The Hindu : LTTE, Hurriyat & self-determination

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Sep 30, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

LTTE, Hurriyat & self-determination — I

By Ajay Darshan Behera

The principle of national self-determination has been used by the Hurriyat and the LTTE to justify their struggle.

IN SOUTH Asia, the two most intractable conflicts — in Kashmir and Sri Lanka — have been characterised by a certain obduracy in terms of their resolution. Then September 11 happened and gradually these are also showing signs of resolution.

The Government of India is embarked on a constitutionally mandated election in Jammu and Kashmir to allow the people to choose their actual representatives to carry out a dialogue on the future status of the State. The All-Party Hurriyat Conference, a conglomerate of separatist parties, was pressed to take part in the elections to assess its representative character. Since its inception in 1993, the Government of India has challenged the legitimacy of the representative character of this grouping to negotiate on behalf of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. The Hurriyat, by keeping itself out of the election process, neither has the popular mandate nor the capacity for violence like the LTTE in Sri Lanka to impose itself as the sole representative of the people on whose behalf they speak.

The LTTE has come to the negotiating table partly due to battle fatigue and the constricted regional and global space since September 11 for the support structures for its insurgency. These two movements had invoked the right to self-determination and arduously embarked on the nation-state project. Understandably, neither the Indian nor the Sri Lankan state would grant these movements the right to a separate nation-state. The principle of national self-determination has been used by the Hurriyat and the LTTE to justify their struggle and also by countries such as Pakistan that support the cause of the Hurriyat, however without much clarification.

The Pakistani leadership does not miss many opportunities to invoke the right to self-determination of the Kashmiris in any and every forum. The establishment in Pakistan has tried to impress on the international community that the violence perpetrated by non-state actors in Kashmir should not be perceived as terrorism as it is the outcome of an armed struggle for national liberation. It is also attempting to use the case of Kashmir and the Palestine struggle to justify that there are just causes for terrorist actions. Addressing the 57th Session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 12, 2002, Pervez Musharraf, self-appointed President of Pakistan, said: "There is a need to address the root causes of terrorism... When a people's right to self-determination and freedom are brutally suppressed by foreign occupation, they be (sic) driven to put up resistance by all means."

If one is not too bothered about the context, one can be polemical and ask the General what about the self-determination of the people of Pakistan? Don't they have a right to make their political choices? This kind of a polemical riposte does not help in understanding these two protracted struggles in South Asia and neither does it help the cause of international diplomacy and conflict resolution. Therefore, it would be pertinent to understand the validity of the principle of self-determination in a changing historical context and the difficulties in the applicability of the principle.

The principle of national self-determination has historically played an important role in the origin and formation of states. The spread of nationalism in 18th century Europe marked the rise of what began to be called the modern "nation-state". Nationalism was the precursor for a group of people to transform into a nation, and it was increasingly understood that a nation had a right to a state of its own. Of course, in the early period it was an unstated principle and the internal cohesion of nations took place for some practical economic and cultural reasons.

The uniting principle of this political organisation called the state was supposed to be a common nationality. The application or rather adherence to this principle led to the rise of the "nation-state" in central and central-eastern Europe as well, consequent to the spread of nationalism to those areas. Following the defeat of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires after World War I, the successor states were created on the basis of the idea of national self-determination, nevertheless with certain qualifications.

In the intervening period between the two World Wars and during the first two decades following World War II, the concept of national self-determination also played an important role in legitimising the anti-colonial struggles of peoples in Asia and Africa.

In the process of decolonisation, the right of self-determination alluded to independence or self-rule of the subject people; in most cases, the territorial boundaries of the new states were colonially demarcated. Thus, the self-determination of colonial territories got linked to territoriality rather than nationality. Even though most of the post-colonial states were multi-national in character, they were still referred to as "nation-states".

Strictly speaking, most of the European "nation-states" are not "nation-states" in the actual sense of the term. In fact, the number of states which can actually claim to be "nation-states" can be counted in single digits. However, the dominant discourse associated with the rise of the state perceives the "nation-state" as the ideal way of politically organising a society. The connotation implied in the term "nation-state" legitimised the demand for national self-determination down the ages, which in turn has generated most of the bitter and bloody conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries and continues to do till this day, more specifically in South Asia.

In the initial years after decolonisation, the vagueness of the applicability of the concept to non-colonial situations allowed the post-colonial states to reject the right of self-determination to their constituent nationalities. The U.N. Charter, while declaring that all people have a right to self-determination, asserts that the attempts to disrupt existing international boundaries violate the charter. Even the international community also frequently gave support to the principle of the territorial integrity of states. Perhaps, what was more important in preserving status quo in the global system of states was the balance of power reflected in the Cold War, which had a sobering effect. As neither side wanted to confront the unpredictability arising from the territorial disintegration of states, the colonially demarcated boundaries of post-colonial states were not disturbed. This reined in the aspirations of a large number of nationalities.

Even though most of the post-colonial states recognised that they were multi-national states, the discourse associated with the "nation-state" was so powerful that their own effort was to approximate to the ideal of a "nation-state" and therefore try to build a nation out of a multitude of nationalities. This has been referred to as the nation-building process. The process of forging the loyalty of the nations to the state has been a conflictual, arduous and long one. The institutional backbone of a multinational state was based on the process of centralisation, which invariably led to the privileging of one nationality or territory over other nationalities and territory. Differentiated or uneven development contributed to problems of "multi-nationality nation-building". The principle of national self-determination, which in earlier instances had provided the ideological underpinning for the anti-colonial struggles, now served the same for a number of nationalities, within their own territorial boundaries.

(The writer is Research Fellow, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi.)

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

Stories in this Section

Muting the war drums

The surrender of Sharma

LTTE, Hurriyat & self-determination — I

Ending torture

Experiencing volatility of global market

U.S. gives space to ISRO