SECTION-1: Setbacks for Hindu Mahasabha, 1945–1946

As the war was coming to a close, attempts began to be made in different quarters for a solution of the political problem. After the failure of the Gandhi–Jinnah talks, two other outstanding events leading towards some sort of settlement had taken place from the non-official side. First, on 9 November 1944, Gandhi readily offered to cooperate with a committee, that Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru had for long opined should be appointed to investigate the entire constitutional and communal problem. Sapru then persuaded the Standing Committee of the Non-Party Conference to appoint a Committee under his chairmanship. The Sapru Committee, which Dr Mookerjee correctly believed was the outcome of Gandhiji's inspiration, met in Delhi on 29 December and dispersed on 31 December. It came with an interim report unanimously recommending the acceptance of parity between Caste Hindus and Muslims in the formation of an Interim National Government, subject to the condition that the Muslims must agree to a joint electorate. It is evident from Chairman Sapru's letter dated 7 January 1945 that while the Sikh attitude was quite helpful and he was expecting response from Hindus, Jinnah refused to recognise them. He also noted that while the view of the Hindus, shared by many minorities, favoured a strong Centre, the Muslim League view was that there should be no Centre of any kind. Wavell did not really expect anything to come of the Sapru Committee whose report was sent to him in April 1945 while he was in London. The Mahasabha realised at once the enormous mischief that Sapru's proposal was going to make with regard to Hindu interests. Dr Mookerjee records in his diary, “No one would think of doing away with a separate electorate, but the proposal of parity would be looked upon as both desirable and possible by HMG and would now have the added support of a non-official committee of so-called impartial statesmen and politicians such as the Sapru Committee was dubbed to be”. In fact, Sapru's proposal to form an Indian Government on the basis of parity between Caste Hindus and Muslims was one of the basic features of the Wavell Plan, but the condition laid down by it – acceptance of a joint electorate – was completely ignored.

This paper seeks to situate the dramatic emergence of modern Indian liberal thought during the 1810s and 1820s in a wider Asian, European and American context, further developing the notion of a global or trans-national sphere of intellectual history. From the perspective of British and British imperial history, the paper contributes to the story of how provincial and overseas interests came together to construct an ideological challenge to the “despotism” of the Court of Directors of the East India Company.

In the classic form in which British and American scholars have practised it for the last twenty or thirty years, intellectual history presupposes the idea of a continuously evolving intellectual tradition. Intellectual historians explain each moment in the history of political thought by showing how it relates to the concepts that existed beforehand. What is specific about a particular text is the way its author has consciously repeated or altered the intellectual conventions inherited from the immediate past.

“[L]ong after this controversy is hushed in silence”, Chitta Ranjan Das had said of Aurobindo Ghose during the Alipore bomb trial in 1909, “long after this turmoil, this agitation ceases, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone, his words will be echoed and reechoed, not only in India, but across distant seas and lands. Therefore, I say that the man in his position is not only standing before the bar of this court but before the bar of the High Court of History”.

Introduction

This book has dealt with the history of peace-building and international intervention in East Timor. However, needless to mention, there have been a variety of international peace operations including preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping, peace-making or peace-building, or missions led by the UN, regional or multinational organisations. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the relative position of peace-building in East Timor with other UN peace operations. Although each UN peace operation is independent, the UN conducts its mission as a stream or as a chain of the total UN operations. In other words, each mission is influenced by the preceding ones. The UN learns from previous missions in terms of operational skills, know-how and information. This chapter will conduct a comparative analysis of the case of peacebuilding in East Timor with Cambodia.

There is much ‘lesson-learnt’ type of literature about UN peacebuilding. After writing such literature, however, few authors analysed the next cases on UN operations to confirm whether the lessons which they gave were in fact learnt or not. Unless such lessons are sent to the UN and put into the agenda when it sets up the next mission, the UN will have another ‘partially-successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ operation or receive similar lessons to the previous ones again. In reality, this negative tendency has frequently happened in UN peacekeeping and peace-building.

In this context, this chapter will discuss on whether peace-building in East Timor was based on lessons learnt from previous missions.

Introduction: Significance of this Research

At the present time, attention has been paid to the term ‘soft power’ in the field of international relations, especially since the advent of the book Soft Power by Joseph Nye in 2004. He put emphasis on the need of states to adopt the concept of soft power in order to exert their power effectively. It is interesting that Nye introduced peacekeeping or peacemaking as one instance of soft power. Nye described Norway's role as a peacemaker by taking the initiative in peace talks in civil and international disputes, thus enhancing Norway's soft power and elevating its value to larger states. He also stated that one of the sources that soft power of a country rests on is its culture. The UN achieves peacemaking and peacekeeping missions by recruiting military and civilian staff from most of its member states. The UN is not a state, so the ideology of Nye's book is not applicable to it; but it exerts a significant power in achieving international peace and security. In this sense, the UN has legitimacy in paying attention to the concept of soft power in its activities including peace operations.

Has the UN valued the concept of culture in its peace operations? In several interviews with the UN staff, many of them answered that the UN inevitably prioritises universal values which are historically rooted in the Western society.

INTRODUCTION

This essay explores the complex relationships between the oppositional politics of Muslim separatism in South Asian and European imperialist discourses. It argues that there are two defining tensions within this politics. The first is between territorial nationalism and the global imaginings of religious identity within its assertion of collective identity, and the second is between the homogenizing imperatives of nationalism and the subjectivity of individual selfhood.

The focus here is on the oppositional politics articulated in the historical geography of Muhammad Iqbal's (1877–1938) Persian and Urdu poetry.

Introduction

UN peace operations, which originated in UNTSO in 1948, have changed and expanded their scope and mandates. In An Agenda for Peace in 1992, the then UN Secretary-General, Boutros-Ghali, mentioned four types of UN operations: preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peace-keeping and post-conflict peace-building. Among them, postconflict peace-building is a mission in which a UN mission helps a newly-born or newly-democratised state construct the nation-building process from various aspects: security, justice, governance, medicine, education, etc. A series of UN peace operations in East Timor were the typical cases for the process of peace-building. A strong economic and military commitment from the UN enabled East Timor to become independent from Indonesia in May 2002. In fact, it has been said that East Timor is a child of international society.

East Timor has been fully supported by the UN in its peace-building process. The United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET: June–October 1999), which was established as a political mission, was mandated to organise and conduct a popular consultation to decide whether the East Timorese people chose a special autonomy within Indonesia or rejected the proposed autonomy, resulting in East Timor's separation from Indonesia. The United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET: October 1999–May 2002), which was a multi-functional peacekeeping mission, exercised administrative authority over East Timor during the transition to independence.

The dominant tradition of locating South Asian cultural and intellectual history overwhelmingly within the directly colonial relationship has narrowed the scope of existing historiography. How, then, might we begin to think about India's location within a multilateral set of imaginary and practical relationships whose axes would seem to exceed the conventional colonizer/colonized binary? If one were to survey the political literature of high-colonial Bengal for explicit comparisons between India and other countries, France (especially the France of the various incarnations of republicanism), Italy (especially the Italy of Mazzini), Ireland (especially the Ireland of rural immiseration and Home Rule), Japan (especially for a decade or so after its victories over Russia in 1904–5), and (starting in the 1920s) the Soviet Union would certainly be found to feature prominently.

A Perspective on History and Theory

This book has dealt extensively with the history of East Timor and has analysed the peace-building process of East Timor from a variety of perspectives. One of the most significant features of the book is that it witnessed the fact that East Timor, which was merely a tiny Portuguese colony in Southeast Asia, has received massive support from the international community since 1999, and has accepted one of the largest UN peacekeeping operations in UN history. In this sense, East Timor is regarded as one of the most significant examples for those people who support the concepts of political freedom and selfdetermination of ethnically marginalised people. The book also indicated that a humanitarian crisis in East Timor after the referendum in September 1999 was solved by the international commitment, leading to the creation of INTERFET and UNTAET.

However, it has to be accepted that there was considerable passivity displayed by the international community towards East Timor on the question of human rights abuses committed by the TNI during the Cold War era. Although East Timor was always on the UN agenda during this period, one could witness the gradual decline of interest among UN member states. Political realism was the policy adopted towards East Timor by the superpowers and its neighbouring states which always prioritised their national interests, namely their diplomatic relationship with Indonesia and regional stability for their economic interests.

The Origin of the East Timor Issue

East Timor had a long history as a neglected Portuguese colony for four centuries. There was little investment from Portugal in infrastructure, health facilities or education. Sandalwood and coffee had been the only export industries. An economic slump in Portugal in 1889 urged a Portuguese Royal Commission meeting to reach the following conclusion in terms of control over its colonies.

A series of acts of decolonisation in the 1960s encouraged Portugal to promote early independence of its colonies. However, its ‘rash’ policy was not considered to comply with Article 73, Chapter XI of the UN Charter:

In 1960, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 1541 (XV), which urged colonial powers, in particular implying Portugal, to transit information to the UN Secretary-General under Article 73(e) of the Charter in respect of such territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government, including East Timor.

Introduction

The pattern of East Timor's process towards independence has been peculiar; it did not follow the decolonisation process of that in many Asian and African states in the 1960s and 1970s, nor the cases of states which became independent shortly after the end of the Cold War. In other words, the independence of East Timor was achieved not as a result of trends in the international political climate but because of ‘some unpredicted events’. Some claimed that such events were the Asian Economic Crisis of 1997 following the fall of the Suharto regime. Another identified the optimistic or brave decision of Suharto's successor Habibie to hold the referendum as the precursor to independence. Or another might give the 1991 Santa Cruise massacre which raised the international awareness of the human rights abuses in East Timor as the reason, as have already been mentioned in this book. However, it is also absolutely true that the history of East Timor and the process to its independence was considerably influenced by the policy of Australia, the important power in the region. Therefore, this chapter focuses on Australia's policy towards East Timor from the political, economic, and security viewpoints.

Australia's strong ties with Indonesia diminished the consistency of its policy in East Timor, which can be recognised by the shift in its vote in the UN General Assembly.

Introduction

Since the 1990s, several factors such as the compromising of state sovereignty, and the superpowers' interests in humanitarian issues gave rise to the establishment of UN transitional administrations. The United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) was one of them. UNTAET was officially launched on 25 October 1999 for a nation-building purpose in East Timor, which had been completely demolished by a campaign of violence by pro-Indonesian militia.

The significance of UNTAET in the history of UN peacekeeping operations can be recognised in the following two points. The first is that while UNTAET was similar to some other relatively successful multi-functional peacekeeping operations such as those in Cambodia (UNTAC) and in Namibia (UNTAG), it was the first operation in which the UN took control of the departments of government in East Timor such as finance, justice, infrastructure, economic and social affairs, etc. Furthermore, in terms of a ‘state-building’ mission, UNTAET was said to be the most exhaustive UN mission. It took on a huge variety of responsibilities, such as responsibility for policing as well as for elections, executive, legislative and judicial sectors, and treaty-making. Indeed, UNTAET was the first UN mission that had treaty-making power. In fact, UNTAET entered into treaties with the World Bank's International Development Association (IDA) and with Australia on the Timor Gap. UNTAET evolved from the experience of the UN operation in Kosovo (UNMIK: 1999-present).