance of threat’ while retaining balancing and bandwagoning as the only two options available to states, selected on the basis of expedience and external threat. He hoped to remove the limitations of the ‘balance of power’ concept and retain Waltz’s (1979) central contentions. Walt selected four cases – Turkey, Iran, India and Pakistan – to establish his argument. Michael N. Barnett (1996), in a remarkably illuminating study appearing in Katzenstein’s volume, has, however, brilliantly exposed how Walt’s assumptions and findings eventually defeat his purpose. Walt argues that states balance not against power but against threats, and threats derive from a combination of geo-strategic and military factors and ‘aggressive intentions”’ In his theoretical discussion, Walt elevates intent to the status of a critical variable vital for explaining security dilemma and alliance pat­ terns. Yet he leaves the concept of intent under-specified and under-theorised, and even fails to develop a conceptual tie between intent, on the one hand, and anar­ chy and balance of power, on the other. For Barnett, ‘identity’ offers a conceptual handle in identifying and constructing threats and in fundamentally determining the desired and available security policies (Barnett, 1996). Shared identity often generates a shared definition of threat and represents a potential source of alliance formation. Barnett doesn’t deny that conflict is a part of any social relationship and Arab states, who supposedly shared an identity, have showed quite a flair for con­ flict. But the mere existence of conflict does not automatically in and of itself entail a realist world. Barnett shows that the strategic alliance is due to moral

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commitment because it has preceded any systemic threat that might have given rise to its existence, whether it is containment or Islamic fundamentalism. Katzenstein’s work, in spite of detractors, has opened a new vista in security studies. While some of the conclusions and findings may not be convincing, they point to the need for further tightening the approach, particularly in developing a methodology that can discriminate independent norm effects on security behaviour or practices. However, Katzenstein’s claims, that norms, culture and identity matter to security, actors are culturally and socially constituted, and security is at least as much a matter of ideas and cultural mediation as it is a reflex of material calculations, are invaluable to the development of an alternative thinking on security.

Identity in Adler’s security community Like Wendt and Katzenstein, Emmanuel Adler’s work hinges on the identity. Building on Karl Deutsch’s pioneering concept of pluralistic political community, Adler’s (1997: 250) security communities are “socially constructed cognitive regions or community-regions”, whose security and welfare frontiers coincide with the limits of shared understandings and common identities. Territoriality separates people and provides them (at least most) with a definite homeland. The state becomes the basis of citizens’ unconditional allegiance. Yet, states hang together for common purposes. Hence, the idea of a community life coterminous with terri­ toriality is socially contingent. The region, conceived as transnational space, is also a legitimate collective imagination, bound by mutual recognition of a shared destiny and identity. Community-regions can therefore be the most powerful destination of men. Such community-regions are “socially constructed”, “spatially differentiated” and transnational in nature, constituted by “national, transnational, and interna­ tional elites and institutions” (Adler, 1997: 253). Adler defines such regions as “regional systems of meanings … not limited to a specific geographic place” (Adler, 1997: 253). People whose commitments go beyond sovereign territoriality, who can and do communicate/interact freely across borders, work with a political commitment towards promotion of regional interests, and catalyze such sentiments and perspectives in their respective jurisdictions, construct these regions. The identity of the construct is vital. The community-regions are physical in the obvious sense. But more than this, Adler describes them as “cognitive regions or cognitive structures that help constitute the practices of their members, whose meanings, understandings, and identities help keep the region in place” (Adler, 1997: 254). Likewise, Adler and Barnett (1998: 73) reworked Deutsch’s idea of security community as those regions comprised of sovereign states whose people maintain “dependable expectations of peaceful change”. Two other themes stand out in Adler’s writings. First, Adler’s security commu­ nity is essentially meant for liberal democracies (Adler, 1997: 257–260). Why this preference? Adler develops an interesting argument based on democracy to privi­ lege the case for a liberal order. Totalitarian systems might be capable of collective

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understanding, but they can never betray trust. An additional element comes from the culture of peaceful negotiation of conflicts, one that reinforces mutual trust among unknown members. Adler did concede that security communities were possible in other kinds of orders after all – but a liberal democratic order had to consecrate or diffuse the underlying norms in such regions (Adler, 1997: 260). Second, Adler in his subsequent writings did recognize the role of power behind the development and institutionalization of security communities. However, in an earlier volume titled Security Communities (1998), which Adler co-edited with Michael Barnett, he/they erected a dichotomy between force and community, and asserted that friendship represented a direct challenge to the realist imagery of power-balancing (Adler and Barnett, 1998: 5). Adler proposes a new understanding of power as the “authority to determine the shared meanings that embody the identities, interests, and practices of states, as well as the conditions that confer, defer, or deny access to ‘goods’ and benefits” (Adler, 1997: 261). Meanings there­ fore are not only created but are often “imposed on physical objects” lacking them. Hence rule creation, implementation, umpiring and enforcement are “subtle and most effective form(s) of power”. Adler also notes that social reality is not only a matter of identity and con­ structed/imposed meaning. The configuration of identity and the imposition of meaning are in large measure physically determined, with material and technolo­ gical resources playing vital roles in this (Adler, 1997: 261–262). Adler’s norm analysis, inherent in his idea of security community, is thus theoretically closer to the Wendtian variety of constructivism, where both material and ideational factors are given due (though not equal) weightage. Although Adler’s contribution is undoubtedly significant, several limitations mark his work of which two are particularly pressing. First, it is not quite clear in what specific sense Adler and Barnett join security and identity. Various associa­ tions are claimed, such as identity ‘imprints’ security (Adler and Barnett, 1998: 3), to identity and security being ‘tied’ (Adler and Barnett, 1998: 4) or married (Adler and Barnett, 1998: 30), and identity being causal to security (Adler and Barnett, 1998: 34). It is not clear therefore exactly how the two variables are related to each other, for each of these three forms of association indicates a distinctive relationship and provides varying levels of importance as a factor of/in security. If identity ‘imprints’ security, it is an intervening variable that only mediates some other relationship, and this is not radically different from the realist position that rules out any autonomous role for friendship in promoting security. Marriage or tie-up, however, conjugates identity and security, without spelling out the extent of independent effect of the former on the latter (Bially, 2000: 301–302). As a con­ stitutive factor it is not clear whether identity is really autonomous of its material underpinnings in defining security or not. The claim that identity is causal to security is robust and direct. But Adler’s insistence that one needs to put the material factors alongside identity confuses. For, in effect, this amounts to a case for multi-causality, where it is quite clear that identity matters, without, however, any indication of how much of identity actually matters in specific instances (Bially, 2000:

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302). There is nothing in Adler’s methodology that allows a precise measurement of the nature and extent of the relationship between identity and security, some­ thing that limits the originality as well utility of his concept, since several other scholars working within diverse theoretical traditions have noted the close or proximate association of the two. The second problem relates to the applicability of the idea of security commu­ nity. Like Deutsch, Adler’s ethno-centrism is transparent, his bias too overtly manifest. Given the criteria for the formation of a security community as a socially constructed cognitive region, the concept is unserviceable as an explanatory tool for the security predicament of the bulk of the non-Western world (if not entirely).

Huntington’s distortions The dominant version of the cultural paradigm comes through the work of Hun­ tington, whose The Clash of Civilizations remains one of the most controversial foreign policy essays in recent times. Writing on the nature of crises before the international order, Huntington dismissed either ideology or economic factors to constitute the primary source of conflict in the new world. Huntington’s main thesis is that cultural identities, which he calls civilizational at the broadest level, are and would condition the patterns of cooperation, conflict, communication and fragmentation in the post-Cold War international system. He classifies the global civilizations into seven basic types – namely, Western, Sinic (Chinese), Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox and Latin American – holding the possibility of a further variation in the shape of the African civilization. The book evolves in five parts, with each part espousing a set of arguments (Huntington, 1996). Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis, despite its oversimplifications and inherent crudity, became attractive in the post-9/11 world as a convenient frame of reference to describe the contours of the new global (dis)order. Of the various themes put across by Huntington, three deserve particular atten­ tion. Among these concerns, Huntington’s fulminations, misgivings and concerns about Islam stand out from the rest. Huntington asks why, at the dawn of the new century, Muslims outnumber members of any other civilization in their involve­ ment with intra-group violence. He suggests six possible causes, three historical and general and three more recent. The first is the familiar argument that Islam is by birth a militant faith. “The Koran and other statements of Muslim beliefs contains few prohibitions on violence, and a concept of non-violence is absent from Muslim doctrine and practice” (Huntington, 1996: 263). The second reason relates to Islam’s history of expansion qua a militant, coercive and enforced proselytization policy. Unlike most other religions, Islam spread by the sword. The third reason behind the Muslim–non-Muslim clash Huntington identified in the “indigest­ ibility” of Muslims. To quote Huntington (1996: 264), “Even more than Chris­ tianity, Islam is an absolutist faith. It merges religion and politics and draws a sharp line between those in the Dar al-Islam and those in the Dar al-harb”. Huntington

Identity, conflicts and security 109

adds three more recent factors. First, he argues, Muslims are the victims of Western imperialism that targets Islam’s material weakness owing to the West’s own antiMuslim prejudice. The violence of the Muslims is thus the defensive violence of the victim, the torn and the undignified. Secondly, is the instability of Islam caused by the absence of a dominant leader. Finally, is a veritable demographic explosion in Muslim societies that supplies a continuous army of youth in the age group between 15 and 30, who are a natural source of violence and instability throughout the world (Huntington, 1996: 264–265). The second major contention of Huntington is the volatility and intensity of fault-line wars, the paradigmatic case being the disintegration of Yugoslavia in general and the devastation of Bosnia in particular. According to Huntington (1996: 270), In fault line wars, each side has incentives not only to emphasize its own civilizational identity but also that of the other side. In its local war, it sees itself not just fighting another local ethnic group but fighting another civili­ zation. The threat is thus magnified and enhanced by the resources of a major civilization, and defeat has consequences not just for itself, but for all of its own civilization. Referring to the war in the former Yugoslavia, Huntington commented: In the early shapes of the Yugoslav breakup … the leading actors in Western civilization rallied behind their coreligionists. Boris Yeltsin’s government on the other hand, attempted to pursue a middle course that would be sympa­ thetic to the orthodox Serbs … Islamic governments and groups … castigated the West for not coming to the defense of the Bosnians. (Huntington, 1993: 37) Huntington also used the case-studies of the Iraq War (1991) and the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan (1992–93) to reinforce his theme. To drive home the central argument once more, Huntington’s chief concern had been to forcefully argue a case for the West versus the rest thesis, in which he saw the Confucian– Islamic connection to be the most serious threat. The new-found civilizational consciousness of the non-Western states wedged a sharp divide between the two. The non-Western states were either isolationalists, or joined the West for aid and protection, or were contemplating balancing the West by all means. Interestingly, Huntington drew a contrast between the old arms race policy, where each party developed its own capabilities to match the other, and the one between the Isla­ mic–Confucian alliance and the West. While the former was playing the game conventionally, the latter was relying on non-proliferation and self-reduction strategies on its part.1 To all fairness, the crisis of the West thesis is not a monopoly of Huntington. Scholars like Farid Zakaria, Kishore Mahbubani and R. D. Kaplan, among others,

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have also indicated anti-Western, cultural turn in world politics. In fact, Kaplan’s own pessimistic reading of an evolving conflict-prone international system, one that replaces the more balanced bi-polar one, or Mearsheimer’s aggressive realism, which predicts intense geo-political rivalry in Europe and East Asia, are not very different from Huntington’s predictions (Kaplan, 1994; Mearsheimer, 2001). But, neither Kaplan nor Mearsheimer has any fondness for Huntington’s faith in civili­ zations as the moving structural force behind this dark, pessimistic anarchy. In this sense, Huntington’s claim to be unique is indeed undisputed. Huntington claims that the international system is changing from being one where nations cooperate, compete, and even war in their pursuit of material interests to one where the states are defining their identities and interests along cultural/civilizational lines. Therefore the war against terrorism is essentially a cul­ tural battle between the Christian West and the Islamic civilization. It is a fact that Osama bin Laden and his terrorist outfit the Al Qaeda did portray the conflict in these terms. It cannot also be denied that the ruling elites across Islamic states of the world are critical of Western cultural imperialism in general and the celebration of hedonism in particular. Take the victory celebrations and processions of famished, directionless Islamic youths across the Islamic world. Some were venting their protest against the illegitimacy and gross inefficiency of the ruling regimes, whose survival was nearly exclusively guaranteed by the American hegemony in the region. In contrast to the general masses, the reaction of the ruling elites all over the Muslim world was sober and cautious. If identities and interests are culturedetermined, such sobriety and reticence, in the face of military invasions, make no sense at all. Although President Bush did indulge in some quasi-religious propaganda immediately after the tragedy of 9/11, he was quick to offer recantations and refrained from invoking religio-cultural metaphors in his efforts to put together a global coalition against terrorism. If one carefully reads the papers and documents related to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the philosophical/ intellectual fountain-head of the Bush administration, there is no confirmation of the clash of civilizations thesis. It is true that some members associated with the PNAC have occasionally paid lip service to Huntington’s idea.2 And yet the PNAC vision is certainly about domination but not about cultural domination. It is about estab­ lishing ‘Pax Americana’ across the globe and to transform the United States, the sole remaining superpower, into a planetary empire primarily through military means. The realization of the PNAC vision might require the surgical lancing of a large number of Islamic states in the Middle East and North Africa, but the list also includes North Korea and China. The mention of China and North Korea as ‘rogue’ states suggests that the exclusions are not culture-defined. For the culture/ civilization paradigm to make sense, one needs a definition of culture that is dis­ tinguishable from either culture as ideology or culture as power renditions of the con­ cept. Huntington labours a great deal on civilizational fault lines and the conflicts they induce, without explaining why such conflicts were not regular power con­ flicts, fought over hard material interests. First, Huntington fails to demonstrate that

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states are defining threats in cultural/civilizational terms. If this was the case, the West would be unwelcome in many parts of the world, particularly in East Asia and Southeast Asia. If conflicts were culturally defined, the Islamic world would not be so hopelessly divided. Secondly, if conflicts are essentially culturally deter­ mined, their impact cannot escape the patterns of policy formulation or the archi­ tecture of alliances. Take the major wars fought in the Islamic world. In neither the Gulf War of 1990 nor the anti-Taliban war in Afghanistan in 2001 did any grand alliance of Islamic states take on the civilizational might of the Christian world led by the USA. In none of the wars in the Middle East between the US-led forces and their targets was there any evidence of ‘kin-country syndrome’ or ‘civiliza­ tional rallying’, in concrete military sense. If civilizations are on a war-path, what prevented the Islamic states to put together a counter-coalition against the invasion of non-Islamic cultures? What could be the source of deterrence? It seems the only meaningful answer is the huge power differential between the two sides that pre­ vented the formation of any countervailing coalition against the American moves. Even major powers like China and Russia, in spite of their disapproval of American unilateralism, decided to play along, perceiving a higher pay-off in cooperating with the hegemonic power than trying to balance it (Sussex, 2004: 35). Third, the clash of civilization thesis cannot account for the fissures that arose in the NATO group of states over the invasion of Iraq in 2003. While Bush and Blair remained glued together in their defence of the war, Chirac and Schroeder had serious misgivings about the American conduct. Are then the USA and UK more conscious of their civilization and common cultural heritage than either France or Germany? First, Huntington fails to distinguish between the deliberate mobilization of emotive cultural symbols in conflicts on the domestic level of intra-state politics and their invocation at the global level of interactions. Fouad Ajami is correct in saying, “Nations cheat: they juggle identities and interests” (Ajami, 1993: 6). But Huntington freezes identities and oversimplifies interests. For a rather misplaced comfort of clarity and parsimony, he sacrifices the ambiguities, trade-offs and nuances of civilizations. Second, Huntington is uncharitable to an objective reading of the past. Zones of mixed ethnicity, religion and culture, sharing close territorial proximity, have always been prone to conflicts along communal lines. The national question was never settled here. With Tito’s demise, the balancing act among the nationalities collapsed. Serbia’s military superiority clashed with the economic development of the Croats and the Slovenes. The cruel genius of Slobodan Milo­ sevic and Franjo Tudjman exploited the situation to the maximum. They dilated the cultural and ethnic differences and saw to it that the carnage of the erstwhile Yugoslavia resembled a deadly duel of the “inheritors of Rome, Byzantium and Islam” (Ajami, 1993: 7). The Croats and the Bosnian Muslims were ultimately saved by the American fire-power under the NATO umbrella, while neither the Slavic nor the Islamic civilizations mobilized to fight for the rights and justice of their respective kin-groups. But the NATO action was shoddy and woefully inadequate. This was because the death of a few hundred thousand Christians did not force the USA, the lynch pin of the security organization, to alter or revise its

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schedule of vital geo-political or strategic interests. Russians and Muslims did not join their respective kin-groups because they lacked the capability to undertake such action. Realism provides a far more convincing account of the bloody disin­ tegration of Yugoslavia than does Huntington’s narrative of inter-civilizational violence.

Identity and ethnic conflicts However conceptualized, ethnicity is a key component of security. The variations in the definitions of ethnicity and security, however, have crucial ramifications for the level of the latter and in the purposes of the former. If the sanctity of the ter­ ritorial boundaries of the existing nation-states is an absolute precondition to nation-state security, then ethnicity, in the sense of some invariant of ethnic iden­ tity mobilisation by a certain section of the political elite for political or socio­ cultural purposes, will constitute a threat to nation-state security, if such mobiliza­ tion aims at transformation of the existing territorial boundaries, of such nationstates. Argued from the site of community, the problems of national security quaethnicity are all problems of the state, for it is the inescapable tendency towards animus dominandi of an ideology of territorial nationalism that “marginalized, disciplined, and punished recalcitrant communities” to sustain a “system of interest representation, a framework for group representation, and a system of institutio­ nalization so that the bureaucratic-authoritarian regime can consolidate its hold as well as forge extensive constituencies for its rule” (Samaddar, 1998: 108). The security for the state therefore often demands the deliberate subversion of com­ munities, turning ethnicity into an active input of producing and reproducing state militancy through time. There are, however, problems of such blanket community prioritization, espe­ cially when one attempts to link up ethnicity with societal security. First, there are crucial practical limitations of the ‘givens’. The strategy of planning security through the dominant ideology of nationalism is indeed fraught with grave con­ ceptual fallacies, and is one that is responsible for intense ethnic counter mobiliza­ tions that merely wish to emulate the logic of ‘territorial exclusivism’ inherent in the disciplining and marginalizing power speak of such territorial nationalism. To criticize such a strategy is not to believe that, left to itself, the communities, con­ ceivably in a state of ethnic mobilization, would achieve security for themselves. Although the communities have come to suffer the compulsive compression of the politics of nationalism, following the gradual articulation and then institutionaliza­ tion of the territorial demarcations of nation-states generally, it is difficult to believe that there were no problems of security, order and competitive equilibrium among ethnic groups prior to the spatial articulation of the world into a number of nationstates. The dyad between the nation-state and ethnic communities is an exceed­ ingly complex affair; a theory that would prioritise the claims of one over the other, although admitting that much of the relationship is constituted by a media­ tion of power of a complex character. This in itself can be imaginative and

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possessed of a subtle elegance, but its contribution to an integral understanding of security cannot be granted automatically. For the purpose of addressing the demands of security in a concrete and prag­ matic sense, a theory would have to partially discipline its cognitive imagination without, however, surrendering the luxury of thinking about alternative space. The parameters of such a theoretical formulation constitute the following. First, the security predicament of multi-ethnic states is real and not necessarily contrived. Second, ethnicity would constitute security threats if a particular ethnic component tends to dominate disproportionately the allocation of scarce resources and significant positions of power within a state. If the ethnic group or groups, which are manifestly the victim of such discrimination, have ethnic affiliations in other bordering states, the nature of conflict (hence the issue of security) will not merely be domestic but will assume inter-state dimensions. Third, the subjective awareness of a series of experiences is crucial to the formation of identity for an ethnic group. The range of demands and the intensity of the group’s commitment to pursue them generate its relative sense of security vis-à-vis other groups. Fourth, communities share a common world of inter-subjective symbols, notions, customs and dialogue, and this world generates tendencies along a spectrum of conflict and cooperation which have crucial salience to group maintenance, stability and security. In a multi-ethnic society, ethnic conflict often results from the distortions that occur in juxtaposition of security for the territorial state and the ethnic group. However, such a problematic juxtaposition is not the only source of conflict in a multi-ethnic society. The clash between socio-racial stratification and anthro­ pological or morphological culture may induce serious security problems not only between groups but also within them (Hoetink, 1975: 1–19). The binary between inclusive territorial nationalism and exclusive ethnic identities does not exhaust the possibilities of conflict in multi-ethnic nation-states, because there is no abiding difficulty to at least theoretically grant the possibility of the boundary of a nation as reinforcing the life world of the community, that is a shared, dialogic world of inter-subjective symbols, transmitted and perceived as common experience both for the nation and the communities. Fifth, it follows from the earlier stipulated limitations that to focus on ethnicity in terms of some form of security is to deliberately take the political unit as the preferred frame of reference, wherein certain accepted principles determine and regulate the competitive and collaborative exchanges among multiple ethnic groups and the territorial state itself. It naturally follows that one’s understanding of the concept of ethnic group is key to a proper assessment of the relationship between ethnicity and security. This is neither the place to recapitulate the familiar definitions of ethnic groups and ethnicity put forward by the various proponents of the primordialist, instrumentalist and decon­ structivist positions, nor is this chapter meant to be a theoretical catalogue of the schools of ethnicity (Brass, 1991; Phadnis, 1990). Nevertheless, an exclusively objecti­ vist or cultural anthropological conception of ethnicity is unserviceable to study eth­ nicity security linkages. A definition suggested by Fredrik Barth in 1964, which defined ethnic group solidarity by some recognized ascriptive criteria, with those

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criteria being crucial to generate a bounded world of culture is tenable (Barth, 1969: 9–38). The formation of ethnic groups in this sense depends on the use of ethic identities for categorization and interaction proposed by leading actors of the group. The stability of a plural society, or a stable system of inter-ethnic relations, therefore, requires recognized rules of interaction along the boundaries of groups. The extent to which such recognized rules get weakened, threatening to displace the boundaries, will be the measure of insecurity for the political unit. Insecurity in such a situation may take two distinct forms. First, if the contestation over rules becomes so intense as to threaten the internal solidarity of an ethnic group, ethnic violence engendered by such a sense of displacement and insecurity will target competitive ethnic groups, although the marginalization or emasculation of the rules may not be the conscious creation of the target group. Second, if, on the other hand, the threatened rules along the boundary of the group motivate it to renegotiate the terms of exchange with the dominant representative political ideas of the nation-state, the security threats will be directly focused at the latter. In each case, however, targets of potential or actual ethnic violence are human groups, only their perceived identity as targets varies according to the mode of classification employed by the aggrieved ethnic groups. To the extent the nation-state intervenes in favour of the ‘victims’ of the former case, it becomes implicated in the ethnic struggle, thereby complicating the contest between groups and posing new threats along their self-consciously defined boundaries. The rules that essentially stabilize the acceptable inter-ethnic threshold in a multi-ethnic society usually relate to a modicum of cooperation and collaboration (or consensus in a few rare instances) between contending groups, with the avowed intention of turning an original precarious equilibrium into an interdependent and institutionalized cooperative partnership. In the context of modernizing or devel­ opmental states, these rules usually centre upon delicate schemes of distribution and sharing of scarce resources of various kinds, most notably, educational opportu­ nities, economic power (viz. access to higher posts in the civilian bureaucracy or high paying entrepreneurial opportunities) and political position. Unequal access to such important resources among groups divides them horizontally whereas differ­ ential rates of attainability within groups divides vertically. Usually, such stratifica­ tion occurs simultaneously with the fact of differential accessibility to key resources being appropriated and directed by the reigning dominant political interests of territorial nationalism that not only makes the availability of the same resources abundant for some members of society and virtually inaccessible for the rest, but justifies such gross asymmetry by the politics of nationalism itself and usually on grounds of nation-state security. In this sense some groups become ‘safe’ for the nation; others are not. While this might trigger a competition among groups to be counted as faithful by the state, such herd mentality is a delusion given the cultural vulnerability (boundary maintenance) of some groups against the state, and because the politics of nationalism, in its eternal search for more power for greater security, is simply incapable of forging delicate ties of friendship with deprived and discriminated groups.

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The political narratives of territorial nationalism are notoriously suspect when it comes to the practice of egalitarianism. The scheme of distribution of public goods, resources, positions and power by the nation-state is highly preferential in their choice of targets. The ethnic struggles that succeed in assuming a mass character are often the ones fought over manifest discriminations in the distributive agenda of the nation-state, where the passage from radical ethnic identity assertion to intense political mobilisation and demand for secession or political independence follows a logical sequence of events. The state will necessarily fight its own battle, trying to divide the ethnic community from within, by political co-option of its leading actors, by a liberal doze of economic aid and by the grant of some well-guarded political cum administrative autonomy. The problem is that such battles are not the battles of the state. Where the nation-state, due to its inclusive claim to territorial allegiance, has forfeited the confidence of an ethnic group, it can hardly regain the lost ground without transforming its nature. The problem is especially acute for states committed to a homogenous nationalist discourse that tend to rule out any meaningful compromise vis-à-vis the mobilised group. In such cases, purposive dialogue collapses due to alienation and mutual obduracy. The compulsion to intervene by invoking the “discreet charms” of state terrorism may be too great for the nation-state to resist (Samaddar, 1998: 107–119). The more pronounced the arm of violence of the state becomes, the greater is the insecurity it suffers by way of ethnicity. In situations where ethnic groups lock horns against each other independently of the nation-state, during the initial phase of such struggle, the problems of security, for political and social order, are equally grave. If for the moment one hypothetically grants the possibility that the nationstate, undecided in its choice of political support for either of the contending groups, prefers exit to voice as a probable course of action, the resolution of such conflicts will be left to the regulatory mechanisms of the ethnic groups themselves, and this will presumably involve attempts to redefine boundaries, alter the mean­ ings of old social and cultural symbols, and evolve new identities capable of freezing a cooperative inter-ethnic threshold. The road to this could very well be tortuous and bloody, for the re-negotiation of intra and inter community power relationships involves vulnerable indicators like economic status of groups, their demographic growth, the incidence of boundary crossing in both cultural and territorial senses, etc. Holding on to the cultural and somatic attributes of ethnic groups is vital to their subjective percep­ tion of distinction from other groups and to their internal cohesion. Where terri­ tories have assumed cultural or sentimental ascription for groups and are transmitted historically to new generations, there is no obvious settlement of their transgression by ‘others’. If ethnic consciousness is defined by ‘otherness’, such a sense of exclusion is not necessarily the exclusive tactic of the nation-state. To the extent that communities are unable to settle their clash of identities short of ethnic violence, the state will retain moral ground to be consulted in such violent disputes, and may be required to intervene, to mediate the conflict.

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The problem, however, is that it is not quite sure whether the state can make available such powers of mediation. The history of state–ethnicity relations seems to suggest that the state has actually intervened successfully in favour of the community only when it sufficiently insulated itself from the ideology of territorial nationalism and took the community as a partner in any attempted solution of group disputes. Such a bifurcation between the nation-state and the ideology of territorial nationalism may sound awkward to those who define the state by territoriality alone. It seems, how­ ever, that the nation-state is more than mere territoriality, for otherwise, the survival of such a long lasting and universal spatial articulation becomes a travesty of history itself. The state may resist the insinuation of territorial nationalism if it consciously articulates a set of performance criteria that attaches to the very legitimacy of political rule itself (Mitra, 1997: 17–49). Moreover, if the nation-state disciplines communities, the communities can build states. It is in this context that the idea of genuine commu­ nitarian foundation for the political rule of the nation-state is vital for the stabilization of state–ethnicity relations. The phenomena of ethnicity in a modernizing and developmental society remain deeply embedded with the problems of governance. Ethnicity in this sense constitutes ideological and cultural constraints for orderly governance from outside. To the extent the governance of a society will reflect the dominant interests of powerful groups, and will refuse to sufficiently broaden the scope for political participation to members of all groups under fair terms of politically regulated competition, or refuse to admit the increasing blurring of boundaries and respon­ sibilities for the purpose of better governance itself, the binary between the con­ flicting interests of the state as the territorial short hand for governance and those of secessionist ethnic groups, would continue to generate insecurity both for the state and for the groups themselves. Thinking about security for multi-cultural or poly-ethnic societies virtually impels us to think of the complexities of that relationship at fixed scales or levels, such as the community, society or the nation-state. However, state territories are not absolute markers of sovereign space, although the element of territoriality remains a vital component of spatial imagination even today. States, or nation-states, do not exhaust the variety of geographical imagination that peoples’ possess, although the vitality of such cognitive possession may not directly reflect in imaginative or transformative projects of spatial re-articulation of even some portions of the world. The social transformations underlying multi-ethnic societies can in fact one day prepare the epitaph of the nation-state. But this would have to show that the nation-state has become useless as a geographical or territorial construct, not by itself, but for normative criteria independent of space as a variable of social reality.

Conclusion This rambling chapter was conceived with two purposes in mind. First, it is meant to showcase a wide variety of literature that discusses identity issues from the stand point of peace, conflict and security. To that end, this chapter has analysed both

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international relations and political science literature that address the identity question in different ways. What we find is that the variety of positions and styles make a baseline comparison of these genres an impossible academic task. We have, therefore, desisted from taking that arduous and unproductive route. We have put under a critical microscope the general works on identity conflicts, paying attention to both primordial and instrumentalist varieties, focused specifically to the IR theory literature on identity, culture and norms, covering Wendt, Katzenstein, and Adler and Johnston, discussed the controversial thesis on civilizational conflict à la Huntington, surveyed the more substantive multicultural tracks of Sen, and con­ cluded with an analysis of the literature on ethnic conflicts. Secondly, our purpose here was to advance a simple argument; identity is an absolutely essential part of political conflicts and their attendant security implications. Identity and culture care not epiphenomena and avoidable side-effects of redistributive conflicts as some social analysts would have us believe. While we do not neglect resource conflicts, we do maintain, by working through a body of work, that identity issues cannot be reduced to mechanical effects of class differentiations, and, more crucially, they require ontological primacy on their own terms. The showcasing of the literature, its partiality notwithstanding, is ultimately to serve this end.

Notes 1 There are many shortcomings of Huntington. For details, please refer to the works of Robert Bartley, Fouad Ajami, and Weeks in a special issue of Foreign Affairs published in 1993 (Vol 72, No. 4).. 2 The most prominent among them has been Norman Podoretz, a noted die-hard Jewish conservative, who, after specifying the long list of states and regimes that “richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced”, believed that this action was due to “the long-overdue internal reform and modernization of Islam” (quoted in William Rivers Pitt, Blood Money, truthout, Thursday 27 February 2003, http://bloodmoney.htm, p. 3).

References Abdelal, R., Herrera, Y. M., Johnston, A. I., and McDermott, R. (2009). “Identity as a Variable”, in R. Abdelal, Y. M. Herrera, A. I. Johnston, and R. McDermott (eds), Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Abdelal, R., Herrera, Y. M., Johnston, A. I., and McDermott, R. (2009). “Introduction”, in R. Abdelal, Y. M. Herrera, A. I. Johnston, and R. McDermott (eds), Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2. Acharya, A. (1999). “Culture, Security, Multiculturalism: The Asean Way”, in Keith Krause (ed.), Culture and Security: Multilateralism, Arms Control and Security Building, London: Frank Cass. Adler, Emmanuel and Barnett, Michael (eds) (1998). Security Communities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adler, Emmanuel (1997). “Imagined (Security) Communities: Cognitive Regions in International Relations”, Millennium: Journal of International Relations, 26 (2): 249–279. Aguiar, F. and de Francisco, A. (2009). “Rational Choice, Social Identity, and Beliefs about Oneself”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 39 (4): 547–571.

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Ajami, Fouad (1993). “The Summoning”, Foreign Affairs, 72 (4). Barnett, Michael N. (1996). “Identity and Alliances in the Middle East”, in Peter J.Katzen­ stein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Barth, Fredrik (1969). “Introduction”, in F. Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 9–38. Bartley, Robert L. (1993). “The Case for Optimism”, Foreign Affairs, 72 (4). Bially, Janice Mattern (2000). “Taking Identity Seriously”, Cooperation and Conflict, 35 (3): 279–308. Brass, Paul R. (1991). Ethnicity and Nation State, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Brubaker, R. and Cooper, F. (2000). “Beyond ‘Identity’”, Theory and Society, 29 (1): 1–47. Cho, Y. C. (2017). “State Identity Formation in Constructivist Security Studies: A Sugges­ tive Essay”, Japanese Journal of Political Science, 13 (3): 299–316. Deutsch, Karl, Burrell, Sidney, Kann, Robert A., LeeJr, Maurice, Lichterman, Martin, Lindgren, Raymond E., Lowenheim, Francis J., and Van Wagenen, Richard W. (1957). Political Community and the North Atlantic Area, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. dos Santos, M. C. (2018). “Identity and Discourse in Securitization Theory”. Contexto Internacional, 40 (2): 229–248. Fearon, J. D. (1999). What is Identity (As We Now Use the Word)? Draft, Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Standford, CA. Fisher, S., Abdi, D. I., Ludin, J., Smith, R., Williams, S., and Williams, S. (2000). Working with Conflict: Skills & Strategies for Action. New York, NY: Zed Books Limited. Ghai, Yash (ed.) (2000). Autonomy and Ethnicity: Negotiating Competing Claims in Multi-ethnic States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Gleason, P. (1983). “Identifying Identity: A Semantic History”, The Journal of American His­ tory, 69 (4): 910–931. Hoetink, Harmannus (1975). “Resource Competition, Monopoly, and Socioracial Diver­ sity”, in Leo A. Despres (ed.), Ethnicity and Resource Competition in Plural Societies, The Hague: Montana Publishers. Hopf, Ted (2002). Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Huddy, L. (2011). “From Social to Political Identity: A Critical Examination of Social Identity Theory”, Political Psychology [online]: 127–156. Huntington, Samuel P. (1993). “The Clash of Civilizations”, Foreign Affairs, 72 (3): 22–49. Huntington, Samuel P. (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Citations in this study are from the Penguin edition, New Delhi, India, 1997. Johnston, Alastair I. (1995a). Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Johnston, Alastair I. (1995b) “Thinking About Strategic Culture”, International Security, 19: 36–43. Johnston, Alastair I. (1996). “Cultural Realism and Strategy in Maoist China”, in Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kaplan, R.D. (1994). “The Coming Anarchy”, Atlantic Monthly, 273 (2).

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Katzenstein, Peter J. (1990). Analyzing Change in International Politics: The New Institutionalism and the Interpretative Approach, MPIfG discussion paper, No. 90/10, Köln: Max-PlanckInstitut für Gesellschaftsforschung. Katzenstein, Peter J. (1996a). “Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security”, (with Ronald J. Jepperson and Alexander Wendt ) in Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Katzenstein, Peter J. (1996b). Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Post­ war Japan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Krause, Keith (ed.) (1999). Culture and Security: Multilateralism, Arms Control and Security Building, London: Frank Cass. Krause, Keith and Williams, Michael C. (eds) (1997). Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Issues, London: UCL Press. Mearsheimer, John J. (2001). The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company. Miller, D. (2000). Citizenship and National Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mitra, Subrata (1997). “Legitimacy, Governance and Political Institutions in India after Independence”, in Subrata K.Mitra and Dietmar Rothermund (eds), Legitimacy and Conflict in South Asia, New Delhi: Manohar: 17–49. Parekh, B. (2008). A New Politics of Identity: Political Principles for an Interdependent World, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Phadnis, Urmila (1990). Ethnicity and Nation-building in South Asia, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Samaddar, Ranabir (1998). “The Failed Dialectic of Territoriality and Security, and the Imperatives of Dialogue”, International Studies, 35 (1): 107–122. Schafer, M. (1999). “Cooperative and Conflictual Policy Preferences: The Effect of Identity, Security, and Image of the Other”, Political Psychology, 20 (4). Sen, A. (2009). “The Fog of Identity”, Politics Philosophy & Economics [online]: 285. Smith, A. D. (1991). National Identity, Reno, NV: University of Nevada. Sussex, Matthew (2004). “Cultures in Conflict? Re-evaluating the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ Thesis After 9/11”, in Peter Shearman and Matthew Sussex (eds), European Security after 9/11, New York, NY: Ashgate. Walker, R. (1997). “The Subject of Security,” in K. Krause and M. C. Williams (eds), Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Case Studies, London: UCL Press: 61–81. Walt, Stephen M. (1985). “Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power”, I­ nternational Security, 9 (4): 3–43. Walt, Stephen M. (1998). “International Relations: One World, Many Theories”, Foreign Policy, 110: 29–46. Walt, Stephen (1997). “Building up New Bogeymen”, Foreign Policy, 106: 176–189. Waltz, Kenneth W. (1979). Theory of International Politics, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Weeks, Albert (1993). “Do Civilizations Hold?”, Foreign Affairs, 72 (4): 55–56. Wendt, Alexander (1992). “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics”, International Organization, 46 (2): 391–425. Wendt, Alexander (1999). Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yorulmaz, M. (2016). “The Relation between Identity and Security: A Comparative Study on Kosovo and Macedonia”, Insight Turkey, 18 (1): 165–189. Zehfuss, Maja (2002). Constructivism in International Relations: The Politics of Reality, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

8 ARMED CONFLICTS AND PROTECTION OF CIVILIANS Omprakash Mishra

Traditional war involved combat between the armed forces of the belligerents. Modern warfare increasingly involves civilians as the target of armed action, both in terms of casualty and other consequences. The ‘new war’, whether intra­ national or international, whether a low intensity conflict or a high pitched battle, marks the end of the traditional distinction between combatants and civilians and calls for improving the current strategies to protect the civilian population. The common Article 3 framework of the Geneva Conventions for the protection of civilians has been a good umbrella but is found to be increasingly inadequate in addressing the multiple challenges posed by a surfeit of armed conflicts throughout the world. This chapter seeks to argue that the world needs new mechanisms to deal with armed conflicts. It is necessary to build upon the emerging norms of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and ‘responsibility to protect’ and find ways and means to strengthen the protection of the civilian population as an essential com­ ponent of the United Nations’ goal of maintenance of international peace and security. This chapter details the nature of the challenges involved, charts out the existing protection principles, analyzes the emerging norms and reflects on the way forward.

Armed conflicts The proliferation of armed conflict in different parts of the world has directly contributed to immense human misery and forced displacement of millions of people. The scale and magnitude of the crises affecting a large number of countries have been unprecedented and, as a consequence, the nature and level of interna­ tional attention to mitigate the sufferings of the affected populations have also been without precedence. The crises may be understood as the ‘new war’, mostly being played out in domestic settings but involving regional and international

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dimensions, affecting civilians and forcing people to flee the battle zones across different parts of their country and wherever possible across state frontiers. A plethora of internal conflicts is destabilizing a large number of states and gen­ erating huge displacement across the borders and internally within the country. This leads us to conceptualize about ‘new wars’. Increasingly, ‘new wars’ are being fought within the borders of states rather than between the states. An over­ whelming percentage of victims in these ‘new wars’ are civilians. Hélène Lambert and Theo Farrell point out some of the features of the ‘new wars’ of 1990s: The 1990s also saw the rise of what were termed the ‘new wars’. Some of these conflicts were developing world legacies from the Cold War (for exam­ ple, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador); some were wars that coincided with the end of the Cold War (for example, the wars of central Africa and the former Yugoslavia). All suggested that the character of war had changed from the modern form of high-tech and state-on-state warfare, to a pre-modern form of low-tech and trans-state warfare. These new wars had been messy affairs involving a broad range of military actors, including insur­ gents, militias and criminals, as well as state-based military forces. The new wars are not waged for reasons of state but rather a mix of motives involving greed and grievance: wars are fought to secure resources; and to avenge past wrongs. Moreover, these new wars are characterized by the blurring of the lines of traditional boundaries of war in terms of space, time and participants. (Lambert and Farrell, 2010: 257) A surfeit of internal conflicts and resultant internal displacement (with some of them also generating refugee flows) is the central issue of our times. In this regard, Mary Kaldor has noted: [R]ecent conflicts – especially in Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan – do seem to confirm the contention that forcible displacement is a central methodology of new wars. In Iraq, for example, some 4 million people were displaced at the height of the war in 2006–2008; roughly half were refugees and half were internally displaced. Indeed, it can be argued that one reason for lower levels of deaths in war is that it is easier to spread fear and panic using new com­ munications, so that more people leave their homes than formerly. At the same time, there does seem to be a trend towards increasing displacement per conflict. Using the American Refugee Council data, Myron Weiner (1996) calculated that the number of refugees and internally displaced persons per conflict increased from 327,000 per conflict in 1969 to 1,316,000 in 1992 (1992 was, of course, a peak year for conflict). Using the Uppsala Conflict Database and figures from UNHCR and the IDMC, an upward trend in refugees and internally based persons can be observed per conflict. (Kaldor, 2013)

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Armed conflicts that are made easy by cheap and lethal weapons of destruction in “a convulsive process of state fragmentation and state formation” (ICISS, 2001) in many parts of the world necessitate rethinking on approaches to security and the role of the states. New sets of actors and a new set of issues in the post-Cold War world are transforming the international system. An unhappy trend of “con­ temporary conflict has been the increased vulnerability of civilians, often involving their deliberate targeting” (ICISS, 2001). These conflicts are generating significant displacement and sometimes this is the primary objective of the conflict.

Armed Non-State Actors Theoretically, only state authorities have the legitimacy to the use of force, to enforce rule of law and administer a justice system. However, the rise of Armed Non-State Actors (ANSAs) across the world shows that national authorities do not enjoy a monopoly over the use of force. Exposure to violence and violation of their human rights by ANSAs is a living reality for millions of civilian victims of conflict. Overwhelming numbers of people are caught in conflict, whether one involving a civil war or a secessionist movement, and invariably ANSAs of various hues and description are involved. A 2010 study of civilians who are internally displaced showed: While governments or armed groups associated with the government were the main agents of displacements in close to half of the situations of displacement, in more than a quarter of situations, the main agents of displacement were armed groups opposed to the government. (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2011: Paragraph 1.20) ANSAs are also subject to international humanitarian law under the Geneva Con­ ventions and their Additional Protocols. Guiding Principles on Internal Displace­ ment are explicit on ANSAs’ obligations toward the IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons). Provisions of the Rome Statute and Kampala Convention, two more recent instruments, are also applicable to ANSAs. Irrespective of the general pro­ visions of international law protecting IDPs, whether from state authorities or ANSAs, “[T]hey may not be sufficient to address IDPs’ specific needs such as the protection against forcible return or the provision of identity documents, or the needs of the specific groups of IDPs, such as internally displaced women or chil­ dren” (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2011: Paragraph 1.19). UN Security Council has addressed some of the violations committed by the ANSAs. The Council’s Resolution 1612 in 2005 concerns the monitoring and recording mechanism of six grave IHRL (International Human Rights Law) vio­ lations committed against children in armed conflicts by ANSAs (United Nations Security Council, 2005). ANSAs carry out forced displacement of population groups based on their assessment of loyalty or disobedience of the affected group and as a part of their

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resistance movement or strategy. They can, however, play a good role should they cooperate in assistance to the civilian victims or enable voluntary and safe return of the displaced. It is important to study and identify the “incentives that could be used to improve ANSAs compliance with their legal obligations regarding the protection of IDPs” (IDMC, 2011).

Regime-induced conflict victims A large number of forced displacement situations involve deliberate use of coercive force by the governments against their own population. This, ‘regime-induced displacement’ has risen substantially (Orchard, 2010). Cohen and Deng have noted: When governments become directly involved in uprooting minority popula­ tions they often see those who they are uprooting not as their citizens but as the ‘other’. This process of dehumanization enables authorities to more easily explain away the high number of those killed or uprooted. (Cohen and Deng, 2009: 20) Phil Orchard’s study of 103 situations of mass displacement between 1991 and 2006 in 53 countries (involving more than 100,000 refugees or IDPs) demonstrated that there was a high co-relation between civil wars and regime-induced displace­ ment. It was one of the primary causes in 65 of the cases (Orchard, 2010). Orchard writes that “the propensity of regimes in fragile states to displace their own citizens has become a major concern in the post-Cold War era” and that the “frequency of regime-induced displacement has been increasing over time” (Orchard, 2010: 59).

International law and states’ obligation Questions arise as and when the international community requires the consent of a state to either offer and or give international assistance with regard to protection of civilians. Reisman argues that human rights are “constitutive” of the contemporary legal order and that popular sovereignty supersedes the traditional norm of state sovereignty. In a way, a state that rules without popular consent cannot be regar­ ded as sovereign (Reisman, 1990). Therefore, a state that either perpetrates suffer­ ing on the civilian population or is unable to protect them against the mechanizations of non-state actors, cannot be considered worthy of the loyalty of its citizens. What are the provisions of IHRL on this issue? There are some non-derogable rights that must be respected at all times. The Human Rights Committee of International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights has stated that even though some provisions are listed as non-derogable, this does not mean other provisions can be discarded at will. IHRL is applicable when internal displacement is a con­ sequence of internal violence and/or armed conflicts, but is also applied to dis­ placement caused by natural disasters. Under Article 70 of Additional Protocol I to

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the 1949 Geneva Conventions, parties are obliged to agree to humanitarian relief that is conducted in an impartial and non-discriminatory manner. In terms of the Article, offers of relief assistance shall not be regarded as unfriendly acts. Under Article 18(2) of Additional Protocol II, relief measures to mitigate the undue hardship of people caught in internal armed conflicts “shall be undertaken subject to the consent of the government in power”. It has been argued by International Law experts that in cases where it is not possible to determine who has the control of the government, consent would be presumed as assistance is of paramount importance and cannot be delayed (Sandoz, Swinarski and Zimmermann, 1987). The Charter of the UN imposes significant obligations on the Member States in several respects. One of the purposes of the UN under Article 1(3) is to “achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for fundamental freedoms for all …”. Articles 55 and 56 of the Charter elaborate on the aim of international cooperation. However, duty to cooperate regarding humanitarian assistance must be read together with Article 2(7) on non-inter­ ference in domestic jurisdiction. There would be a broad agreement, nonetheless, that this principle should be balanced against the duty to achieve international cooperation under Article 1(3). Francis Deng has argued that duty to cooperate implies a corollary obligation to accept international assistance. Undoubtedly, humanitarian law upholds the right to offer assistance for civilians caught in armed conflicts, whether international or non-international. Bothe argues that international organizations such as the UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) and ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) can undertake unilateral action if there is an unlawful refusal of consent to give relief assistance to the victims of armed conflict. Such refusal may not be considered legal (Bothe, 1989). Moreover, as the ICJ (International Court of Justice) judgment in the Nicaragua case maintained, strictly humanitarian aid given without discrimination is not in violation of international law. The significance of the Principle is self-explanatory especially in view of the contested nature of internal conflicts causing displacement where government authorities and ANSAs are usually at loggerheads. This may cause problems in an impartial and non-discriminatory distribution mechanism. Secondly, since a large number of internal displacement situations are ‘regime-induced’, it is difficult to ensure that the principles of humanity, impartiality and non-discrimination would inform the actions of national authorities. International humanitarian law is quite explicit, in Article 18(2) in Additional Protocol II and Article I in Additional Pro­ tocol I of the Geneva Conventions, that relief actions for the civilian populations need to be carried out in an exclusively humanitarian and impartial manner. Judgment in Nicaragua Case by ICJ also elaborated on the element of non-dis­ crimination in distribution of emergency relief. The ICRC has put it emphatically: [t]he humanitarian character of the action is fulfilled once it is clear that the action is aimed at bringing relief to victims, i.e., in the present case, the civilian

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population lacking essential supplies. What matters most of all is to avoid deception, that is to say, using the relief action for other purposes. […] The impartial character of the action may be assumed on the basis of fulfilling the obligation, also laid down, to conduct the action ‘without any adverse distinction’. (Kèlin, 2008: 113) Paragraph 2 on non-diversion of humanitarian assistance for political or military purposes is equally significant. It directly flows from the first principle in Paragraph I. This requirement assumes urgency in view of the nature of conflict causing dis­ placement. Parties to the conflict may be tempted to divert resources for the ben­ eficiary of their choice or they may attempt to leverage the resources to gain support. The ICRC commentary cited by Kèlin explains that [t]he obligation to protect relief consignments means, on the part of the Party concerned, that it must do its utmost to prevent such relief from being diver­ ted from its legitimate destination, particularly by strictly punishing looting and any other diversion of relief and by providing clear and strict directives to the armed forces. (Kèlin, 2008: 114)

Common Article 3 Under Common Article 3(2) of the Geneva Conventions impartial humanitarian bodies are entrusted to offer their services for the mitigation of the sufferings of the affected civilian population. Article 18(1) Protocol II also refers to this principle. In reference to Article 70(1) Protocol I, ICRC has explained that “[t]he fact that consent is required does not mean that the decision is left to the discretion of the parties”. The authorities cannot refuse relief and assistance without good grounds. This aspect is also covered, to a certain extent, in the various Human Rights Covenants (Kèlin, 2008). The Security Council has also reiterated in almost all its Resolutions dealing with conflict, humanitarian action and displacement since the 1990s that authorities must grant immediate and unimpeded access to international humanitarian organizations. Often such Resolutions have been passed by the Council under Chapter VII of the Charter that deals with the enforcement action in case of defiance. The World Summit in 2005 also underlined the need to ensure “that humanitarian actors have safe and unhindered access to populations in need in conformity with the relevant provisions of international law and national laws” (United Nations General Assembly, 2005). As per Common Article 3 of Geneva Conventions, consent is required only where a relief operation is passing through territory that is controlled by that gov­ ernment. State parties to international human rights treaties also have a positive obligation to provide protection when there are widespread violations of the right to life. After all, human beings have an “inherent right to life”. The ICCPR

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(International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) considers the right to life as inherent and this is recognized as customary international law. As per the Interna­ tional Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), existence of economic, social and cultural rights implies that a state must accept offers of international assistance to IDPs (Loupajärvi, 2003).

International peace: A broader vision The United Nations’ focus on maintenance of international peace and security is encompassing enough to include considerations of the intensity and impact of armed conflicts on the security and welfare of population groups across the inter­ national borders as well as within the boundaries of nation states. As such, numer­ ous armed conflicts played out within the borders have been considered as constituting a threat to the maintenance of international peace and security and hence subject to action under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Chapter VII pro­ visions entitled “Action with Regard to Threats to Peace, Breach of Peace and Acts of Aggression” was widely considered relevant for situations involving inter­ state disputes and resultant war amongst member states of United Nations. Article 2 (7) UN principle required the world body not to interfere in the domestic jur­ isdiction of member states or even required the members to submit a matter to the UN which they considered falling under their domestic jurisdiction. In a way, this was a definite prohibition on the UN action within the territory of the nationstates that constituted the UN. At the same time, it was also readily seen that a plea of domestic jurisdiction may serve as an excuse for UN scrutiny or action necessary to serve the cause of international peace and security. Therefore, the framers of the Charter thought it wise to exempt UN action under Chapter VII as constituting an exception to the otherwise general rule of non-interference in the domestic jur­ isdiction. While some UN actions, especially those constituting and deploying peacekeeping operations in various parts of the world, did blur the line between ‘domestic jurisdiction’ and international action, it was only since 1990s that a broader view of what constitutes a threat to international peace and security caused deployment of Chapter VII measures in situations involving gross human rights abuses and humanitarian crises. The interlinkages between international peace and security and the displacement of civilians, both across the borders as refugee flows and within the state boundaries as internally displaced, were established by numerous resolutions of the Security Council beginning with the decision to establish a no-fly zone in northern Iraq in 1991. Subsequently, the Security Council adopted resolutions in this respect in the cases of Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda and Bosnia as well. In 2004, the Security Council authorized the United Nations Operation in Burundi: to use all necessary means … to ensure the respect of ceasefire agreements … to carry out the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of comba­ tants, … to contribute to the necessary security conditions to the creation for

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the provision of humanitarian assistance, and facilitate the voluntary return of the refugees and internally displaced persons. (UNSC, 2004) Metaphysical focus on state sovereignty cannot blind us to the violence and excesses committed by the rulers on the pretext of maintaining order. Kant main­ tained that morality is higher than authority of the sovereign power. His applica­ tion of universal law supported coercion if it hinders the hindrances to freedom. According to Gomes, this position can be applied to a justification of humanitarian intervention as it “will be a hindrance to the hindrance of freedom, and will thus be consonant with freedom in accordance with universal laws – that is, it will be right” (Gomes, 2011: 1058–59). Moreover, Kant’s formulation of duty is that it is a moral obligation, as individuals who assist others can expect reciprocation at some other time. Humanitarian intervention would be invoked in cases where states fail to provide “even the minimum degree of security and order to their populations”. In such cases, sovereignty ceases to exist (Ayoob, 2002: 109).

ICISS report The report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) entitled “The Responsibility to Protect” has engaged the international community since its publication in 2001 (International Commission on Interven­ tion and State Sovereignty, 2001).The report has been at the centre of animated debate, controversy and international attention for the radical recommendations it offers to address ‘the intervention dilemma’. The context in which the Commis­ sion was constituted under the initiative of the Government of Canada is also noteworthy. It was a response to the open challenge articulated by the UN Secretary-General to the international community to bring in fresh ideas and per­ spectives to put a stop to massive human violations and genocide witnessed in some parts of the world. The Secretary-General asked a pertinent question: Why should it not be possible for the world to put an end to conflict and violence that claim millions of lives while the perpetrators are comfortably ensconced in their offices protected by the wall of State sovereignty? Many commentators contend that the ICISS report addresses the question of humanitarian intervention. The report however begins its consideration by refuting such an association. It refers to four cases – Rwanda, Kosovo, Somalia and Bosnia – where humanitarian intervention was made, or demanded and contemplated, but was given a short shrift. In Rwanda, humanitarian intervention, despite the urgency of the situation given the possibility of genocide, was not undertaken. The result was a most brutal massacre of hundreds of thousands of people. According to the report, this was “a failure of international will – of civic courage – at the highest level. Its consequence was not merely a humanitarian catastrophe for Rwanda: the genocide destabilized the entire Great Lakes region and continues to do so” (ICISS, 2001). In Kosovo, intervention did happen but it raised major

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questions of legitimacy of an intervention that was not authorized by the Security Council. It was undertaken by NATO forces. The report refers to many questions that were raised: How could the bypassing and marginalization of the UN system, by ‘a coali­ tion of the willing’ acting without Security Council approval, possibly be jus­ tified? Did the way in which the intervention was carried out in fact worsen the very human rights situation it was trying to rectify? (ICISS, 2001) Earlier, in 1995, the UN had failed to prevent the massacre of thousands of civi­ lians who had taken shelter in UN designated and maintained ‘safe areas’ in Sreb­ renica. The betrayal of the promised protection had shocked the entire world. In Somalia during 1992–93 “an international intervention to save lives and restore order was destroyed by flawed planning, poor execution, and an excessive depen­ dence on military force” (ICISS, 2001). In fact, as the report mentions, humani­ tarian interventions have been controversial when they have been undertaken and also when they have not been undertaken. All four of the cases – Rwanda, Kosovo, Bosnia and Somalia – have “had a profound effect on how the problem of intervention is viewed, analyzed and characterized” (ICISS, 2001). Failure of the Security Council to act decisively in Rwanda and Kosovo led the Secretary-General to raise some tough questions for the international community in his address to the General Assembly and in his Millennium Address. He chal­ lenged the Member States to “find common ground in upholding the principles of the Charter, and acting in defence of our common humanity” and later, in the Millennium Address, asked “if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unac­ ceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Sreb­ renica – to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?” (ICISS, 2001).

Responsibility to protect Sovereignty embraces a dual responsibility, externally – to respect the sovereignty of other states, and internally – to respect the dignity and basic rights of all the people within the state (ICISS, 2001), and this “modern understanding of the meaning of sovereignty is of central importance in the ICISS approach to the question of intervention for human protection purposes” (ICISS, 2001). The term “humanitarian intervention” is not suitable as there is strong antipathy towards any militarization of the word “humanitarian” (ICISS, 2001). The Commission instead preferred the term “intervention” or even “military intervention” for the purposes of human protection. The Commission felt it is also necessary to re-conceptualize the issues involved with fresh eyes beyond “humanitarian intervention” and embrace the concept of responsibility to protect.

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The language of the earlier debates on “humanitarian intervention” did not help to carry the debate forward and “the language of past debates arguing for or against a ‘right to intervene’ by one state on the territory of another state is outdated and unhelpful”. Instead the Commission preferred “to talk not of a ‘right to intervene’ but of a ‘responsibility to protect’” (ICISS, 2001). The conceptual idea of sover­ eignty as responsibility advocated by Francis M. Deng was referenced by the Commission to deduce and elaborate a responsibility to protect. According to the report: Thinking of sovereignty as responsibility, in a way that is being increasingly recognized in state practice, has a three-fold significance: First, it implies that the state authorities are responsible for the functions of protecting the safety and lives of citizens and promotion of their welfare. Secondly, it suggests that the national political authorities are responsible to the citizens internally and to the international community through the UN. And thirdly, it means that the agents of state are responsible for their actions; that is to say, they are accountable for their acts of commission and omission. The case for thinking of sovereignty in these terms is strengthened by the everincreasing impact of international human rights norms, and the increasing impact in international discourse of the concept of human security. (ICISS, 2001) The ICISS report became the basis of the agreement reached by world leaders in the World Summit Outcome held in 2005 to address atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and war against humanity. They agreed that these crimes must be dealt with under the doctrine of responsibility to protect the populations. Both the UN General Assembly and the Security Council have repeatedly endorsed the concept of responsibility to protect and the theme has been at the centre of quite a few international actions.

Secretary-General’s reports The UN Secretary-General has been presenting regular yearly reports on respon­ sibility to protect to the General Assembly as a follow-up to the outcome of the Millennium Summit. These reports are a statement of the prevailing challenges facing the world and the response mechanism of the UN. The reports provide an overview of the means and methods being employed and contemplated for suitable international action and the role the UN and international community can play in the process. These annual reports relate to and exemplify the state of international preparedness to tackle atrocity crimes and other relevant issues. The mandate for the report of the Secretary-General derives from the three paragraphs of the 2005 World Summit Outcome (Paras, 138, 139 and 140) as mentioned in the first such report to the General Assembly in January 2009. The report entitled “Implementing the Responsibility to Protect” refers to the for­ mulation of the conceptual idea of Francis M. Deng and his colleagues on

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“sovereignty as responsibility” (Deng et al., 1996), which provided the basis for thinking on the report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, co-chaired by Gareth Evans of Australia and Mohamed Sahnoun of Algeria on “Responsibility to Protect” (ICISS, 2001). Earlier, the Secretary-General had appointed a High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. Some of the recommendations of the ICISS report were incorporated in the report of the High-Level Panel (UNGA, 2005b). Relevant recommendations of the High-Level Panel also formed part of the report of the Secretary-General entitled “In Larger Freedom” (UNGA, 2004). These reports provided the material considered by the 2005 World Summit. The General Assembly adopted the Summit Outcome in its Resolution 60/1. The Security Council too had taken due note of the relevant paragraphs of the Summit Out­ come in its Resolution 1674 in 2006. The Council endorsed the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. However, and as the Secretary-General noted, “the credibility, authority and hence effectiveness of the United Nations in advancing the principles relating to the responsibility to protect depend, in large part, on the consistency with which they are applied”. He further noted that “this is particularly true when military force is used to enforce” the responsibility to protect (UN Secretary-General’s Report, 2009).

Atrocity crimes A much needed advancement in offering protection to the civilian population due to armed conflicts has been possible through strengthening international legal commitments against some of the atrocity crimes: Genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The UN has highlighted the overlap and inter-relationship between atrocity crimes and armed conflict: “Atrocity crimes are more likely to occur during armed conflict, especially internal armed conflict. Armed conflict is itself a source of risk for atrocity crimes, while atrocity crimes can also increase the risk of armed conflict”. Armed conflicts do not necessarily involve atrocity crimes and all atrocity crimes do not take place in the context of an armed conflict. The distinctive aspect of atrocity crime is “the deliberate targeting of specific groups, communities or populations, including persons protected under the Geneva Conventions, and sometimes cycles of reaction and counter-reaction between communities” (UN Secretary-General’s Report, 2013). The Secretary-General’s 2013 report on Responsibility to Protect underlines that “focusing exclusively on conflict prevention would overlook atrocity crimes that occur outside of armed conflict or that are not necessarily related to armed conflict” (UN Secretary-General’s Report, 2013). The report explains the atrocity crimes and key distinction between them: Genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity have much in common with regard to the specific prohibited acts and thus the

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associated risk factors. Nevertheless, there are key distinctions. In the case of genocide, the distinction lies in the intent of the perpetrators to “destroy in whole or in part” a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. War crimes can be committed only in the context of armed conflict or occupation. War crimes may include the targeting of civilian infrastructures that are not military objectives and of anyone no longer taking an active part in hostilities as well as the use of weapons prohibited under international law. Crimes against humanity are distinguished by the systematic or widespread nature of the gross human rights violations committed. War crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity may be committed in the course of the same event or can be precursors to other atrocity crimes. (UN Secretary-General’s Report, 2013) It needs to be emphasized that these acts are provided for in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. All acts constituting the crimes and violations related to the responsibility to protect are prohibited under international customary law. These are binding on all the states and override their treaty obligations. Ethnic cleansing is yet to be defined as a distinct crime under international criminal law but it is “often a result of a combination of acts that could constitute genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity”.

Collective security The Secretary-General has emphasized the principle of collective security for the fulfillment of measures for the responsibility to protect and noted that each indi­ vidual state has undertaken an obligation to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity as per paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome. This includes a responsibility to prevent the commission of such acts, support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability and assist those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out (UN Secretary-General’s Report, 2014). UN Member States have also confirmed “their readiness to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner and in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations”. A key distinction of the Responsi­ bility to Protect principle is to shift “the discussion from the discretion or right of third parties to intervene to the responsibility that a variety of actors have, at dif­ ferent levels, to assist in protecting potential victims of atrocity crimes”. Thus a framework of collective responsibility pervades the obligations of states for respon­ sibility to protect the civilian population from atrocity crimes (UN Secretary-General’s Report, 2014). Concerted engagement in Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Kenya and Kyrgyzstan has helped to avert atrocity crimes but “outbreaks of inter-communal violence in the

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Central African Republic and South Sudan represent significant failures to prevent atrocity crimes”. The report also notes that “international action has not proved effective in addressing the situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” despite heightened concern over human rights. In Iraq and the Syrian Arab Republic, “the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and other violent extremist groups has resulted in an increase in atrocity crimes and the deliberate targeting of religious minorities” (UN Secretary-General’s Report, 2015). The brutality of assorted crimes committed by ANSAs such as ISIL, Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab has disturbed the conscience of humanity. These barbaric practices by terrorist groups call for modification of “the ways in which [interna­ tional community] anticipates, prevents and responds to the commission of atrocity crimes” (UN Secretary-General’s Report, 2015).

Conclusion Armed conflicts are at the root of the protection crisis for the civilian populations of the world. An international assistance and protection regime for the conflictaffected civilians would depend on international cooperation. In cases where the national authorities refuse to or are unable to address causes and consequences of armed conflicts, it becomes incumbent for the international community to inter­ vene under a responsibility to protect. However, much would depend on available international cooperation on a given issue. Political divisions, particularly within the Security Council, are exacerbating the move away from decisive action — whether for prevention or for response. In some contexts, where atrocity crimes have been committed, or where populations are at risk, major global powers sup­ port opposing factions and put these allegiances ahead of their protection respon­ sibilities. The founders of the United Nations recognized the importance of harnessing the power of key States to an effective collective security system, but they also expected members of the Security Council to use their power responsibly and in the interests of greater security for all. Today, however, Security Council deliberations frequently fail to generate common solutions and at times serve to deepen discord among Member States. The Security Council may “remain seized” about a matter, but this is of little relevance to suffering populations unless concrete steps forward are taken. Despite the severity and longevity of the civil war in Syria, the UN was unable to intervene in any meaningful way as the Security Council remained paralyzed without a consensus and the civil war degenerated into a fullblown international war. In the case of atrocities against the Rohingyas in Myan­ mar, the international community could hardly intervene and the plight of the affected population group within the country and outside of it remains vulnerable. Nonetheless, we may derive some consolation from a series of developments that is positive and impacting. The civilian victims of atrocity crimes are at the centre stage of international attention and action like never before. The excuse of domestic jurisdiction is now considered too weak when citizens are subjected to

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gross violations of human rights. Atrocity crimes may lead to international inter­ vention as there is a responsibility to protect the civilian victims of conflicts and crime. We are witnessing a gradual strengthening of the international regime in this direction. This is the need of an interdependent world.

References Ayoob, M. (2004). Third World Perspectives on Humanitarian Intervention and International Administration. Global Governance, 10(1): 81–102. Bothe, M. (1989). The Position of the Recipient State. In F. Kalshoven (ed.), Assisting the Victims of Armed Conflict and Other Disasters (pp. 91–98). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publications. Cohen, R. and Deng, F.M. (2009). Mass Displacement Caused by Conflicts and One-sided Vio­ lence: National and International Responses. SIPRI Yearbook, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deng, F.M., Kimaro, S., Lyons, T., Rothchild, D. and Zartman, W. (1996). Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001). The Responsibility to Protect, Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Ottawa, Canada: International Development Research Centre. Retrieved from http://responsibili tytoprotect.org/ICISS%20Report.pdf Kaldor, M. (2013). In Defence of New Wars. Stability: International Journal of Security and Development. Retrieved from https://www.stabilityjournal.org/articles/10.5334/sta.at/ Kèlin, W. (2008). Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement Annotations. Washington, DC: The American Society of International Law & The Brookings Institution – University of Bern Project on Internal Displacement. Lambert, H. and Farrell, T. (2010). The Changing Character of Armed Conflict and the Implications for Refugee Protection Jurisprudence. International Journal of Refugee Law, 22: 237–273. Loupajärvi, K. (2004). Is There an Obligation on States to Accept International Assistance to Internally Displaced Persons Under International Law. International Journal of Refugee Law, 15: 693–698. Orchard, P. (2010). The Perils of Humanitarianism: Refugee and IDP Protection in Situa­ tions of Regime-Induced Displacement. Refugee Survey Quarterly, 29: 38–60. Reisman, M. (1990). Sovereignty and Human Rights in Contemporary International Law. American Journal of Refugee Law, 84: 869–873. Report of the Conference Organized by Geneva Call and IDMC (2011). Armed Non-State Actors and the Protection of Internally Displaced People. Geneva, Switzerland. Retrieved from http:// www.internal-displacement.org/sites/default/files/publications/documents/201106-Armed-n on-State-actors-and-the-protection-of-internally-displaced-people-IDMC-GenevaCall-ANSA s-thematic-en.pdf (last accessed on 20 March 2020). Sandoz, Y., Swinarski, C. and Zimmermann, B. (eds) (1987). Commentary on the Additional Protocols of 8 June 1977 to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949. Geneva, Switzerland: Martinus Nijhoff Publications. Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_La w/pdf/Commentary_GC_Protocols.pdf (last accessed on 20 March 2020). United Nations General Assembly (2005a). Resolution A/RES/60/1. Retrieved from https:// www.un.org/en/sections/documents/general-assembly-resolutions/ (last accessed on 20 March 2020).

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United Nations General Assembly (2005b). Report of the Secretary-General, A/59/2005. Retrieved from https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-C F6E4FF96FF9%7D/CPR%20A%2059%202005.pdf (last accessed on 8 May 2020). United Nations General Assembly (2009). Report of the Secretary-General, A/63/677. Retrieved from https://undocs.org/A/63/677 (last accessed on 20 March 2020). United Nations General Assembly (2013). Report of the Secretary-General, A/67/929-S/2013/ 399. Retrieved from https://undocs.org/A/67/929 (last accessed on 20 March 2020). United Nations General Assembly Security Council (2014). Report of the Secretary-General: Fulfilling Our Collective Responsibility: International Assistance and the Responsibility to Protect, A/68/947-S/2014/449. Retrieved from https://undocs.org/A/68/947 (last accessed on 20 March 2020). United Nations General Assembly Security Council (2015). Report of the Secretary-General, A/ 69/981–S/2015/500. Retrieved from https://undocs.org/A/69/981 (last accessed on 20 March 2020). United Nations Security Council (2004). Resolution 1545(2004): Burundi. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/resolutions-0 (last accessed on 20 March 2020). United Nations Security Council (2005). Resolution 1612(2005): Children and Armed Conflict. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/resolutions-adopted-secur ity-council-2005 (last accessed on 20 March 2020).

9 TOWARDS SUSTAINING PEACE A transformative UN approach Priyankar Upadhyaya

Since its founding, the United Nations (UN) has upheld its image as the single most important global institution devoted to the cause of peace. Amid the turbu­ lence and upheavals of past decades, it has pre-empted, mediated and deployed peacekeeping operations and facilitated successful peace processes to defuse and resolve conflicts worldwide. The three predicates of the UN peace and security architecture – peace and security, human rights and development – have inspired a range of trajectories to handle the growing complexity of new and old conflicts and other non-traditional threats to peace and security.1 Alongside remarkable developments signifying progress and innovations, the UN peace agenda has had to reckon with multi-layered criticisms. For instance, many scholars interrogate the foundational influence of Eurocentric visions, which con­ fined global peace and security to Cold War legacies, disregarding decolonization conflicts and related struggles. Detractors also question the continuing hegemony of powerful countries and financial institutions in moulding liberal peacebuilding in ways that might legitimize the crafting and continuation of neo-colonial structures within emerging national systems of governance. These and many other issues have resonated and polarized opinions in UN corridors, as well as in global discourses on peace. This chapter contextualizes the major trends and landmarks in the dynamic evolution of the UN approach to peace, ranging from the narrower concerns of peace during the Cold War era to the evolving expanse of positive peace and the more recent holistic visions of ‘sustaining peace’ embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The study highlights the resurgent framework of ‘sustaining peace’ as a transformative trajectory of peacebuilding. In this new con­ figuration, peacebuilding is no longer restricted to post-conflict situations or the contexts where conflict is manifest or proximate. It is now conceptualized in the broader canvas and links up organically with preventive diplomacy and

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peacemaking. Accordingly, the UN Secretariat has been working to restructure the key entities concerned with the ‘peace and conflict pillar’ so as “to ensure more joined up, cross-pillar engagement to prevent conflict and build and sustain peace” (UN, 2017c). The UN’s role in bringing together 193 countries to set up a proactive global agenda around ‘sustaining peace’ and the SDGs has been a historic move. Is the UN on the threshold of redefining the traditional concept of peace? How does the emerging concept of sustaining peace relate to the recent emphasis of ‘conflict prevention’ and ‘diplomacy for peace’? Might ‘sustaining peace’ be viewed as another “Trojan horse for outside intervention” (Mahmoud, 2017: 1), like some earlier approaches? Or should the focus be on identifying context-specific factors as a starting point for sustaining peace, making it primarily a local process best undertaken through national policies and local actors? Although there is still not much clarity about such issues there is however no doubt that ‘sustaining peace’ represents a highpoint in the dynamic UN peace agenda, reflecting the continued expansion of peace discourses from its state-centric focus to larger societal concerns including social justice, poverty alleviation, women and youth empowerment for peace. As such, the peace studies can draw critical insights from the dynamic evo­ lution of the UN peace agenda culminating in the transformative philosophy of sustaining peace.

Dynamic evolution The evolution of the UN peace agenda, since its inception to the present day, is linked to changing trends and debates in peace and conflict studies. The conceptual progression from negative to positive peace, and from the ‘universalism’ of liberal theories of peace to national or local ownership of peace, corresponds closely to similar developments in UN parlance. Perhaps the most significant indicator of the dynamic UN peace agenda has been the constant evolution of its methodologies to achieve peace. In the course of over seven decades, the UN has conceptualized, developed and fine-tuned a range of trajectories to ‘make’ peace in various conflict situations. Beginning with the challenges of post-war insecurities, the UN has constantly tried to modify its approach through the Cold War threats of large-scale interstate wars to the unprecedented spurt of civilian violence in a post-bipolar world. While preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention have elicited a stronger focus in recent times, methodologies such as peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding have taken on new dimensions to meet new forms of conflict and threats. Notwithstanding the immediate challenge of creating an international security structure and instruments to avoid the carnage caused by the Second World War, the founders of the United Nations were conscious of the multiple ways in which peace must be nurtured over the long term. Beginning with its foundational commitment to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”, the United Nations Charter established three founding pillars: peace and security, human rights

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and development. The coupling of peace and security with human rights and development gave a broader meaning to the concept of ‘peace’ within the UN system. The preamble of the Constitution of UNESCO, which highlights the need to construct the defences of peace in the minds of men and women, is a quintessential example of such a holistic understanding. The unblocking of the Security Council in the early 1990s, however, paved the way for a renewal of the UN’s prime commitment to preserving and maintaining peace. A significant step towards redefining the UN preventive approach was taken in 1992 with the launch of the report An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peacekeeping by then UN Secretary-General Boutros BoutrosGhali. Boutros-Ghali wanted the UN to adopt an integrated agenda with conflict prevention at its core, the aim of which would be: “to seek to identify at the ear­ liest possible stage situations that could produce conflict, and to try through diplomacy to remove the sources of danger before violence resulted” (BoutrosGhali, 1992). While An Agenda for Peace highlighted the importance of early warning, mediation, confidence-building measures, fact-finding, preventive deployment and peace zones, subsequent UN policy papers such as the Agenda for Development (1994) significantly expanded preventive measures to include such diverse vectors as humanitarian aid, arms control, social welfare, military deployment and the media. Similarly, the role of the UN Secretary-General in peacemaking has evolved over recent decades, largely through precedents. A greater focus on preventive diplomacy during the post-Cold War era by successive Secretary-Generals has led to a remarkable rise in the deployment of personal envoys or special rapporteurs to facilitate peace agreements in protracted conflicts. The UNITAR-led Peacemaking and Conflict Prevention Programme, initiated in 1993, is one instructive example of UN efforts in conflict prevention and resolution. Accordingly, peacemaking is increasingly becoming an organic part of a larger continuum alongside preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. While the UN Charter does not refer to ‘peacekeeping’ per se, the concept was developed based on its general principles and, in subsequent years, became a core activity of the UN peace agenda. After the launch of the first UN peacekeeping mission in the Middle East in 1948 by the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), peacekeeping gradually developed into one of the main UN peace and security tools to defuse complex threats to international peace and security. The ‘Blue Helmets’ of peacekeepers are perhaps the most recognizable emblem of UN peace work around the world. Notwithstanding the limitations of the Cold War, peacekeepers contributed significantly to the cause of peace by defusing violent conflicts and creating situations conducive for negotiations between warring parties. In 1988, the UN peacekeeping forces were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Indeed, the purpose and scope of UN peacekeeping operations expanded in manifold ways during the post-Cold War era with the emergence of post-conflict peacebuilding. This was a result of the post-bipolar consensus to provide a greater role for the UN to address the unprecedented rise in intrastate

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conflicts. The number of blue-helmeted soldiers soared from about 15,000 in 1991 to more than 76,000 in 1994, with new responsibilities and tasks entrusted to their role.

Peacebuilding from the top or below After the 1992 publication of An Agenda for Peace, peace researchers turned their critical attention to the concept of peacebuilding. Many felt that the emerging UN mandate for peacebuilding was grounded in the resurgence of liberal inter­ nationalism and the idea of a democratic transition to peace (Bertram, 1995; Hea­ thershaw, 2008). This idea was supported by development research promoting good governance to remedy fragile states, coupled with peace research asserting that democracies are unlikely to go to war against each other (Gleditsch and Hegre, 1997). Together, research on ‘liberal peace’ provided arguments in favour of eco­ nomic development and democratization as the pathway to a prosperous, peaceful world. As the ‘liberal peace’ agenda took hold, researchers started to raise questions focusing on the underpinnings of contemporary ideas about peacebuilding in lib­ eral ideology, as well as the organization of multilateral peacebuilding institutions, mechanisms and frameworks. These critiques centred on the peacebuilding poten­ tial of the twin tenets of the ‘liberal peace’ project: democratization and economic liberalization. As described by Neclâ Tschirgi (2004: 4–5), the liberal peacebuilding ‘template’ was based on the premise that fundamental social ‘engineering’ of conflict-prone societies is essential to prevent their relapse into conflict. It was sug­ gested that the resurgent model of peacebuilding represented a hegemonic application of Western ideas and practices, applied rather condescendingly and without exploring other suitable modes of peacebuilding (Mac Ginty, 2006: 144). In the words of Oliver Richmond (2004: 91): “The question of what peace might be expected to look like from the inside is given less credence than the way the international community and its organizers and actors desire to see it from the outside”. According to Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver Richmond (2013: 764) this “tension is also visible in contradictions between local and international perspectives of what peace is and how it may be achieved”. In response to repeated failures to produce peace through military operations, serious questions have been raised about the ethical and legal consequences of military intervention on humanitarian grounds, and difficulties in differentiating between humanitarian intervention and an operation to achieve regime change. Writing on the securitization of the peace agenda, Tschirgi (2004: 17–18) argues that the term ‘peacebuilding’ has been conflated with a new post-9/11 discourse of ‘nation-building’, ‘regime change’ and ‘stabilization’, driven by the national secur­ ity interests of dominant external actors, with the United States as the ‘critical player’. Robin Luckham (2005: 17–18) argues that this new interventionism is marked by a “developmentalization of security”, as security and military experts find themselves called to implement development-based peacebuilding missions.

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Of late, the top-down model of peacebuilding has come under increasing criti­ cism. A burgeoning post-millennial body of research raised doubts about the con­ temporary liberal peacebuilding recipe, generating numerous ‘lessons learned’ and ‘best practices’. According to Lederach, modern peacebuilding needs to go beyond top-down statist diplomacy and focus on reconciliation and the rebuilding of rela­ tionships (Graf, Kramer and Nicolescou, 2007). Peacebuilding in its expanded version is defined as a “comprehensive concept that encompasses, generates, and sustains the full array of processes, approaches, and stages needed to transform conflict toward more sustainable, peaceful relationships” (Lederach, 1997: 20). Peacebuilding activities may, therefore, contribute either to ending or avoiding armed conflict, and “may be carried out during armed conflict, in its wake or as an attempt to prevent an anticipated armed conflict from starting” (Smith, 2004: 20). Thus, peacebuilding may involve ‘working around conflict’, ‘working in conflict’ and ‘working on conflict’, where it is feasible (Kievelitz, Kruk and Frieters, 2003: 8). Notwithstanding the expanding horizons of peacebuilding, some researchers still prefer ‘conflict transformation’ as a more comprehensive strategy of transforming a society towards peace (Lederach, 1997; Graf et al., 2007). As Hugh Miall (2004) points out, transformation towards peace requires more than the identification of win–win outcomes that benefit conflicting parties. Conflict transformation requires a process of engagement, transforming the relationships, interests, discourses and, if necessary, the very constitution of a society that supports the continuation of vio­ lent conflict. This suggests “a comprehensive and wide-ranging approach, empha­ sizing support for groups within the society in conflict rather than for the mediation of outsiders” (Miall, 2004: 14). There is thus an increasing consensus that peacebuilding works best as a trans­ formative process involving stakeholders from ‘below’ within local institutions and civil society. Top-down approaches relying on exogenous methodology do not sustain peace, as they tend to erode the peacebuilding capacities of local institutions and civil society. The discontent with the liberal peacebuilding discourse has led researchers, as well as practitioners, to turn to alternative peacebuilding concepts, including multi-track peacebuilding, to produce more inclusive and sustainable political transitions (Galvanek and Planta, 2017: 18). Some have highlighted the importance of blending the top-down implementation of peace accords with bottom-up processes to heal societal divisions and engender societal ownership of the agreement (Prendergast and Plumb, 2002). Cautioning against a ‘one-size-fits­ all version of peacebuilding’, the Utstein Study2 emphasizes the importance of tai­ loring each intervention to the requirements of the situation, while simultaneously improving overall strategic collaboration by standardizing peacebuilding planning mechanisms (Smith, 2004).

Towards sustaining peace A decade after its creation, the peacebuilding architecture was comprehensively reviewed by three independent panels. Recognizing the narrow interpretation of

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‘peacebuilding’ simply as post-conflict intervention, the Advisory Group of Experts for the 2015 Review of the UN Peacebuilding Architecture introduced a much wider concept of ‘sustaining peace’ to supplant peacebuilding. The other two panels – the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) and the High-Level Advisory Group for the Global Study on the Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) – also highlighted the need to widen the scope of peacebuilding. All three reviews cross-referenced each other’s work in their recommendations while presenting a blueprint for the emerging notion of ‘sustaining peace’ as a counterpoint to peacebuilding. The UN Security Council and General Assembly thus adopted landmark iden­ tical resolutions on sustaining peace in April 2016, thereby multiplying the scope of peacebuilding (UN, 2016; UNSC, 2016). The preamble of the dual resolution introduces a brand new conceptual trajectory of ‘sustaining peace’, comprising “activities aimed at preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recur­ rence of conflict, addressing root causes, assisting parties in conflict to end hosti­ lities, ensuring national reconciliation, and moving towards recovery, reconstruction and development”. The holistic vision of ‘sustaining peace’ is one of the key trajectories of the new UN plan to foster peaceful, just and inclusive societies, free from fear and all forms of violence. Predicated on the concept of ‘sustaining peace’, the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council have reached a well-formulated consensus to prevent all forms of violence, recognizing the symbiotic relationship between peace, sustainable development and human rights across a wide humanitarian expanse. The concept of ‘sustaining peace’ has indeed reframed the scope and metho­ dology of UN peacebuilding. While the term ‘sustaining peace’ is not distinguished explicitly from peacebuilding, it sets out a new ambitious agenda and approach for UN efforts to build peace. Hitherto, the mandate of the Peacebuilding Commis­ sion was confined to post-conflict situations and treated prevention solely as a form of post-conflict mitigation, rather than a means of averting the outbreak of conflict in the first place. ‘Peacebuilding’, instead of denoting a comprehensive process, was narrowly construed in terms of time-bound, exogenous interventions that take place ‘after the guns fall silent’ in fragile or conflict-affected states (UN, 2015). Sustaining peace, on the other hand, does not define peace as the binary oppo­ site of conflict, and as such, can “reclaim peace in its own right and detach it from the subservient affiliation with conflict that has defined it over the past four dec­ ades” (Mahmoud, 2017). The term ‘peacebuilding’ thus no longer remains con­ fined to the post-conflict scenario. Detaching peacebuilding from the margins of post-conflict situations increases its relevance to all phases of conflict – before, during and after hostilities – implying that peacebuilding should be undertaken simultaneously with peacekeeping, development and humanitarian activities. Con­ flict prevention has been assigned a central role in ‘sustaining peace’. Making eight separate references to conflict prevention, the preamble of the joint resolution highlighted the centrality of prevention in the ‘sustaining peace’ schema (UN, 2016).

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The new methodology of peacebuilding which embodies ‘sustaining peace’ addresses the fact that violent conflicts are seldom linear, sequential processes, and that there is rarely an ordered transition from ‘state fragility’ to armed violence and humanitarian assistance, or from peacemaking to peacekeeping and peacebuilding. It represents an acknowledgement that circular or vicious cycles are more typical, with conflicts escalating to various forms of social tension, political strife and vio­ lence, particularly in light of the changing nature of violent conflicts in recent years (PBSO, 2017). According to the new resolution (UN, 2016), ‘sustaining peace’ is “a goal and a process to build a common vision of society”. While this process is hard to define and harder still to break into concrete, operational steps, the resolution offers sev­ eral building blocks to that end. These include enhancing the links between peace, development and human rights; creating inclusive national ownership in which local actors have a consistent voice and women and youth play a critical role; and promoting more strategic and close partnerships with diverse stakeholders. Con­ ceptually speaking, the idea of sustaining peace seems to be well grounded in endogenous processes and context-specific capacities embedded in national policies. Conceived as a shared public good and a collective endeavour engaging all stake­ holders, it lacks the features of a donor-driven outside intervention, as apprehended by some sceptics. With new resolutions, ‘sustaining peace’ now sits at the heart of the UN peace and security pillar. Although it remains a work in progress, the nascent conceptualization of sustaining peace promises a transformative and comprehensive roadmap to meet today’s complex challenges to peace, human rights and development – the three pillars of the United Nations. More significantly, the new approach recognizes that sustaining peace is everyone’s business, and should be accorded the highest priority in the agenda of each UN agency and mission. It represents a shared task and responsibility to be fulfilled by the respective governments together with all other national stakeholders, and should ‘flow through all three pillars of the UN’s engagement at all stages of conflict’ (UN, 2016). All these measures require sustained support and attention on the part of the international community. Sustainable Development Goal 16 concerns peace most directly, and aims “to foster peaceful, just and inclusive societies which are free from fear and violence”. It sets targets for reducing all forms of violence in all countries, ensuring access to justice for all, and building effective, accountable and inclusive institutions. It underpins the need to address the root causes of conflict by synergising the imperatives of peace, sustainable development and human rights, “from conception to execution”, in the words of Secretary-General António Guterres. Goal 16 is linked intrinsically with some of the SDGs and lies at the heart of ‘sustaining peace’. In all, 36 targets from seven other SDGs directly measure an aspect of peace, inclusion or access to justice, only a third of which are found in SDG 16. Described as SDG 16+, these additional targets propose to strengthen the case for universality; identify factors that entrench inequality between and within countries; place a gender and human rights perspective at the heart of efforts to achieve peace,

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justice and inclusion; underline the need for international cooperation to deliver the 40 per cent of SDG 16+ targets that have a global or regional dimension; and inspire partnerships that bring together those working on governance, justice, human rights, security, public health, education, jobs, social welfare and other challenges (Steven, 2017: 7). Agenda 2030 and the reframing of peacebuilding as ‘sustaining peace’ are com­ plementary and mutually reinforcing, with Goal 16 providing a live connection between the two trajectories. Both are people-centred and focus on various drivers of violent conflict that relate directly to the socio-economic and environmental aspects of sustainable development, including economic, social and environmental inequalities, lack of jobs, poor natural resource management and climate change. Investing in ‘sustaining peace’ means investing in basic services, bringing humani­ tarian and development agencies together, building more effective and accountable institutions, protecting human rights, promoting social cohesion and diversity, ensuring the meaningful participation of women and girls in all areas of society, and moving towards sustainable energy. Strengthening the rule of law and pro­ moting human rights are pathways to this process, as are reducing the flow of illicit arms, and strengthening the participation of developing countries in institutions of global governance. Within this matrix, ‘sustaining peace’ is construed as both an enabler and an outcome of sustainable development (UN, 2016, 2017a). With the unprecedented emphasis on sustaining peace, the UN system has accorded a high priority to reinstating a holistic conception to peace, development and human rights. While development and human rights are being defined in a more comprehensive manner, the concept of peace has been expanded through various resolutions, reports and goals. This emerging awareness is reflected sharply in the recent recognition of the complementarity between sustaining peace and the goals of Agenda 2030. Recognizing the organic links between the two amid intertwined global challenges such as rising inequality and climate change, UN Secretary-General Guterres has called for “a global response that addresses the root causes of conflict, and integrates peace, sustainable development and human rights in a holistic way, from conception to execution”. The rising scale of violence in today’s hyper-connected world clearly signals the inadequacy of the existing international peace agenda. The changing spectre of threats, both traditional and non-traditional, have provided greater justification for a holistic approach to peace that could transcend Cold War legacies and include a range of humanitarian concerns along with regional and local concerns of peace. Many recent initiatives both within and outside the UN system are symptomatic of this broadening and deepening of the global agenda of peace.

Challenges and learnings The evolution of the UN peace agenda over the past seven decades and the cor­ responding academic discourse suggest an emerging trend in favour of an inclusive approach to peace and peacebuilding. It is no longer possible to conflate peace

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with the narrow state-centric visions that dominated the Cold War era, notwith­ standing resistance from those who suspect that such a broadening of the peace agenda might dilute its focus from the core issue of war and nuclear disarmament. There is a realization that the confinement of peace to a narrower template has not done justice to this empowering and emancipatory idea. However, despite the recent advances in the UN agenda for peace, the world has not become any more peaceful. While large-scale interstate wars have declined, the severity of violence, both direct and indirect, continues unabated. Growing inequalities, aggravated by the consequences of globalization along with youth radicalization, religious fanaticism, acts of intolerance and ‘cultural cleansing’ have multiplied threats to peaceful co-existence. Referring to the increasingly complex nature of violent conflict in today’s turbulent world, the International Decade for the Rapprochement of Cultures declaration observes: [R]ecurrent cycles of deadlock and conflict undermine governance and legis­ lation at international, national and local levels preventing long-term peace and development. The litany of polarization within our societies often defined along the lines of ‘identity’ – religious, cultural, ethnic or otherwise – are increasingly manifested in prejudice, intolerance, racism, xenophobia, discrimination, radicalization and extreme violence. (UNESCO, 2016) The trust of people in democratic institutions and governance is waning in many parts of the world. The challenge of political, social and economic inclusion remains daunting, in particular with regard to persistent exploitation based on gender, caste, class, race, ethnicity and nationality. Mounting refugee crises and growing civilian causalities in terrorist attacks also continue to blight the lives of millions of the world’s most vulnerable people. Unsurprisingly, the UN’s peacebuilding credentials have come under critical scrutiny in many conflict-ridden areas. The Syrian conflict is a recent example where UN agencies have struggled to uphold their responsibility to protect the people of Syria. The failure to devise meaningful responses to the crisis has once again raised doubts about the very raison d’être of the UN’s Responsibility to Protect. The 2017 Report of the Secretary-General on the Responsibility to Pro­ tect (R2P) admitted that “Despite this support coming from the highest levels of Government – the responsibility to protect doctrine has failed to be adequately upheld” (UN, 2017b). At the same time, the growing contention over humani­ tarian interventions has led many to doubt the continued relevance of the termi­ nology of R2P. Members of the international community, especially from the global South, have raised doubts about the objectivity of military interventions on humanitarian grounds (Upadhyaya, 2005). Such contentions are also found in arguments over human security, as well as in debates on the Right to Peace. Evidently, there is a growing urgency within UN circles to develop an inclusive and overarching framework for implementing peace, with preventive action at its

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fore. The ‘sustaining peace’ agenda, which was launched in 2015, now incorporates a greater UN focus on ‘preventive diplomacy’. Indeed, the new emphasis on lea­ dership, accountability and performance management around the surge in pre­ ventive diplomacy, an emerging ‘whole-pillar’ approach and the proposal to establish a High-Level Advisory Board on Mediation is suggestive of a major transformation in the ethos and work culture of the peace and security architecture. The UN Secretary-General’s much anticipated Report on Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace is a bold policy innovation to revamp UN’s approach to manage and resource its peacebuilding efforts and “to ensure greater coherence and accountability within those pillars and generate greater coherence and synergies across the United Nations system” (UN, 2018). By firmly positioning preventive action at the fore­ front of peacebuilding and highlighting new tools along with better management and financial practices, the report lays the groundwork for a much-needed reno­ vation of concerned UN structures and processes to deal more effectively with the complex challenges of sustaining peace in today’s turbulent world. The major challenge which lies before the UN peace agenda is to reconcile universal standards of peacebuilding with the exigencies of the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding. The ‘local turn’ argument, which favours ‘inclusive national own­ ership’ for peace operations, challenges many core assumptions of top-down liberal peacebuilding. It is widely felt that efficacious conflict prevention action must prioritize a community‐first approach, acknowledging the needs and concerns of local communities involved in the conflict. It is important to focus on local per­ spectives and conflict dynamics, particularly as experienced by marginalized groups in the affected communities. Local ownership of conflict prevention activities is, therefore, a prerequisite for sustaining peace. However, all too frequently, ‘national ownership’ is defined narrowly and equated with acquiescing to the strategies and priorities of the national govern­ ment. In divided post-conflict societies, such an approach risks perpetuating exclusion. Just as importantly, in the aftermath of violence, neither a cohesive nation-state, nor an inclusive or effective system of governance, should be taken as givens. The national responsibility to drive efforts to sustain peace must, therefore, be shared across all social groups and encompass a wide spectrum of political opi­ nions, including those of women and youth. Clearly, peace activities need to emerge organically from within society, in order to address the multiple concerns and aspirations of different sectors and seek common ground, so that all sectors feel involved in strategies, policies and mechanisms that offer a way forward. Peace cannot be imposed from outside, but neither can it be imposed by domestic elites or authoritarian governments on fractious populations that lack even minimal trust in their leadership or each other. However, the need for ‘national ownership’ should not be allowed to become a justification for inaction. The ‘local turn’ may in certain respects contradict the universalism that lies at the heart of the liberal peace model, as well as notions of universal human rights. However, the focus on local agency highlights the multifaceted nature of peace and redefines the meaning of peace and legitimacy in different contexts, from

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maintaining a livelihood to striving for autonomy, aspiring for social justice or expressing an identity. One implication of the ‘local turn’ is a retreat from some of the certitudes and binaries that underpin conventional modes of thinking. This opens up the possibility of emancipation and empathy in a local to a global fra­ mework. In comparison to the top-down service delivery and capacity-building approach, the ‘local turn’ is grounded in grass-root perspectives, drawing on the values, identity and needs of subjects, rather than the ‘benevolent’ assumptions of national and global elites, whose vanguard cosmopolitanism and centralized narratives of peace and globalization seldom manifest themselves in sustainable outcomes. Described as hybrid forms of peace, the new generation of peace theories represents a combination of norms and interests prescribed by international actors as well as local actors and their cultural imperatives. Peace in such emerging visions is no longer viewed as a state-centric activity, but rather as everyone’s business. It revolves more around everyday action in accepting, resisting and reshaping inter­ ventions, and the unique forms of peace that emerge from interactions between local and international actors (Richmond and Mitchell, 2012). Indeed, the scholarship on peace, as well as institutional practice, is still mired in tensions between the proponents of a universal, objective and singular approach to peace, and those who view it as plural, diverse, subjective and culturally contextual. The schism between the two approaches is not only theoretical, it also has a critical bearing on the institutional practices of peacebuilding. While universalists insist on universal norms and principles, and centralized coordination, integration and ‘deli­ vering as one’, their opponents argue for the local ownership of peace, indigenous knowledge and skills, and local participation in the peace process. However, efforts are now underway to reconcile these contrary positions by adopting positive ele­ ments from both. Gëzim Visoka (2016), for instance, highlights the importance of bringing about “peace between peace theories”. He suggests that ‘reality congruent’ research can help find a path drawing on the strengths of both liberal inter­ ventionism and critical emancipatory approaches. Visoka draws on Norbert Elias’s ideas of ‘figurational sociology’ to explore structured configurations, unexpected outcomes and agency in a locally rooted approach that goes beyond critical thinking to explore ways to advance more ethical and more useful research findings. In practice, though, the emerging trend in several conflict zones favours hybrid forms of peace, blending international norms of liberal peace and interests with local forms of agency and identity. Scholars such as Richmond (2014: 125) describe such phe­ nomena as “the emergence of a post-liberal peace in hybrid form (i.e. a positive hybrid form of peace), representing the next step in peace theory and practice”. Along with the ‘local turn’ in international peacebuilding, there is renewed interest in exploring indigenous, customary and traditional institutions and approaches to conflict resolution and peacebuilding, and in considering whether they can co-exist with traditional and context-specific approaches to conflict reso­ lution (Upadhyaya and Upadhyaya, 2017). The key issue is whether such co-exis­ tence leads to more or better conflict resolution options for the population, thereby promoting conflict settlement processes (Galvanek and Planta, 2017).

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The emerging consensus on sustaining peace equates peace not only with the absence of conflict but also with the synergetic presence of diverse vectors that prevent and transform conflict in a peaceful and constructive manner. Nurturing peace in today’s interconnected world thus requires a broader canvas that along with the imperatives of human rights and development also entails a vibrant focus on education for peace, global citizenship, cultural diversity and intercultural dia­ logue. Such holistic visions of peace resonate well with the ethos of ‘culture of peace’, which has been described as “a set of values, attitudes, modes of behaviour and ways of life that reject violence and prevent conflicts by tackling their root causes to solve problems through dialogue and negotiation among individuals, groups, and nations” (UN Resolution A/Res/52/13, 20 November 1997). Lead­ ing peace researchers consider this description to be the most progressive definition of peace to date (Richmond, 2014: 125). While there is every reason to support the emerging paradigm of ‘preventive action’ embedded in ‘sustaining peace’, the diverse and politically contested nature of peace needs to be recognized, not as a part of the problem, but as an inherent part of the solution. Indeed, peace is never apolitical, it is always politically charged. Peace can be radically transformative or it can be a passive acceptance of wrongdoing and injustice. Just as conflict is inevitable to the human experience, the concept of ‘peace’ will always be a site of arguments and a journey of discovery.

Notes 1 The three foundational pillars have recently been linked to the 5 Ps of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – people, planet, prosperity, partnership and peace. 2 The Joint Utstein Study of Peacebuilding (2003) was commissioned by four partner countries of the Utstein group – Norway, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany.

References Bertram, E. (1995). Reinventing governments: The promise and perils of United Nations peace building. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 39(3): 387–418. Boutros-Ghali, B. (1992). An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy. Peacemaking and Peace­ keeping. Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to the Statement Adopted by the Summit Meeting of the Security Council on 31 January 1992, UN Doc A/47/277–S/ 2411, 17 June 1992. Galvanek, J.B. and Planta, K. (2017). Peaceful Coexistence? ‘Traditional’ and ‘Non-traditional’ Conflict Resolution Mechanisms. Research Report. Berlin: Berghof Foundation. Gleditsch, N.P. and Hegre, H. (1997). Peace and democracy: three levels of analysis. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 41(2): 283–310. Graf, W., Kramer, G. and Nicolescou, A. (2007). Counselling and training for conflict transformation and peace-building: the TRANSCEND approach. In J. Galtung and C. Webel (eds), Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies. London: Routledge. Heathershaw, J. (2008). Unpacking the liberal peace: the dividing and merging of peacebuilding discourses. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 36(3): 597–621.

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Kievelitz, U., Kruk, G. and Frieters, N. (2003). Joint Utstein Study of Peacebuilding. National Report on Germany. Eschborn: Deutsche Gesellschaftfür Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ). Lederach, J.P. (1997). Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace. Luckham, R. (2005). The international community and state reconstruction in war-torn societies. In A.H. Ebnöther and P.H. Fluri (eds), After Intervention: Public Security Manage­ ment in Post‐Conflict Societies: From Intervention to Sustainable Local Ownership. Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF). Mac Ginty, R. (2006). No War, No Peace. The Rejuvenation of Stalled Peace Processes and Peace Accords. London, Palgrave Macmillan. Mac Ginty, R. and Richmond, O. (2013). The local turn in peacebuilding: A critical agenda for peace. Third World Quarterly, 34(5): 763–783. Mahmoud, Y. (2017). Sustaining peace: What does it mean in practice? IPI Issue Brief, April 2017, www.ipinst.org/2017/04/sustaining-peace-in-practice (accessed 22 April 2018). Miall, H. (2004). Conflict Transformation: A Multi‐Dimensional Task. Berlin: Berghof Research Centre for Constructive Conflict Management. PBSO (UN Peacebuilding Support Office) (2017). Guidance on Sustaining Peace. New York, NY: PBSO. https://unsdg.un.org/sites/default/files/Guidance-on-Sustaining-Peace. 170117.final_.pdf (accessed 22 April 2018). Prendergast, J. and Plumb, E. (2002). Building local capacity: From implementation to peacebuilding. In S.J. Stedman, D. Rothchild and E.M. Cousens (eds), Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Richmond, O.P. (2004). UN peacebuilding operations and the dilemma of the peacebuilding consensus. International Peacekeeping, 11(1): 83–102. Richmond, O.P. (2014). Peace A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richmond, O.P. and Mitchell, A. (eds) (2012). Hybrid Forms of Peace: From Everyday Agency to Post‐Liberalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, D. (2004). Towards a Strategic Framework for Peacebuilding: Getting Their Act Together. Overview Report of the Joint Utstein Study of Peacebuilding. Evaluation Report 1/ 2004. Oslo: Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Steven, D. (2017). The Roadmap for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies: A Call to Action to Change our World. New York, NY: Center on International Cooperation, https://cic.nyu. edu/publications/roadmap-peaceful-just-and-inclusive-societies-call-action-change-our-w orld (accessed 15 March 2017). Tschirgi, N. (2004). Post‐Conflict Peacebuilding Revisited: Achievements, Limitations, Challenges. Report prepared for the WSP International/IPA Peacebuilding Forum Conference, October 2004. New York, NY: International Peace Academy. UN (United Nations) (1997). Culture of Peace. UN Doc A/RES/52/13. New York, NY: United Nations. UN (United Nations) (2015). The Challenge of Sustaining Peace: Report of the Advisory Group of Experts on the Review of the Peacebuilding Architecture. UN Doc. A/69/968–S/2015/490. New York, NY: United Nations. UN (United Nations) (2016). Review of the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture. UN Doc A/70/262. New York, NY: United Nations. UN Doc A/RES/243. New York, NY: United Nations. www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/71/243 (accessed 22 April 2018). UN (United Nations) (2017a). Building Sustainable Peace for All: Synergies Between the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Sustaining Peace. High Level Dialogue of the Pre­ sident of the General Assembly for the 71st session, 24 January 2017. New York, NY:

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United Nations. www.un.org/pga/71/wp-content/uploads/sites/40/2016/12/Sustaina ble-Peace-and-2030-Agenda_Concept-note_FINAL.pdf (accessed 22 April 2018). UN (United Nations) (2017b). Report of the Secretary‐General on the Responsibility to Protect. New York, NY: United Nations. www.un.org/pga/71/2017/04/28/2017-report-of-th e-secretary-general-on-the-responsibility-to-protect (accessed 22 April 2018). UN (United Nations) (2017c). Note from the Secretary-General to Member States: ‘Restructuring of the Peace and Security Pillar’, 11 September 2017. New York, NY: United Nations. UN (United Nations) (2018). Report of the Secretary-General on ‘Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace’ (A/72/707-S/2018/43). UNESCO (2016). Roadmap: The Rapprochement of Cultures 2013–2022. Paris: UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002443/244334e.pdf (accessed 22 April 2018). UNSC (United Nations Security Council) (2016). Resolution 2282 (2016), S/2282(2016), 27 April 2016. Upadhyaya, P. (2005). Human security, humanitarian intervention, and third world con­ cerns. Denver Journal of International Law and Policy, 33(1): 86–89. Upadhyaya, P. and Upadhyaya, A.S. (2017). Traditional Institutions of Dispute Resolution in India: Experiences from Khasi and Garo Hills in Meghalaya. Research Report. Berlin: Berghof Foundation. Visoka, G. (2016). Peace Figuration After International Intervention: Intentions, Events and Consequences of Liberal Peacebuilding. London: Routledge.

10 SOCIAL CONFLICT AND CASTE A security challenge Debi Chatterjee

Security concerns have traditionally been central to the analysis, understanding and conducting of international relations. That security was seen as the security of a state against the aggressive designs of others. That security was seen as military security with its focus on protecting land, territory and material resources of the state. Conventional security, as it may be referred to, in other words, has revolved around the question of security of nations seen from a realist perspective, not­ withstanding the great debates in the field of International Relations theory that have time and again surfaced. The complexities of security however have more than exposed the inadequacies of the conventional approach which as noted by Barry Buzan was “too narrowly founded” (Buzan, 1991: 432–33). The concerns for human security increasingly came to the fore. In its 1994 Human Development Report, the UNDP noted: the concept of security has far too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory from external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from the threat of nuclear holocaust … forgotten were the legitimate concerns of ordinary people who sought security in their daily lives. The Report viewed human security as safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression; and protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life, whether in homes, in jobs or in communities (Human Development Report, 1994). It equated security with people rather than terri­ tories, with development rather than arms. Within the ambit of human security, the 1994 Report included: economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security and political security.

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In India, any discussion of human security can hardly be meaningful without reckoning with the factor of caste. Caste-based social stratification tends to under­ mine all the basic parameters of human security. The low castes remain easy prey to atrocities perpetrated by the upper castes; they are economically marginalized over generations making them the poorest sections of the population. Endemic poverty undermines their food security and health security as poverty-generated malnutrition and disease chase them throughout their lives. While persistent efforts of the low castes at overcoming their social stigma and marginality have yielded some but limited results, they have also generated intense resistance from upper and middle castes, often resulting in conflicts of a violent nature. From their side the different middle castes have been trying to improve their social and political cre­ dentials, of course not without facing resistance from upper castes and rival middle castes. Much of the conflicts are marked by periodic displays of varying degrees of ferocity. Caste discrimination and caste-generated conflicts are today the most discordant factors in Indian society. The negative presence of caste stratification is felt in every sphere of Indian life. It fragments the social fabric through its system of ‘graded inequality’ (a term used by Ambedkar), so much so that it becomes difficult to think or speak of the Indian people as a nation having an integrated identity, thus making it vulnerable in terms of internal and external security. On 25 November 1949, in his last speech in the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar had said, on 26th January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. …how long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? (Kadam, 1991: 50–1) The life of contradictions seems to persist, despite the expressed concern of the Constitution makers of independent India.

The post-independence political ethos and caste As the Constitution of independent India was being drawn up it was realized that eradication of caste was an important imperative that would have to be addressed. The basic principles of human rights were written into the Constitution in its Preamble, in Part III that dealt with Fundamental Rights and Part IV titled ‘Directive Principles of State Policy’ that were to be considered as guiding princi­ ples of the State authorities. It was agreed by the Constitution makers that unequals would first have to be brought up to a position of equality before being treated as equals to the others. The point had been repeatedly emphasized by Dr Ambedkar as member of the Constituent Assembly and Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution. With dogged persistence, he had fought for the incorporation of the special rights for the depressed sections of the society in the Constitution.

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His efforts were fruitful to the extent that measures for compensatory discrimina­ tion were embodied in the Constitution to uplift, among others, the untouchable castes. These castes, members of which were identified for the benefits, came to be referred to as the Scheduled Castes – the names of the castes being listed in a ‘Schedule’; the practice of untouchability was forbidden and universal adult suffrage and democratic vocabulary underlined the discourse on human rights. In the voluminous document that was drafted under the efforts of a team of over 300 members of the Constituent Assembly, there were arduous attempts to address the requirements of nation building in the newly-born independent state. Yet, nation building remained stunted because of the operation of caste cleavages. Violations of human rights, rampant in the vortex of caste, class and gender intersections, made for the extreme vulnerability of certain sections of the population. Post-independence politics was dominated by the upper castes and their ideol­ ogy. In the 1950s, India’s national politics was dominated by English speaking, urban politicians trained in law. Most of them came from the upper castes and many were trained abroad. Even the lower level leadership tended to come from the upper castes in northern India. The Indian National Congress that came to power immediately after independence and remained to control the reins of poli­ tical power for nearly two decades, rested essentially on upper caste leadership and showed little active interest in incorporating new groups into the political system. This was particularly true of north India politics. In southern India this trend was less rigid and a pattern of low caste mobilization based on ethnic identity and reservation policy implementation occurred (Jaffrelot, 2003) The politicians here were not only ‘vernacular’ but as the 1950s evolved they were also increasingly from the lower castes (Varshney, 2008). North India, however, largely remained trapped in the Sanskritization process which focused only on positional changes and not structural changes (Jaffrelot, 2003: 145). Under the given circumstances, the constitutional provisions that could have heralded the necessary changes largely remained dormant.

The middle castes: Seeking to re-negotiate status The First Backward Classes Commission, the Report of which was submitted in 1955, constituted “a milestone for the low caste movement in north India” (Varshney, 2008: 229). Enquiries of the Commission bolstered low caste mobili­ zation on an unprecedented scale in the North. The rather imprecise categorization of ‘Backward Classes’ brought together several low castes in efforts to bargain more effectively for ‘reservations’ (Banerjee-Dube, 2008: xxviii). By the 1960s much of southern India had witnessed a relatively peaceful lower caste revolution. (Varshney, 2008: 218). This clearly was the result of the powerful non-Brahmin movement in the region heralded by E.V. Ramasami. The coming to power of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham (DMK) as an anti-Brahmin party in Tamil Nadu in 1960 was significant.

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From the 1970s there was a significant rise of the middle castes all across India. This, in turn, radically changed the overall political scenario. Many of the regional parties that had moved into prominence since the 1970s rested on the growing power of the rural middle castes. They sought to protect the interests of the dif­ ferent middle caste lobbies. In many areas, it may be noted, that these middle castes were also the locally dominant castes and hence capable of manipulating local power equations. As coalition politics became more important both at the state levels and the national level the role of these regional parties, and through them the middle caste lobbies, became crucial. Further, the importance of the middle castes was greatly reinforced by the Second Backward Commission Report, better known as the Mandal Commission Report published in 1980. The Commission considered caste to be the building block of the Other Backward Classes. The decision of the Government of India led by the Prime Minister VP. Singh, 10 years later, to partially implement the Mandal Commission Report was announced in 1991. As per this decision, 27 per cent reservation was announced for those iden­ tified as the Other Backward Classes or OBCs. This reservation was to be in addition to the already existing reservation that existed for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The governmental decision no doubt bolstered the position of the middle castes. Moreover, it provided impetus to political mobilization along caste lines. The battle lines were drawn between the pro-Mandal and anti-Mandal forces which in other words also meant the pro-reservation and anti-reservation forces. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the names of middle caste leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Laloo Prasad Yadav were making history as they were repeatedly challenging the upper caste political domination in northern India. As the ascent took place of those several middle castes who were granted the OBC tag, enjoying the benefits of the 27 per cent reservations, other middle level castes not listed as OBCs came forward to oppose the system of reservations or claim OBC status. Prominent amongst them were the Jats. Ever since the imple­ mentation of the Backward Caste reservation in the 1990s, the Jats were seen demanding their inclusion in the list of OBCs. In 2016 the powerful Jat community in Haryana brought the state and adjoining areas to a virtual standstill, defying the government with impunity in their quest for reservation in government jobs and educational institutions under the OBC category. It may be noted that in the agitation for quotas, the principal target of the Jats was those who represented power in the state of Haryana. As the Jat community is the single largest caste in the state of Haryana accounting for 29 per cent of the population, it has often been considered the dominant player in state politics. In recent times, the Patidar movement in contemporary Gujarat, too, is a major attempt undertaken by a middle caste to re-negotiate its status and rights. The Patidar community, most having the surname of Patel, form an affluent section of the Gujarat population. The Patels account for between 15 and 20 per cent of Gujarat’s population. Traditionally a farming community, they have been successful as entrepreneurs, gradually moving into lucrative businesses. They are seen to own

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motel chains across the USA and also corner stores in the UK, and they are seen to be engaged in the diamond business in Europe as well as trading in Africa. In fact, this Gujarati community has often been at the forefront of the expansion of the Indian diaspora. The demand for reservation was put forward by them with a hope to gain access to education, government jobs and other facilities. Hardik Patel, a young graduate, has been the face of the Patidar agitation. Both the Congress and BJP were found attempting to woo the powerful Patel com­ munity ahead of Gujarat elections of 2017. Significantly, the movement led by Hardik Patel began without any direct political patronage under the banner of the Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS). The Patidar community that had been the BJP’s backbone in the state for 20 years, now turned against the party in pushing for the recognition of the rights of the Patel community. Ironically, this same Patel community in the 1980s had protested vociferously against reservations for other communities. They were seen launching violent anti-reservation movements between 1981 and 1985 which targeted both Dalits and OBCs. Now, they are demanding reservations for themselves. Factors which may be behind this demand today are manifold. First, the Patels seek to get OBC status in order to get their children into medical and engineering colleges or institutions providing technical education; this could make it easier for them to migrate abroad, as well as find jobs locally. It may be noted that the Patels are poorly represented in these sectors since traditionally, instead of pursuing higher studies, they had chosen to go into business at a young age. Second, for years a large section of middle and lower middle class Patels in rural areas had invested their surplus cash from agriculture in micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). The vibrant Gujarat model of development focused on big industries, neglecting these small and medium industries, many of which in course of time, turned ‘sick’.2 Third, the diamond industry of Surat, controlled by the Patels of Saurashtra, is facing a sharp slump leading to layoffs and closures. Given these factors, discontent amongst the Patels is palpable.3 In the neighbouring state of Maharashtra, it was the Marathas who were becoming vocal. The Maratha movement, too, was launched without the overt support or guidance of any political party. It was estimated that at the Maratha Kranti Morcha rally in south Mumbai on 9 August 2017, the number of people who assembled ranged from 150,000–1,000,000 (Seetharaman, 2017). While the Marathas had, for a while, been demanding reservation, the immediate trigger for the protest was the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Maratha girl allegedly by three Dalit men in Kopardi, 180 km south of Aurangabad. Among the demands of the Marathas was the removal of proposed amendments to the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989.

Rise of the Dalit challenge and countering the violent backlash The Dalit challenge has indeed been significant. It was posited on a division not only between the upper castes and the rest, but between the “outcastes versus the caste system itself” (Vanaik, 1997: 324). The Dalit movement was not content with

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efforts to negotiate caste oppression through Sanskritization or a move away from the system in the mode of bhakti. It wished “to fight against the system and seek its very eradication” (Vanaik, 1997: 323). In the 1970s, with the emergence of the Dalit Panther Movement in Mahar­ ashtra, attempts were seriously undertaken to weld together the different excluded castes under the single nomenclature of ‘Dalit’. The Dalit Panthers were not the first to use the term, but they did bring it into focus. They had used the term in a rather open-ended manner to include all those who were exploited politically, economically and in the name of religion. Over the years however the term ‘Dalit’ was used to signify only the Scheduled Castes. Just as the term ‘Dalit’ signified the historic exclusion of the persons concerned, it also indicated their consciousness and resistance. Young Dalit writers including Namdeo Dhasal, Arjun Dangle and J. V. Pawar, through the Dalit Panther Movement, took the initiative in trying to build up a grand war against the varna-jati system.4 Their tools were both political and cultural. However, the long-lasting impact of the Panthers in the field of Dalit culture was perhaps far more noteworthy than in the field of politics. Through their efforts, there emerged an altogether new genre of protest literature that is today referred to as Dalit Literature. But, in the field of politics they could hardly make a dent. Politics in India till the 1980s was largely dominated by the upper and middle castes; for several decades after independence, the Dalits were used as ‘vote banks’ by mainstream political parties. It was only in 1984 with the formation of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) that Dalit aspirations to wield political power received the first boost.5 The BSP emerged from the BAMCEF, a middle-class trade union organization that was founded by Kanshi Ram in 1976. The party [BSP] was the product of post-Independence developments: a long term process of democratiza­ tion, policies of affirmative action and an increase in literacy among Dalits parti­ cularly between 1981–91 which helped in the sharp rise of political consciousness. Additionally, these developments coincided with the decline of the Congress system, providing space for narrower identity based parties (Pai, 2013: 96). Equally important too was the improvement in the agrarian economy in parts of Uttar Pradesh leading to changes in rural social relations and the emergence of a low caste identity (Pai, 2013: 96). By the late 1980s the Dalits were seen to be making a significant impact in the political arena. In particular, the BSP’s electoral successes in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in India, for over two decades since the 1990s, contributed significantly in moulding the Dalit mindset. The politics of symbolism promoted by the BSP under the leadership of Mayawati appreciably helped in the process of developing the Dalit consciousness (Pai, 2013: 96). Several decades of affirmative action programmes clearly led to the emergence of a substantial Dalit middle class. Today, it is evident from data available from dif­ ferent sources that there has been a remarkable increase in the proportion of Scheduled Caste employees at various levels in the state sector. Even at the lowest levels of such employment, there are opportunities for a regular salary, a pension and to move to urban areas. All these have, in turn, opened the doors for Dalits to

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send their children for higher education and higher level jobs, all thanks to the quota system (Jodhka, 2014: 137). Against this backdrop, Dalit assertions and articulations have found new modes and channels of expression, impacting clearly on the political scenario. While earlier Dalit movements and parties revolved around political leaders taking on issues of political empowerment such as identity, dignity and self-respect, the new middle class Dalit intellectuals focus on the need for economic empowerment through a variety of new methods (Pai, 2013: 119). The struggles of the Dalits have since the 1990s have widened to enter the international milieu, seeking to draw support from the Dalit diaspora, international organizations and rights bodies. The formation of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) was a significant development of the late 1990s. It was officially launched in India in December 1998 to act as a non-political, secular forum comprising of a band of Dalit scholars and activists. The purpose was to promote solidarity, cooperation and collective action at the national level for the promotion of Dalit human rights. Its efforts were largely directed towards demon­ strating the link between Dalit issues and human rights issues. The NCDHR was involved in a variety of events such as the World Conference Against Racism at Durban in 2001, all World Social Forums, the 40-days Dalit Swadhikar Rally across India in 2004, the first ever public hearing on “The Situation of the Dalits in India” at the European Parliament in Brussels (December 2006) and the first International Conference on the Human Rights of Dalit Women at The Hague (November 2006). It may be noted that the NCDHR was not set up as an attempt to subsume, replace or negate ongoing efforts of the Dalits and others in various mass organi­ zations, people’s organizations, labour unions, etc. Rather, its aim was to galvanize the movements into a representative body that would collectively organize, edu­ cate, agitate and demand an end to untouchability and casteism once and for all in both the government and civil society. Further, from the late 1990s, Dalit Solidarity Networks were set up in different countries to promote the cause of Dalit human rights. These Networks have formed in the USA, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, France, Denmark and Sweden. They have brought into their fold individuals as well as concerned groups. For this purpose, they have linked up with international human rights organiza­ tions such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Among other activities, they organize seminars and workshops, set up websites and undertake signature campaigns and petitions. In March 2000, the International Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN) was formed. It is a network of national solidarity networks, groups from affected countries and international bodies concerned about caste discrimination. It aims at linking grassroots priorities with international mechanisms and institutions; to establish ‘Dalit rights’ as ‘human rights’(Chatterjee, 2011: 141–55). The assertion efforts of the Dalits are today a visible reality. Humiliated and marginalized, they yearn for dignity and social justice. Their struggles have a long history, but the post-1990s has been witnessing the articulation of new demands in

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a new style, using new tools, alongside the more traditional, at both the national and international levels. However, the emergence of Dalit assertiveness along with an articulate Dalit middle-class leadership in the movement, cannot blind us to the reality that most Dalits still continue to live in extreme poverty, without land or opportunities for better employment, health and education. With the exception of a minority who have benefited from India’s policy of quotas in education and government jobs, they are relegated to the most menial of tasks as removers of human waste and dead animals, leather workers, sweepers, cobblers and landless labourers. Their children comprise the bulk of child labour and make up the majority of children sold into bondage to pay off debts to upper-caste creditors. Consultations in rural areas undertaken for a 1998 UP / Bihar Poverty Study and a 1999 Consultation on Poverty Monitoring have revealed a vivid picture of the many links that exist between social identity and poverty in Uttar Pradesh. It was found that social identity is a strong predictor of who is and who is not poor, who is illiterate, who is employed in low-paid, low-status agricultural labour and who lives in poorly constructed housing with limited access to basic services (Kozel and Parker, 2003: 395–6). Moreover, Dalits have proved to be extremely vulnerable to the adverse impact of globalization in view of their traditional exclusion from the socio-economic and power structures. It is feared that with increasing emphasis on privatization, the growing discrimination against the rural, agricultural and informal sectors, the socio-economic exclusion of the Dalits is all set to be reinforced. Shrinkage of the public sector has as its corollary the shrinkage of the reserved zone for the Dalits. Rolling back of the subsidies that have come alongside has meant added hardships for those who were, given the social odds, already at a disadvantage and had been heavily dependent on subsidies. Post-1990s, they have been particularly hard hit in terms of employment, food security, health and education. And, not surprisingly, over the last several decades, violence against the Dalits has been escalating dramatically.6 As the lower castes seek redressal of their grievances and attempt to exercise their rights, Dalits remain the worst victims of heightening atrocities. This is notwith­ standing the fact that attempts made by the government to check the atrocities have led to the successive adoption of significant pieces of legislation including The Untouchability Offences Act [1955], The Protection of Civil Rights Act [1976] and The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act [1989]. Alarmingly, in the decade of 2006 to 2016, the crime rate against Dalits rose by 25 per cent – from 16.3 crimes per 100,000 Dalits reported in 2006 to 20.3 crimes in 2016, according to an India Spend analysis of 2016 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data.7 On the whole, despite the constitutional abolition of the practice of ‘untouchability’, it remains very much a reality, particularly in rural India. But it is not just a tale of victimhood. Dalits today are more organized and connected. They see themselves as a part of an assertive movement of social justice. In recent times, the atrocities perpetrated on them have increasingly brought them out in hundreds onto the streets in protest.

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The suicide of 26-year-old Rohith Chakravarti Vemula, an Indian PhD student at the University of Hyderabad and an activist of the Ambedkar Students’ Asso­ ciation (ASA), on 17 January 2016 sharply brought the issue of Dalit repression at the higher levels of education into focus. It became a rallying call for Dalit activists who came on to the streets across the country demanding justice for Vemula. In his death, Rohith Vemula emerged as a symbol of protest against injustice and indignity that the Dalits suffer. On 11 July 2016, four Dalit men skinning the carcasses of dead cows at Mota Samadhiyala village of Unataluka in Gir Somnath district in Gujarat were stripped and flogged by persons who claimed to be members of a gaurakshaks or cow protection group on the accusation that the former were killing cows. The com­ munity was intensely agitated. Protests broke out across Gujarat. The young Jignesh Mevani, a Dalit lawyer and activist, led the Dalit Asmita Yatra protest march from Ahmedabad to Una. It ended on 15 August 2016. It was estimated that some 20,000 Dalits took a pledge to give up their traditional jobs of skinning dead cows. Mevani demanded that land be given for upliftment of the Dalits. Ahead of the Gujarat Assembly elections, Jignesh Mevani was perhaps the most articulate and visible in taking up the cause of the Dalits. He contested and won the election from Vadgam constituency, as an independent candidate with Con­ gress support. The movement spearheaded by Jignesh Mevani following the Una incident was seen as significant in connecting the caste question with the economic question, apparently going beyond ‘mere’ symbolic politics against caste (like building Ambedkar statues) and instead foregrounding the need to challenge what he calls the ‘material basis’ of caste oppression (demanding that every landless Dalit be given 5 acres). Elsewhere, in Uttar Pradesh cow vigilantism has come into the news ever since Yogi Adityanath of the BJP took over as the chief minister of the state in March 2017. The blanket ban on slaughter across the state, and the alleged forced closure of meat shops, has come to highlight the growing vigilantism by ‘gaurakshaks’. The Bhim Army that was formed by Chandrashekhar Azad and Vinay Ratan Arya for the development of Dalits, lower caste shudra and other marginalized sections of society in 2014 came into prominence after a series of caste clashes took place in Uttar Pradesh in 2017. The clashes broke out between Dalits and Thakurs of Shabbirpur village in Uttar Pradesh between 20 April and 23 May. The crack­ down on the Bhim Army started to accelerate after it called for a mahapanchayat on 9 May to protest against the attack on Dalits and the state government’s ‘insensi­ tive’ attitude towards them during the clashes. On that date thousands of Dalit rights activists, led by the Bhim Army, gathered at the Jantar Mantar to raise their voice against the caste-based violence in Saharanpur city of Uttar Pradesh. The Special Task Force went on to arrest Azad under the National Security Act. The Bhim Army organized two big rallies in Jantar Mantar (New Delhi) and thousands of Dalit protesters gathered under its banner to protest against the atrocities they continue to face and to demand the release of their founder. It is significant to note that, as well as using other tools for communication, the Bhim Army was seen

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running a campaign on social media to spread the word about the rally. It also circulated a video of Mr. Chandrashekhar’s mother appealing to the people to join the rally.8 The Bhima-Koregaon incident in 2018 significantly demonstrates the determi­ nation of Dalits to stand their ground today. Every year, on 1 January, huge crowds gather in a small village in Maharasthra to commemorate the 1818 Battle of Bhima-Koregaon, one of the final fights in the third Anglo-Maratha War. This battle presaged the fall of the Peshwas, the rulers of the Maratha Empire. The victory was notable because many of the British soldiers were not in fact British but Mahar, one of the castes deemed ‘untouchable’. For Ambedkar, the Battle of Koregaon did not represent a British victory, but the end of the tyrannical Peshwas and the assertion of Mahar strength and dignity. In 2018, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the battle, many Dalit and Bahujan groups collectively organized a big public conference in the name of Elgar Parishad at Shaniwar Wada, which was the seat of the Peshwas until 1818. The Brahminical upper castes, feeling threa­ tened by such assertions of the Dalits, sought to marginalize them. The violence that followed was a reflection of this tension between Hindutva nationalism and resilient subaltern politics that seeks justice.9

Caste as a threat to India’s security: The contemporary scenario In India, caste position has remained an indicator and determinant of both eco­ nomic power and social status for centuries. Those at the top of the hierarchy have been the main beneficiaries of goods and services, whereas those located at the lower end suffer their denial. Inter-caste disparities are consistently visible in stan­ dards of living, educational attainments, health parameters and economic levels. At the same time, the struggles for changing the balance are equally evident. The face of Indian democracy has been clearly changing over the years from what it was in the early decades after independence. The rise and assertion of the middle and low castes is perceptible; at the same time, the resistance to their rightful demands is evident in the heightening atrocities repeatedly unleashed upon them by upper caste, rightist political forces. The struggles can hardly be under­ stood in terms of only a binary conflict between the upper and lower castes. The scenario is much more complex, with inter-caste strains and conflicts taking place at numerous levels. Under these circumstances, it is not difficult to understand that caste poses a colossal threat to India’s security in multiple senses of the term. For many, their caste identities become the cause of their insecurity, as perils surface on countless fronts threatening their survival, livelihood and dignity. Needless to say, the weak remain especially vulnerable. For those at the lower levels of the hierarchy, caste position becomes synon­ ymous with a variety of denials – these include denials of physical security, health, education, property resources, land and employment opportunities. All these denials build up to construct a condition of immeasurable vulnerability in terms of

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overall security of the individual, which in turn accounts for the lack of security of the community that remains trapped in a vicious circle of perpetual insecurity. Today, the social and political scenario is marked by sundry levels of intensifying caste conflicts as different caste groups compete with one another in efforts to gain or retain what they consider as their rightful shares in the social, economic and political spheres. There are conflicts between the upper castes and the Dalits, between the upper castes and middle castes, the middle castes and Dalits, and among the different middle caste and Dalit communities themselves. The conflicts are not confined to the social sphere alone, but are evident in the tussles over access to economic resources and in the political milieu. Changing equations in traditional land relations in different regions greatly define the shifting contours of these struggles. Over the past several years, one Indian state after another has been on the boil because of caste-based agitations. In different regions, marginal castes live under constant threat of violence perpetrated by the dominant caste groups. It may further be noted that one of the major determinants of the security of a country is the inner strength of its population; this in turn is dependent on the latter’s cohesiveness and sense of belonging with the state and the emotional bonding attached to citizenship. A caste-fragmented India is weakened at its core. Because for many people in India, identity and sense of belonging remain castecentric rather than nation-centric or state-centric, the frame of having a cohesive populace with a consciously accepted commitment to citizenship is under perpetual threat. The noted writer Partha Chatterjee was probably right in saying that the new political processes in India had not brought forth bourgeois equality but conflicting claims of caste groups (Chatterjee, 1989: 169–209). The reality is, as Dirks would put it, that “caste as a specter continues to haunt the body politic of postcolonial India” (Dirks, 2001: 17). Yet, amidst all this, a ray of hope seems to be evident. As the struggles intensify, a new democracy, on new parameters of wider participation of the low and hitherto marginalized castes, appears to be in the process of taking birth.

Notes 1 Caste as a unit is a closed-rank, status group, whereas as a system it presents a network of relationships. Caste stratification of Indian society has developed for over thousands of years based on the Hindu Brahminical philosophy of Varnashrama Dharma. G.S. Ghurye (1950) identified six core features of the caste system: (1) the segmental division of society; (2) hierarchy; (3) restrictions on social intercourse; (4) civil and religious dis­ abilities and privileges; (5) restricted choice of occupation; and (6) restrictions on mar­ riage. The hierarchic arrangement of the castes has deeply entrenched socio-cultural and economic marginalization of the low castes. 2 A sick industry is an industrial unit or a company (having been in existence for not less than 5 years) which is found at the end of any financial year to have incurred accumulated losses equal to or exceeding its entire net worth. 3 The Real Story of What Hardik Patel, 21, Wants – And Why: https://www.ndtv.com/ india-news/the-real-story-of-what-hardik-patel-21-wants-and-why-1210424

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4 What appears to have been an initially perceived as a four-fold varna classification dating back almost 3,000 years has over time seen the growth of thousands of caste groups, referred to as the jatis. Time has seen the repeated occurrences of changes and mutations in castes; however, despite the changes, the essential characteristics of caste, inequality and social exclusion, have largely remained intact. 5 For a detailed discussion see Kumar, V.‘BSP and Dalit aspirations’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 39, No. 18 (May 1–7, 2004), pp. 1778–1781. 6 See Alternative Economic Survey, 2000–2001, Second Generation Reforms: Delusion of Devel­ opment, 2001. Rainbow Publishers, New Delhi: Lokayan, Azadi Bachao Group. 7 https://www.firstpost.com/india/crime-rate-against-dalits-increased-by-25-from-2006-to -2016-cases-pending-investigation-up-by-99-4419369.html (accessed on 7 June 2018). 8 Bhim Army to protest at Jantar Mantar again, 2017. The Hindu, 15 June. 9 For detailed discussions on the Bhima-Koregaon incident see Thakur and Maharana, 2018. Bhima Koregaon and Politics of the Subaltern, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 53, Issue No. 7, 17 Feb; Pal, 2018. Understanding Bhima Koregaon, The Hindu, January 4.

References Banerjee-Dube, Ishita (ed.) (2008). Caste in History, New Delhi: OUP. Buzan, Barry (1991). New patterns of global security in the twenty first century, International Affairs, 67(3). Chatterjee, Debi (2011). Dalit Rights / Human Rights, Jaipur: Rawat Publications. Chatterjee, Partha (1989). Caste and subaltern consciousness. In Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies VI, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dirks, Nicholas B. (2001). Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ghurye, G.S. (1950). Caste, Class and Occupation in India, Bombay: Popular Book Depot. Human Development Report (1994). United Nations Development Programme. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/huma n-development-report-1994 Jaffrelot, Christophe (2003). India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Low Castes in North Indian Politics, New Delhi: Permanent Black. Jodhka, Surinder S. (2014) Caste, New Delhi: OUP. Kadam, K.N. compiled and edited. (1991). Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and the Significance of His Movement: A Chronology, Mumbai: Popular Prakashan. Kozel, Valerie and Barbara Parker (2003). A profile and diagnostic of poverty in Uttar Pradesh, Economic and Political Weekly, January 25. Kumar, Vivek (May 1–7, 2004). BSP and Dalit aspirations, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(18). Pai, Sudha (2013). Dalit Assertion, New Delhi: OUP. Pal, Prabodhan (2018). Understanding Bhima Koregaon, The Hindu, January 4. Seetharaman, G. Maratha (2017). Community’s reservation demand a political headache for CM Devendra Fadnavis, The Economic Times, August 20. Thakur, Sai and Maharana, Byasa (2018). Bhima Koregaon and politics of the subaltern, Economic and Political Weekly, 53(7), February 17. Vanaik, Achin (1997). The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Seculariza­ tion, London and New York, NY: Verso. Varshney, Ashutosh (2008). Is India becoming more democratic? In Ishita Banerjee-Dube (ed.), Caste in History, New Delhi: OUP.

11 THE MAOIST MOVEMENT ‘India’s gravest internal security threat’ Partha Pratim Basu

Classical Marxism held that a certain level of capitalist development marked by the maturation of the conflict between antagonistic classes standing in divergent rela­ tionship to the means of production constituted the preconditions for revolutionary change under the leadership of the working class. However, Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, felt that revolutionary transformation of China, a predominantly agricultural society, would be enormously delayed if capitalist industrialization had to await this critical level of development. Mao’s adaptation of Marxism to the Chinese conditions, involving projection of the peasantry rather than the working class as the pivot of revolutionary change toge­ ther with the formation of a wider revolutionary coalition between workers and peasants (the ‘United Front’ thesis), and people’s war with an accent on armed struggle through guerilla offensive, came to be popularly known as Maoism (LeaHenry, 2018: 5; D’Melo, 2009). While the earliest experiment with Maoist revolutionary strategy and techniques in the Indian context arguably goes back to the Telangana movement of the late 1940s under the aegis of the undivided Communist Party of India, it is customary to trace its proximate origins to the peasant uprising in Naxalbari in 1967. Though this initial spark was doused quickly through police and paramilitary action, similar insurgencies marked by violent guerrilla activism in other parts of the country continued to haunt the Indian state even in the new millennium (Banerjee, 2017). It may be noted that the twentieth century witnessed the outbreak of numerous Maoist-style guerilla movements, with varying degrees of firepower and organiza­ tional clout, posing serious challenges to ruling regimes in Asia, Africa and South America. But while most of these outfits have either passed into political oblivion or been overpowered or absorbed into mainstream politics, a protracted people’s war between the Maoist protagonists and the Government of India continued well into the new millennium (Roy, 2017) so much so that Prime Minister Singh

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branded it (twice) the gravest internal security challenge faced by the country. This chapter, consisting of several sections dealing with the evolution of the movement and its organizational features, the government’s response and its evaluation, and a critique of the movement as well, seeks in conclusion to understand this phe­ nomenon as the vanishing point of the two perspectives of national security and human security.

An outline of the Maoist movement in India The precursor of the Maoist challenge faced by contemporary India was the Nax­ alite movement which in turn was born out of the ideological struggles within the Indian communist movement that culminated in splits in the Communist Party of India in the 1960s (Gupta, 2007: 163–168). The Naxalite movement started in the village Naxalbari in the Darjeeling district of the northern fringe of West Bengal in 1967, and a new political party, the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (CPI-ML), was officially floated in its wake in 1969 under the leadership of Charu Majumdar. Its think-tank characterized the Indian state and its economy as semifeudal and semi-colonial, and believed that the feudal landlords, backed by the armed might of the state, constituted the major hurdle to the transformation of feudal ties. Hence, they felt that the only option available to the Indian people to tear down India s feudal agrarian structure was through armed resistance following the example of the Chinese communists led by Mao Zedong. This constituted the backdrop of Majumdar’s call to dump parliamentary democracy, organize peasants and seize political power through guerilla warfare and physical extermination of class enemies (Banerjee, 2017: 43). The first phase of the movement, which had spread to Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh as well, was crushed by armed crackdown through the combined might of the national and state governments, and, subsequently, by the late 1970s, it had become splintered into numerous small groups . The process of their remobiliza­ tion and consolidation began in the 1980s with the CPI-ML-Liberation moving into the direction of electoral participation while the CPI (Marxist–Leninist) (People’s War) [CPI(ML)(PW)] and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) stick­ ing to the path of peasant-based guerilla warfare. The agenda of the CPI(ML)(PW) which in the 1990s and beyond had set up base primarily in Andhra Pradesh pivoted around mobilizing the rural poor around the old issues such as ‘land to the tiller’ and minimum wages for agricultural labourers. Its guerilla squads launched a crusade against the local feudal oppressors and commercial exploiters, and sought to promote equitable distribution of resources and social justice through popular par­ ticipation via alternative mechanisms of governance. This, predictably, engaged them in a fierce confrontation with the state, e.g., violent campaigns against gov­ ernment agencies, ambushing of police forces, kidnapping of government officials, in turn provoking armed intervention by the state. At around the same time, the MCC’s revolutionary activism in Bihar focused on the caste–class interface and combined struggles for land redistribution, fairer wages and human dignity (izzat).

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In 2004, the PW and the MCC, and several other Naxalite armed groups, merged to form a new political party named the CPI (Maoist) which ushered in the third phase of the movement (Banerjee, 2017: 43–44; Chitralekha, 2017: 163–164). During this period, the operational base of the Maoists expanded to the tribalinhabited Bastar region of Chhattisgarh; their ideological thrust also shifted from anti-feudal to anti-imperialist forms of struggle. The early 1990s ushered in eco­ nomic reforms in India which paved the way for the entry of global capital to the resource rich states of central and eastern India: Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha. These state governments, caught up in a vigorous competition over attracting investment, concluded MoUs (memorandum of understanding) with several leading corporate houses, and the central government under successive National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regimes lent their weight behind this process. Under these circumstances, the Maoists concentrated on mobilizing the tribal communities (adivasis) against the massive displacement and the dispossession of land and forest caused by this capi­ talist penetration. That the tribal populace of the Indian heartland had a long his­ tory of waging struggles to protect jal, jameen and jangal (water, land and forest) ever since the colonial times aided such mobilization (Haragopal, 2017: 74–75). This gave rise to a fresh spate of violence by the Maoists, more sophisticated and devastating than before, which involved destruction of buildings, loot of ammuni­ tion depots and capture of weapons, overwhelming attacks on police stations, jail­ breaks and liberation of inmates, murderous assaults on local politicians, induction of child soldiers and a general campaign to ward off outside investors. A string of bloody incidents took place during the national elections held in 2009 following poll boycott calls by the Maoists which sparked off attacks on polling booths, gun battles with security personnel and landmine blasts etc to keep the voters at bay. In 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh iterated his statement (first made in 2005) that the Maoist insurgency and the associated acts of terror constituted “the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by India” (Lynch, 2016: 13–15). By 2010, the Maoists, boasting the strength of an estimated 14,000 guerillas and many more semi-trained sympathizers, had reportedly established their dominance over a ‘red corridor’, stretching from the upper Gangetic plain bordering Nepal, across the plains of Bihar and through the forested hills that parallel the east coast of India down as far as northern Tamil Nadu (Hariss, 2011: 310).

Organization, armaments and finance To undertake a brief consideration of the organizational and financial aspects of the Maoist movement, the CPI (Maoist) like every other communist party had polit­ buro and central committee as apex bodies that oversaw the functions of various state committees or special zonal committees. The village level mass organizations, known as sanghams or collectives in the Chhattisgarh region, constituted the poli­ tical wing of the party charged with the responsibility of disseminating the Maoist ideological message at the grassroots. The dalam comprising some 10 to 15

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members (including women) exposed to arms training and marked by a military like hierarchy formed the basic unit of the party’s action wing, though there was a separate military outfit – the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army – which was assisted by people’s militias (made up of village defence committees) for specific actions (Sundar, 2011: 55; Chakrabarty, 2014: 153–54). Secondly, while the first generation Naxalites wielded rather ordinary weapons such as sickles, spears and farm implements, the later Maoist campaigns featured use of increasingly sophisticated armaments including self loading rifles, light machine guns, mortars, rockets and a variety of explosive devices which naturally sparked off speculations about the sources of this weaponry. Though the police claimed at times that Maoists relied on foreign connections (such as China or Sri Lanka) to procure arms, a more sober consensus within the security establishment held that most of the arms were looted from the police themselves or from raids on gov­ ernment armouries (Sundar, 2011: 55). In this connection, P. V. Ramana, of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, based on his interaction with the top echelons of Andhra Police, found the Rocket Launcher Programme of the Maoist rebels spread over two phases worthy of note (Ramana, 2011: 33– 34). He also drew attention to the probable nexus between the Maoists of India and Nepal, and referred especially to secret deals regarding the Nepalese Maoists imparting military training to their Indian counterparts, though he also mentioned that these linkages were played down by all sides including the Government of India (Ramana, 2010). Finally, maintenance of this huge combat machinery called for a steady flow of funds which, Sundar reported, were procured through what the Maoists called levies on industries and forest contractors, giving rise to a chain of patronage and protection (Sundar, 2011: 57). Indeed, industrialists often were found to work out private bargains with the Maoists which they seemed to look upon as a ‘royalty’ payable to the ‘local government’, and the rates allegedly were almost equivalent to what they paid to the respective state governments (Hariss, 2011: 324). Ramana, however, in a more recent article offered a far wider coverage of the sources of Maoist finances which included levies derived from government projects and schemes as well as taxes imposed on the local people in the Maoist strongholds (Ramana, 2018: 62–68).

Government response Coming to the issue of official response, successive governments, whether ruled by the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have relied chiefly on military oriented strategies in dealing with the Maoist challenge. The central government sent paramilitary forces and extended liberal financial assistance to the affected states for modernization of police forces; the Ministry of Home affairs chose to open several counter-insurgency and anti-terrorism (CIAT) schools; and in early 2009 a dedicated combative force known as CoBRA (Commando Battalion for Resolute Action) was set up to take the Maoists head on. It also “advised the states to

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strengthen the intelligence-gathering mechanism, to augment police forces, to fortify police stations, to provide incentives, and to impart specialized training in jungle warfare to the police” (Ramana, 2011: 40–42). In connection to this, particular mention must be made of Salwa Judum, a statesponsored vigilante movement deployed in the Bastar and Dantewada districts of Chhattisgarh around 2005–2006 as part of the counter-insurgency operations. Implying a ‘purification hunt’ in the local language, it started out as a civil society initiative launched by a schoolteacher from South Bastar in the form of a public campaign against atrocities perpetrated by the Maoists. However, it took on a more organized and explicitly political shape under the leadership of Mahendra Karma, leader of Opposition in Chhattisgarh, and soon attracted government patronage. Though officially projected as a spontaneous ‘peace march’ to save the tribals from the perils of Maoism, it became evident before long that it was appropriated by the government’s counter insurgency offensive which created an unseemly divide between the state-sponsored vigilante tribals and the Maoist indoctrinated and controlled tribals. The campaign was joined by those who were at the receiving end of the Maoist movement: wealthier adivasis, local tradesmen and contractors, local politicians and panchayat members among other regional economic and political stakeholders. As a result, it virtually turned into a battle between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ within the tribal communities, fanned fraternal suspi­ cion and mistrust and exposed their hapless members to further rounds of Maoist violence. Their guns were now turned away from the perceived enemies towards ordinary villagers who faced persecution and punishment including death sentences as suspected informers following farcical trials in the ‘people’s courts’ which for all practical purposes were reduced to an instrument of justifying the Maoist atrocities (Chakrabarty, 2014: 192–93; Roy, 2010). It is no wonder that Salwa Judum attracted a barrage of criticism and in 2009 was censured by the Supreme Court. This latter action prompted the government at the time to change tack and launch Operation Greenhunt – a massive and nationally coordinated drive to tame the Maoists through superior military force. It rested on a three step (‘clear, hold, develop’) policy framework as outlined by the Home Minister P. Chidambaram. First, the armed forces were to clear the area of the Maoist activities through their militaristic operations; second, the authority of the civil administration had to be restored and consolidated; which, third, was to be followed by the introduction of development measures (Mahanty, 2017: 66). However, as Mahanty observed, the policy was essentially security-centric with “area domination” and “neutralizing” the Maoists as its main focus whereas the developmental intent, apparently one of its key elements, was sidelined (Mahanty, 2017: 66). The operation, begun in late 2009, pumped into Maoist regions an estimated 20,000 paramilitary troops, especially from the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) battalions, in addition to the ITBP, BSF and SSB forces already deployed (MHA figures quoted in Lynch, 2016: 16) which enabled it to penetrate former no-go zones deep inside the forests of Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra. The Maoists took no time to hit back: in April 2010 they ambushed 80 troops of the

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Indian Central Police Security Forces (CPSF) in Chhattisgarh, killing an estimated 75 in the worst attack on Indian security forces in the new millennium. However, by 2013, the security operations jointly conducted by national and state govern­ ments seemed to deliver results, the expanse of the insurgency began to abate and the fatality count declined steadily. Under these changed circumstances, Prime Minister Singh announced a two-pronged attack on the Maoist network combin­ ing joint and proactive military operations with greater economic development and responsible governance programmes in the areas with the strongest Maoist support (Lynch, 2016: 16). This development-cum-security approach (also known as “walking on two legs”) perhaps drew its inspiration from the report submitted in 2008 by the Plan­ ning Commission Expert Group led by D. Bandyopadhyay (Banerjee, 2017: 44). The report attributed the Maoist phenomenon to the abysmal poverty and appal­ ling standards of living of the Dalits and tribals that had remained almost unchan­ ged for centuries and called for treating the Maoist question as a developmental challenge and not simply as a law and order problem. The then prime minister appeared to acknowledge as much in a speech in New Delhi (Chakrabarty, 2014: 168) and his government identified the districts worst affected by Maoist operations across several states for special attention on planning, implementation and mon­ itoring of development schemes. As part of this focused area approach, the major flagship programmes of the Government of India such as Pradhan Mantri Grameen Sadak Yojna, Forest Rights Act (2006), Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employ­ ment Guarantee Programme (MGNREGA), Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojna, National Rural Drinking Water Supply Programme, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and Indira Awas Yojna (later Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna) were extended to these areas and vigorously pursued in order to win hearts and minds of the local popu­ lation, mitigate their socio economic grievances and thereby deny the Maoists the scope for recruiting new members from the affected areas. This move was supple­ mented by two significant decisions: relaxation of the provisions of the forest laws to enable smooth implementation of the above programmes in the forest areas and the formation of a high-level committee by the Ministry of Panchayati Raj to look into the aspects of minimum support price, value addition and marketing of minor forest produce in the Fifth Schedule (i.e., tribal-inhabited underdeveloped) Areas. This strategy switch did make a dent into the existing popular perception that in the inaccessible hinterlands of the Red Corridor, marked by near absence of gov­ ernment-sponsored development initiatives, the Maoists were the only saviour. However, the success of these measures remained qualified by the known limita­ tions of these development projects such as tardy progress of projects covered by the Integrated Action Plan or the rampant corruption afflicting the implementation of MGNREGA (Chakrabarty, 2014: 169–70; Banerjee, 2017: 45). The tenure of the UPA II government ended in 2014, and the NDA II regime led by Prime Minister Modi initially announced a “National Policy and Action Plan to address ‘Left Wing Extremism’ with multi-pronged interventions in the areas of security, development, rights and entitlements of local communities”

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(Singh, 2015), which appeared to be an extension of the policy of its predecessor. However, that the Maoist challenge was far from over became plain before long: ten CoBRA commandos were killed in 2016 when an improvised explosive device (IED) went off in the forests of Bihar’s Aurangabad district; in the following year, Odisha Police lost seven of its personnel in a landmine blast near Sunki in Koraput district; and, in the deadliest attack up to date, on 24 April 2017 the armed rebels slaughtered 25 CRPF personnel and injured seven in Sukma district of Chhattis­ garh. This led the Home Minister Rajnath Singh to proclaim a new security operations doctrine called SAMADHAN which reverted to the security-centric approach and stressed modernization of central and state police forces; fast-tracking infrastructure building especially road construction; more helicopter support for security operations; the development of joint task forces for operations along interstate boundaries; better interstate coordination and intelligence sharing; and choking the militants’ sources of funding. The “walking on two legs” strategy was virtually discarded. The government, however, was reportedly keen to continue civic action programmes, giving each company of security forces 300,000 rupees (approx. £3,200) to be spent on the welfare of the locals. A separate sum was earmarked for each district experiencing left-wing insurgency and was to be used for publicizing government schemes, the benefits of peace and the misdeeds of the Maoists (Sandhu, 2017; Zavaid, 2018). Simultaneously, it was announced that the government would consider engaging in dialogue with the left-wing extremists only if they renounced violence and expressed faith in the democratic process and the Constitution of India. The Ministry of Home Affairs also drew attention to the surrender-cum-rehabilitation scheme for Maoists to enable them to return to the mainstream which included an immediate grant of Rs. 2.5 lakh for higher ranked Maoist cadres and Rs. 1.5 lakh for middle or lower rank cadres … to be kept in their name as fixed deposit which may be withdrawn after completion of three years subject to good behaviour. (Indo-Asian News Service, 2017) In sum, the government sought to meet the Maoist challenge through the twin responses of armed crackdown using paramilitary forces and a development drive targeted towards those lands known to be hotbeds of Maoist influence. The pri­ mary emphasis was undoubtedly on militaristic measures, and this was not surpris­ ing too, given the rampant violence unleashed by the Maoist groups to accomplish their projected goals. However, making the welfare measures work is very crucial for winning the hearts and minds of the tribals – the long-suffering victims of development deficit – though this aspect has seemingly received only secondary attention from the authorities and has almost been sidelined under the NDA II dispensation.

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Official strategies: A critique The government claimed that its robust strategy to combat the Maoist menace has already started showing results as reflected in the declining fatality figures (Zavaid, 2018), a series of Maoist surrenders (The Hindu, 2018; Kaiser, 2018) and, most importantly, high voter turnout in the Chhattisgarh assembly elections in November 2018 in one of the core Maoist bastions despite poll boycott calls and escalation of pre poll violence (Ghose, 2018). Critics, however, remained far from convinced and point out that the government strategies to deal with the Maoist question suffered from several flawed assumptions: that the Maoists aimed for a violent overthrow of the Indian state which justified the militaristic approach to wipe out the challenge; that a counter-insurgency drive with superior force can suppress the Maoist movement; and that welfare initiatives focused on Maoistdominated areas would wean the people away from the radicals (Mahanty, 2017: 67). This section engages in a detailed consideration of these arguments. First, it is indeed correct that the CPI (Maoist) described the party’s goal in terms of the capture of state power in the long run, and Article 4 of the party constitution declares: The immediate aim of the party is to accomplish the New Democratic Revolution in India by overthrowing imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucratic capitalism only through the Protracted People’s War and estab­ lishing the people’s democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the proletariat. (quoted in Sundar, 2011: 47–48). Yet Mahanty has asserted that ever since its inception the Maoist movement has remained organized and participated in concrete struggles highlighting the every­ day concerns of the common people, putting forward a long list in support of his contention: the Naxalbari peasant uprising of 1967 took up the rights of tillers over the land they cultivated; the Srikakulam struggle during 1968–72 was over the adivasis’ right to land and forest produce; from the 1980s onwards, almost all the Naxalite groups despite programmatic differences made land and forest rights the key to political mobilization; finally, in the post liberalization era, the issues of unequal land relations and the extraction of forest resources and alienation of tribal land lay at the heart of the Maoist political discourse and activism (Mahanty, 2017: 67). Banerjee further maintained that these struggles acted as catalysts for trans­ forming the rural society in post-independence India and compelled the Indian state to enact laws relating to forest rights of tribals, minimum wages for agri­ cultural labourers and provision of rural employment among others, which opened up new avenues for civil society groups and human rights activists to put pressure on the administration via the judiciary so that the government could not jettison its commitment to meeting the needs of the poor (Banerjee, 2017: 45). Sundar seemed to concur and contends that it was these more concrete social and

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economic objectives rather than the plans for overthrowing the state that had struck a responsive chord among the people of the Maoist controlled areas and generated pro-Maoist sentiment (Sundar, 2011: 48). This brings us to the second argument, i.e., the strategy to rely on the security forces to banish the Maoist threat was inherently dubious because the Maoists have managed to garner a measure of popular support by meaningfully addressing, even if within the limited stretch they controlled, some of the perennial grievances of the tribal populations long neglected by the state. To begin with, the high sound­ ing promises of prosperity and public welfare of the Nehruvian era failed to materialize thanks to the entrenched cultures of bureaucratization and the attendant vices of corruption, nepotism and fraud. The economic liberalization of the 1990s did push up the GDP as well as basic living standards in the country, but its ben­ efits evidently remained skewed and unequal; and for the teeming millions, this new economic regime implied withdrawal of economic protections, loss of land, dwindling employment opportunities and economic exclusion, with the state maintaining a studied indifference to the sufferings of its own population. With this backdrop, the mining sector emerged as a significant growth engine of the Indian economy, and, as already noted, the newly emerged states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, embarking on an industrialization drive, were found to offer overly generous concessions to the top industrial houses. These ventures, while producing ample returns for government coffers, ignored the needs of the specific regions and entailed unchecked environmental degradation, alienation of forest land and huge displacement of the local population which enabled the Maoists to find a firm footing within the beleaguered tribal communities of central and eastern India (Lea-Henry, 2018: 11–16). The Maoists started working among the tribals of Bastar (Madhya Pradesh, now in Chhattisgarh) and Gadchiroli (Maharashtra) way back into the 1980s to organize them to demand a rise in the nominal price they were paid for collection of tendu leaves (used to make bidis – narrow cigarettes). Spurred on by the Maoists, the tribals went on a strike in protest, and although the contractors engaged in this trade make hefty profits even today, the prices have reached a decent level and, more importantly, participation in this collective action has taught the agitators the value of unity and the ways and means of conducting political negotiation. Further, with the forest land being government owned, the Forest Department officials were seen as intimidating figures for the tribals, preventing them from ploughing their fields, collecting firewood, plucking leaves, picking fruit, grazing their cattle, from living so to say. Indeed, the forest dwellers were often subjected to public humiliation, physical assaults and imprisonment because the officials viewed them as encroachers and themselves as enforcers of the letters of law. Under Maoist lea­ dership, the people finally chose to confront the Forest Department and take over forest land and cultivate it, while the Department’s personnel were ultimately barred from entering the area (Roy, 2010). Finally, once the mineral-rich heartland of India was opened up to the multinationals for extraction of bauxite and other resources leading to forcible land acquisition and police action against villagers

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unwilling to part with their land, the Maoists spearheaded the popular resistance. Indeed, they had reportedly set up a parallel administration (called janatanasarkar) which apart from forming agricultural cooperatives to increase wage rates and running a forest department of its own to protect the forest by regulating illicit trade in forest products, also took up the issues of gender equality, education and health (Haragopal, 2017: 75). Under these circumstances, as Hariss observed, the poor tribals developed a positive disposition towards the Maoists not for any ideological reasons but because they were perceived as ‘good people’ who shared their sense of injustice, were opposed to their oppressors and sought to promote their basic rights (Hariss, 2011: 319). In other words, the Maoists won the con­ fidence of the tribal populace by articulating their needs and aspirations, and the hapless tribals got attracted to them on their own, and not necessarily under duress as was often made out to be the case, which raised serious questions as to the potential efficacy of attempts to eliminate the Maoist challenge through military operations alone. Indeed, Sundar (2011: 51–54) has argued that the high-handed counter-insur­ gency measures have only enhanced the support for the Maoist campaign and elevated a movement with local roots into one with a national presence. She maintained that the resistance against forcible acquisition of land, even when led by the immediate victims (and not by Maoists), met with harassment, repression and imprisonment on the charge of being Maoist sympathizers. This had two con­ sequences: these activists were driven into the Maoist fold and the Maoists, watching brute force applied on peaceful protestors, seemed to believe that the situation was ripe enough for them to exploit and expand their support base. Similarly, Roy’s account of the launch of Salwa Judum and its consequences highlighted how state-sponsored vigilantism gave birth to a spiral of violence: In the slipstream of the Salwa Judum, a swarm of police stations and camps appeared. The idea was to provide carpet security for a ‘creeping reoccupation’ of Maoist-controlled territory. The assumption was that the Maoists would not dare to attack such a large concentration of security forces. The Maoists, for their part, realized that if they did not break that carpet security, it would amount to abandoning people whose trust they had earned, and with whom they had lived and worked for 25 years. They struck back in a series of attacks on the heart of the security grid … . (Roy, 2010) Finally, the critics interrogated the adequacy of welfare measures as a foil to Maoist activism because in their view the issues involved were not merely economic in nature but also touched on securing a share of political power. Thus while acknowledging the importance of the development-oriented schemes targeted towards the Maoist-controlled tribal areas, Mahanty stressed that this hardly con­ stituted the right kind of answer to the crisis of deprivation in rural and tribal India for the struggle in the adivasi areas was about political power, power of self

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governance, power to control the resources of the region. They aspired for autonomous participation in formulating development plans that would not only end poverty, create employment and protect natural resources as well as their local knowledge systems, but also enable them to negotiate with outside forces, national and international, to jointly draw up development programmes on mutually agreed terms. This in no way amounted to seizure of state power, which was the ultimate goal of the CPI (Maoists), but reflected the urge to institute a process of the local people exercising power over their region, through the gram sabha. These local government bodies were presently dominated and manipulated by pro-corporate elements which in collusion with the district administration facilitated clearance of project proposals in violation of various extant legal stipulations. While there were no doubt a few instances of the victory of the people’s movement such as Vedan­ ta’s aluminium plant and bauxite mining in Niyamgiri shutting down because 12 gram sabhas of the region had voted against it, or withdrawal of the POSCO project a result of a resolute campaign by the local people, these isolated developments fell far short of the universal aspirations mentioned above (Mahanty, 2017: 67–68). Sundar also agreed, and averred that without an effort to change the basic structure of exploitation in which the local administration in collusion with the industrialists, traders and contractors made the crucial decisions without consulting the people, and unless New Delhi s blueprint for development took adequate account of adi­ vasi lifestyles, having shed the clichéd notion of equating development with bringing the indigenous people out of the forests instead of trying to build on existing strengths, these financial resources would likely go all waste (Sundar, 2011: 67). This section, thus, sought to make three points. First, despite the avowed goal of the Maoists to capture state power through revolutionary violence, it cannot be denied they have effectively drawn attention to crucial humanitarian issues per­ taining to the tribal regions long lagging behind the rest of the country in terms of development, and the Maoist movement remained largely instrumental to the passage of a body of social security oriented legislation. Second, the success of counter-insurgency measures in crushing the Maoist onslaught was questionable because their contributions to aid and abet the adivasis’ everyday struggle for sur­ vival has earned the movement a degree of popular support from the beneficiaries which has acted as a kind of protective shield and not only neutralized the edge of the government’s armed offensive but also rendered it counter-productive. Third, the government-led, long overdue development initiatives, even if successfully implemented, could only partially address the situation on the ground because finding a voice within the local power configuration and participating effectively in the process of decision making regarding their land and its resources constituted no less vital a concern for the besieged tribals than their economic woes being addressed through state largesse, which called for an overhaul of the structures of political and economic governance in the areas concerned.

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The Maoist movement: An appraisal All these arguments, however, cannot wash the charges leveled against the Maoists, by trenchant critics as well as like-minded commentators, of strategic and tactical mistakes, mindless violence and corruption, political opportunism and duplicity, among others. Thus one commentator, known for his pronounced sympathy for the Maoist cause, questioned the continuing relevance of a political strategy developed in the context of the Chinese socio- political conditions during 1920–40 for the contemporary Indian scenario, and argued that the delineation of the Indian agrarian society and economy as “semi-feudal and semi-colonial” failed to take into account the fault lines it exhibited in terms of caste and tribal loyalties. Moreover, of late, India’s rural economy has been undergoing radical changes, and the big farmer-turned landlords (the jotedars, the main class enemies in Maoist perception) who once dominated the rural socio-economic power structure have given way to a variety of vested interests. This new generation rural elite comprise the descen­ dants of old landlords who have taken to non-agricultural occupations like trading, services, etc, as well as new entrants such as industry, building contractors, road construction agencies, transport operators, among others. This also created new employment opportunities for the unemployed rural poor, and consequently, their dependence on agriculture has largely waned, their traditional semi-feudal ties weakened and turned them instead into stakeholders in the economy contingent on their respective occupations. It is therefore difficult for the Indian Maoists today to galvanize these fractured masses of the rural poor into one homogeneous class of exploited peasants, focusing on the nebulous ‘semi-feudal’ system as their enemy. Unable to factor in these diversities and formulate an appropriate strategy for this multi-tiered society, the Maoists turned their attention to most exploited layer and found fertile soil to experiment with their programme among the tribal poor in the inaccessible and hilly terrains of central and eastern India. These people readily fitted into the Maoist category of poor peasants suffering from extreme economic and social exploitation by landlords, as well as displacement from their hearth and home by multinational corporations – the two enemies that could be described as semi feudal and semi colonial in Maoist rhetoric – and as a result the Maoist operations remained confined to a limited territory and restricted section of its inhabitants (Banerjee, 2017: 45–46). A second category of critics who perceived the Maoist operatives as implicated in criminal activity sought to explain their behaviour in terms of the ‘rebel greed’ hypothesis; i.e., insurgent movements using the popular grievance narrative to advance their own economic and political ends. Thus Lea-Henry (2018: 17–18) identified a divide within the present day Maoist movement between the com­ mitted or the ideologically charged category who comprised the inner circle of the movement vigorously pursuing the cause of justice, and the opportunists and drif­ ters who joined the Maoist ranks for the promise of immediate power and adven­ ture and constituted the bulk of the activists. This point seems to have been corroborated by Banerjee (2017: 44) when he said that following the arrest of the

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front ranking leaders and ideologues of the Maoist movement, a large number of its cadres were reduced to ‘roving gangs of marauders and extortionists’. Hariss also referred to ethnographic studies which viewed the Maoist insurgency to be driven by ‘greed’ or the ‘quest for loot’ and pointed out that it was no coincidence that the Maoists were most active the India’s mining hub: The mines are cash registers for the Maoist war chest. Through extortion, covert attacks and plain old theft, insurgents have tapped a steady stream of mining money to pay their foot soldiers and buy arms and ammunition, sometimes from treasonous cops themselves. (Miklian and Carney, quoted in Hariss, 2011: 324) Indeed, their studies further revealed that the Maoists initially found a niche in the region not by mobilizing poor tribal peasants but rather among the rural elite, including non-tribal people from intermediate castes, by supplying protection and facilitating their acquisition of lucrative contracts for local government projects in collusion with the corrupt and unscrupulous officials of the newly formed Jhark­ hand and Chhattisgarh states. The charge of political opportunism underlying this statement was further underlined by those who drew attention to the fact that the Maoists while opposing the electoral exercise and regularly issuing poll boycott calls, were also found from time to time to intervene in electoral contests among mainstream political parties and use their military muscles to sway the results in one direction or the other (Lea-Henry, 2018: 23; Roy, 2017). An allied instance of political deviousness pertained to Maoist opposition to the government-sponsored development programmes which sought to supply exactly what they had been demanding on behalf of the tribals for a long time. In other words, they under­ mined the development and material well-being of the communities they osten­ sibly tried to support and to cash in on the sense of persistent disenchantment among the tribals towards the state (Lea-Henry, 2018: 25). Finally, we turn to what has perhaps been the most notorious feature of the Maoist movement – its propensity to feed on an ever escalating and self-perpetu­ ating cycle of indiscriminate violence which Lea-Henry maintained has become a part of the movement’s deep culture and attained a life of its own. This self-sus­ taining spiral of violence, he argued, was contingent on a foundational shift in Maoist ideology: from fighting to abolish old structures of social domination, to seeking instead to replace those structures with their own form of authoritarianism, control and fear which made the movement look more like a hostile invasion than an insurgency built on legitimate grievance. As to its consequences, he observed: Violence that, in its very increasing need to find targets, has spread to ideolo­ gically similar socialist organisations, to sympathetic elites, to both the local peasants and adivasis for whom they claim to be fighting for; and as a final logical extension, back onto factional divisions within, challenges to authority

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from, and wavering members of, the Maoists themselves – a self­ cannibalisation. (Lea-Henry, 2018: 21) Interestingly, an observer otherwise sympathetic to the Maoist objectives (Sundar, 2011: 48–49) did not seem to approve the violent excesses indulged in by them, and pointed out that their blueprint of revolution blurred over the nonviolent but militant struggles elsewhere in India, including against mining. To make her point, she brought in the example of Jhabua in western Madhya Pradesh which roughly replicated Dantewada in Chhattisgarh, the Maoist hotbed, in terms of its demo­ graphic profile dominated by a tribal majority who were largely poor and illiterate and yet, unlike Dantewada, remained the site of the nonviolent Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement) apart from other local struggles over land and forests. In this connection Banerjee (2017: 45) quoted the reasons offered by one of the front ranking Maoist leaders behind his surrender in 2014; the party leadership had ignored his repeated objections to acts like destruction of school buildings and indiscriminate killing of adivasis in the name of dismantling the spy network, and thus he dropped a hint about ongoing differences within the party brass regarding extreme violence deployed as a political tool.1 Again, drawing on human rights activist K. Balagopal, Hariss sought to read a connection between the shift in the Maoist movement’s nature in an increasingly anti-democratic direction and the growing incidence of violence. The Naxalites spread into the northern Telangana region mainly through mass organizations but heavy repression on the part of the government forces brought an increased reliance on the armed squads; the immediate economic and social problems of the masses took a back seat and the battle for supremacy with the state became the central instance of struggle … (requiring) … a range of acts of violence, which have no direct relation to the immediate realization of any rights for the masses, though the resulting repression invariably hits at the masses. This resulted in a steady decline in Maoist popularity among the new generations of tribals who despite having benefited earlier through Maoist interventions pro­ gressively refused to be treated as pawns of revolution (Hariss, 2011: 315), a development that proved highly damaging for the fate of the radical movement and likely accounted for the greater success claimed by the government in its antiMaoist campaign and a series of surrenders by Maoist functionaries in recent times as mentioned earlier. Thus, considering the downside of the Maoist movement, this section has argued that even from the perspective of Maoist sympathizers, their theory and strategy derived from it were hopelessly outdated, especially in view of the momentous shifts taking place in the current power architecture in rural India which severely circumscribed the movement’s potential. Secondly, several moves by Maoist campaigners have smacked of political chicanery fomenting speculations

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that the movement has been hijacked by time-servers bent on personal gain and gratification under the guise of a movement high on ideological rhetoric. Last but not the least, the exorbitant violence that characterized the Maoists’ discourse and action, especially when it seemed to exceed the movement’s declared goals and took a heavy toll of the lives of ordinary people, was found abhorrent by com­ mentators in general which they felt has cost the movement dearly in terms of valuable mass support and thereby increased their vulnerability to counter-terrorism measures.

Conclusion It follows from the above analysis that the Maoist movement in contemporary India, and the government efforts at tackling it, have become caught up in a strange bind sitting precariously as it does on the borderline of national security and human security. As noted above, the Maoist movement has been responsible for effectively mainstreaming critical human security issues connected in particular with the day-to-day survival of the hapless tribal populations of India whose history of political and economic marginalization in fact dated back to the colonial times and continued more or less unabated even during the post-independence era.2 But this positive and constructive ethos of the movement got drastically undermined by its fetishization of violence as an indispensable instrument of attaining these objec­ tives, though its leaders and sympathizers sought to justify their position with reference to the brutality of government repression and the cold indifference evinced by the administration as well as the public institutions, including the independent statutory commissions, towards the plight of the said people. This, however, seemed a weak rationalization to many who were further disillusioned by the Maoist campaign allegedly showing signs of decadence, especially as far as their take on electoral contests or the targeted development programmes launched by the government for the improvement of the economic conditions of the tribal populace was concerned. All this perhaps went to lend credence to the official portrayal of the Maoists as a grim threat to national security that could only be tackled through firm and unwavering counter-insurgency measures, and the development initiatives under­ taken in the wake of the ‘walking on two legs’ strategy appeared to have received a short shrift in the process. Yet, the incontestable fact remains that so long as the miseries and grievances of the ‘wretched of the earth’ inhabiting the forests lying in India’s heartland, the wellspring of the Maoist upheaval, goes unattended, the radical campaign is unlikely to subside or, even if it does, it would be only a transient affair. It is only a bold experiment such as granting meaningful autonomy to the tribals within the framework of the local government (adivasi swaraj in Mahanty’s words) (Mahanty, 2017: 70) and acknowledging them as full-fledged partners in and not mere beneficiaries of the state’s development agenda that could make a dent in this vicious cycle. But whether a government wedded to a neo­ liberal growth mantra irrespective of the party that rules, and apparently reluctant

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even to open a political dialogue with the Maoists3 could embark on such an experiment constitutes the moot question.

Notes 1 Soul searching on the part of the Maoist leadership has been going on for a long time, however. See Banerjee (2017: 45), Chakrabarty (2014: 131), Hariss (2011: 320), Roy (2011). The decision of Gadar, the well-known Maoist ideologue and balladeer, to leave the party and embrace parliamentary politics in 2017 may also be viewed in this light. 2 The recent controversy kicked up by the Supreme Court order of 13 February directing 21 states to evict 11.8 lakh illegal forest dwellers whose claims over forest land have been rejected by the authorities may be recalled here. See PTI report ‘Supreme Court stays its Feb 13 order directing eviction of 11.8 lakh forest dwellers’, India Today, 28 February 2019. 3 Indeed, past instances of such dialogues betrayed lack of sincerity and political will on the part of the government. See Haragopal (2017: 72–73) for the developments in the course of the aborted dialogue between the Maoists and the Andhra government in the first decade of this millennium.

References Banerjee, Sumanta (2017). ‘From Naxalbari to Chhattisgarh: Half a century of Maoist jour­ ney in India’, EPW, LI:21, May 27: 43–47. Chakrabarty, Bidyut (2014). Communism in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chitralekha (2017). ‘Coming to be Maioists: Surviving tropes, shifting meanings’, in Ajay Gudavarthy (ed.), Revolutionary Violence Versus Democracy: Narratives from India, New Delhi: Sage. D’Melo, Bernard (2009). ‘What is Maoism’, EPW, 44(47), November 21–27. Ghose, Debobrat (2018). ‘Chhattisgarh election: High voter turnout despite Maoist threat’, Firstpost, November 14. https://www.firstpost.com/india/chhattisgarh-election-high-vo ter-turnout-despite-maoist-threat-shows-importance-of-infrastructure-development-5549601. html Gupta, Dipak (2007). ‘The Naxalites and the Maoist movement in India: Birth, demise, and reincarnation’. Democracy and Security, 3(2): 157–188. Haragopal, G. (2017). ‘Maoist movement: Context and concern’, EPW, LI:21, May 27: 71– 76. Hariss, John (2011). ‘What is going on in India s “Red Corridor”? Questions about India-s Maoist Insurgency, Pacific Affairs, 84(2): 309–327. Hindu, The (2018). ‘Senior Maoist leader ‘surrenders’ in Chhattisgarh’, August 24. Indo-Asian News Service (2017). ‘Will consider dialogue with Maoists if they renounce violence: Government’, July 19. Kaiser, Ejaz (2018). ‘60 Maoists surrender in Chhattisgarh s Narayanpur district’, Indian Express, April 26. Lea-Henry, Jed (2018). Imagined Wounds: The False Grievance Behind India s Maoist Movement, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, Research Paper No #30, January. https://www. researchgate.net/publication/322593957_Imagined_Wounds_The_False_Grievance_ behind_India%27s_Maoist_Movement Lynch, Thomas F. (2016). India s Naxalite Insurgency. Strategic Perspectives 22, October. Washington, DC: Institute for National Strategic Studies. ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/ Documents/stratperspective/…/Strategic-Perspectives-22.pdf

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Mahanty, Manoranjan (2017). ‘Adivasi Swaraj is the answer to violence’, EPW, LI:21, May 27: 66–70. Milkian and Carney (nd). ‘Fire in the hole’, quoted in Hariss. Ramana, P.V. (2010). ‘Linkages between Indian and Nepalese Maoists’, November 9. http s://idsa.in/idsacomments/LinkagesbetweenIndianandNepaleseMaoists_pvramana_091110 Ramana, P.V. (2011). ‘India s Maoist insurgency: Evolution, current trends and responses’, in Michael Kugelman (ed.), India’s Contemporary Security Challenges, Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 29–45. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publica tion/indias-contemporary-security-challenges Ramana, P.V. (2018). ‘Maoist finances’, Journal of Defence Studies, 12(2): 59–75. Roy, Arundhati (2010). ‘Walking with the comrades’, Outlook, March 29. https://www. english.upenn.edu/sites/www.english.upenn.edu/files/WalkingwiththeComrades.pdf Roy, Siddharthya (2017). ‘Half a century of Maoist insurgency’, The Diplomat, September 21. https://thediplomat.com/2017/09/half-a-century-of-indias-maoist-insurgency/ Sandhu, Kamaljit Kaur (2017). ‘12 takeaways from Centre’s new strategy to deal with Naxals’, India Today, May 8. Singh, Rakesh (2015). ‘Modi govt firms up anti Naxal strategy’, Pioneer, May 31. Sundar, Nandini (2011). ‘At war with oneself’, in Michael Kugelman (ed.), India s Contemporary Security Challenges, Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 46–68. https:// www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/indias-contemporary-security-challenges Zavaid, Azaan (2018). ‘Red terror: New strategy puts a leash on Maoists’, Hindustan Times, April 16.

12 EXPANDING THE WPS AGENDA Experiences from Nepal and north-east India Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya

The exclusion of women in the conduct of international relations, especially in the war and peace process, has long been interrogated by feminist scholarship and peace researchers on varied grounds. Convincing arguments have been made for the inclusion of women in peacebuilding processes (Enloe, 1989; Tickner, 1993 Dahlerup, 1988; Brock-Utne, 1989; Weber, 2006). Scores of studies have analyzed women’s varied exposure to conflict situations and their less recognized engage­ ment with peace processes (Anderlini, 2007; Banerjee, 2008; Manchanda, 2017; Parashar, 2018, Mullick, 2013; Paffenholz, 2015). It is now generally recognized that women are endowed with unique understanding and credibility to enrich peace negotiations for a sustainable outcome. They are also often more capable of reaching across to the ‘enemy’, including people of different cultures or ethnicities, to provide a much wider context to conflict prevention and post-conflict peacebuilding (UNESCO, 2018). Indeed, the inclusion of women at the peace table increases the durability and the quality of peace. Various agencies of the United Nations (UN) and its entities, especially the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), have strongly recommended the participation of women in post-conflict peace processes. However, the transformative shift came in October 2000 when a United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR 1325) stipulated a range of inter­ national standards to strengthen women’s participation in conflict prevention and peacebuilding. The UNSCR – along with its subsequent resolutions 1820 (2009), 1888 (2009), 1889 (2010), 1960 (2011), 2106 (2013), 2122 (2013) and 2242 (2015) – produced the Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS). The WPS offers a historic political framework which demonstrates that a gender perspective is pivotal to negotiating peace agreements and reconstructing war-torn societies for sustain­ able peace. The WPS agenda has mobilized unprecedented global pressure on concerned stakeholders in conflict zones to increase the participation of women in

Expanding the WPS agenda 179

the decision-making bodies (Paffenholz, 2015). The adoption of the WPS agenda has inspired a considerable increase in the specific provisions concerning the inclusion of women or gender in peace agreements. Even though the representa­ tion of women and their expression on peace and conflict issues increased sig­ nificantly within the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and other UN bodies, a range of national and regional strategies was introduced for advancing WPS. A UN Women study thus shows that since the adoption of resolution 1325, 27 per cent of peace agreements have included references to women, compared with only 11 per cent between 1990 and 2000 (UN Women, 2018). Despite its global recognition and visibility, the WPS agenda is yet to achieve the desired outcome. A UN Development Fund for Women study (UNIFEM, 2012) found that women’s participation in peace negotiations remained low during the first decade after the passage of UNSC 1325. Similarly, a trend analysis of 1,500 peace and political agreements adopted between the years 2000 and 2016 (140 processes) shows that only 25 agreements refer to women’s engagement in the process.1 The UN Secretary-General Report on Women (UNSG, 2017) points out that only half of the peace agreements signed in 2016 contained gender-specific provisions compared to 70 per cent in 2015.2 Indubitably, the implementation of the WPS agenda in different local and regional contexts is a work in progress. In many conflict zones, the WPS agenda remains unimplemented for one reason or another. A major restraint has been the non-applicability of WPS to situations where conflict is not formally recognized. However, the non-implementation of WPS per se doesn’t preclude the participa­ tion of women in the peace process. In many situations, the local or cultural tra­ ditions have facilitated women’s participation in the peace process without any recourse to WPS or any other international regime. There is thus a need to explore women’s engagement with peace processes in diverse regional and cultural settings, especially to discern patterns of women’s involvement in the peace process with or without following the WPS agenda. Such a comparative study would unravel how the WPS agenda makes a difference in cases of women engaged in the peace process. To this end, the chapter looks at two recent conflicts in South Asia viz. the Maoist insurgency in Nepal wherein the WPS agenda was well implemented and the north-east zones of India wherein women groups and organizations participate in the peace process but without the WPS framework. A comparative perspective of the conflict situation might be helpful to discern how the adoption of WPS standards in case of Nepal has engendered greater opportunities in this respect. India’s north-east experience, on the other hand, highlights the indigenous traditions and how they could be a supplement to the WPS agenda and vice versa.

WPS in post-conflict Nepal Nepal is a least developed South Asian country which has suffered a decade-long violent conflict between the Government of Nepal and the Maoist rebels. The deeply entrenched feudalistic monarchical system entailed a highly authoritarian

180 Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya

and repressive political structure which alienated its citizens in many ways and created fertile grounds for the protracted insurgency. The decade-long Maoist-led insurgency (known as the ‘people’s war’) took its toll of over 17,000 people since its beginning in 1996. The war ended with the signing of a Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA) on 21 November 2006, which committed to form two transitional justice mechanisms: A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and a Com­ mission on Disappeared Persons (CDP). Although women formed a much pub­ licized feature of the Maoist rebel force, they neither became a partner in the peace process that led to the signing of the CPA nor was their post-conflict rehabilitation prioritized (Upadhyaya, 2014). However, despite not being represented in the formal peace talks held in 2006, women played a significant role at the non-formal level (Ariño, 2008; Do and Iyer, 2009; Falch, 2010b; Upadhyaya, 2014). Although none of the signatories to the CPA was a woman, clause 3.5 of CPA mentioned that the peace accord will address the problems related to women, dalits, janajatis, madheshis, oppressed, neglected minorities and the backwards by ending discrimination based on caste, class, sex, language, culture, religion, and region and to restructure the state on the basis of inclusiveness, democracy and progression by ending pre­ sent centralised and unitary structure of the state. (Clause 3.5, CPA, 2006) The follow-up elections resulted in one third of the total seats going to women. The subsequent onset of a secular democratic governance engendered a strong context for including women in the post-conflict peacebuilding. Increasing asser­ tions for equal participation and mainstreaming of gender led to the implementa­ tion of UNSCR 1325 and 1820. Nepal not only accepted the existence of armed conflict, but it also negotiated the peace process formally and invited the United Nations to oversee the implementation of it. After the signing of CPA, the government and Communist Party of NepalMaoist (CPN-M) signed another accord – ‘Agreement on the Monitoring of the Management of Arms and Armies’ (AMMAA) – especially for managing ex-com­ batants. A Special Committee constituted for this purpose offered three options to the ex-combatants: integration into the Nepalese Army, voluntary retirement with remuneration or rehabilitation with special packages. While a large number of women combatants (3,454) opted for voluntary retirement, a few secured jobs in the government and some were integrated into the Nepalese Army. However, a number of discontented ex-combatant women came together and formed a group named the ‘Former PLA Women Foundation’ to handle their problems. See­ mingly, the socially active women found reintegration easier than those who were either single or did not belong to any social network. The establishment of the Nepalese National Action Plan (NAP) in 2011 for the implementation of UNSCR 1325 under the newly created Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction was a unique achievement in this direction. The NAP was an

Expanding the WPS agenda 181

outcome of a long consultative process with a range of stakeholders including government agencies, development partners, donor organizations, international non-government organizations (INGOs) and civil society organizations. The NAP also engaged in nation-wide consultations with grass-roots women at the regional and district levels. It also benefitted from the special consultations with women who were directly affected by conflict. These consultations were attended by over 3000 participants and generated more than 1500 action points, which were clustered under the five pillars of the NAP as they relate to the WPS agenda.3 A Steering Committee was constituted for the implementation of NAP, in which 11 out of 25 members were women, such as the Minister for Women, Children and Social Welfare, members of the National Women Commission, Secretary of the Ministry of Women, Children and Social welfare, and repre­ sentatives of the Women’s Welfare Society, Women’s Peace Group, Women Security Pressure Group, Women’s Network for Peace, Power, Democracy and the Constituent Assembly, Rural Women’s Development and Unity Centre, Women for Human Rights, Single Women’s Group etc. The NAP District Coordination Committees headed by women included two conflict-affected women as members who had been assigned by the Local Peace Committee (NAP, 2011). But in the post-conflict peace negotiations women were side-lined in the formal peace process. The head of the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), Ian Martin (2010, said that, “At all the political negotiating tables I have seen in Nepal during the peace process, not once have I seen a woman at the table” and perhaps this resulted in CPA not including more than one paragraph related to women. Even though women had made peace interventions during the war, they were initially excluded from this formal peace process (Upadhyaya, 2014). However, due to considerable participation of women during the conflict and the subsequent peace process, and because of the pressure exerted by various international agencies, the state apparatus was eventually compelled to give women parliamentary representation. Table 12.1 shows the increased number of women in Nepal’s general elections and constituent assembly elections, but it also shows that in the 2013 and 2017 elections, women’s representation still constituted less than one third of the total. TABLE 12.1 Representation of women in Nepal’s elections

Election year

Women’s participation

1991 1994 1999 2008 2013 2017

2.9% (6) in parliamentary election 3.4% (7) in parliamentary election 5.8% (12) in parliamentary election 33.8% (197 out of 601 in constituent assembly election) 30% (172 out of 575 in constituent assembly election) 29.6% in parliamentary election

Source: Acharya (2017).

182 Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya

This increased participation of women in the decision-making body happened only because of the adoption of UNSC Resolution 1325 and the pressure gener­ ated by donor countries to bring in quotas for women in the new Constituent Assembly. Women in Nepal were not only involved in the legislature; there was a mandatory provision that 33 per cent of positions on the Local Peace Committees (LPCs) – formed in every district and municipality – and Village Development Committees (VDCs) were reserved for women (NAP, 2011). The aim of estab­ lishing LPCs in districts of Nepal was to encourage and facilitate inclusive peace­ making and peacebuilding processes (Odendaal and Olivier, 2008). According to the terms of the LPC structure, there were to be up to 23 members in which there had to be one-third representation for women. Though women got an opportu­ nity to participate in the LPCs their involvement and effectiveness was limited because, at times, there would be as few as just 6–7 women in the committee – a number too small for their voices to be heard (Tendulkar et al., 2016).4 Compulsory inclusion of women in government structures has been one of the biggest achievements for promoting women’s political participation in the Nepal peace process (NAP, 2011). It was after the UNMIN and the presence of various donor agencies that a lot of activism took place in Nepal. Workshops, awareness camps, advocacy groups and activist volunteers took the message of inclusion of women in peace processes across Nepal. Even though the patriarchal structures of Nepal remained resistant to including women in major positions (Upadhyaya, 2014), because of these activities across Nepal there was no dearth of awareness. This gives hope for women’s participation in post-conflict reconstruction. In Nepal, affirmative actions such as quotas and reserved seats for women have turned out to be effective tools for accelerating women’s representation in formal politics. Women there hold a higher level of a political position than ever before (Falch, 2010a). In Nepal, Shantimallika, SANKALPA, Sancharica Samuha and other NGOs worked for the inclusion of women in the post-conflict political sphere (Chun and Skelsbaek, 2010). Shantimallika was established in 2003 with 150 women peacebuilders for implementing UNSCR 1325 and 1820 (ADB Report, 2013). In 2006, the ‘Women’s Network for Peace and Justice’ had engaged in promoting 33 per cent women’s reservation in government. This network strived to build a bridge between civil society and political parties for the fulfilment of their objective. SANKALPA is another local NGO which has worked for women’s participation and representation in Nepal’s peace process and peace structure. It has also worked for implementing the National Action Plan on UNSCR 1325 and 1820 in colla­ boration with the Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction (ADB Report, 2013). The network of 36 women’s NGO groups, Women Acting Together for Transforma­ tive Change (Women Act), encouraged women to participate in the political process through advocacy and interactions. Supported by International donor agencies, the ‘Women’s Network for Peace and Justice’ was set up. This network of 11 women’s group was supported by USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and raised their

Expanding the WPS agenda 183

voice for 33 per cent female representation in government structures (ADB Report, 2013). The Women’s Alliance for Peace, Power, Democracy and Con­ stituent Assembly was initiated by the government of Norway in 2007 (this was later known as SANKALPA). Similarly, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development and CARE supported peace pressure groups in the Gorkha district in Nepal who have issued citizen’s charter in the area to eliminate domestic violence against women (ADB Report, 2013). The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is a regional development bank in Asia that has also supported the Nepalese post-conflict peace process through its various infrastructural projects. The ADB projects work in 18 districts, benefiting around 70 per cent of the population, where 11 per cent of the families are headed by women (ADB Report, 2013). ADB has launched water and sanitation projects in several conflict-affected districts and these projects were operated by Nepalese women’s groups. Women were also engaged in road building projects. These post-conflict developments have brought some positive transformation in women’s political participation. According to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UNDP, women’s involvement in infrastructure is a new phenomenon in Nepal (NMFA and UNDP, 2011). These achievements have not been a panacea for women’s involvement in peace, yet an institutional effort is in place to identify women’s agency-hood and involve them in justice and fairness. And the state remains expressly committed towards upholding justice and fairness to women.

The case of north-east India Unlike Nepal, India did not consider implementing the WPS agenda in the case of its north-east region.5 By declaring the north-east a ‘disturbed zone’ and not ‘an armed conflict zone’, the Indian government precluded the implementation of the UN provisions in the region. Many women’s groups assert that the absence of the WPS agenda in the region has constrained women’s participation in the peace process. It is revealing here to highlight some of the relevant aspects of conflicts in the north-east to convey, historically, the involvement of women in the peace process and what their future role may be. Many parts of India’s north-east have remained ‘conflictual’ ever since the Republic of India came into being. While the insurgency in Nagaland is often credited as one of the oldest unresolved conflicts in the world, there have been sporadic major militant activities and low-intensity conflict in Assam, Manipur and Tripura. The severity of the armed separatist movement in Nagaland led the Indian government to evoke the very contentious Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA) in 1958.6 The AFSPA was later extended to further parts of the north-east to counter the insurgents therein. There are contentions over natural resources, illegal migration, displacement and citizenship, and so on. The making and unmaking of borderlands further aggra­ vated the conflictual portents in this region (Baruah, 1989; Das, 2013). However, it is the extremely diverse population of north-east and their long-drawn quest for

184 Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya

identity which provide an overarching context to many conflicts. Being a hub of crosscutting migratory routes from distant lands of Tibet/China, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand and Bangladesh, the north-east has absorbed a veritable blend of cultures and traditions which often aggravates identity related anxieties. Also, because the territorial organization of north-eastern states in the 1950s didn’t reckon with the ethnic and cultural specificities, this has allowed for discontentment and conflictual assertion of ethnic identity. It was always a challenge for the newly formed Indian nation-state to integrate the north-eastern tribes which largely belong to Tibeto-Burman/Mongoloid stock and, thus, are closer to Southeast Asia than to South Asia, especially because of the region’s poor connectivity to the Indian mainland by a small corridor, often called ‘the chicken’s neck’. The north-east’s international borders stretch much further than its domestic boundary. The creation of East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh) also curtailed the physical connection between mainland India and its north-eastern states. In addition, the north-east has long experienced the ‘the psychology of iso­ lation’ that has been perpetuated by the fear of outsiders. The Inner Line system implemented during colonial times in some parts of the region corroborated tra­ ditional anxieties against outsiders. It is feared that non-indigenous people will disrupt the salience of tribal culture. The current anger is directed mainly towards the flow of Muslim migrants from Bangladesh (Upadhyaya and Upadhyaya, 2016). The series of protracted conflicts in the north-east have engaged women var­ iously depending on the different conflict dynamics. Compelled to protect their family and community resources, in violent upheavals women served as shelterproviders to the militants with some even serving as combatants. But it is their role as peace activists which has traditionally grabbed the headlines. Even so, often such peace activism did not flourish as an independent movement but remained within the broader terms of patriarchy (Nag, 2006). Indeed, the pervasive impulse of ethnic identity embedded in most of the conflicts further intensified the pressure of patriarchy on women as women are seen to be the custodians of culture and tra­ dition (Bhattacharya, 2018). Thus, women peace activists in north-east were not only faced with repressive pressures of patriarchy but also with the challenge to form a united coalition of women which would transcend deep barriers of inter­ ethnic divisions. Nevertheless, amidst the varied layers of conflict, there has been a long tradition of local peace initiatives in diverse ethnic groups including the Naga Mothers’ Association, Kuki Women’s Association, Lamkang Women’s Union, Mayan Women’s Union, Chothe Women’s Union, Tangkhul Shanao Long, and so on. These organisations actively focus on protecting their community-based rights. Perhaps, the most well publicized act of civil resistance came from Irom Sharmila, an iconic figure of peace and human rights who undertook a hunger strike unre­ lentingly for 16 years to seek justice on this count. This remarkable act of public protest attracted tremendous response from women’s groups. The National Alli­ ance of People’s Movements (NAPM), a network of over 200-odd movement groups along with Meira Paibis and Apunba Lup, extended support to her cause

Expanding the WPS agenda 185

(Lokendra, 2002). Yet, in the absence of any overarching coordination amongst them, their impact in terms of establishing peace or even opposing AFSPA in a concerted manner remained rather feeble. Irom Sharmila’s example shows the tragic ineffectuality of the struggle for democracy and freedom through Gandhian means (Das, 2013). Amidst the protracted conflicts, the region witnessed over a dozen accords pro­ mising peace and stability. However, with the exception of the Mizo Accord of 1986, the peace accords did not yield enduring peace. The accords were critiqued for stipulating short sighted and impractical solutions without creating adequate accountable political infrastructure for conflict resolution or governance (Das, 2005). The pre-accord negotiations were not inclusive enough and evaded the generic issues of the conflict. The negligible role of women in peace accords is flagged as one of the major causes of fragile peace accords. The accords hardly contained women related references, as is evident from Table 12.2 below. The fact is that the prolonged violent conflict situations in the north-east have affected women in varied ways. Apart from being the worst affected victims of the conflict spree, women have played a role as supporters of armed groups, and, in some cases, as armed fighters. At the same time, women have mobilized effectively for community survival and mitigation of violence. In fact, there is a long history of women contributing to peacebuilding and mediation as well. The long inven­ tory of women’s organizations concerned with peacebuilding include the Assam Boro Women’s Justice Forum, Nagaland’s Naga Mother’s Association, Naga Women’s Union, Manipur Hmar Women’s Association, Arunachal Pradesh’s R.K Mosang Memorial Society, Tripura’s Borok Women’s Forum of Twipra, Dimasa Women’s Society, Manipur’s Zomi Mother’s Association, Assam’s All Tiwa Women’s Association, Rabha Women’s Council, The Manipur Women Gun TABLE 12.2 North-east peace accords

Peace Accords

Signatories

References on women security

Naga-Akbar Hydari Accord (1947) Sixteen Point Agreement (1960) Shillong Accord (1975) Assam Accord (1985) Mizoram Accord (1986) Darjeeling Hill Accord (1988) Agartala Agreement (1993) Bodoland Territorial Council Accord (2003) Nagaland Peace Accord (2015)

All All All All All All All All

men men men men men men men men

No No No No No No No No

All men

No

Source: Centre for Development in Peace Studies, Guwahati, India. http://cdpsindia.org/index.asp

186 Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya

Survivor’s Network, Control Arms Foundation of India, etc. These groups have helped the women deal with trauma and agony as the result of armed conflicts. They also have worked towards the economic empowerment of women affected by violence. While the state and non-state actors continued to engage in peace activities, several women’s organizations raised their voice to expand women’s participation as per the UNSCR 1325. It was felt that women’s issues were generally ignored in the peace process and accord terms. For instance, when the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) entered into a ceasefire with the Indian government in 2011, the then ULFA’s charter of demands contained the issue of economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights but not a single demand directly related to women’s rights (Hazarika and Sharma, 2014). Much of the community discontent related to the disregard of an inclusive and participatory approach towards reinte­ gration and rehabilitation of women rebels. The former female rebels received meagre and insufficient monetary compensation for adequate rehabilitation, and some never even received any recompense (Moral, 2017).

Customary practices Customary norms, religious beliefs and matrilineage practices are much highlighted as significant factors facilitating the participation of women in the north-east. Sev­ eral ethnographic studies have recorded the unique ways through which women were included in community decision-making and dispute resolution. With the arrival of modern state-led institutions, these traditional institutions having ethnic- or church-based origins have evolved or vanished. However, it is not difficult to find the influence of customary practices on women working as peacemakers between disaffected parties. Anthropologists have identified many ‘lived in’ customs which have inspired the culture of women playing a role in conflict resolution. For instance, in the Tangkhuls tribe, women have long served as peace negotiators called Pukhrelas or Pukrelia. In this traditional institution, women hold Y shaped sticks and burst forth between warring clans in an effort to stop them from killing each other. In these cases, the women of one clan were married into a rival clan or village, so providing a channel for commu­ nication and understanding and thus persuading their men to stop the violence and killings (Manchanda, 2004; Baruah, 2007). Most significant is the traditional construct of motherhood in the prevention of killing and violence. A number of north-eastern women’s groups have articulated their demands in the language of motherhood. Most significant instances are: the Naga Women’s Association (NWA) and the Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA) in Nagaland, Meira Paibi (fire torch bearing), Manipur Hamar Women’s Association, Manipur Zomi Mothers Association, the Kuki Women’s Association, Assam Boro Women’s Justice Forum, etc. (Banerjee, 2008). These women’s organizations have helped the women deal with pain and torture due to armed conflict; they have also worked for the economic empowerment of women affected by conflict (Mullick,

Expanding the WPS agenda 187

2013). The most well-known organization is the Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA) which aims to eliminate violence and promote responsible community living. Naga women’s peace activism has, in fact, opened up space for the recognition of women as legitimate peacebuilders in civil society. The NMA activists have worked as negotiators and mediators between the government and Naga Students Federation on contentious issues like age limit for jobs. The NMA has held rallies and demonstrations for the withdrawal of AFSPA, against drug trafficking and Naga women’s inheritance rights, etc. In a symbolic gesture of the condemnation and rejection of violence, the NMA follows the tra­ dition of covering the body of every victim of violence with a black shawl irre­ spective of whether the victim is an insurgent or a member of the police. On similar lines, the Mothers’ Union of Tura has worked to persuade militant groups of Meghalaya to give up arms. The Naga Women’s Union of Manipur together with the members of the NMA have also started the process of bringing about reconciliation between different rival militant groups and to put an end to ethnic and factional killings (Dutta, 2005). The Naga Mothers’ Association and Naga Women’s Union have successfully managed, after much struggle, to abolish the discriminating customary laws that prohibited women to participate in the local or village council. The emotive vocabulary of motherhood imbedded in caring and nurturing readily garners respect and authority from all across the community. The ethos of motherhood adds a unique verve to the feminine voices in governance and peacebuilding. However, the de-sexualized frame of motherhood can also sub­ stantially limit the space and scope of women’s protests (Haripriya, 2012; Banerjee and Dey, 2012). Women in north-east used their ‘bodies’ as a site of the protest. An instructive example is the protest of Meira Paibis (women torch bearers) of Manipur in 2004. The protest saw a group of 12 middle-aged women lodging a naked protest in front of the Indian Army headquarters against the rape and killing of 32-year-old Thangjam Manorama. Known as the ‘Mothers of Manorama’, this protest led to an unprecedented rise in nonviolent resistance movements in the state. Soon after, the Assam Rifles had to vacate their headquarters and the AFSPA was removed from seven Assembly segments in the Imphal Valley, though it remained in the rest of the state. Similarly, the Meira Paibis have effectively protested against various social evils including the menace of growing alcoholism in the state, which led to the declaration of Manipur as a dry state (Banerjee et al., 2010; Devi, 2017). A significant peace initiative came from the Mahila Shanti Sena (women’s peace corps) which was formed in 2001 to handle conflicts arising out of disaffection between caste, region, religion, ethnicity or gender etc. An interesting feature of this initiative was the formation of a Rapid Action Force (RAF) to ensure quick response to pre-empt and defuse acts of violence. Wherever there is information of any possible surfacing of tension on the basis of caste, the Mahila Shanti Sena takes action, drawing its insights from the local women who are not necessarily its members (Das, 2013).

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Despite the striking presence of such remarkable women’s groups like NMA and Meira Paibis, the peace work of women in the north-east is less noticed because of their absence from the formal peace processes. Some of the customary laws and their patriarchal interpretation also constrain the role of women in public life. At the same time, the 73rd constitutional amendment, while recognising the unique tribal customs in north-east, has had a mixed impact on north-east women. Although it recognised and promoted traditional institutions (TI) of local selfgovernment such as village councils and village development boards (VDBs) in many parts of north-east, in some ways it precluded the implementation of the constitutional provisions for women’s representation. The states of Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya and two districts of Assam are a case in point. In 2016, the Supreme Court of India finally issued a directive to the Nagaland state government to allow women’s reservation in urban local bodies, as in others states (Thaosen, 2017). In fact, leading Naga tribal bodies like Naga HoHo, Lotha HoHo and Sumi HoHo insist that the 33 per cent reservation for women in urban local bodies is against their customary laws and against Article 371 (A) of the con­ stitution which allows them to follow their customary rules (Thaosen, 2017). Thus, the traditional tribal structures resist a quota system of any kind or affirmative action in favour of women. However, due to enormous pressure for women’s quotas, the Naga HoHo yielded to nominate two women to the Naga HoHo bodies (Manchanda and Kakran, 2017). The only exception to this reluctance has been an implementation of 25 per cent women’s quotas in the Village Development Board (Nagaland Village and Area Councils Act, 1978). The gender dynamics of north-east tribes presents a paradox. While the elements of a matrilineal society reveal traditions of women ruling and administering the clan, in practice, however, the women just have a decorative role to play while their male relations perform the actual administration. For instance, the Nokma (village headman responsible for the distribution of agricultural lands) in the Garo tribe of Meghalaya is attributed as a TI which could administer justice and resolve conflicts amicably with the erring and the aggrieved party. However, here too, the women who lead Nokma (A’king Nokma) as per the matrilineal customs hardly enjoy any decision-making power which in practice belongs to the men in the family. In any case, such TIs of governance – Syeims, Dorbar, Dolois, Nokma – are in decline due to the overwhelming sway of non-traditional institutions (NTIs), whereas hybrid institutions such as the Autonomous District Councils (ADCs), Laskars and Council of Nokmas are yet to flourish as an effective alternative to the NTIs (Upadhyaya and Upadhyaya, 2016). The recent narrative of women in the north-east has been moulded by the Indian government’s reluctance to bring in external elements. The ‘North-east India Women Initiative for Peace’ (NEIWIP), a collective network of women, has raised this demand time and again. The Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network (MWGSN) and Control Arms Foundation of India (CAFI) have also highlighted this demand (NEIWIP leaflet). During the first North-East India Women Peace Congregation in 2015, women leaders aimed to “strategize to develop a Regional

Expanding the WPS agenda 189

Action Plan on Women Peace and Security with reference to UNSCR 1325 which were to be taken up with relevant stakeholders of Government of India” (Manipur Times, March 24, 2015). In a major step to affirm their faith in the WPS regime, the women leaders organized a ‘Women Peace Conclave’ in Guwahati for ensuring the participation of women in the peace process, peace negotiations and decision-making forums (Women Peace Conclave, 2016). It is evident that although women in the north-east may not have participated in formal peace talks, their interventions for peace have been very innovative and thus remarkably sig­ nificant. However, due to a lack of formal commitment of the government to involve women in the peace processes, their participation in formal politics has remained marginal.

Lessons learned Both in Nepal and India’s north-east, women have played an active role and campaigned for the establishment of peace and democracy. Whereas the peace process in Nepal was moulded significantly by the WPS agenda facilitated by the UNMIN, it was women’s organizations which employed the WPS regime effec­ tively as a tool to legitimize their demands for a greater presence of women in the political sphere (Ariño, 2008). Nepal not only implemented UNSCR 1325, but also welcomed the support of the international communities and organizations. India’s reluctance to accept ‘outside’ involvement in its internal matters defined its approach vis-à-vis the north-east peace process. In the absence of the WPS agenda, women’s participation in the peace process was largely inspired by customary and local stimuli. Expectedly, the women’s movement aimed for socio-economic empowerment rather than aspiring for greater space in political decision making. They protested not only against the atrocities of the armed forces, and for the repeal of AFSPA Act, but also against social evils such as the use of drugs or alcohol. The absence of the WPS agenda also saw less attention being paid to women agency-hood. While women’s victimhood is reported widely, their agency-hood remains neglected (Phukon, 2017). For example, women’s organizations such as Sadou Assam Nari Sanstha, Mula Gabharu Sanstha, Assam Jugral Mahila Parishad which represented women’s activism during the Assam movement and at times acted as a ‘human shields’ between agitating students and armed forces are less highlighted (Mahanta, 1988; Phukon, 2017). Similar resistance is noticed to the inclusion of women in the post-conflict reintegration and rehabilitation process. However, the level of involvement of women in the peace processes in both situations is significantly different. In Nepal, the increased participation of women in governance and post-conflict peacebuilding assumed remarkable salience during the people’s struggle for democracy. Women’s agency-hood was vigorously sup­ ported by the international community, and also by the readiness of the state and the civil society to follow the WPS norms. Not only did Nepal accept the UNSC resolutions concerning WPS, but related action plans at the national level too were brought in place, promptly. Subsequently, global international pressure and support

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in terms of monetary and human resources were channelled to propel women’s participation in the post-conflict peace processes. On the other hand, the women in India’s north-east had to rely on traditional and informal ways to engage with the peacebuilding. Despite their noticeable contribution to building peace constituencies, women are rarely invited to the formal peace talks and still more sparingly nominated into formal peace commit­ tees. Their conspicuous absence from the negotiation table and policy intervention has been rather paradoxical in view of their unique lineage to be at the forefront of struggles against social injustice and violence. Indeed, the absence of any institu­ tional framework, national or international, undermines their potential to con­ tribute to social peace and, in turn, weakens the possibilities of a sustainable solution to the problems. Whereas the traditional institutions hardly enhanced their political participation, the non-applicability of 73rd constitutional amendment in some north-eastern areas further curtailed their involvement. Unsurprisingly, the absence of an insti­ tutional framework for women’s representation has often triggered the demand of implementing the WPS agenda through various peace congregations. While TIs of governance and conflict resolution might still provide effective avenues of women’s participation, the unresolved tensions between the TIs, NTIs and hybrid institutions continue to undermine any such possibility. A meaningful coexistence between these institutions requires greater coordination and a more trusting relationship. There is a need to streamline TI practices, eliminate dis­ crepancies and overlaps in the jurisdiction, and accord recognition to the TIs for the work that they do (Upadhyaya and Upadhyaya, 2015). While the peace process in Nepal offers an instructive case of women moulding the outcomes of peace negotiations and policies in their favour, women’s partici­ pation in India’s north-east has lagged behind despite their unique lineage. There is indeed a felt need to ensure women’s representation in the decision-making bodies and policy interventions through the national and international mechanisms. The WPS regime provides a comprehensive roadmap to do so. These norms must be reflected in the national policies and actions, even if the concerned countries are not ready to implement the WPS agenda per se.

Notes 1 http://wps.unwomen.org/pdf/research/Bell_EN.pdf (last accessed on 20 March 2020). 2 In 31 major peace processes during 1992–2011 women participated only on 4 per cent of occasions. Of these, 9 per cent participated as negotiators, 2.4 per cent as chief mediators and only 3.7 per cent were taken as witnesses. 3 http://peacewomen.org/nap-nepal (last accessed on 20 March 2020). 4 Nonetheless, our own fieldwork (April 2014) showcases the remarkable participation of women in the peace processes through the LPC, ranging from helping in the identifica­ tion of displaced persons to prioritizing relief operations. 5 The north-east region of India comprises of eight states – Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Tripura and Sikkim– a region poorly connected to the Indian mainland by a small corridor.

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6 AFSPA applies to the seven states and grants security forces the power to search properties without a warrant, to arrest people and to use deadly force if there is ‘reasonable suspicion’ that a person is acting against the state.

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Dahlerup, D. (1988). “From a small to a large minority: Women in Scandinavian politics.” Scandinavian Political Studies 11(4): 275–297. Das, Samir Kumar (2005). “Nobody’s communique: Ethnic accords in northeast India”. In Samir KumarDas (ed.), Peace Processes and Peace Accords. South Asian Studies, vol 2. Delhi: Sage Publications. Das, Samir Kumar. (2013). Governing India’s Northeast Essays on Insurgency, Development and the Culture of Peace. London: Springer Publishing. Devi, L. Basanti (2017). “Meira Paibis: Forms of activism and representation of women in Manipur.” In Ashild Kolas (ed.), Women, Peace and Security in Northeast India, 145–172: New Delhi: Zubaan Publication. Do, Quy-Toan and Lakshmi Iyer. 2009. “Geography, Poverty and Conflict in Nepal.” Harvard Business School, 1–26. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/07-065. pdf (last accessed on 20 March 2020). Dutta, Anuradha (2005). “Women as peacemakers: A study of northeast India.” In Monirul Hussain (ed.), Coming out of Violence: Essays on Ethnicity, Conflict Resolution and Peace Process in Northeast India, New Delhi: Regency Publications. Enloe, Cynthia (1989). Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. London: Pandora Press. Falch, Ashild (2010). “Women’s organizations: A driving force behind women’s participa­ tion and rights.” PRIO Policy Brief 03:14. https://www.prio.org/utility/DownloadFile. ashx?id=237&type=publicationfile Falch, Ashild (2010). “Women’s political participation and influence in post-conflict Bur­ undi and Nepal.” PRIO Paper 1–56. https://www.peacewomen.org/sites/default/file s/partpol_postconburundinepal_falch_2010_0.pdf (last accessed on 20 March 2020). “First Northeast India Women Peace Congregation.” (2015) Manipur Times, March 24, 2015. Haripriya, Soibam (2012). “Agitation women, disrobed mothers.” Eastern Quarterly 8 (I and II). Hazarika, A.P. and Sheetal Sharma (2014). “Armed struggle, identity and the state: experi­ ences of women in conflict situations in Assam, India.” North East Network Report. Lokendra, A. (2002). “Peace process in Manipur: Armed conflict, state repression and women.” In A. Dutta and R. Bhuyan (eds), Genesis of Conflict and Peace: Understanding Northeast India—Views and Reviews. New Delhi: Akansha. Mahanta, Aparna (1988). “Emergence of new women’s groups in Assam.” In Neera Desai (ed.), A Decade of Women’s Movement in India, 132. Mumbai: Himalaya Publication. Manchanda, Rita (2017). Women and Politics of Peace: South Asian Narratives of Militarization, Power and Justice. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Manchanda, Rita (2004). “Maoist insurgency in Nepal: Radicalizing gendered narratives.” Cultural Dynamics 16(2/3): 237–258. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi= 10.1.1.876.9190&rep=rep1&type=pdf (last accessed on 20 March 2020). Manchanda, Rita and Seema Kakran (2017). “Gendered power systems and peace politics in Nagaland.” In Ashild Kolas (ed.), Women, Peace and Security in Northeast India, 114–144. New Delhi: Zubaan Publication. Martin, I. (2010). Supporting Nepal’s Peace Process: From Conflict to Constituent Assembly. http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/224740 (last accessed on 20 March 2020). Moral, Rakhee Kalita (2017). “Demobilized, dispossessed … disappeared? In search of ULFA’s female ex-combatants.” In Ashild Kolas (ed.), Women, Peace and Security in Northeast India, 68–91. New Delhi: Zubaan Publication. Mullick, Durang Basu (2013). “Women in peace building in north east India.” https:// www.countercurrents.org/mullick260613.htm (last accessed on 20 Mar 2020).

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Nag, Sajal (2006). “Her masters voice: Women, peace-making and genderisation of poli­ tics.” In Prasenjit Biswas and C. Joshua (eds), Peace in India’s Northeast: Meaning, Metaphor and Method, 221. New Delhi: Regency Publications. Nepal Action Plan (2011). https://www.peacewomen.org/sites/default/files/nepal_2011.pdf (last accessed on 20 March 2020). Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and United Nations Development Program (2011). Democracy Support through the United Nations: Nepal Case Report. Odendaal, A. and R. Olivier (2008). Local Peace Committees: Some Reflections and Lessons Learned. Academy for Educational Development and USAID. Paffenholz, Thania (2015). “Beyond the normative: Can women’s inclusion really make for better peace processes?” Graduate Institute Geneva. http://www.allianceforpeacebuilding. org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Beyond-the-Normative-Can-Womens-Inclusion-Rea lly-Make-for-Better-Peace-….pdf Parashar, Swati (2018). “Discursive (in)securities and postcolonial anxiety: Enabling excessive militarism in India.” Security Dialogue 49 (1–2): 123–135. Phukon, Dolly (2017). “Contested space of democracy in Assam: Women’s agency for change.” In Ashild Kolas (ed.), Women, Peace and Security in Northeast India, 48–67. New Delhi: Zubaan Publication. Tendulkar, Upreti, Suman Babu Paudel, Gopikesh Acharya and Daniel Harrish (2016). The Effectiveness of Local Peace Committees in Nepal: A Study from Bardiya District. Nepal Center for Contemporary Research, 1–28. Thaosen, Maduli (2017). “Turmoil in Nagaland overs 33% reservation for women in local bodies.” Feminism in India, February 9. https://feminisminindia.com/2017/02/09/nagala nd-turmoil-women-reservation-bill/ Tickner, J. (1993). “Gender in international relations: Feminist perspectives on achieving global security.” Political Science Quarterly 108. https://doi.org/10.2307/2080425 (last accessed on 20 March 2020). UNESCO (2018). Long Walk of Peace towards a Culture of Prevention. Paris: UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0026/002628/262885e.pdf (last accessed on 20 March 2020). UNIFEM (2012). Women’s Participation in Peace Negotiations: Connections Between Presence and Influence. New York, NY: UNIFEM. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resour ces/03AWomenPeaceNeg.pdf (last accessed on 20 March 2020). United Nations Security Council (2017). United Nations Security Council Report on Women, Peace and Security. New York, NY: United Nations Security Council. United Nations Security Council (2000). Security Council Resolution 1325. http://www.un. org/events/res_1325e.pdf (last accessed on 20 March 2020). UN Women (2018). Annual Report 2017–18. New York, NY: UN Women. Upadhyaya, Anjoo Sharan (2014) “Women and peace process in Nepal.” In Priyankar Upadhyaya and Samrat Schmiem Kumar (eds), Peace and Conflict: The South Asian Experience, 140–159. New Delhi: Foundation Books. Upadhyaya, Anjoo Sharan and Priyankar Upadhyaya (2016). Traditional Institutions of Dispute Resolution in India: Experiences from Khasi and Garo Hills in Meghalaya. Berlin: Berghof Foundation. Upadhyaya, Anjoo Sharan and Priyankar Upadhyaya (2015). “Peacebuilding in India: Meghalaya’s Experience.” In J. Peter Burgess, Oliver Richmond and Ranabir Samaddar (eds), Cultures of Governance and Peace: A Comparison of EU and Indian Theoretical and Policy Approaches. Manchester: University of Manchester.

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13 BOLLYWOOD ON THE NO-MAN’S LAND Bajrangi Bhaijaan Sudeshna Banerjee

The highly militarized India–Pakistan border both symbolizes and reinforces the antagonism permeating India–Pakistan relations. Reports of the UNDP and the UNICEF, on the one hand, and those of the Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, on the other, clearly indicate that both the countries remain hostage to war thinking and war preparation (Mehdi, 2005). Even after seven decades since the Partition of India and the creation of two countries out of one, the border between the two countries is globally reckoned as one of the most hostile in the world. The conspicuous absence of any real initiative to eradicate this strain of hostility from official formalities, surveillance and rituals pertaining to the border by either government in all these 70-odd years may well be construed in terms of high stakes of both the states in the perpetuation of a hard border, resistant to any popular negotiation.1 While military casualties of the hostile border situation are meticulously quantified and publicized by either state, the demographic, social, psychological and environmental costs of a hard border incurred by the civilian population is never audited, even though the latter may be the worst sufferers of the ever-eluding prospect of lasting peace. [For a detailed historical account of how the two states have failed to work towards lasting peace, see Wirsing (1998).] So a pertinent question – especially 70 years after Partition – is whether people’s narratives about borders, at variance with the state-authored narratives, have not congealed on either side; and, if they have, why they have not managed to make an identifiable space for themselves even amidst the continuing hegemony of the state’s or the majority community’s rationalization(s) of a hostile border in either country. Critical research, indeed, finds that the India–Pakistan border evokes response not only from the dominant perspectives but also from marginal ones that pose fundamental questions around the border’s meaning and legitimacy (Purewal,

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2003). However, popular cinema in South Asia has not received as much serious attention in this regard as it should have; all the attention that Bollywood cinema has elicited from the practitioners of international relations studies appears to revolve round its perceived role as soft power. [For an exposition of the concept of soft power, see Nye, Jr. (2004); for various perspectives on Bollywood cinema as soft power, see Schaefer and Karan (2013).] And yet the possibility of such cinema popularizing the marginal perspectives and inducing a rethink about the hegemonic perspectives is relevant to both peace studies and peace activism. As a move in that direction, this chapter delves into the world of popular Bol­ lywood creations of the last 10 years and zeroes in on the movie Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015, henceforth BB) for a direct and focused take on the border question that is at a wide variance from statist and majoritarian narratives. Without denying the dense intertextuality in which the film may be situated, it is important to ask whether it is really irrelevant for peace and conflict studies that this film gives a call to the ‘awaam’ (the common people) on either side to mobilize and reclaim the border for their own agency if only to “erase the hate component forever”.2 In this connection, the chapter also finds it significant that the film clearly appears to deploy the tropes of childlike innocence, irrationality and femininity as implicit counterpoises to the adult (male) rationality and hypermasculinity that informs the state’s propagation of a hard and hostile border. These are all reasons why BB’s possibilities for generating a popular rethink about the desirability of a highly militarized hostile border needs highlighting. Scholars of peace studies, in trying to identify border narratives different from or critical of the two states’ justification of a hard militarized border, steer clear of ‘emotional’ narratives and exclusively focus on the ones that satisfy the criterion of dispassionate, rational argument that is usually deemed as befitting the supposed civility and impersonal orientation of public discourse. The dismissal of ‘emotional’ narratives as personal, and hence unworthy of consideration, leaves us with alternative narratives that are considered noteworthy if only because they are dispassionate and impersonal enough to be reckoned as rational. But, is it not significant that such unemotional narratives are in the mirror image of the impersonal rationale of a hard militarized border that makes no exception to its general principle of territorial defence? Actually, how­ ever, the excision of emotional critiques of a hard border from scholarly reckoning derives from imagining the public sphere in gendered terms. The binary opposition that is generally constructed between the so-called public sphere and the so-called private one is intimately wound up with the equation of femininity with emotion and masculinity with intellection, and the relegation of women into the public sphere where domesticity is seen as squarely situated. By the same logic the public sphere is conceptualized in terms of an essential maleness, dispassionately distanced from the emotional (see, e.g., Fraser 1990). So the question is: if the rigidness of a hostile border is often perceived by the common people on either side in their ordinary everyday lives in terms of traumatizing closure and is recounted in terms of pain or even exasperation, would that critique be considered irrelevant to aca­ demic exercises like peace and conflict studies just because it is couched in

Bollywood on the no-man’s land 197

emotionality? BB, a movie with considerable doses of emotion, often bordering on sentimentality, indeed gives the present author an apt occasion to raise this ques­ tion. Not only does it emotionally script the triumph of the ‘soft’ reason of a mute child’s need to be united with her parents over the reason of the closed border, but it also deploys tropes of femininity, unreason and childishness as counterpoises to the hegemonic tropes informing the justification of the hostile border between the two countries. Furthermore, peace and conflict studies does need to register a cinematic text, however melodramatic, when it morphs from being a simple tale of the muteness of a child and her subsequent recovery of voice into an overt message to the common people on either side of the border to assert their voice(s) against the insensitivity of a militarized border. Finally, it should not be lost on a critical reader that the film shifts focus from the Line-of-Control (LoC) that the ‘war films’ from Bollywood fixedly prioritize, naturalize and sanctify. [For a critique of the pre-existing Bollywood cinematic focus on the LoC, see Athique (2008).] BB in its optimistic climax takes us to the no-man’s land as a symbolic vista of new possibi­ lities; this makes the film particularly relevant to the concerns of peace studies and peace activism.

Too much read into a simple text? The way the present author proposes to read BB is admittedly open to question. The film being a text – that too audio-visual in nature – may be interpreted in diverse ways that may differ from and even conflict with one another. The prac­ titioner of classical international studies, in particular, would most likely be sceptical of the efficacy of the proposed exercise and ask whether the director intends the interpretation that the present author gives to the film; in other words, whether the reading is at all warranted by the maker’s own intentions. Equally pertinent would be the question whether the box-office success of the film, in any way, indicates that the audience, in appreciating the film, saw in it an alternative border discourse. The present author’s answer to these questions would be at various levels. How­ ever, that requires us to give a brief resumé of the storyline and a brief outline of what sense the present author makes of the film, justifiably or otherwise. Released in 2015, BB has a simple storyline. Shahida, a girl child, muted by a shock, comes with her mother to the Nizamuddin Dargah (the tomb of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya) in Delhi from Pakistan in pursuit of her family’s hope that her speech would be restored. On her homeward journey the train tempora­ rily halts, and she, in a fit of childish playfulness, alights at midnight. But the train resumes its run to and beyond the border, leaving her behind in India. One Pawan Kumar Chaturvedi, an ardent devotee of Bajrangbali,3 finds her and feels enjoined by his personal god to reunite this helpless child – Munni as he names her – with her parents. Finding all possible channels of her return blocked, he takes the des­ perate decision of travelling with her to Pakistan without a visa in search of her parents. Crossing the border with the help of a handler, Pawan, nicknamed Baj­ rangi, comes to be hounded by the Pakistani intelligence establishment on the

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suspicion of spying. Still the god-fearing simpleton does not abandon his mission. With help from Chand Nawab, a small-time television correspondent from Kar­ achi, he ultimately manages to restore the child to her parents, only to be nabbed by the Pakistani intelligence. Convinced of his innocence, however, a Pakistani intelligence officer disobeys his higher authority and releases Bajrangi from con­ finement. But Bajrangi is now faced with the insurmountable problem of crossing the Pakistani check-post without a visa and with official orders from the army high command that he should not be allowed to cross. However, in the meantime, Chand Nawab had used social media to mobilize ordinary people on either side of the border to enable the visa-less border-crossing of the ‘innocent Indian civilian whose affection for a mute child had brought him to Pakistan’. Aroused by this call, a virtual sea of humanity assembles on either side of the border. Their thun­ derous cheering of Bajrangi gets the better of the border guards’ compulsory obe­ dience to orders. As the handful of border guards decide to look the other way, the sea of humanity on either side storm the gates open to enable Bajrangi to cross over. The loud cheering of the ordinary citizenry then blends into the voice of Munni calling Bajrangi ‘mama’ (maternal uncle); her rush of emotions at seeing Bajrangi successfully cross over fused with the relieving feeling of reunion with her parents, had caused a jolt in her brain restoring her voice. On the no-man’s land Bajrangi, by now ‘Bajrangi Bhaijaan’ for the assembled Pakistanis, takes Munni in his arms to playfully toss her into the air. The film ends with this freezeframe! The film broke box-office records on both sides of the India–Pakistan border (Swaminathan, 2017). But that is not the primary reason why it is being discussed here. The possible space that it provides for interpretations contrapuntal to the hegemonic border discourse(s) is what this chapter notes about this film, which otherwise has to be sat through in a mood of willing suspension of disbelief. There is no denying that the film has all the ingredients of commercial cinema of the Bollywood kind – from song and dance sequences to Himalayan panorama, to Salman Khan with his six-pack abs to the camera’s strategic gaze on Kareena Kapoor as Salman’s love interest Rasika, to a fairy-tale ending. Yet BB is the first commercial film to give a direct call to activism by the awaam on either side towards a redefinition of the border, if only to make it sensitive to the civilian priorities. True, Chand Nawab’s call to the citizens on either side is too sentimental and loud for sophisticated film appreciation. But he is clearly a protagonist of the message that the hostile border participates in the perpetuation of hatred of one people for another; to replace the regime of ‘nafrat’ (hatred) with one of ‘humdardi’ (empathy) and ‘pyar’ (love) people needed to now re-script the border with their own agency. Further, it is eminently possible to read the character of Shahida/ Munni in an allegorical light, albeit recognizing the contraptions of a popular form that frames it. A discerning viewer may, indeed, want to keenly register that the moment the mute girl gets back her voice near the end of the film is also the moment the ordinary people on either side descend upon the border and raise their voice in favour of Banjrangi’s border-crossing.

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Notwithstanding the characteristic melodrama, it is possible to read it as a text inchoately subverting the reason of the state that relegates all alternative reasons pertaining to the border to the status of ‘unreason’. The film, in its turn, seems to delight in symbolically deploying childish innocence, femininity and irrationality and somehow endearing these counterpoises to the audience by melding melo­ drama with these metaphors. Significantly, the storyline, the script, the situations and the screenplay cumulatively bring out another problematic implication of the hostile India–Pakistan border – the way in which the exclusionary and exterioriz­ ing vibes of the barbed wires of the border, on the one hand, and the communal divide propagated within the national territory by the majoritarian discourse(s), on the other, continually justify and reinforce one another. [For a discussion of the way in which cartographic, communal and political lines in South Asia not only divide countries, but are replicated within countries, creating new internal frontiers, see Samaddar (2017).] Finally and most importantly, the film tends to invoke the no-man’s land as some kind of an emancipatory space – beyond hegemonic terri­ toriality of the two states – where the ordinary people’s priorities and predicaments could be shared surmounting an insensitive border. Coming back to the question of the director’s intention, the present author’s subjective reading may well be contested and questioned. But since the director Kabir Khan’s own comments on the making of the film are available in the form of interviews, an engagement with them may be in order. Indeed, his comments make the present author to think twice before unhesitatingly declaring ‘the death of the author’ (Barthes, 1977; Derrida, 1997), and inscribe the text exclusively with her own reading. In an interview, Kabir Khan affirmed that his choice of the no­ man’s land as the site of the climax was deliberate; the no-man’s land, incidentally, is a stateless space and to cinematize the two peoples defying the hegemonic dis­ course of enmity and touching each in love on that particular site is highly sig­ nificant. In the same interview Khan said, “I feel strongly about unity, secularism and people-to-people friendship [emphasis mine]. I’m a product of a mixed marriage. Growing up, I saw the celebration of both cultures [Hindu and Muslim]”. Else­ where, talking about Tubelight (2017) – a film of his that broached the question of India–China people-to-people contact against the backdrop of the hegemonic discourse of ‘enmity’ between the two nations – he brought up the question of war, indicating an ideological orientation that is so likely to have informed his treatment of BB, too: “War cannot be a solution to any issue, it takes the lives of thousands of civilians from both the countries who are involved in a war” (India Today Web Desk, 2017). This comment becomes relevant for the present discus­ sion because I discern BB as questioning the justification of a hostile border; a hostile border is sought to be justified in terms of an ever-present possibility of war, and, in its turn, reinforces the possibility of war by being perpetually encoded with ‘enmity’. Indeed, in the name of ‘beating retreat’, the Indian Border Security Force and the Pakistani Rangers routinely perform belligerent actions at the India–Paki­ stan border at Wagah: “Wagah is the ultimate border where hate and hostility is enacted every day in the morning and evening” (Mehdi, 2005: 121). By carefully

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nurturing it as daily ritual that is also marketed as a tourism spectacle of “carefully choreographed contempt”,4 the states on either side not only reify but also com­ modify mutual hostility for the citizens on either side to consume and be hege­ monized by.

The context: Situating BB and other texts However, popular cinema admittedly aims for box-office success; and BB evidently does so. Thus, Kabir Khan, too, would have to gauge whether the environment of popular sensibilities was ready for a message like that in BB. Or, possibly a chan­ ging world of popular sensibilities (Singh, 2008), in the first place, assured the director that a cinematic text like BB could expect to make money. It may be suggested that BB was made amidst a transforming world of public discourse about India–Pakistan relations. Citizens’ peace activism – however small an enclave – was clearly emerging in the two countries and beginning to get media attention. It is unmistakable that in the immediate run-up to India’s nuclear test at Pokhran (1998), closely followed by Pakistan’s at Baluchistan (1998) and in the immediate conflict of the Kargil War (1999), the border came to be filmed in block-busters in the jingoistic imaginary of patriotic ‘sons’ defending the feminized territory of the nation at a highly militarized border, invincible enough to ensure an inviolate closure at the LoC, where the enemy should be held at bay from invading the body of the motherland. The state propaganda on either side justifying the choice of combat over peace, and media reportage in the two countries capitalizing on the intense sensationalism of war news and the patriotic appeal of war-time demoni­ zation of the ‘enemy’, created a popular appetite for ‘war films’ – epitomised by J. P. Dutta’s films – Border (1997), Refugee(2000) and LOC Kargil (2003) (Athique, 2008). What is significant for the present discussion is the visualization and narra­ tivization of the India–Pakistan border in these films. Rather than simply being permeated with jingoism, these films attempted to naturalize the barrier created by the Radcliffe Line in the west (Athique, 2008). Again, a Bollywood blockbuster like Sarfarosh (1999) that did not directly focus on cross-border combat even amidst the popular jingoism in the run-up to Kargil War, represented the border, none­ theless, as radically disjunctive with the threat of cross-border terrorism typically emanating from the other side, that is, from Pakistan. Since this chapter seeks to demonstrate the essential difference between such narratives and that of BB, it is also crucial to note in passing the way Dutta’s films and their ilk elided/silenced the distinctiveness of the no-man’s-land, lest this stateless stretch conjured up the possibility of a radically different border narrative. This mood of the Kargil moment – clench-fistedly imagining the India–Pakistan border as a grim line with ‘the enemy on the other side’ – lingered for quite some time in popular cinema in the subcontinent. Hindustan Ki Kasam, a Bollywood film released in 1999, associated terrorism exclusively with Pakistan. Two twin boys, born of Indian Hindu parentage, become separated at birth. The one brought up in India by Hindu foster-parents typically turned out to be a liberal Hindu and a

Bollywood on the no-man’s land 201

writer, whereas his brother brought up by a Pakistani terrorist called Jabbar grew up to be a fanatic ‘jihadi’. Thus the India–Pakistan border was blatantly conflated with an essentialized cultural divide between Pakistan as the home of Islamic fun­ damentalism and India as a cradle of liberalism and humanism (Din and Langah, 2012). Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, released in 2001, apparently celebrated the spirit of love surmounting religious divides; a Sikh truck driver saves a middle-class Muslim girl from gang-rape at the time of Partition, wins her love and marries her only to ultimately go through a whirlwind of trying situations once the girl visits Pakistan and gets confined by her parental family who block her return to India. The nar­ ration of the hero’s entry into Pakistan to ‘recover’ his wife took up the second half of the film; Pakistanis were stereotyped as India-haters, the Pakistani regime as inherently repressive, and the Pakistani people as fundamentalist – ever-ready to be unleashed as terrorists against India. However, the popular jingoism excited by state propaganda and the corporate­ media-authored ‘militainment’ of the Kargil War moment gradually petered out.5 The intertextual terrain in which BB’s making may be situated is, therefore, the one that gradually emerged around peace-oriented creativity from the period around 2003–2004 onwards. Of course, this essay does not claim that this terrain came to completely supplant/sideline the discourse of ‘enmity’. In 2001, a rabidly anti-Pakistan film such as Gadar: Ek Prem Katha could still expect to be a hit in India. But other strands were developing in the world of cinema and in the sub­ continent – strands that came to undercut the prominence that war films had attained in the heat generated by Kargil. Indeed, if the Kargil moment had rein­ forced an unquestioning defence of the border as reflected in ‘war films’ of the type made by J. P. Dutta, the subsequent period on both sides of the border wit­ nessed the emergence of pockets of public discussion interrogating the sanctity of the hard border between India and Pakistan. Significantly, in the wake of such discussions a genre of films emerged that directly addressed the trauma of Partition. Anticipated by Mammo (1994), Train to Pakistan (1998) and Earth 1947 (1998), Partition films became visible as a trend in the beginning of the new millennium with the making of Hey Ram (2000), Refugee (2000) and Pinjar (2003) in India.6 Partition films were made in Pakistan too. Two independent films from Pakistan – Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani (2003) and Mehreen Jabbar’s Ramchand Pakistani (2008) – sent across strong messages that differed from the statist rationalization of the post-Partition border (Saeed, 2009). Instead of revering the border as some kind of a sacred line that neatly and radically divides two nations, foreclosing any emotional spill-over, these films questioned the notion of compulsory congruence between official cartographies of closed borders, on the one hand, and people’s (especially women’s) trans-border memories and lived experiences, on the other. Significantly, some of these films drew upon the feminist critique of Partition and the post-Partition border that had emerged with the new millennium (Butalia, 1998; Menon and Bhasin, 1998); women were thus shown as the most quintes­ sentially partitioned subject, with Partition’s borders really and metaphorically rupturing their bodies, emotions and identity with terrible violence. The highly

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acclaimed and award-winning Khamosh Pani made in 2003 in Pakistan poignantly underscored “the violence women continue to endure in the name of religious and national identity” (Saeed, 2009). It depicted – even through a poignant use of sound and music – how the violence of Partition, with its real and metaphorical borders, pierces women’s lives not only in form of self-enforced silence about experience of rape and abduction, but also in the form of any accidental termina­ tion of that silence (Saeed 2009; Sundar 2010; Viswanath and Malik 2009). In the same year – 2003 – Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s Pinjar was made in India based on a novel of the same name authored by Amrita Pritam. The film is about Puro, a Sikh girl, who was abducted by a Muslim youth, Rashid. She managed to escape and return to her parents, who, however, refused to take her back in the name of family honour. Puro found no alternative but to marry Rashid – a compulsion that saw her name and identity changed with no option for her to have her choice. The Partition’s border symbolized the delinking with her past life as she ultimately chose to stay in Pakistan with Rashid. As one scholar observes, “the film acknowledges the irrevocable rupture of Partition, as well as the burden upon women to endure and absorb the consequences of the separations forced upon them” (Master, 2009: 68). Ramchand Pakistani (2008), an independent film made in Pakistan, essayed its own specific take on the way the Partition-created border tears women’s world of affect asunder. It also poignantly foregrounded children as the other category that had not created the adult-authored border and yet constitute another innocent part of society grievously affected by insensitive border mechanism (Saeed, 2009). It is unlikely that the idea behind BB did not take into account the legacy of the so-called Partition films. However, there was another development that is likely to have reinforced the making a film like BB, with its critique of a hard border between India and Pakistan – peace-oriented activism in the subcontinent from 2003–2004 onwards. Though the initiative of the two governments, especially the role of the-then Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, has often been emphasized in this regard in the standard accounts of ‘improving bilateral relations’, the role of citizens’ initiatives in fostering people-to-people contact and campaigns against visa restrictions is less discussed. It is, indeed, pertinent to ask whether it was the emergence of these initiatives, campaigns and movements that induced the respective governments to tone down the high decibels of their militarist rhetoric. Writers, filmmakers, film artistes, cultural performers and peace activists came to play a significant role in crossing the border and speaking in favour of friendship between the two countries (Mehdi, 2005: 119). The reason why this civil society segment of pro-peace initiatives is more important than diplomacy is that even after 2003–2004 the two states have almost cyclically alternated ‘cooperation’ with militarist brandishing. So, in order to identify a possible milieu that promised the success of a film advocating people’s activism against the hostile border, we need to ultimately look at the emerging segment of pro-peace activism rather than at the world of inter-state bilateral talks. After all, even though the two states hold high level talks about ‘bilateral cooperation’, neither of them has ever decided to

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suspend the enactment of hostility at the Wagah border, carried out in the name of a ‘beating retreat’ ceremony in all the seriousness of a sacrosanct daily ritual. As if they have a tacit agreement regarding this one matter, amidst all the adversarial posturing, the two ‘enemy’ states immortalize Wagah as a “symbolic battlefield where the ritual authentically communicates each army’s power to its rival” (Mehdi, 2005: 122). Indeed, commercial cinema was quick to resonate to the emergence of propeace activism. Drawing upon the critical acclaim received by the Partition films, too, a slew of films– Veer-Zara (2004), Main Hoon Na (2004), Ek Tha Tiger (2012) and PK (2014) – charted a track very different from Dutta’s war films, or from those such as Hindustan Ki Kasam and Sarfarosh that stereotypically represented Pakistanis as terrorists and/or drug-traffickers. Instead, as each of these films narrates in its own way love between an Indian and a Pakistani national, defying the dis­ course of hatred (Bharat and Kumar, 2008), the drift of public sentiments had possibly encouraged the makers of these films to entertain a greater possibility of popular reception for themes that defied the prohibitive vibes of the hostile India– Pakistan border sustained by the two states. One film studies scholar suggests that these films reflect the sensibilities of a younger generation who had come to occupy the centre-stage distanced from Partition of India (1947) by 60 years (Singh, 2008). However, another scholar reads the contemporary discursive context more discerningly in his effort to situate the making of Veer-Zara: It has long been argued rather vociferously by activists, artists, and scholars on both sides of the border that whatever the animosity between the two states, the people of Pakistan and India only harbor goodwill towards each other; in other words, it is civil society rather than the state that is invested in the peace process. When Veer submits his resignation and abandons the uniform of an officer of the Indian Air Force, should we only read this as an instance of love triumphing over patriotic militarism? Or does that sar­ torial gesture signify something much more profound, namely that institu­ tions of the state hinder rather than facilitate the building of bridges between the two countries? (Lal, 2018: 116) By the 2005–2006, the call for people-to-people contact became louder, its reach among the citizens in both the counties wider and its cultural articulation more varied. An international NGO – Friends without Borders – initiated a project of people-to-people contact between the two countries in 2005. The Indian news­ paper, Times of India and the Pakistani media house, Jang Group, partnered with Friends without Borders to generate the peace campaign named Aman Ki Asha (Hope for Peace). Though the Dil Se Dil (From Heart to Heart) Border Concert planned by them was canceled in 2007, they stepped up their effort in other ways. It is note­ worthy that in 2013 as tensions between the two states – India and Pakistan – rose over alleged cross-border firing and loss of lives at the LoC, with the state actors on

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either side exchanging allegations and counter-allegations, Samir Gupta, a Delhibased IT professional, initiated the idea of global vigil for peace between India and Pakistan using the Aman Ki Asha Facebook group; members volunteered to orga­ nize vigils in New Delhi, Islamabad, Mumbai, Karachi, Chandigarh, Lahore, Shahdadkot, Bradford, Boston, Los Angeles, New York and Toronto on 27 January 2013 (Khan, 2010; Sarwar, 2014). Thus even while many people in both the countries continued to acquiesce in the two states’ justification of a hostile border, a sphere of public opinion was steadily and noticeably developing on either side against visa restrictions and in favour of a varied repertoire of activism and people-to-people contact. Indeed, 2013 marked a high tide of such activism, prompting Google to take note and make use of it in an advertisement for its search engine. The ad emoted on the basis of the trauma of Partition and post-Partition borders separating friends and families. It fictionalized the cathartic reunion of two elderly men who had been friends in their childhood, but had come to lose contact because of the vivisecting effect of Partition and the consequent human displacement. Of course, the com­ mercial aim was to project Google Search as the only possible conduit for making this dream reunion possible. But what is significant for the present essay is that this ad had a tremendous impact on internet viewers in both countries; it was viewed 1.6 million times even before being officially released on television on November 15, 2013 (Reunion directed by A. R. Sharma, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=gHGDN9-oFJE). The emotionally moving content of the ad, along with its sensitive treatment and exquisite filming, coupled with its instant popularity, wove it prominently into the intertextual web in which BB may be seen as ensconced. After all BB was made in the perceptible trail of this ad, which in its turn, is most likely to have been inspired by the Pakistani short film Respect (2012), in which two friends separated by Partition meet each other on social media (Respect directed by Taha Kirmani, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt-kk9iJ5OA). Even after the foregoing effort at situating BB in its appropriate intertextual context, the present essay may have to confront the argument that, after all, Kabir Khan’s engagement with the border in BB may have been only incidental and not consciously political. Some critics may point out that Kabir Khan’s Phantom, made in 2015 (the year in which BB, too, was released) fictionalizes Indian intelligence agents’ successful operation against Pakistan-based terrorists; and this may be read as pandering to the stereotypical representation of Pakistan as the hotbed of terrorist activities – a stereotype that is so integral to the hegemonic narrative in India about Pakistan. Khan himself, however, has said in an interview that the two films – BB and Phantom – are not antithetical to one another: Phantom is a different world but the same zone. I’m taking the Lashkare-eTaiba head on. Phantom takes a strong stand against those who don’t allow people-to-people friendship [emphasis mine] and unity. Once again, only those people who think Lashkar is Pakistan will think Phantom is anti-Pakistan. The

Bollywood on the no-man’s land 205

same elements who engineered 26/11 also killed 200 school children in Peshawar. (Indian Express, July 24, 2015, http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/ bollywood/salman-khan-bajrangi-bhaijaan-director-kabir-khan-hanuma n-doesnt-belong-to-only-one-community/) What needs emphasizing in response is that, whatever may be the nature of the interrelationship of the two films in Kabir Khan’s schema, the present chapter decidedly focuses exclusively on BB and not the whole terrain of Kabir Khans’ cinematic creativity for its own sake. Despite its intertextual embeddedness, BB is also a unique text and this essay, in its quest for an evocative popular text explicitly advocating a friendly India–Pakistan border, finds the answer precisely in this uniqueness. Indeed, it is because of its effort to foreground this uniqueness that, even after situating BB in relation to other texts in the preceding discussion, this essay would now exclusively focus on BB as a filmic text. As stated in the introduction, this chapter aims at searching the world of popular culture for a text into which meanings contrary to the hegemonic border narrative(s) can be read. In BB the present author finds just that. This occasions the present author to now break into a first-person narrative about her own politics of reading. The decision to go to war, for me, is an elite act that severely violates the ordinary citizen’s human rights; and by perpetuating the possibility of war and feverish obsession with defence expenditure, the fiscal policy of the governments in India and Pakistan system­ atically deprive their citizens of a larger amount of budgetary allocation to food security, environmental security, education, health, housing, rural electrification and so on. And, if I was starting to feel optimistic about the new turn in pro-peace activism in 2010–2013, I have also come to discern the fragility of that turn in the light of the most recent developments. The allegedly terrorist car-bomb attack on an Indian Security Forces’ convoy at Pulwama on 14 February 2019, killing more than 40 CRPF jawans, has come to be followed by warlike posturing and retalia­ tory moves by the two governments, practically bringing the subcontinent to the brink of war (Gettleman, 2019). This has troubled my congealing optimism about the pro-peace environment coming of age; one could now clearly register what had somehow become temporarily submerged – the sustained capability of war­ mongers in official circles, political parties, majoritarian ideological formations in both India and Pakistan to take advantage of unfortunate developments like the Pulwama attack to excite a gullible middle class into a mood of intense war-crav­ ing. The perpetually war-sensationalizing commercial media, whether in India or Pakistan, would only reinforce the mood by appealing to an inchoate hunger for masculinist assertion of the military kind that these two post-colonial middle classes have nurtured, possibly as a derivative of their past subjugation to the military might of the British Empire. It is time we searched for popular texts that coun­ terbalance the upsurge of war-mongering with a narrative of the possibility of peace that can stand firm in its own right and ethical claim and comes from the

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ordinary people’s repertoire of realizations and yearnings. Initiatives like Aman Ki Asha, however sincere, constitute an enclave of peace activism limited to elite intellectual circles, where it tends to hover in the absence of a shared template with the ordinary people’s narratives. Only such narratives that can be widely dis­ seminated and severally repeated – narratives that are popular and entertaining, moreover – can resonate to the ordinary people’s everyday, where they, too, not only acutely experience the insensitivity of militarized borders but grope for a model narrative to be able to articulate their difference with the border’s violent closure. It is in this connection that the possibility of a popular film, with its capacity for multipliable audience, sets a template, especially if it narrates the pro­ spect of the people voicing their yearning for a soft border. My academic inter­ vention in this connection, too, becomes a part of the intertextual mesh of peaceactivist narratives when I almost audaciously suggest the eminent possibility of reading a popular cinematic text like BB in relation to the Sadat Hasan Manto’s timeless short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’, one of the most powerful hitherto-obtaining literary narratives questioning the states’ reason of the border.

The ‘hard’ border With their respective strategic/political interest in keeping the prospect of war somehow ever-looming on the horizon, the two states use propaganda and the Wagah border ceremony to normalize a hard border. Their concern is to generate consent among their respective citizens to such a highly militarized disjunction to an otherwise continuous landmass. The typical charges that the two states trade against one another crucially rivet on the border and reinforce the supposed need for its impregnability – cross-border firing, cross-border infiltration, cross-border terrorism and so on. Commercial news media, in their own turn, have generally found it profitable to tap into the typical imaginary of enmity at the border – an imaginary that never fails to promise TRP-enhancing sensationalism (Stahl, 2010). In academic literature such normalizations of a hard border have been variously interrogated in recent years, especially from the standpoint of various critical the­ ories. Gender has possibly been the most searing critical tool in this regard (Butalia, 1998; Mostov, 1995; Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989). If borders are generally imagined as manly protection of the vulnerable – and hence feminine – territorial space of the nation, a hard border is even more masculinist in its dominant ima­ ginary; indeed, the invocation of ‘hardness’ as against ‘softness’ is itself gendered. The impregnability, invincibility, weaponized deterrents to cross-border infiltra­ tion, super-intelligent border surveillance, automated border control, blinding search lights and metallic buffers only help reinforce the gendered imaginary around the ‘hardness’ of a dispassionate border management that does not yield to the ‘soft’ – read feminine – vibes of emotion, sensitivity and compassion. The ‘war films’ of the late 1990s in the sub-continent valorized this gendered representation of the border, fictionalizing in a manner that lionized the male characters, who defended the border as true ‘sons’ of the nation. The camera

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usually represented the border in terms of stealthy movements of soldiers in ambush at the LoC, surveilling male eyes synchronized with the sound of soldier’s boots on the soundtrack melding into an impression of manly vigil protecting the vulnerability of feminized space of the nation within the border, the metallic noise of army convoys on the border roads reinforcing the masculinity of border-vigil with the implicit association of technology and metallic structures with masculinity. Machine guns and tanks with their protruding and rotating muzzles and, even more so, missiles are cinematized in these films in a way that emphasizes their penetrative power, the other side of the border being imagined as a feminized space to be mauled in order that the motherland on this side may be protected and glorified. Most significantly the borderland is represented in these films as the zone of the soldier and not of the civilian. The voice at the border is typically the voice of combat and/or command; the voice of the civilian population, if any in this area, is not of their autonomous agency but of victimhood at the hands of the nation’s ‘enemy’. I see BB as highlighting this masculinist trope of the border surveillance, very cinematically at that, using the camera and the soundtrack in tandem. However, in a marked difference with the ‘war films’ cited above, this film masculinizes the border mechanism, not to valorize its impregnability and impersonality, but to critique its insensitivity. To the discerning viewer the paradox is that with all its technological sophistication and its intelligent vigilance catering to national secur­ ity, the border mechanism is helpless in the matter of recovering a mute 6-year-old child in the immediate vicinity of the border, albeit on the other side. The way in which the border guard tries – with all the diplomatic correctness on his side – to reason with the mother about why she cannot be allowed to go to the other side without a visa to look for her child barely a mile away, is carefully cinematized to sound routine and insensitive. On the other hand, the close-up of the mother’s flushed face streams with tears, fear of loss running through her taut veins and brimming at the brink of her terrified eyes. Her indignation at the guard’s inability to realize the impossibility of a mute child ever being able to find her way back across the border overwhelms the soundtrack in the form of an anguished wail and comes across as far more reasonable in the given situation. The immediately pre­ ceding sequence had already portrayed the helplessness of the child in all her orally challenged vulnerability, running in vain after the trundling metallic body of the train that leaves her behind and moves into the mindless zone of an automated border system where no humans are seen on the screen; only metal gates close shut with deafening noise and clockwork impersonality, and lights flash with a blinding effect. Interestingly, the train that leaves the child behind, separating her from her mother and tracing its typical metallic negotiation of an equally metallic border along metallic tracks, is the Samjhauta Express. This train service jointly run by the Indian and Pakistani railways, however, strictly operates within the constraints, protocols and restrictions typical of the bilateral relations between two mutually suspicious states. To the discerning viewer BB’s portrayal appears to hint at the irony of the official ‘samjhauta’ (compromise) between two states – India and

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Pakistan – by making the soundtrack synchronize with the photography to bring out the steely insensitivity of the routine, bureaucratic formality of border-crossing of this official transport service; the metal chassis of the train, the metallic tracks and the aurally magnified metallic dialogue of the two may be read as the audio-visual metaphor of a mechanical track – a track of state-to-state formalism as opposed to the informality and emotional terrain of people-to-people contact. Using the entire spectrum of shots, from long to short and from the worm’s eye to the bird’s, a soundscape that intermeshes thudding, crashing and slamming metallic noises with women’s agonized cries, close-up of heavy iron bolts and border guards carefully concealing even their half smiles in their dutifully stiffened jaws, the film situates the Samjhauta border-crossing in a suffocating zone of prohibitiveness, ever-threa­ tening closure and chilling surveillance; the iron-made and iron-bound chassis paradoxically carries ordinary citizens who are not the authors of this hard border but are often helplessly at its receiving end. The script appears to move by undercutting the adult-authored, elite-authored statist reason that normalizes the hostile border with the argument of territorial integrity in the face of cross-border attack/terrorism/infiltration; in the process what gets progressively revealed is the hypermasculinity and latent violence of the hegemonic border rationalization. By the time the film’s narrative has moved past the futile appeal of Shahida’s mother’s to the border personnel, it is bound to occur to the viewer that on either side of the border the states’ reason is programmed to reduce all alternative takes on the border as unreasonable. It no longer comes as a surprise, therefore, that Pawan’s reason of risking his own life to restore a mute child to her parents is treated by the army officer at the border as unreason of an utterly insane variety. Another dimension of the film seems to confirm the film’s latent project of destabilizing the hegemonic reason of the border. BB invests considerable footage on bringing out the way in which mainstream media, too, sustains the statist reason of a hard border. The film scripts the way in which one big audio-visual media house after another refuses to buy/telecast the story of a simpleton crossing the border to reach a mute child home. Here two dominant reasons converge – the reason of the state and the reason of capital. For these houses, as the film explicitly scripts, it is commercially sane to safely take the cue from the state’s unitary rationalization of all visa-less border crossing as espionage/ infiltration and then spawn sensationalist spy stories of border-violation which only reinforce state’s justification of a hostile border.

The ‘soft’ counterpoise With the notion of unreason thus suggesting itself to the viewer as a possible counterpoise to the statist reason, a critical sensibility is prone to expect the script (and the cinematography) to deploy unreason as a counterpoise. Pawan’s reason of risking his own life to return/restore a mute child to her parents is, of course, treated by the army officer at the border as insanity. But does the film not deploy unreason in the form of childishness and femininity too? The 6-year-old Munni,

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whose childlike impulse to play with kid goat(s) beside the railway tracks separated her from her homeward-bound mother, may be easily reckoned as a victim of the rigidity and impersonal masculinity of the hard border. Munni is not merely help­ less relative to the border narrative of the state, but also symbolically located in a mental space that neither authors nor enforces nor even comprehends the adult reason of a hostile border. And Pawan is a dimwit, reckoned by adult society as worse than a child in his near-imbecility. The childlike simpleton fails to under­ stand the logic of the visa regime and doggedly declines to understand why he cannot cross the border into Pakistan to redeem his pledge to Bajrangbali of bringing a helpless child home to her parents. Significantly, the frequent appearance of lambs in the film strikes me as a visual metaphor of childish innocence. If actually invoked as by the director, such an allegory of lamb-like innocence, of course, makes the film vulnerable to the criti­ cism of essentializing childhood as a ‘natural’ state of innocence. But, since assess­ ment of the artistic aspect of the film is not my concern, I read this innocence as taking on a political significance – ordinary people’s innocence of the creation and maintenance of the hostile border. Childish innocence may act as metaphor of the ordinary civilian’s innocence of the border – its making, its sustenance and its sur­ veillance. And it had, indeed, been used, even before the making of BB, in the Pakistani film, Ramchand Pakistani that scripted the 7-year-old Ramchand from a village in Pakistan crossing the India–Pakistan border unawares and then getting caught by the Indian Border Security Force, only to languish in jail for 10 years in India; Ramchand Pakistani, thus, used the child to symbolically represent the ordinary people’s helplessness viz-à-viz hard borders that they have not made. This symbolic deployment of childlike innocence possibly also alludes to the circum­ stances in which high politics of elite adults authored the borders in 1947 and hardened it further during the 1960s, with the vast majority of the population often at the helpless receiving end. Innocence, in the sense of people’s innocence of hostile borders, is also reflected in BB’s cinematic journey through small towns, villages and bazaars in Pakistan. Any discerning viewer would note that the film’s script, camerawork and fleshing of characters along this route represents an ordinary population wrapped up, very much like their Indian counterparts, in all the ordi­ nariness of an everyday, unconcerned with the typical territorial anxieties that make the two states militarize borders to the teeth and protect them to the point of paranoia. I also see the film as invoking femininity, if only as a counterpoise to the hypermasculinity of the hard border’s latent violence, ruthless commitment to ter­ ritoriality, sleepless surveillance and insensitivity to civilian vulnerabilities. For example, an intense care-based reason inheres in Shahida’s mother’s entreaty that she should be allowed to bring her child back somehow, as her child cannot speak. She further reasons that Indian territory is just five minutes away from the spot where she has pulled the chain and stopped the train to report the loss of her child. But the state’s reason is: “So what if it is five minutes, the place is under the jur­ isdiction of another nation-state. And you need to make a visa afresh to go there”.

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It is ironic, however, that to quell her feminine ‘unreason’, the state officials have to ultimately abandon rational argument and deploy the overpowering force of a masculine physique that restrains her before the heavy metal gates of the border close as the ultimate symbol of inviolate closure that no ‘unreasonable’ extension of feminine care can violate. Again, significantly, it was Rasika’s father, who, as a typical authoritarian male head of the household, is more amenable to the persua­ sion of hegemonic discourse of enmity and wants to drive Munni out of his house on the grounds that she is from the ‘dushmans’ (enemy’s) country. Rasika’s protest that Munni, an innocent child, is not party to any enmity, is just silenced by the patriarch’s growl. A film that can thus be read as critically exposing the border as hypermasculine, also feminizes Salman Khan, who is otherwise rated as a star with an overt macho appeal among the audience. After having initially shown the actor in all the glory of his famed six-pack abs, the film steadily feminizes his character (Pawan) with studied brushstrokes of irony. The script narrates how this apparently muscular guy has disappointed his Sanghi father by failing the RSS’s test of manliness; he can neither wrestle, nor master the masculinity of intellect, nor regiment himself into routine and rhythm of the RSS drill. Distancing the character from any trace of heroism, the script makes Pawan’s exasperated father explicitly declare that his son is ‘zero’. If the Salman-played character, Pawan or Bajrangi, excels in anything it is his care and concern for Shahida who he renames Munni; and such mother-like care is reckoned as a feminine preserve in patriarchal society. At the border and in police custody in Pakistan, Bajrangi’s six-pack abs only serve to protect his bones from the incessant thrashing by the intelligence establishment and the police; but, as he silently endures the beating, the endurance paradoxically makes his character conform all the more to stereotypical femininity. Most significantly, however, BB’s script arranges for a veritable subversion of the masculinity of the border vigil by using Munni’s agency itself. Munni’s love for bangles makes her covet the handcuffs in the possession of a Pakistani police officer at the border and ultimately steal them. By making Munni imagine handcuffs as bangles is in conformity with the patriarchal stereotype of equating bangles with femininity/effeminacy. But in effect the femininity that is used to thus subvert the masculinity of the armed enforcement of the border, is itself reconfigured as power rather than powerlessness. A close, critical reading of the script induces me to see this stereotypically gendered discourse of bangles made to stand on its head in the film. Instead of conjuring up the powerlessness of femininity, such a cinematic turn uses the girl-child’s imagination to effectively denude the handcuff of its masculine associations and make it powerless!

Hands to hold and voice to recover It is eminently possible to read into the film a metaphorical use of the hand and the voice capable of talking back to the hegemonic border narrative(s). The reason of the hard border, after all, is about denial of any direct touch between the citizenry

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of the two countries; all overtures need to be necessarily mediated by and chan­ nelled through the concerned departments, offices and protocols of the state. From the perspective of the two states, people-to-people contact is a potentially suspi­ cious affair. The caring function of the hand does not figure in the range of sym­ bols marking the relation between the two states that habitually assume each other to be enemies. Diplomatic/bureaucratic hand-shakes, on the one hand, and the armed hands of soldiers locked in combat, are the accustomed symbols in the two antagonistic official imageries. Again, the state’s rationalization of the hard border denies legitimacy to any voice of the people at variance with the narrative of the state, arguing that such autonomous voice is potentially capable of endangering the security and territorial integrity of the nation. The mainstream media, more often than not, privileges the state’s border narrative and ignores/delegitimizes the non­ conformity, real or imagined, of the difference of the people’s voice. What is more, whether in India and or in Pakistan, the respective majoritarian ideologies reinforce the state’s position by fanatically appealing to the susceptibilities of the religious majority, effectively marginalizing/silencing any other border narrative as either sacrilegious or seditious or both. In such circumstances, the state’s rationale of a hostile border between ‘our’ nation and that of the ‘enemy’ resounds, virtually reducing the citizenry to muteness. Does Munni’s story somehow allude to this muteness? And, do the numerous sequences, shots and close-ups depicting the activity of the ordinary people’s hands – whether in the form of embrace, caress or a mute person’s signs – symbolize the somatic as the site of people-to-people contact as against the insensitivity of the barbed, metallic border? The hands of a Pakistani maulvi (a learned teacher of Islamic law) embraces Bajrangi – a maulvi, who was not bothered about the latter’s religious difference while hiding him from the Pakistani intelligence in his own little madrasa and then transporting him out of the area under surveillance. Chand Nawab, the small-time Pakistani correspondent embraces Bajrangi a number of times in the film, whether to celebrate shared elation or to communicate mutual affection and gratitude. The hands of Munni eagerly fling around Bajrangi’s neck every time she has to ride piggy-back, indicating her assured feeling of comfort and security in the company of an Indian, about whose (different) nationality she, as a child of six, is blissfully unconcerned. Again, Munni as a mute person communicates through her right hand that she habitually raises in accompaniment of a broad grin to indicate that her feelings had been correctly read. And the affective care with which Bajrangi gradually imbibes and reciprocates that sign language is symbolic of Bajrangi’s transformation from a man shrinking from any contact with the ‘enemy’ country to a human with compassion, transcending the border and touching pulses across it. And, most importantly, the climactic sequence that scripts the ordinary people on either side railing against the mechanical closure embodied in the barbed wire and padlocked iron gates, uses hands in various gestures graphically synchronizing with the crescendo of the people’s cheering voice. Thousands of Pakistani hands (of people assembled to have the border gates opened) caressingly stroke Bajrangi’s body with deep gratitude and affection as he moves through the sea of humanity

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towards the border. It is the same hands, in tandem with their counterparts just across the barbed wire, that rise in indignation at the insensitivity of the hard border that is disallowing Bajrangi to cross over into India on his return journey. The camera uses mid-shots to close-ups in its frequent visual reference to these hands. Using the mid-shot to show hands (and feet) climbing the huge padlocked iron gates that deny the two citizenry’s proximity to each other, the camera closes up with a climactic effect on the hand that ultimately breaks the padlock. Hun­ dreds of hands then push the heavy gates open for Bajrangi to cross over! In keeping with this tenor, Bajrangi whom the hands of the Pakistani intelligence establishment had handcuffed [emphasis mine] and wounded to the point of move­ ment impairment, is helped across a big boulder at the border by the compassionate hands of a frail elderly Pakistani civilian. The caressing, embracing, helping civilian hands at the border may be read in an intertextual context in which the two states daily make the Border Security Force and the Pakistani Rangers respectively “swing their arms in huge parabolas” to display “choreographed contempt” and “precision nastiness in which thumbs [down] are used with terrifying effect” (Mehdi, 2005). Accompanying this regular theatrical performance of hostility at Wagah, the two border security establishments use microphones to egg on their citizen-spectators to express belligerence against their counterparts across the border. No wonder, the ceremony climaxes with the border gates on either side being slammed and sealed. BB, by contrast, appeals to the audience with the emotionally moving spectacle of the two citizenries using their unarmed hands to compassionately open the border gates. Humdardi and pyar (as the script itself uses the terms) is the key to BB’s cinematic focus on the ordinary citizen’s compassionate hands. Bajrangi’s own right hand comes into (close-up) focus, too. Earlier in the film, he had instinctively raised his right hand to communicate Khuda Hafiz (lit: May God be your protector; the parting phrase derived from Persian and common among Muslims in the terrain from Iran to the Indian subcontinent) out of heart­ felt gratitude to the maulvi who had sheltered him from the Pakistani intelligence. But his hand had dropped mid-way, inhibited by his deep conditioning in the culture and taboos of a Brahmanical milieu. But in this final sequence, with the script having navigated him through deeply transformative developments, he now unflinchingly raises his hand in a Khuda Hafiz gesture, saluting the cheering Pakis­ tanis he is leaving behind; and this gesture is a parallel of the Jai Shri Ram (lit: Hail Lord Rama; a greeting phrase common among many denominations of Hindus in northern and western India) that the maulvi had unhesitatingly wished him some days back. The reciprocity of Jai Sri Ram, uttered by the maulvi and Khuda Hafiz, gestured by Bajrangi, however, may be read as negotiating another border. Within the territories of the two respective nation-states majoritarian intolerance towards the minority community incessantly inseminates a boundary, a boundary that reinforces the ‘enmity’ at the India–Pakistan border. Thus I read Bajrangi’s hand, raised in the Khuda Hafiz gesture, as a counterpoise to Rasika’s father’s resentment against his Muslim neighbour consuming a meat-based diet next door and

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supposedly polluting his Hindu household with a ‘foul’ smell. Symbolically – and not unexpectedly – his intolerance of the Muslim presence next door intimately ties up with his belligerence towards the ‘enemy’ across the border. The hands raised in cross-border empathy and locked in cross-community embrace, on the other hand, tie up with the plurality of the culture in the subcontinent symbolized in the film in the spatial-visual metaphor of Delhi’s Chandni Chowk. That is the neighbourhood where the script, with a touch of irony, locates the age-old tene­ ment of Rasika’s father, an anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan character. This gives the camera the opportunity to capture the tremendous architectural plurality and hybridity typical of the Chandni Chowk skyline; the dome style shared by the Jama Masjid and the Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib is Byzantine/Persianate in terms of derivation and Indian in terms of imaginative indigenization. Children of the neighbourhood, who might otherwise be exposed to the persuasion of the major­ itarian discourse, are caught by the camera playing under the walls of the magni­ ficent Humayun’s tomb, possibly to hint at a latent paradox. The camera closes in on the pietra dura work on the walls of the tomb – Italian in origin, Mughal by adoption. The cinematography may be easily read as taking advantage of the cul­ tural plurality of the location to also sensually invoke plural foodscape and aro­ mascape, so typical of this neighbourhood. Against this backdrop of cultural hybridity, the film also claims Bajrangbali, the monkey-god, for individual piety, in this case that of Pawan. The latent dig seems to be at the Hindutva outfit called Bajrang Dal, 7 who appropriate the folksy deity of Bajrangbali to foist it as a masculinist leitmotif of hatred against both the Muslims and Pakistan.8 This brings us to the most significant aspect of the film as I see it. At a simpler level the film’s story is definitely about a child lost and found and her voice lost and found. But could we not, at a symbolic level, read into this film an allegory of the people’s voice lost and found? Indeed, if at the level of the storyline Munni is a child who loses her voice to ultimately get it back at the end of the film, at the level of the symbolic she may be read as the allegory of the lost (and found) voice itself. The theme song indicates so, as it plays again and again even while Bajrangi wades through one trying situation after another with Munni in his caring custody. Tellingly, the theme song ultimately overflows the soundtrack and fills up the Himalayan panorama in the climactic shot: Tu jo mila, lo ho gaya main qaabil, Tu jo mila, lo ho gaya sab hasil’ (Now that I have found you, I have become able Now that I have found you, I have found everything) But whose voice should we read it as – a voice so enabling? A Pakistani intelli­ gence office seems to give us the cue when, convinced of Bajrangi’s innocence, he defies the orders of his superior in the intelligence establishment and helps Bajran­ gi’s border-crossing. The chief border guard on the Pakistani side of the border in Kashmir cites the orders of his superior and refuses to open the border gate for

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Bajrangi even while the slogan – Bajrangi Bhaijaan (lit: respected elder brother, Bajrangi) – voiced by hundreds of local Pakistani villagers rents the air. Coming to Bajrangi’s aid, the intelligence officer then tries to reason with the border guard, and, significantly, this is what he says, pointing towards the vast sloganeering crowd, “Yeh aawaz sun rahe hain? Yeh hai Pakistan ki awaam” (“Can you hear the voice? It is the [voice of] the common people of Pakistan”). The voice lost and found – apparently Munni’s – is thus allegorically the voice of the awaam or the common people on both sides regarding the signification of the border, at least to me. This allegory comes home with all its impact when we register that the moment, near the end of the film, when the common people go against the will of the state and voice their support for Bajrangi’s border-crossing, is also the moment when Munni recovers her speech. And the voice of the masses at the border gra­ dually merges into her individual voice as she calls out to Bajrangi to bid him adieu. The reference to the ‘common people’ as the repository of the voice at variance with the state is significant; what unavoidably rushes into our critical sensibility is a possible allusion to the way in which the voice of the common people had been marginal to the elite deliberations that determined the borders in 1947. This emphasis on the voice of the common people gives us an occasion to look deeper into the possible significance of the evident subalternity of the lead char­ acters of the film – Munni, Bajrangi and Chand Nawab – as well as that of the thousands of Pakistani villagers assembled at the border and their counterparts on the other side. And, if Chand Nawab, the struggling, freelancing television corre­ spondent catalyses the crystallization of the common man’s narrative in the film in favour of Bajrangi’s innocence and humanity, it is significantly at variance with not only the narrative(s) of both the states but also that of corporate media. Nawab’s narrative highlights a scantily educated Indian simpleton’s affection for a 6-year-old mute Pakistani girl, hails his extraordinary resolve to reach her home in Pakistan, resents the way he is being unjustly punished for this love’s labour by the Pakistani intelligence and upholds the duty of the common people of both countries to enable him to cross the border to India. On the other hand, both the state and the corporate media are shown in the film as converging, in their own respective interests, on the stereotyping of any visa-less border crossing as spying/infiltration and situates it in the zone of criminality; such stereotyping only continually reinforces the justification for a militarized hard border. When big media houses refuse to give televisual space to Chand Nawab’s narrative, he resorts to social media: This servant of god [Pawan] has fallen into the pit of hatred [fomented between the two peoples]. That hatred is compelling him to desperately flee from one hideout to another in Pakistan like a convict. This hatred must be terminated. And this job needs to be done by us – the thousands and millions of ordinary people of the two countries [emphasis mine], who want our children to grow up amidst love and not hatred.9

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If Chand Nawab’s appeal is to the common people as a more democratic constituency for the reception of his alternative narrative, the appeal is also made in an alternative space of dissemination, distinct and different not only from state-sponsored channels of communication but also from those of the big media houses. And this appeal facilitates a mass mobilization – rather than a civil society mobilization – at the Pakistan–India border. Responding to this appeal, thousands of ordinary people gather on both sides of the high-altitude border and it is their chorus in favour of an innocent civilian that catalyses Bajrangi’s border-crossing. Melodramatic as it may be, what matters here is that BB, with Chand Nawab as the protagonist, is the first film in the subcontinent to give a direct call to the common people of the two countries to assert their voice towards the undoing of a hard border that the two states justify.

The space of alternative possibilities: The no-man’s land The film’s emphasis on the voice of the common people, that evidently comes across as different from that of either the state or the majoritarian ideological for­ mations, impels the logic of the narrative towards the delineation of a space for this difference. It is probably not unexpected that the film identifies such a space in the virtual domain of social media. But, the territorial power of the state is most hegemonic in its cartographic form that draws the border as a sharp wedge, embossed with trigonometric precision, on geographical space. An alternative nar­ rative of the border, therefore, may equally tend to be expressed in terms of geo­ graphical space, albeit different in its imaginary from the state’s cartography. Resistance to the tyranny of an insensitively closed border may well tend to define a trans-territorial geographical space as the organizing trope for the alternative imaginary. Significantly, BB resonates to such a quest and opens up for viewers a possibility unexplored by any commercial Hindi cinema before – the emancipatory possibility inchoate in the stateless space of the no-man’s land. The last shot of BB captures and freezes Bajrangi affectionately tossing Munni into the air where she remains because the shot freezes and the film terminates. But what is significant is that this happens not on the LoC but on the no-man’s land where the territorial power of neither India nor Pakistan prevails. If BB is the only commercial film so far to have dared to thus distinguish the no-man’s land from national territorialities, it is probably important to hear what Kabir Khan has to say in this regard. Asked in an interview whether his choice to shoot the last shot on the no-man’s land was deliberate in his scheme of things, he replied, “Yes. While writing the screenplay, we were heading towards it. I wanted it just like that …with the man and child caught in their moment in that space between the borders and the river flowing by … I knew I wanted it for the climax” (Indian Express, July 24, 2015, http:// indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/salman-khan-bajrangi-bhaijaa n-director-kabir-khan-hanuman-doesnt-belong-to-only-one-community/). This statement confirms my suggestion that the film strikes with its symbolic imagina­ tion of the no-man’s land as the space for the awaam of the two countries to surmount the insensitivity of rigid borders and contact as people.

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Audacious as it may sound, BB’s deliberate recourse to the no-man’s land and the visual invocation of the fluidity of a stream in which Bajrangi stands knee-deep to take Munni in his arms may be read as a signification of the no-man’s land very akin to that of Hasan Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’. In this connection it is important to recall that Manto was scathingly critical of the elite authorship of the Partition of India (1947). His literary creations often highlighted the way in which the redrawing of borders to create two national territories on the basis of religious difference traumatically tore millions of ordinary human existences asunder (Narang, 1994). ‘Toba Tek Singh’ is one of Manto’s short stories particularly inscribed by his disdain towards the cartography of the two states that the redrawn borders came to rigidly bound. Agitated over the way the new national carto­ graphies forcibly displaced helpless people from the comfort zone of their age-old habitat, the accustomed rhythms of life, and the cultural plurality amidst which people had lived together for centuries identifying themselves with centuries-old place names, Manto sarcastically inverts the tragic into the comic. He fictionalizes a situation in which the post-Partition arrangements demanded that ‘lunatics’ too should be exchanged. Muslim lunatics from Indian asylums were to be sent to Pakistan, whereas Hindu and Sikh lunatics from Pakistani asylums were to be sent to India. Questioning the reason of Partition whereby adult male elites proclaimed the rationality of the new cartographies overnight, Manto portrayed the ‘lunatics’ as failing to make any coherent sense of these new developments. The questions voiced through the ‘lunatics’ exposed the contradictions inherent in post-Partition identities and geographies; Manto parodied the ‘sanity’ of the ‘wise’ people who had authored the Partition’s borders (Alter, 1994; Das, 2005). The common peo­ ple’s non-identification with the new border was personified by one inmate of the asylum who would rather live in a tree than have to come down and choose between a Hindustan and a Pakistan. However, Manto’s protagonist, Bishan Singh’s episode is the most relevant for the present chapter. Religion was no marker of identity in his mental register; he identified squarely with his native vil­ lage, Toba Tek Singh. So when people gave him confusing and often contra­ dictory information on where his village belonged in the new cartography, he refused to be sent to the country that the officials earmarked for him and ran, instead, to the no-man’s land. There he stood like rock and gave out a shriek before sinking into eternal rest on a piece of land neither in Hindustan or in Pakistan. This death on the no-man’s land is deeply symbolic of the predicament of the common people, who would rather die peacefully in a state of borderlessness than live an alienated, displaced existence tormented by the inability to identify with the exclusive cartographies of the new nation-states (Nisar, 2014). For me, BB has moved a full circle from Manto’s short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’; not, of course, in terms of creative excellence, but definitely in terms of the sig­ nification of the no-man’s land. For Bishan Singh the no-man’s land was an escape from the state-enforced conformity to a territoriality determined by the two nation theory. Bishan did not subscribe to any other identity save his nativity in Toba Tek Singh. Denied access to it and forced by the exchange mechanism to go to an India

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where this villager from Toba Tek Singh (now in Pakistan) would be a nowhere person in terms of his self-perceived identity, he rather chose to die in a nowhere place between and beyond the territories of two mutually hostile nation-states. This sense of the no-man’s land signifying a stateless space unbound by excusive and hostile territoriality is very evident in the last shot of BB too. Symbolically, such a space unencumbered by the tyranny of a hegemonic narrative predicated upon hostility and suspicion, is the ideal space for Bajrangi and Munni to remain perpetually connected as a popular archetype of people-to-people contact. The gushing, babbling stream in the no-man’s land is symbolically a contrast to the closure of the barbed wires and the iron gates, even while it also symbolizes an openness and flexibility of non-state dialogue. And yet 62 years had elapsed after the publication of ‘Toba Tek Singh’ when Kabir Khan’s BB was made. In other words, peace activism and notions like people-to-people contact had in the meantime come to crystallize, even as, very crucially, new generations had begun to think through the mechanical reiteration of typical narratives of hostility and closure. Bishan Singh had escaped compulsory inclusion into an exclusive citizenship based on the two-nation theory by choosing to die on the no-man’s land. But, 62 years later, Bajrangi’s is a generation for which the no-man’s land need not symbolize a site of escape into eternity but a paradigmatic space of possibilities to live for. That is possibly why the shot freezes once Bajrangi, on taking Munni in his arms, tosses her into the air in the no-man’s land. Munni thus remains suspended in the air never to fall to the ground. Let us remind ourselves that Munni allegorically symbolizes the voice of the awaam that was once lost but now found and reverberating in the vocal cords of thousands of common people from either side. The frozen flight of Munni, as I read it, is the envisioning of the soaring possibility of people-to-people contact vigorously interrogating the hitherto dominant border narrative. This is how the no-man’s land translates in the film from a geographical space into a metaphorical one – a stateless space where the awaam of the two countries assert their voice to script other narratives.

Conclusion Peace activism and critical thinking are increasingly critical of the way in which the two states virtually collaborate to keep mutual suspicion and enmity alive among the two citizenries through the daily performance of ‘beating retreat’ at the Wagah border (Murphy, 2001). Some have also suggested the replacement of this ritual with a peace memorial and museum. With the whole point of the ‘beating retreat’ ritual at Wagah being a hegemonic exercise of initiating citizens into a culture of hostility, the need for an alternative project has been felt by peace activists. Yet the possibility of popular cinema – with its remarkable mass appeal – being used to popularize an alternative has been largely elided in the peace activists’ quest for counter-hegemonic narratives. Possibly, the theatricality and melodramatic quo­ tient of such films have stood in the way of the appreciation of their efficacy as

218 Sudeshna Banerjee

vehicles of sensitization. But then the Wagah border ritual is even higher on those quotients, and ludicrously so, prompting foreign visitors to make sarcastic remarks that have not done the ‘prestige’ of the two countries any good, either!10 It is important to register that Aman Ki Asha, as a civil society peace initiative, had in its first statement of purpose recorded its anguish shortly before BB had been made, Peace between India and Pakistan has been stubbornly elusive and yet tanta­ lizingly inevitable. This vast subcontinent senses the bounties a peace dividend can deliver to its people, yet it recoils from claiming a share. The natural impulse would be to break out of the straitjacket of stated positions and embrace an ideal that promises sustained prosperity to the region, yet there is hesitation. (Swaminathan, 2017: 25) The statement had then gone on to read: “The people of today must find its voice and force the rulers to listen. The awaam must write its own placards and fashion its own slogans. The leaders must learn to be led and not blindly followed” (quoted in Khan, 2010). BB’s maker seems to have responded precisely to this call by inse­ minating – albeit in a melodramatic wish-fulfilment mode – a situation in which the awaam does find its voice. The producers and distributers may have had their appetite for profit whetted by the huge viewer response on the release of the film and its continued ability to justify its television rights, but the possibilities of the film for peace activism have hardly been explored. And yet it is peace, rather than war, that is challenged to create its own worldview with a repertoire of stories, myths, folklore in post-Partition India–Pakistan where hegemonic discourses, whether statist or majoritarian, make war the template of normalcy (Visvanathan, 2019). There is no reason why a text like BB, with the additional advantage of being an audio-visual feast packaged in a popular culture genre, should not be reckoned and popularized as one such story, very moving at that! This potential was realized by a pro-peace journalist in Pakistan in 2015; while noting that the film had “done record business in Pakistan” she registered it as a “commercial flick that happens to speak to many on an emotional level, in reiteration of how poli­ tical and military realities are not always expressive of the sentiments of people on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC)” (Tarar, 2015). A scholar, too, observed in 2016 that BB, as a ‘heartwarming’ film, had done more than many diplomatic rounds of talks towards improving people-to-people relations between India and Pakistan (Thussu, 2016). BB’s potential for generating popular peace-thinking is all the greater because it squarely addresses the question of the border. A highly mili­ tarized and practically closed border incessantly participates in perpetuating the atmosphere of hostility and hatred; the reason why the two states find it so important to perpetuate the Wagah border ceremony. BB can be read as putting its critical finger directly on this hatred-spewing border. The film can thus be drawn upon as a story, appealingly audio-visual, that supplies a template for a differently

Bollywood on the no-man’s land 219

configured border – a border inscribed with not with nafrat, but with humdardi and pyar. After all pro-peace activists and peace theorists feel the urgent need for a reconfiguration of the India–Pakistan border11; while the governments have been found to be eager to establish was museums and war memorials, they have not cared to memorialize peace. A pro-peace scholar from Pakistan has therefore urgently suggested the establishment of a peace museum at Wagah replacing the ‘beating retreat’ ceremony (Mehdi, 2005). Another author writes, while enjoining a powerful peace movement in India and Pakistan, that India and Pakistan must reimagine the border as a fold of peace instead of as a threshold of hostilities (Vis­ vanathan, 2019). BB could go a long way in popularizing such reimagining, pro­ vided peace activism takes it on board and systematically ensures its continued dissemination. Suggestions – and, hopefully, plans – about a peace museum, too, can ill-afford to leave out the preservation and daily screening of a film like BB in its precincts, as if such films were merely popular entertainment to be kept at arms’ length from any serious exercise.

Notes 1 For example, on becoming nuclear powers in their respective capacities, the two states used the mass media, under their respective patronage and directives, to whip up mass hysteria in favour of these deadly weapons among the citizenry within their respective territories (Mehdi, 2005: 118). “Since 13 April 1984, Indian and Pakistani troops have confronted each other, eye ball to eye ball, for the control of the 76 km long glacier [Siachen Glacier]. This is the longest-running armed conflict between two regular armies. Fighting at an altitude of over 22,000 feet in the minus 60 °C temperatures, both India and Pakistan bear enormous costs for their unwillingness to take the peace route” (119). 2 The turn of phrase within quotes is taken from what the Pakistani small-time journalist, Chand Nawab, a central character in BB says while voicing over a video he makes in order to sensitize his viewers over social media about the urgent need for common people’s initiative across the border to move away from the hate-centred rhetoric of the two states. 3 Bajrangbali or the ‘iron-limbed hero’ is a folksy Hindu epithet for Hanuman, the ‘monkey-god’ (see Lutgendorf, 2007). 4 This is a quote from ‘Michael Palin at the India – Pakistan Border ceremony – BBC’, BBC Studios Channel on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9y2qtaopbE 5 This essay in using the concept of militainment draws upon Roger Stahl’s study (2010) of war becoming, especially since the 1990s, a major fixture in commercial entertain­ ment, a feature of popular culture and an object of consumption. 6 For subtly differing definitions of Partition cinema, see Ira Bhasakar’s presentation on ‘Popular Films and Reconciliation’ at the WISCOMP Symposium on ‘Reconciliation in South Asia: Exploring the Terrain’, 2005 as reported in Basu and Bhatnagar (2007: 36); Viswanath and Malik (2009). 7 “The Bajrang Dal is a contemporary manifestation of the accumulating discourse on the requirements of ‘Hindu masculinity’”, and the organization was “envisioned as a looser, less organized, and less demanding version of the RSS, requiring no uniform or partici­ pation in daily drill, but sponsoring ideological and martial training camps” (Lutgendorf, 2007: 367). 8 For a critical study of the ways in which the lives of the Bajrang Dal activists in Delhi not only display Hindu religious fundamentalism but also a bloated quest for masculinity

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that connects, moreover, to the processes of contemporary capitalism, see Srivastava (2010). 9 I am quoting this from Chand Nawab’s appeal, as made in the film. 10 For example, Claudia Kolker, a tourist from the West found the ceremony a huge parody in which two nations performed pas de deux even while hissing war. See, Kolker quoted in Mehdi (2005). Also see ‘Michael Palin on at the India–Pakistan Border on the Pakistan Side’, BBC Worldwide video on YouTube. 11 Since 2008 pro-peace activist groups like Milne Do and Aman Ki Asha have been organizing cultural programmes and sporting activities at the Wagah border. See Mehdi (2005). Also see, e.g., ‘India, Pakistan: So Near and Yet So Far – Milne Do’, Aman Ki Asha, 9 January 2017, http://amankiasha.com/india-pakistan-so-near-and-yet-so-far-milnedo/.

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