A Nation Is Known By the Enemy It Keeps

A man is known by the company he keeps – or so goes the old, albeit gendered, moral saying. But to make sense of international realpolitik today, it must be recast: a nation is known by the enemy it keeps. This has been most evident in the recent India-Pakistan conflict and the frenzied debates around ‘hyphenation’ and ‘de-hyphenation’ that it has sparked.

Not so long ago, India was competing with China to be the regional hegemon in South Asia. In contrast to the authoritarianism and one-party dominance of the Chinese Communist Party, India’s story as the largest democracy, with its unparalleled plurality and diversity, was being proudly projected to the West, accompanied by grand claims of playing guru to the world.

After the horrific terror attack in Pahalgam on April 22, whatever has transpired on the military and diplomatic fronts in May, is largely perceived to have undone this binary. In global conversations, Pakistan has replaced China as India’s defining enemy once again.

Equality in war

Sidestepping the question of whether military action was strategically necessary, the move has, in effect, conferred an undeserved sense of parity upon Pakistan. Unlike the stark disparities in socio-economic and political indicators – where Pakistan lags significantly, as even its staunchest supporters admit – the battlefield, extending to the seas and airspaces, has equalised the two sides, as is wont in any war.

Modern states follow a hierarchy in dealing with their domestic and international adversaries. While an ordinary criminal is subject to and punishable under the law, those accused of terrorism are often dealt with globally according to a much lower standard of legality. The enemy, on the other hand, exists beyond legality and illegality, as a legitimate political opponent. The threat or act of war is enough to give it equality despite its differential standing in all other respects.

This dimension of equality in international conflict has most sharply been revealed in the Russia-Ukraine war. Although Ukraine is a considerably smaller power compared to Russia, which harbours imperial aspirations under Vladimir Putin, it has managed to hold out against all odds – much to the surprise of the rest of the world.

Strategically, the enhanced role of technology in warfare, even surpassing traditional military confrontation, has narrowed the gap between major and minor powers, further reinforcing equality. Gaza presents a vivid contrast, where the lack of equality, stemming from the absence of a Palestinian state, has rendered its people into objects of unspeakable violence and devastation. Any comparison of Pakistan with Palestine, as commonly made on social media, is therefore completely mistaken. Pakistan, like India, has nuclear weapons at its disposal and can compete in war as an equal state power.

Enemy and self-identity

Beyond victory and defeat on the battlefield, the enemy has historically been pivotal and definitive in shaping a political power’s self-identity. This was evident during the Cold War, when the rival Soviet and US blocks defined themselves against each other. At the time, the communist scare in Europe led to a notable compromise between labour and capital, manifesting in the form of social democracy, followed by the rise of neoliberalism. Subsequently, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ‘threat’ of communism was replaced by Islamophobia, which came to determine global policies in the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’.

Yet today, we find ourselves at a juncture where none of the previous fault lines help make sense of contemporary international politics. After the American withdrawal from Afghanistan and the return of Taliban rule, the re-election of Donald Trump – combined with his preference for economic protectionism on one hand and the rhetoric of political expansionism on the other – threatens to dismantle the modicum of international order that survived the Cold War, even with the US as the sole remaining superpower. With no clear ideological polarity dividing rival camps, the world appears to be in flux, marked by shifting global alliances and allegiances.

Perhaps an old-fashioned Maoist might observe that there is disorder in the heavens – and even welcome it as the blooming of a thousand flowers. However, the real problem is that there is no sight of a genuine regional or transnational solidarity emerging from this apparent chaos. Ongoing wars and war-like conditions with no imminent end have become the new normal.

A political dead end?

Over the last decade, the more populist leaders have emphasised the distinctiveness of their ethnic cultures at the domestic level, the more this has paradoxically resulted in the indistinguishability of nation-states at the international level. Whereas the global arena was previously a site for the clash of ideologies, it has now become a shifting network of transactional friendships based purely on needs and interests. The enemy, too, has lost its ideological heft and has been reduced to a mere placeholder, entirely contingent on the ever-changing trends in domestic and international power politics.

The friend-enemy distinction has politically been salient to any project of nationalism. But whatever other excesses Indian nationalism may have been guilty of, it at least upheld the foundational imagination at the time of independence – that the subcontinent had not been divided into a Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Rather, Pakistan had broken away with its two-nation theory from an India which continued to offer a secular and inclusive vision of nationalism to all its citizens. Even the most vociferous critics of India in Pakistan have lately, but loudly, begun to acknowledge this. India, though, has come a long way from its founding vision, and very much resembling the global decline of ideologies, has lost the keenness to distinguish itself as a universal and progressive idea.

When commentators and politicians express anxiety about India’s re-hyphenation with Pakistan, all that they are concerned about is the country’s global stature and prestige. If forging closer links with the West as a counter to China was meant to position India as a rising regional power, getting saddled with Pakistan now implies a considerable diminution of that status. Caught between its enmity with China and Pakistan, India’s present situation reflects a deeper internal malaise, whereby it has lost touch with the ethical moorings that once inspired it to be at the forefront of fashioning new global imaginaries in the wake of decolonisation. We may have reached a dead end in our international relations. Yet, if a fresh start is ever to be made, the powers that be must remember that the path to such a future lies through the past and its unrealised possibilities.

Salmoli Choudhuri is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Humboldt University, Berlin, and an Assistant Professor of Law at National Law School of India University Bengaluru (on leave) (salmoli.choudhuri@nls.ac.in)

Moiz Tundawala is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Oxford, and an Associate Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School, Delhi NCR, India (on leave) (moiz.tundawala@law.ox.ac.uk)

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