It is difficult not to be alarmed at the manner in which India and Pakistan found themselves on the brink of war. It just took the insanity of a handful of terrorists selectively mass-murdering 25 Indian, male, Hindu tourists at Pahalgam for the two nuclear-armed neighbours to go so far as to resort to veiled threats of annihilating each other.
India’s anger is perfectly understandable, and the groundswell of nationalistic passion among ordinary Indians can be nothing short of the awe and the apprehension in W.B. Yeats’s phrasal adjective, “terrible beauty”, while describing a similar surge of Irish nationalism in the Easter of 1916. However, the ease with which the current upswing of hostility between the two countries was triggered indicates the deeper, even ‘primordial’, nature of this enmity, although this notion has been disputed as imaginary and condescending.
It is also quite ironic that this understanding of ‘primordial conflict’ or ‘legacy conflict’ has so far been freely used in journalistic and official portrayals of ethnic and tribal feuds, especially those in the Northeast. It implies, among other things, that no outside intervention can likely resolve these clashes, and thus waiting to have the conflicting parties tire out is the best resort. In Freudian terms, this has often taken the shape of an ‘intellectualisation’ exercise to disguise either an embarrassing official failure to live up to expectations or a dismal abdication of responsibility.
The Manipur case is illustrative. A violent conflict between the state’s majority, valley-dwelling population, the Meiteis, and the Kuki-Zo group of tribes who mostly inhabit the foothills adjoining the Imphal valley has crossed the two-year mark on May 3. Yet there has been no authoritative intervention from the Indian State to bring the law back solely in its hands. This despite Manipur completing two months under president’s rule, making people begin to abandon hope of a return of peace and normalcy even under direct Central rule. Although fatigue has ensured a clear dip in cases of open clashes, there is still no comprehensive operation to cleanse the state of illegal weapons in the hands of the warring parties or to ensure free movement along its highways across the buffer zone created in the early weeks of the outbreak of violence. The worst losers are undoubtedly all the people displaced by conflict whose hopes of returning to the homes they fled from are dimming.
If the notion of ‘primordial conflict’ carries a condescending tone, given the image of atavism it attributes to the conflicting parties, there is also the notion of ‘frozen conflict’, a derivative of what Johan Galtung termed ‘negative peace’. This is the mere absence of violence, even though hostilities remain unaddressed as undercurrents. Opposed to this is Galtung’s ‘positive peace’, which is about the restoration of an all-round sense of justice and reconciliation, thereby making the very need for conflict redundant.
These thoughts are important in any assessment of the Kashmir problem as much as in the case of the other peripheral borderland — the Northeast. Was the calm restored after the violent agitation over the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019 which ended Kashmir’s status as a special category state, negative or positive peace? Was the abrogation itself a positive step towards lasting peace in Kashmir?
It now seems that it was just about allowing the Kashmir problem to remain a ‘frozen conflict’, which unfortunately even a single spark can shatter. Now that the flames have been lit, Kashmir has been forgotten and the conflict canvas broadened to keep India and Pakistan teetering on the edge of a mutually disastrous war.
The pattern of a single spark igniting an inferno is also becoming Pavlovian. This is what is dangerous for even while restraint won and the disaster of war was avoided this time, India and Pakistan can be drawn back to the brink of war by more Pahalgams and Pulwamas in a never-ending cycle.
The lesson should be loud and clear. The way forward must be to transform the ‘negative peace’ in Kashmir to a positive one so that it can emerge out of the ‘frozen conflict’ it is trapped in. The same can be said of the Northeast.
Pradip Phanjoubam is editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics