|
Open Page
Let's lead Kashmir from blood to healing
|
Kashmir has entered the Pakistani blood as the cancer of revenge only because it has negated its collective Indian past and lives through a deep identity falsification. South Asia lives in a collective psychological nightmare bordering on insanity because we repress or are oblivious of our` common Indic bond and Indic root. From this reality perversion we must urgently come to a balanced view and historically fulfilling relationship.
|
KASHMIR IS in our blood, exhorted the Pakistani President in his historic address of January 12, 2002. Karan Singh, once heir apparent to the throne of J&K, rightly asked in his Hindustan Times column (3.2.02) in which sense Musharraf meant this. "If he is using `Kashmir' as shorthand for the Jammu & Kashmir State," reminds Karan Singh, "then surely it is in my blood, because my ancestors founded the State and ruled it for a century. If he is talking in ethnic terms, then it must be pointed out that General Musharraf is neither a Kashmiri nor a Dogra, nor a Ladakhi, nor a Balti nor a Mirpuri... If he is speaking as a Muslim, then there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan, and surely Kashmir runs as strongly in their blood as it does in his."
Blood or allegiance
There are exclusive (blood) and inclusive (allegiance) concepts of citizenship. For example the Nazis professed a "blood and soil" concept of total exclusivity, which dug their own grave as the short-lived Nazi experiment in Germany showed. The British Commonwealth was an experiment of allegiance, which failed to take off as it vacillated between exclusivity and inclusivity. The Roman Empire emerged into the limelight of history with the same Nazi exclusivity. Civis Romanus sum, to begin with, was the right of the Roman to be above law vis-à-vis the non-Roman subject of the empire. But Roman citizenship progressively was made inclusive, in CE 212 Emperor Carraculla conferred it as a right on every free man irrespective of race and creed. Its principle was transformed from blood to allegiance. And at the height of the cold war President Kennedy, standing at the monstrous Berlin Wall celebrated, "Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was `civis Romanus sum'. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is `Ich bin ein Berliner'."
In this sense we the authors of this article, who hold Indian passports, wish to declare ourselves `Civis Indica sum' so that we shall at the same time be Pakistanis, Bangladeshis or Maldivians. Thus we herald the new `South Asian citizenship' of all-inclusive allegiance, righting the ill-starred one-nation/two-nation theories, healing the derailed Kashmiri identity, healing our still bleeding collective common Partition wound.
The Pakistan Mohammed Ali Jinnah envisaged was certainly secular and based on allegiance. But Pakistanis, to begin with, failed to have the consciousness-level for maintaining a working democracy, so its survival could have been maintained alone by the military. The military in turn could have ensured its survival only by raising and maintaining Kashmir as the "unfinished agenda of Partition." Yet, it miserably failed to finish that agenda as it hoped in 1948, in 1965, in 1971, then Kargil 1999. Pakistan was truncated, the two-nation theory was discredited. Kashmir thus remains the cancer of shame, humiliation, negation for the Pakistani Army and the radical sections of its population. It is possibly only in this sense that Musharraf could have meant `Kashmir is in our blood'.
The drowning man sees the whole world drowning with him. When its dictators drown or Pakistan drowns as a failed state, it will carry with it whatever it would. There could again be war in the region, even nuclear war. The cancerous lava within is boiling and gaining pressure both the sides. It could explode if we fail to contain it by healing, collective civilisational healing and reconciliation of the subcontinent and the planet, as we elaborate in our just released book, Healing the Subcontinent - Indepth Psychoanalysis of Partition and Kashmir worked out as a case study of `The U.S.-South Asian Relations - 1942-1965' (Minerva Press, New Delhi - London; 2002).
The Indic is the solution
We can resolve Kashmir and heal the subcontinent only by moving from blood to allegiance as happened in the Roman empire and as has been happening in history slowly but steadily ever since. The melting pot experience of the U.S. is the best testimony to democratic allegiance to a nation riding the crest of global power. And we have today the inspiring example of the Germans, the Dutch, French, etc., exchanging their nationalities for a common European allegiance — the Pax Hellenica. If we have to transcend the blood and emotional hangovers of Kashmir and heal the bleeding Partition wound we must broadly conceptualise a Pax Indica of the Spirit and proudly boast `Civis Indica sum' as we are doing in this book — truly inaugurating a South Asian glasnost and perestroika. India cannot step in history as a nuclear superpower, it must do so as a spiritual superpower and spiritualise the rest. That the Spirit must be victorious is the ontological command.
The sleeping Gujral Doctrine points to such a vision, L.K. Advani and before him Mulayam Singh Yadav and countless others were broaching such con-federative ideas. But we fear that this will find outright rebuff in Islamabad and rejection by our other neighbours as Big Brother mania and New Delhi's dominational will and pursuit. This is a perception born of fear and distrust on the one side and self-doubt on the other. And we Indians have not done enough to correct it and heal it. History has been a massive proof that the Indic has been a liberative and liberational idea, never a dominational one.
The emergence of the SAARC provides us with the abundant proof that there is an underlying psychic archetype and civilisational identity that bring these seven sisters naturally together. The Raj rose and functioned on this Indic foundation, the British always perceived the subcontinent in federational terms, the 1935 Government of India Acts provided for a Federation of India. It was only after the break-up of the December 1946 London Conference that partition was seriously considered as the basis of transfer of power. And as the nightmare and blood of Partition engulfed the subcontinent the Pakistanis progressively distanced from the Indic stressing the Islamic, and the Indian side disowned it for its want of credibility and political liability. But was this not a massive suppression of the subcontinent's collective reality? Having repressed it, we were paying the price ever since. And unacceptably high prices will be demanded in future.
It is good that Pakistanis remember that the Americans who parted from Europe never denied their European roots as many Pakistanis do. Kashmir has entered the Pakistani blood as the cancer of revenge only because it has negated its collective Indian past and lives through a deep identity falsification. South Asia lives in a collective psychological nightmare bordering on insanity because we repress or are oblivious to our common Indic bond and Indic root. From this reality perversion we must urgently come to a balanced view and historically fulfilling relationship.
If we can revalidate the 1935 Government of India Acts with suitable amends, we will see that India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Maldives could be the seven rays of the rainbow that makes up the Indic spectrum — the promise of human hope in the Twentyfirst century, civis Indica sum. Like the South African state and citizenship, there could be a South Asian state and citizenship. The growing sense of Euro and European citizenship beckons us towards such courageous regional conceptualisations.
Fundamental unity
The rainbow is one, reality is One. So is the Indic. We hold Indian passports but we are as well Pakistanis or Maldivians, because our collective Indic racio-civilisational memory is long and touches the Indus and its underlying Harappa-Mohenjadaro-Sapthasindhu-Saraswati valley layers reaching even the fringes of the forgotten Atlantis. Here history passes into the mythic/mystic and humanity to the cosmic/immortal. The Indus that washes the countless cities and towns and villages and nurtures Pakistan in its underlying and unseen form of Saraswati comes to meet and confluence in the Sangam at Allahabad, Allah's abode. If Pakistan is a state founded on the faith in Allah, its heart is not Karachi, Rawalpindi or Islamabad but verily this Allah's abode at this mystical confluence of the Triveni and the perennially repeating Kumbhamelas. This view of reality is neither superstition nor flight of imagination. It is the concrete inner historical reality of the subcontinent and its con-centricity, i.e. inward coiling on to its own innermost core, the Skambha, the centre that holds the subcontinent and the cosmos, as the Vedic seers saw. In as far as we negate this inner centre, we negate quintessential reality and lead the region to decline and self-destruction. And in so far as we recognise and affirm this Skambha, the Indic emerges as the shaping force of history not only of the subcontinent and its Asian space but also of world history.
The two-nation theory is falsehood, it is untruth. It will be disproved as Marx and Soviet Union were. The two-nation theory holds the Muslims of India to ransom, it strangulates the sovereign emergence of the Kashmiriyat, the Punjabiyat and Bengaliyat, the Mahrathadom, the Malayaliyat, etc. And the Indo-Pak. enmity derailed the subcontinent from its avowed path to peace to that of nuclearisation, talibanisation, and permanent doom. The two-nation theory and the Kashmir dispute hold the Indic in chains, they hold human civilisational progress in chains. We can snap this chain, heal the subcontinent, heal the planet's cancerous wounds when we redeem the Indic and covenant its mandate of the civis Indica sum.
Unacceptable
When the Indic forms the basis for such a South Asian home, there ipso facto emerges also an Asian peace order, in the balance and concordance of South Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, North Asia, East Asia — with Pakistan forming a central link among the Indic, the Arab-Islamic, the Mongoloid, and the Sino-Nipponic. " New Delhi has to realise," as Karan Singh stresses in the same article, "that the present status quo in Jammu & Kashmir is essentially unstable and unacceptable.
Speaking broadly, apart from secessionist elements the Kashmiri majority is demanding a sustainable degree of autonomy in terms of the State Autonomy Report, the Kashmiri pandits who have left the Valley lock, stock and barrel are still groping in the dark, the Dogra pahari people of the Jammu region are chafing under what they consider to be political and administrative domination of the Kashmiris, while Ladakh really has little in common with both the other regions and seeks a direct relationship with the Centre."
Grasping the opportunity
After 1971 war and Pakistan's truncation, Sheikh Abdullah was ready to give up pretensions of J&K's independence and seek accommodation within India. After September 11 and December 13, Musharraf is now making an about-turn from the footsteps of Zia towards an inclusive Pakistani Islamic society of the Jinnah vision — renascent, secular, modern, at par with India, reconciling both the Indic and the Islamic components of the Pakistani collective psyche and its destiny in history. It is the hour of Reordering South Asia, a South Asian glasnost, that will be federative and con-federative within, and pointing towards an Asian peace order and a healing post-nuclear global peace order outwards.
We must seriously consider the formation of a `2+5 New Kashmir Commission' combining in it the Camp David, Oslo, Radcliffe models, negotiating on a bilateral Indo-Pak core but broadening towards a multilateral periphery addressing the long-term issues of the Asian peace order and the ultimate global peace order. If we can work out our collective subcontinental healing and spiritual rebirth, we have no doubt that the Twentyfirst century is the Indic century, the Asian century. Historical movement has shifted from the linear to the cyclical, reality has moved from its rational mechanical stadium to the quantum and the holistic. It is the Indic hour in history. If we fail to respond to it with the vision of the Civis Indica sum, South Asia might as well be opening gates for another 1757 and 1857 and 1947.
V.T. PATIL
Vice Chancellor,
Pondicherry University
&
SRI ASIANADA
Professor of Philosophy,
IOU (Netherlands)
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Open Page
|
