VIJAYAWADA

THE HINDU

THURSDAY, MARCH 10, 2016

DIPLOMATIC LICENCE

Why India must

heed geography

PERSPECTIVE

A tale of two communalisms

The cycle of communal hatred and violence can be stopped only by ending first
the false equivalence between minority and majority communalism

SUHASINI HAIDAR

NISSIM MANNATHUKKAREN

In October 2006, India supported Shashi Tharoors bid to become United Nations Secretary General. The battle for the post
was closely fought, but what hurt India the most was not losing
but the fact that its candidate, who is now a Congress MP, was
pitted against two other South Asian leaders Ashraf Ghani,
now the President of Afghanistan, and Jayantha Dhanapala, Sri
Lankan UN diplomat neither of whom bowed out in Indias favour. Worse,
the Sri Lankan candidate actually endorsed South Koreas Ban Ki-moon, underlining Indias regional isolation on the issue.
Ten years later, the prize is much bigger as India hopes to push for a place in
the UN Security Council, in the UNs 70th year. The government has also
made considerable efforts to build international consensus around the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, which it would like to see
progress this year.
As last weeks mega international conference in Delhi, the Raisina Dialogue, showed, the lesson in 2016 remains the same as the one from 2006: it is
not possible for India to be a world leader or an Asian leader without first being a South Asian leader. Whats more, it is important for India to work on
uniting, connecting, and sharing its prosperity with its neighbours before
seeking the same from outside. If you cannot integrate with your region, you
cannot integrate with other regions, said former Foreign Secretary Shyam
Saran in a keynote session at the conference.
Participants from the region were more specific. The delegate from Nepal
said that border connectivity, despite Indias promises, remains poor. Whats more, It is not possible for
border infrastructure for Indias more
peaceable neighbours to the north and east India to be a world
Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myan- leader or an Asian
mar is much less developed than for
countries to its west. Adding to that, no In- leader without
dian centre of excellence or modern city first being a South
has been developed close to Indias northern borders or can be accessed easily by its Asian leader
neighbours, and Indias poorest, least developed States border these four countries. As a result, SAARC road and rail
connectivity requires immediate attention, and the still-not-developed Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal corridor compares unfavourably to the 38,400km ASEAN Highway Network or the Singapore-Kunming Rail Link, while
Chinas first-ever cargo train to Tehran heralds the way for a China-Afghanistan-Iran rail and road link as well.

As the nation went into paroxysms of rage over the alleged eulogisation of Afzal
Guru,
an
anniversary
passed by, as always, quietly.
On February 18, 1983, 2,191
Muslims, mainly women,
children and the old, were hacked to death
with machetes and daggers in Nellie, Assam. For a massacre of genocidal proportions, not a single person has been
brought to book in 33 years. Nellie does
not even exist in the public memory. The
tragic irony is that a nation threatened by
anti-national slogans in not threatened by
actual pogroms, whether it is Nellie, Delhi
1984, or Gujarat 2002.
The majoritarian logic is based on the
premise that the majority religious community can commit any act of mass violence, but that will not be anti-national.
What is anti-national is only minority violence. This logic was clearly evident in the
response to the Malda riot in January,
something that acquires criticalness with
the looming West Bengal elections.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called
the riot communal: Communalism is on
the rampage in Malda, said its spokesperson. For a party that rose in the 1980s
mainly through engineering a tectonic
shift to politics based on religious polarisation, that is an extraordinary feat of duplicity. All the more so, considering the
costs of such a shift have hardly been benign: the tragic loss of lives and property
in communal riots from Babri Masjid to
Muzaffarnagar.

Desiring cooperation, not competition

The second message was that Indias neighbourhood desires cooperation
rather than competition between India and China. Calling for a coordinated
approach between Indias Connect Central Asia policy and Chinas One Belt,
One Road Initiative (OBOR), former Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai
said the two countries need positive symmetry. Why cant India see that its
neighbours look to China for its economic power and not see it as a threat,
asked former Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga. These are powerful words that India can ill afford to ignore. While it is possible for the subcontinents largest country with the greatest security interests to cavil at U.S.
F-16 aircraft sales to Pakistan, Pakistans JF-17 aircraft sales to Sri Lanka, or
Chinese submarines docking in Colombo or Male port, it is much harder to
stop development projects without evoking a negative response in the region.
Leadership comes at a price, and until India becomes a net provider of prosperity in the region, it will be harshly judged for blocking aid pipelines. It was
unfortunate that the government didnt use the conferences theme of Asian
connectivity to clarify what Indias position on OBOR is, and how it correlates to Indias plans. Worse, the ministers and Foreign Secretary did not even
refer to the project directly.
More worrying is that India aspires for this leadership without an internal
assessment of what it costs to project its power on the international sphere.
Earlier this month, The Hindu reported on a Finance Ministry memo that
seeks to curtail rather than increase visits by Ministry of External Affairs diplomats abroad. The move, along with a diktat to secretaries not to travel above
four times a year without prior permission from the Prime Minister, seems
absurd, if not completely out of sync, with Indias ambitions. Likewise, this
years Budget proposal, that shows a significant drop in developmental assistance to six SAARC countries, casts doubts on the seriousness of the governments Neighbourhood first programme.
Finally, an unspoken but resounding message from the Raisina Dialogue
was that India needs to maintain the U.S.-China balance despite its obviously
friendlier relationship with Washington than with Beijing over the last few
years.
As U.S. President George Washington wrote more than two centuries ago:
The Nation, which indulges towards another habitual hatred, or an habitual
fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.
(Farewell Address, September 17, 1796). These words ring true for India in
this context.
It is important then that Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar himself shot
down the proposal made by U.S. Pacific Command chief Admiral Harry B.
Harris during the conference, when the U.S. commander called for joint IndoU.S. patrols to secure freedom of movement in the South China Sea. Indias
valid concerns about Chinas increased aggression towards Chinas maritime
neighbours must be balanced with Indias desire to resolve land-border issues
as well as cooperate on developing the entire region along with China, which
despite all the issues has been Indias largest trading partner since 2008.
This is a balance that India will increasingly have to engage with in its
neighbourhood as well, as both the U.S. and China make increased overtures
to countries of the subcontinent. Future versions of the Raisina Dialogue
would do well to look for greater participation from both countries, even as
India uses the event to project its power well beyond South Asia.
suhasini.h@thehindu.co.in

FROM THE ARCHIVES

(dated March 10, 1966)

Creation of Punjabi
State favoured
After three hours deliberation
this afternoon [March 9, New
Delhi], the Congress Working
Committee decided to
recommend to the Government of
India to carve out a new State with
Punjabi as the State language from
the present Punjab State. It is
learnt that the pros and cons of
conceding the demand for a
Punjabi Suba was discussed by the
Committee at considerable length.
The working committee
resolution said, Out of the
existing State of Punjab, a State

with Punjabi as the State Language

be formed. The Government is
requested to take necessary steps
for the purpose.
One argument which seemed to
have appealed to the members was
that while all other languages have
a State of their own the Punjabi
alone should not be denied one.
The second and more effective
argument related to the
Governments strength and
determination. It was felt that if
the Government of India did not
like the idea of splitting up the
Punjab State then it should be
prepared to face whatever the
consequences.

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS

>>A Nation page headline - Project-hit people owe Maharashtra government Rs. 350 crore: I-T Dept (March 9, 2016, some editions) is wrong. Actually, they owe Rs. 350 crore to the Income-Tax Department as capital gains tax
and not to the Maharashtra government.
It is the policy of The Hindu to correct significant errors as soon as
possible.
Please specify the edition (place of publication), date and page.
The Readers Editors office can be contacted by
Telephone: +91-44-28418297/28576300 (11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday to
Friday); E-mail:readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
The Terms of Reference for the Readers Editor are on www.thehindu.com
CM
YK

| 11

Minority communalism can never be compared with majority communalism, for the
former is ghettoised and mainly feeds upon its own people. Picture shows victims of
the communal violence in Muzaffarnagar in 2013. PHOTO: RAJEEV BHATT

brute power that being 80 per cent of the

population brings, majority communalism is infinitely more consequential for it
Equalising the unequal
determines the sociopolitical discourse,
The aftermath of Malda (which did not leaving minority communalism to defend
have any fatalities) saw another curious itself and ghettoise further.
Majority communalism, dangerous in
development: a torrent of discussion that
there has been a massive silence on the itself, becomes deadly when it becomes
the official ideology
part of the secular
media, and the Award
Vast numbers of ordinary of the Indian state,
as the Sangh Parivar
Wapsi Brigade about
Muslims are in a bind:
would want it to be.
the Malda commubeing discriminated by the Minority communal riots. The upshot
of this narrative is that
larger Hindu society and nalism can never
of state powthere should have
by their own community dream
er. That is the differbeen an equal outrage
over Malda as Dadri. Unless there is ence between a Yogi Adityanath and an
equivalence in treating Hindu majoritar- Akbaruddin Owaisi. Here Jawaharlal Nehian communalism and Muslim minority rus words are valid even now: both Hindu
communalism, secularism is merely pseu- and Muslim communalism are bad. But
do-secularism. It is precisely this demand Muslim communalism cannot dominate
for equivalence that is dangerous at the Indian society and introduce fascism.
moment, for it ignores some fundamental That only Hindu communalism can.Thedistinctions between the two types of refore whether it is the communal riots of
communalism. First, it equalises what Gujarat, Moradabad, Bhagalpur, Bombay
cannot be equalised, for equality is not the or Muzaffarnagar, the overwhelming
equal treatment of unequal entities. And number of those killed are Muslims. Thus
second, it participates in the increasing it is counterintuitive for the minority
conflation of Hindu communalism with Muslims to provoke riots, for they would
be the primary victims, as fatalities and as
nationalism.
Minority communalism can never be refugees in camps. The forces that gain
compared with majority communalism, the most from a religious polarisation, esfor the former is ghettoised and mainly pecially based on violence, are the BJP
feeds upon its own people (think the ule- and the Sangh Parivar. Unsurprisingly, 75
mas and Shah Bano), the very people it per cent of the Lok Sabha MPs with crimiclaims to represent, while the latter nal cases for causing communal disharthrives by feeding off the society at large, mony come from the BJP.
Further, in a comprehensive study of
including the minorities. Other than the

communal riots, Yale University researchers assert that riots produce ethnic polarisation that benefits ethno-religious parties at the expense of the
Congress and the BJS [Bharatiya Jana
Sangh]/BJP saw a 0.8 percentage point increase in their vote share following a riot
in the year prior to an election. The BJP
resorted to the time-tested method of attempting a religious polarisation in Bihar
elections, and already there are indications that Malda will be the BJP focus in
Bengal, which has no history of communal violence.
Unlike the narrative on Twitter and television, the print media substantially covered the Malda violence. It overwhelmingly concluded that rather than the
radicalised sections of Muslims now suddenly deciding to wipe out the Hindu minority, what emerges is a complex web of
criminal-politician nexus having a substantive role in engineering violence in a
crowd of Muslims.
The majoritarian narrative
But this complexity does not fit well
with the dominant narrative of scaremongering and Islamophobia. Witness the
discourse of the Islamic State enveloping
the nation rapidly, or the pre-emptive
framing of Umar Khalid as an Islamist terrorist in the Jawaharlal Nehru University
Case. If not Muslim-perpetrated riots,
Muslim-perpetrated terror acts will destroy India.
This narrative sadly ignores that the
death toll in the Maoist, and the separa-

tist/nationality movements in Kashmir,

Punjab, and the Northeast is possibly 5080 times that caused by Islamist terror in
the rest of India. And it also whitewashes
the deadly results of state terror in these
conflict areas. In demonising Muslims, it
downplays that overwhelmingly the perpetrators of Islamist terror are foreigners,
and that the participation of Indian Muslims continues to be negligible even after
Gujarat 2002.
Despite the number of violent incidents and new vigilante groups motivated
by Hindutva, it is a categorical mistake to
assess intolerance by violence only. We
will then miss the insidious working of
Hindu majoritarianism as nationalism.
Hence when an Aamir Khan or a Shah
Rukh Khan comments on intolerance,
there is a massive outpouring of outrage
branding them as anti-national, while
when an Anupam Kher declares, I am today scared of saying I am a Hindu, it hardly evokes a response.
Pointing to Muslim superstars in Bollywood as an example of Indias tolerance is
uninformed. It is like arguing as there are
many black celebrities in America, there
is no racist oppression there. The Indian
Muslim today feels like a second-class citizen, an emotion which can only be understood by looking at intolerance as discrimination at a quotidian level (for
example, the state witch-hunt through
draconian anti-terror laws). No society
built on religious discrimination or the
gargantuan scale of caste oppression can
be termed as tolerant. But what is new after 2014 is that this now mixes with the
ballast of state-backed Hindutva, which
sees the Muslim as well as the politically
radical Dalit (Rohith Vemula, for instance) as dangerous anti-nationals.
Ultimately, if the Hindutva project is an
upper-caste (and patriarchal) one which
masks a community divided by hideous
caste oppression, caste divisions mark
Muslim communalism too, albeit on a
lesser level, with the small upper-caste
Ashrafs as the main beneficiaries of votebank politics. But the vast numbers of ordinary Muslims (Pasmandas) are in a
bind: being discriminated by the larger
Hindu society as well as by their own
community. Rather than flourishing
through appeasement, as in the majoritarian narrative, their political disenfranchisement ensures that they are forced to
survive on the crumbs offered by secular parties.
Only a coalition of the oppressed
castes, classes and gender across religions
can overcome communalism. But that
struggle for secularisation has to go along
with the resistance to the majoritarian attempt to equate majority and minority
communalism. The scourge and cycle of
communal hatred and violence can be
stopped only by ending first the history of
false equivalences and selective silences.
(Nissim Mannathukkaren is Chair of
the Department of International
Development Studies, Dalhousie
University, Canada. Email:
nmannathukkaren@dal.ca.)

Four corners of a good deal

For India, a closer relationship with the U.S., Japan, and Australia should not only be seen
in defence terms it could help secure its energy supplies
MICHAEL KUGELMAN
& RAYMOND VICKERY

On March 2,
speaking at a
conference in
New Delhi, the
head of United
States Pacific
Command issued a clarion call for more
robust U.S.-India cooperation in the AsiaPacific. Admiral Harry Harris observed
that India is beginning to exert its leadership in the region, which he referred to as
the Indo-Asia-Pacific. His appeal for
partnership was strikingly direct. We are
ready for you, he declared. We need you.
Lets be ambitious together.
Of particular note was Admiral Harriss
pitch for greater cooperation between the
U.S., India, Japan, and Australia. The U.S.Japan-India trilateral has gained momentum in recent years, with regular meetings
and a variety of collective exercises. Conversely, the four-way arrangement has
made much less progress and has largely
been limited to some meetings and naval
exercises several years back.
This quadrilateral relationship is typically depicted in defence terms. It is undoubtedly a national security-based arrangement. It is therefore a sensitive
matter, particularly given the message it
sends to Beijing. This helps explain why
Indian officials have not reacted warmly to
Admiral Harriss proposal.
However, something significant gets
lost amid all this loud talk of national security and China concerns: a closer relationship between these four key democracies
can also boost Indias tenuous energy security in a big way.
Growing energy appetite
Indias yawning energy needs are wellknown. Economists say that for Indian economic growth to return to double digits,
energy supplies must increase by three to
four times over the next few decades. Deficits, however, are immense including,
for electricity alone, peak demand deficits
of 25 per cent in some southern States.
This helps explain Indias addiction to
overseas energy. Eighty per cent of its oil is
imported, as is about 20 per cent of its coal
though in recent years, coal imports

Economists say that for Indian economic growth to return to double digits, energy
supplies must increase by three to four times over the next few decades. Picture
shows a coal mine in Meghalaya. PHOTO: AFP

Australia can provide large

energy benefits to India. It
already provides sizeable
quantities of coal and is a
top global producer of LNG
have increased by as much as 56 per cent in
a single year. India also imports 40 per
cent of its uranium. And it is increasingly
importing natural gas.
Import-dependent energy policies are
always fraught with risk, and Indias is no
exception. Many, if not most, of its hydrocarbon imports come from unstable or faraway regions; two thirds of its oil comes
from West Asia, and distant Venezuela is
also a key source of oil. Additionally, India
sees great potential in gas-rich Central
Asia. However, because Pakistan denies
India transit rights to Afghanistan, India
lacks direct access to the region.
Though New Delhi has scored some
successes in Central Asia including uranium cooperation with Kazakhstan it
has largely lost out on many opportunities,
even while China has seized them. New
Delhi seeks to enhance its access to Central Asia by developing the Chabahar port

in southern Iran; however, so long as Afghanistan remains unstable, access to

Central Asia via Chabahar will be difficult.
Afghanistans security problems also
make the TAPI gas pipeline an unlikely
prospect.
Meanwhile, the lifting of sanctions on
Iran following its nuclear deal with the
U.S. opens up energy possibilities for India, which has reduced its imports from
Iran in recent years. However, New Delhi
faces serious competition from other importers rushing to cash in.
Enter the quad
Australia can provide immense energy
benefits to India. It already provides sizeable quantities of coal. The two sides have
explored uranium cooperation. And most
importantly, Australia is a top global producer of LNG. In recent weeks, New Delhi
has telegraphed a strong desire to capitalise on Australias gas riches. With LNG
prices having fallen by 75 per cent since
2014, the timing could not be more ripe to
explore deeper energy cooperation particularly given the volatile location of Qatar, the top current source of Indias LNG
imports. The quadrilateral would boost
India-Australia relations overall, and bet-

ter position New Delhi to negotiate workable LNG agreements with Canberra.
Additionally, India could leverage a
closer relationship with Australia to engage more deeply with the latters neighbour, Indonesia, which provides India
more than 60 per cent of its current coal
imports. This would help advance New
Delhis Act East policy. Cultivating deeper energy relationships with these two relatively close-by Southeast Asian countries
an objective that the quadrilateral relationship can help bring about would
ease the burden on Indias naval forces of
protecting energy assets in areas more farflung than Southeast Asia.
Additionally, Indonesia and Australia
despite their proximity to the South China
Sea and their susceptibility to Islamist
militancy, including attacks by the Islamic
State are far more stable than West Asia,
which would ease concerns about the security of Indian energy assets and imports
originating in these two countries.
More broadly, for India, the quadrilateral relationship could enhance energy engagement with the U.S., Japan, and Australia across the board. These three countries
have signed on to the India-led International Solar Alliance. Japan and India are
offtakers for U.S. LNG projects. And all
four countries have an interest in energy
infrastructure development.
In recent years, a major roadblock to the
quadrilateral relationship was Australia,
which withdrew from the arrangement in
2013, citing concerns about Chinas reaction. Today, however, Canberra has a different government and has expressed support for resurrecting it. For New Delhi,
reviving the quadrilateral relationship
may not make much sense from a national
security perspective. However, viewed
through the lens of energy security, it arguably makes very good sense.
(Michael Kugelman is the Senior
Associate for South Asia at the
Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
Raymond Vickery is a Global Fellow at
the Woodrow Wilson Center; a senior
adviser at Albright Stonebridge Group;
of counsel at Hogan Lovells; and a
former U.S. Assistant Secretary of
Commerce.)
VJ-VJ