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Series on Memory, History and Power: The Memory Sewing - alternative history(ies) of the past and present

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Wall of Memories (1994/2015), Rosana Paulino | Source: Paulino’s website

This article is a part of our Series on Memory, History, and Power. Read the Series Introduction here.

Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay Funes the Memorious[i], tells us a story of Ireneo Funes, who, after falling off a horse and hitting his head, starts recalling absolutely everything. This is soon revealed to be a curse: unable to connect with others, the world became intolerable to Funes. From its very title, Borges’ essay is a story about the function of memory. ‘We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’, says Pierre Nora[ii]. Memory is not the ability to remember everything, but, instead, an acknowledgement that things escape us.

From Borges’ essay, we come to understand that remembering is not an act of accumulating events or sensations. As Funes absorbed literally everything, he was not able to give space to any sort of abstraction. He was unable to imagine. Actually, to keep everything in mind became a heavy curse. Memory requires a degree of abstraction. It demands forgetting, acknowledging that we cannot fully grasp what happened and, with this, understand that it has a fragile matter that necessitates the constant activity of remembering. Memory is, then, an active act of looking for what is already lost and, from that, creating strategies for things not to be forgotten.

In this short essay, I intend to compare memory with the act of sewing: in a delicate exercise of patience, we sew threads until they form a larger fabric, aware of thread’s fragility. Here, we can compare how remembering resembles the ways in which the needle creates connections with other tissues. As the needle aims to connect the tissues together, creating a common piece, memory as well creates a network of elements. In this way, it provides meaning to the world, in other words, it provides a common ground from which we come to understand who we are between past and future.

Here, an interesting parallel can be made to some habits that come from the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé. According to these traditions, people carry with them, in wallets or pockets, a piece of tissue which is embroidered with herbs and spices. This amulet or talisman is called patuá and one uses it for luck and protection. Some of these patuás have a relative’s photo on them.

Coming from black origins, the Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino uses elements from Candomblé religious practices to reflect on Brazilian History, highlighting the invisible threads of colonisation that still endure. In the work ‘Wall of Memories’ (1994), Paulino presents us with 1,500 little patuás, carefully sewn, displayed on a bigger wall, with each one of them having a small portrait of a black person or family.

Paulino’s work represents an inquiry into her own story as embedded in Brazil’s uneasy relationship with its past. She denounces the absence of the black population in the collective imagination of the country’s construction, even though most of Brazil’s population has origins related to the black diaspora. As Paulino delicately reveals, black people are reduced to a marginal place in the public sphere, leading to many forms of oppression and violence in contemporary public policies. Her works, then, make visible those hidden in political communities. Investigating her own identity, Paulino turns to a collective history to understand her marginality as a black woman in the country she comes from and lives in.

As viewers, we become aware of those representations that are actually invisible in the social-political fabric of Brazil. This is an attempt by the artist to use visual arts as an exercise of looking at those black people often ignored in the Brazilian context, interrupting, then, perpetuated colonial exclusions from the political sphere. Paulino literally sewed each one of the patuás, embroidery with pictures of eleven unknown families, but which could be one of her ancestors, as she argues. The point here is that the action of connecting threads allows the artist to fill some gaps in the present, disclosing narratives and illuminating hidden histories and subjectivities. In this way, Paulino uses her lived experience, as someone who has black origins, to metaphorically sew a collective memory, since it belongs to a broader context of political dynamics from where she speaks. By that, I am referring to the black experience that still informs how Brazilian society deals with its violent past and current black population[iii]. With her work, Paulino raises a reflection on racism, colonialism and history. As viewers, we have no option left but to think about these sensitives issues when dealing with our past and present, especially as Brazilians.

Although the Brazilian past is full of violence and exclusion against the black population, Paulino goes back to her ancestors to protect her at present. The patuás, then, represent how she honours their history and how this connects with her lived experience. Here, a traditional linear historiography, where past and future are temporal standpoints of a succession of events, enters into the question[iv]. Actually, dealing with present demands looking at collective memories, since there are different ways of approaching the past, and the past works here as a promise of something soon to be revealed – a redemption, according to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin develops this idea of redemption as a moment of awakening, in which one takes into account other perspectives when looking at one own’s history. This awakening implies being sensitive to the ones defeated in history, namely, those who are easily forgotten when great events are told. To him, history is a constellation, which operates by ‘telescop[ing] the past through the present’[v], allowing ‘the past to place the present in a critical condition’[vi]. In Benjamin’s words, ‘it’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present casts its light on the past’[vii], but that the past has elements that endure in the present.

Then, the present is a complex constellation assembled by different approaches to the past(s) and this is the reason why the present unfolds into fragmentations and uncertainties[viii]. What is so striking and promising in Benjamin’s philosophical project is the consequence of this fragmented history(ies): it is precisely this struggle of different past appropriations, its uncertainties, that creates a fissure that can make one aware of ones’ own embeddedness in a collective history. With Benjamin, we realise how a linear narrative of history actually contains within itself unknown victims of progress and modernisation. As he states, ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’[ix]. Once one realises this constellation, it breaks with the order of the things, namely, the unique version of ‘History’. This movement is what Benjamin calls redemption: awakening, as an enlightened moment, of the dialectical process that configures the present[x]. Looking at Paulino’s work, one realises that those faces permeate a hidden and troubled history of Brazilian modernisation and colonisation.

Hence, as Benjamin states, ‘articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it “the way it really was.” It means appropriating a memory (Erinnerung) as it flashes up in a moment of danger[xi].’ Against the legacy of oblivion, the patuás from Paulino are a lost treasure of protection, making us aware that memory demands acts of sewing threads that connect us with others[xii]. This is why memory is a fragile matter because we are always at the edge of losing the thread. Still, sewing is all we have left to not forget.

[i] Jorge Luís Borges, “Funes el memorioso,” in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2007), pp. 583–590.

[ii] Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p.7.

[iii] Paulino, Parede da Memória (Wall of Memories).

[iv] Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire, p. 43.

[v] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 741.

[vi] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), p. 338.

[vii] Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 462.

[viii] Vivienne Jabri, The Postcolonial Subject (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 15.

[ix] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, v. 4 - 1938-1940. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Others. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

[x] George Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite All: four photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago, US: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

[xi] Benjamin, Selected Writings, v. 4 - 1938-1940, p. 391.

[xii] Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin. História e Narração em Walter Benjamin. (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2013), p. 92.

Series on Memory, History and Power: Introduction

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The fallen Columbus after a group led by American Indian Movement members tore it down in Minnesota, 2020 | Photo by Tony Webster, used under Creative Commons.

Over the last years, we have seen disputes over statues and monuments all over the world. Memorials dedicated to military achievements, war heroes, colonialists and slave traders have been at the centre of debates on the deconstruction of history and the ways some events and national groups have been inscribed in the public space. In 2019, for example, we saw Santiago, the capital of Chile, being occupied by protesters waving the flag of the indigenous Mapuche people. One particular image went viral all around the world: in the photo, dozens of protesters climb a military monument in the centre of Santiago and at the top of the statue, a man raises the Mapuche’s flag, a people that has been under attack in Chile since the arrival of Spanish colonizers, in the 16th century. In South Africa, the campaign Rhodes Must Fall led to the removal of a statue in honour of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. The withdraw flared up a discussion regarding what to do with other monuments to Rhodes around the country. In 2020, we saw similar scenes being repeated throughout Europe, United States and Latin America, when statues of slave trader Edward Colston, Columbus, Belgian King Leopold II and Portuguese Jesuit missionary Father António Vieira, just to name a few, woke up either, at the bottom of a river, painted in red, headless or wearing signs saying: ‘decolonize’. Such movements intended to problematise what is remembered in the public sphere and how those monuments relate to the way we conceive a country’s history or the history of colonialism and slavery.

‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’[i], writes Walter Benjamin on his 7th thesis on the philosophy of History. For some, statues such as those of Colston, Rhodes and Vieira are symbols of civilisation. For many others, they are memories of massacres and genocides, symbols of barbarism. Monuments as, for example, the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, built in the memory of the infant Henry the Navigator – considered the patron of the 16th century Portuguese colonial expansion – represent the memory of the victors, they anchor history the way power wants it seen. That is the reason why, if we take Benjamin’s critique of history as a guide, we need to deconstruct such monuments built by hegemonic historical narratives. And what we have been seeing over recent years throughout the world are precisely such moments of such deconstruction.

That is to say that the debate over monuments and statues should be considered under a broader scope of history, memory and dynamics of power intertwined in both phenomena. In a recent article in the French newspaper Le Libération, Paul B. Preciado described statues as ‘prosthesis of historic memory that remind us the lives “that matter”’. They inscribe on public space the bodies that deserve to be immortalized in stone and metal. ‘Public sculptures’, he writes, ‘do not represent the people, they build it: they depict a national pure body and determine an ideal of colonial and sexual citizenship’. To critique history as celebrated by statues is, then, to critique the construction of the nation state itself. This series analyses both how events and characters are chosen to be marked in a city or a country’s landscape, and how art might disrupt national and imperial ideals, functioning sometimes as a sort of counter-memory.

Series Publication Schedule

  • Part I: Portugal: the return of the colonial war, by Miguel Cardina
  • Part II: Which door to which city? The Vraca Memorial Park and anti-fascism legacy in Sarajevo, by Renata Summa
  • Part III: Indigenous Uruguay: monuments, histories and memories, by Henrique Gasperin
  • Part IV: The Red Atlantic: modernity and markers of discrimination, by Victor Coutinho Lage
  • Part V: The Memory Sewing: alternative history(ies) of the past and present, by Mariana Caldas

[i] Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 256.

Gendered Partition of India: An Untold Story

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By Akshara Goel

Women during the partition. Source - Sabrang India.

‘Partition has caused the politics of the belly’ - Francois Bayart.

On 15th August 1947 India attained independence from the two hundred years of British rule, but, witnessed its secondly, partition into present-day Pakistan and subsequently Bangladesh. The date, 15th August, is chiefly remembered as the victory from colonial domination? achieved through non-violence. Concurrently, its bemoaned for partition the narratives which are limited to national leaders, political causes and high politics dominated by the upper-class male perspective leaders. However, Indian feminist scholarships have argued that this recollection has disregarded the gendered understanding of wide spread communal violence – the story of displacement and dispossession and, the process of realignment of family, community and national identities. Women survivors of partitioned India occupied a distinctly marginalised space in the partition violence. They were not only subjected to barbarity from men of the ‘other’ community but also from their family members and community which began in the pre-partition period (before 1947), and carried on until the 1950s. The ‘other’ here refers to ‘enemy community’ who were not part of the dominant ethnic community of India or then West Pakistan or Pakistan.

Women partition survivors were made attached to their male family member or community as they were assumed incapable of making their decisions on migrating to the other side of the border. Consequently, theywere compelled to agree with the twin concept of ‘Azadi’ - translated as Freedom - that was the loss of community, networks, identity and more or less stable inter and intra-personal relationships . Simultaneously, they witnessed double jeopardy. Firstly, by many human right discourses that were packed up recognize them as victims during the conflict occurred at the time of partition. Secondly, since males couldn’t perform their “role of protector” or unable to participate in “income generation activities” it drove to the domestic violence or resurgence of religious practices. This resulted in re-composition of the patriarchal structure which got disintegrated under the partition conflict, wherein, it led to greater control of women rather than, letting providing them with a mechanism to create their agency otherwise their agency was limited to the act of producing or reproducing the nation, according to the Indian government.

The predominant memory of partition for these destitute women consisted of confusion, dislocation and severing roots. The day-to-day violence caused by the partition formed the everyday experience for these women. They were exposed to distinct forms of sexual violence that carried the symbolic meaning designated to their status in the male dominated -patriarchal society where gender relations are arranged along the beliefs and traditions of the religious and ethnic communities. The most predictable form of violence was sexual assault inflicted the men of one community upon the women of the ‘other’ community to assert their own identity and ‘subduing the other by dishonouring their women’. However, the most notorious action was the sadistic pleasure these perpetrators sought from the humiliation of women.

According to anecdotes by the women partition survivor, they were raped in front of their male family members and some of them were paraded naked in the market or danced in gurudwaras (holy shrine of Sikhs). For the stigmatization purpose and its legacy onto the future generation, the perpetrators sexually appropriated these women by desexualizing her as wife or mother through mutilating or disfiguring her breasts and genitalia (tattooing-branding on their breasts and genitalia with triumphant slogans like a crescent moon or trident) so that they no longer remain a nurturer. The motivation was to make her an inauspicious figure by degrading into an unproductive woman. These barbarian acts reflected the thinking of the patriarchal community wherein women are just considered objects of honour constructed by the male. Women survivors of Partition encountered or witnessed the episodes of violence from their family members and community as well. The latter, coerced their women to death, in some cases women were forced to kill themselves, to avoid being sexually offended and to preserve their chastity along with the shielding the honour of individual, family and community. According to the anecdote by Taran, a partition survivor who successfully came to India in 1947- “We girls would often talk about death – some were afraid, others thought of it as a glorious death – dying for an end, for freedom, for an honour. For me everything was related to freedom (from British colonial rule), I was dying for freedom”. Fortunately, she didn’t have to go through the ‘choice’ of death while her women friends were planning how to prepare for their death- an interview was taken by the Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin – Indian feminist writer and activist, respectively. However, women were made to ‘volunteer’ for death coerced to poison, put to the sword or drowned or set ablaze individually or collectively that is with other younger women or women and children (Butalia 1998 cited in Chakraborty, 2014, pg. 41-43) .

Some of the partition survivors were women who got abducted by ‘others’ and went through the identity crisis concerning the dominant ethnic community. They were abducted as Hindu (dominant community of India) married as Muslim (dominant community of Pakistan) and again recovered as Hindus and eventually had to go through a lot of bitter and painful “choices”. Women who were brought back ‘home’ after getting abducted, following the 1947 partition period with Pakistan, weren’t given choice to decide their home. It was assumed that Hindu women will retreat to India while Muslim women will be transmitted to Pakistan (during 1947 partition). Their space of home could have changed wasn’t given consideration. It wasn’t the boundary of domestic that defined home but it was the boundary of a nation, yet, they met the fate of non-acceptance from their natal families. In theory, everyone had a choice to move or stay but in practice staying on was virtually impossible. The ‘choice’ of whether to move, stay or return was a decision being made for women, by the patriarchal nation-state and their families. Women’s agency wasn’t a principal concern in any of the conflicts and its aftermath .

The partition of violence affected the everyday world and the lives of women. This concept of the “everyday world” was promulgated by Dorothy Smith (1987). She maintains that “everyday world” refers to lived reality in the private sphere in which women’s representation and gendered lives on the domestic space gets effected and affected by the major events in the political sphere – “the domain of men”. The primary meaning of “everyday world” is to connect the political space with domestic (private) lives of women in a given historical instance. In other words, women survivors of partition have illustrated that there is a definite continuity between the “everyday world” and “extraordinary historical times” of the partition era. This everyday world consists of the private/domestic space in which a woman identifies herself’ and a ‘safe space’ as assumed by the patriarchal structure. However, in the partition violence, their ‘safe space’ gets threatened and compromised as they get dragged into the turmoil of public/political space where their male counterparts take an authoritative position but with no or negligible space for women. The patriarchal mechanisms decided everyday belonging of these women survivors. The fate of these women become tied to that of the nation-state or family and community which dictated how the women should live their life in post-partitioned independent India.

The partition violence and Indian nation-state – their efforts and narratives towards the women survivors- have played a crucial role in deconstruction and reconstruction of the women’s identity, space and role. It can be observed that the national belonging for all the partition women survivors was meditated through the institution of the heterosexual and patrilineal nuclear family and community concurrently they were disenfranchised as sexual commodities, patriarchal properties and communal commodities by the nation-state and their respective community and family. After partition, the Indian patriarchal state has explicitly infantilized women survivors by denying them to represent themselves and this process eventually has caused their disenfranchisement.

 

Akshara is a prospective PhD candidate and has completed her Master of Arts in Diplomacy, Law and Business (2020) from Jindal School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal Global University, Delhi-NCR, India. Presently, she is a Commissioning Editor in E-International Relations and Associate Editor of Law & Order.

Korean unification: what can Seoul learn from Berlin?

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By Carlotta Rinaudo

Image Credit: Flickr

“If we let Korea down, the Soviets will keep right on going and swallow up one place after another”, President Harry S. Truman, 1950.

As Truman spoke, North Korean forces were crossing the 38th parallel thereby invading the South, American troops were poised to intervene, and the Korean Peninsula was on the brink of becoming a first battleground of the nascent Cold War. Thus, in 1950 the Korean War began, and it has yet to conclude. While an armistice was agreed in 1953, no official peace treaty was ever signed, and the two Koreas have been divided by a demilitarized zone (DMZ) for almost 70 years. In this time their peoples have known very different lives and their societies have concurrently diverged, so that now, the peninsula is both governmentally and societally bifurcated.

North of the parallel we find a country pursuing its own variant of “Juche” Socialism, an ideology that promotes state control and economic self-reliance. However, Juche Socialism, in practice, has produced a very different reality. State control has transformed North Korea into a family-run kleptocracy, and the idea of economic self-reliance has instead made North Korea largely dependent on foreign aid. North Korean people have resorted to informal economics in order to survive, with women manufacturing goods in their homes and selling them in black markets. Furthermore, North Korea embraced the doctrine of “asymmetric escalation”, which sees the Kim family amassing stockpiles of nuclear weapons in order to protect their rule from exogenous pressure, including invasion and regime change. In contrast, South of the parallel, there is a highly-productive capitalist and democratic society, which has boomed into the 11th largest economy of the world, and is widely-known for its Samsung products, K-pop music, and pop-art lights.

Despite these drastic differences, the political elites of both countries advocate for the integration of the two Koreas. In 1972, President Kim Il Sung formulated the Three Charters of National Reunification, and The Arch of Reunification was erected in Pyongyang in 2001. In South Korea, a Ministry of Unification was established in 1969, with President Moon Jae-in pledging to achieve a reunification of the Korean Peninsula by 2045. Therefore, if unification is a possibility, what would be the implications?

The article aims to evaluate costs and benefits of a hypothetical reunification of the Korean Peninsula, assessing the case from a South Korean perspective. In a follow-up article, the same question will be tackled from a North Korean perspective.

The current situation on the Korean Peninsula can be compared to that of Germany during the Cold War: today’s North Korea and yesterday’s East Germany share a communist regime and an inefficient planned economy, while their counterparts adopted a democratic government and a market-based economy. Therefore, the German unification can provide valuable insights into the issues that the two countries would face should the Koreas become one again. It is exactly for this purpose that the German-Korean consultative body on unification issues was formed in 2010. What are, then, the implications at an economic, military, political and social level, if we draw from this German experience?

Many South Koreans fear that the process would simply be too expensive, with Seoul having to carry the burden.
In 2017, South Korea’s per capita GDP was $29,743, while North Korea’s was $1,214, the former being twenty-five times bigger than the latter. It would doubtless be a long process for the two to converge. Similarly, today the Eastern part of Germany still lags behind its Western counterpart, with salaries being only 84% of those in the West, and Germans often migrating from East to West as most of the major companies are headquartered there. Today German citizens still pay the so-called “Soli”, a controversial solidarity tax that is invested by the German government to fill the gap between West and East.

Despite these concerns, experts suggest that long-term economic benefits of a Korean unification will outweigh its costs, just as it has in Germany, first of all by creating a single market of 75 million people. North Korean citizens would be liberated from starvation and malnutrition, while South Korea would benefit from a significant injection of cheap labor in the economic system, but also from a huge amount of natural resources like coal, iron ore, and rare earth materials, which abounds in the Northern half of the Peninsula.

At a geo-economic level, North Korea’s geographical position has always isolated South Korea from import and exports via land. With a united Korean Peninsula, this would no longer be the case: Seoul could finally connect with the rest of the world via rail, with goods being shipped from Busan to Europe, whilst also integrating Pyongyang in global supply chains. Meanwhile, it could enable the construction of pipelines that transport natural gas from Russia to Seoul.

Nonetheless, the denuclearisation and demilitarisation of North Korea still pose a challenge.
East Germany was a base for Soviet nuclear weapons, but it did not have arsenals of its own. Similarly, at the point of unification, the 175,000 soldiers of the East German Soviet National People’s Army either left the army, or simply joined the military force of West Germany by swapping their uniforms.

In terms of military capabilities, North Korea is a different case. It has an army of 1,2 million, a stockpile of various missiles, chemical and biological weapons, and more than 60 nuclear warheads. It is one of the world’s largest conventional military forces, and the question of how to deal with it still remains largely unanswered.

In addition, how to ensure that the political elites that violated the rights of the North Korean people will be held accountable? What will happen to the Kim family? How to build a future where the North Korean people are equally represented in the government and other spheres? Germany still has a long way to go in this sense: while some “Eastern Germans” have become top political leaders, such as Chancellor Angela Merkel and former President Joachim Gauck, very few of the business leaders of big German companies were born on the Eastern side of the Berlin wall.

Finally, integration will come with social consequences.

Although the injection of cheap labor might be advantageous to big companies, it could also reduce the salaries of South Korean workers, or even replace them, generating further discontent among a society that, like the Japanese one, already suffers from a high level of old-age poverty.

In addition, North Koreans might struggle to fit in the capitalist world of South Korea.

Thae Yong-ho, one of the most famous North Korean defectors, once declared that for North Koreans in the South “the first difficulty (…) is that they don’t know how to choose”, because “in North Korea there is no opportunity to choose.”

After a period of timid and cordial relations, tensions between North and South Korea recently escalated again, with North Korea blowing up the inter-Korean liaison office and executing a South Korean official last September.

Although a Korean unification often appears like an impossibility, the issue should nonetheless remain open to discussion and the search for new solutions, especially regarding economic balance, North Korea’s huge military capabilities, the Kim family, and the integration of North Korean citizens.

Unification is a process, not an end-state: in Germany it has not concluded yet – in the Korean Peninsula, it might take even longer.

 

Carlotta is a MA candidate in International Affairs at the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London. After completing her BA in Interpreting and Translation, she moved to the Middle East and developed a strong interest in the MENA region, North Korea, Cybersecurity, and the implications of the rise of China. Carlotta has written on a number of Italian publications on the Hong Kong protests and other forms of political unrest.

Strife Feature – Political leaders with military backgrounds: a comparison of India and the US

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by Saawani Raje

George Washington at the Battle of Monmouth

The US and India are similar nations in many respects. They have both had fairly stable trajectories of progress in the course of their democratic histories. Covering large areas of geographical territory, they are both nationalistic territorial nations with a colonial past. Significantly, they both have a history of successful civilian rule uninterrupted by military coups or takeovers. However, they appear to differ in one important aspect— in America, civilian leaders having military experience is common and politically advantageous. Multiple Presidents were serving Generals prior to ascending to the Presidency. In India by contrast, it is rare for political leaders at any level to have come from a military background.

This difference is interesting because it speaks to the civil-military ‘problematique’, which has been a central concern of civil-military relations theorists for the past several decades. This problematique is the challenge of reconciling a military strong enough to do anything civilians ask them to, with a military subordinate enough to do only what civilians authorise them to do.[1] A key question in this civil-military debate is the role of the military in the polity of a nation, especially in its decision-making process. A brief survey of military involvement in political decision-making in two of the world’s biggest democracies— India and the US — brings forth an interesting distinction. The difference in American and Indian attitudes towards military participation in politics, I argue, stems from the role conflict has played in the creation of both these nations.

 

Military involvement in the United States

In a TIME article of April 2016, Mark Thompson discusses why Americans wanted a military general in the White House. Looking back at American history, the trend of military leaders eventually becoming civilian leaders is fairly typical. George Washington was the first general who went on to serve as the President of the United States, and twelve Generals have won American Presidential elections since. Significantly, only twelve out of the forty-three American presidents have never served in the military. In the 2017-2018 Congress, 102 members (18.8% of the leadership) had served or were serving in the military.

A 2017 Gallup poll shows that American society’s confidence in the military remains high, at 72%. Additionally, public endorsement of presidential candidates by retired Generals and military officers has become a mainstay of the presidential race. In the 2004 Bush-Kerry presidential race, twelve retired generals and admirals endorsed Kerry, himself a military veteran. Kerry’s Vietnam war record became a matter of controversy, and General Merrill McPeak eventually appeared in television advertisements defending Kerry and his service in Vietnam. On the other side, retired General Tommy Franks who had the distinguished military record of being the architect of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, endorsed George Bush and went on to speak in support of his candidacy at the Republican National Convention. In 2008, Colin Powell , a retired four-star general and the National Security Advisor under George Bush (2001-2005) famously crossed party lines to endorse Obama on national television. Political endorsements from military leaders reached a fever pitch during the Clinton-Trump race. In September 2016, Clinton touted 100 endorsements from former military leaders after Trump displayed 88 retired military figures who backed his campaign. The involvement of military officials in American politics, whether as leaders or leader-makers continues unabated.

 

Civil-military gap in India

The situation in India could not be more dissimilar. The civil-military dissonance is so pronounced that there seems to be no evidence of polls, policy briefs or literature that even engage with the notion of a civilian leader with military experience taking office. This lack of any evidence points to how deeply entrenched the civil-military separation is in the minds of the Indian populace and political and military elites alike. Since 1947 (when India became independent), there has not been a single Prime Minister with military experience. Defence analyst Nitin Gokhale opines that the ‘havoc’ wrought by ‘an indifferent polity and insensitive bureaucracy’ to India’s armed forces ‘has hit the ordinary soldier hard….The Indian soldier today stands at the crossroads, confused about his status in the society and unsure about his own role in a nation led by “faux peaceniks”’. Retired military men make rare appearances on news channels— never the campaign trail— and restrict themselves to talking about military matters. In recent years, the military has shown an increased willingness to get involved in the polity. In 2007, for example, the Indian army opposed the demilitarisation of the Siachen glacier. The Army chief General J J Singh publicly expressed his views more than once in a country where it is extremely unusual for military leadership to vocalise their disagreement with civilian leaders. These instances are, however, not a mainstay of political debates around policymaking and certainly never crossing the border into civilian leadership, in sharp contrast to the US.

 

Role of military conflict as influencing factor

This poses an interesting question: What could be the factors that influence this significant difference in the way military involvement in politics is perceived in the US as opposed to India? I would argue that the role military conflict played in the formation of a nation and national identity is a significant factor in influencing attitudes to military involvement in politics. Military conflict played a significant role in the development of the US as a nation. The US has been in a state of either declared war or conflict for 79 of the 179 years, from just before the founding of Jamestown until 1785, nominally known as the end of the Revolution. It thus had a predominantly military experience of colonialism. The military also played a crucial role in the War of Revolution marking the end of colonial rule. The War was an event with mass participation— according to some historical estimates, two out of every five white American men who could serve did so either in the state militias or the Continental Army.

Royster proposes that military service was the source of an ‘American’ character.[2] The Revolutionary War created a ‘dual army’ tradition that combined a citizen-soldier reserve (which was the militia) with a small professional force ‘that provided military expertise and staying power’.[3] This democratised and nationalised military service has lasting legacies on the psyche of American society regarding attitudes to military service. Furthermore, Congress in 1775 created the Continental Army commanded by George Washington. This Continental Army was built on ideological motivation and a sense of loyalty that surprised most foreign observers. Baron von Closen of the French army exclaimed: ‘It is incredible that soldiers composed of men of every age, even children of fifteen, of whites and blacks, almost naked, unpaid, and rather poorly fed, can march so well and withstand fire so steadfastly!’[4]

This and Washington’s appointment as General of the Continental Army despite the ‘hypersensitive fear of military ascendancy’ are significant.[5] Washington remained deferential to Congress even when its inefficiency threatened the army’s survival. Despite the prominent position held by the military, Washington set forth an example of civil supremacy while commanding the army. This attitude and his later Presidency could have contributed to erasing civilian suspicion of ex-military men becoming civilian leaders. In sum, it can be argued that armed conflict and the military experience— whether for independence or for individual rights as Englishmen within the empire played an intrinsic role in shaping the American identity as a society and nation.

 

Transfer of Power from the British to Indian government on 15 August 1947

 

Indian independence and the military

The Indian experience of the handover of power was very different. First, unlike in America, the Transfer of Power from the British to the Indian government was a predominantly administrative procedure that did not involve physical military confrontation. The army was seen as a tool by the British and Indian civilian leaders who used it for their own political ends. Second, the British recruitment policy for the colonial Indian army focused on drawing recruits from select communities, alienating the armed forces from the rest of the population involved in the nationalist movement. This was in contrast to the experience of the US militias, which democratised and nationalised military service and experience. This also built a deep-rooted suspicion between the civilian leaders of India and the military (which was headed by British commanders-in-chief for a few years even after India became independent). This suspicion led to institutional arrangements separating civilian and military spheres. The position of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces was abolished, soon after independence in 1947, and the President of India (a nominal civilian head) was made the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.[6] Significantly, a Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs occupied the top tier of higher defence management in India. This was a purely civilian committee and included senior ministers from the Prime Minister’s Cabinet.[7]

Additionally, lasting attitudes of civilian and military leaders also did not allow the overlapping of military and civilian leadership to the extent that was prevalent in America. In September 1946, a year before India became independent, Jawaharlal Nehru (the first Prime Minister of India) wrote to the Indian Commander-in-Chief Sir Auchinleck. As a ‘coup-proofing’ strategy, Nehru felt ‘the need to make the army firmly responsible to India’s elected representatives in the future’. This resulted in Indian institution-building regarding defence and military matters that continuously evaluates the army to prevent it from getting ‘out of control’. For example, the Commander-in-Chief was removed from the Cabinet in 1946— a privilege he had enjoyed thus far— to keep him out of political decision-making. Additionally, all significant communications and decisions have to go through civilian officials and politicians at the Ministry of Defence little or no military experience. Thus, decision-making in India with regard to military matters was firmly established as the preserve of the civilian bureaucrats.

 

Conclusions

It can be proposed that the stake of military conflict in the creation of an independent nation is a factor influencing social and political attitudes towards the mixing of civilian and military spheres. This is not to argue that this is the only factor. The time periods in which India and the US secured independence are drastically different. Furthermore, India follows the Westminster parliamentary system and not the Presidential system, which influences public opinion on political leadership in general. Additionally, while India has been involved in a protracted conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir since independence, it has not had the direct experience of experiencing the World Wars or Cold War as an independent state or major party. These factors contribute to civilian perceptions of military involvement in political spheres.

Lawrence Freedman in his recent work ‘The Future of War: A History’ emphasises the need to keep context central to the study of war and conflict.[8] Differences such as the one identified in this article raise pertinent questions about the applicability of seemingly generalisable civil-military relations theories. This post makes a case for viewing these theories through specific historical contexts.

 

Saawani Raje is a Doctoral Candidate in the King’s India Institute. Her work focuses on civil-military relations in India and decision-making during military crises. She holds an MA in South Asia and Global Security from King’s College London and a BA from the University of Cambridge. Her other areas of research interest include security studies, strategy, diplomatic history and South Asian politics. You can follow her @saawaniraje

Notes:

[1] Peter Feaver, “The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control,” Armed Forces and Society 23, no. 2 (January 1996): 149- 78.

[2] Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People At War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1979).

[3] Alan Millet, Peter Maslowski and William Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012 (New York: Free Press, 2012), 165.

[4] Millet, Maslowski and Feis, For the Common Defense, 175.

[5] Millet, Maslowski and Feis, For the Common Defense, 179.

[6] Ayesha Ray. The Soldier and the State in India. (California: Sage Publications, 2013), 37.

[7] Ayesha Ray in Harsh Pant (ed.) The Handbook of Indian Defence Policy (New Delhi: Routledge India 2015).

[8] Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History (London: Allen Lane, 2017).

 

Image Source:

Banner/image 1: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~cjd327/military.html

Image 2: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/india/images/9/9f/Transfer_of_power_in_India%2C_1947.jpg