The Penguin History of the World

The weaknesses and uneasiness of a ‘new nation’ made things worse when India quarrelled with its neighbour Pakistan over Kashmir, where a Hindu prince ruled a majority of Muslim subjects. Fighting began there as early as 1947, when the Kashmiri Muslims tried to bring about union with Pakistan; the Maharajah asked for Indian help and joined the Indian republic. To complicate things further, the Muslim spokesmen of Kashmir were themselves divided. India refused to hold the plebiscite recommended by the United Nations Security Council; two-thirds of Kashmir then remained in Indian hands as a running sore in Indo-Pakistan relations. Fighting stopped in 1949, only to break out again in 1965–6 and 1969–70, with conflict gradually more infected by the Cold War. In 1971 there was a new round of fighting between the two states when East Pakistan, a Muslim but Bengali-speaking region, broke away to form a new state, Bangladesh, under Indian patronage (thus showing that Islam alone was not enough to constitute a viable state). It soon faced economic problems even worse than those of India or Pakistan.

In these troubled passages, India’s leaders showed great ambitions (perhaps going at times so far as a wish to reunite the subcontinent) and sometimes blatant disregard of the interests of other peoples (such as the Nagas). The irritation aroused by Indian aspirations was, moreover, further complicated by the Cold War. India’s leader, Nehru, had quickly insisted that India would not take sides. In the 1950s, this meant that India had warmer relations with the USSR and Communist China than with the United States; indeed, Nehru appeared to relish opportunities to criticize American action, which helped to convince some sympathizers of India’s credentials as a progressive, peaceful, ‘non-aligned’ democracy. It came as all the greater a shock, therefore, to them and to the Indian public, to learn in 1959 that Nehru’s government had been quarrelling with the Chinese about the northern borders for the previous three years without saying so. At the end of 1962, large-scale fighting began. Nehru took the improbable step of asking the Americans for military aid and, even more improbably, received it, at the same time as he also took assistance both in military and diplomatic terms from the Soviet Union. His prestige, at its height in the mid-1950s, was seriously diminished.

Logically, the young Pakistan had not courted the same friends as India. In 1947 the country was much weaker than its neighbour, with only a tiny trained civil service (Hindus had joined the old Indian Civil Service in much larger numbers than Muslims), divided geographically in two from the start, and almost at once it had lost its ablest leader, Jinnah. Even under the Raj, Muslim leaders had always (perhaps realistically) shown less confidence in democratic forms than the Congress Party; usually, Pakistan has been ruled by authoritarian soldiers who have sought to ensure military survival against India, economic development (including land reform) and the safeguarding of Islamic ways. But the experiment has not been a success. By the 1970s, well before the wars in Afghanistan started, Pakistan was a country deeply uncertain about its identity as well as its development pattern.

It always helped to distance Pakistan from India that she was formally Muslim while her neighbour was constitutionally secular and non-confessional (at first sight a seemingly ‘western’ stance, but one not hard to reconcile with India’s syncretic cultural tradition). This was to lead Pakistan towards increasing Islamic regulation of its internal affairs. Religious difference, though, was to affect Pakistan’s foreign relations less than the Cold War.

The Cold War brought further confusion to Asian politics when an association of professedly neutralist or ‘non-aligned’ nations emerged after a meeting of representatives of twenty-nine African and Asian states at Bandung in Indonesia in 1955. Most delegations other than China’s were from lands that had been part of the colonial empires. From Europe they were soon to be joined by Yugoslavia, a Communist country seeking a new identity after it broke with the Soviets in 1948. Most of these nations were also poor and needy, and suspicious both of the United States and the USSR, though less in conflict with the latter. They came to be called the ‘Third World’ nations, a term apparently coined by a French journalist in a conscious reminiscence of the legally underprivileged French ‘Third Estate’ of 1789, which had provided much of the driving force of the French Revolution.