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A protester holds a placard showing an image of burning PM Narendra Modi during a demonstration against the Manipur violence in Mumbai, India.
Getting Modi to talk about Manipur violence
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been reluctant to speak publicly about a surge of ethnic violence in the country’s Manipur province. An explosive viral video of a mob of men stripping and abusing a pair of women forced him to respond last week, but his political rivals say he’s done little to quell the broader conflict, which has killed at least 130 people and driven tens of thousands from their homes.
Podcast: Modi's India on the world stage
Listen: Is India a US ally? Based on the pomp and circumstance surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Washington in June, the answer seems obvious, right? They love us! We love them! End of story. Right?
Well ... it’s complicated.
India’s government is not ready to hitch its star to the American wagon, and the US has made it somewhat clear that it’s not a fan of India’s friendly ties to Russia and Iran. Add to that increasing international scrutiny of India’s eroding democratic norms, press freedom crackdowns, and religious persecutions, and the question becomes murkier still: Is India a US ally.
Ian's guest this week will do her best to answer that question and more. Barkha Dutt is an award-winning Indian broadcast journalist with more than two decades of reporting experienceSubscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.Demonstrators drape the national flag of Israel on the walls of Jerusalem's Old City.
What We’re Watching: Bibi’s defiance, US strikes in Syria, Lula’s China visit, Putin’s Hungary refuge, India vs. free speech
Bibi’s not backing down
Israelis waited with bated breath on Thursday evening as news broke that PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was preparing to brief the nation after another “day of disruption” saw protesters block roads and strike over the government’s proposed judicial reforms.
The trigger for the impromptu public address was a meeting between Bibi and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, also from the ruling Likud Party, who has voiced increasing concern that the looming judicial reform would threaten Israel’s national security, particularly as more and more army reservists are refusing to show up for training.
That never happened. While he talked about healing divisions, a defiant Netanyahu came out and said he will proceed to push through the reform, which, among other things, would give the government an automatic majority on appointing Supreme Court judges. This came just a day after the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed a bill blocking the attorney general from declaring Netanyahu unfit for office due to a conflict of interest over his ongoing legal woes and his bid to dilute the power of the judiciary. In response, the attorney general released a letter Friday saying Netanyahu's involvement in judicial reform is "illegal," suggesting a much-dreaded constitutional crisis may have begun.
Two things to look out for in the days ahead: First, what does Defense Minister Gallant do next? If he threatens to – or does – resign, it could set off subsequent defections and be a game changer. Second, how do the markets respond? Indeed, markets rallied Thursday before Bibi’s address in hopes that the government was set to backtrack on the reforms that are spooking investors, but the shekel value slumped after the speech.
US strikes Iranian-backed group in Syria
The US confirmed Thursday that it had struck an Iranian-backed group in northeastern Syria after a Tehran-aligned militia launched a drone attack against a US base near the province of Hasakah, killing at least one US contractor and injuring another contractor as well as five US troops.
While strikes on US bases in northeastern Syria are not necessarily uncommon, the scale of casualties seen Thursday is quite rare. Indeed, a high-ranking US official recently said that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, which takes orders directly from the supreme leader, has launched 78 attacks on US positions in Syria since Jan. 2021.
The US Department of Defense, meanwhile, said that the drone used in this attack was of Iranian origin, and that President Joe Biden had given the go ahead for a precision-guided retaliatory strike on an Iranian-backed group that reportedly killed 11 fighters.
Video footage suggests the strike was on Deir Ez-Zor, a province that borders Iraq and contains oil fields. The US still maintains around 900 troops in the country’s northeast after President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of roughly 2,000 troops in 2018. It is at least the fourth known attack on Iranian assets in northwestern Syria under the Biden administration.
Iran, for its part, has not commented on the strikes, but the likelihood of increased tensions with the US is only rising.
Lula takes his beef directly to Xi Jinping
“Tell me who you walk with,” the saying goes, “and I’ll tell you who you are.” Well, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva is rolling deep to his upcoming summit with Xi Jinping, taking nearly 250 businesspeople along for the ride. More than a quarter of them are from Brazil’s powerful meat export industry alone.
That tells you everything about the trip’s main focus: trade, trade, and more trade. And why not? It was during Lula’s last stint as president that China displaced the US as Brazil’s largest commercial partner, fueling a historic economic boom as it gobbled up huge quantities of Brazilian meat, soybeans, and iron ore. Nowadays, facing a much tougher economic and political environment, Lula is keen to recapture some of that commercial magic.
But the geopolitical context also matters. Important as China is commercially, the US is Lula’s most important regional security and investment partner, and Washington was Lula’s first trip beyond Latin America as president. As the US-China rivalry deepens, Lula and his dealmaking entourage will need to tread carefully in a world that is splitting apart under their feet.
Hungary is a safe space for Putin
The Hungarian government said Thursday it wouldn’t jail Vladimir Putin if he came to Hungary, despite the International Criminal Court’s recent issuance of an arrest warrant for the Russian president for war crimes.
Budapest’s reasoning was a doozy: While they have signed and ratified the Rome Statute, which created the ICC, they say they haven’t gotten around to incorporating it into Hungarian law yet, so no-can-do on arresting Putin.
It’s all purely hypothetical, as there’s no chance of Putin going to Hungary any time soon. But that’s the point. Hungary’s avowedly “illiberal” PM Viktor Orban has long made clear that he won’t just toe the EU party line on Russia. He’s reluctantly gone along with EU sanctions on Russia, but he’s also said the EU is needlessly expanding and prolonging the war by arming Ukraine – something his government won’t do.
Moscow, for its part, says arresting Putin abroad would be “an act of war.”
India's opposition leader sentenced to prison for defamation
The world’s largest democracy seems to be getting less comfortable with a key tenet of it: free speech.
Rahul Gandhi, a member of the Indian National Congress, the main opposition party, was sentenced on Thursday to two years in prison for “defaming” Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He was also disqualified as a lawmaker by the lower house of parliament. In April 2019, Gandhi referred to the PM — along with two corrupt officials also named Modi and charged with embezzling millions of dollars — as “thieves.”
This is a big deal because Gandhi is Indian political royalty. After all, he's the son, grandson, and great-grandson of prime ministers (his great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, was India's first PM), and was surely planning to run against Modi for the top job in 2024. What's more, he recently completed a five-month-long march in hopes of reviving the Congress party, which for decades dominated Indian politics but took a beating from the BJP in the last election.
Although his party is appealing the conviction, the stakes are very high for Gandhi due to a provision in India’s election law that disqualifies MPs sentenced to, coincidentally, at least two years in prison for any offense, including defamation. Gandhi turned to Twitter in defiance, tweeting up a storm on Thursday with messages like "Long live the revolution" and quoting Mahatma Gandhi with "truth is my God."
Meanwhile, opposition groups accuse the PM of using the courts to go after his political rivals. Indeed, Gandhi’s sentence comes on the heels of the recent arrest on corruption charges of Manish Sisodia, the head of the AAP, another opposition party that runs the capital, New Delhi. Democratic backsliding indeed.
Scotland's First Minister and Scottish National Party (SNP) Leader Nicola Sturgeon.
What We’re Watching: Sturgeon's resignation, NATO-Nordic divide, India vs. BBC, Tunisia’s tightening grip
Nicola Sturgeon steps down
Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced on Wednesday that she is stepping down. She’s been in the role for over eight years, having taken power after the failed 2014 independence referendum. Speaking from Edinburgh, Sturgeon said she’d been contemplating her future for weeks and knew "in my head and in my heart" it was time to go. A longtime supporter of Scottish independence, Sturgeon was pushing for a new referendum, which was rejected by the UK’s top court late last year. In recent weeks, she and her colleagues had been debating whether the next national election in 2024 should be an effective referendum on independence. Sturgeon will stay in power until a successor is elected — likely contenders include John Swinney, Sturgeon’s deputy first minister, Angus Robertson, the culture and external affairs secretary, and Kate Forbes, the finance secretary.
Turkey divides Finland and Sweden
On Tuesday, NATO and other Western officials publicly acknowledged for the first time that Finland and Sweden might join the transatlantic alliance at different times, a notable public admission that negotiations with Turkey over Sweden’s NATO accession haven’t gone well. Neither Nordic country can become an alliance member without unanimous support from all existing members, and NATO-member Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has a beef with Sweden. Erdogan is angry that Sweden’s government has provided asylum for dozens of Kurdish leaders he considers terrorists, and it didn’t help when a right-wing activist burned a Koran outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm, an act Sweden’s government treated as an offensive act of free speech that’s protected by law. Erdogan may also see a political opportunity to boost his reelection chances by defying European leaders in general and Sweden in particular. (Turkey’s elections are expected in May or June.) For NATO, Finland’s membership is arguably the more urgent priority. Though Sweden monitors occasional Russian naval intrusions into its territorial waters, it’s Finland that shares an 810-mile land border with Russia. European leaders hope that, if Erdogan wins his election, a deal can be cut in the coming months to allow Sweden to join the club.
India takes aim at BBC
Indian tax officials raided the BBC’s local offices on Tuesday in what they said was a probe into the British broadcaster’s business practices. But the move comes amid a broader government campaign to censor a new BBC documentary about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in anti-Muslim riots that killed more than 1,000 people in the state of Gujarat while he was governor in 2002. Modi has always denied stoking – or neglecting – the violence, and India’s Supreme Court has reached a similar conclusion. In the weeks since the doc aired in the UK, Modi’s government has cracked down swiftly in India, blocking it from being viewed online in the country, halting screenings at Indian universities, and forcing both Twitter and YouTube to remove it locally. Modi has often used internet laws to muzzle criticism, and tax officials have searched critical media outlets before. Last year the subcontinent slipped eight points to 150 out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. How will the UK government respond?
Tunisia crackdown intensifies
Robocop is not messing around now. Tunisian President Kais Saied, whose monotone style earned him that nickname, has unleashed a ferocious crackdown on his critics and opponents in recent days. On Tuesday, sweeping arrests ensnared the leader of Ennahda, an opposition Islamist movement that once held power in the country. Saied, a constitutional lawyer who was elected as an outsider candidate in 2019, has led a massive overhaul of Tunisia’s government, diminishing the power of the legislature and the courts. He says he’s trying to make government more decisive and efficient in the only country that emerged from the Arab Spring with a democracy. His critics say he is plunging the country of 12 million right back into an authoritarian winter. See our full profile of Saied here.
Indian billionaire Gautam Adani.
As Asia’s richest man falters, will his ties to Modi hurt the PM?
For years, India’s Adani Group, an Indian conglomerate and the world’s largest private developer of coal plants, faced repeated allegations of corruption, money laundering, and theft of taxpayer funds. Those claims tended to be of local origin, and they triggered low-level investigations that usually went away. Meanwhile, Gautam Adani, 60, continued to amass his wealth, becoming critical to India’s infrastructural expansion under powerful Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Known as “Modi’s Rockefeller,” Adani is now Asia’s wealthiest man.
US probe leads to scandal. Now, Adani’s family-run energy and transport empire has been slammed with a US-based investigation by Hindenburg Research. The New York-based financial forensics investigator has cited evidence of suspected money laundering, stock manipulation, and tax fraud, causing Adani Group’s market value to tumble. Crucially, the report also raises questions about Adani’s proximity to his friend and ally, Modi.
Starting off with diamonds and commodities, Adani is now the coal king of India. Despite protests and regulations against the use of dirty fossil fuel, the first-generation entrepreneur has also expanded into defense, media, and cement, but much of his money has come from energy and infrastructure contracts, many of them tendered during the Modi era. While the relationship between the two men has been under scrutiny for years, the widely cited Hindenburg investigation doesn’t just detail the extent of Adani’s misdoings, but it also claims he couldn’t have gotten so far without the government stonewalling regulators and supporting his expansion.
Modi’s been silent about his ties to Adani, but he has reportedly nurtured a connection with him since the 1990s. Before Modi was PM, he was the chief minister of Gujarat, the same state where Adani got his start and where one of Modi’s major gifts to him was land at a throwaway price, which essentially became the launchpad for Adani’s biggest power moves.
The fallout. The scandal has triggered a run on Adani’s companies, clouding prospects for India’s excellent emerging market potential, but their immense size and role in India’s recent growth spurt still have analysts convinced that Adani is too unique to fail.
With elections due next year, the bigger question is whether it will hurt Modi’s prospects for a third term. The Hindenburg findings prompted India’s divided opposition to demand an investigation into how regulators let Adani get this far. Many analysts claim that he and Modi have scratched each other’s backs for over two decades, noting that Adani was worth a mere $2.8 billion in 2014, when Modi became PM, and that he’s now worth $119 billion.
Still, analysts are doubtful the PM will be hurt by the fallout.
“I don’t expect these revelations about the Adani Group to harm Modi politically,” says Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington. “He remains remarkably popular and can easily withstand the types of challenges that would doom more vulnerable politicians.”
Teflon Modi. Modi’s popularity is amongst the highest in the world. Despite recent and not-so-recent failures – from bungling India’s COVID response to not reigning in anti-Muslim policies of his Bharatiya Janata Party – Modi seems to be India’s Teflon Man.
“One reason why Modi doesn’t suffer politically from these episodes is that these challenges can be depicted as a reflection of his victimhood,” says Kugelman, referring to Modi’s often-used “they’re gunning for us” brand of Hindutva politics. Modi alleges that “powerful forces are unfairly conspiring to impugn and weaken him, and that can’t stand," he says.
Last week, Adani’s spokespersons took a similar nationalist approach against his American naysayers, claiming that an attack on the group was an attack on India. But while Adani is threatening legal action against the US-based investigators, Modi might not need to go on the defensive just yet.
“India lacks a strong and united opposition with the capacity to exploit these moments, and the main opposition group remains quite weak,” says Kugelman.
For now, Modi is popular enough at home that he doesn’t need to worry too much about the hits to his image.
“The Adani scandal will come and go like the others before it and will have little lasting political impact on Modi,” says Kugelman, noting that the PM can “easily withstand these political shocks.”
Art imitates life, but politics quash both in India and Pakistan.
Art imitates life, but politics quash both in India and Pakistan
As the hit 2022 film “The Legend of Maula Jatt”, the best-performing movie in Pakistan’s history, was set to be released in one of the world’s largest movie-watching markets last weekend, it was abruptly canceled. No official reason was given by India’s film authorities, but right-wing Indian politicians took credit for the change of plan.
Pakistani films have not been screened by India’s lucrative film market since 2011. Though there’s no official ban, New Delhi adheres to an unofficial prohibition aimed at reducing the presence of Pakistani art on Indian screens. This has been expanded under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist rule to also exclude Pakistani actors from performing in India’s Bollywood.
It’s not just movies. Despite the surging popularity of Pakistani stars among international and Indian audiences, India’s right-wing media and politicians have backed efforts to keep Pakistanis off-screen. But the bans have also extended into other arts and media. Pakistani music is ridiculously popular in India, but Pakistani musicians are not allowed to perform in the country. In December, Indian authorities banned a Pakistan-based streaming service. The ban on Pakistani culture has even beset India’s biggest religion: cricket.
The Indian cricket team has refused to host Pakistan or visit Pakistan since 2009 (the two sides play internationally in matches that are amongst the most viewed in the world). On the local level, the India Premier League, one of the planet’s most lucrative, has not drafted a single Pakistani cricketer since 2009, despite Pakistan’s players being among the finest in the game and threats of legal action by Pakistani authorities.
Pakistan was the first to press the cancel button on Indian movies. After the war in 1965, a strict ban was imposed on screening Indian cinema, and it wasn’t lifted until 2008. Still, the wildly popular Bollywood productions were available in pirated formats for decades across the country. While some Indian (and other foreign movies, but also a long list of local ones) are still banned by moribund Pakistani censors — for reasons like “inaccurately depicting” Pakistan, Islam, or other “taboo” subjects, including menstruation — some Bollywood productions still manage to get screened in Pakistan.
Not so much in India, where anti-Pakistan sentiment has surged since the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks (that were traced back to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group that’s been linked to Pakistan’s spy agency), and has been compounded by the advent of Modi’s muscular nationalism. The latter has promoted a loud and proud anti-Muslim sentiment that targets Indian Muslims as well as Pakistanis.
While the heated rhetoric between New Delhi and Islamabad continues, the South Asian neighbors, with a combined population of over 1.6 billion and with each still retaining millions of relatives and friends from the other side, remain among the most culturally disconnected in the world. Trade remains mostly suspended, there are no direct flights, and educational and people-to-people exchanges are essentially over.
The cancellation of this particular Pakistani flick is a crushing disappointment for millions of moviegoers in India, as well as actors and producers in Pakistan, all of whom point squarely at politics.
“It’s quite ridiculous. Neither side has the courage to officially declare a ban. Unofficially, they’re both driven by expeditious political goals,” says Maria Wasti, a celebrated actor and member of Pakistan’s United Producers Association.
“Art and culture have no boundaries. Moreover, art and culture make excellent political and diplomatic resources. But neither side is using them properly.”
While GZERO reached out to Zee Cinema (which has purchased the rights to the shelved Pakistani production) and did not get a response, India’s anti-Muslim wave is also hurting its own film industry.
The reason for not screening this film in India “is the same reason their own films are in jeopardy,” says its producer, Ali Murtaza, of AAA Motion Pictures, referring to ongoing violence and controversy around “Pathaan” – India’s biggest film in years that is about to hit the theaters. It features an Indian Muslim secret agent falling in love with a Hindu woman – a theme right-wing Hindu groups find objectionable.
“There’s no official reason we’ve been given. We even got the movie through the regional censor boards. But there’s an extreme view of Pakistan and Pakistani products,” says Murtaza.
Too bad, for “The Legend of Maula Jatt '' is being hailed as legendary by the less divided international South Asian diaspora. It’s a remake of a 1979 classic from Lollywood (the name given to the Pakistani film industry, based in Lahore) that was actually banned in Islamist Pakistan for being ahead of its time. A colorful, lusty, and violent period piece (that has earned over 1 billion rupees in Pakistan and $10 million internationally since its release in October), the film has received accolades at home and abroad.
But more importantly, the film is in Punjabi, one of the three most common languages spoken by millions of Indians and Pakistanis. While Hindi and Urdu are the lingua franca of government in India and Pakistan respectively, Punjabi is more informal and spoken by more than 200 million people across the subcontinent. A colorful, guttural, and folksy tongue, Punjabi is considered the ultimate South Asian icebreaker: a congenial uniter, not a formal divider.
India’s press is saying that the film’s uniting qualities are the reasons it has been denied a screening in their country, despite its international success and local appeal. Set and costumed in an idealized version of a united Punjab that is neither Indian nor Pakistani, the film firmly challenges the “Us vs. Them” narrative prevalent in mainstream Indian and Pakistani productions.
Indian PM Narendra Modi walks after inspecting the honor guard during Independence Day celebrations at the historic Red Fort in Delhi.
Gearing up for a third term, meet Modi 3.0
Narendra Modi, 72, is stronger than ever. Last week, the Indian prime minister claimed the top prize in a three-pronged election by keeping his home state of Gujarat. Nabbing one of India’s richest states a sixth time in a row may propel him into a likely third term.
Although headwinds are starting to pick up, the Indian economy remains the fastest growing in the world. And despite his right-wing BJP party being fueled by dangerously populist and divisive communal politics, Modi remains a darling of the West, a friend of Big Business, and Washington’s biggest regional bet to counter China.
But the Great Indian Political Equation has flaws: a Cold War-era proximity to Russia, a rough neighborhood which continues to get rougher, rising inequality at home, and a stubborn strain of Hindu chauvinism that is keeping India from firing on all social and economic cylinders.
So, two questions pop up. First, is Modi going to evolve beyond his limiting politics? Second, what should the world expect from New Delhi when India becomes the third-largest economy on the planet in 2027, in the middle of Modi’s probable next term?
Modi is the fairytale success story of Indian politics: the lowly tea vendor who became an abstinent political worker, who became a populist chief minister, who became one of the world’s most powerful prime ministers. But it wasn’t a smooth transition.
Two decades ago, when he was running Gujarat, Modi was blacklisted by the US State Department over his involvement in the deadly anti-Muslim pogrom of 2000. That was Modi 1.0: local, communal, and controversial.
But the 13 years of successful governance which saw the state propel economically became his launchpad into his own version 2.0. His alliance with corporate India was already sealed well before he arrived in New Delhi in 2014 as PM. But it was the big moves in international affairs — firming up a bipartisan bond with Washington, joining the right economic clubs and political groups, and boosting India’s economic momentum — that proved his international street cred.
Still Modi was limited. Bogged down by China, irritated by Pakistan, statically tied to Russia by defense ties and a longstanding tradition of non-alignment, he was criticized for not doing enough to bridge India’s massive income inequality gap, as well as possessing a heavy-handed authoritarian streak.
With a third term approaching, a Modi 3.0 is emerging. And some recent moves indicate that the Indian PM is moving away from previously dug-in positions.
In the fall, Modi turned heads when he scolded longtime pal Vladimir Putin about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Last week, India cancelled Modi’s annual huddle with Putin over Moscow’s nuclear saber-rattling. Both moves were carefully calibrated by New Delhi to tackle the impression that it is not a reliable partner of the West.
Still, the broad contours of Modi’s foreign policy won’t change in the run-up to the general election in 18 months, estimates Eurasia Group analyst Pramit Chaudhury.
On the one hand, “the slow drift toward the US will continue, though India’s will continue to keep hedging, as it’s not entirely sure about the US commitment to the Indo-Pacific, thanks to America's propensity for isolationism,” he says. On the other, the more private sector-driven, less state-owned, and digitally savvy India that Modi is trying to create makes it naturally compatible with the US economy.
Also, Modi will likely carry on “managing China, not getting any closer, while continuing to purge China’s economic influence within the Indian economy,” Chaudhury assesses. Meanwhile, Pakistan will be dealt with a firm hand, considering India’s old nemesis is dead broke and has no real solution to stop Modi from absorbing disputed Kashmir.
In the Middle East, India aims to leverage hard-earned relationships with the Saudis and the Emiratis to replace Islamabad as their favored South Asian partner — which would be a coup for New Delhi. Finally, the recently acquired G-20 presidency will test Modi’s international mettle on whether his pursuit of a green transition is in line with the West.
But what will an uber-powerful “Maximum Modi” look like at home? For Chaudhury, Modi’s latest tactics indicate that he is moving beyond “Hindutva” – the muscular brand of Hindu-first politics that he depends on – in order to tackle the flaws of his own machine. Since his cult of personality already cuts across India’s communal lines, the PM is beginning to reach out to poor Muslims to join his ranks.
Though it’s unclear how the old-school BJP apparatchiks will respond to this kindness, perhaps behind this rare show of inclusivity lies a cold rationale: to split the opposition, influence upcoming state elections, and bridge the massive inequality gap.
Remember: India has no term limits. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first PM, ruled for 16 years. While Modi has professed to retire to a Himalayan ashram after his next term, his years in power have only strengthened his support.
Sure, India is richer and more powerful under him, but at great cost to its most sacred, progressive values. With no clear successors aligned, and the economic stakes involved, the biggest question in South Asia remains: what’s Modi actually thinking?Families torn apart by Partition.
The endless anguish of Partition: India and Pakistan at 75
Seventy-five years ago this week, two of the most powerful countries in Asia were born in a bloodbath. At the stroke of midnight that separated Aug. 14 from Aug. 15, 1947, British India was divided — along an inexpertly drawn line — into a sprawling, Hindu-majority India, and a smaller, Muslim-majority Pakistan.
The event, known as “Partition,” tore apart families, villages, and whole regions, sparking violence that left millions dead and displaced. It also laid the groundwork for sectarian conflicts and enmity between India and Pakistan that have lasted to this day.
To learn more about why Partition happened, and how it continues to shape the troubled relationship between these two countries, we sat down with Akhil Bery, a former analyst at Eurasia Group who is now Director of South Asia Initiatives at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Alex Kliment: Let's start at the beginning, Akhil – what was Partition, and why did it happen?
Akhil Bery: Under the British Empire, Muslims were the largest religious minority in India, accounting for about 25% of the population. And due to their minority status, they were guaranteed a certain amount of representation in various legislative bodies.
As the calls for independence from the British grew louder, there was a fear that Muslims would lose these protections, especially in a Hindu-dominated India, and so there were calls for a separate Muslim state. There's some debate about whether that was an actual goal or whether it was just a negotiating tactic. But that sort of became the rallying cry for Muslims.
Then in 1947, after World War Two, Lord Mountbatten came to India as the new viceroy, and his mandate was to end the British Raj. He charged a prominent lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, with partitioning India along sectarian lines: a Hindu-majority India on one side, and Pakistan, for Muslims, on the other.
And let me guess, this imperial Englishman didn’t draw such a great map?
Well, Radcliffe had been to India – once. But he did all of this from England, using outdated census information.
So it was just a mess, villages were split in half and so on. You had mobs burning villages, attacking people. You had Hindus and Sikhs versus Muslims, and vice versa.
It was a small percentage of the population who engaged in these things, of course – most people were bystanders. But when the dust settled in 1948, some 15 million people had been displaced from their homes, and the conservative estimate is that at least 2 million people died. That history of violence is what gave birth to India and Pakistan.
Why was it so violent?
Until the mid 1940s, British India was a multi-ethnic, multicultural country. I mean, you had Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, for the most part coexisting peacefully.
But the British had long practiced a deliberate policy of divide and rule, selectively playing sectarian groups off each other as a way to undermine any anti-British movements in India.
So as the British departure from Indian territories became more likely, those divisions provided fertile ground for more ideological ideas of nationhood: you had Muslims for a Muslim-majority Pakistan, and Hindus in India who believed that because you were going to have a Muslim-majority Pakistan, then India should also be a Hindu majority country.
And of course, when Partition arrived, you had fanatics on both sides taking advantage of the situation to carry out violence.
You are from India – are there any Partition stories that you grew up hearing or that you remember from your family?
Every family has some sort of story of the Partition or of the terrorism and violence that came after. My grandfather was born in Lahore [today’s Pakistan] and my grandmother was in Amritsar, which is in Punjab, in today’s India. They used to be able to travel freely between those two cities, and there was even visa free travel between the two countries until the late 1960s.
But for my grandmother, as a newlywed young mother, some of her earliest memories of that time were of hosting Partition refugees from Pakistan in Delhi.
How has Partition shaped sectarian attitudes in the two countries?
It’s still unresolved today. If you look at how both India and Pakistan deal with religious minorities, neither of them has a good track record on that. Look at India right now with the growth of the BJP, you've seen an increase of violence against Muslims.
And in Pakistan, an Islamization of the country that goes back to when General Zia [ul-Haq] was in charge in the 1970s, and he kind of promoted the Islamization of Pakistan, which ended up supporting the Taliban, and passing anti-blasphemy laws and so on.
So, I mean, this idea of a hard line, religious, almost fanaticism is prevalent in both India and Pakistan now.
On top of those internal tensions, did Partition leave flashpoints between India and Pakistan directly?
Yes, in Kashmir. The conflict over Kashmir is a legacy of Partition. At the time, you had a Muslim-majority state with a Hindu king who signed an “Instrument of Accession” (which ceded the area to India).
But this is where the history gets dicey because Pakistan believes that as a Muslim majority it naturally belonged to Pakistan, and there is disagreement about whether the king even wanted to sign the document.
India, meanwhile, believes that because the king signed the agreement Jammu and Kashmir should be a part of India.
And this conflict over Kashmir is really what prevents India and Pakistan from finding peace with one another. There have been numerous attempts, but it's just never a great combination of people on both sides and it's been a bloody history throughout. They’ve fought three wars over this. There have been terrorist attacks from Pakistan into India. There've been terrorist attacks from India into Pakistan. These are two nuclear armed neighbors who don't get along because of Kashmir, so that’s one big, unfulfilled legacy of Partition.
Where does the Kashmir issue stand now?
Until India’s decision to abrogate Article 370 (a law that had given Kashmir a measure of autonomy) in 2019, Jammu and Kashmir was India's only Muslim majority state. Now its status has been downgraded to a union territory. And because of that, it has hardened minds. India and Pakistan don't have trade relations. The border is still militarized. There is a ceasefire in effect on the line of control. But there isn't really a path forward right now.
How is Partition remembered today – and is it seen differently in India and Pakistan?
The generation that survived Partition is slowly dying out. It's been 75 years. New generations don’t have those same stories, and yet the wounds of Partition are still there and it's still a political cudgel, so you are seeing more competing hardline views.
In India last year, they designated August 14, which is Pakistan's independence day, as “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day.”
And you've got Hindu nationalist groups, for example, that espouse this idea of “Akhand Bharat,” or “unified India”, who believe that India should unite the continent, basically. And it's not just Pakistan they want – they want Bangladesh, Nepal, Tibet, Myanmar, and so on.
There's also a view in India that Partition was a mistake because, due to the wastage of resources on security (in the standoff with Pakistan), an undivided India could have spent more on health and education to achieve better development outcomes.
And then, of course, there is the view that India should just be an overtly Hindu state, since Pakistan is a Muslim state. And that view has come into prominence more and more, especially with the decline of India’s Congress Party as a relevant opposition party, and the rise of the BJP, which is a very unabashedly pro-Hindu party.
And how is it seen in Pakistan?
In Pakistan, meanwhile, with the rise of the BJP and the Hindu nationalism across the border in India, it's seen as incredible foresight by Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the founding father of Pakistan) to predict that this would come to pass and that this is why you needed a separate Muslim homeland in the first place. So Partition is a good thing in that view.
What would it take to put to rest the ghost of Partition?
Right now you've got a government in India that doesn't see the benefit of negotiating with Pakistan, and you've got Pakistan in the midst of an economic and political crisis.
And for India, the top geopolitical issue right now is China, and that also hampers things because India does not get along with China, but China has a very, very strong relationship with Pakistan.
So, yes, you have a ceasefire holding along the line of control (in Kashmir), but will it last? All it takes is one more terrorist attack, and things will get dicey again. Remember that in 2019, suicide bombers from Pakistan killed 40 Indian soldiers. Modi escalated by sending planes over into Pakistan for the first time since 1972. And Pakistan right now is dealing with a surge in terrorism in its border regions.
But if there are these kind of confidence building measures, like no firing on the line of control, no terrorist attacks, maybe some steps to normalize trade, then there is a future.
Sounds like there’s not much light at the end of the tunnel at the moment – do you think India and Pakistan will ever bury the hatchet?
I personally think you need more economic engagement and more people-to-people ties. There needs to be a realization that the other side is not the enemy. The Indians and Pakistanis have shown an ability to come to agreements in the past. Diplomacy is very helpful. And I think there is a role that international actors have to play there.
The rise of India's relations with the Middle East, I think, is a net positive because Middle Easterners typically had strong relations with Pakistan. So as the US influence in the region ebbs, I think there’s space for Middle Eastern countries to use the leverage that they have to say like, ‘okay, we get that you're not going to have peace with one another, but at least let's try to normalize some aspects of the relationship.’