Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies

3 Four Indian Cases That Challenge State-Nation Theory?

c h a p t e r t h r e e Four Indian Cases That Challenge State-Nation Theory? In the last chapter we produced substantial aggregate evidence of public opinion that we believe supports the state-nation model. But have we neglected salient failures, which, if examined carefully, would present inconvenient facts for statenation theory? We hope that others will submit our theory to full-blown analytic tests. Here, however, we want to meet this fair objection by taking a preliminary look at four of the most difficult cases that challenge the project of state-nation in India: the crisis that erupted in the state of Punjab in the 1980s; the insurgencies in the northeastern hill states of Mizoram and Nagaland, which had similar beginnings but ended very differently; and the well-known case of the ongoing separatist struggle in the Kashmir Valley. These cases also bring in different aspects of the difficulties encountered by the Indian state in reconciling its diversity: the Punjab crisis had a religious dimension, Nagaland and Mizoram involved communities that were not an integral part of the civilizational history invoked by the Indian state, and Kashmir is part of an international dispute. Each of these cases allows us to examine different aspects of our argument. Let us begin by acknowledging some unpleasant facts. From 1980 to 1995, more than twenty thousand deaths occurred in the Punjab in the violence by and against Sikh militant groups demanding an independent country of Khalistan. In the northeast of India, the non-Hindi-speaking, Christian-majority tribal territories of Nagaland and Mizoram have witnessed protracted civil wars waged against the Indian state. The Mizos fought their own war of independence against India for twenty years before there was a lasting peace accord; in Nagaland, 90 c r a f t i n g s ta t e - n a t i o n s Arabian Sea Laccadive Sea LACCADIVE ISLANDS (India) ANDAMAN ISLANDS (India) NICOBAR ISLANDS (India) Bombay (Mumbai) Calcutta (Kolkata) Delhi Nagaland Mizoram Jammu and Kashmir Punjab Tamil Nadu Bay of Bengal AFGHANISTAN PAKISTAN NEPAL CHINA BHUTAN BANGLADESH MYANMAR SRI LANKA MALDIVES 0 0 150 150 300 Miles 300 Kilometers International boundary 1972 Line of Control State or union territory boundary Line of Control undetermined Figure 3.1. Map of India with Contested Peripheral States insurgent groups have been fighting for independence for sixty years, with no victory or peace in sight. The presence of armed forces in the Valley of Kashmir, the heart of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, is one of the most embarrassing facts for any democrat in India. The stability of Jammu and Kashmir has been impeded by the unfulfilled UN Security Council resolution for a plebiscite to determine its status vis-à-vis conflicting Indian and Pakistani claims of sovereignty, long periods of formal and informal central government rule by Delhi, insurgencies, popular f o u r i n d i a n c a s e s t h a t c h a l l e n g e s ta t e - n a t i o n t h e o r y ? 91 protests, and three wars between India and Pakistan. As the reader can see in figure 3.1, these four cases involve four states on the periphery of India. This short chapter, of course, cannot do justice to the historical and sociological complexities of these cases. Our goal is much more limited. What do these cases tell us—or not tell us—about the limits of our state-nation model? the punjab crisis: why democratic breakdown? why reequilibriation? The Punjab crisis presents us with the first challenge for our reading of India’s democratic experience. Here the crisis refers to a series of political developments in the state of Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s that brought the constitutional order within the state to a standstill, gave rise to a powerful and violent secessionist movement, and complicated the relationship of the Sikh minority with the Indian union both inside and outside the state of the Punjab. The resolution of the crisis after 1996, as sudden and surprising as its onset in the 1980s, raises two sets of largely unanswered questions about what caused the disequilibrium and what led to the reequilibrium. First, did the Punjab crisis represent a failure of the statenation model to accommodate diversity and democracy...