by Hafsa Kanjwal in Aeon Magazine: In April 1955, at a closed session of the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke forcefully about the need for countries in Asia and Africa to refuse to join either of the two great powers – the United States and the Soviet Union – and to remain unaligned. Arguing that alignment with either power during the Cold War would degrade or humiliate those countries that had ‘come out of bondage into freedom’, Nehru maintained that the moral force of postcolonial nations should serve as a counter to the military force of the great powers. At one point, Nehru chided the Iraqi and Turkish delegates at the conference who had simultaneously spoken favourably about the Western bloc and the formation of NATO while lamenting the continued French colonisation of North Africa. Nehru said:
We must take a complete view of the situation and not be contradictory ourselves when we talk about colonialism, when we say ‘colonialism must go’, and in the same voice say that we support every policy or some policies that confirm colonialism. It is an extraordinary attitude to take up.
A few years later, in 1961, along with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Sukarno of Indonesia, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Nehru became one of the founders of the non-aligned movement. Having lifted the yoke of British colonialism, India presented itself as poised to take on the moral and political leadership of the decolonising world. This was perhaps to be expected, especially given that India was the largest and most populous country to become independent from European colonial rule. The story of India’s anticolonial struggle, too, had been mythologised by the nonviolent resistance offered by Indian figures such as Mahatma (‘great soul’) Gandhi. Nehru, too, was perceived as a charismatic and well-read leader who spoke for the people of Asia and Africa, and attempted to find what the scholar Ian Hall has called a ‘different way to conduct international relations’. The stature of both men played a critical role in establishing Indian dominance in the Third World order, and also in establishing ‘the idea of India’ as a secular liberal democracy that was built on the foundational idea of unity in diversity.
Even as Nehru proclaimed the moral superiority of India for taking a stance against colonialism in all forms, he oversaw India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir. In Kashmir, Nehru said, ‘democracy and morality can wait’.
In the middle of the 20th century, a wave of anticolonial and national liberation movements gained independence from European powers, by exercising their right to self-determination. Nationalist leaders of the former colonies, however, remained committed to the ideals of the nation-state and its territorial sovereignty that derived from European modernity. Independence, it was widely accepted, came in the form of the nation-state, which outshone other forms of political organisation or possibilities. The borders of the nation-state became contested, as European powers often imposed boundaries that ill suited visions of what constituted the political community. This would have deleterious consequences for places where geography, demographics, history or political aspirations posed serious challenges to nationality. In turn, newly formed nation-states asserted their newfound sovereignty through violence and coercion, which had implications for Indigenous and stateless peoples within their borders whose parallel movements for self-determination were depicted as illegitimate to the sovereign nation-state order. Mona Bhan and Haley Duschinski call this process ‘Third World imperialism’.
Some anticolonial nationalists were real nationalists, that is, they saw claims of self-determination within their imagined community of a nation as ‘separatist’, ‘secessionist’, ‘ethnonationalist insurgencies’ or ‘terrorism’. Such framings, rife in Indian discourses on Kashmir, are ahistorical and dehumanising. When we move beyond seeing these regions from the perspective of the dominant nation-state, we come to see how they are places with their own histories, imaginaries and political aspirations – some of which may reinscribe the nation, while others seek to move beyond it through understandings of other forms of sovereignty.
In popular and even scholarly discourses, colonialism is often seen as happening ‘overseas’ – from Europe to somewhere in the Global South. Many people see colonialism as something that we are past temporally, despite acknowledgement of its ongoing legacies. Forms of colonialism within the Global South remain more difficult for many to see because many of these regions are geographically contiguous to one another and, thus, seen as having some form of cultural or racial unity that would form a nation. This results in what Goldie Osuri calls a ‘structural concealment of the relationship between postcolonial nation-states and their [own colonies],’ as well as the concealment of ‘the manner in which postcolonial nationalism is also an expansionist project.’ Contemporary colonies – like Kashmir, Western Sahara, Puerto Rico, Palestine, East Turkestan, among others – show the porous boundary between colonialism and postcolonialism, raising some difficult questions about the current global order.
More here.
