Another tragic partition

Book review of 'Durand's Curse: A Line Across The Pathan Heart'

DURAND’s CURSE 

A Line Across The Pathan Heart

Rajiv Dogra

Rupa Publications

256 pages; Rs 595

In a media interview following the publication of Durand’s Curse, former Foreign Service officer Rajiv Dogra confessed that he was not a trained historian and needed, in the course of his research, to put in “back-breaking work of 15 to 16 hours a day for months together.” However, he appears to have taken a few shortcuts as well. A number of paragraphs in the book’s 13th chapter (“A Troublesome Ally”) are identical to parts of an article titled “Mortimer Durand: The Man who Drew the Fatal Durand Line”, posted on April 1, 2011 on the website www.khyber.org. That article was written by David Rose, an award-winning British author and investigative journalist (there is an eight-page bibliography at the end of the book, but Mr Rose’s article finds no mention in it).

This was a chance discovery of a single source from which Mr Dogra (who has earlier written a book on India-Pakistan relations) has “borrowed”; there could be others, raising questions about the credibility of a book that otherwise appears well researched. 

Surely, the publisher should have been more vigilant.  

Durand’s Curse is an emotional denunciation of the agreement that India’s then foreign secretary, Mortimer Durand, signed with the Amir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman, in November 1893, to delineate the spheres of influence of British India and Afghanistan. Mr Dogra points out many anomalies about the agreement that remain unanswered to this day: Mortimer Durand had agreed in writing that the Persian text of the agreement would be regarded as binding, and yet the agreement was signed in English (a language the Amir had no knowledge of); the aim was to delineate the respective spheres of influence of British India and Afghanistan, and yet by 1921 the 2,640-km Durand Line had been demarcated like an international border; and the line was drawn on a small-sized map in a zig-zag fashion that Mr Dogra describes as the “casual romp of a pen”. Also, unlike Cyril Radcliffe, who after a meticulous exercise marked out the border that brought Pakistan into being in 1947, Mortimer Durand had no assistance from trained draftsmen and cartographers, and consulted no one. 

What could have prompted the Amir, a Pashtun himself, to have gifted away over 100,000 sq km of Afghan territory, housing half of its Pashtun population, to the British? No doubt, as Mr Dogra writes, the Amir was “in an unenviable position because he was caught between two powers (Russia and Britain), both of which were in an expansionary mode”, and he could annoy neither. However, he speculates that the Amir’s ill-health — he had a variety of physiological and psychological problems that usually peaked between October and February, precisely the period when Durand was present in Kabul — could have weakened his decision-making capacity. For the then Indian foreign secretary it was a huge achievement; he was knighted within six weeks. 

The Durand Line enabled Britain to secure control of the strategic Khyber and Kurram passes that tribesmen used to raid caravans and towns in Punjab. It stretched from Wakhan in the north (near the Chinese border) to the Iranian border in the south and thus deprived Afghanistan of not just half of the traditional Pashtun tribal lands, but of Balochistan as well — and thus of access to the Arabian Sea. The Pashtuns have never accepted the partition of their lands. The Amir lost little time in fighting back, and the result was the jihadist uprising of 1897-98. The region has been in turmoil ever since. Nor has independent Afghanistan (a status it has enjoyed since 1919) ever given up its dream of recovering these lands or, alternatively, of seeing the Pashtuns unite into a separate nation — a source of continuing tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan since it came into being in 1947. This was accentuated when Pakistan began to be considered strategically important during the Cold War and became part of the Western camp, inevitably pushing Afghanistan into the Soviet camp.

Mr Dogra is a passionate champion of the Pashtuns’ cause, arguing that the referendum conducted in India’s erstwhile North West Frontier Province (now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) in 1947 should have offered them the option of not just joining India or Pakistan, but of uniting with Afghanistan or of establishing an independent state (as Afghanistan itself had argued at the time). Pakistan, which has been accused of treating Afghanistan almost like a fifth province, will never renegotiate the Durand Line, while Afghanistan itself has never accepted it as the international border (but has no backers). So, Mr Dogra’s stance is impracticable. But with Pakistan itself roiled by terrorist and sectarian violence, and the army-civilian dynamic always in the mix, he concludes that “far more than the games that the big powers decide to play in Afghanistan, its future may be hinged (sic) to the convulsions that shape Pakistan.”

If Mr Dogra reckons that a Pakistani implosion will allow Afghanistan to expand up to its earlier eastern boundary (the Indus), there’s no knowing how long the Pashtuns will have to wait.