13 - 19 September 2001
Issue No.551
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 13 - 19 September 2001 Issue No.551 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Kashmir and Palestine
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed argues that a just solution is necessary for a revival of both the Middle East and South Asia
Before Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as his prime minister, then, later, as his successor, the Russian government was headed by veteran politician Evgeny Primakov, who made many good friends in Egypt, including myself, during his years as Pravda's Cairo correspondent in the '60s.
In the short period of his premiership, Primakov came forward with an idea that did not materialise at the time but that could still have a future. His proposal was that Russia, India and China (with populations of 150 million, one billion and 1.3 billion respectively) should form an alliance to counterbalance the unipolar character of the new world order, where the United States reigns supreme as the sole remaining superpower. With a combined population of 2.5 billion people, almost half the world population, such an alliance would constitute a formidable counterpole.
In the former bipolar world order, blocs were to one extent or another based on ideology. No common ideology links the three states. Without ideological links, blocs are necessarily shaky. Moreover, in the present unipolar world order, each of the three has a distinct type of relationship with the United States. In a recent agreement signed between presidents Putin and Jiang Zemin, Russia and China formalised the "friendly" character of the relations between them. Actually, what brought them together is not the ideology of communism but, rather, a realistic approach towards recent developments in weapons technology -- more specifically, the Bush administration's anti-ballistic missile defence project.
How will India react to this development? Will it be more tempted to respond to Primakov's idea and become the third party of this new bloc, or will other factors induce it, rather, to try and counterbalance Russian-Chinese rapprochement with an opening of its own onto the United States? India's reaction will necessarily be informed by a number of regional and global factors.
There is first of all India's amazing success story in the field of information technology (IT), particularly since the mid-'90s. India's goal is to become an IT superpower by 2008 and, judging by the preeminence it is already enjoying in this field, it looks set to reach its goal on schedule. Its traditional economic development envisaged the combination of land, labour and capital but, now that knowledge- based technology has entered the scene, India's electronics industry has become the fastest growing sector of the economy. By 2008, the share of IT exports is expected to rise from its present level of six per cent to 35 per cent, while the share of the IT sector in the economy is expected to rise from its present level of $9 billion to $140 billion. Services in the field of information technology have become the most critical sector of the national economy.
As one of the world's most ancient civilisations, India has made many important contributions to the common human heritage in countless areas, including science, where it has produced such luminaries as the world-famous physicist Sir C V Raman and the mathematical prodigy Ramanajan. India is blessed with an abundance of brain power and cheap labour, not to mention a sound command of the English language. These three factors together give it a special edge in IT -- indeed, in state-of-the- art technology in general.
To gain consumer confidence, Indian software experts in Bangalore, India's answer to California's Silicon Valley, are trained to speak English with the local accents prevailing in different parts of the Anglo-Saxon world. Thus, a customer calling from the United States, for example, will feel he or she is on the line with an American expert, when in fact it is an Indian expert who takes the call and who charges the company to which he belongs only a fraction of the fee his American counterpart would command for providing the same high-calibre software service. That is how India managed to build up its primitive capitalist accumulation in the field of IT.
If this factor places India in a relationship of complementarity rather than competition with the United States and other developed countries, the same is not true when it comes to another factor that is bound to affect India's reaction to the Primakov proposal: Kashmir.
The issue of Kashmir is as highly charged on the sub-continent as the Palestinian problem is in the Middle East. In fact, there are many points of similarity between them. Both are the result of the partitioning of a country (India in one case, Palestine in the other); both were formerly under British rule; and both were partitioned in 1947. But there are also important differences between the two cases, notably that, in the case of Palestine, Israel could not have come into being without a massive inflow of Jewish immigrants from Europe, while in the case of India, there was no immigration from outside the sub-continent, but a reshuffling of the original population after partition, with Muslims migrating to Pakistan and Hindus to India. The ruler of Kashmir, a state with a Muslim majority, chose to join India. Since then, Kashmir has been an issue of contention between the two countries.
Following a year of fighting in the wake of partition, India and Pakistan signed a cease-fire agreement on 1 January 1949, under the terms of which roughly one third of Kashmir went to Pakistan. Nehru promised at the time that a plebiscite would be held to determine what the people of Kashmir wished to do: ratify the accession to India or accede to Pakistan. Fifty-one years later, the promised plebiscite has not materialised.
The early Kashmiri independence movement saw itself principally as a national struggle. The ideology informing the nationalist project was that of Kashmiriyat or "Kashmiri identity." This movement was headed by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), which advocated "equal political, economic, religious and social rights for all citizens in the proposed state irrespective of race, religion, region, culture and sex." A Muslim majority state that voluntarily acceded to India in 1947 lent tremendous strength to the construction of India as a secular and pluralistic state. This was an issue central to the war against fundamentalism.
But parallel to the rise of nationalists, Kashmir in the late '30s also witnessed the emergence of an Islamic movement, which found its most vocal champion in the Jama'at-i-Islami, established by Sayed Abul A'ala Al-Maududi and set up as an independent organisation in 1952. The Islamic organisations remained, at least at the political level, a marginal force in Kashmir till the '80s, but with the launching of the armed struggle in 1989, they have come to play a central role in Kashmiri politics, and have sought to present the armed struggle as a jihad between Islam and heresy (kufr), thereby challenging the Kashmiri nationalists' definition of the struggle as one between the Kashmiri "nation" and the Indian state. The Islamists insist that the Kashmiris are a part of the worldwide Muslim umma, not a nation by themselves, for according to them, Islam and nationalism are incompatible with one other. From this viewpoint, Kashmir must become part of Muslim Pakistan, in the context of a "holy war" between the Muslims of the world, on one hand, and the Hindus, in league with other "heretical enemies of Islam," on the other.
Obviously, political elites in both India and Pakistan dread the unfolding of such a scenario and see it as imperative to defuse the Kashmir problem before it is too late. Both sides know that an absolute victory is not possible for either Pakistan or India, especially following the successful testing by both countries of nuclear devices in May 1998. Can the Kashmir problem be settled this year? There is a feeling on both sides that time is running out -- in the case of the 80-year-old Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee for considerations of age, in the case of Pakistani leader, Pervez Musharraf, by the Pakistani Supreme Court judgement calling on him to cede power next year. Although the recent encounter between the two leaders indicates that Pakistan may be beginning to move away from its maximalist position on Kashmir, it is unlikely to satisfy India's minimum demands.
Egypt should be no less interested than Russia in an India which retains the characteristics of a leading non-aligned state, well entrenched in the South rather than in the North, and which opposes the proliferation of fundamentalism, whether Muslim or Hindu. There is a pressing need for just and equitable settlements of both the Kashmiri and Palestinian problems, the two key geostrategic focal points of any attempt to bring about a revival of South Asia and the Middle East as a whole. There is a huge potential here for close cooperation between Cairo and Delhi, in the tradition of the cooperation they enjoyed in the days of their independence struggles.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page