India & Pakistan: Friends, Rivals or Enemies?

The Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS) organised a discussion on Duncan McLeod’s book ‘India & Pakistan: Friends, Rivals or Enemies?’ on November 4, 2008 at the CLAWS Seminar Hall. The discussion was chaired by Lt Gen Shankar Prasad, PVSM (Retd).

Opening Remarks: Brig. Gurmeet Kanwal (Retd), Director, CLAWS
Pakistan is perhaps going through its worst days with virulent terrorism and insurgency in the NWFP and FATA spreading to other parts of the country. The security situation, further compounded by the dire economic scenario is reminiscent of the year 1999 when Pakistan was faced with a similar situation when General Musharraf took over. Post 9/11, with the war in Afghanistan, the US needed Pakistani logistics support in return for which they bailed Pakistan out of the economic situation it was in. This time around, the new democracy and the upcoming elections will have to be observed closely. India is an ancient civilization but a young nation with socio-economic challenges and widespread disparities amongst its peoples. Therefore, it remains to be seen as to how the India-Pakistan relationship will flourish in the future.

Chair’s Remarks: Lt Gen Shankar Prasad (Retd)
The India-Pakistan relationship is an interesting issue for India. As the India-Pakistan relationship goes through various ups and downs with the Indo-US Nuclear deal in India and Pakistan’s economic, strategic, political and energy crises looming large, it is the right time for Duncan to tell us what he thinks of the situation.

Duncan McLeod
International Relations theory has been constantly asking one seminal question, which is “Why does war occur?” But the account of the South Asian region is missing from the discourse on this question. Historical reiteration is our way of dealing with India-Pakistan relations, in particular citing the 1965 and 1971 wars. Another question asked is what the levels of violence in these wars were. In my personal opinion, the 1965 war was an example of limited levels of violence whilst the 1971 war was an example of the unlimited nature of violence in a war. But the objective is to get away from these historical debates and arguments from pre-1947.

At the end of the Cold War in 1991, while International Relations theory busied itself with the neo-realism versus neo-liberalism debate, featuring many academic ‘isms’, it was clear that it couldn’t account for the political developments taking place in South Asia. Prof Martin Wight, in a landmark article, called ‘Why is there no International Relations theory?’ drew upon the three traditions of International Relations and concluded that states can be friends, rivals or enemies. This is of particular importance to South Asia where the Westphalian system has been laden on ancient civilizations, thus making the state-centric approach an inappropriate tool for the analysis of the India-Pakistan relationship. While in the western world, state identities are paramount, in this region, the identities are more transient with changes being unwritten and unspoken. To get a grip on this region, this transience must be understood. For the right tools of analysis, the right toolbox is needed and hence there is the need for a framework of analysis

Instead, there is the tradition of historical reiteration, which pertains directly to India and Pakistan with India reiterating Pakistan’s aggressive stance and cross-border infiltration, while Pakistan repeatedly talks about the referendum on Kashmir and the Instrument of Accession. However, historical debate is endless, doesn’t offer any solutions and doesn’t add to the understanding of the region. We need to leave these highly politicised historical debates aside as they might, in turn, be counterproductive to moving towards a rapprochement.

If one is to look at the India-Pakistan relationship through the two theoretical frameworks of being ‘rivals’ or ‘enemies’, the questions raised are: what levels of violence are these states prepared to use against one another? How much of this is limited? How much of this is unlimited? So if you have a dispute within a limited culture of conflict, then once the specific objective is reached, the violence ends. However, if one was living in a world with unlimited violence of the sort Thomas Hobbes wrote about, chaos and anarchy would reign through the diabolical nature of man – in a “kill or be killed” situation.

In the India-Pakistan context, the wrong question to ask is who did what to whom? Instead, one must ask if the two states see each other as rivals or as enemies. If they think of each other as rivals, do they accept the other’s right to exist and then counter it with limited violence? Or is the level of ideological antagonism so great that one state finds the existence of the other unacceptable and chooses to destroy it with unlimited violence? During the 1971 conflict, human intervention theory could argue in many ways, but the war was a large-scale refugee crisis without any shadow of doubt. India’s involvement in East Pakistan including going in and terminating East Pakistan is an example of unlimited violence stemming from deep-rooted ideological antagonism. The only constraint on unlimited violence is material incapability. However, in 1971, considerable diplomatic manoeuvres were mitigating material limitations.

When violence went beyond limited into unlimited, the analytical tool to put down this behaviour came from the constructivist argument where Pakistan and India were perceived by one another as rivals or enemies as removed from historical repetition. It is then examined if the culture of conflict changes from limited to unlimited and under what circumstances, but it was found that unlimited violence doesn’t start from limited violence. Accounting for a changing culture is not needed. Limited violence doesn’t escalate; the culture of unlimited violence begins and ends as a culture of unlimited violence.

Given the humongous land border the two nations share and the risk that human error poses to this nuclear-capable neighbourhood, this particular problem of the western mindset of being unable to understand the India-Pakistan relationship merits a new theoretical framework for the South Asian region.

Discussion
- If it is presumed that violence will be unlimited, then the role of negotiation is limited. However, in Kashmir, one of the defining characteristics of the conflict is that there is a culture of détente.
- Only conventional war is characterised as limited or unlimited in South Asia, not nuclear war. All-out conflict is a western concept; in the 1971 war, neither were the cities bombed nor was there any large-scale destruction.
- However, the reason it is unlimited war is because East Pakistan doesn’t exist anymore. While it might have been tactically limited, according to strategic calculations, the war was unlimited as its objective was the wiping out of East Pakistan.
- India and Pakistan are neither friends nor rivals, but enemies. Rivalry suggests parity, which is not the case here. The existing relationship cannot be classified as friendly.
- In 1947, India and Pakistan emerged as rivals, but now India is a stronger nation. Post-1965, Pakistani nationalism withered away. Pakistan is the product of an ideological momentum, the two-nation theory, which is inherently divisive and an existential threat to India.
- The national problematique of Pakistan is that the movement for its creation was not in the region that came to constitute it.
- Confidence-building measures between the two countries are to be substantially upgraded. While trade and bus routes have come to whet the appetite for cooperation, more substantial partnership is needed. The psychosis of partition has been injected so effectively that any interruption in good relations is a move backwards towards continued violence between the two states.