Fault Lines of Freedom:Postcolonial Identity Politics of South Asia in a Global Era

Note: Submitted as an assignment for Indepth Course in Political and Social Changes in South Asia

The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas,
so they don’t know what it means.’
Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses, 1988:337

Fault Lines of Freedom: Contours of Analysis

“Divided nations en route – ex hypothesis – to unity”
- Clifford Geertz (1973: 279).

A sardonic comment by Professor Geertz seems an appropriate ingress for a discussion on the convoluted passage of South Asian democracies from imperial colonies to the global village, ‘beset by virtually the entire range of primordial conflicts complexly superimposed one upon the other’. This essay analyses competing identities as the fault lines of new nations in South Asia, through exploring the postcolonial geo-politics of the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka. The author argues that patterns of colonial hegemony were perpetuated by the ruling elites replacing the colonisers after gaining independence, aggravating and entrenching these fault lines inherited along with Westminster democracy, bureaucracy and a host of other civil institutions as a part and parcel of colonial legacy. On the same note, Price comments, ‘the lasting significance of the colonial state, then, lies in the Orientalist results of colonial hegemony’. Furthermore, the author argues that a vicious circle of postcolonial insecurities continues into the global era that further complicates and globalises local issues and sets the arena for sophisticated and deadly warfare.
Postcolonialism provides a powerful analytical tool in deconstructing the colonial experience, to illustrate the formation of new identities in the region. Price argues that by understanding the political integration of pre-modern polities we are able to construct a better view of the nature of colonial disruption and its consequences for political development in South Asia today. She notes that while there are few words in pre-modern texts, which mean ‘identity’, the number of words referring to ‘community’ is countless. British Imperialism, as it unified South Asia for the first time in known history, transformed these old regional identities and gave rise to new, changing all facets of social life through modernity. At the core of this process lies the British obsession with categorisation of local communities into ethnic and religious groups, which underlines their stratagem of divide and rule. Borrowing from Foucault, Price argues that ‘the British took a skewed perception of Indian society, based on cultural misunderstanding and at times, racial prejudice’, an observation similarly valid regarding Sri Lanka. The ensuing essentialism – the paradigm shift among ordinary people in their everyday lives, in the forms of stereotypification and the recognition of ‘us’ and ‘them’ – created the conditionality for the emergence of two nation theories within the subcontinent and Sri Lanka.
Contributions from the Subaltern school are indispensable in deconstructing the colonial experience, which have veritably argued that much of the scholarship on the nationalist movement had neglected the non-elitist groups. Subalternists argue that, ‘if the traditional heroes of the nationalist movement had not betrayed the aspirations of ordinary men and women, the movement would have had revolutionary results’. The fact that these protagonists, coming from cosmopolitan regional capitals of the empire such as Colombo and Calcutta, had passed through the very doors of Oxford and Cambridge and most visibly shaped national identities and the nationalistic movements, moving on to become the future leaders of these independent states, speaks for itself.
To re-establish this historicity in modern terms I borrow Aswini Ray’s lines: ‘ the unresolved Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, and the ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka…are historically rooted in the distortions of the colonial process of globalisation and the cold war, still surviving beyond its end in Europe’. To take this stance is not merely adhering to a so-called ‘anti-modernist’ view of Globalisation, where you view the term as only another buzzword to denote western colonisation over the rest of the world and romanticize the latest phase of capitalism; it is a powerful tool to historically analyse the shifts in global hegemonies and the relationship between globalisation and postcolonialism; it is to place globalisation, as Kinnvall and Jönsson say, ‘in a localised historical context by looking at the role of colonisation and de-colonisation in the region’. The colonial mode of production structurally linked Europe with Asia. It opened up trails of migration, exchange of goods services and ideas back and forth between the two continents, albeit with all the trappings of imperial exploitation and cultural dominance. If globalisation is viewed as ‘interweaving linkages of factors of production, consumption and lifestyle’, then it is at least as old, Ray argues, as the expansion of European civilisation through proselytization, trade, commerce, mass migration, industrial capitalism and colonialism. On the same note I contend that while colonialism has been and still is an important part of globalisation, more modern aspects of globalisation, (or glocalisation, to be accurate) such as weakening of the state power aggravating insecurity and identity quests, fragmentation and transnationality with expanding diasporas and ‘imagined communities’, create new implications to South Asian societies, culturally, socially and politically.
I will support my claim through the cases of India – Pakistan and Sri Lanka at inter and intra national level while the latter part of the essay will focus on the same conflicts at a sub national level. Religion, gender and nationalism will serve as a pivotal triad around which I weave my case for postcolonial identities as the fault lines of these newly independent states.

(Fault) Line of Control: India and Pakistan on the Edge

“As to where Pakistan was located, the inmates knew nothing…the mad and the partially mad were unable to decide whether they were now in India or Pakistan. If they were on India, where on earth was Pakistan? It was also possible that the entire subcontinent of India might become Pakistan. And who could say that both India and Pakistan might not entirely vanish from the map of the world one day…”
Sadat Hasan Manto, Kingdom’s End and Other Short Stories 1989: 12

Aren’t the implausibility and strangeness enfolding the new geographies of belonging and alienation, of identity and insecurity, beautifully captured in Manto’s words? By the time of British withdrawal in 1947, the Raj was fissured into many splinters; into the main two camps of India and Pakistan; and into more than five hundred princely states that were torn between the choice of joining India or Pakistan or remaining independent. Jalal argues that ‘the loss of the sub continental vision [has] compartmentalised South Asian historiography [and] deflected from any sort of common understanding of the common dilemmas of the region’s present and the interlocking trajectories of its future’. She further argues that the two hundred years of colonial institution building sapped the subcontinent’s capacity for accommodation and adaptation, crucial for a multicultural political entity of India’s nature.
Chakrabarty claims that Indian nationalism developed as a reaction to imperialism and its tradition of history writing that viewed the impact of colonial rule as a munificent process that granted India its modernity and political unity. He quotes Anil Seal who presents a rather extreme view of nationalism as ‘the work of a tiny elite reared in the educational institutions the British set up in India. This elite, both “competed and collaborated” with the British in their search for power and privilege. Seal portrays the history of Indian nationalism, as “the rivalry between Indian and Indian, its relationship with imperialism that of the mutual clinging of two unsteady men of straw.” On the other extreme is Bipin Chandra who depicts the modern Indian history as an ‘epic battle between the forces of nationalism and colonialism.’ He argues that nationalism, authored by such visionaries like Gandhi and Nehru, was the antithesis to colonialism, which united and produced an “Indian people” by mobilizing them for struggle against the British. I find Guha’s stance the most enriching of all, when he argues that domination and subordination of the subaltern by the elite was an everyday feature of Indian capitalism itself and that it manifests in the manner in which the elite nationalists sought to mobilize the subaltern classes. The “Indian culture of the colonial era,” Guha argues further, is a culture of “dominance without hegemony”, stressing the fact of “failure of the bourgeoisie to speak for the nation”
A postcolonial approach to deconstructing Partition veers the debate into investigating the formation of the two-nation theory and divided identities rooted in the colonial practices: Censuses played a key role in the formation of nationalist and religious identities in India. Haan argues that these censuses had a considerable influence on how society viewed their own identities and those around them. Census returns divided population into religious groups separating Hindus, Muslims and Christians and also divided Hindus on the lines of Varna classification scheme. It is interesting to notice how the religious divisions bred essentialism and stereotypes that were inherently engendered. Muslims were generally attributed with male characteristics of aggression, sexual promiscuity and hyper-fertility where as Hindus were seen to be feminine, docile and peaceful.
This leads us to the formation of fundamental religious identities within the nationalist movement that ultimately resulted in the split of the freedom struggle creating two nation states on the basis of religious difference. Ahmed argues that Hindu fundamentalist organisations came into being in the 1920s with a specific in-built bias against the minorities (especially Muslims). Jinnah’s creation of Pakistan and Islamic identity presents an interesting case of nation building. To begin with, Pakistan was a completely new country and the Muslims in pre-independent India did not share a common culture, language, political organization or territory to call their own. Jinnah's achievement, according to Ahmed, was to create ‘a modern Muslim persona, one which would represent a modern Muslim nation and reflect its spirit while providing identity and unity. It heralded the dawn of modern Muslim mass politics, of political images and symbols’. The two-nation theory is also central to Pakistan Ideology, which maintains that Muslims and Hindus have retained their distinctiveness historically and that the discrimination of minority Muslims in India justified the separation and creation of Pakistan. However, Ali points out the inherent dilemma of Pakistan in asserting its identity as an Islamic state in modern era especially as the ideology can alienate the non Muslim minorities and be used as a tool by the political and military leadership to deprive them of regional and cultural identities.
To return to the theme of gender I take the Babri Masjid incident of 1992. While portraying the Hindu nationalism as a micro-religious nationalism of the elites, Bacchetta argues that the Hindu nationalists strategically used the sacred space of Babri Masjid as a symbol of Muslim military invasion and male sexual aggression. India is the motherland, often depicted in collective Hindu conscience as the body of the mother goddess ‘Brahma mata’ and the Muslim invasions that India ‘suffered’ from antiquity are seen as a violation of female Hindu body. It is interesting to note that killing a cow could also carry such gendered connotations, since for the Hindu, the cow is ‘Gaumata’ – Cow Mother Goddess, and the slaughter of a cow by the Muslims in 1934 has led to communal riots and continues to be at the root of the rumours that set off communal violence even today. This violation of the female Hindu body - and not just any female body but the mother’s body - by the Muslims is an extreme challenge to the honour of Hindu manhood. This could only be re-asserted through the likes of razing a mosque to ground and, unofficially, violating Muslim women and castrating Muslim men and leaving one thousand dead within the first month following the riot of 1992. Thus, as Hansson and Kinnvall assert ‘the use of “woman as other” becomes a way for group and sometimes even state representatives to reassert control in time of crisis’.
Any debate pertaining Indo-Pakistan relations is incomplete without mentioning Kashmir. I will discuss it briefly in relation to the impact of globalisation and war on terrorism. Varshney attributes the unresolved problem to three kinds of nationalisms: religious nationalism of Pakistan, secular nationalism of India and ethnic nationalism embodied by the Kashmiriyat. Madan argues that the case of Kashmiri nationalism is slightly problematic since, though the Kashmiris share distinctive physical characteristics, a distinctive culture and two mutually intelligible languages, it lacks the written literary tradition and therefore does not lead itself to a nationalism as strong as the Bengali case, in which the nationalists were successful in creating Bangladesh - a nation different to that of India and Pakistan.
Chadda is of the view that the Kashmiri conflict and the Indo-Pak relations would have taken a different route had it not been played out in the arena of cold war US-Soviet rivalry. The UN, dominated by the Western powers, was not in a position to play an impartial role in bringing about a solution to a third world conflict. Today, the Kashmiri dispute is inevitably linked to the most crucial of global concerns – the international network of terrorism, with India frequently accusing Pakistan of using Afghan war veterans to train Kashmiri insurgents. The implications of globalisation on arms control, narcotics and terrorism will be returned to during the discussion on Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka: Repeating History - Recurring Fault Lines

‘It was a Hundred Years War with modern weaponry, and backers on the sidelines in safe countries, a war sponsored by gun-and drug-runners. It became evident that political enemies were secretly joined in financial arms deals. “The reason for war was war.”’
- Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 2000: 43

Ondaatje was referring to the political situation in Sri Lanka in the mid 1980s. 20 years later, the situation remains much the same. After a stalemate ceasefire negotiated in 2001, recent developments in December 2005 have brought the government and the LTTE to the brink of war. The economic and social development of the country taking a backseat due to the preoccupation with war is only secondary compared to more damaging consequences of cyclic upsurges of nationalism and the possibility of communal violence, spurred by insecurity and deep mistrust of the ‘other’.
Orjuela claims that ‘[a] conflict over power and resources has resulted in a deep social divide, [where] ethno-mobilisation plays a central role and civilians are increasingly the perpetrators and the victims of violence’. She argues that the postcolonial democratic system reinforced the identity politics introduced during the British rule, leading to the development of two nationalisms within one state. De Silva contends that the model of parliamentary democracy – too simplistic for a population of ethnic diversity - concentrated power in the hands of a postcolonial elite who perpetuated the colonial stratagem of divide and rule to gain advantage of electoral politics. The author attributes the rise of mass nationalism among the Sinhalese as a reaction, not only towards the British, but towards this English educated power-elite that continued hegemonic tendencies into post independence era as well. One aspect of decolonisation was seen as a renewal of country’s religio-cultural traditions. A second aspect of decolonisation involved the relative positions and the sharing of power among the various ethnic groups. The major political parties to mobilize mass support played upon both these aspects and the demands of Sinhala Bhuddhist majority became the dominant cultural identity.
This ‘Sinhalesation’ of the state essentially prompted minority Tamil nationalism. The Sinhala nationalist ideology holds that territorial integrity and prevalence of the majority rule as necessary to preserve the Sinhala Buddhist identity where as the Tamil nationalist ideology claims the Tamil nation’s right to self determination in what it defines as the Tamil homeland in the North and East of the island.
At this point it is necessary to point out that the LTTE ideology should not be equalled to Tamil nationalism. To quote De Silva ‘Tamil nationalism has endured in a variety of forms: From collaborationist-nationalisms practised in the 1990s, by the EPDP, EPRLF, PLOTE, TELO and breakaway factions-like the former-EPRLF ‘Rasik group’ in the east and former-PLOTE ‘Mohan group’ in the Jaffna peninsula, that operate as auxiliary units of the Sri Lankan armed services to chauvinist-separatism (typified by the Eelamist LTTE)’.
The Eelamist version of Tamil nationalism has tried to incorporate other minority groups of different ethnic origin (such as the Muslims) under the term of ‘Tamil-speaking people’. The formation of Tamil identity in terms of suffering and struggle is central to LTTE ideology. This includes a multitude of painful experiences relating to discrimination due to language policy, university admission system, unfair economic development and political system favouring majority rule that refused to recognise Tamil identity, inciting a feeling of second-class citizenry. The LTTE has glorified the courageous Tamil struggling against suppression. Orjuela points out that LTTE fosters a culture of heroism and devotion of war martyrs with religious features inspired by both Hinduism and Christianity.
The role of religion in competing nationalisms in Sri Lanka is slightly more ambiguous than the clear-cut Hindu-Muslim divide of India. While Buddhism remains central to the majority Sinhalese identity (which also includes the Christian Sinhalese minority), the fact that LTTE leadership comes from the Christian minority where as the majority of the Tamils are Hindus prevents the direct politicisation of religion in the conflict. Neither can one trace a fault line along gender regarding Sinhalese and Tamils as with Hindus and Muslims in India (though the former group is accused of dominating the latter in Sri Lanka). Indeed, there seems to be a dearth of research regarding this dimension of the conflict.
Placing Sri Lanka’s conflict in a global context refines our understanding by elucidating another significant dimension. Substantial popularity and sustenance from Tamil Diaspora that is plugged into an efficient global support network, helps the LTTE to solve logistical problems, re-supply its arsenal and access new technologies of warfare. About 60% of the LTTE’s war budget is generated through Tamil Diaspora and trade in North America, Europe, Southeast Asia and the Far East. The LTTE is often accused of trading in drugs, weapons and other illegal activities. At the same time the separatists have sought legitimacy and support by playing on ‘struggle for liberation’, to foster ties with more formal global economy of international humanitarian assistance.
However, Uyangoda indicates other imperatives of globalisation such as the power of global and regional actors to urge both parties to find solutions. The international community has begun to define the options available for both parties, by conceptualising mediating and even imposing a framework for negotiations. With the global war on terror giving rise to anti-separatist ethos, a consensus has emerged among main political powers such as EU, USA, India and the UN that in the current conjuncture of South Asian politics, they are not in favour of creating a new ethnic state in Sri Lanka. Nonetheless Uyangoda points out that externally mediated settlement may not necessarily lead to be successful as they may not match the political zeitgeist within the country. Despite many setbacks the LTTE has shown remarkable resilience in holding on to their original demands, leaving little space for the attainment of a political solution. With the Southern reaches of the country renewed in its nationalist fervour, President Rajapakse, who recently came to power backed by JVP and Sihala Urumaya, has stated that he is no longer in favour of Norway for the role of the mediator. He has left the option open for India to step back into the picture while proclaiming that there will be no concessions to the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka.
With both parties far from willing for the least bit of compromise, it remains to be seen which politically imaginative, mastermind solution, let alone what externally induced negotiation process, could bring enduring peace to this deeply divided society.

Fault Lines of Civility: Identity Politics at a Sub National Level
For a comprehensive analysis of socio-political dynamics in South Asian societies, it is necessary to zoom in at the social fabric, stepping down from national and international expositions to the sub national or communal level. Ethnicity becomes the central conception around which group identities are formed at this point. Madan argues that it is not only characterisation of identity, but also a set of strategies to achieve certain ends in the interest of a particular group, which could be opposed by competing ethnic groups. Ethnic movements therefore may involve violence. Coping with ethnicity, Madan continues, is the ‘successful management by an ethnic group through “identity games” to further its economic and political interests’. He defines “identity game” as ‘the deliberate choice by an ethnic group of particular aspects of its cultural profile for highlighting in the expectation that doing so will yield the desired results in a given situation’.
In a study regarding ethnic conflict and civil society Varshney argues that there is a strong link between the structure of civil life in a multiethnic society to the presence/absence of ethnic violence. First, he claims that interethnic and intraethnic networks of civic engagement play very different roles in ethnic conflicts. Interethnic associations are conducive to peace, while communities that are based on intraethnic (fault) lines are prone to conflict as they lead to weak interconnections between community groups. Second, he argues that both formal and informal civic networks, which cut across ethnic groups, promote peace. ‘Vigorous associational life, if interethnic, acts as a serious constraint on politicians, even when ethnic polarization is in their political interest’, adds Varshney.
Drawing from a fascinating study on the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India, Varshney illustrates how, despite ethnic diversity, some regions, cities, towns and villages in India remain peaceful when others erupt in communal violence. He investigates how ethnic violence is predominantly an urban phenomenon – a claim reaffirmed by Tambaih and certainly applicable to Sri Lanka too.
Between 1950-1995, rural India, where majority of Indians still live, accounted for only 3.6% of the deaths while eight cities account for 46% of all deaths of Hindu-Muslim violence in the country. This clearly establishes the town/city as a unit of analysis, and Varshney argues that India’s Hindu-Muslim violence is city specific, not state specific, albeit ‘with state and national politics providing the context within which local mechanisms linked with violence are activated’.
To Varshney, the pre-existing local networks of civic engagement between Hindu and Muslim communities are the single most important factor that contributes to the different outcomes in different cities during a crisis, (i.e., Calicut remained peaceful when Aligarh drowned in a bloodbath during the Babri Masjid incident). He explains that especially, when formal associations such as trade unions, professional associations, sports clubs or cadre-based political parties, draw from both Hindu and Muslim communities providing them a civic space for interaction, the capacity of these communities to endure national level exogenous shocks, i.e., partition, in this case Babri Masjid incident, is considerably higher. By allowing communication between members of the two communities, these networks make neighbourhood-level peace possible at a time of crisis. Furthermore, routine civic engagement allows the two communities to regulate and manage the tensions and conflicts thorough non-violent means.
Varshney stresses the importance of ‘peace committees’ in Calicut - temporary organisations consisting members of both communities, that greatly contributed to the maintenance of peace through policing neighbourhoods, killing rumours and providing local administration with information. Another dimension of this is the intercommunal business organisations that link the livelihoods of many Hindu families with Muslim families. Varshney suggests that intercommunal business survives because of this link than the neighbourhood warmth between Hindu and Muslim families: ‘Though valuable in itself the latter does not necessarily constitute the bedrock for strong civic organisations’.
On the contrary, Aligarh albeit of the same size and composition of Calicut, had its Hindu and Muslim population living in highly segregated neighbourhoods. It lacked both formal and everyday civic mechanisms that strengthened interethnic interaction and understanding. The peace committees that were organised in Aligarh were intraethnic; did not draw from the two Hindu and Muslim groups and they primarily served to protect intraethnic neighbourhoods. Contrary to building bridges across the fault lines, they bred mistrust and reiterated communal consciousness.
Like all other cities that broke into violence, Aligarh showed evidence of politician-criminal nexus. The criminals engaged in violence and murder could not be brought to justice since they were under the protection of the politicians and had close connections with the local media which were instrumental in spreading rumours and polarising masses: Brass has called this arrangement ‘institutionalised riot system’. The politicians in Calicut, on the contrary, were not given into ethnic polarisation though it was in their political interest. The politicians considered it a risky strategy in a society where inter religious civic integration was strong, fearing that if their party was directly linked to destroying decades long Hindu-Muslim peace, they would be punished by the electorate. This proves that strong interethnic civic engagement reinforces peace and mutual trust, as against intraethnic associations that reiterates the fault lines, controlling and curtailing political actors and de-hegemonising their power to exploit national crises to their gain.
Tambaih’s explication of the 1983 riots in Colombo refines (and simultaneously complicates) my argument on inter group relations thus far. He detects a pattern in the recurrence of ethnic riots; albeit intermittent events, they constitute a series of unfolding succeeding occurrences, for example, the 1983 riot – most virulent in the island’s history – were preceded by the riots of 1958, 1977 and 1981. However, these riots are short lived, as they are necessarily ‘human outbursts with a life cycle of orgasmic violence and spent energies’.
Similarly, at the root of this complex process are often the distortion of micro-events and the response of the human masses to mytho-historical clarion calls that explain the present in terms of the past that justifies violence. According to Tambaih Mahavamsa’s passionate and pious characterization of Sri Lanka as being totally dedicated to preservation of Buddhism by the Sinhala race with the ever-present danger of the Tamil incursions is a living faith and a justification of collective action. Furthermore, Tambaih places the 1983 riot in the context of routinisation a ritualisation of electoral violence, a situation that encouraged the belief that the ethnic problem could be dealt in a similar fashion.
In a refreshing discourse on violence in Sri Lanka Kapferer contends that ‘the disorder of violence does not necessarily reflect a disordered world, rather its structuring and creatively organising movement’. Moreover, violence reveals structure in itself and in the world around it, even as it appears to destroy it - such apparent destruction being itself a structuring movement. The fact that these civilian destroyers return to their daily existence, back to living side by side with the very community they gruesomely clashed with, bears deep implications for inter group relations. Duly, Tambaih stresses the need of research in Anthropology of displaced persons and suffering.
Fault Lines of Freedom: Concluding Remarks
‘Is there any conclusion that can be drawn from 50 years – which is a long time in the life of a any modern nation – of the duel quest of statehood and nationhood by the major sates of South Asia?’ questions Embree. In the colonial struggle for freedom of the nation, these deeply multicultural civilisations resulted in creating nations within nations, unfortunately trapped within the idea of a unitary state. Ethnic identities became the fault lines along which territories had/has to be split. Histories and religions of people become justifications for collective and political retaliation.
In revisiting my original argument I reaffirm that ethnic identities created during the colonial period became political fault lines for India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The alienation between political elites and the masses of these states have often resulted in short sighted policies to gain electoral victory. The consequences of these policies are manifest in current political chaos of the region, infested with insurrections, separatist wars, militancy and civil violence. Increasingly, these power struggles unfold in a global arena where modern knowledge, technology, Diasporas, terrorist networks and international law define the boundaries and the velocities of these postcolonial identity games. Chellaney argues that ‘the future of the international campaign against terrorism hinges on success in this region to root out terrorist networks and deter regimes from encouraging or harbouring armed extremists’. With India and Pakistan entering a sophisticated nuclear age, every level of ethnic interaction has deep implications to region’s security. And the future of peace within the region depends upon imaginative political solutions to guide these pluralistic societies still juxtaposed between tradition and modernity.

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Author’s note on word count (excluding Bibliography and cover page): 4761