The beauty of compromise: finding the middle in South Asia.
World Policy Journal › Vol. 24 Nbr. 4, December 2007
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The beauty of compromise: finding the middle in South Asia.
Over the past decades, the nation-states of South Asia have been home to some of the most bitter and costly conflicts of the modern world. Women have opposed the domination of men; subaltern classes have resisted the hegemony of the elite; regions on the periphery have protested exploitation by the center. To class, gender, and geography have been added the fault lines of language, caste, religion, and ethnicity.
No region of the world--not even the fabled Balkans--has had a greater variety of conflicts. South Asians are an expressive people, and so they have expressed their various resentments in an appropriate diversity of ways--through electing legislators of their choosing; through court petitions and other legal mechanisms at their command; through marches, gheraos, dharnas, hungerstrikes, and other forms of non-violent protest; through the burning of government buildings; and through outright armed rebellion. The record of South Asian nation-states in dealing with these conflicts is decidedly mixed. Some conflicts, which once threatened to tear a nation apart, have been, in the end, resolved. Other conflicts have persisted for decades, with the animosities between the contending parties deepening further with every passing year. From this vast repertoire of experience within South Asia, this essay will foreground some of the more intractable conflicts including the Kashmir dispute, the Naga insurgency in India, and the rebellion of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. These conflicts have remained unresolved because of the inflexibility and (dare I say it) the dogmatism of contending parties. The question I pose here is this: could a middle path of accomodation and reconciliation, adopted by either party to a conflict or both, help in reducing or mitigating the violence and suffering? Remembering JP In search of an answer, let me first turn to some forgotten episodes in the career of a man who might be considered a paradigmatic South Asian, Jayaprakash "JP" Narayan. Narayan was an Indian patriot, but he retained close links with the republican struggle in Nepal as well as the socialist movement in Sri Lanka. He worked actively for conciliation between India and Pakistan. And he was an early supporter of the Tibetan people. Within India, JP is known and celebated for his role in two major movements: the Quit In...See the full content of this document
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