This volume owes its origin to a Volkswagen Stiftung funded research project on 'Foreign Affairs as Home Affairs: A Comparative Analysis of Inter-State Relations in the Arab East and South Asia which was jointly undertaken by me and Dr. Eberhard Kienle of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The generous Volkswagen grant provided me with preliminary research support and enabled me to undertake research trips to the UK and USA. Subsequent Visiting Fellowships at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, and the Maison Des Sciences De L' Homme, Paris, offered me ideal facilities to collate the data and plan this monograph. But the present study would have remained incomplete unless in the concluding part of my research I could receive financial assistance from a Ford Foundation grant to the Peace Studies Group, Department of History. University of Calcutta.
In the course of writing this monograph I incurred many a debt which can be hardly repaid. To Professor Barua De I am grateful for providing me with the entry points to address the 'ethnic question' in South Asia. The analytical framework for the present monograph, however, developed from the lengthy and critical discussions I had with Eberhard on the literature of ethnicity and nation building. In fact, Dr. Kienle's book an Ba'th v. Ba'th the conflict between Syria and Iraq 1968-1989 (London: 1990) provided me with theoretical insights to explore in a comparative context the relationship between the politics of ethnicity and nation-building. I have been fortunate to receive constructive comments from Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri, Professor Stephen Cohen, Professor Jean Racine, Professor Richard Herrmann, Dr. Raj Chandravarkar, Dr. Crispin Bates, Dr Gowher Rizvi and Professor Sumit Ganguly that helped me to sharpen or modify my arguments. I would also like to recall my rewarding interactions with Dr. Moonis Almar, Dr. Mohammad Waseem and Dr. Iftikhar Malik.
The challenging questions that were posed to me at the seminars in Oxford and Cambridge Universities and at Maison Des Sciences De LHomine in Paris made me rethink some of my initial formulations on the nature of Kashmir and Sindh questions. Thanks are due to the staff of India Office Library and Records (London) the Indian Institute Library (Oxford), the Centre For South Asian Studies (Cambridge). Library of Congress (Washington DC), Nehru Memorial Library and Museum (New Delhi) and National Library (Calcutta) for rendering all possible assistance. Professor Bireswar Banerjee very kindly prepared the maps. My colleague Hari Vasudevan ungrudgingly read the entire manuscript and spent long hours to suggest valuable stylistic changes. Professor Bharatı Ray, Professor Jayanta Ray, Professor Basudeb Chattopadhyay, Bhaskar Chakrabarti and Professor Arun Bandopadhyay of my Department in Calcutta University have kept me intellectually alert without which I would not have been able to undertake new research ventures. I should also put on record the unalloyed support I have received from my family-my mother, parents-in law and brother. My wife Suparna-herself a historian-has been a source of sustenance, both intellectually and emotionally. Suhasini provided me with pleasant breaks between computer sessions. Unfortunately, however, my father who had a keen interest in this work could not see the finished product. Finally, I am most grateful to the Department of History, University of Calcutta, for sponsoring the publication of this monograph under its UGC Special Assistance Programme. Sincere thanks are also due to Shri Kanak Bagchi for supervising the production of this volume with considerable care and rigour.
Recent scholarship has highlighted the need to develop a comparative approach for unfolding the common dilemmas in South Asian political processes. In this work an attempt has been made to explore the Kashmir and Sindh questions within the two common subcontinental parametres of nation-building and ethnic assertions. While the book was in press Navnita Chadha-Behera's much awaited State, Identity and Violence: Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh (Delhi: 2000) was published. It will remain a matter of regret that I was unable to use this work which could have enriched my thesis on the Kashmir question in Indian federalism. If the arguments in my monograph appear unconvincing or suffer from inaccuracies, the responsibility remains mine alone.
A state can be defined as an organisation invested with the monopoly of means of coercion over a given territory and population. On the other hand, a nation is a grouping of individuals who, on the basis of whatever criteria and in contradistinction to other such groupings, owe each other feelings of loyalty and solidarity. States per se claim to represent nations. For, a state exercises its authority in the name of the people. But there could be a situation where a state fails to be coextensive with nation, making groups of individuals living within the frontier of that particular state to imagine themselves as members of a loyalty group whose identity does not coincide with the borders of that state. In such circumstances possibilities of cross-border loyalties may also exist. Such potentials are especially strong in the Third World where the process of artificial decolonisation had caused non-convergence of state borders with cultural and ethnic frontiers. Faced with this lack of congruence between state and nation, a successor state in the former colonised world takes recourse to a nation-building project. This involves an attempt to forge a domestic political and social consensus for creating a nation, so that the state and nation become coterminous.
In each nation-building process identity politics constitutes a mediating force between state and society. A crucial aspect of identity assertions in multi-ethnic post-colonial states has been ethnic politics.
While in the industrialised world of the North ethnic politics is usually played out within existing state structures and ethnic identities tend to get subsumed by more encompassing identities emanating from socio-politico-economic processes, ethnic assertions in the Third World states-particularly where nation-building strategies betray gross distortions-usually assume separatist and irredentist tendencies challenging the format of nation-state created in the wake of decolonisation. Not surprisingly, the implicit assumption in traditional political science literature that states correspond to nations, and nations to states, has been exploded by continuing doses of ethnic secessionism, especially in the Third World. Methodologically, the present explication of the Kashmir question in India and the Sindh issue in Pakistan draws upon the insights provided by this analytical model which relates ethnic politics to the non-convergence of state and nation.
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