There is a great political lesson in this: that the society with the least politics is the best society. Afghanistan, Burma, Kashmir, Manipur, Chattisgarh – these areas need The Market to bring about normalcy, to wean people away from the predatory gun culture. There is Law that needs to prevail – the law of private property. If the vast majority agree to live under this law, then things will soon return to normal – business as usual, as they say – and the problem of social order will be solved.
The British were much more practical in dealing with these frontiersmen, as compared to the American fixation with democracy. The British came to administer the north-west frontier only in the 19th century, yet there are tales of many “civilian” heroes. Philip Mason’s The Men Who Ruled India tells of many of these heroes, but the one I have selected for today is Herbert Edwardes in Bannu, on the Af-Pak border, whose tale runs as follows:
The Afghans had ceded Bannu to the Sikhs but neither had ever administered this high desolate valley, where every man went armed and no one had ever willingly paid a tax. Every three years, the Sikhs sent an army to punish the Bannuchis for their failure to pay tribute….
The time came to send out another of those punitive expeditions. Sir Henry Lawrence agreed, but on condition that a British political officer went too and tried to make a peaceful settlement. The Sikhs smiled and agreed; Herbert Edwardes set out, the only Englishman with an army of Sikhs, recently defeated. He was not even in command. But he began by enforcing an order that the army must pay for everything.
This transformed the situation. The Bannuchis were astonished by an army that did not plunder; they came and talked. They sold provisions to the army. Night after night, they came to Edwardes’ tent and sat talking to him…. When he came the next year for three months, he achieved miracles. They dismantled their forts; they agreed to pay a reduced land revenue and he began a field-by-field survey that would lead to an accurate assessment. Finally he decided that they needed a legal code, and wrote it one night. He turned it into Persian next day and made a beginning of administering his code single-handed. The Political Adviser became judge as well as financier, tax-gatherer, commander-in-chief, engineer and legislator – Moses as well as Napoleon.
Even Edwardes himself seems hardly to have realized quite how miraculous his achievement was. He was alone among these people who obeyed him because of the certainty with which he spoke to them, because of the intensity of his moral fervour…
Indeed, the British often spoke of their empire as “an empire of laws and not of men.” The law came first. This was the moral purpose. But here on the frontier everything devolved upon a handful of men – and what extra-ordinary men these were. And all this in the day’s of the Company Bahadur.
When we read about these men and their key administrative skills, two words stand out: They were “minutely just.” Punjab had no laws when the Lawrences took over. The Punjabis too were wild people. But every British administrator relied on his own “sense of justice,” applying the same general principles to all individual cases. This is how they won confidence, respect – and even submission. They were just a handful of chosen men. They proved that a working government upholding a moral social order is not at all difficult to accomplish – if you know the subject. Luckily for them, mass democracy was not a fashionable idea then. Interestingly, John Lawrence was a “leveller.”
The key problem of this region today is social order. This requires laws to which the majority will willingly submit. This moral purpose must come first. After this should come the free market – Liberty Under Law. All this can be accomplished without party politics. Putting democracy first cannot work – the only outcome is party politics. And politics, as we saw in the contrasting cases of Switzerland and the USSA, is what we should seek to minimize. With sound laws and free markets, no one will seek politics as a means of survival, of obtaining the good things of life. That is a good society.
To conclude: About Kabul, there is much in the Baburnama on this great city, which Babar loved and ruled over. In those days, it was not considered an “Afghan” city; rather, it was cosmopolitan and seven or eight languages were spoken there. There was trade with all the surrounding regions, including India. Babar died in Delhi, but left instructions for his body to be buried in Kabul. It is there he lies.
Even then there were Muslim zealots creating trouble. But the city was cultured and cosmopolitan, a far more advanced city than the Delhi of the Lodis which Babar conquered.
So there is Hope.
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