India's pursuit of de-hyphenation
Escaping a foreign-policy logjam
Indian foreign policy has had a good few months.
The External Affairs Ministry has managed a relatively smooth sailing through the Ukraine-Russia war, all the while trying its best to ensure that the Indian economic recovery is not devastated by the second-order economic shocks of the crisis. There finally seems to be some de-escalation at the Ladakh border with China, although it can be fairly argued that China's retreat has more to do with its own internal affairs, and that peace on this particular border will never be anything more than temporary.
So while it's always pertinent to never believe too much of your own hype, it would be very tough to argue today that India's presence on the world stage is in a stronger position than it was even three-four years ago.
But going a little deeper beyond the news of the day, I think there's one thing that deserves even more praise. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and EAM Dr. S. Jaishankar are successfully starting to steer India out of a narrative quagmire that long seemed to haunt our existence in the field of foreign policy. As the title of the article suggests, I am talking about the concept of "hyphenation".
Joined at the Hip
In his 2020 book, The India Way, current Indian External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar says the following about the strategic vision of Indian foreign policy:
"This is a time for us to engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, bring Japan into play, draw (the) neighbors in, extend the neighborhood and expand traditional constituencies of support".
This is a very simple but brilliant way of explaining New Delhi's current state of mind, but as far as I'm concerned, the most newsworthy part of this statement was a word that was not mentioned. The astute observer will have seen that while the generic term "neighbors" includes them, the country of Pakistan finds no mention in this statement. And I don't think that's a coincidence.
In the foreign policy discourse, "hyphenation" is the idea that there are some countries that are so linked to other countries (often neighbors) at the conceptual level itself, that they must be thought of together, as a "hyphenated entity". That is, if you think about country X, you will always think of it in relation to, and combined with, country Y. So X and Y, become "X-Y".
The single best example of this Israel. Israel is a unique country due to all sorts of reasons - geographic, cultural, religious, historical, etc. But the one thing that is almost certain, is that the moment most people think of the word "Israel", the very next word that most likely comes to their mind, almost instinctively, is the word "Palestine". This is perhaps the single most frustrating thing from an Israeli foreign policy perspective - when people think of Israel, they don't usually first think of its remarkable economic and technological story, they almost certainly first think of it as "Israel-Palestine". Therefore, Israel seems to be doomed (unless a very unlikely final settlement solves the problem permanently) to be hyphenated with Palestine.
This hyphenation is something that will continue to shape the policy of other countries towards Israel in the medium-long term future. There's many who might say that this hyphenation has been weakened in the last three-four years due to historic developments like the Abraham Accords, and the subsequent normalization of relationships in the neighborhood between Israel and many of the Gulf monarchies, with the UAE, the most progressive Muslim-majority nation in the world today, playing a leading role. And I think that's a compelling argument. In many ways, the Accords and their subsequent developments are a message from the Gulf monarchies, a signal that points to the need for dehyphenating Israel and Palestine from each other - to no longer see any possible opportunity involving Israel singularly from the lens of its hyphenated counterpart. But as a slow process of dehyphenation is ongoing in West Asia itself, there is still a long way to go for it to extend to the whole world, especially to non-monarchical Islamic countries like Pakistan, where the public opinion on this issue is still strongly negative.
Pakistan: A Stillborn State
There is a lot that has already been written on the Partition of India that happened in 1947. There's a historical aspect to it, a cultural and religious aspect to it, a human aspect to it, and there's even many more ways the event can and should be thought about. It is still one of the most important events to occur in the region in recent history, and it is still having second and third-order effects to this day.
There's some who argue that the people of the region are too hung-up on this one event that happened over seven decades ago. That we are too obsessed with the past, and that this effects our ability to look into the future. While there might a smattering of truth to this, I personally think that the opposite is actually true in some ways. At least from an Indian point of view, I don't think we've even properly thought through what this event meant on an ideological and conceptual level.
Because Pakistan is not merely a place. It is an idea - a Nazaria - whose very existence is conceptually linked to the country (British-India) it was formed out of. Simply put, their primary identity is a negative one: they are "not-India". There is also the sobering and criminally under-discussed fact the creation of this "nation" (and its successor State Bangladesh) needed the religio-ethnic cleansing of the non-Muslim populations of these areas (the erstwhile British-Indian provinces of Bengal, Punjab, and Sindh) to even come into existence in the first place. The international community has, despite its willingness to wade into human rights debates of all kinds across the world, never curiously paid much attention to this aspect of the event, choosing to take a "both-sides" approach to the event, where people from all communities were to blame.
The names of the places and people who lived in what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh are still littered throughout the pages of Indian history. Any person who studies even the mainstream (Marxist) narrative of Indian history will still read about the Lahore Session of the Indian National Congress (INC) in 1929, where the INC declared for the very first time that its mission was to fight for complete freedom ("Poorna Swaraj"). We read about the Chittagong Armory Raid conducted by Surya Sen and his brave band of brothers (and sisters) in 1930. We are still taught about the brave Indian nationalist Khan Abdul Gaffar and his Khudai Khitmatgars and the Dacca Anushilan, even though these places and these people no longer really form part of our country.
It perhaps shouldn't be a surprise then, that India and Pakistan (which included modern-day Bangladesh till 1971) are joined-at-the-hip in the eyes of the rest of the world. The common history, socio-cultural identity, languages, food etc. still exist to some degree, most prominently expressed in a natural curiosity in each others' affairs, even though they are now definitely starting to wither away due to the sands of time. Perhaps the hyphenation is inevitable? Perhaps this conceptual purgatory cannot be escaped?
This reality of always being compared to Pakistan - in economic growth, in military (and nuclear) capabilities, in the cultural sphere, and even in the outcomes of cricket matches - was something that most Indian people, and government, had just internalized. It wasn't just the world that conceptualized these two countries together. It was a central driving force of both countries' internal politics as well. Maybe it was due to the fact that, despite being subjected to a bloody partition, we Indians still tended to view the Punjabi and Sindhi and Bangla populations as some sort of long-lost brothers (even though the feeling was not always mutual), but whatever the reason, this was considered, both in India and abroad, something that could never really change. We Indians had therefore, hyphenated ourselves with these abnormal "neighbor(s)" of ours.
And due to this internal hyphenation, it perhaps shouldn't be a surprise that the world viewed us in a similar light. When I was in college in the United States between 2013-18, if someone did ever ask me about India, it would almost always be accompanied with the hyphenation. People were less interested in India, and more interested in "India-Pakistan ties".
And I have to say, for a good part of the last seventy-five years, the Pakistani establishment deserves a lot of credit (in an objective, not moral sense) of punching above their weight, and managing to successfully entangle India into this conceptual knot. In a purely realistic view of the two countries, due to the differences in size, cultural cohesion, civilizational history, etc. there really shouldn't have ever been any sort of parity between them. But there was, and it was due to a combination of Pakistani over-performance (for example, levering their geo-strategic location to benefit in the Cold War) and a massive Indian under-performance. In the 1965 India-Pakistan War for example, it is generally understood that Indian indifference and strategic blunders had actually allowed Pakistan to achieve a military superiority over India.
But this dynamic has definitely changed in the last fifty years, with a noticeable acceleration in the last ten-twelve years. We've seen a situation where India is, slowly but surely, coming out of its permanent state of underachievement. India has finally started living up to its potential, and has pulled away from Pakistan in not just an economic sense, but also in a conceptual sense. And this has led to a big change in both how the world sees the two countries, and how Indians see Pakistan itself. Pakistan on its part has continued to cut its own nose to spite its face, now increasingly to its west (with Afghanistan) as well at its east.
As an economy, Pakistan seems to have completely stagnated. Although as the title of this subsection suggests, there is good reason to suggest that the Pakistani economy never really took off in the first place. Even in the decades where it outperformed India, the performance had more to do with American investments in Pakistan, as a compensation for Pakistan's role in the Cold War. The Pakistani HQ in Rawalpindi never truly invested heavily in any sector of the economy that could have made them a manufacturing or services powerhouse, as a result of which Pakistan remains a primarily agrarian nation, that now finds itself in perhaps the worst place to be - getting international bailouts to make sure it can service older debt. The contrast with India's rise over the last three decades, and even Bangladesh's emergence as a textile powerhouse, must surely be a humbling experience for Pindi, at least for the part of the Pakistani elite that are still left in Pakistan, and haven't jumped ship to the Gulf Nations, or in the West.
Dr. Jaishankar himself addressed this in his book, in the chapter The Dogmas of Delhi. In his opinion, "the reputation and real difference between India and Pakistan has put paid to any hyphenation effort". And I think it's hard to disagree with the esteemed Minister.
The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference
In the 2000s, when I grew up in India, Pakistan and everything about it, evoked very strong emotions. The Kargil War and the Pakistani deception kicked-off this sea of emotions. Countless events like the Vajpayee-Musharaff years and the numerous India-Pakistan cricket encounters are also entrenched in my memory. But I don't think any event will ever top the anger and resentment generated towards Pakistan than the events of 26th November, 2008.
Perhaps it was the sheer audacity of it all, perhaps it was the titanic failure of Indian intelligence, perhaps it was the fact that the Pakistani plan was to somehow pass it off as an attack from India's majority community, thus fostering further divisions, or perhaps it was because the then-Indian government failed to respond to this shocking attack in any way. All of these things combined, firmly settled how an entire Indian generation felt about Pakistan.
One thing that always stood out to me was the targeting of Mumbai's microscopic Jewish minority by the terrorists. They attacked a place called Nariman House, a meeting place of the city's small Jewish community, killing six people in the process. It said a lot about the mindset of these terrorists, that in a city of 23 million people, they still managed to target a community that might not even run into the thousands. This was a moment of particular pain for a lot of Indians, including me, as India prides itself as being one of the few places in the world where Jews have never been historically targeted for being who they are and practicing their religion.
It is my belief that this one incident was essentially the final nail in the coffin for India's tired old approach towards Pakistan - an approach that somehow expected a positive approach from India to be reciprocated by the other side, despite years and years of evidence to the contrary. Even though this change in approach wasn't immediately reflected by the government of the day in 2008, it certainly solidified amongst the public, and would later find expression in the the policies of future governments.
Pakistani terrorism into India has continued into the 2010s, mostly targeting the Indian State of Jammu & Kashmir. But despite events like Uri and Pulwama continuing to happen, I don't think they illicit the same level of negative response from Indians that they used to. It's not like there is no anger anymore, but the increasing gap in capabilities means that the erstwhile emotional anger has basically been transformed into a sort of mild annoyance - like the feeling of a fly constantly bothering you as you try and reach your destination.
And I think this shows the growing maturity of the Indian view on this issue. Due to India's growth over the last decade, and Pakistan's stagnation, most people in India have essentially acquired a state of indifference towards our western neighbor. Even when the special status of Jammu & Kashmir was abrogated, meaning that for the first time in Indian history, our Constitution would apply equally to every state, Pakistan's expected protestations were again met with a big shrug, and to questions as to why it was taking so long for the Indian government to recover the parts of Kashmir occupied illegally by Pakistan in 1947.
It is indeed a positive development, and this internal change has manifested itself in India's messaging on the global stage. If one follows the international posture of this current Indian government, one will find that Pakistan is almost never directly mentioned by name, instead being usually brought up indirectly, through the general criticism of "cross-border" terrorism.
So while I do think some sections of analysts in the West will continue to hyphenate India and Pakistan, I think the internal dynamics within India and India's foreign policy messaging, will eventually drive this dehyphenation to its logical conclusion. For my part as an Indian, I'm glad that this strange relationship with our strange neighbor has acquired a more mature equilibrium, so India can continue to work towards its own development, working with countries that want to do the same for their own people. What it means for Pakistan, is a question that they must ponder and answer.
India and China: the threat of a second hyphenation?
Keen observers of the politics of the Asia-Pacific region will point out that while it is true that India and Pakistan are increasingly not seen as joint entities, the emerging American view of the region is threatening to create a new hyphenation - that between India and China.
In many ways, this relationship will be the defining relationship of the next fifty years, for Asia as well as for the world. While a lot has already been written about this relationship in Indian, Chinese, as well as western sources, I will be trying to think through what this relationship means from an Indian political, economic, cultural and social point of view. And this will be the subject of my next article.