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As I mentioned in the last video, we have
to look at the British presence in India in order
to understand some of the developments that played out in
the late 20th century particularly between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
So, this cannot be even a rough overview of British presence in India.
So, my apologies already for the
extremely superficial treatment of this. Don't attack me for this.
So, you will have look at a real history book about, if you want to understand this
extremely complex and rich presence of British presence in India.
And particularly, the way this relatively small nation with a
relatively small expeditionary force managed to subdue this vast empire.
It's a story
on it's own and hopefully Coursera will put out a course on this.
It's a fascinating history, but it's a history that we cannot even scratch here.
So my apologies already.
The one thing to remember is that British presence in India
starts as a private commercial enterprise, in the British East India Company.
And it becomes a national and public
enterprise after the Battle of Plassey in 1757.
And it's incidentally the Afghans have an indirect but an
important role in there because the local ruler, the Nawab,
was fearing a possible attack from Afghans so he could
not devote as many of his forces as possible to this.
So that contributed to the victory of the
British and that is the starting point
of formal British rule in what became the empire
of India and here Queen Victoria became the first empress of India.
Again, we will not talk about this history in depth.
But, what is important now is the way the British
ruled India is in a mixture of direct and indirect rule.
So they used local princes who remained in power, and so the British
exercised suzerainty over them but local autonomy remained with the
established rulers.
And that created a commonality of interests between many
of the existing political powers and the new British lords.
And then there were other territories that were directly administered by
Britain, and that will become important now when we look at Pakistan.
So the administrative legacy of the British in India
is very rich, very important, but it's also very varied.
It's not uniform across the board, something that we
will now see plays out importantly in Pakistan.
It's not a rule that was established without resistance.
You have the famous,
the Indian mutiny of 1857
where particularly the Muslim subjects revolted against British rule.
But that's again not the subject of
our, it's not our concern in this lecture here.
What is of concern here is something that we already
hinted at when we talked about Iran, so remember, Iran was
broken into spheres of influence, and that came about from
the competition, the intense competition, that you had between the
Russian empire which was establishing its own colonial
expansion in a territorially contiguous space towards its south.
So, it was moving into Central Asia, and then
the growing British presence in India, that was
growing up north.
And as you can imagine, at one point
they will meet and that will create competition between
the two and as we discussed, there was
a very intense competition between these two colonial empires.
And it was played out particularly in
the Russian antagonism towards the Ottoman Empire.
But also over the dire competition between these
two empires in Iran and in what's today Afghanistan.
So, we saw that in 1907 they came to an agreement with respect to Iran.
Here is a map that shows the distribution of the relative spheres of influence.
But, it's here
to remember the particular role that
this colonial competition played for the creation of Afghanistan.
So let's now briefly, and again my apologies to the Afghans among
you who are watching these series, and who know
much more obviously, and who might be disappointed that I'm
not paying as much attention to the very rich and very important
Afghan history that I'm now summarizing in perhaps overly
curt manner.
But let's remember Afghanistan, modern Afghanistan, starts in 1747.
If you remember when we
talked about Iran you have the armies of Nadir Shah who were invading India
and on the way back Nadir Shah dies, and what we, as we discussed with respect to
Iran, several of his military leaders then created their own regional orders,
little principalities in the territory that he had consolidated.
And one of these leaders, Ahmad Shah Durrani, who was one of the
most prominent military leaders in Nadir Shah's army, does the same now
after his death in what becomes Afghanistan.
So we
have now, [...] he assembles his troops,
meets in the city of Kandahar, assembles the tribal leaders,
and had himself crowned as the King of the Afghans.
And, it's important to remember that this is primarily a Pashtun
effort at that time, and it's in line with
the history of the time, it's not necessary a territorial endeavor.
It's not that he's setting out and establishing
firm boundaries to his rule, it's just he's just establishing
as primus inter pares as the first among equals, among the
other tribal leaders of the various Pashtun tribes.
He establishes his authority over them, and that establishes
the reigning Durrani dynasty in Afghan that lasted until the 1970s.
So what you see now, are various degrees of central
control being established by the Afghan government.
But by and large is a relatively remote form of government.
And we will come to it in a minute, it's a central government that is heavily
dependent on foreign subsidies. And at the same time, is subject to
very intense foreign interference,
particularly by the Russians and the British, and that
creates a particular sentiment that is not yet nationalism
in the classical sense, but it bears
the seeds of modern Afghan nationalism.
And I'll like to quote you from a very, a good history that I recommend to you, for
those of you who are interested in understanding
more about the development of the modern Afghan state.
It's Angelo Rasanayagam's
book about Afghanistan - A Modern History.
And I'm reading you from something that he writes about this period.
And I'm quoting: "The external pressures
on Afghanistan generated a kind of nationalism,
not strong enough to forge a national
consciousness, or a sense of national unity.
But strong enough together with this religion
to reinforce the traditional Afghan spirit of independence.
Islam brought together Afghans of all social
classes in times of national crisis.
The perceptions of what was in the national interest, differed radically.
For the backward, unlettered rural masses, subject to the petrifying influence of
Malek and Mullah, nationalism meant the conservation of a traditional way of life.
The spirit of independence took
on a nationalistic dimension when the country
was threatened by non-Muslim powers, British or Russian.
Then resistance took on the specifically religious
aspect of a jihad (holy war) against infidels.
But there was another form of nationalism actively pursued by the Kabul Court and
its associated bureaucracy, whose objective was to strengthen Afghan
independence through modernization.
These different perceptions were to clash dramatically
in the 20th century." End of quote.
So note the, these two elements of nationalism that
the author just mentioned.
You have this, this proto-nationalism born out of a rural resistance against
foreign infidels, and you have this more modern nationalism from
the central government that seeks to modernize and strengthen the Afghan
state in order to be able to withstand these foreign pressures.
And these two elements they now clash.
Already in the 19th century to some extent,
but very dramatically in the 20th century at repeated intervals.
And you have now the story of different
types, different governments, different kings trying to modernize society,
emulating what they see is happening in Turkey, in Japan,
to some extent in Iran,
and then facing massive societal resistance from the rural areas.
And that ultimately leads to the sorry history of the
enduring conflict of the last thirty years that we will come to in the next video.
But at this point, I'd like to refer to one particular
element that was negotiated between the British and the Afghan ruler at the time,
it's the 1893 negotiation on the Durand Line, that you see here.
And there are now very, very many and very
conflicting interpretations of what the Durand Line actually refers to.
Whether it was an international
boundary already at the time or whether it's only delineated spheres of influence.
What is clear is that the British
government in India wanted to limit
[...] the Russian influence
over its territories.
And also wanted to limit the ability of
Afghan tribal forces of raiding into British territory.
So here we have this line was negotiated,
and it's important to remember, and
we come to this in a minute, that the Afghan
state from its inception relies very heavily on subsidies being
paid to it by the Russian and the British governments.
And here
in return for maintaining order and preventing
Afghan tribes from raiding into the British areas, the
Afghan government is receiving a stipend that
is supposed to allow him to establish the military forces to do so.
And, as we discussed this line cuts right through the traditional Pashtun
areas of settlement and it cuts this people into two parts now.
And it's also important to note that the areas, the tribal areas on the east of
that border, those that are under [...] nominal
British control, are not actually administered by the British.
They leave them more or less to their own devices.
And that's you know where we come and we talk about Pakistan,
the federally administered tribal areas, they are exactly
that, they're tribal areas that govern themselves, and
they look to their ethnic brethren in Afghanistan for
the maintenance of their
culture, their intermarriages, their economic patterns.
So the border has very little actual impact on living conditions for
people on both sides of that border so keep that in mind.
And, the other thing that we already mentioned is that Afghanistan
is internally very much divided
into different ethnic and linguistic groups.
And what accounts for the relative stability of the Afghan state is
that the Afghan state does not do very much to these communities.
It's a very aloof presence, it's very nominal, that form of government,
and remember what we discussed when we talked about the Lebanese state.
A state that remains relatively aloof can be quite stable because
it does not interfere with the daily lives of the communities.
And just
as we discussed with Lebanon, once the state tries to do more, communities will
resist, and that's exactly the same pattern we see now in Afghanistan.
Once the state tries to modernize and to enforce change
onto local communities through social engineering as we see in the 1920's,
as we see again in the 1960s, and very dramatically in the 70s and 80s,
there is massive local resistance.
And, for those of you who are interested in the stable
parts of Afghan history, the so called Golden Era, particularly the
1960s, I invite you to read Louis Dupree's book Afghanistan, which is
a very comprehensive description of the
Afghan state and Afghan society at the time prior to the outset
of conflict.
And the most interesting part, I think, for those of you who
are familiar with the Afghan conditions today, in reading this book is the
perpetuity of particularly the
role that foreigners play in Afghanistan that
has very little changed in the way foreign projects are carried out for example.
And that brings me to
the enduring characteristic of the Afghan state, now remember it was
created as a buffer state to separate Russian and British
spheres of influence. And that leads to both sides
supporting the Afghan state and maintaining its integrity financially.
And so we see from the 19th century onwards a pattern where
foreign powers are supplying the Afghan state, not the Afghan society, the
Afghan state with the financial and material means for its existence.
So remember what we discussed with respect to
the Gulf States and rentier nature of their economies.
So we see from the 19th century onwards, the Afghan state receiving
the material
resources that it requires to
maintain its own bureaucracy from outside.
So it dispenses with the need to tax the local population.
And
that also dispenses with the need to create a bureaucracy
that's able to collect resources, so we see a very weak,
very shallow Afghan institutionalized state that exists nominally, and
it's clearly there, but it has very limited impact on the people.
And one thing that Louis Dupree does very well in
his book, he presents now the way that Afghanistan located
now, that the boundaries between two rival empires,
and particularly after the Second World War,
being located now at the crossroads between these two competing
superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States and its allies.
And the way the Afghan goverment
very, very skillfully managed to exploit both and
extract resources from both of these superpowers and their respective allies.
And it does so already very skillfully in the 1920s and 30s.
So we see now a pattern
of those institutions and material infrastructure that
does exist in Afghanistan is now produced and, you know, provided for by foreigners.
See here, for example, the Supreme Court being built by foreigners.
Here you see the, the former royal palace built by the Germans.
It's a little bit destroyed in the war.
You see here the Kabul Airport that was built by the Russians, I don't
have a picture of the Khandahar airport
that was simulateously built by the Americans.
[...] There are several
hydroelectric dams built by the respective superpowers.
[...] This is a pattern that exists continuous to this day.
You see here the the Afghan-Korea Vocational
Training Institute, that was built by the Koreans and produce.
And I
worked myself, in the parallel infrastructure, it was the Afghan-Korean
Civil Service Training Institute, I worked there for about a year.
So we see here the Italian provided national legal training institute that was
built recently, you see here a prison that was built by the Americans and UNODC.
And this competition between foreign,
you know, foreign powers with their respective ideological visions, was
very skillfully used by the Afghans to extract resources for their benefit.
And it's quite questionable to the extent to
which, the external powers managed to bring the point across.
That's again something that continues to this day.
We see here some very interesting phenomena, and it shows you how
skillfully the Afghans exploit that competition that exists, you
see here on the left the so-called Lincoln Room
that Americans built in the central library of Kabul
University, a university that they actually built in the 1960's.
And on the right you see the Islamic Republic of Iran's cultural center.
Also in the library provided for with Iranian
revolutionary books.
And the Afghan authorities put all of these two competing powers
next to each other and they let them play it out.
And I'm pretty sure the Afghans are not particularly interested in either one
of their ideological visions, but what they manage to do is to extract
the resources that these foreign powers are
willing to expend on Afghanistan, and that's
a story, very well described in Dupree's book, so have a look at this.
The other thing now, to the part of the
history that I would like you to remember is, and that's something that is easily
forgotten in the conflicts that then start developing in the mid
1970's onwards, is that Afghanistan at this time, in the
20th century, is a very stable, or relatively stable
place with a government that doesn't do very much.
And with a tribal and traditional society that lives
[...] in a very slow changing
pattern.
So you see here, these are photos from the city of Herat that I took in 2004.
And it shows the city by and large as it looked also in the 19th century.
There was not much change happened. And if you're interested
in understanding this phenomenon,
a good point to start would be to look at
this guidebook that the wife of Louis Dupree that I just mentioned, Nancy
Hatch Dupree, wrote. It came out the first time in 1970, and
this is the edition from 1977. So it shows you how
relatively unchanged Afghan society has remained right up
to the last moment before the conflict starts.
And [...] if you read the descriptions,
and it's, it's a travelogue, it's a book for
travelers, probably the book that your parents and grandparents would
were on this hippie trail at the time, might have used.
It's tangible
when you flick through the photos, you read the
texts, that this is a society, and that was precisely
the appeal of that society for western travelers at the
time, that you could almost, as if you would engage
in time travel, [...] you would enter
a society that was not at all different from the
descriptions that we could gain
from early travelers from the 19th century or perhaps earlier.
And that is something that now dramatically changes with the onset of the
conflict, and the reason the conflict sets out is the massive social engineering,
the ambition of a state that is relatively weak to start from, but
that now has this unbounded ambition to change society in the image of modernity
imported from somewhere else.
And the resistance you see from,
particularly, the rural population against it.
That's a story we will discuss in the next video.
But, for the time being remember that this society
[...] is stable, relatively peaceful, not particularly
prosperous, but not particularly conflictual,
so the ethnic fragmentation does not necessarily lead to conflict, and it's
a state that is relatively weak and has relatively limited ambitions,
and whenever a state expressed, bigger ambitions
as they did in the 1920's, we had
problems, as you know, as Louis Dupree
describes as the pattern of fusion and fission.
So whenever you have a state that tries
to enforce greater degree of control you
have resistance and that ultimately leads to the dissipation of state structures.
I'll leave it on that.
Now let's look at the neighboring country, Pakistan.
Pakistan's political history begins in 1906 with
the formation of the [...]
All India Muslim League.
And it's a political association that aims to protect, I'm
quoting, "Muslim interests amid neglect and underrepresentation", end of quote.
And it's aimed to oppose the Indian Congress, the
Congress party that still dominates Indian politics, and that was dominated by
Hindus. And it thought
to express and to defend the interests of the
Muslim population in British India among the agitation for independence.
And it drew inspiration from
the Indian poet and writer, Muhammad Iqbal,
who drawing on earlier ideas, you know expressed among others here by the
11th century Beruni, who described that you know,
you have the description of Beruni when he describes India
at the time, you know, this is India the 11th century.
That he observed that Hindus and Muslims
are different in every respect as he claimed,
and that's the position that Mohammad Iqbal shares.
He says that the Muslims and the Hindus have nothing in common,
they oppose each other on almost every aspect of their daily lives.
It's not a political community, and that therefore they should
be separated, once the question of
independence from British rule is discussed.
And that leads ultimately and again, I'm squeezing
together a very complex history, so my apologies here,
it leads to the development of the so called two-nations theory.
They claim that the Muslims and the Hindus formed two different
nations and that religion is the primary characteristic that defines these nations.
Over linguistic or
ethnic affinities. And let's remember, we have in
the British in the Indian subcontinent,
many groups that share common language and common
ethnicity but are different in their religious outlook.
We had it with the Bengalis, we had it with the
Punjabis, and there's many, many other groups where
the linguistic and
ethnic unity does not coincide with
religious unity. So what Muhammad
Ali Jinnah based on what Mohammad Iqbal had written earlier, was now
arguing is that religion is the core, the essence of the
Muslims' political identity, and that therefore
should form the basis of the political state.
And I'd like to read to you a part of a lecture or
a speech that Muhammad Jinnah gave in 1940 to the All Indian Muslim League.
And I'd like you to pay attention to the way it seemingly
contradicts everything that I've been telling you in the course of this course.
Remember what I mentioned already in the very first lecture, and
repeatedly ever since, that I cautioned you against the dangers of essentialism;
of reducing a complex psychological, historical, social setup to one
factor that is deemed to be the essential characteristic of an individual or group.
And I cautioned you against doing this. Muhammad Ali Jinnah
makes essentialism the very core of his political philosophy.
So keep in mind the implications of this.
I'm quoting:
"It is extremely difficult to appreciate why our Hindu friends
fail to understand the real nature of Islam and Hinduism.
They are not religions in the strict sense of the word,
but are,
in fact, different and distinct social orders,
and it is a dream that the Hindus
and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality,
and this misconception of one Indian nation has troubles and will lead
India to destruction, if we fail to revise our notions in time.
The Hindus and Muslims belong to
two different religious philosophies, social customs,
literatures.
They neither intermarry nor interdine together and, indeed, they belong to
two different civilizations which are based
mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.
Their aspect on life and of life are different.
It is quite clear that Hindus and
Mussalamans derive their inspiration from different sources
of history.
They have different epics, different heroes, different episodes.
Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other
and, likewise, their victories and defeats overlap.
To yoke together two such nations, under a single state, one
as a numerical minority, and the other a majority, must lead to growing
discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may
be so built for the government of the state."
End of quote.
I leave it to you to what your position is to the accuracy of that claim.
I just point out some of the implications if that claim were
correct, when we deal with Muslim minorities
in other situations, not in the Indian context.
But if you think of Muslim minorities in Europe, Muslim minorities in the
United States, Muslim minorities in Thailand, in parts of Africa.
If that claim is accurate, we have a [...]
potentially very explosive situation on our hands, and so this is
one part of the challenge that the very creation
of Pakistan poses outside the narrow confines of
the historical dispute that we will now see.
And it's needless to say that this runs directly counter the vision of
a secular state that Gandhi and the Indian congress had.
And they obviously are imbued with Hindu ideas, but
their vision for the state was not necessarily a Hindu nationalist state.
But already now we can say that this agitation, and these line of
argument that Jinnah presents here, is taken up later on by Hindu nationalists,
and Hindu fundamentalists, in the late 20th century, and you
see a sort of a fundamentalism in reverse, if I like to call it that way.
So just, for the time being, let's leave it at that.
But note
the explosive nature of this position.
This is a map we showed already in the last video, and that shows the
rough distribution of religious majorities in British India.
And this ultimately forms the basis of the
claim by the Muslim League to get an independent Muslim
state at independence. And it's a claim that is resisted
by both the British authorities and certainly by the Indian congress,
but ultimately, Jinnah, through the force of his personality,
through the force of his ability in the negotiations, but also due
to the overall political situation on the ground,
has his way and British India is released into
independence into two separate nations. You
have the the Union of India and the Dominion of Pakistan.
And Pakistan is now created as
two non-contiguous territorial entities, East Pakistan and West Pakistan.
And that creates problems on its own.
And we now have massive population transfers.
Basically civil war going on in the creation of Pakistan.
And enormous loss of life and property but the one thing that
I'd like to stress here is that not all Muslims choose to leave India.
We have now a very large presence of Muslims who chose
to remain in what's today the Republic of
India, and here for example you see the one of the old mosques in Delhi, so
it continues to be a strong religious minority in India and
a very active part of the Indian society, Indian state and Indian bureaucracy.
So, it's not at all that the Muslim presence in India has stopped.
As you can imagine, this is an extremely painful
part of both Indian and Pakistani history, so it's,
I cannot do justice to the intricacies, and the
complexities, and the human suffering involved in that history.
What you should be aware of is that the creation of Pakistan, and the
separation of these formerly intertwined communities, caused very
great loss of life. And inflicted very lasting
psychological damage to people on both sides of the divide.
The claim that Muslims and Hindus form two distinct nationalities that
cannot coexist harmoniously has obviously been opposed by others.
Primarily by those who argued that
there should be a common Indian nationality composed
and blind to the religious identity of the people.
Which is ultimately the dominant
constitutional ideal of the Republic of India,
which comprises people of many different
religious persuasions into one common Indian citizenship
and then, not dissimilar to the
way the Ottoman had different millards leaves the
personal status to the religious law, that each community might have for itself.
That's the first line of opposition.
The other line of, you know, the critique
of that, the two-nations theory that Jinnah and his
friends espoused, is by pointing to the fact that
whatever the common nationality of Indians might be, the Pakistanis
are not one nationality either.
They are divided internally into different ethnicities.
There's an inner religious divide between Shi'ites and Sunnis, reflected
among many other things in the fact that Jinnah was
a Shi'ite, but that fact is almost an unspeakable
fact nowadays in Pakistan, it's a fact that is completely suppressed
because it runs counter to the dominant Sunni view of
Pakistan as a Sunni state, so there's this division as well.
And ultimately something that we will discuss in the next video, when
East Pakistan seceded from Pakistan, from
common state of Pakistan and turned itself into
the new state of Bangladesh, based on its Bengali linguistic and ethnic
identity. That seems to confirm empirically
that this idea that the religion is the overarching
characteristic of any Muslim and his primary focus of identification,
that this might not necessarily be empirically true, I'll
leave this to you how you interpret this, but keep
in mind that the, this question is important far
beyond the narrow confines of Pakistan in modern political history.
It's a question that arises with all Muslim communities elsewhere, and so it's
a claim made by many different political ideologies within
the Muslim world, so it's a claim that we have come
across repeatedly way outside
the narrow Pakistani context. Try to keep this in mind.
And in the next video we will now look at the way
the post-independence political history of Pakistan,
how it played out.
And the particularly as it then lead to
the creation of Bangladesh as an independent state,
the way it locked Pakistan into this perennial conflict with India,
and the way this conflict between Pakistan and India played
out in Afghanistan and contributed to the destablization of Pakistan.
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