In a clear and informative addition to a field with enough convoluted theories to resemble scholasticism, Ajit Bhalla covers selected conflicts and tensions in Asia, a region which has a wide range of diverse histories, populations and traditions. In the process of analysing Myanmar, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, and China, Bhalla summarises earlier and recent history, colonisation and decolonisation, constitutional arrangements, and contemporary politics. For example, Myanmar’s 1988 State Peace and Development Council plan included exterminating the Rohingyas; moreover, the 1982 constitution allocates citizenship to specified ethnic groups but not to Rohingyas, who form one group among the country’s Muslims. Western powers lifted sanctions too soon, in 1990 and in 2016 (the regime is a noted arms buyer), and China’s substantial involvement with Yangon ensures India’s quiescence.
Diverse problems
Other chapters are equally bleak. The author attributes continuing ethno-religious violence in the Philippines to poor national leadership, ineffective governance, and weak institutions. Prolonged suppression, with episodes of terrible state violence against the Mindanao-based 4-6% Muslim minority, has created enduring bitterness and some receptivity to Islamic State overtures.
Spoilers often figure; in Thailand — never a Western colony — Bhalla argues that these are national leaders, the army, Buddhist nationalists and southern Buddhist leaders. The latter make local settlement with ethnic Malay Muslims difficult, the army has sacked a general whom Malay leaders trusted, and Bangkok seems permanently to exclude regional autonomy.
Bhalla shows the risks rebels face in considering settlement; internal dissent can also be bitter. In Sri Lanka, Velupillai Prabhakaran eliminated other Sri Lankan Tamil groups in making the LTTE the sole leaders of the Eelam movement; coercive government action only worsened things, but international mediation failed, and southern-based opposition apparently blocks regional devolution.
Conflicts in India
Some conflicts can look utterly insoluble. Despite India’s undoubtedly democratic structure, for Bhalla the lasting and very serious problems in Kashmir result from failures of political leadership at all levels, namely the state and the respective central governments in Delhi and Islamabad. On the Northeast, the author is clear about the effect of sustained central-government neglect on India’s internal and external security.
China, according to Bhalla, can only exacerbate the issues it faces in, respectively, Tibet and Xinjiang by treating culture and religion as separate matters. Bhalla considers that Beijing sees religion as threatening its authority more than cultural diversity does, but he argues that the long stalemate in Tibet is worsened by international (including Indian) indifference and holds that the Xinjiang leadership is divided and ineffective.
Bhalla’s success story, Indonesia, surprisingly omits the part the then United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan played in persuading President B.J. Habibie to accept U.N. intervention so that East Timor could secede peacefully; Indonesia had been publicly accused of attempted genocide. Neither does Bhalla mention documented — and at most partially successful — Saudi Arabia-funded attempts to foster a more hardline tone in South and Southeast Asian madrassas.
Some of the author’s asides will raise eyebrows, and the book seems to neglect leadership as restraint. At the end of a very intense day on which a South Asian head of government had made a highly provocative statement, the then Foreign Secretary of India remarked to this reviewer, “If only the [expletive deleted] had kept quiet...” and added that India had fully intended to abide by a prior agreement. On that occasion, India soon concluded that the neighbour’s comments were empty gestures, and honoured the agreement; war did not occur. The point here is that in all human exchange, what we and others say and do constitutes part of how we take things to stand. The philosophy of the social sciences, nevertheless, apparently remains as remote as ever from mainstream political science.
Asia’s Trouble Spots: The Leadership Question in Conflict Resolution; Ajit S. Bhalla, Rowman and Littlefield International, £27.95.
The reviewer teaches at IIT Madras.
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