In a new book, Dr Neera Chandhoke considers the political context and moral considerations that complicate the right of secession in the postcolonial world

Chandhoke, Neera

LSE Research Online

2013-2-15Contested secessions in formal democracies: The case ofJammu and Kashmirblogs.lse.ac.uk /southasia/2013/02/15/contested-secessions/In a new book, Dr Neera Chandhoke considers the political context and moral considerations thatcomplicate the right of secession in the postcolonial world.It is well known that the collapse of actually existing socialist societies at the turn of the 1990s inaugurated an era ofhyper ethno-nationalist movements in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and subsequently in parts of the postcolonialworld. Political mobilisation around the axis of ethnicity invariably resulted in the demand for a state of one’s own.The scale as well as the pace at which existing states broke, and new states were created, was quiteunprecedented in history. Given the cascading effects of secession, the concept was practically catapulted onto theacademic agenda of liberal political philosophers, who until then had tended to take the territorial borders of thesociety that they theorised and prescribed for, for granted.However a rather odd division of labour seems to have arisen inthe domain of secession studies. Separatist movements havearisen in the developing as well as in the developed world. Butwhereas secessionist politics in Canada, the United Kingdom,and Europe, have occasioned a fair degree of interest amongnormative political theorists, considerations of separatism in thepostcolonial world more or less fall within the academiccategory of identity/civil wars, ethno-nationalism, terrorism,security, and strategic studies. Axiomatically this genre ofintellectual inquiry proscribes the raising of normative issues—questions about whether particular groups have the right tosecede, if so why, and what the moral considerations that the right of secession has to be weighed against are,generally lie beyond the intellectual horizons of conflict studies. But these very questions are extremely significant,since they address an issue that is central to collective life in democracies: justice.Liberal philosophers based in the West have addressed precisely these questions, mainly because they prefer totake as their conceptual referral what can be termed ‘consensual secessions’ pace Quebec. The problem is thatmost cases of secession in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and in much of the postcolonial world fall into the category ofwhat can be termed ‘contested secessions’. Contested secessions are marked by (a) the extensive deployment ofviolence, (b) illiberal ethno-nationalist leaderships (c) and third-party interventions. What is the approach that liberalpolitical theorists should employ in cases of contested secessions?The issue becomes infinitely more complicated when it comes to contested secessions in formal democracies suchas India, and in plural societies such as the one found in the state of Jammu and Kashmir in India. The paradox ofthe case that constitutes the empirical referral of my work, the state of Jammu and Kashmir, can be summed up asfollows: whereas the people of Jammu and Kashmir have been subjected to institutionalised injustice by theGovernment of India, at the same time it cannot be said that the Indian state is undemocratic and by this virtueillegitimate. Neither can we deny that a range of moral considerations inhibit an outright grant of the right ofsecession. How do we then deal with the demand for secession in one part of the state, notably the Kashmir Valley?My book, “Contested Secessions: Rights, Self-Determination, Democracy and Kashmir”, which is the outcome of myinvolvement with the Crisis States Research Programme, attempts to negotiate this question in particular and thephenomenon of contested secessions in general.Whereas the Kashmir problem constitutes the empirical linchpin of the argument, this is not another book on1/2Kashmir. It is a work on the right of secession. This study takes on board a number of considerations that mediatethe political context and the right of secession and which complicate reflection on the right of secessions. Theseconsiderations have neither been acknowledged nor given moral weight by liberal theories of secession. In theprocess, not only are distinctive aspects of contested secessions in formal democracies sidelined, theories thatmight be appropriate for countries such as India, have simply not found their rightful place in the literature on thesubject. Now that a number of movements in the postcolonial world have begun to demand a state of their own, it istime to confront this issue. This work builds on the insights provided by liberal theories of secession, as well as goesbeyond them in considering the phenomenon of violent and contested secessions which mark much of the postcolonial world.For more information on this topic, see Neera Chandhoke, “Contested Secessions: Rights, Self-Determination,Democracy and Kashmir” (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012).Dr Neera Chandhoke is Director of the Developing Countries Research Centre, University of Delhi. She haspreviously been an international visiting fellow at LSE’s Department of International Development and hascontributed research to the Crisis States Programme. Copyright © 2016 London School of Economics2/2

Contested secessions in formal democracies: the case of Jammu and Kashmir

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