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Book Reviews
Sumit Ganguly
Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions since 1947
New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 187pp. 11.75
This is a difficult book to review. It comes with glowing reviews from
mainly American and British sources, which would suggest that it is of
interest and use to the policy-making communities in both these countries
which I am sure it is. But since they are, in a sense, part of the problem,
it is difficult to see their reviews as anything but self-serving, particularly
in the context of their opposition to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by
either India or Pakistan. Is the book a dispassionate assessment of a complex
issue, or is it meant to feed the policy process in the US and Britain? It
appears to be the latter, but because of the academic pedigree of the author,
it should actually be the former.
It is also a difficult book to review because so much has happened since it
was published. The recent mobilisation of the armed forces of both India
and Pakistan, apparently bringing both countries close to all-out war, is
obviously a story in itself, and the author has been a little unlucky in
being overtaken by events in this regard.
Nevertheless, in some ways it is a very good and useful book on a topic of
great current interest and concern. Its strengths lie in its presentation of
the issues in a historical perspective which is actually what the author
was trying to avoid thus putting a lot of what is currently happening in a
broader context. But as a book written principally for outsiders, it fails to
make the case convincingly in a domestic political sense that there is
anything intrinsic to the hostility between India and Pakistan. And therein
lies its main weakness.
It attempts to summarise and simplify issues that any political observer in
the subcontinent would recognise are actually far more complex than the
narrative presentation suggests. Mutual antagonism ebbs and flows with a
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certain type of politics and with the roles played by certain individuals
and interests. It has little in reality to do with an inherent clash of ideas of
what the two states represent, as attested by the fact that they are not
permanently at war or at least not till recently.
As the title suggests, the book recounts the history of India-Pakistan
tensions since partition and independence in 1947, and attempts to identify
the reasons why the conflict has persisted so stubbornly. It suggests that
there is a strong element of inevitability in India-Pakistan tensions
stemming from essentially rival and conflicting views of what their states
represent. India represents (to itself) the secular, pluralistic and democratic
option, while Pakistan represents (again to itself) a different reality: the
protector of the Muslim legacy and identity in the sub-continent. India
cannot justify its existence without challenging the raison dtre for
Pakistans existence, and vice versa.
This predisposition to hostility is said to animate political attitudes that
play out in repeated bouts of armed conflict and warfare over a symbol of
what both nations are said to stand for. Kashmir, because of its Muslim
majority population, is the symbol of this differing world-view and the
principal battleground for the two protagonists. This dispute now appears
to the outside world to be as symbolic and intractable as the Arab-Israeli
dispute, and as tiresome.
Current interest in the details of this dispute flows largely from the nuclear
status of both countries. These are seen to have significantly raised the
stakes for the region and the world, and form the basis for arguments in
support of outside mediation and arbitration. The fact that this is an explicit
policy objective of Pakistan, and is thus opposed as forcefully by India,
has complicated any possible resolution of the issue immeasurably. At the
same time, the fact that the status quo suits India but not Pakistan, creates
a policy dynamic (in Pakistan) that is equally dangerous. And the paradox
of nuclear capacity actually bringing some sort of restraint, and hence
stability to the way in which hostilities are conducted between India and
Pakistan, complicates the policy environment still further, as this runs
counter to what the US and the UK in particular want to believe.
The author does very well in bringing out these issues, but it is difficult to
see why they should be linked to some sort of predisposition to hostility
between the two countries. History is full of intense periods of animosity
between nations over seemingly minor territorial disputes, and this could
just be another. It is perhaps because the Arab-Israeli dispute is so
intractable that policy makers around the world now think that all current
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Book Reviews
George Schpflin
Nations, Identity, Power. The New Politics of Europe
London: Hurst and Company, 2000. 442 pp. 16.50
It has been two years ago since George Schpflin, the Director of the
Centre for the Study of Nationalism at University College London,
published this book, which contains a collection of papers some of which
had previously been published between 1992 and 1998 on the issues of
ethnicity, nationalism and the development of the democratic nation-state
in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The central question put forward
by Schpflin is what binds the modern (post-communist) nation-state
together. More precisely, the author seeks to examine the role of ethnicity
in the process of nation-building and democratisation in post-communist
societies.
Schpflin argues against the liberal dogma of universal rationality, which
has falsely overemphasised the function of the rational individual and the
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Book Reviews
58
Tzvetan Todorov
Life in Common. An Essay in General Anthropology
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. 175 pp. 16.95
Book Reviews
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