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Recent troubles in Kashmir have awakened once again the ghosts that we thought had been put to rest. There is a liberal voice within me, and within many Indians, which says that people have the right to choose the kind of life they want to lead as well as the nation they want to live in. Liberals call this ‘the right of self-determination’. We fought for our own independence from Britain based on this principle, and we should now apply it to Kashmir.
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There is an opposite pull within me from a nation called India which has nurtured me for sixty-one years like the soil that nurtures the tree beside my house. As a result a sense of nationality has grown within me. At our nation’s birth, all Indians (born and unborn) accepted a social contract to protect the equal natural rights of all, and we assert these rights periodically during elections. A secessionist thus cannot just get up and abrogate this contract without the consent of others. Thus, I feel a genuine moral conflict, a dharmasankat. Can I be true to my moral conscience and to the Indian nation at the same time? I have rights but I also have duties to others.
One of the first principles of politics is that you cannot graft a personal morality onto the state. A ruler must observe the ‘morality of responsibility’ not the ‘morality of conscience’, Max Weber, teaches us. This ruler’s prudential ethic is the ‘god of a lesser world’. With secession, Manmohan Singh has to worry about wounding the idea of a plural India when the demand is based on religion. He also has to worry about protecting millions of Muslim lives when the spectre of a second partition is raised. He cannot just follow the moral high ground. Bhishma taught the same lesson in the Mahabharata to Yudhishthira, who wanted to renounce violence; a ruler must have an army and police to protect his people.
India has made many mistakes—it has violated human rights, rigged elections, and has dreadful governance. Yet, it is a legitimate democracy in my eyes. I am a Punjabi and an Indian, and these two identities often clash, but the way to resolve them is not by secession but through the ‘hard work of democratic politics’. Our Constitution does not allow the right to secede because ‘discontented minorities might be tempted to shirk the hard work of principled, democratic politics by using the threat of secession as a strategic bargaining tool as a de facto veto over majority rule, thus undermining democracy’.
This is why I disagree with Arundhati Roy, Veer Sanghvi and Swami Aiyar, all of whom have supported Kashmir’s secession in recent weeks. I also disagree with Arun Jaitly, to whom territorial integrity is inviolate at any cost. To me, civilized nationhood lies in consensus. Kashmir could secede through consent, as Norway did from Sweden in 1905. For this, one would need a plebiscite not only in Kashmir but also in India per our original social contract. Democratic nations place a high hurdle to counter threats of premature exit, or as Lincoln said, before a nation ‘is torn asunder at the pleasure of its component parts’. In America, it needs two-thirds majority in the Congress and in the States. In India, this would be equivalent to winning two super majorities, both in Parliament and in all state legislatures.
Finally, a demand for secession ought to make us look at ourselves in the mirror. What is wrong with us that a member of our team wants to leave permanently? Clearly India’s weakness is governance and the state’s failure to deliver the most basic services to citizens. When it comes to dealing with the police, the courts, and the bureaucracy, all levels of the government fail every day. A demand for secession ought to spur us to arrest the decline in our institutions. There is no point in saying that the ‘Idea of India’ will be wounded if we let Kashmir secede. We have to improve the reality of India.
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