Global Politics, Peace and Conflict in South Asia - Literature review Example

Running Head: GLOBAL POLITICS, PEACE AND CONFLICT IN SOUTH ASIA Global Politics, Peace and Conflict in South Asia of the of the Institution] Global Politics, Peace and Conflict in South Asia The Pakistan- India Rivalry Background India and Pakistan were created on the basis of two contradictory ideas of nationhood. At the time of partition in 1947, the All India Muslim League (AIML) asserted that the Muslim population would not be secure in a Hindu majority India. The Indian National Congress (INC) was at pains to convince the leaders of the AIML that Indias heterogeneity and intermingled Hindu-Muslim population would render any conception of the Indian State based on religious lines meaningless. There was a pluralist bent among the founding fathers like Mohandas Gandhi and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who dreamt of an India that did not belong to any exclusive religion. (Nawaz, 2009, 410) The AIMLs disagreement with the Congresss view led to the creation of a Muslim-majority Pakistan and a Hindu-majority India. Despite Indias opposition to the partition, Pakistan emerged as the more dissatisfied state. The primarily Muslim Kashmir valley became a part of India after its Hindu ruler Hari Singh opted for India, when he realised that independence was not an option for Kashmir. Sheikh Abdullah, the popular leader of Kashmir, also agreed to the accession to India. Pakistan fought its first war over Kashmir in 1947 but succeeded in gaining control of only one-- third of the Kashmir valley. Pakistan struck again in Kashmir in 1965 (Operation Gibraltar), hoping to gain from the low morale of the Indian Army after its loss to China in 1962. There had also been riots in Kashmir in December 1963 following the theft of a holy relic believed to be a hair of Prophet Mohammed from the Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar. (Khan, 2008, 40) Finally, the death of Prime Minister Nehru in 1964 and the rather weak Indian response to a Pakistani military probe in the Rann of Kutch in western India in 1965 convinced Pakistan that it should strike Kashmir soon. Pakistani soldiers disguised as tribesman had hoped for support from the Kashmiri Muslims. The anti-India sentiment in Kashmir did not translated into a Pro-Pakistan sentiment. Pakistan failed to make territorial gains in Kashmir in 1965. In the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war, India demonstrated that religion could not be the basis of the Pakistani nation by helping East Pakistan gain independence from the West. East Pakistanis separated from West Pakistan by over a thousand miles of Indian territory began to feel dissatisfied as a result of economic and political exploitation, and attempts to impose West Pakistans cultural markers such as the Urdu language over the Bengali language. (Talbot, 2000, 120) Taking advantage of the Easts unease, India helped the liberation forces in the East to defeat the Wests army, and in a short 14 day war scored a resounding victory over the West. The Indian victory produced two concessions. First, disputes over Kashmir would only be discussed bilaterally in the future. Second, while the international border was not demarcated in Kashmir, there was agreement on accepting a line of control. Pakistans desperation to gain control over Indian Kashmir was most forcefully demonstrated by the war in Kargil in the spring of 1999. India won a convincing victory, having pushed the Pakistan Army and mercenaries back to their old positions, but did not seek occupation of Pakistani occupied Kashmir. India continues to fight a proxy war with Pakistan over Kashmir where Pakistan aided Kashmiri Muslims and Afghan mercenaries seek to disrupt political order in the valley. (Booth, Aivazian, Demirguc-Kunt and Maksimovic, 2000, 90) The result has been the fleeing of the minority Kashmiri Hindu population into Jammu, and the even greater homogenisation of Kashmir as a dominant Muslim enclave. Pakistan would be happy if India were incapable of holding on to Kashmir, while India will not allow a Muslim dominated territory to secede. In this environment of uncertainty, India can bring better civilian governance in Kashmir only if Pakistan desists from fighting its proxy war aided by terrorists. Given Pakistans failing economy and its dependence on Western donors, the United States can try to convince Pakistan to refrain from abetting in any way terrorist infiltration in Kashmir. India can then proceed to improve the health of its democracy in Kashmir. Impact of Globalisation on South- Asia and Pakistan- India Relationship The impact of globalisation can be seen everywhere allover the world. Nations changed their ways of doing poitics, handling economy, military and cultural issues as a result of globalisation. Same is the case for Pakistan India Rivalry. Some of these impacts are discussed in this paper. That nuclear weapons figure into this environment of rivalry within South Asia is a tragedy no matter which countrys perspective is taken. The Chinese built their arsenal to respond to the Soviet threat, the Indians were in turn worried about Chinese nuclear capabilities, and the Pakistanis then became concerned about Indian weapons. Neither the Soviets, Chinese, Indians nor Pakistanis had explicitly intended for other states to feel threatened as a consequence of their weapons. India probably has one hundred to one hundred and fifty nuclear weapons that can be delivered by short- to long-range ballistic missiles and from nuclear capable aircraft. India is also developing a nuclear submarine through its Advanced Technology Vehicle project in order to gain a credible second-strike capability against Pakistan and China. (Nawaz, 2009, 410) Nuclear weapons with second strike capability can deter nuclear or large-scale conflict by raising the costs of war. Moreover, overt capability has a better chance of reducing errors due to misperception rather than covert capability. India, Pakistan and China need to learn from the Cold War experience with respect to the command and control of nuclear weapons. Unintended explosions as a result of the inability of a nuclear command and control facility to distinguish between a false alarm and a genuine strike can lead to the most tragic loss of lives compared to anything witnessed in the past. (Desai, Foley and Hines, 2004, 2452) Given India and Chinas past differences, the Chinese nuclear test of past century set off the Indian alarm bell, even though the Chinese test was not inspired by the Indian threat. When China had used force to bring Tibet into the Communist fold, India had felt that religious and political independence was legitimate Tibetan aspirations. The Dalai Lama was given political asylum by India when he had nowhere else to go. Second, the Sino-Indian border dispute and the consequent war of 1962, resulted in a Chinese victory and a gain of fourteen thousand square kilometers of Indian territory for China. The Indian nuclear programme is largely a response to external threats, especially those emanating from China. India had unsuccessfully sought a nuclear guarantee from the pre-existing nuclear powers in December 1964, after the Chinese test in Lop Nor on October 16, 1964. Foreign Minister Swaran Singh and L. K. Jhas visits to the United States and the Soviet Union in 1965 and 1967, respectively, failed to secure India any security guarantees against nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Nehru had expressed his opposition to nuclear weapons just a few days before his death on May 18, 1964. The All India Congress Committee (AICC), driven for the most part by the Gandhian principles of peace and non-violence, was opposed to such weapons, while the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS), the precursor to the current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was in its favor. The Congresss dominance in Indian politics ensured that the Hindu nationalist BJP view would not carry much weight for some time. The Indo-Pakistan war inspired a hundred Indian legislators to write a letter urging Prime Minister Shastri to keep the nuclear option open. There is some evidence to show that Shastri gave a green signal to the father of Indias nuclear programme Homi Bhaba, allowing him to work towards reducing the time it would take to develope a bomb. India also played a key role in the nuclear non-proliferation deliberations in the UN. It successfully obtained a provision allowing technology transfer for peaceful purposes, and one other provision allowing peaceful nuclear explosions. The Indian position is that the Sino-Pakistani threat and the lack of security guarantees inevitably drove India towards the bomb, despite a high dose of pacifism in the 1960s. India called its 15-kiloton underground test of 1974 a "peaceful nuclear explosion". (Cohen, 2006, 96) From 1974 to the present, except a brief pacifist interlude between 1977 and 1979, the governments of various Prime Ministers sustained the momentum of the Indian nuclear and missile programmes. Prime Minister P. V. N. Rao of the Congress Party came close to testing in 1995 but withdrew, when the United States discovered that a test was in the offing. Prime Minister Vajpayees BJP government carried out five nuclear tests in May 1998. Pakistan promptly responded by testing its first nuclear devices a few weeks later. (Giannetti, 2003, 190) The South Asian region has made considerable progress towards global economic integration. Yet intra-regional cooperation is rather dismal. Indias exports to South Asian countries were only 4.2% of Indias total exports in 2006. Moreover, the share of South Asian countries in Indias total imports was only 0.5% in 2006, a figure that has remained static since 2000. (Baker and Wurgler, 2002, 20) The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation is largely inhibited by the Indo-Pakistan political rivalry. The trade policies of individual South Asian countries have promoted economic integration of the region with the rest of the world. Sri Lankas average tariff came down from the twenty to twenty-five percent levels in 1991 to about ten percent in 1995. (Rampini and Viswanathan, 2008) Sri Lanka was the earliest economic reformer and has sustained reforms with great vigor. It has been aggressively seeking foreign investment, has the most mature financial market in South Asia, and, enjoys the greatest degree of economic integration with India. India has moved from protectionism and import substitution to liberalisation and export promotion. Between 2005 and 2006, Indias imported weighted tariffs came down from 87% to 20.3%. It has agreed to abolish all its quantitative restrictions by 2025, an event that will spur retail trade in India. The book value of foreign direct investment at $4 billion in 2003 was more than double the 2000 figure ($1.8 billion). Foreign institutional investors have been very bullish about the information technology, entertainment and communications sectors in India. (Haqqani, 2005, 210) Indias software exports growing at an annual compounded rate greater than fifty percent (from $0.3 billion in 2000 to $3.9 billion in 2009) per annum has convinced the policy maker that comparative advantage is an important source of capital accumulation and economic growth. Indias national champions in the software sector such as Infosys and Wipro have experienced a meteoric rise. General Electric, Microsoft and DuPont are opening major research and development centers in India, taking advantage of Indias relatively inexpensive but highly skilled, English-speaking labor force. Furthermore, India is successfully seeking venture capital in its growth sectors. Bangladesh has reduced its tariffs and is actively seeking foreign investment in infrastructure areas such as ports and power generation. (Booth, Aivazian, Demirguc-Kunt and Maksimovic, 2000, 90) The foreign investors are most bullish about Bangladeshs abundant natural gas. While foreign investors are eager to supply Bangladeshi gas to India, Prime Minister Hasina Wajed tried to play to the domestic audience by harping on economic security as a reason for Bangladeshs resistance to sell gas to India. The multinationals will desist from further exploratory activity unless assured by the Government of exports to India. The likelihood is that exports to India and exploration will both resume after the elections. Pakistans anti-India proclivities have caused it much economic harm, despite economic liberalisation. Dr. Ishrat Russian, the Governor of Pakistans State Bank has estimated that even Pakistani exporters have not repatriated the $700 million that they have earned abroad, at a time when Pakistan is close to a balance of payments crisis. (Smith and Watts, 2005, 270) Neither are foreign investors interested in Pakistan. The International Monetary Fund is the lender of the last resort. President Clinton has made it clear in Islamabad during his April 2000 visit that Pakistan can renounce terrorism and seek prosperity, or it can seek terrorism and renounce prosperity. South Asian countries are together on multilateral trade issues, such as their opposition to the linking of labor standards or ecological standards to trade and the rising protection of the textile sector in the United States and the European Union despite the World Trade Organisation agreement. They worry that in an era of diminishing tariffs, these may become the new non-tariff barriers against South Asian exports. Moreover, cheap labor, which has historically been a source of comparative advantage, has led to an improvement in wages and labor conditions in the most labor repressive regimes in Eastern Asia. South Asian countries worry that protectionist trade unions in the West may take away the fruits of comparative advantage that is rightfully theirs. The partition of South Asia into Hindu and Muslim majority regions has been at the root of the most violent inter-state conflicts in South Asia. Contradictory interests based on Indias furtherance of secular nationalism through democracy, and Pakistans quest for religious nationalism based on Islam, continues. South Asian regional cooperation has suffered at the hands of the Indian-Pakistani rivalry. It is heartening to note that South Asian countries have begun to realise the costs of not participating in global trade and investment. The costs of not cooperating regionally will rise as South Asian countries embrace trade as a route to development. References Baker and J. Wurgler, (2002), ‘Market Timing and Capital Structure’, Journal of Finance, 01, 1-32 Booth, Aivazian, Demirguc-Kunt and Maksimovic, (2000), Capital Structure in Developing Countries. Journal of Finance, Pg. 87-130. Cohen, S. P (2006) ‘The Idea of Pakistan’ Brookings Institution Press’; 2nd edition, Pg. 90- 100. Desai, C. Foley and J. Hines, (2004), ‘A Multinational Perspective on Capital Structure Choice and Internal Capital Markets’, Journal of Finance, 06, 2451-2487 Giannetti, (2003), ‘Do Better Institutions Mitigate Agency Problems? Evidence from Corporate Finance Choices’, Journal of Finance and Quantitative Analysis, 185-212 Haqqani, H (2005) ‘Pakistan between Mosque and Military’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Pg 200- 220. Khan, Y (2008) ‘The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan’, Yale University Press, Pg 30-50. Nawaz, S (2009) ‘Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within’, Oxford University Press, USA, pages 400- 450. Rajan. G, and L. Zingales. (2006) ‘What Do We Know about Capital Structure?’ Journal of Finance, 1421-1460. Rampini and Viswanathan, (2008), ‘Collateral and Capital Structure’, working paper, University of Duke. Rutherford, J (2005) ‘An international perspective on the capital structure puzzle’ Eds: New Developments in International Finance, pg1-2. Smith. C, Watts. R, (2005) ‘The investment opportunity set and corporate financing, dividend, and compensation policies’, Journal of Financial Economics, 263-29. Talbot, I, (2000) ‘India and Pakistan (Inventing the Nation)’, Bloomsbury USA, Pg 100- 110. Read More