What is the Big Deal with India and Pakistan?
by Paul GrantAlmost on a monthly basis, there are news stories of India and Pakistan threatening each other. Why?
As with most current events, the tensions are a combination of ancient, recent (in living memory), and immediate. The tensions are also a confusing combination of ethnic, religious, political and military. India and Pakistan have fought each other several times as sovereign nation-states, but there has been off-and-on stress in the region for a very long time.
Very Long Ago
People have been living in the region longer than most anywhere else. The Haruppan civilization in the Indus River valley flourished earlier than ancient Egypt, and included massive public works and a script. There are recent murmurings of archeologists finding even older cities under water off the shore of south India. Little remains of the cultures of these peoples, but their historical existence is important to our understandings of ourselves as God's children.
The beginnings
Many Western historians elect to start their undergraduate survey courses at around 1600 BC, when the Aryans invaded. These were a people from Central Asia, who had developed a new technology of iron for use in warfare, and they used it to spectacular success.
The Aryans, who spoke a language closer related to English than the Hebrew and Aramaic spoken by Jesus, established a rule over the indigenous Dravidians, and set up the caste system that dogs India to this day. The caste system had its roots in the Aryan Vedas, a collection of hymns written in Sanskrit. The set of religions that came out of the Vedas had in common an understanding of human life as a series of reincarnations extending over eons. Rebirth is closely related to Karma, such that the social rank of a person is immediately related to their performance in the previous life.
Social turmoil in the 600s BC climaxed in Siddhartha's founding of Buddhism. Today, Buddhism is largely missing from the land of its birth, with pockets in the south and in the far north. In the year 2001, the Taliban in Afghanistan vandalized several statues of Buddha that had remained long after the people had converted to Islam.
Islam arrives
It took Muslims much longer to establish a permanent presence in India than in Africa or Europe. The trouble was partly one of geography: India is separated from Arabia by hot, arid plains, and by outrageous mountain ranges. When Islam finally came, it was not the missionary religion of north Africa, but the incidental religion of marauding invaders. Mahmud, also called the idol-smasher, was an Afghan leader whose forces erupted over the passes each year for decades, only to sweep into the plains and carry off the gold, the slaves and the women of the cities. This is where the animosities between Muslims and Hindus start.
With time, Muslims set up kingdoms in the plains and grew in number. These were not Arabs, but Persians and Turks, and they developed a reign much more closely resembling medieval Europe than medieval Arabia: dozens of kingdoms, feudally related to the occasional overlord who ruled them all (the Moghul empires); warring with each other and with the Hindus; occasionally living harmoniously with their neighbors, but generally growing in power and population. By the end of the pre-British period, Muslims ranged from dominant to influential all the way from Afghanistan to Bengal.
Hindus and Muslims never got along, although the tensions were generally lower-level and localized. The Moghuls built several wonderful monuments and buildings, including the Taj Mahal. However, very problematically from a 21st century perspective, the Muslims had a tendency to build on top of the remains of Hindu temples they had destroyed. One such location was Ayodhya, the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram.
If a standoff between today's India and Pakistan ever boils over into nuclear war, it will be triggered by this city.
The British and Partition
The British rule over India was a gradual process, rather than a conquer-and-reign event. In some places the British were in power for almost two hundred years, and in some places they were never in full control. The British pursued a policy of delegated authority to local leaders, and of preserving a semblance of order. The net result of preventing former Muslim aristocracies from harming the Hindu populace, was to encourage the latter to voice grievances. Tensions grew higher and higher, with occasional riots leaving dozens dead. By the end of the British Raj, the Muslims were convinced they would not survive an independent India. In the days following W.W.II, Indian Muslims feared independence would result in a Hindu genocide of Muslims. The Muslims convinced the British to partition India, setting aside a "homeland" for Muslims.
The trouble was, there was very little territory in South Asia exclusively occupied by Muslims. Thus, when India and Pakistan (which initially included Bangladesh) were carved out of the British territory, millions of Muslims and Hindus perceived themselves to be on the wrong side of the line.
Partition was a messy affair at best. Kashmir ended up as a majority-Muslim state of India's, the two units of Pakistan were thousands of miles apart, and there were sizable religious minorities in nearly every city in Pakistan and India. After partition, upwards of seventy million people fled east and west across the border, and many families lost their entire estates. Partition was at once a traumatic event, a relief for many, and a precipitant for endless tension between India and Pakistan. The hostilities between the countries can be read as natural consequences of an ongoing partition process, but the roots of the animosity extend back well before the British arrived in the first place.
The Ram Temple
Although there is some discussion as to whether or not there ever was a temple underneath the mosque, the mosque itself was built in 1528. It is only beginning in the British period that Hindu revivalists began to develop Ayodhya into a focal issue, but passions have run higher with each passing year since then. For an excellent overview of the whole "drama" surrounding Ayodhya, see this article by S. P. Udayakumar of the University of Minnesota.
In 1949, Hindu idols were installed in the mosque in the middle of the night, and after subsequent rioting, the Indian government shut the mosque to both sides. For the next thirty years, there was general silence. In the 1980s, a resurgent Hindu fundamentalism settled on Ayodhya as a symbol of grander designs: a Hindu theocracy in India, an India with no Muslims or Christians. After the collapse of the communist world in 1989-91, when communism lost credibility as a device for national progress and unity, nationalism and Hindu fundamentalism stepped up to the plate. To quote Udayakumar,
The religious importance coupled with contemporary political significance leads the Hindu communalists to conclude: Ayodhya is the centre of our Hindu nationhood, and Lord Rama our national leader. Without Ayodhya, this nation cannot be a nation in the fullest sense of the word, just as there can be no Christendom, which is what Europe is, without the Vatican.
Irrespective of this mistaken understanding of Christianity, the point is clear: the Ram temple was about nationalism, and this nationalism had no room for non-Hindus.
By that point, Hindu fundamentalists were planning on destroying the mosque, but the government managed to keep things under control until October 1992, when a mob of 75,000 Hindus, mostly impoverished youths, demolished the 450 year old stone building by hand.
Today there is neither a Mosque nor a temple on the site. Any suggestion of initiating temple construction triggers massive riots, and the entire affair could destabilize the governments in India and Pakistan.
The Bomb
In 1998, India and Pakistan each successfully detonated nuclear bombs at test sites. Neither side has shirked from brandishing nukes against each other in their continual standoffs. This development does not change the balance of power or the tensions, but it does dramatically increase the stakes of conflict between the states. Should tensions reach a point where one side felt suicide acceptable, as long as they took the other down with them, the lives of hundreds of millions of humans will be at risk. Next to this scenario, the United States' affairs in Afghanistan, the ongoing strife in Israel, and even war in Iraq are little fish. This is the big one.
Please pray for peace in South Asia. There is no human resolution to this ugly affair, because the bitterness is ancient and deep. Pray for the safety of the millions and millions of individuals, uniquely created in the image of God.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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