EDITORIAL: ENDLESS HOSTILITY, ENDLESS CONFLICT: THE CHICKENS OF THE TWO-NATION THEORY HAVE COME HOME TO ROOST AND NOW THREATEN CATASTROPHE
Vinod Mubayi
It is useful to recall what some supporters of the Partition of British India on the eve of its occurrence said about its essentially benign nature. The separation or division based on the religious identity of the vast majority of its inhabitants, viz. Hindus and Muslims who became the two nations in this discourse, was likened to a family quarrel in which two brothers and their families who lived in the same house were bickering with each other. Give each of them their own separate home and the quarrels will eventually dissipate and disappear. Well, that was then. Rarely can a prediction have been so spectacularly off the mark. For not only did the quarrels not disappear, instead they grew and grew and with both “brothers” now having acquired nuclear weapons they threaten to consume their descendants.
The recent 3-day war between India and Pakistan following the terrorist killings of 26 Hindu tourists and one Kashmiri Muslim pony-wala in Pahalgam provides an example of the dangers provoked by Muslim and Hindu politicized religious rhetoric not only to the battered and ravaged land of Kashmir that has seen four wars in the last seven odd decades but also to the survival of South Asia itself. Who were responsible for the terrorist act is still unclear. It is probable that they were Kashmiri militants trained in Pakistan who wished to burst the bubble of “normalcy” in Kashmir promoted by the Modi regime in recent years after it abrogated Art 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution and abolished Jammu & Kashmir’s statehood on August 5, 2019. While the Pakistan government disavowed any responsibility and hinted that it could be an Indian false flag operation, the Indian government insisted on Pakistan’s culpability.
Even if Pakistan’s deep state agencies had no involvement with this ghastly act, its protestations of innocence were not helped by a speech Pakistan Army Chief General (now Field Marshal) Asim Munir gave a week before the Pahalgam where he not only repeated at length all the rhetoric of the two-nation theory justifying the creation of Pakistan (“We [i.e., Muslims] are different from the Hindus in every possible aspect of life”, etc.) but also emphasized more than once the familiar cliche that “Kashmir is our jugular vein.” Meanwhile, Modi and his cohorts drawn from the RSS are also ardent believers in this idea of two nations when one recalls that RSS and Hindu Mahasabha leaders in the 1920s and 1930s like Savarkar and Golwalkar established their own version of the two-nation theory well over a decade before Jinnah proclaimed it in the well-known Lahore resolution in 1940. Pakistani leaders, especially from the Army like FM Munir, use the two-nation theory as an eternal justification of the state’s creation notwithstanding the fact that it has been almost 77 years since that happened. BJP leaders, on the other hand, employ it as an electoral tool to polarize the electorate on religious identity in order to unify its 80% Hindu majority, which is otherwise divided on lines of caste and class. Much of the rhetoric of both “nations” is grounded in macho patriarchal posturing that masquerades as hyper-nationalism while liberally distorting past history. This is heavily amplified in the age of social media where fake news is a potent toxin, a virus circulating freely and wreaking havoc in the body politic.
The events surrounding the 3-day war, dubbed Operation Sindoor by India (Sindoor or vermillion, is a red powder worn by some Hindu married women in the hair parting on their head to signify their marital status), vividly exemplified all these features of misinformation and disinformation whose most deleterious feature is to create a dangerously false public opinion, a kind of WhatsApp reality of hyper-nationalism with little connection to actual events. Indian social media and some TV channels were perhaps the most egregious culprits in this regard posting outrightly fake videos such as the alleged destruction of major Pakistani cities like the port of Karachi or the “capture” of Islamabad and so on. Given government control over much of the television and print media, what is especially reprehensible is the creation of jingoistic public opinion based on falsehood as a means of strengthening political power; this makes conflict resolution between the two countries extremely difficult if not almost impossible.
The conflict may have originated with the terrorist attack in Pahalgam, but it has been well over a month since that happened and the killers have not been apprehended; no credible explanation has been offered for why a popular tourist site in Kashmir was bereft of all security personnel when the valley has hundreds of thousands of military, paramilitary, and police personnel swarming all over the area; why, in an era of cell phones and instant communication, it took well over an hour for any security to arrive; and why no one so far has been held responsible for the lapse that led to this ghastly tragedy. It needs to be recalled that the police in Kashmir are under the control of the union home ministry in Delhi led by Amit Shah.
Once the Modi regime decided to “punish” Pakistan by launching missile attacks on terrorist bases, some located in Pakistan administered Kashmir and others in Pakistan Punjab, on the night of May 6/7, the conflict quickly escalated with Pakistan using superior Chinese technology to down several Indian Rafale aircraft and India mounting missile attacks on Pakistan airfields, one of them close to its nuclear weapons storage facilities. In a very insightful article in the latest issue of Caravan magazine, Yale University academic and commentator on South Asian affairs Sushant Singh wrote that the military exchange between India and Pakistan
“a US diplomat told me, brought the world “closer to a nuclear exchange than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.” Few people realize, they said, that, after three days of drone, artillery and missile strikes, the two countries were just three rungs short of the brink when the United States mediated a ceasefire. “We stopped the nuclear conflict,” the US president, Donald Trump, said on 12 May. “It could have been a bad nuclear war. Millions of people could have been killed, so I’m very proud of that.” Despite the pause, India and Pakistan, locked into their own narratives, remain ready to push forward militarily, seemingly unconcerned that the whole of South Asia could end up in the shadow of mushroom clouds… The guns may be silent now, but the events of May 2025 stand not as a story of triumph, but as a stark warning — of how two nuclear-armed nations once again tiptoed to the brink of catastrophe, and how the world had to pull them back.”
The most urgent danger posed by this seemingly unending conflict is that the region faces urgent and stark environmental challenges from the fast-advancing crisis of climate change that within a couple of decades threatens to make large areas of South Asia uninhabitable from increasing temperatures, rising sea levels, melting of Himalayan glaciers, future scarcity of water and frequent extreme weather events. Close and integrated cooperative actions between all countries of South Asia, especially India and Pakistan that share the waters of the Indus River Basin, is vitally necessary to avert climate catastrophe. But given the heated rhetoric of jugular veins and revenge of terrorist actions, the mushroom cloud catastrophe looms even closer.
We carry below two articles on the suffering of two civilian Kashmiri families, one Hindu and the other Muslim, in the recent India-Pakistan war. Eds.
Top - Home