Search

The article focuses on problems of democracy and nation-building in Pakistan. Topics include Pakistan was established in 1947 as the state for the Muslims of India; Pakistan has failed to stabilise as a Muslim/Islamic democracy while in the regional and international arena it enjoys the unenviable reputation of being a sanctuary for terrorists and terrorist networks; and Jinnah had kept the idea of Pakistan vague, using Islamic identity as the main reason for a separate state outside India.

Partition and the legacy of the two-nation theory have shaped the history of the subcontinent. The division of two nation-states into Hindus and Muslims had formalized this divide in a way that one religious community dominated the other, that is, the Hindus in India and the Muslims in Pakistan. The partition of the subcontinent along religious lines with accompanying communal violence produced a politics that was reproduced consecutively in the day-to-day lives of religious minorities of the region. In this article, I discuss how Hindus came to be constituted as minorities in the state of Bangladesh, in the context of its Constitution, legal structure, demography and ideology. It charts the trajectory of their journey as a minority in Bangladesh, the politics of minority vote banks, its interplay with electoral politics, the intricacy of property laws and the reasons for their resultant exodus into India. In describing the growing vulnerability of Hindus, I locate their responses in the context of present-day national, regional and global politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is based on my engagement with the Sindhi-speaking Hindu minority of Sindh that migrated to India in and around 1947, when the province of Sindh became a part of Pakistan. It privileges therefore a specific religious group and its response and negotiation to a specific moment. My current research on Sindhi-speaking Muslims along the border interrogates the classification of 'Sindhis' as a spatially fixed identity, and revisits the state-endorsed premises of irrevocability and border-formation. It is essential to examine three generations of Sindhis in India, post-1947, in order to understand whether Partition persists for example, among those who go to Sindhi-medium schools and live in erstwhile refugee camps at Pimpri or Ulhaasnagar; among those who do business in at least three continents of the world; among those who manage clothes and electronics shops in the bustling markets of Indian cities; and among the very few who write in Sindhi and worry about their language, the only marker of their identity in India, and who have only Sindhi Muslims across the border to share these anxieties with, and those who speak English or Hindi and would have nothing to do with Sindh or Sindhis. The issues tie up with diasporic studies, border studies and identity politics in contemporary India. The study would also have to be taken up by a host of scholars situated in different parts of India who could examine how a linguistic minority such as the Sindhis negotiate in different regions and the specific forms of disjunctures that continue to take place as a result of Partition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article invites a rethinking of the relation between homeland, diaspora and religion. We reflect on Muslims of Indian origin whose ancestors left British India long before 1947, when the country was partitioned and the new nations of Pakistan and India were established. The article interrogates the understanding of the Indian diaspora with religion as its core feature. It cautions that such a conceptualization often leads to the perception of the Indian diaspora as a Hindu diaspora and consequently to the exclusion of Muslims of Indian origin. Empirical evidence is presented illustrating that Muslims of Indian origin in Surinam and in the Netherlands feel connected to each other as well as to Hindus of Indian origin through a shared sense of ethnic consciousness, a sense of distinctiveness, common history, the belief in a common fate and the perception of their homeland. We therefore argue in favour of the inclusion of these Muslims in the Indian diaspora (studies). Their exclusion means denying these Muslims their history as well as rendering them ‘homeless’. This amounts to a re-enactment of the 1947 partition in the countries which the Indian diaspora now tries to retain a collective memory of, and tries to reinstate as their original homeland in which Hindus ànd Muslims were ‘brothers of one mother’ i.e. Hindustan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1947, the continuing dispute over Kashmir has seen large-scale permanent as well as temporary displacements of sections of the Kashmiri population. The majority of those affected by these events have been Muslims who have sought sanctuary in Azad Kashmir and, subsequently, in Pakistan. These waves of forced migration and the associated hard-ships, however, have not appeared in international or regional refugee statistics. This paper details the displacement events and statistics, and explores refugee discourse to locate the reasons behind the non-appearance of these refugees on regional and international agendas. The authors then focus on the ways in which the presence of the Kashmiri refugees, particularly in Azad Kashmir, has contributed to the development of a Kashmiri consciousness, or Kashmiriyat, within Kashmiri communities in Azad Kashmir and the Kashmiri diaspora. The work presented here is based on documentary analysis, discussions with Kashmiris living in the diaspora, and observations from earlier fieldwork carried out in Azad Kashmir and Pakistan on Kashmiri identity formation. Personal knowledge of political structures, events and activities within Azad Kashmir, and in the Kashmiri Diaspora located in Europe and America also has been drawn upon. The paper spans the period from Partition in 1947 until May 2003 when the Azad Kashmir prime minister proposed consideration of a permanent division of Kashmir with the Chenab Line formula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article informs that the short India/Pakistan war in 1971 was one of a series of conflicts which began with the founding of the two nations and exchange of populations that took place in 1947. India's population, basically Hindu, has a large minority of Muslims; Pakistan is almost exclusively Muslim. With the use of Triandis's technique for measuring social distance both the prewar and wartime samples of both Hindus and Muslims indicated on a seven-point scale the desirability of engaging in 10 kinds of social activities with members of nine subcultural groups. With the t test, it was possible to determine changes in social distance between Hindus and Muslims living in India who were not wartime enemies, and to make similar assessment of social distance between both these groups and Pakistanis, the recognized enemy. Indian Hindus showed an increase in social distance between themselves and Indian Muslims between January and December. There were no significant changes in social distance toward any of the other subcultural groups being considered.