- Partitioning the Mind
07 May 2007 05:00:00 am - 07 May 2007 03:07:04 pm
- Last edited by KermMartian on 24 Feb 2009 11:37:41 am; edited 1 time in total
This is a research paper I wrote for my humanities classes. Enjoy. (c) 2007 Christopher Mitchell - don't you even think about trying to steal it for yourself.
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Christopher Mitchell
April 15, 2007
Partitioning the Mind
Salman Rushdie's epic novel Midnight's Children contains many figurative themes that are directly mirrored by the actual events of the story. Halfway through the book, the main character, Saleem Sinai, is struck by flying debris after an explosion and loses his entire memory of his past. This event completes a series of three events effecting increasingly-permanent separation between Saleem's present and his past. The past and present become partitioned in Saleem's mind until the venom of a snake breaks down the barrier, much as the Partition of an old India into a new India and Pakistan brings on a national amnesia of previous friendly ties. Following the cessation of British rule in 1947 and the creation of the independent nations of India and Pakistan, the two new neighbors fought a series of four wars at intervals of between six and twenty-eight years. Old alliances and neighbors were forgotten in the sharply-defined distinctions of Muslim versus Hindu and Sikh, India versus Pakistan. In neither history nor the events of the novel did an analogous political snakebite occurs, yet Rushdie implies via the correlations between literal and figural that only a similarly momentous event would be sufficient to destroy the cultural and political barriers of Partition and reunite India and Pakistan. A similar theme of division and restoration is prominent in Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, in which a previously-undiscovered moon of Earth is divided between two polar opposite races. The literal and symbol theme of Partition as expressed through Saleem Sinai's amnesia in Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie serves as a commentary on the institution of the Partition and puts forth a theory on the events necessary to end its stalemate.
Until 1947, the area that now comprises India and Pakistan was mostly under British rule. The British began to spread through India beginning in 1757, gradually gaining control of the entire subcontinent and placing it under the oversight of the British East India Company. Through a series of laws, the British East India Company moved from a commercial to political body, a position it held until an Indian revolution in 1857 (Chamberlain 88). Following the revolt, Britain dissolved the British East India Company and converted India into a colony controlled directly by the Crown (Ibid. 128). Beginning around 1920, a growing Indian Independence Movement called for the elimination of British rule and creation of an independent Indian state. One political party, the Indian National Congress, took a primary role in the dispute under the guidance of Mahatma Gandhi (Gupta 20). He advocated non-violent protest against the British rule, yet as the political situation retained the status quo and little progress was made, the leaders of the party began to propose increasingly radical and violent protest against the British rulers. Nationalist sentiment grew among the populace as the British countered vocal dissent with anti-sedition laws, and the final catalyst for the elimination of British control came when “the All-Indian Congress Committee†prompted by Gandhi “passed the famous ‘Quit India' resolution†of 1942 (Chamberlain 219). It advocated full and immediate independence of a united India from colonial control. At the same time, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, became a vocal proponent for creation of an India divided into a Hindu and a Muslim state (Edwardes 295). His plan was eventually accepted, and as the British officially handed over control to a native government at one minute to midnight on August 15, 1947, fully independent states of India and Pakistan were created.
The thematic elements of division in Midnight's Children center on the Sinai family's move to the newly-created Pakistan and the family's subsequent destruction. The date is September 1958, eleven years since the start of Indian independence, and the Reverend Mother instructs the Sinai clan to move to Pakistan in preparation for her own emigration. Saleem discovers first a relatively minor physical manifestation of the India-Pakistan border: he can no longer host the Midnight's Children Conference or indeed communicate with any of the children. They stay for several years, return briefly to India when Saleem's father suffers a heart attack, and leave India for good in 1963. Shortly before their departure, an operation permanently removes the protagonist's telepathic abilities, finalizing the temporary silence that Pakistan's borders had wrought upon his gift. The third and most absolute step in Saleem's separation from his past occurs when he is struck in the back of the head by a silver spittoon in the explosion that destroys his family. The second Kashmir War has just begun in 1965, and the force of the blow completes his break with his childhood, family, and past.
Another of Rushdie's novels, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, contains a similar theme of division and separation that provides additional insight into Saleem's amnesia as a thematic element. In this work, the son of a storyteller takes a trip to Earth's second moon, Kahani, to try to restore his father's lost Gift of Gab. He discovers that through Processes Too Complicated To Explain, the inhabitants of Kahani have stopped their moon's rotation, keeping one side in perpetual daylight and the other in constant darkness. The inhabitants of the light side, called Gups, are noisy, talkative, and imaginative; the people of the night side, Chups, have inverted eyes and communicate almost exclusively in gestures. The boy Haroun and his father Rashid, who has come to the moon another way, are captured by the Chups and imprisoned in a ship built of solidified shadow. At one point, Haroun uses the two minutes of light from the Gup equivalent of a flashlight to discover that the bright light makes both the people on the ship and the ship itself more two-dimensional and less real. He manages to escape and through strenuous wishing overcomes the Processes Too Complicated To Explain, moving the sun directly over the ship and destroying it. From then on, Kahani has a regular cycle of night and day; with this normality restored, the Chups and Gups once again live in mutual peace. As with Midnight's Children, a strong theme of division runs through the story, yet it follows an inverted progression from unity through division back to union. At some point in the far past, Chups and Gups lived peacefully together, yet for some reason they decided to partition their world and break their previously-shared bonds. Haroun is able to produce a temporary fracture in the previously absolute separation, then later dissolves the partition completely as a Gup army defeats the Chup dictator to reunite the two races in peaceful coexistence. The common themes found in the two narratives as compared with historical events show Rushdie's views regarding Partition as a whole as well as his ideas on its removal.
The initial idea for the Partition and the historical debate that followed was started by the All-Indian Muslim League in the mid 1930's. Its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, believed that as the country's religious minority, Muslims would not fit into a united independent India. He advocated the division of the subcontinent into a Muslim state and a Hindu state as the only way to prevent civil war among the inhabitants of a free India. Jinnah proclaimed that “To yoke together†Hindus and Muslims “under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority,†would be fatal to both groups (Chamberlain 224). He believed it would inevitably “lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state†(Ibid.). Mahatma Gandhi emerged as a staunch opponent to the institution of Partition, countering “My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines†(Ibid. 225). Gandhi argued that peaceful coexistence was always the best course of action; to agree to “such a doctrine [of division] is for me a denial of God†(Ibid.). Nevertheless, the idea of Partition gained momentum within both religious groups, eventually organized in mid-1947 as the Mountbatten Plan. By July 8th, the British had passed into law the plan that carved the subcontinent into India and two separate Pakistani areas (Campbell-Johnson 132). East Pakistan is today's Bangladesh, while West Pakistan remains modern Pakistan. The initial break between the two countries on midnight of August 15th, 1947 was the dawn of what is now a six-decade-long antagonism between the two nations.
The first of three stages in Saleem's separation from his past in India occurs when he and most of his family move to Pakistan in preparation for the anticipated emigration of his grandparents to Pakistan. Saleem soon discovers that the move is more than a geographic displacement, however. As his “second period of hurtling growth came to an end†and he is “exiled once more from [his] home,†the protagonist finds that “the existence of a frontier ‘jammed' my thought-transmissions†(Rushdie 325). The first step of his separation is the least momentous of the three; it is a temporary disconnection from his several hundred peers of the Children of Midnight, a connection which to his knowledge will be restored once he crosses over the Indian-Pakistani border back to the country of his birth. He even comments prior to helping General Zulfikar plan a coup that “although the telepathic airways were jammed in this country, the modes of connection still seemed to function†(Ibid. 328). At no point does he express the temporary suspension of his telepathic gift as a feeling of loss or emptiness; it is present but simply disabled. The political divide of the Partition provides the only possible jam to his powers he has yet to discover, indicating that that the border between India and Pakistan may be as much an ideological division as a physical boundary. When he returns to India, however, his parents trick him into surgery that runs his temporary suspension of his telepathy into a permanent loss.
Haroun's moon Kahani initially had day and night just like any celestial orb; the Gups and Chups happily coexisted. At one point in the past, the “Eggheads,†engineers who design Gup technology, brought “the rotation of Kahani […] under control†so that “the land of Gup is bathed in Endless Sunshine, while over in Chup it's always the middle of the night†(Haroun 80). To further deepen the divide between the two peoples, an “unbreakable (and also invisible) Wall of Force†was built to keep Chup and Gup separate (Ibid. 80). In contrast to Midnight's Children, the partition between two nations is created voluntarily, while all three stages of Saleem's loss of his loss are brought upon him by external forces. The partition of Chup and Gup, however, mirrors the historical separation of India and Pakistan in 1947; neither side trusts the other, and each is committed to remaining independent of the other. The strict adhesion to the historical situation ends there, for small chinks begin to appear in the armor of the absolute division of light and dark.
The historical reality of the birth of Partition is aptly interpreted by Rushdie in both Midnight's Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The debate regarding the justification of Partition as led by Jinnah and Gandhi respectively started about ten years before the British finally agreed to hand over rule to a native government; by the time 1947 rolled around, the idea had gained enough momentum among the general populace to put into law the Mountbatten Plan for the creation of India and Pakistan. Initially, this was not a terminally divisive move; although Jinnah had expressed the opinion that Hindus and Muslim could never coexist peacefully, Gandhi insisted the two religions could easily inhabit the same united country living side by side. Some evidence for the former opinion can be seen the readiness with which the general populace put their support being the more radical plan, particularly as Britain continued to drag their feet on the issue of their withdrawal. Partition may have been historically inevitable, and Rushdie portrays it so in both of these fictional works. Saleem Sinai is involuntarily taken to Pakistan on the instruction of his grandmother, and indeed the later removal of his gift was achieved through deception and force. The final loss of his telepathy is not an inevitability at this point in the story, and no true removal of his past has yet taken place as he has every expectation of eventually returning to India. Rushdie provides less detail about the origins of the Chup-Gup divide in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, saying only that “the rotation of Kahani has been brought under control†but failing to explain what political events spurred the creation of “Chattergy's Wall†dividing the two halves of Kahani (Haroun 80). Iff the water genie hints that the separation may have been prompted by “the leader of the Chupwalas, the Cultmaster of Bezaban,†but regardless of the cause it appears to be a political and racial separation rather than a move undertaken for some kind of pragmatic consideration. In both of the stories, religious or racial concerns prompt an initial separation of one people from their opposite counterparts; the only difference is that in Midnight's Children, the disconnect of Saleem's mind is initially temporary, while the separation of Chup and Gup in Haroun and the Sea of Stories appears to be a permanent measure that Chup would like to maintain as a defense against the power of Gup for as long as possible. In history and both books, the initial separation is quickly followed by events that begin to move the division towards the opposite of its initial state; Saleem and India each move further from their united past, while cracks begin to appear in the separation of dark and light on Kahani.
A short two months after the creation and partition of independent India and Pakistan, the two countries were locked in military conflict, as they would be three other times in the decades following their founding. This Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 took place over Kashmir, a region that became part of neither India nor Pakistan in the Partition. As an independent state positioned roughly between India and Pakistan, it was a tempting acquisition for both nations; the first to attempt an invasion was initiated by Pakistan in late October of 1947, and “[o]n October 27th, the first Indian troops were flown into Kashmir†(Mellor 60). Pakistan quickly made substantial inroads into Kashmir, but India soon counter-invaded. The war continued as a cyclic gain and acquiescence of territory until the end of 1948, when the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, called for the United Nations to mediate the conflict. The “Security Council Investigation Commission†of the UN organized a “'Cease-Fire' as the first step towards a settlement of the conflict […] on the first day of 1949,†with around three thousand soldiers dead and modest territorial gains for both nations (Ibid. 63). The Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 demonstrated one of the substantial flaws in the institution of Partition, as neither nation was entirely happy with the territorial division between the two, and both were eager to acquire additional land. Pakistan, with the far smaller area, was the more aggressive in seeking out new territory and ultimately precipitated the conflict. However, it ended up the loser in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947, gaining much less area than India captured and losing the denser, more fertile areas of the country to its enemy. The 1947 war also had the significant result of placing India and Pakistan at odds with each other politically; the stage was set for future conflict between the two nations over the Kashmir area, and proper historical background was in place for the fictional destruction of Saleem Sinai's past.
The second, more serious step in the progression of Saleem's mental loss occurs in 1962, when the Sinai family is reunited in India. One day soon after their return, while the war between Chinese and Indian forces rages, Saleem's parents tell him they have decided to take him and his sister on a picnic. They pack, yet on the way they stop at the “Ear Nose Throat Clinic;†he realizes “picnics tricked me†and fears that an operation to clear his infected sinuses will remove his telepathic abilities (Rushdie 347). Indeed, when he wakes up from the anesthesia, he is devastated to discover that the “connection [is] broken (for ever),†and feels a “[s]ilence outside me†(Ibid. 348). His mental power has become so integral in his self-identity that its absence feels like a loss of one of his senses, for instance suddenly becoming blind or deaf. This terminal loss can be equated to the worsening of Indo-Pakistani relations as a result of the first military conflict between the two nations. The Partition cut off each nation and its associated religious majority from the other, prompting mass migration, displacement, and even death. The Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 served to deepen this initial divide by simultaneous increasing animosity between each country and building the sense of national pride and identity within the inhabitants of each of the fledgling nations. Saleem's final loss of his connection to the children of midnight mirrors this deepening historical divide. By becoming separated from the hundreds of other children who have daily debated in his brain, the temporary rift he had already felt in his years in Pakistan suddenly becomes impassably wide, cutting him off completely from his friends and peers, much as the first Indo-Pakistani war in 1947 made it even more of an improbability that modern India and Pakistan would resolve their ideological differences and reunite. Saleem's loss of a part of himself becomes a loss of his entire self when a concussion erases Saleem's memory.
Several events happen nearly simultaneously in Haroun and the Sea of Stories that begin to break down the established separation between Chup and Gup. The most important occurs in the hold of the shadow ship where Haroun, Rashid, and the water genie Iff are being held prisoner. Iff had given Haroun “a Bite-a-Lite:†“[b]ite the end off, […] and it gives you two full minutes of bright, bright light†(Haroun 150). When one of his companions tries to sabotage the ship's generator, Haroun takes the opportunity to use the light. “The light that poured out†from the Bite-a-Light “was as bright as the sun;†its intensity blinds the Chups around him but also makes the “whole vessel seem[…] to quiver for a moment†(Ibid. 165-166). In fact, the light makes both ship and Chups “a little less solid, a little more shadowy,†making Haroun realize that if “the sun would come out, […] they'd all melt away, they'd become flat and shapeless†(Ibid. 166). The first incursion of light upon dark is used for the constructive purposes of escape, but the boy thinks it could also be used to destroy the tyrannical leader of Chup. In Midnight's Children, the progression operated in the opposite order. Saleem goes from being fully united with his past to a partial division with the loss of his telepathy to full separation with his amnesia. Kahani, on the other hand, starts with a complete divide between light and dark, then progresses through a brief period of mixing to finally a full breakdown of the barriers between light and dark to restore peaceful coexistence of Chups and Gups. Haroun's experience with the Bite-a-Lite can be interpreted two different ways in a historical context. Firstly, the events of Haroun and the Sea of Stories can be seen as an inverted narration of the modern history of India, progressing from dystopia to utopia instead of the historical regression from unity to strife. Alternatively, Haroun and the Sea of Stories can be interpreted as representing a possible series of events after the present day Partition in which the countries are reunited into one. The final step in Kahani's journey from hatred and division back to unity is, like Saleem's total loss of his memory, a momentous event.
The events of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 served to worsen the already strained relationship between India and Pakistan resulting from the circumstances of their creation. Two of Rushdie's novels, Midnight's Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, contain an analogous intermediate event in their progressions from one extreme to another. In Midnight's Children, the removal of Saleem Sinai's magical gift of telepathy occurs halfway along his journey from full participate in India's Midnght's Children Conference to isolation from his past, his family, and his homeland. As with the historical conflict, Saleem's surgery makes more permanent a pre-existing division, yet still leaves some room for return to the previous status quo. Although he is no longer able to contact his fellow members of the Conference, he still has the India of his birth and his family to support him. Nevertheless, as with the historical reality of Indo-Pakistani relations, Saleem's remaining ties with the past are soon severed by additional physical trauma. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the brief weakening of the division of light and dark is merely a precursor to the final banishment of the partition between Chup and Gup. As with Midnight's Children, the escape of Haroun and Iff using the Bite-a-Lite represents a midpoint between the absolute division of the opposites of light and dark, an indication that a move to the final state of unity is possible yet an event too weak to bring about the change on its own. The final stage towards full transformation to and from partition in Midnight's Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories respectively each symbolically indicate the possible of a future reunion between India and Pakistan.
Following the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947, also called the first Kashmir War, three subsequent conflicts drew the attention of the international community and further increased the ideological and cultural separation between India and Pakistan. Three of their four major offensives to date have been disputes over the territory of Kashmir, while the final war concerned Bangladesh. The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, also called the Second Kashmir War, began when Pakistan again began to invade the Kashmir area under what they called Operation Gibraltar (Gupta 71). India counterattacked, and soon the two nations were locked in a conflict similar to the first Kashmir war. India managed to push back into Pakistan itself, then Pakistan captured a smaller piece of Indian territory. After five weeks and thousands of casualties, with stalemate an inevitability, the United Nations ordered a ceasefire. The next major armed conflict broke out in 1971, when fighting began between East and West Pakistan following a disputed election (Palit 45). The Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 was unique in that it was the only modern Indo-Pakistani war that did not concern the occupation of Kashmir. India joined the fray when its Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, announced her support for the independence of West Pakistan, also called Bangladesh (Ibid. 62). As refugees began to flee the fighting in West Pakistan, India started an offensive against East Pakistan that led to Pakistan's defeat within about two weeks of fighting on the India-Pakistan border. Little scholarly detail is available on the fourth conflict, joined in 1999, but it too centered on the Kashmir issue and brought little gain or resolution to either side. The mistrust and enmity between the two countries that their four wars to date have shown remains firmly in place, layering cultural and nationalistic partitions on top of the geographical border.
1965 brings the onset of the second Indo-Pakistan War to Saleem's Pakistan, a conflict that lasted about five weeks and ended in stalemate. Saleem's entire family was killed in a series of blasts; the last explosion destroys his home and flings his mother's silver spittoon towards his head. As he gets up, it hits him in the head, and he loses consciousness and his memories in the same split-second. The next view he gives is a third-person account of the Buddha, a physically and mentally numb man in an elite Pakistani military unit. He has lost every shred of his identity, living only on the extraordinary sense of smell he acquired as a small recompense for his missing telepathy. This loss of his memory and sense of self completes the three-stage process that began with the removal of his birth country that jammed his telepathy and the more permanent excision of his gift by the operation to clear his sinuses. The total destruction of his links to his past self can be interpreted in the context of India-Pakistan relations as the further division that the middle two wars had wrought upon their separation. The Fourth Indo-Pakistani War of 1999 was not a factor in Rushdie's writing, as Midnight's Children was first published in 1981. The issue of Kashmir repeatedly brought the two young countries to belligerence and three times to armed conflict, fights that continued the dual trends of strengthening national identities and driving these respective identities further from their common origins. Saleem's past is now inaccessible to him, and his own self-identity has radically changed. He has moved from having a physical link to his homeland to fighting for its enemy, and now relies on a non-magical, somewhat less-impressive gift to earn his keep. Saleem becomes cleanly separated from his past, only able to reach back across the divide to reconnect to his past when he is nearly killed by the venom of a poisonous snake.
Haroun is able to overcome the Processes Too Complicate To Explain and bring the inhabitants of Chup and Gup back together by restoring the daily cycle of day and night. After his escape from the shadow ship of the Cultmaster, he uses a vial of golden Wishing Water that Iff had given him to move the sun directly overhead. Haroun wishes “'this Moon, Kahani, to turn, so that it's no longer half in light and half in darkness'†(Haroun 170). He concentrates for over eleven minutes, then just in the nick of time, as he is about to be recaptured, “Haroun Halifax's wish came true†(Ibid. 171). The moon turns quickly, and “the sun rose, at high speed:†“[s]hadows could not remain solid in that brightness; and the huge ship itself had started to melt†(Ibid. 173). His wishing manages to both defeat the technological prowess of the Chups and turn an entire planet, in a single momentous instant returning all of Kahani to a normal cycle of light and darkness. In addition to restoring the physical rotation of the planet, he defeats both the Eggheads of Chup and the Cult of Khattam-Shud of Gup, both of which groups wanted to segregate the moon into zones. Once again, this event can be seen within the narrative as either an inverted retelling of the history of Partition, or an explanation of how the resolution of the Partition might come about. It seems more logical to interpret the passage as a mix of the two, explaining how Rushdie thinks the Partition can be solved by a reversal of the events that led to and followed its inception. Such a reading would dictate the reunion of India and Pakistan via a gradual resumption of friendly relations followed by an eventual political and geographical merge, just as a political and territorial split followed by armed conflict led to their bitter division in the first place. The final events in the restoration of the normal order on Kahani in Haroun and the Sea of Stories provide one view on the resumption of friendly relations between India and Pakistan.
Midnight's Children contains a similar projection of the end of Partition, indicating an equally tumultuous event as the solution to reunion. After months spent with a special unit of the Pakistani military, The Buddha finds himself lost in the forest with other members of his group. As they desperately try to survive, a blind, translucent serpent bit [the Buddha…] and poured venom into […] his heel†(Rushdie 419). The bite succeeds in rejoining him “to the past, jolted into unity by snake-poison†as he becomes Saleem once again (Ibid.). The verb Rushdie uses to describe his reconnection indicates that only the shock of an event that nearly killed Saleem was sufficient to resolve his trauma-induced amnesia. Analogously, Rushdie can be suggesting that only an equally catastrophic political or military incident would be sufficient to reunite India and Pakistan, but implies that such an occurrence would be enough to permanently fuse the two nations politically and ideologically.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories provides both similar and contrasting themes to Midnight's Children. Both works contain a theme of division that starts at one state, goes through an intermediate medium, and through a calamitous event arrives at a new state. In the first work, the theme is introduced with the partition fully intact; light and dark are separated by lunar rotation and a wall that girdles the entire moon. An event occurs that temporarily breaks down the barrier, and soon thereafter, the movement of an entire moon swaps light and darkness and begins a normal cycle of day and night. Midnight's Children follows the opposite progression, from full unity through a medium to full division and directly back to unity, yet includes two momentous events, one at the onset of complete separation between past and present, and one at the reunion of the two. This contrast serves to place Midnight's Children as thematically linked to the historical events it portrays, specifically the separation and growing rift between India and Pakistan. It also situates the figurative events of Haroun and the Sea of Stories as after modern times, figuratively describing a possible class and series of events that would lead to reconciliation of India and Pakistan. A smaller, temporary occurrence may be necessary to freeze the grip of the status quo, but the main impetus would have to be a large and catastrophic incident.
Salman Rushdie proposes a momentous political or military event as the best chance for resolution of the partition of India and Pakistan via the themes of division and unity in his novels Midnight's Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Saleem Sinai, the self-proclaimed leader of the Midnight's Children Conference in the former novel, loses his past in a series of three increasingly serious events. The division between Chup and Gup follows a reversed progression, breaking down from complete separation to unity through two steps. Connections can be drawn between each of the three steps towards Saleem's total loss of his family, memory, and friends and the historical events of Partition; Haroun's shorter, reversed narrative indicates it is a closer match to a theoretical resolution of Partition. In Rushdie's analogy of the onset of Partition, it is never completely irreparable. Even when Saleem has been without a past as the Buddha for years, a snakebite is able to restore his dormant memory. Similarly, the historical rift between India and Pakistan, deepened as it has been by a series of four military conflicts, is still fixable; Rushdie suggests through the events of Haroun and the Sea of Stories that an incident as momentous as a near-fatal snakebite is to Saleem or the instantaneous rotation of their moon is to the inhabitants of Kahani. The question of what this final event might be is not clear from either of his novels; he leaves open the possibility of any event such as nuclear war, some outside invader, or any number of other possible occurrences. Nevertheless, he implies that eventual resolution of the conflict between India and Pakistan may be possible at some point in the future, provided that a strong enough catalyst occurs to bring reunite them once again.
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