Afghanistan struggling to handle its diversity

The Taliban takeover of Kabul shows us once again the problem with presuming religion as a bond to hold people together. If anything, religion has most often been the source of a lot of evil. The large number of persons fleeing Afghanistan shows that people at large too realise this. The absence of a modern, liberal state makes them most fearful. As of now, they feel helpless and run to get out of the way of the religion-driven zealots.

The makers of the civilised world in which we live today had no doubt about it. After all, they had emerged out of the communal religious wars that had killed millions in Europe. Yet, when confronted with anti-Semitism in Europe, and pan-Islamism in India, they had little hesitation in deciding that both the Zionists as well as the Islamists needed to be given a nation of their own. The two nations that were thus created in the 20th century have been characterised by tremendous violence. India remains a major sufferer at the hands of religious separatism.

Unfortunately, the cruelty inflicted on others by collectivities rooted in religion is still tolerated. Many who normally stand by liberty and freedom of the individual, frequently act coy when confronted by the need to condemn religious zealots. Worse, every now and then, thinkers of contemporary times imagine that primordial loyalties, whether of ethnicity, language or creed, should be nurtured and respected even while those driven by such loyalties only inflict pain on others.

Many also argue that these primordial loyalties knit people into nations. In countries like India where such loyalties either do not exist or are extremely weak, the modernist thinker imagines the absence of a nation. The idea that there could be civilisational unity which harbours within itself a tremendous diversity of religion, language and ethnicity was, and remains, incomprehensible to the modernists. That India is only a geographical entity was a myth which the British created for the people of India. That India is a nation in the making, was a variation of this myth which underpinned the efforts of the leaders of the nationalist movement. It even managed to find a place in the textbooks of history circulated by the Government of India.

The fact remains that nation-states based on primordial loyalties are very different from those like India where such loyalties are weak or absent. In nations based on primordial loyalties, whether of kinship, religion or ethnicity, everyone else is fair game. In contrast, in countries like India, where the interaction between citizens, and between the people and the state is mediated by a formal Constitution, there is a lot of effort to create institutional structures to provide services to their citizens irrespective of their primordial identity. In the process, primordial loyalties remain weak while a new identity, based on a collective commitment to the Constitution, grows stronger. India’s greatest success is seen in the public at large having an intuitive commitment of this variety. The experience of history of the past 300 years too suggests that successful states are those which are based on the idea of a rule-based government which refuses to pander to primordial identities.

The simple fact is that all modern nations are artificial constructs. All of them are made up of people who speak different languages, have different religions, practice different social and ethical behaviour patterns. The important thing is that successful nations find a way in which people with such diversity manage to live together, work together, and feel at one. Most importantly, in electoral democracy, they have found a way to peacefully elect a government which represents the people and whom the people trust.

This particular idea of a nation found its fruition in the West and since then has been successful in many other parts of the world. India, of course, remains one of the examples of a most successful nation where people who speak different languages are able to come together to live peaceably. A recent examination of the Census data of 2011 by Shamika Ravi indicates that speakers of as many as 100 languages live in the cities of Bengaluru (Karnataka), Dimapur (Nagaland) and Sonitpur (Assam). More than 90 languages are spoken in Jalpaiguri (Bengal), southwest Delhi, East Khasi Hills (Meghalaya), Karbi Anglong (Assam), Pune (Maharashtra) and Darjeeling (Bengal). These people manage to live together without inter-personal conflicts escalating into violence all the time mostly because they trust each other and their government, and the trust is based on living in a society that is under-pinned by laws that are transparent and whose meaning is accepted by all.

The lifescape of Afghanistan is just as diverse as that of India. But, there is a difference too. The people who live in Bengaluru and Sonitpur have become used to having an anonymous state structure take care of them. After that, negotiating diversity is easy and one can marvel at it without resorting to strategies to dominate each other. This is not the case in Afghanistan where the various tribes that live in that region have yet to work out the basics of government formation, let alone the routinisation that comes after that.

One of the most interesting parts of the history of modern Afghanistan is that it was the only country which formally objected to the creation of Pakistan when the British left India. It was their contention that the Durand Line, which divided Pashtun tribal areas and incorporated the eastern regions into Pakistan, was merely an artificial line arbitrarily drawn by the British. Pashtuns were the people who lived in the eastern slopes and foothills of the Hindu Kush mountain ranges up to the plains of the Indus. It was these people who launched depredatory raids into northern and western India since 1100 CE (Common Era). Many of them stayed back in India to rule over the indigenes. It was only after 700 years, in the 1870s, that the ‘Army of the Indus’, officered by the servants of the British East India Company, occupied the lower reaches of the Hindu Kush and incorporated these into British India. Little doubt then that after independence, the Pashtuns dreamt of an independent Pakhtunistan. In the early years of the 21st century, the military of Pakistan sought to crush this dream by killing almost half a million Pashtuns and displacing over three million, all in the name of the myth that religion breeds brotherhood and unity.

There is a lesson in this for India too. The idea that a religious/ethnic group must aspire either to independence or to dominating all others is one that takes us down a path where the end results could be horrific.