Lord Parekh
Main Page: Lord Parekh (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Parekh (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, on securing and initiating this debate. I will not pay particular attention in this address to the question of Kashmir. For me, Kashmir is a legacy of the partition of India. If the partition had not taken place, Kashmir would have had a very different character. To link Kashmir and India in this way is a mistake, because Kashmiri Islam has very little in common with Indian Islam. It is also the case that Kashmiris define themselves primarily as Kashmiris, rather than as Hindus or Muslims. So, left to itself, the Kashmiri problem would have been solved in a normal, amicable, political manner.
Thanks to the partition, the Kashmir issue has become acute. The partition in turn took place as a result of the British Empire. Wherever Britain has been faced with multi-ethnic societies, it has left many of them after partitioning them—we can think of Malaysia, Cyprus, Ireland and many other countries. Britain has had limited capacity to handle multi-ethnic societies. Therefore, when confronted with India, the problem became even more acute and the partition that took place was the most horrendous event in the history of these two countries. We here do not appreciate how much it is seared into the consciousness of people in India and Pakistan. It was a partition in which millions moved across the boundary and thousands were raped or wounded. That partition is remembered daily by those people who suffered at the hands of it, in broadly the same way that the Holocaust is remembered by Jews whose families suffered.
Given all that, the question for us is not to get into the debate about what to do, but whether something can be done to reconcile these two countries to the existence of each other. India and Pakistan were both born within the crucible of the partition. This horrendous event has now built up mutual hatred, so that India cannot say anything good about Pakistan, nor Pakistan about India.
In that kind of situation, how can we get these two countries to accept each other as the neighbours they are? I end by suggesting two or three ideas which need to be pursued. The first important thing is that there is a phobia. In India, there is a tendency for people to refer to Pakistan in a very elder brotherly and cavalier kind of manner, saying that they do not expect anything civilised from that part of the world. Conversely, in Pakistan there is a tendency to have a kind of younger brotherly hatred towards India, dismissing the idea that India could ever do anything good. That kind of phobia, with a built-in incapacity to see the good in the other, has to be broken. Unless you do that, you cannot make any sensible reconciliation. To respond to that phobia, you require not just ordinary political forms of co-operation—you need the capacity to appeal emotionally to people, so that they can respond to each other in terms of those historically shared memories, triggered by events.
The other thing would be that there are no deep conflicts of interest between India and Pakistan—no economic or political conflicts. They even look alike: culturally, they are similar. The question therefore would be for these two societies to establish institutional relations for clearing up misunderstandings and to create a situation in which they can talk to each other intelligently and peacefully.