'Indo-Pakistan': A Federation to Meet China:
FISCHER, LOUIS
'Indo-Pakistan': A Federation to Meet China By Louis Fischer China's threat requires union of nations now joined by geography, economy and race "What does China want?" I asked. "China wants to...
...If the Government"—of the United States —"gives the green light, then India can benefit by all the scientific knowledge that this country has and help us to produce either the cheap oral contraceptive I have been speaking about or something equally cheap and effective...
...He added, "It is very painful to me that our right and left hands are both equipped with arms...
...Religion, to be sure, makes a difference, especially since Hindus and Moslems refrain from intermarrying and, often, because of varying dietary taboos, from interdining...
...It is a tragedy," Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, founder of the Swatantra party, has said, "how what could have been such a great and prosperous and happy nation now stands divided and reduced to so painful a dependence after independence...
...We grow more food and the population catches up with the increase...
...The nations have yet to be born, and the newly independent governments see their task as the creation of that cohesion between all sections of the people which is the mark of nationhood...
...This is a superficial view...
...Vinoba Bhave, whose voice, after Nehru's, is the most influential in India, says, "Whereas Pakistan spends at least a hundred crores of rupees [approximately $200 million] every year on her army, India spends three times this amount on her army...
...In order not to come empty-handed, we brought delicious Kashmir apples...
...Hostility to Israel serves a similar purpose for Arab leaders, and both India and Pakistan have sought to make nationalistic capital out of their dispute over the ownership of the Himalayan state of Kashmir...
...In actual life," Mahatma Gandhi said to me in 1942, "it is impossible to separate us into two nations...
...bases in Pakistan...
...He added something equally significant...
...Comment on the folly of enmity would be wasted breath...
...The difficulty now is if we talk about it...
...Pakistan's 2 per cent growth in population per year, he declared, was "a matter of grave urgency...
...Vinoba Bhave is not the only Indian leader who regrets the partition of his country...
...This upsets our neighbors [Pakistan] because we are so much bigger...
...A British Cabinet mission, consisting of Sir Stafford Cripps, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Secretary of State for India, and A. V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, arrived in New Delhi on March 24, 1946, and, after consulting all parties and many representative individuals, published its plan on May 16 with explanatory comments...
...Twenty years ago," he told Cyrus L. Sulzberger in an interview which the New York Times published on March 2, 1957, "I would have said that certainly we should have some kind of confederation, not federation—independent states with common defense and economic possibilities...
...Pakistan has a strange configuration...
...The rivers, the mountains, the floods are all giving us one message—'unite!' " That Bhave was not speaking poetry but practical politics is clear from his concrete proposal...
...We are not two nations...
...Pakistan has the same problem and takes the same view of it...
...An autonomous Kashmir might have become a bone of contention between feuding India and Pakistan...
...American arms aid to some countries is a disguise for economic and budgetary assistance...
...they wanted to know if she was as lovely as her voice...
...The undernourished, crowded hundreds of millions in India and Pakistan pay every day in every way for the cutting up of their subcontinent...
...They trained and fought in the same units and shared regimental loyalties...
...Let them remain as two administrative units but let the three subjects: defense, foreign affairs, and communications, be common...
...It is doubtful, therefore, whether Pakistan, the efforts of Nehru and Krishna Menon notwithstanding, can arouse in Indians the fears and hates that are the diet of nationalism...
...If "at current prices" means at the current prices of each year, then there may have been no improvement at all...
...The situation requires India and Pakistan to combine their armed forces for mutual defense against the Chinese...
...The Indian nationalistic reaction is strong...
...India produced a record harvest of 73 million tons of cereals in 1959 and hopes to grow between 100 and 110 million tons in 1965...
...Yet he affirmed unequivocally, "This country says that she wants to remain neutral on the question of birth control and family planning in India...
...Confederation would correct the 1947 blunder of allowing religious politics to sever India from Pakistan...
...They spoke the same language in many senses...
...To me," he asserted, "the only solution of the Kashmir problem is the union of the two brother nations, India and Pakistan...
...Red China, on the other hand, has actually grabbed Indian territory and is strong enough to grab more, and Nehru, after much hesitation and long delay, branded it an aggressor...
...The ambassador, reading from the official text of his address distributed by his embassy, then alluded to the "massive aid" India had received from the United States, yet cautioned that "this economic aid will only bear fruit and produce full results if we can arrest the growth of our population...
...In 1949, in fact, Nehru had said publicly in New York he would have resisted partition had he anticipated the dire results that flowed from it...
...The two men were friends...
...But the waste of two defense systems, of two conflicting foreign policies, of two economies competing in futile enmity, of two water systems, and of railways that lead nowhere will have been eliminated...
...India, he stated, was "one of the few countries in the world which has officially at governmental level adopted the policy of birth control and family planning...
...When Lord Louis Mountbatten, British viceroy at the time of partition, showed Jinnah that to divide India the great provinces of the Punjab and Bengal would have to be divided, Jinnah, according to Mountbatten, was "horrified...
...For India plus Pakistan, in such poverty, to spend close to a billion dollars a year defending themselves against largely fictitious menaces attributed by each to the other is monumental folly if not criminal politics...
...Many officials and citizens of both countries have discovered that the expected benefits of bisection were illusory...
...The Nehru Government has reinforced its military stations near the China border and is attempting to bolster the three tiny states of Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan, which lie high in the mountains between India and China and may, because their people are more Tibetan-Mongolian than Indian, become the first targets of a further Chinese military-political push southward into the Indian subcontinent...
...These fears are either imaginary or, to the extent that they are real, ineradicable as long as the two countries remain twain...
...It can only be advanced to some form of interdependence between the two neighbor-brothers...
...Kashmir could, by self-determination, he a third member of the confederation, indeed the confederation capital—a sort of Washington, D.C...
...Jinnah's emotional reaction was correct...
...Thus to spend four hundred crores of rupees on the army yearly is enormous...
...Bengal and the Punjab were integrated entities...
...Having grasped this transparent truth, certain governments request and receive arms and finances for defense...
...Here he asked for assistance from the United States Government...
...He also calls for drastic measures in agriculture and in the control of population birth rate...
...What we want to achieve is to cut down our birth rate"—which is not high by American or Western standards—"by at least half...
...The British Labor Government opposed partition...
...Today, however, nobody would, and nobody can, turn back the clock to colonial dependence...
...Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who fathered Pakistan, in 1947, vainly demanded a corridor between west and east Pakistan...
...To Bhave, the Pakistan and Indian armies are "our" right and left hands, the hands of one body...
...Kashmir in a confederation will inhibit the northern imperialists...
...India and Pakistan are, though chiefly agrarian, short of food...
...Both countries are too poor to afford such duplication...
...As a member of the Baghdad Pact (which, since the defection of Baghdad, has become CENTO) and of the Far-Eastern Alliance, or SEATO, Pakistan is aligned with the Western powers against the Communist alliance...
...Instead, the high-ranking British Laborites recommended a confederated India with one government to manage foreign affairs, defense and communications, and leaving all other subjects to the members of the confederation...
...The addition of Pakistan to India, it might be argued, would only multiply the headaches...
...A strong Asian front would be established against aggression in Asia...
...The Paks supplied dinner and beer...
...Yet a number of Western countries have a birth rate equal to Pakistan's—and India's...
...The point is well taken...
...For raw materials and machinery available cheaply in India, Pakistan goes to remote continents...
...Defense is nowadays so large a part of foreign policy that effective common defense requires a common foreign policy...
...We met," General Thimayya reported, "at the fifty-third milestone from Srinagar to Muzzafarabad...
...Its western lobe, with approximately 38 million inhabitants, is one thousand miles from its eastern lobe, with 48 million inhabitants, and between them lies India with 420 million people...
...When Azad's book appeared, Nehru, with customary magnanimity, did not deny the validity of the accusation...
...We have earmarked a sum of about $200 million in our Third Five Year Plan...
...An inspection of the map reveals that the Chinese conquest of additional Indian territory could imperil the survival of Pakistan...
...We," the three ministers wrote, "are therefore unable to advise the British government that the power which at present resides in British hands should be handed over to two entirely separate sovereign states...
...She receives economic aid from the United States and uses the money saved for the purchase of armaments...
...Bihar is a poor state and Berain a poor village...
...Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the President of the Congress party at the time of the negotiations with the British Cabinet mission, and subsequently Minister of Education in independent India, published an autobiographical book, India Wins Freedom, in 1958, which, though dedicated to Nehru to whom Azad was devoted, blames Nehru as well as Vallabhbhai Patel, the "strong man" of the Congress party, for acquiescing unnecessarily in partition after giving Jinnah, the Moslem League leader, the opportunity to insist on it...
...China remains an immediate as well as a long-range problem to India...
...Nehru himself supports the idea of confederation...
...I personally feel...
...Yet they had to be bisected or there would have been no Pakistan...
...It takes courage to give up what seems like a bird in the hand, but the reward would be considerable...
...President Sukarno uses the Indonesian claim on Dutch-held New Guinea to foment anti-Dutch sentiment which will, he hopes, fertilize the seedbed of nationalism...
...This is very different from the independence for Kashmir proposed in the past by some circles...
...After partition, India began to grow jute and Pakistan built jute factories...
...I say to you with all the emphasis I can command that on a question like this a great country like the United States cannot afford to be neutral...
...In effect, therefore, the United States has been arming Pakistan against India and India against Pakistan...
...This advance from misery to slightly less misery warranted self-congratulation and national publicity...
...The first question asked me by the Pak officers concerned the Indian girl who spoke on the local Indian radio station...
...An independent Kashmir, moreover, might have tempted Russia or China to intrigue and infiltrate and fish for influence and footholds from which to menace both India and Pakistan...
...The mission stated that it had examined "closely and impartially the possibility of a partition of India" but found that division of the country would weaken its defense and tear its transport system in two...
...Until the Congo crisis, Rajeshwar Dayal was Indian high commissioner (ambassador) in Pakistan, where Ayub Khan is President...
...India does just the opposite...
...Brohi, Pakistan's high commissioner in New Delhi, is equally at home among Indians...
...Every Moslem is merely a Hindu who has accepted Islam...
...The China peril is enhanced by the support which Mao might obtain from Indian Communists...
...Equally, a Chinese invasion of Pakistan would put India in jeopardy...
...But under British rule the Hindus, Sikhs, and Moslems in the Indian Army ate at the same table and consumed the same kinds of food...
...Before its birth, Mohammad Ali Jinnah called the present Pakistan "quite impracticable" and "moth-eaten...
...Confederation for common defense—with common communications and common foreign policy following automatically-—would not be difficult to achieve as might seem at first sight...
...But I would like to add that common defense is not possible without a common foreign policy...
...So Jinnah acquiesced in the atrocity, and both provinces as well as other areas ran with the blood of hundreds of thousands...
...This was particularly true of the high-ranking officers who, whether Pakistanis or Indians now, are graduates of the Sandhurst Royal Military Academy or some other British training school, and have been steeped in the British military tradition of playing polo rather than politics...
...According to Indian Government statistics, the average annual income per person in all villages was $36 in the first half of the 1950s and the same in the second half...
...Besides, Pakistan is weaker than India...
...India is nonaligned...
...When a highly responsible, supremely intelligent diplomat speaks in such stern terms it is easy to imagine how desperate India's economic situation is and will remain despite the very numerous visible achievements...
...After 12 months of cooperative agriculture, including hand spinning and weaving to obviate the purchase of mill textiles, the annual per capita income rose to 62 rupees, or approximately $12.40...
...IT WOULD HAVE been difficult, even in the best of circumstances, to lift undivided India out of her subnormal living standard which, according to Indiagram, the bulletin of the Indian Embassy in Washington, allowed a "per capita income at current prices" of $54.72 in 1955-56, $60.92 in 1957-58, and $65.72 in 1958-59...
...Hence, if Pakistan continues to remain a member of other alignments like the Baghdad Pact, how can there be a common defense...
...Speaking in Kashmir, Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi's spiritual heir, said, according to Bhoodan magazine of October 21, 1959, "I am happy that General Ayub Khan [the President of Pakistan] has made an offer of common defense...
...Each side declares that the other intends to make war on it because of the Kashmir dispute or for some other reason...
...In part, said Indian Ambassador M. C. Chagla, speaking in Dallas, Texas, on May 16, 1960, this is due to increased consumption...
...This creates a foreign policy gulf obstructing the coordination of Indian and Pakistan defenses...
...Moreover, these figures are averages for the maharajah, the millionaire and the farmer...
...But with the two countries joined for mutual benefit, Kashmir would serve them as a bridge rather than a battlefield...
...It would alter the temper of the entire Afro-Asian world...
...But he added, "there is a more serious reason why our food production is lagging behind, and that is the constant and continuous increase of population...
...But modern warfare is less a matter of individual prowess than of technological progress, and in this India far outranks Pakistan...
...During the recent floods we witnessed that our rivers took logs worth crores of rupees to Pakistan...
...AFTER THE United Nations arranged a cease-fire to end the fighting in Kashmir between the Indian and Pakistani armies, the key figures of both met as old friends...
...Pakistan depends on the waters of rivers that rise in India...
...The meek Hindus, to be sure, have a traditional fear of Pakistan's martial Moslem...
...The Kashmir issue, which has bedeviled Indo-Pakistan relations for more than a decade, also would vanish...
...India and Pakistan have been spending almost 50 per cent of their federal budgets on armaments, and their armed forces were, until the China invasion, emplaced to watch over one another...
...The Congress in Washington eagerly opens its purse when asked for military assistance to foreign countries but is more reluctant to allocate funds for development...
...Their disappointment reveals more clearly than elsewhere the chasm between the grim reality of national independence and the dreams of golden glory which preceded it...
...China wants to swallow us," replied the highly placed minister in Nehru's Cabinet...
...India is following a policy of non-alignment...
...I know," he declared, "that private agencies in this country"—the United States—"have been working at producing such a pill, hut unless the government here officially steps in, the help that we would expect from this country would indeed be infinitesimal...
...Partition separated vast farmlands from their markets and cities from their rural hinterlands...
...The menace of China," he said, "is generating more patriotism in India than the Kashmir issue or Pakistan ever did...
...From the point of view of peace and prosperity in Asia and of the struggle against Red imperialism a common indo-Pakistan defense is more desirable than Pakistan's membership in alliances which have little reality and more important than U.S...
...TO ATTAIN this GOAL, Ambassador Chagla asserted, "I think that what we really need in India today is a cheap oral contraceptive...
...Chagla, a great jurist, was fully aware of the explosive effect his remarks might have on American domestic politics...
...The danger looks real and big...
...Villages are 30 per cent of India and embrace rich landlords and landless paupers...
...A concluding article will appear next week) This is the first of a two-part article from the forthcoming Russia, America, and the World (Harper, $4.50) by Louis Fischer...
...The history of India's partition in 1947 is now well documented...
...The village: Berain, in the province of Bihar, with a population of 429, and an income before Gramdan of 45 rupees, or $9, a year per person...
...When I assured them that indeed she was, they sighed happily and then got a basket of oranges for me to send to her...
...Reunification in a confederation would open up a dozen, a hundred corridors...
...Planning for a sensible size of family is a vital condition of progress to prosperity," Ayub Khan said on December 30, 1959...
...In these articles, Fischer advocates an Indian-Pakistani confederation to meet the challenge of Communist China, and asks for a common and coordinated industrialization, defense and foreign policy of the two countries...
...he declared, "that India and Pakistan will have to come together, for the whole world is in the process of uniting...
...India and Pakistan as separate nations separately administered would, after confederation, still confront myriad towering problems...
...Nevertheless, of course this remains the logical future path—confederation with each member maintaining its independence intact...
...Thus relieved of military expenditures, they use the money saved for other purposes...
...Partition was superfluous surgery...
...But far more drastic measures are needed to meet the continuing challenge of China...
...He made this specific...
...But that, according to a report by Ford Foundation experts, will be 28 million tons less than India will need in 1965 when her population shall have risen to 480 million...
...Seen in this perspective, and in view of India's alarm over Chinese aggression, the West and the world would gain by scrapping the policy of arming Pakistan, which most Indians mistakenly regard as an expression of American hostility toward them, and concentrating instead on reinforcing the inner defenses of both Pakistan and India...
...Before independence in 1947, areas now in Pakistan grew the jute which factories in what is now India manufactured into the gunny sacks and burlap used for packing throughout the world...
...Gandhi called it "vivisection" and opposed it to his death...
...In Asia and Africa there is nationalism but there are no nations...
...Every Moslem will have a Hindu name if he goes back far enough in his family history...
...India and Pakistan are one by geography, economy and race, and the case, consequently, for joint defense in the face of China's bellicosity is unanswerable...
...The wounds remain open and suppurate...
...If this confederation were established, he believes, Kashmir would serve as a bridge linking the two countries rather than as an issue dividing them...
...Rajeshwar Dayal, a member of the Indian Civil Service under British rule, was the district magistrate of Mathura during World War II when Captain Ayub Khan served in the British Army in the same area...
...In the same period the urban annual income average for everybody from the Nizam of Hyderabad and G. D. Birla to the Calcutta beggar rose from $160 to $200...
...A careful study of a village which, having joined Vinoba Bhave's Gramdan movement, voluntarily pooled its land, labor and animals, reveals truly inhuman conditions...
...Louis Fischer is a well-known writer who is an expert on Communism and the Soviet Union, as well as on India, and whose expertise has resulted in many books on both areas such as The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Thirteen Who Fled, Gandhi and Stalin and Russia Revisited...
...Not many inhabitants of southern India, however, care about northern Kashmir, and the poor anywhere in India are too immersed in their own daily tribulations to think of Kashmir...
...This is not an intelligent way to make appropriations, defend nations, fight Communism, spread democracy or fortify peace...
Vol. 44 • January 1961 • No. 3
