Colonial legacies, post-colonial (in)securities, and gender(ed) representations in South Asia's nuclear policies

Abstract

Through a comparative study of India and Pakistan's national security discourses, this article explores the linkages between post-colonial India and Pakistan's nationalist/communalist identities, configurations of masculinities, and gendered representations underpinning their nuclear (in)securities. This paper contends that the colonial politics of place-making in the sub-continent has not only inscribed a process of ‘othering’ between these states but has also facilitated the rise of divergent visions of post-colonial nationalisms, which, at each of their phases and with particular configurations of masculinities, have used women's bodies to re-map India-Pakistan's borders and national (in)securities. This article particularly draws attention to a new form of gendered manipulation in South Asian politics in the late 1990s, whereby both states, embedded in colonial notions of religious/cultural masculinities, have relied on discourses of Hindu/Indian and Muslim/Pakistani women's violence and protection from the ‘other’ to pursue aggressive policies of nuclearization. It is at this conjectural moment of a Hinduicized and Islamicized nationalism (flamed by the contestations of a Hindu versus an Islamic masculinity) that one needs to provide a feminist re-interpretation of India-Pakistan's nationalist identities, gendered imaginaries, and their re-articulation of national (in)securities – that represents a religious/gendered ‘otherness’ in South Asia's nuclear policies.

Keywords:

• nationalism/communalism
• gender
• representations
• nuclear insecurity
• South Asian politics

Notes

1. The rise of a Hindu/cultural masculinity coincided with the rise of a cultural nationalism in the early twentieth century India, where the latter was a consequence of the challenges posed to the upper caste and class Hindus from the Westernized hegemony of the colonial rulers as well as the Western educated Indian elites – who so-to-speak had been de-Hinduicized. The struggle against this threat led to the creation of a reformed fundamentalism with a Hindu supremacist agenda led by Hindu nationalists like Dayanand Saraswati and later by Veer Savarkar and Golwalker.

2. The term Sangh Parivaar refers collectively to the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Jana Sangh, and, more recently the Bharatiya Janata Party – the latter having formed the coalition-led national government of India from May 1998 through April 2004. The BJP maintains ties with its master organization the RSS and upholds the ideology of Hindutva, which depicts India as a Hindu nation. I will subsequently elaborate in the text of the article the three elements of Hindutva as relevant to the BJP era.

3. I am indebted to the reviewer of this paper for drawing my attention to this aspect of the argument.

4. Given the relative lack of state-level pronouncements that overtly link gender to India-Pakistan's nuclearization, I have relied in this article (especially for the pre-1998 years) on secondary data, i.e. on quotations and citations from other researchers and scholars on this subject. However, the post-1998 years, following India and Pakistan's nuclearization, have been slightly more conducive than the earlier years in providing me with primary data as relating to governmental-level perceptions on the gendered aspects of South Asian nuclearization. I attribute this conduciveness partly to the fact that in the aftermath of the 1998 nuclear tests, these tests were being discussed in governmental reports and media publications.

5. This observation does not preclude the fact that some so-called secular Indian nationalists like Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar were pro-Hindu in ideology and practice.

6. This is because of three reasons. First, to those political advocates, such as Jinnah, pursing the ideal of Pakistan as a stable democratic polity, the concept of Pakistan's Muslim nationalism was a territorial/political (and not an Islamic) concept and sought to represent all Pakistanis residing within the territorial confines of Pakistan; second, various ethnic and social divisions continue to constitute the contemporary demography of Pakistan; and, third, at the advent of partition there were more Muslims staying in India than in Pakistan (Owen, 2002).

7. Existing simultaneously with what is defined in the West as Pakistan's mainstream and orthodox national politics and political culture, is a progressive and unorthodox political culture. Represented by feminists, journalists, academics, civilians, musicians, and other peace groups, this progressive group is not only opposed to an Islamization of Pakistan's nationalist identity and politics but is constantly working vis-à-vis the Pakistani state to demand women's empowerment, anti-militarization, anti-nuclearization, and promoting India-Pakistan's bilateral relations. See Manchanda, 2001.

8. In this context I must admit that although women's violation and abductions did occur from both sides of the India-Pakistan border, one cannot argue that the lots of all these abducted women were uniformly grim and that all their abductors on either sides of the border were bestial. A Hindi movie from India, Pinjar, provides an example of an Indian woman, who, despite being abducted by a Muslim male to Pakistan during partition, was unwilling to return to India during the repatriation and resettlement programs conducted by the post-independent Indian state. This is because, although originally abducted, she had by marriage settled with her new family in Pakistan where she was accepted and respected. Such examples that contradict negative images of the ‘other’ are often undocumented or ignored in both statist discourses of India and Pakistan in seeking to secure their nation and their women.

9. Nehru's views on India's nationalism based on sarvadharma samabhava also guided his ideological position vis-à-vis the Indian Muslims as well as India's relation vis-à-vis Pakistan. This ideological orientation becomes evident when one considers Nehru's views that in the post-1947 period the salience of partition had only an academic significance; that, both India and Pakistan share a common sub-continental history and culture; and that any perception related to the unequal treatment of Muslims or other minorities in post-independent India, is no longer a valid basis for designing the nationalism of India (Parthasarathi, 1987).

10. In the epic Ramayana, the story of Sita's abduction goes as follows: Sita (the princess-queen of Ayodhya and wife of Lord Ram), while on exile with her husband, was abducted by the demon-king Ravana from the neighboring Indian state (that is now called Sri Lanka). Following this abduction, there followed a war between Ram and the demon-king as a result of which Sita was rescued. What becomes glorified in this legend and is often cited by the Hindu nationalists is the focus on Sita's chastity to prove which (since she was imprisoned by another male) she had to go through a fire (the ‘fire’ representing the Hindu God of strength and purity). The point here being, if the issue of Sita's chastity as representative of Indian womanhood is so crucial, then the Hindu party too must draw lessons from this event and protect contemporary Sitas from demons (in this case transposed to Islam/Pakistan).

11. The Ram Janmbhoomi-Babri Masjid (mosque) riots occurred on 6 December 1992 in a small town in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. The riot was the result of a religious dispute centering around the Hindu fundamentalist claim that the Babri mosque built at Ayodhya in 1528 for the Mughal King Babur was actually constructed on the site of a temple commemorating the birthplace of Ram. Following communal instigation by the Hindu Right, thousands of Hindu fundamentalist agitators destroyed the masjid.

12. The term jehad means ‘to struggle to exist’. In this sense, jehad has been identified primarily with two key strategies by which the Islamic religion has sought to struggle and exist: first, through a more confrontational manner, when, if necessary, the Muslim community takes recourse to confrontation to protect their territory, religion, and women; and second, through a more peaceful manner, where jehad meant a moral or spiritual struggle to overcome one's worldly desires. What has made the concept of jehad so problematic in the discourse and practice of Islam is that its militant zeal has been popularized.

13. In this context, the Hindu Goddesses Durga and Kali are not depicted as soothing images of mother goddesses but as aggressive and militant icons to combat the rakshash (demon). The corollary being that this BJP leader's ‘vengeance’ against the nation's perceived rakshash – in this case transposed to Pakistan – must also be justified as a divine act modeled upon the explicable, i.e. the armed Hindu Goddesses Durga and Kali.