London Calling: How does India look from afar? Looming world power or dysfunctional democracy? And what’s happening in Britain, and the West, that India needs to know about and perhaps learn from? This fortnightly column helps forge the connections so essential in our globalising world.
Every sizable nation has border areas, remote from the capital, which have their own identity, culture, concerns, and fault lines. All too often, distance means that the issues of these liminal regions are not well understood in the centres of power. Few people who take the big decisions make the journey. Those who live in these outlying regions too often feel scorned and neglected.
When tensions explode and grab the spotlight, news media and politicians scratch their heads and wonder what’s going wrong. A soothing balm is applied – or sometimes a show of strength is staged; the turbulence abates; the caravan moves on. But the underlying issues persist. And the region remains, as far as most of the country is concerned, out of sight and out of mind.
It has been long time since I have been to Manipur, but I recall being shocked when a senior civil servant spoke of his trip to Kolkata as ‘going to India’. Quite a few of the top administrators didn’t want to be there. The myriad divisions in Manipur were exacerbated by the lack of jobs – I remember a cycle rickshaw driver telling me he was a graduate.
One evident change is the number of youngsters from the smaller north-eastern states who have headed to India’s big cities to study and find work. On a personal level, good for them. But it’s not so good for those they leave behind when many of the brightest and best feel that they have no future in their hometown.
The fault line in Northern Ireland
Over the past week, I’ve been in a region which was for many decades Britain’s forgotten corner: Northern Ireland.
In both London and the region’s capital, Belfast, eyebrows were raised when I said I was making the journey simply as a tourist. That wasn’t quite the whole story. My grandfather was born in Belfast, apprenticed in what were once the busiest shipyards in the world (the Titanic was Belfast-built) … and then forced out.
East Belfast street art. Photo: Andrew Whitehead
That was a century ago. The family was mixed, part-Protestant and part-Catholic, and at the time of tension, they had to flee the fiercely Protestant part of the city where they lived. They moved to Glasgow, Scotland’s principal city, where my grandfather was able to get work as a shipyard boilermaker.
The fault line in Northern Ireland is religious, cultural, and political. The region has a narrow majority of Protestants who, by-and-large, see themselves as British; the large Catholic minority regard themselves as Irish, and many want to break away from Britain and become part of the Irish Republic which constitutes the larger part of the island of Ireland.
Belfast peace wall. Photo: Andrew Whitehead
For decades, with London’s connivance, the Northern Protestants ran their region in a way which trampled on the rights and dignity of the minority community. In the 1960s, young Catholics – inspired by the civil rights movement in the United States – took to the streets demanding social and political justice. Time and again, they were brutally dispersed by the overwhelmingly Protestant local police.
Deprived of any sense of political agency, some young Catholics took to violence.
The Irish Republican Army, a left-wing and nationalist armed group, staged what can only be described as a low-intensity guerrilla war against the British state. That, in turn, prompted Protestant hardliners to set up their own militia forces and fight back. Tens of thousands of British troops were deployed. Much of the bombing and shooting was at civilian targets. The fear and terror was evident across the region.
What Northern Ireland euphemistically calls ‘the Troubles’ persisted for 30 years and claimed 3,720 lives. And, this happened in a region with a population of under two million. It was eventually brought to an end by political rather than military means. Tony Blair’s big achievement as British prime minister was to initiate and then implement a peace process – hand-in-hand with the government of the Irish Republic – which embraced both Protestants and Catholics, including the gunmen on both sides.
A local system of power-sharing was devised, the police force was completely revamped, public and private investment (quite a bit from the Indian companies) was encouraged, and the armed militant groups agreed to abandon violence. Northern Ireland remains part of Britain but the option to leave the UK and unite with the Irish Republic remains open.
Over the years, there’s been much talk – at one point quietly encouraged by London – of the Irish peace process as a model for resolving the Kashmir conflict. But some of the lessons of how political will and flexibility can help an area of deep and lasting conflict could equally be relevant to parts of the Northeast.
Northern Ireland remains divided. There are now more towering ‘peace’ walls separating Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods than there were at the height of the violence. Almost all local youngsters go to schools with a religious foundation and so have few friends from the other community.
Power sharing has regular crises and hardline parties have outflanked more moderate political forces. But this tension doesn’t play out in the streets. There are occasional violent incidents, but by-and-large Northern Ireland is at peace. And, later this year, it’s likely to get its first Catholic First minister, representing a party which was once the political wing of the IRA. A generation ago, that would have been unimaginable.
Everyone I talked to in Belfast agreed that life has improved in the last two decades. We weren’t by any means the only tourists last week – and one of the most popular activities is a guided taxi tour to see the political street art which is now the most visible aspect of the old tribal divide. When the ‘Troubles’ have become a tourist attraction, you know that times really have changed.
Andrew Whitehead is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham in the UK and a former BBC India Correspondent.
