Mirza Waheed on India, Pakistan, and the Literature of Partition

Novelist and journalist Mirza Waheed joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V Ganeshananthan to talk about brewing tensions between two nuclear powers: India and Pakistan. Waheed, who was born in Kashmir and previously worked as a journalist, explains how the recent massacre of Indian tourists there at the hands of militants connects to a broader context that includes Partition, the 1947 event that separated the two countries. He reflects on growing up in Kashmir, a place to which both Pakistan and India would like to lay claim. Waheed reads from his debut novel, The Collaborator.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/. This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, and Hunter Murray.

Mirza Waheed

Tell Her Everything • The Book of Gold Leaves • A massacre has reignited the forever war between India and Pakistan – once more, Kashmiri voices are missing | Mirza Waheed | The Guardian

Others

The Collaborator (2024) | MUBI  • The Collaborator (2024) – IMDb • An Urdu Epic Puts India’s Partition Into Historical Perspective – The New York Times | By Aditi Sriram, April 8, 2019 • Kamila Shamsie • Saadat Hasan Manto • Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie

Mirza Waheed: Before this attack, the Indian government revoked Kashmir’s autonomous status in 2019 as one of the most contextual bits for everything that goes on in Kashmir now. Until 2019, Kashmir had a degree of autonomy within the larger Indian Union, which was given to Kashmir in 1947-48 after the first war. The Modi government revoked this autonomy, unilaterally, without any consultation, without any participation, and then imposed a long siege on Kashmir in 2019, which lasted months where no communication was allowed; everybody lost touch with their people, phones were jammed—everything—and people were basically besieged for months and months and months. Since then, there has been a slow return to normalcy. And there’s also been a push by the Indian state that Kashmir is normal. Kashmir is returned to normal. And by which they mean that we resolved Kashmir. “Look, there are tourists going to Kashmir in record numbers, therefore Kashmir has returned to normal.”

That facade of normalcy, that narrative of normalcy, was shattered in a brutal way, on the 22nd of April, because this is definitely one of the most militarized regions on Earth. There’s at least half a million soldiers in Kashmir. So it’s also a massive security failure; how can militants launch such a brutal attack with all this military apparatus there? So that narrative of normalcy is shattered, which also points, crucially, to the idea that the peace that is in Kashmir is an imposed peace. It’s a silence. It is a coerced assimilation, where Kashmiris themselves have no voice now. It’s total repression. People are detained for Facebook posts. Journalists are in prison. Human rights activists are in prison. Lawyers are in prison. Many political activists are not allowed to say anything. The media has been completely transformed into a very compliant, statist industry. People don’t have a voice. So that kind of imposed peace is not going to work, because people are not part of it.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: So you’re mentioning the revocation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which was what had granted special status or autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir—

MW: And Article 35A, which guaranteed Kashmiris exclusive rights to their property and jobs and land.

VVG: Some additional context for our listeners: back in 2020 we interviewed the journalists Rohini Mohan and Praveen Danti about widespread protests in India over the Citizenship Amendment Act, the revocation of Article 370, and all of this. Just as a little bit of further context, Partition, which took place in 1947, divided India into India and Pakistan. Pakistan is a Muslim majority country, India is a Hindu majority country, and in recent years, we’ve seen the rise of Hindu nationalism there, and we’ve done some episodes and had some conversation about that. This is part of what you mentioned about the tourists; the fact that they were mostly Hindu tourists is part of what is such a trigger for conflict here.

I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what role the Modi government played in the current situation. Also, Pakistan is essentially military-run— is that an accurate way to describe that? Can you talk about the Modi government and Pakistan’s government in the context of the present situation?

MW: The Modi government is the government of the BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the Bharatiya Janata Party, as we all know, is a Hindu nationalist party, and it’s always been their manifesto. Nothing is hidden. And the parent organization—the RSS, from which a lot of the BJP cadre, and Prime Minister Modi himself, comes—they believe India should be a Hindu state, a “Hindu Rashtra,” by which we mean Hindus must have primacy in everything. Everybody else is allowed to stay there and live there—Muslims and Christians and Sikhs and other minorities—but their vision has always been, for about a century, that India should be a Hindu Rashtra, a Hindu nation. And this is not recent; this is a matter of history. They always wanted this, even before the independence of India from British rule.

But going back to your question earlier, when the partition happened in 1947, sadly and tragically it was on religious lines; Hindus stay on this side and the Muslims go to the other side, that’s how Pakistan comes into being. Of course, we all know that India doesn’t choose to be a theocracy at the time; India chooses to be a secular state. One has to say that. India’s constitution was secular in nature; there’s no state religion. Pakistan, on the other hand, later on, became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, because the founding principle was that Muslims are not going to feel safe in a Hindu majority country, so they want an owned country, an owned state, where Muslims will feel safe and have their own state. That’s the brief backdrop, if I have explained it clearly enough. Flash forward—

Whitney Terrell: Dividing nations up by religion always works. It seems like it’s always a recipe for really great success.

MW: I know it is just—

WT: It’s working so well in Israel/Palestine.

MW: Sometimes we feel we’ve made the same mistake historically, again and again and again.

So flash forward to the modern era, to let’s say 2014 when Modi is elected, when BJP is elected, it is an openly Nationalist Party. They don’t believe in a secular ethos. Right now, India still is secular, constitutionally speaking, but I don’t think these people believe in that. They believe in Hindu supremacy and they are trying to remodel, refashion India into a different state. I don’t think it will work, because I’ve lived in India, as a student and worked briefly in Delhi, and I have great connections and bonds—I mean, one sounds so cliche and stereotyped when one has to say “I have great friendships in India,” and so on and so forth, of course, I do! And it’s a very diverse country. It is the size of a continent. The North is radically different from the South. East India is another country. And within those broad regions, there are various differences, and it’s a properly diverse country, the size of the continent, as I said. There are lots and lots of ethnicities and linguistic groups. I don’t think a homogenous model will work for that kind of a country.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle.