Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T04:13:26.978Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Lines of (In)Convenience: Sovereignty and Border-Making in Postcolonial South Asia, 1947–1965

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2017

Elisabeth Leake  and
Daniel Haines
Elisabeth Leake
Affiliation:
Elisabeth Leake ([email protected]) is Lecturer in International History at the University of Leeds.
Daniel Haines
Affiliation:
Daniel Haines ([email protected]) is Senior Lecturer in Environmental History at the University of Bristol.
Get access

Abstract

Border studies in South Asia privilege everyday experiences, and the constructed nature of borders and state sovereignty. This article argues that state elites in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan during the 1950s and 1960s actively pursued territorial sovereignty through border policy, having inherited ambiguous colonial-era frontiers. By comparing security and development activities along the Durand Line, between Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the better-known case of India and Pakistan's ceasefire line in Kashmir, this article demonstrates that the exercise of sovereignty required a bounded space that only borders could provide and a rejection of competing border zone authorities. The local specificity of each border, however, created the historical conditions in which political elites acted. Combining an archival history methodology with conceptual insights from political geography and critical international relations, this article uses an original integration of two important Asian border spaces into one analysis to highlight tensions between sovereignty's theory and practice.

Keywords

AfghanistanbordersconflictIndiainternational relationsPakistanSouth Asiasovereigntyterritoriality
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 76 , Issue 4 , November 2017 , pp. 963 - 985
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

List of References

Adelman, Jeremy, and Aron, Stephen. 1999. “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History.” American Historical Review 104(3):814–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Agnew, John. 1994. “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory.” Review of International Political Economy 1(1):53–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Agnew, John. 2008. “Borders on the Mind: Re-framing Border Thinking.” Ethics & Global Politics 1(4):175–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ali, Mehrunnisa, ed. 1990. Pak-Afghan Discord: A Historical Perspective (Documents 1855–1979). Karachi: Pakistan Study Centre, University of Karachi.Google Scholar
Barkin, J. Samuel, and Cronin, Bruce. 1994. “The State and the Nation: Changing Norms and the Rules of Sovereignty in International Relations.” International Organization 48(1):107–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bashir, Shahzad, and Crews, Robert D., eds. 2012. Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baud, Michiel, and van Schendel, Willem. 1997. “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands.” Journal of World History 8(2):211–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blom Hansen, Thomas, and Stepputat, Finn. 2006. “Sovereignty Revisited.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35:295–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruslé, Laetitia Perrier. 2013. “The Border as a Marker of Territoriality: Multi-Scalar Perspectives and Multi-Agent Processes in a South American Borderland Region.” Geopolitics 18(3):584–611.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chatterji, Joya. 1999. “The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal's Border Landscape, 1947–52.” Modern Asian Studies 33(1):185–242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chester, Lucy P. 2009. Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Collins, Michael. 2013. “Decolonisation and the ‘Federal Moment.’” Diplomacy & Statecraft 24(1):21–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cons, Jason. 2013. “Narrating Boundaries: Framing and Contesting Suffering, Community, and Belonging in Enclaves along the India-Bangladesh Border.” Political Geography 35:37–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 2014. Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Copland, Ian. 1991. “The Princely States, the Muslim League, and the Partition of India in 1947.” International History Review 13(1):38–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cullather, Nicholas. 2010. The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daechsel, Markus. 2015. Islamabad and the Politics of International Development in Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dawn . 1957a. “No Rest till Kashmir Is Freed.” July 26.Google Scholar
Dawn . 1957b. “Pro-Plebiscite Rallies All Over [India-]Held Kashmir.” July 5.Google Scholar
Dawn . 1962. “Indian Planes Fly Over Azad Area.” January 17.Google Scholar
Devji, Faisal. 2013. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. London: Hurst & Co.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dhulipala, Venkat. 2014. Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elden, Stuart. 2006. “Contingent Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity and the Sanctity of Borders.” SAIS Review of International Affairs 26(1):11–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elden, Stuart. 2010. “Land, Terrain, Territory.” Progress in Human Geography 34(6):799–817.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, Michael Ross, and Bunck, Julie Marie. 1996. “What Constitutes the Sovereign State?” Review of International Studies 22(4):381–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gellner, David, ed. 2013. Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, Eliga H. 2012. Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gupta, Sisir. 1966. Kashmir: A Study in India-Pakistan Relations. London: Asia Publishing House.Google Scholar
Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice. 2013. “Nation-Building or State-Making? India's North-East Frontier and the Ambiguities of Nehruvian Developmentalism, 1950–1959.” Contemporary South Asia 21(1):22–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haines, Daniel. 2015. “A ‘Commonwealth Moment’ in South Asian Decolonization.” In Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence, eds. James, Leslie and Leake, Elisabeth, 185–202. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
Häkli, Jouni. 2008. “Re-Bordering Spaces.” In The SAGE Handbook of Political Geography, eds. Cox, Kevin R., Low, Murray, and Robinson, Jennifer, 471–82. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haroon, Sana. 2011. Frontier of Faith: A History of Religious Mobilisation in the Pakhtun Tribal Areas c. 1890–1950. Karachi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Herbst, Jeffrey, McNamee, Terence, and Mills, Greg, eds. 2012. On the Fault Line: Managing Tensions and Divisions within Societies. London: Profile Books Ltd.Google Scholar
Hopkins, B. D. 2008. The Making of Modern Afghanistan. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hussain, Delwar. 2013. Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh/India Border. London: Hurst & Co.Google Scholar
Jalal, Ayesha. 2014. The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Reece. 2009. “Sovereignty and Statelessness in the Border Enclaves of India and Bangladesh.” Political Geography 28(6):373–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Reece. 2011. “Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102(3):685–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kashmir in the Security Council . 1952. Srinagar: Lalla Rook Publications.Google Scholar
Khilnani, Sunil. 1997. The Idea of India. London: Hamish Hamilton.Google Scholar
Korbel, Joseph. 1953. “The Kashmir Dispute after Six Years.” International Organization 7(4):498–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leake, Elisabeth. 2017. The Defiant Border: The Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization, 1936–65. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lourie, Sylvain. 1955. “The United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan.” International Organization 9(1):19–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maier, Charles S. 2012. “Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood.” In A World Connecting: 1870–1945, ed. Rosenberg, Emily S., 29–284. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Mansergh, Nicholas, and Moon, Penderel, eds. 1982. The Transfer of Power 1942–7. Vol. 11. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.Google Scholar
Marsden, Magnus, and Hopkins, Benjamin D.. 2011. Fragments of the Afghan Frontier. London: Hurst & Co.Google Scholar
Marsden, Magnus, and Hopkins, Benjamin D., eds. 2013. Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier. London: Hurst & Co.Google Scholar
Mazower, Mark. 2009. No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ministry of External Affairs. 1959. Notes, Memoranda and Letters Exchanged and Agreements Signed between the Governments of India and China 1954–1959. Delhi: Government of India.Google Scholar
Omrani, Bijan. 2009. “The Durand Line: History and Problems of the Afghan-Pakistan Border.” Asian Affairs 40(2):177–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Panigrahi, D. N. 2009. Jammu and Kashmir, the Cold War, and the West. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Robinson, Francis. 1974. Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860–1923. London: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Roy, Srirupa. 2007. Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Rushbrook-Williams, L. F. 1957. “Inside Kashmir.” International Affairs 33(1):26–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saikal, Amin. 2012. Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival. London: I.B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Schetter, Conrad. 2005. “Ethnoscapes, National Territorialisation, and the Afghan War.” Geopolitics 10(1):50–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schofield, Victoria. 1996. Kashmir in the Crossfire. London: I.B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Anthony D. 1996. “Culture, Community and Territory: The Politics of Ethnicity and Nationalism.” International Affairs 72(3):445–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sneddon, Christopher. 2011. The Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir. London: Hurst & Co.Google Scholar
Stepan, Alfred, Linz, Juan J., and Yadav, Yogendra. 2011. Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Talbot, Ian. 1998. Pakistan: A Modern History. London: Hurst & Co.Google Scholar
Taylor, Peter J. 1994. “The State as Container: Territoriality in the Modern World-System.” Progress in Human Geography 18(2):151–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Times of India . 1949. “Cease-Fire Line in Kashmir: Joint Military Talks.” July 19.Google Scholar
Times of India . 1957. “The Root of the Matter.” January 15.Google Scholar
Van Schendel, Willem. 2002a. “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20(6):647–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Schendel, Willem. 2002b. “Stateless in South Asia: The Making of the India-Bangladesh Enclaves.” Journal of Asian Studies 61(1):115–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Schendel, Willem. 2004. The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia. London: Anthem Press.Google Scholar
Van Schendel, Willem, and Abraham, Itty, eds. 2005. Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Verkaiik, Oskar, Khan, Sarfraz, and Rehman, Samina. 2012. “Contesting the State of Exception in the Afghan-Pakistani Marchlands.” In Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities: Ethnographies of Human Mobilities in Asia, eds. Kalir, Barak and Sur, Malini, 55–74. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.Google Scholar
Walker, R. B. J. 1993. Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, Thomas M. 2014. “Borders: Cities, Boundaries, and Frontiers.” In A Companion to Urban Anthropology, ed. Nonini, Donald Macon, 103–19. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali. 2007. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2015. Kashmir's Contested Pasts: Narratives, Sacred Geographies, and the Historical Imagination. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Archival Sources

NAI (National Archives of India). 1948. EA 8(18)-IA/48. Najibullah Khan. Broadcast. February 3.Google Scholar
NAI (National Archives of India). 1953. EA 3/14/R&I/53. L. Rupchand. Annual political report for 1952 for Afghanistan. January 31.Google Scholar
NAI (National Archives of India). 1954a. EA 3/14/R&I/54-III. D. Sareen. Annual report for Jalalabad for 1953. April 8.Google Scholar
NAI (National Archives of India). 1954b. Progs., Nos. 6 (17)-K. Ministry of States, Kashmir Branch. Note for the File. November 1.Google Scholar
NAI (National Archives of India). 1957. UI/551-55/67. “Brief on Kashmir.” July.Google Scholar
NAI (National Archives of India). 1959. EA 5/2/R&I/59. H. L. Kashyap. Report for Jalalabad for September 1959. October 4.Google Scholar
NAI (National Archives of India). 1960. EA 6/1/R&I/60-I. J.N. Dhamija. Political report for Afghanistan for September 1960. October 5.Google Scholar
NAI (National Archives of India). 1963. 118(67)WII/63. Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. “Monthly Summary no. 209 for the Cabinet.” October.Google Scholar
NAI (National Archives of India). 1964. EA HI/1012/1/64. J. N. Dhamija. Handover notes. July 7.Google Scholar
NARA (US National Archives and Records Administration). 1952a. RG 84, UD 3063, Box 2. “Items of political interest from Pakistan press, August 3–9.” August 11.Google Scholar
NARA (US National Archives and Records Administration). 1952b. RG 84, UD 3063, Box 2. “Items of political interest from Pakistan press, August 30–September 13.” September 20.Google Scholar
NARA (US National Archives and Records Administration). 1955a. RG 84, UD 3064A, Box 47. US Embassy, Kabul, to US Embassy, Karachi. Telegram 326. May 13.Google Scholar
NARA (US National Archives and Records Administration). 1955b. RG 59, Lot Files 515.2. US Embassy, Colombo, to Office of South Asian Affairs, Department of State, Washington, DC (SOA). July 25.Google Scholar
NARA (US National Archives and Records Administration). 1955c. RG 84, UD 3064A, Box 50. US Consulate General, Lahore, to Department of State. FS dispatch 86. “Notes on Pakistan's Policy toward the Tribal Areas.” October 27.Google Scholar
NARA (US National Archives and Records Administration). 1955d. RG 84, UD 3064A, Box 50. US Consulate General, Lahore, to Department of State. Dispatch 86. “Conditions in the tribal territories.” November 4.Google Scholar
NARA (US National Archives and Records Administration). 1955e. RG 84, UD 3063, Box 8. US Embassy, Karachi, to Department of State, dispatch 360. November 15.Google Scholar
NARA (US National Archives and Records Administration). 1958. RG 59, CDF 690D.91322/5-2258. US Consulate, Lahore, to State Department. May 22.Google Scholar
NARA (US National Archives and Records Administration). 1959. RG 84, UD 3063, Box 21. Office of Foreign Affairs and Commonwealth Relations, Karachi, to Royal Afghan Embassy, Karachi. October 14.Google Scholar
NDC (Pakistan National Documentation Centre). 1950. Accession 10, 128-SRF vol. 1, 1949–50. Political agent, South Waziristan to M. Ahmad, Chief Secretary to NWFP government. DO 120/S-8/49. January 19.Google Scholar
NDC (Pakistan National Documentation Centre). 1952. 2(4)-PMS/5R. K. Shahabuddin to Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani, Minister for States and Frontier Regions. DO 124/GH. August 30.Google Scholar
NDC (Pakistan National Documentation Centre). 1957a. 13/CF/57 (14). Ministry of Kashmir Affairs, Government of Pakistan. “Annual Report of Activities up to 31 March 1957.”Google Scholar
NDC (Pakistan National Documentation Centre). 1957b. 13/CF/57 (14). Ministry of Kashmir Affairs, Government of Pakistan. “Fortnightly Summary no. 13 for the Cabinet for the Year 1957 (1–15 July 1957).”Google Scholar
NDC (Pakistan National Documentation Centre). 1958. Accession 10, 128-SFR vol. 3, 1951-60. Secretary to Government of West Pakistan, Tribal Affairs Department, to Joint Secretary to Government of Pakistan, Ministry of States and Frontier Regions. No. 2-57/TA/S. October 31.Google Scholar
UKNA (United Kingdom National Archives). 1949. DO 32/2995. UK Foreign Office to UK Ambassador to the United States. October 1.Google Scholar
UKNA (United Kingdom National Archives). 1958. DO 134/27. F. A. K. Harrison. “The North West Frontier of Pakistan.” May.Google Scholar
UKNA (United Kingdom National Archives). 1960. DO 35/8933. A. A. Golds, UKHC, Karachi, to H.A. Twist, CRO. June 28.Google Scholar