Sumantra Bose

The Bosnian State a decade after Dayton

A decade on from the Dayton peace settlement, this essay sets out to examine two questions. First, is the consociational and confederal paradigm established by the Dayton agreement, and subsequently institutionalized, the appropriate framework for the Bosnian state? It will be suggested that in the circumstances that prevail, this framework does in fact provide the most feasible and most democratic form of government for Bosnias precarious existence as a multi-national state. My second question is inextricably linked to the first: since Bosnia is a state of international design that exists by international design, is this international engagement with state-building and democratization an example, indeed exemplar, of liberal internationalism at its best – or of liberal imperialism at its worst? I will suggest that, though this presence and activity has had many aspects deserving of serious criticism, on balance it has done more good than harm. Bosnian society would clearly have been worse-off without the international community in its midst.

States, nations, sovereignty: Sri Lanka, India and the Tamil Eelam movement

Constructing an Analytical Framework Theory, Concepts and Definitions State Building and the Birth of Two Nations The Genesis and Evolution of the Sinhalese Tamil Conflict Against the State The Liberation Tigers and the Quest for a Tamil National Identity State Power and Nationalist Resistance India and the Ceylon Tamils, 1987-90 Reconceptualising State, Nation and Sovereignty

Secular states, religious politics: India, Turkey, and the future of secularism

A pioneering comparative study of the two major attempts to build secular states - where the states constitutional identity and fundamental character are not based on or derived from any religious faith - in the non-Western world. This book explains the origins, evolution and latterly the decline of secularism as a core principle of the state in India and Turkey. The anti-secular political transformations of the twenty-first century are the rise of a Sunni-Islamist definition of Turkish national identity to hegemonic power, and Hindu nationalism as Indias pre-eminent political force. Both secular-state models adopted a similar operational doctrine of state intervention in and regulation of the religious sphere, rather than a Western-style separation of church and state. But, Turkish state-secularism took a culturally deracinated and harshly authoritarian form that led to its failure, whereas Indias secular state - though flawed in practice - followed a culturally rooted and democratic path that makes secularism indispensable to Indias future.

To Partition or Not: A Comparative Perspective

I welcome this opportunity to clarify my views on the matter under discussion. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is almost certainly the single most important ethnonational dispute of the contemporary era, with ramifications across the Middle East and the world. I should first clarify that I do not hold an absolute position either for or against partition. As a native and citizen of India, with roots and residence in Bengal—one of the two Indian provinces partitioned in 1947—I am acutely conscious of the many detrimental effects and consequences of partition in the short term and the longer run, in India and other cases. As a scholar, I have sharply and I believe effectively critiqued some of the neo-partitionist arguments that emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s in American academe, and that found some currency both within academe and in policy-making circles. I have challenged and I think exposed these arguments as ignorant of histories, empirically uninformed to a shocking degree, and based on overly rigid notions of collective identities. In the same works I have also cautioned, however, against the other fallacy and its exponents: ‘dogmatic anti-partitionism’ and ‘dogmatic anti-partitionists’. As an example of this category of the well-meaning but seriously misguided, I have mentioned my own paternal grandfather, Sarat Chandra Bose, a senior leader of the Indian independence movement. In May 1947, as India’s partition drew near, he, in cooperation with a few pro-Pakistan Bengali Muslim politicians, came up with a ‘United Bengal’ proposal, which would prevent the partition of Bengal by preserving Bengal as one state, separate from both India and Pakistan, via an elaborate formula of power sharing between the elected representatives of Bengal’s Muslims (54% of Bengal’s population) and Bengal’s Hindus (43% of the population). The proposal failed for several reasons, but the decisive factor was that at that time there was very little support among Bengal’s Hindus or Muslims—whether at the elite level or among the masses—for a one-state alternative to partition. Bengal’s Muslims were at the time largely supportive of the demand for Pakistan–Muslim selfdetermination in the form of a sovereign Muslim state in the subcontinent. Indeed, most of the top leaders of the Bangladesh liberation movement in 1970–1971 cut their political teeth as young activists in the Pakistan agitation of 1946–1947. Bengal’s Hindus—a large Ethnopolitics, Vol. 10, Nos. 3–4, 445–449, September–November 2011