 Welcome to the third program in our series of great decisions co-sponsored by the Mead Public Library and the Sheboygan Branch of the American Association of University Women, an organization dedicated to empowering women and girls and advancing equity through advocacy, education, and research. Because of the pandemic, we are presenting our sessions virtually and are grateful to WSCS for filming the six programs. A Great Decisions is a project of the Foreign Policy Association, which also publishes a book about the timely topics. We are not offering books for sale this year, but you can call 1-800-477-5836 to order one. That's 1-800-477-5836. As always, we are indebted to Mead Librarian Jeannie Gartman for arranging the schedule for these programs. India and Pakistan is tonight's topic presented by Peter Kranstover, retired from USAID. Peter Kranstover spent close to 30 years serving the US government as a Foreign Service Officer with USAID in Washington, DC, Latin America, Africa, and most recently, Pakistan. He is a political science graduate of Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts and has graduate degrees in economic development and agricultural economics from Oxford University and the University of Wisconsin, respectively. A Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala, he spent his junior year of undergraduate study at the University of Madrid. He and his wife, Annie Lewandowski, who is an international development consultant, have three children and live in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Mr. Kranstover. It's a pleasure to be here this afternoon at the Mead Library and to speak to you a bit here about India and Pakistan, two of the most important countries in the world, certainly a couple of the most populous, India being the second most populous country in the world after China and Pakistan just most recently being indicated as the sixth most. My name's Peter Kranstover and I served with the federal government for approximately 30 years as a commissioned Foreign Service Officer with USAID, with the last assignment being in Pakistan a few years ago. I was reminded after agreeing to do something for the Mead Library regarding these two countries that it's such an interesting and complicated and unusual story about both of these places. And what I've done is to presume to sum up some of the recent history from the region in about 20 slides, which in no way does those countries or that particular history any kind of justice. So, and I'm reminded that when I came back to Wisconsin where I was born and raised and where I now live, that when people would ask me how it was, I'd seek to give them a little bit of an academic lesson in those two places, but quickly discovered that it was easier just to say that Pakistan in particular was just really tense during my time there, but an honor to serve there certainly during that time. So, I'm gonna give you some early background on the area and then move quickly to the post-World War II period, which is what we're most concerned about and which is perhaps a bit most germane, certainly to things that are going on at the moment in the world. An attempt to make sense of the historic tensions between India and Pakistan as it deals with both populist and nationalist positions on the part of current Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP party and Imran Khan, both of whom have come to power just in the past few years. So, just to get us located, pretty basic political map indicating where we are, Pakistan and India, both in relatively tough neighborhoods, the crossroads of civilization. These are, this is a political map that shows you modern-day boundaries, which in some ways, certainly with respect to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and indeed India are somewhat arbitrary. They're in one of the three places of the birth of civilization, the Indus Valley, and a geographic area that's been influenced and ruled over and lived in by Buddhists and Zoroastrians and Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Alexander the Great in 350, 360 BC came through here. It was ultimately in the 14 or 1500s then invaded two-by-central Asian Mongols who through the great leaders of Tamerlane and Babur and ultimately Akbar established a rather interesting and functional empire there for three to 400 years. The one that the British found and came to essentially incorporate themselves with for commercial reasons in the early 1600s. The East India Company that the Brits established there in the early 1600s was a government incorporated, London incorporated stock company and commercial trading company that the British began in an effort to essentially rule that particular part of the world. And indeed they did for quite some time through that somewhat quasi-governmental organization. And that's what established them there really until 1947 when partition occurred and we'll get into that a little bit later. But bookending that ancient period to the present day, we have certainly in the lifetime of some of us in any case the two great leaders of the modern nation state, Ali Jinnah on the left there who was the first prime minister of Pakistan but only unfortunately for about 11 months and of course Mahatma Gandhi who led the independence movement and whose cooperation ultimately along with the British envoy, Lord Mountbatten resulted in the partition of the subcontinent into present day Pakistan and India into what I should say was India and West Pakistan and East Pakistan now of course being Bangladesh. So just a couple of remarks regarding data on these places. I mentioned that Pakistan was the sixth largest country in the world and indeed it has a little over anywhere from 210 to 220 million people currently. India's got 1.35 billion at the moment and with a couple of numbers here you can see that their GDP growth has been quite healthy from 1990 to 2018. Pakistan had a growth rate of approximately 7% to 7.8% GDP growth rate over that almost 30 year period. India enjoyed a relatively similar rate of, although a little bit, not quite as robust as Pakistan's of some 3.8 to 5.3% and this has all been important because the relatively fast population growth rate in both of those countries and the fertility rates there. So you can see that the rate of growth so you've got densely populated places with relatively large elements of poverty that unfortunately have sort of harassed, if you will, the economic trajectory, economic growth trajectory of both of these places over the, since their independence certainly. Taking a look at the place that the British came upon in the 1600s and by the way the Portuguese got there a little bit before them with Vasco the Gamma having put down in present day Bombay. But the British came in and as you can see there were various elements and political frameworks that they came across and certainly a number of different both Hindu and Muslim elements that the British had to deal with and because of the fact that they didn't really confront a modern day nation state as we know it, the British essentially negotiated commercial agreements with any number of principalities and as we would say Maharajas to use a more common term in order to do trading and to establish themselves there. And since there wasn't really a centrally functioning and particularly strong central government at that time they really were able to sort of have their way particularly in the areas of Bombay and Calcutta and around Pondicherry there in the, what is the southeast and they were able to do this and get along for the most part at least in a commercial manner with the local inhabitants who for the most part were essentially their workers, their servants, their bankers in some instances certainly their producers of all kinds of elements and minerals and natural resources that the British were able to take back to Great Britain. The crown and the jewel, right? The jewel and the crown rather for as we say in the, which ultimately was given to Queen Victoria by the Indians. Today you've got this, at least a modern day political map here of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh since 1971 I should say. Now from 47 to 71, Bangladesh was known as East Pakistan. That's how it was partitioned. That's how it was established. And for some reason reflecting the desires of both Jena and Gandhi, although after some rather strenuous negotiations, everybody agreed that having a country of East Pakistan and West Pakistan despite its separation by some 1000 miles was a way to go in order to get partitioned. So as unusual as that type of arrangement was it did happen to reflect the fact that the British were breaking up their empire. It was right after World War II. The British weren't particularly interested in maintaining their presence there at least as colonial administrators. And not only that but communal riots between or amongst a number of different groups in particular of course the Hindus and the Muslims had begun, had been breaking out actually decades before over the years and getting increasingly difficult. So at the moment now we have Mr. Modi in power in India. Benin since May of 2014 as Prime Minister and he's only the second Prime Minister in India who has actually served a full term as a representative of the BJP or the Hindu nationalist party. And really the first one of the BJP which has, who has actually succeeded himself and is in his second term as head of that party. The BJP was formed in 1951 although it grows out of something called the National Auxiliary Society of Hindu Nationalists which formed way back in the 1920s and our national volunteer organization which was sort of a nationalist militia arm that was rather anti-British and was interested certainly in establishing itself as an influential Hindu group and wanted independence as did influential Muslim groups of course during that time. Modi is, has been here to the United States. He was here in 2019. He represents a, at least with respect to his overall party platform a somewhat inward looking kind of politics. He and his party reacted initially against the Congress party which has been really the predominant political party in India since partition in 47 beginning with Prime Minister Nehru whom the BJP Hindu Nationalists always thought had somehow accommodated or been a little soft on the Muslims who by the way make up about 15% of that 1.35 billion people in India at the moment which comes out if I do my math right to a little over 200 million people in the subcontinent there in India. So he and his people do represent a populist slightly right wing certainly nationalist position, ideological position regarding their management and political ideology in terms of how they're running India. We've had ups and downs with the Indians certainly in the 50s Nehru tilted a little bit towards the Russians. Pakistan always tilted a little bit towards the Chinese. Nehru appreciated the Russian economic model believe it or not at least in terms of big public sector institutions and economic planning. He was concerned nonetheless enough by the Russians as well as the Chinese that he actually came to Washington and visited with Kennedy. And in the early 60s he asks Kennedy for some air defense assistance. There was a Chinese Indian War in 1962 and a couple afterwards. And Kennedy agrees. And military hardware intelligence sharing occurs during that time. And as some of our economists in the State Department had seen at that time there was really a need for some economic development. So a relatively large economic development program begins to get moving there in India. Something called Public Law 480 comes in which is our grain export program that Eisenhower put into effect in 1954. We also asked and made negotiations at that time certainly with India and Pakistan so that they would basically get along. They India and Pakistan didn't necessarily see it that way. They were particularly interested in having decent relationships with us. But the existential question for both of these countries is what is my neighbor? IE, either Pakistan or India are going to do. And this is a reflection of some problems of course that occurred during partition. And partition comes about as I had mentioned earlier in 1947. And let me just jump here to show a quick piece here of current day Pakistan. But I wanted to get on to our current Prime Minister there, Imran Khan, and is a reflection of the kinds of things that keep Khan and Modi looking at each other in a relatively suspicious manner. They have met nonetheless and keep communications open. Khan unlike Modi who comes from a relatively humble background because he was a T-seller actually, Modi when he was eight or nine years old at the train station with his father and worked his way up through the party structure. Khan is from a relatively prosperous family in Lahore, the old ancient capital of the subcontinent. Went to Oxford and married an interesting and well-connected British French woman by the name of Jemima Goldsmith. And also to his adoring fans in any case was a world-class cricketer and brought the World Cup of Cricket to Pakistan in 92 if I remember correctly. But both of these fellows are extremely aware of their early history and the partition elements that were implemented in ultimately and unfortunately in a relatively violent way. And it was done as I say it as mentioned earlier in 47 but in a relatively quick way and during that summer. And it was because of not only those communal riots that I had mentioned earlier but also because of the fact that the British were basically tired of trying to maintain a lot of these overseas colonies. India and Pakistan are still members of the Commonwealth nonetheless. But the British government sent Lord Mountbatten shown here who's a member of the royal family to Delhi, the new Delhi to basically negotiate between Jena and Gandhi who you saw earlier. And he had about six or seven weeks and that was it. Now he had served there before he had been there before but he brought along a fellow sound public servant by the name of Radcliffe who was a lawyer never been to India before. And Mountbatten gave him some maps and a desk and things like this at a governance house there in Delhi and said you've got to basically give me a border here. And so Radcliffe sat down and he drew that border between present day India and Pakistan with really no appreciation of the kind of line that he was drawing. You can see the line that separates Pakistan and India. Well it happens to go through some of the most fertile farmland in the world there. Certainly in the subcontinent right through the Punjab. There's Punjab in Pakistan, there's also Punjab in India and also looked over to the east there and decided that and by the way Pakistan and Bangladesh were certainly Muslim majority places. And he put those lines in and presented those to Mountbatten and as tensions were rising Mountbatten accepted this and he said he wanted to get this taken care of and we wound up with Pakistan and we wound up with India. Let me get this back here in our present formulation. Well that was all right except for the fact that people panicked, Muslims in India went west and Hindus in Pakistan went east and panic and sectarian rivalries and efforts basically to loot other places took place over that period of time in 1947, August to say December of 47. And a lot of, perhaps a million people lost their lives in that particular timeframe. Trying to get to what both parties happen to believe were safer areas. So all of this is a result of decades of tensions, a rising consciousness on the part of Muslims that they want that they really need their particular their own state by Hindus who aren't particularly interested in their Muslim conquerors if you will going all the way back to the moguls. Although it was a tolerant and very prosperous sort of particularly under Akbar empire, a syncretic population of different religions and races but panic sort of set in at that time in 47. Pakistan gets about 23% of the subcontinent and no industry really to speak of. And cotton from the west which had supplied Indian mills now are unable to be exported. Pakistan never gets what it was promised in terms of war material. And that's not to be unexpected because of the fact that the Indians and the Pakistanis immediately began to fight with each other. Well, here's sort of what is a little bit of a shot on what happens then. You've got this, you've got current population, current GDP and you have that war in 47 with Pakistan in India, 65 also in 1971 and in 1999. You have the Chinese and the Indians fighting in 62 and then some of the notes here on Pakistan and its population is GDP. And most importantly here perhaps, this civil war of 71 which begins in the, because of elections that East Pakistan now known as Bangladesh had at that time. They had more population than West Pakistan at the moment and they basically won enough in order to form a government. Well, the government then in power in particular with a fellow by the name of Yahya Khan and his foreign minister Zulfikar Bhutto whose daughter eventually became prime minister in the late 80s and then once again in the early and mid 90s and who unfortunately was assassinated in 2007. Pushed very much to have the Pakistani army go into East Pakistan and take over despite the fact that the East Pakistanis had voted for a different party and were insisting upon having a forming the government. Well, the Pakistanis went in, the Pakistani army went in at that point and started to really engage in some awful behavior. A genocide as some of our diplomats and Dhaka at the moment said it in something called the blood telegram which was sent to Washington saying, look, you've gotta use your executive power here and this was to Kissinger and to Nixon saying, tell the Pakistanis to back off. Some, the Nixon administration ignored this, tilted towards Pakistan in this regard. The Indians right next door see what's going on and send their troops into Bangladesh and ultimately about 10 million Bengalis take refuge in India. Some 300,000 to some 3 million estimated deaths that occur in Bangladesh during this time and even up to 2016, 2017, the Bangladeshis have tried and even executed some pro-Pakistani, pro-Islamabad imams who they believe were instrumental in helping the Pakistani army during that period in 1971. So this essentially leads Bhutto who eventually becomes Prime Minister and then in the 70s, Zulfa Khar Bhutto, this loss of East Pakistan that now becomes Bangladesh to decide that he really needs to get nuclear weapons and indeed in 1965 he said to an American journalist that we don't have nuclear weapons yet but we probably need to get them and if we get them we'll go so far as to sacrifice such that we'll eat grass or we'll buy them from somebody. Well, it's a long story and one that's pretty well documented but they eventually in 1998 proved to the world that they have some nuclear weapons. 1974 the Indians had their tests, smiling Bhutta nuclear tests as they called them and they were able to, the Pakistanis were able to through their own scientists and particularly a fellow by the name of AQ Khan who had worked in the Netherlands for many years to get nuclear technology and also, and he came back to India then afterwards along with stolen plans on centrifuges and nuclear technology and he also made connections both with the Libyans and the North Koreans and the Iranians in order to get nuclear technology and ultimately plutonium. So now both of these countries, hugely populated, extremely large, rivals in all types of manners are there in the subcontinent and fortunately continue to talk but do have this fractious history and are constantly eyeing each other in a very wary manner. Now a couple of things exacerbate this relationship, not only the nuclear power and the nuclear deterrence aspect that both of these countries have but also their relations with China, Afghanistan, issues regarding water, cashmere and as I mentioned earlier, nuclear powers. I'm going back here because I just want you to see the fractiousness of India before partition and the dark green being Muslim majority areas and light green being mostly Muslim areas and the red being Hindu and the gray and the yellow being a mix of different religions and sects. Now at the top of that particular one you'll see a slightly tan colored province and that's cashmere. Now cashmere is to the Indians and the Pakistanis as perhaps Bosnia was to the Serbians at the turn of the century in the 1900s or to Irish Republicans in Ireland as Northern Ireland is Irish Republicans. It's a province and a princely state like some of the 500 others that Mountbatten confronted when he was trying to negotiate with everybody on partition didn't know where it was going to go. It was ruled by a slightly disillute Hindu prince who ruled over a majority Muslim population and this fellow was the last guy that Mountbatten was trying to negotiate with and he was very frustrated by it and he said to him they shared an interest in trout fishing interestingly enough in cashmere. Mountbatten said to him I would appreciate it. Let's meet tomorrow, I'll think about it. Tell me which way you wanna go are you gonna go with Pakistan or are you gonna go with India and we'll meet tomorrow and go trout fishing. Well the guy never showed up for his trout fishing date with Mountbatten and as they say the rest is history. Mountbatten apparently never talked to him again but it left the issue of which way that country was or that principality if you will was going to go for you and I to basically take care of or be concerned about or to worry about and why do I say that? Well, here's a little bit, here's cashmere, right? Now the yellow part there is claimed by China. The purple part there is claimed by India. The green part is claimed by Pakistan and that's how it currently is at the moment. Most importantly, Pakistan which has an agricultural sector for that large population is dependent on water of the Indus River but also from the five rivers that start in cashmere or just above it that are vital not only for their agriculture but also for their hydro power. So as one of the former intelligence heads of the Pakistani government said a fellow by the name of Sud, cashmere isn't about land, it isn't about irredentism, it isn't about anything like that, it's about water. That's what we're concerned about and so since 88 really when an insurgency began in cashmere and some 50 to 100,000 civilians and security people have been killed. Nothing really has ameliorated this situation. One might say because of a guy couldn't show up for his trout fishing date with Mount Patton. Not to disparage this or to make light of it because it's a really an extremely fundamental problem. And the Chinese as you can see by this map are interested in one section there. So much so that just this past spring the Chinese and the Indians went at it again although this time not necessarily with guns or anything but with clubs and rocks and things like this over that particularly disputed area. Now this is an area in that part of the world which is 12,000 to 20,000 feet high but it's the source of all of this water for the Indus Valley, part of which India has and part of which Pakistan has and is reflected in a regularly amended and negotiated water rights treaty that both of these countries have. So China, couple of wars with India, water, cashmere, nuclear issues and just to wind up here and not to again diminish this particular element but Afghanistan which borders both India and Pakistan which both of them see as being part of their near abroad or their particular country of influence and which has essentially since the king was overthrown and the Russians came in in 1979 hasn't seen any peace. Strategically from the Americans point of view we went in to Pakistan and with hundreds of millions of dollars every year and essentially going through the CIA and with the help of certainly the Pakistani army and the Pakistani intelligence services moved armaments and training and all kinds of things food to the Afghani Mujahideen or the Afghani freedom fighters who the nationalists who eventually morphed into a number of different factions including the Taliban in order to push back on the Soviets. As the Pakistanis and the Afghanis will tell you they won the Cold War because they basically defeated the Russians there with all of our armaments of course. We channeled them through Saudi Arabia William Casey was Reagan's CIA chief at the time and he was very much concerned about this and took a very hands on approach to do this. The fellow that they dealt with there was a fellow by the name of was a dictator who came in in 78 I believe and Al Haq and he became quite a Muslim fundamentalist a rather austere dictator and allowed a lot of the certainly allowed the Mujahideen to come in and out of Pakistan and encouraged his ISI as they call the intelligence services there in Pakistan to assist the Afghanis. Part of this is a reflection of the fact that having lost West Pakistan which is now Bangladesh in 1971 the Pakistanis will tell you that Afghanistan not only is there an ethnic and historical connection there but it's a place that if indeed God forbid an awful war breaks out between India and Pakistan the Pakistanis can move to they can retreat to and these are the kinds of strategic things you know that the Pakistani planners and military guys think about and so that connection prevails to this day and even after we stopped that program in 88, 89 but it's one that has established the importance certainly in the Pakistanis eyes of their ability to influence real world events from a strategic standpoint. So you have these two terribly interesting and ancient places of very capable people and in unfortunately very tense standoffs with almost existential issues of their relationships with their neighbors something as fundamental as water certainly Kashmir which just doesn't seem to be getting any better certainly under the Modi government he's gone in there and he's basically moved his troops in there and he's decided not to allow Pakistan or Kashmir to have any type of special status which it has enjoyed and of course the fact that they both happen to be very well armed and extremely well financed particularly the Indian army. So I will leave you with that it's been a great pleasure talking to you there's a ton of material here that we could certainly go over I would commend to you these are a couple of pictures up along the Pakistan near the Pakistan Afghan border that friend of mine and I took a few years ago with just some here's a posh student fellow who is like Imran Khan from that particular part of the world but I would commend to you a few books here particularly Pakistan a hard country which lays out all the subject areas really that I mentioned here Pakistan Eye of the Storm a little bit easier to get through The Great Game which is a great piece, Hop Kirk's an old British journalist who wrote a book about that particular area mostly Afghanistan and present day Pakistan and of course takes his title from the Kipling poem about the the Great Game A New History of India by Stanley Walpers a little dated but nonetheless extremely extremely fine and another great piece a little more recent maybe in the past ten years called The Last Mogul by William Dalrymple he talks about the Indian mutiny of 1857 or as my Pakistani friends would tell me the first war of Indian independence and how the British essentially then crushed that mutiny crushed that war of independence and put in direct rule from 1857 to essentially 1947 putting in courts putting in their laws putting in essentially a British education structure there ultimately leading of course to to partition in 47 but that's a wonderful read and it's based on subcontinent Indian and Pakistani documentation as opposed to British reports and things like that from that particular era so I'll leave it at that thank you so much once again it's been a pleasure to be here thank you Mr. Cranstover and we hope you will turn in next week when the topic will be China's Road into Latin America