The bloody road to today's borders in South Asia - and how to move in the direction of peace

From the partition of British India to the civil war in Sri Lanka, attempts  to impose national borders in accordance with ethnic, linguistic, or religious identities in South Asia have spawned wars and crimes against humanity. They have also resulted in  almost unimaginable suffering and bloodshed from the mid-20th century until today: Hindu nationalists in India launch physical attacks against Christians and especially Muslims, falsely accusing them of carrying out fraudulent conversions, duping Hindu women into marriage, and cow slaughter; in Pakistan, religious minorities, including minority Muslim sects, are accused of blasphemy and often killed; rationalists in Bangladesh have been lynched; and minorities in Sri Lanka are being persecuted by Sinhala nationalists, who have forcibly cremated Muslim victims of Covid-19. Such attempts are all the more preposterous in a region where migration and the mixing of peoples and cultures have been occurring from time immemorial. As an activist who comes from Sri Lanka and lives in India, I have been involved in campaigns in both countries against the toxic ideologies and restrictive ethno-religious  identities – Hindu, Muslim, Sinhalese, Tamil – that cultivate much of this violence.

Identities and Borders in South Asia: A View from the Left

Introduction

From the partition of British India to the civil war in Sri Lanka, the attempt to impose national borders in accordance with ethnic, linguistic or religious identities in South Asia has spawned civil wars and crimes against humanity, resulting in almost unimaginable suffering and bloodshed. This is all the more preposterous in a region where migration and the mixing of peoples and cultures have been occurring from time immemorial. The Left potentially has a conceptual and theoretical framework which would allow it to propose solutions to these conflicts, yet flawed interpretations of ‘the right to self-determination’ have led many on the Left to compound the problems instead. A different interpretation suggests that the key goals should be less violence and more democracy, and taking down barriers between peoples rather than erecting more and more of them.

Introduction to a Special Issue of the Journal of Gender Studies on Gender and Nationalism

 

This issue of the Journal takes up the problematic relationship between gender and nationalism. The ambiguity of this relationship derives mainly from the two-sided character of nationalism. The feminist struggle is one for liberation from gender oppression; to the extent that it stands aside from other struggles against oppression (bourgeois feminists who ignore class oppression, white feminists who ignore racism), it becomes limited and partial: that is, it fails to recognise the gendered ways in which racial and class oppression operate, and thereby accepts the oppression of some women. Similarly, foreign domination and ethnic oppression also affect women in specific ways, and a feminism which stands for the liberation of all women cannot be neutral: it has to take a stand against oppression and for liberation.

However, nationalism is not simply about liberation from foreign domination or ethnic oppression; indeed, this dimension is not even present in most forms of nationalism (British nationalism being an obvious example), whereas all forms of nationalism are about the establishment and perpetuation of state power – an inherently authoritarian and hierarchical institution – over a certain area of the earth’s surface. Where this is the only dimension in nationalism (where it is imperialist and racist, for example), there is no dilemma for feminists: they can unambiguously be opposed to it. It is when the liberationist element is also present that the problems arise. This is the grey area where a struggle may be against foreign domination or ethnic oppression but also may be fundamentalist or otherwise oppressive to women, or stand for its own form of ethnic oppression, or in other ways seek to establish a totalitarian state power. Where should feminists stand when the goals of nationalism diverge from those of feminism?