As Pakistan’s civilian government took a dangerous step forward to reign in the militants its state helped to create, US continued its bombardment inside its territory, and India announced a complete overhaul of its system, ‘terrorists watch’ and warned its citizens that they may have to give up some of their 'freedom' if they want the terrorists defeated. The UN Ambassador for Pakistan explained it would have been declared a ‘terrorist state’ and the sanctions would have crippled its economy, if Pakistan didn’t agree to ban the organisations accused of the recent ‘barbaric attack’, as Dr. Manmohan Singh put it, on India. Unfortunately, Pakistan has been a cripple inside long before the Islamists started to vie for power than being just partners to military dictatorships or the occasional civilian governments, and the butchering started in earnest in Afghanistan. India’s Foreign Minister pledged for a resolute campaign for an international agreement on ‘terrorism’ and the Prime Minister gave it credence by promising, "India would not show double standard on the issue". These are of course serious statements of intent on top of the policy shift India has made in recent times about its region.
After the LeT lead raid on Mumbai, “the rape of India” described with his paintings MF.Husain one of India's greatest painters, who lives in exile for ‘artistic-transgression’, Indians unlike any other times have been discussing about Project-India with an earnest and critical eye. Questions hitherto too sensitive are asked openly, and people of all walks of life give their uncompromising responses without fear. In some cases they wore ugly masks; when equating the Muslims with Pakistan, and the Pakistanis with terrorism, whipped up by some sections of the media and political parties. Indians in general remained restrained and composed, and discussed about India, not Pakistan, analytical in their assessment of their long march, and their responsibilities as one of the leading Global players; “hatred and anger into productiveness” as Ho Chi Minh had suggested.
Their questions fall into two categories. One, immediate in nature and about the systematic approach to protect India and those who serve it, and the consequences of the steps they could take. Two, how India can avoid such events, organised within or externally, and are really about “how inclusive India is” not 'just for itself' but for the entire region. Inevitably they lead to the questions about the 'Nehru-Ambedker' political and 'Gandhi-Tagore' spiritual visions as reference axes, mapping the recent historical events as correlation points. One can understand the range of emotions and anxieties, and their extremities: they are angry at the lack of spontaneous outpouring of emotions when outrages are committed in less fashionable poorer neighbourhoods or Imphal or Guhawati compared to the noise made after Mumbai; they are confused and suspicious about their media, quick to extol the virtues of their braves, the soldiers, but only a few months ago cast them in less appealing light when they demanded some financial recompense in exchange; they were full of praise of the bravery of their guardians yet, were enraged to see them walking into the terrorist dens with five-inch pistols where well-kitted out 'modern-terrorist' waited; etc.
Indians seem are sincerely beginning to think about the Other-India, and seek a relationship with it. If this is true, then as outsiders with many expectations, and were to answer the questions India is asking itself, how would we fair? Where would our answers lead us?
Q: Does India have the right to defend itself?
A: Yes it does, without any preconditions.
Q: Does it have to worry about taking action because both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers?
A: This is a specious question.
The knowledge that India is a Nuclear power doesn’t deter Pakistan from taking actions like in Mumbai, Bangalore, etc. Why should it bother India?
The rules of engagements are different here; both don't want to use nuclear weapons even as a threat, but want to probe each other without any other conditions, or with conditions the other doesn't accept.
The whole point of Pakistan’s outward exercises are not about India, but about Pakistan itself. Just as it implodes, it explodes outwardly as a means of rightful expression of anger and injustice, but in reality searching for its own self, a sense of purpose.
It is about its survival as a state, its territorial integrity, its status as an aspiring middle ranking power with Iran challenging, and immediately, prevention of an economic meltdown.
As for India, it is about its position in the region as the superpower, not as a regional power in the region, and about its unity.
Q: Doesn’t India ripping itself apart in some of its regions?
A: Yes, true. However, the questions within India are towards unity, about inclusiveness, and empowerment.
But, the questions over its Western-border are about the nature of the state and the meaning of Pakistan itself.
We may add, it is also a process in Afghanistan, and on India's Southern flank, Sri Lanka; India is surrounded by failing or failed states. But, India cannot allow them to be completely unaccountable.
Q: Can India make much of the non-state actors, while it has swathe of territories conceded to non-state actors?
A: Yes it can. Firstly, it means many things, different type of actors. Secondly, some of the non-state actors in Pakistan and Afghanistan are involved in cross-border terrorism, and India cannot be accused of the same, the easy answer. Complicating any process towards a solution is the involvement of some elements of the Pakistani state apparatuses that either encouraged or lost control over these groups; no one is in a position to accept responsibility for such actions. In this respect, accountability may also mean several things.
Q: Aren't these superfluous arguments? Justifying India’s present positions and to mask its past involvement in the region? For example, didn’t Tamil militant groups receive India's help a while ago?
A: Yes, they did.
No, masking or justifying India’s present or past policies or involvements is not our job.
Our objective is to see whether there are any real shifts in the Indian foreign policy, particularly after the demise of the bi-polar world? And to search these changes are real and tangible or temporary and dishonest?
India has sharply changed its policy towards all its neighbours. Security and development seem to be the main planks of this drive. Which comes first depends on the quality of involvement and, more importantly, all these policies are implemented through the existing and recognised institutions. In this context, it is aggressively pursuing a friendly Statist policy towards every country in the region.
As for practical evidences of these changes, one can see that in the recent history of the civil war in Sri Lanka and the tilting of the military balance in favour of the state away from the LTTE. Indian policy changes are so fundamental and drastic the Sri Lankan military chief could not resist making derogative comments about Tamil politicians in India and taunt them to change the course directed by Delhi. Even after facing serious protests from Tamil Nadu at the provocations, and ignoring the ploy to test the unity of India, the Indian state's unflinching support for the Sri Lankan state clearly illustrates our point. Its refusal to get involved in the events to dislodge the military dictatorship in Myanmar, despite push from the West and pressure from inside shows consistency of its application. Even the Maoist takeover in Nepal didn't make its knees tremble and act as though was, "here, we may need to think differently".
Q: What has been achieved by these policy changes?
A: Evidently, nothing.
Pakistan continues its attack on India though non-state actors or directly, whenever it feels the need to. To deflect the tension it has on its Pashtuns borders, with tribal loyalties to its majority in Afghanistan, which has claim on the territory, and the pressure from the US and the West on terrorism, it would want to open its Eastern frontier time to time, a well documented ploy.
In Sri Lanka, the state now assured of itself, go on in its way to disregard what are decent and principled for India in exchange for what is needed by India; and Tamils and other minorities are at its mercy. Though much was expected from India’s Foreign Minister expected visit, now we learn that is also being cancelled, to the disappointment of Tamils.
Hardly anything worth mentioning has happened on India’s Eastern or North-eastern borders, except for the maintenance of status quo.
However, beneath this docile looking expression, India is stirring and marking a few reference points, which cannot be easily itemised, only in time will of their benefits of them. For example, what has been a thorny issue of ownership about its North Western territories has now reduced to an issue of security and terrorism.
Q: Can India be secure by investing the entire sovereignty of the people in a state?
A: No. India's sovereignty comes from its people and instituted in a very complex way. Firstly, as a country it derives its sovereignty through its regional 'nation' states, and directly though elected representatives to the centre. Secondly, at the centre these arrangements are reorganised according to the coalition put together as the government of the day. In theory and practice, whatever people think or however much it is corrupt, the present system is a guarantee that at least the nominal sovereignty of the individuals remains with the people locally.
It may be a case in point if India were going through a civil war such as that US endured, or an invasion such as Nippon devastation China encountered. However, the greatest trauma, the vast majority of the great Indian people experience, is the condition they are living in and watching their pain and sacrifice exchanged for the benefits of those already in power and economic control of their lives, other than the colonised era and the partition that followed in the North and East sixty years ago.
Policy makers, distracted by the turmoil on its western borders are increasingly becoming Statists in their arguments. Strangely, they have assigned the job of preserving the state, which they never invented or made into being, and turned their duty of 'maintaining' a state functions into an ownership and therefore, making the whole project into a state orientated regressive task. They have stopped realising their own private experiences that tells them, "when we loose sight of the pleasures the simple natures greatest assets freely give, we become attached to tasks and stop living, and everything thereafter become work".
India's assets are its multitude of people, their imagination and their perceptions of the world in all its aspects, their ability to absorb anything thrown at them and make something of it, crudely speaking in modern palaver, the human-resources. If Statism is to be the mere response to their real anxieties, and it is to be superimposed on all discussions to satisfy the urgency of today, then the danger is the true India sliding into an argument of a state rather than of its peoples.
Q: Isn't the state responsible for peoples' safety and security?
A: Yes, but it can't be everywhere.
Furthermore, it is the peoples' safety and security and not that of the state. This is semantics for the stakeholders, who have a sense of ownership and control over the state, and their lives. But, for those alienated from power, not really reaping the development dividends, those feel that they can have no effect in the society, it makes full sense.
No one is suggesting that the people themselves can run their affairs without a centrally organised regulatory body, except 'free marketers' and anarchists. Every country profess to have a democratic system are beginning to ask these same set of questions at some point; "How do we defeat the terrorists?"
What is never seems to be a question is, "What does winning or defeating means?"
When the poor, semi-illiterate and highly indoctrinated jihadi young men left Pakistan, they knew they would not return, as there is nothing worth returning to. Their lives meant nothing more than their handlers would have told them and that is in their deaths those values are found: a place in paradise, and financial compensation for their relatives. Their mission was to reduce their 'enemies' to the value of their lives, not by killing every person, which is impossible, but by making the rest broken inside and lose confidence in themselves, and perhaps making them as violent Nihilists as they were.
When a community feels it cannot function without protection, it is not a community at all. If a community feels it can trade its freedom for security or it cannot fully exercise its freedom collectively or as individuals then it has already begun to lose the sight of freedom. We are not talking about abstract or absolute freedom here, but those values any given community feel it has.
If terrorism by any means worth its salt, it would be to achieve precisely these objectives to make us loose what we hold valuable as principles and beliefs about humanity and ourselves as a first step. Perhaps if they had a second step, they may want to negotiate a political settlement, whatever that is.
Pakistan's rulers have been true Statists, and have been telling their 'citizens' why the repressive political and military conditions and why they have to sacrifice their freedom: for the safety and security it wanted for them from its enemies, especially India.
Have the Pakistanis got any form of security and safety promised for so long? How long before they are likely to enjoy the freedom Indian take for granted? Is Pakistan in a position to stop US bombing its ‘people’?
Many think India is a weak state, but how many would be prepared to live in China, which undoubtedly exhibits overt strength and resolve in order to have safety and security for its state, and very little of people or freedom?
The questions and arguments may be the same in the West, but the conditions are drastically different. Most in Europe are nation-states with homogenised population, except for 3-6% immigrants. They are economically advanced, and have some form of welfare system, that ensures dispossessed young don't end up in Madarassa equivalents. Their concepts of freedom evolved as small nation-states and are constructed through institutions during the last three centuries, largely influenced by the interactions between neighbours and therefore, administrated by the states. For the majority obedience to the centralised authority is as normal as speaking about freedom.
The people in US however, are vastly different. In their own convoluted way they are looking to be free as the Indians. Unfortunately, largely due to being European descendants they have no other knowledge, but to construct their way towards it.
Q: Then, where does India fit in, when it has so expansive an understanding on the subject of freedom?
A: India’s suffering from foreign orchestrated terror and destruction, which are fronted by non-state actors, naturally leads to the Statist logic. Its demand for institutional accountability of the non-state actors through states or other recognised forums, UN, regional bodies is reasonable and emotionally sound.
Yet there is no denying, that this all encompassing new terminologies and arguments give the state wider powers. It can now deal with any in the same manner, if they were terrorist fronts or liberation groups or other NGOs, or provide assistance to other states, which has civil conflicts. However, even this Statist perspective can offer some hope for ordinary people if as Dr. Manmohan Singh suggested, we can underpin real and practical values of human-rights, as a program of empowerment along with the issues of security. This thought, not a promises, alone give us confidence that India wouldn’t conclude that state alone can be the way with it all. We are sure India would insists human-rights as one of its basic principles to define the terminologies ‘security’ and ‘non-state actors’, as any state's dealings with its 'citizens', including its own.
Q: If the political classes in all the leading countries become Statists, what happen to the basic rights of people?
A: Disaster.
Everyone agrees, in the failing states the governments at the centre cannot and don't represent all the communities, and in fact, would be in conflict with many of them. Therefore, the non-state actors by choice or force become part of peoples’ daily live. While we accept all non-state actors must be accountable, our question is about how it should be done? How is it possible for a state to account for something, which it disregarded, campaigned against the people and causes it represented be the only institution to account for it without destroying?
What about the ‘Fund Mangers’ of the ‘money market’, who have brought the world economic system to a stand still? The world has suffered greater disaster from the terrorists than these grey, invisible men? These wo/men who manage other people’s money are more powerful non-state actors as any, but can they ever be accounted through a single state?
Q: What happens to the agreements the non-state actors may have had or precedents established with existing institutions?
A: In Sri Lanka, the Tamils are in conflict with the island’s Sinhala state for a long time, long before the rise and fall of many terminologies that describe them. Though, the present phase is presented, as a conflict between a group, the LTTE, and the state, one cannot undo all the history just by evoking a terminology. It is not just a history written in blood, sweat, and sacrifice, but murder mayhem and genocide.
Ignoring all this, for the purpose of argument, we recall it is also a history of peace talks and agreements, whether implemented or not, between a people and various groups and parties represented them over the past sixty years, thereby making the entire people as non-state actors during this period of time. Can this fact, the history, be also wiped out by this terminology and the people forced to return to the fold of the very state, which says, they do not have any demand as it belonged to the majority people, the Sinhalese?
Q: Do the non-state actors have a role to play in the future?
A: The role of the non-state actors is as vital as the centralised power India, for the people of India as much as for all other in the developing world. It is this element, as enterprisers, social-consciousness raisers, developers and empowering merchants who have brought the development India has witnessed. And it is these elements with the support of the centralised authority, which can take the development and empowerment deep inside the hinterlands, guaranteeing peace and security everyone wants.
In this sense, it is not the total loyalty what is required by any centralised authority from these non-state actors, but agreements towards peaceful co-existence and development and accountability to those effects.
The development India sees is largely induced by private enterprise and private capitalism, in which the state has a vested interest, and acts mainly as a regulator. It social policies fail to fully materialise as the politicians and the establishment ensure the allocations and provisions trickled nowhere below. The disparity and polarity in development is vast, and the predictions between the North and Southern parts of India are not promising. Even within the states, between the urban and rural developments, the disparity is growing wider in the North than in the South, where the politicians for all their corruptions and villainous behaviour seem socially more aware and accountable.
Yet, development has brought greater stability within India and considerable political unity, and has raised the quest for psychological unity, thereby more security. It can therefore argue and assert from its own experience, "What is true and worked for many of its people can also be true for others who haven't been touch by development whether they are in or outside its borders".
Q: Does it mean India helping Pakistan to become economically viable?
A: Yes, a healthy and developed Pakistan and Afghanistan is the best guarantee to prevent cross-border jihadi terrorism, not just in India, even in Europe. And a healthy caring India is absolutely vital as an immune system to prevent any infections from such interactions.
He same attitude and actions are also needed on its Southern region, where the long suffering masses in the island of Sri Lanka are waiting for their turn to develop and prosper. Having lost two or more generations to state-terrorism and counter-terrorism, and civil war, the communities are at a loss with third grade politicians and fifth grade bureaucrats managing the affairs, where the military leaders on both sides determines the real say. This is a matter that can be easily taken care of by India's Southern states, if so delegated, for the benefit of all the communities big or small, Sinhala or Tamil speaking.
Conclusion:
Project -India isn't limited within its colonial borders, and terrorism for one cannot be allowed to set the framework for Indian policies for itself or for its region.
India has seen off many devastative phases throughout is mythical existence, but this is the generation that feels it has "more to loose" than others in the past, which faced much harsher conditions than a failing state can throw at them. With this new mood, will India be prepared to be in connection with its past, and suffer more for the sake of humanity? Or could this be one of many foolish notions of India, from those looking in but not experiencing it? These questions may seem philosophical or idealistic, but we believe the answers India will arrive have serious implications for those sincerely concerned about the human-condition.
India's complexity and diversity as a people are gigantic compared to Africa, which has almost the same population. Africa has only two major religions, Christianity and Islam, and three main languages, English, Arabic and French, except for a few who spoke Spanish on its west coast. Because of these two-pronged successful cultural subversions, the African social-transformation has staggered, and is very much tribalistic than nationalistic. Imagine Africa as whole trying or forced or feel the need to live as 'one country'? It isn't strange that JBS Haldane described India “as the closest approximation to the Free world” and verified the meaning of his citizenship, “proud of being a citizen of India, which is a lot more diverse than Europe, let alone the USA, USSR, or China, and thus a better model for a possible world organization. It may of course break up, but it is a wonderful experiment. So I want to be labelled as a citizen of India (not as citizen of the world as suggested).” In these moments of fury, the tendency would be to dismiss a scientist or historian like Haldane and EP Thompson, as eccentrics incredulous to the rigours of the real world, mere idealists living in their own imagined space.
The grey clouds during Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency time, and India’s darkest hour in its modern history, the military assault on one its spiritual home, and the continuing endemic corruption in the socio-political system are all too much to account for all of us, and some started to have doubts about the ideals of the Indian-project altogether. Are we then reappraising something that is already dead? Are we simple peddlers of yesterday’s ideals when, death to all ideologies is the prediction? We wonder, can the past be so clinically cut off; to trace them and to make any deductions from them can be accused of being unscientific, unrealistic, bordering naivety?
Many historians and pundits have done India’s burial many times over. Only a few years ago we watched a documentary in which a well-spoken West Bengali Marxist expert welcomed its disintegration within a decade or two, with his own merry way to analysis. We now watch their followers violently fight their own peasants to bring in the ultimate Indian institution, the Tatas, to make economic progress to the state. Beyond all the venom of these contemporary punditry, India has survived the most turbulent of its period, the cataclysmic colonial era, and absorbed all its worth to reassess and, today reassert itself as a world economic power, a position it held prior to that time. Yet it was they, the colonialists, who had brought in the political union it never had, but its unity still to be achieved. Those of us who feel raped, helpless, and angry, can we imagine how our forefathers felt when they watched their resources being plundered, some times for no use than pure fun, animals the generations of Indian civilisation helped to preserve wiped in the name of 'sport', and beyond all these injuries, the men and women of one of the oldest civilisation treated like children, not citizens or slaves.
Today as One India demanded respect and dignity for its people from outsiders, without flexing the extra muzzles the modern India has acquired, while many in the Other-India and around its borders are left wanting, expecting India will also address them with the same favour.
Not single Indian or a government can claim to have created the Indian state. What the Northern or Southern-Tamil Emperors could not do, British achieved it; what was always there, the basic universality of an Indian, Gandhi among many others rekindled it, and the economy, the new sense of purpose for the middle India, happened not because of the state, but of globalisation. Any evolutionary process has its own course; one cannot make too much work out it. India that is imagined was there before the Brits arrived, it survived and continued its journey after they had left, and it will still be there on its way when we are also dead and gone. Even the Intelligence Report 2025 says so; they should know a thing or two better than some of us, the US for while was hell-bent on testing the Indian concept of unity and its peoples' resolve with a few test of its own.
We are convinced the ultimate destination of project-India, therefore, we don't worry about its survival or India’s unity as the self-doubts of some of those who have taken charge of its state. India is not an accident, but an evolution of a continent of people, far ahead in many aspects in perception of human condition, and their social relationships than economically advanced nations and continents. It is a people who know their beginning and end, but continually suffer as impediments are placed on their way to confuse and complicate their journey. If invasions and raids and barbaric attacks on its people are the impediments, some form of tests, then the reactions in the same vein would be an attack on India's universal-self, its soul; no outsider, but themselves can undermine that fundamental notion of Indianess.
It is logical and practical to propose its systemised security can only be implemented through regional hubs. It is a fact and an evolving historical perspective that Indian concept of democracy, freedom and empowerment are all intertwined are developed and instituted through its local and regional socio-economic structures. The so called external events that affect the Indians as a whole originate, felt more seriously and suffer the consequences more within its regions than those living on the other end. Isn’t it therefore, logical and practical that the so called external policies are done through its regional institutions under the centralised bodies?
It is with this confidence we ask India, what are its future decisions going to be? Not the immediate policy directives on cross-border terrorism, TADA, its proposals to ‘deter’ terrorism and the like, but about itself in connection to the region around it? Can modern India build high iron-fences around its shiny new citadels to keep its own 'unwanted' and the poor away? In the manner, can it build a security-wall around its seas and land borders to keep the people out, who are in every sense connected to it, in the name of terrorism?
We wait with confidence than mere hope.
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