Book review: Atul Mishra, The Sovereign Lives of India and Pakistan: Post-partition Statehood in South Asia
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23210230231203794 |
| Author | Robert Mizo |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
344 Book Reviews
management of the ethnic conflict in Manipur that erupted in May 2023 has shown that the engine of
internal security is driven by political masters and that the question of quelling violence and safeguarding
citizens, is a political one.
Sharmila Purkayastha
Retired, Department of English, Miranda House
University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
E-mail: sharmila.purkayastha@mirandahouse.ac.in
Atul Mishra, The Sovereign Lives of India and Pakistan: Post-partition Statehood in South Asia. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2021, 300 pp., `1,495.
DOI: 10.1177/23210230231203794
This book is a thoughtful attempt to reveal why the preoccupation with sovereignty, as an end in itself,
by the two post-colonial states has imperilled the relationship between them and their treatment of their
minority communities. The book refreshingly stays away from the usual framing of India and Pakistan
as sovereign states with botched bilateral relations. Rather, it seeks to unravel the root cause of the
enduring rivalry between the two through a critical analysis of what ‘sovereignty’ has meant for them
and how obsessively they have sought to pursue and preserve it. The chequered relationship the two
states endure is a result of this obsession and the anxieties it induces.
The book shows that the perpetual pursuit of sovereignty in a substantive political sense by India and
Pakistan has led to the ‘deprioritization’ of the people and has encouraged statism and bilateral animosity.
In the pursuit of sovereignty, the two states have come to share three intertwining problems—the problem
of national identity, of minorities, and the territorialization of Kashmir.
The book begins with an elaborate investigation into the historical backdrop to the partition of the
erstwhile British colony. It presents the story of partition essentially as the politicization and the eventual
separation of the two largest groups of the subcontinent into two states. Drawing on the historical
developments of the decade preceding independence and partition, this section most importantly
underlines how the partition was not an inevitable outcome of the ideological conflict between two rival
nationalisms as is popularly perceived, but a contingent solution of the deadlock caused by the interplay
of the divergent interests of the Congress, the Muslim League, and the British. The author effectively
underlines the ambiguity surrounding the idea of ‘Pakistan’, which he then uses to help explain the
massive chaos and violence that followed the partition.
Mishra deals with the question of homogenous national identity formation by the two states in the
realms of ideology, politics, and policy. Mishra persuasively traces how identity building in India
essentially changed from the idea of India as a secular and composite nation, as espoused by Jawaharlal
Nehru, to the more recent conception of India as a Hindu Nation. Similarly, Pakistan’s original effort at
creating a national identity based on a secular democratic political order ended with the Islamization of
the polity.
Further, Mishra elaborately documents the processes of political exclusion and ‘minoritization’
(via marginalization) of existing minority communities in Pakistan and India. Minorities, defined here as
groups existing within the boundaries of the two countries but excluded from their national spaces, have
been subject to different forms of ‘disempowerment’ in the two states. Mishra argues that Indian Muslims
experience exclusion and disempowerment in three ways—via a political discourse of suspicion over
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