Shapiro, founder of the Harvard Negotiation Program talks about how to resolve conflict between government. Thats a look at some of the author programs book tv is covering this week. Many of these events are open to the public. Look for them to air in the near future on the tv on cspan2. Good morning. Welcome and good morning. I am on the faculty of Political Science department here at the university. Also a Research Fellow at the peace and war center. It is my great pleasure and honor to have this conversation with johnny, the 2016 winner of the famed norwich military history award. What we are going to do today is have a conversation, you have read his bio you should take a look at the pamphlet that was handed out. He is a very famous journalist and he set up time magazines addition and lives in singapore and works for bloomberg. He has written this book called midnight theories. What we wanted to do was unpack this book and i have intentionally not read the entire bio because i think it would be more interest to the audience to have a conversation than to put the book into perspective. This book deals with events that happened in countries far away, over 70 odd years ago but i would contend that the book is so timely and so relevant to where we are today. It connects with headline issues that you see in the newspapers every day. The war in afghanistan, the war in iraq, americas engagement with the world, and americas leadership in transforming countries, what the 21st century will century will being in asia, the role of religion in conflicts, and if i might say, how important it is for politicians, when when they are running for office to be very careful in what they say. So i want to take you back, if you will a few centuries. I was born a long time ago, not that long ago, but, but i want to take you back a few centuries to india. Thats where for hundreds and hundreds of years there existed this multicultural, cosmetology and culture with christians and jains all living together, were tripping at each other shrine and this is especially true of muslims in hindu who did that. Even today, you can go to virtually any village in pakistan or india and you will find hindus worshiping at muslim shrines and muslims worshiping at hindu shrines. There are intermarriages when the partition of india took place after 150 years the british presence in india and another two to 300 years of another empire before that when the partition took place, it was a hugely significant event. But the point that i want to bring out, before we get into conversation is nothing is as simple as it looks. This is not strictly a religious conflict. I will give you a personal example. An uncle of mine rose to be the head of the indian air force. His family, like many, many muslim families did not leave india because it was their home. In the pakistani world, heres my uncle leading the air force against the Pakistani Air force, muslim to me muslim, patriots on both side, both owing allegiance to their own country so the big point that i want to make is that as important as religion seems to appear, that is not always the case. I want to start by asking you, after hundreds and hundreds of years, these people have lived together. In 1947, millions get injured or killed. Why . I was glad you started with an easy one. [laughter] i give you a oneword answer. Power. What changed in 1947 . What was different than the previous 150 years 50 years benchmark for the first time, power was there. The british were leaving and they were headed out and didnt have the money to maintain their empire in india or the portico will to do it and they werent wanted there. Hindus and muslims had lived together, but they were would have small riots break out and would last a day or two but you didnt have this mass scale of violence that you had in 1947. What you had was, had was, because the rich were leaving, Muslim Community and political leaders saw a future in which they would be a permanent minority. They would be cut out of power in india. Under a parliamentary system, the Congress Party which was dominated by hindus would always win. They would get the majority of votes wherever they ran. The muslim parties would be confined. In this system, they feared it was also a winner take all system where if you ran the government, your friends and family and cronies would get the contracts. You would write the textbooks in school. You would write the rules of worship and so on. So the political leaders argued that the only way muslims could be safe after the british left was if they had a state of their own where they were majority and ran the government. That was at the very top level. What happened is that political leaders, as you say you have to be very careful about how you talk about these things, they would paint these pictures for their followers of the terrible things that were going to happen if they didnt get their own state. Not only would you be forced to convert, but your daughters would be kidnapped and raped in your grandfathers grandfathers would be killed and so on. This filters down from the top level of Political Leadership in new delhi. Once you get down to the ground level, it becomes very simple and it becomes kill or be killed. About a year before some terrible riots broke out and its still unclear who started them, but something around ten or 15,000 people were killed over the span of four days. This gave indians a vision of what they thought would happen if they didnt defend themselves. So they started to arm themselves, they started to organize and you have to remember this was just after world war ii sue had a lot of young men who had been trained in the military in africa and europe, asia and a lot of them still had weapons so unlike previous riots when violence broke out, these organized squads, you can almost call them death squads were much more effective, much more deadly than previous attacks. They werent fighting with fists and knives are using machine guns. That such an interesting series of thoughts that you have tried to connect. Let me ask you, a lot of the trouble, i grew up in bombay so my family and i went through the partition. There was a whimper there. What i wanted to ask you was if you could unpack that part of your book we talk about the killings. Why were they localized . Why didnt they happen all over . This is something thats important to remember. I think a lot of people have this idea that the british left in all this violence broke out and people were killing each other. It wasnt bad at all. My family was here and my father was a child in bombay at the time and no memory of any violence. Most of india was unaffected by this per there was one particular province called the boone job which is now split between india and pakistan and this is where the border was going to go. They decided to draw the border to divide areas where muslims were in majority and hindus were majority. A new border was going to be drawn. The problem was, theres a Third Community in that area and they were a very Small Community with about 5 Million People but they were concentrated in the middle of the province. The border was going to split their community and half and historically, there was a historical memory of how they had suffered under a muslim ruler years ago. More recently in the spring of 47, muslim mobs had massacred several thousand. They had this vision of what would happen to them if the british drew this border and they found themselves on the wrong side of the line. Also, there were overrepresented in the army so they were heavily militarized. So it started the violence after the border was drawn. Thats why its dread spread very, very quickly. It was very concentrated in this area. It was muslims on the indian side who were pushed out and hindus were pushed out from the other side. As you have this movement of people, Something Like 14 Million People cross the border over the span of a few months. You had these long convoys of refugees, 250,000 people who were essentially defenseless. There were some soldiers that would try to guard them, but they would come in swoop in and they were able to mask her several hundred people at a time. But it was that, combination of communities with the new border that provoked them. So thats so interesting. By the way i want to commend you for still calling it bombay. A lot of have never gone use to mumbai. What what i was going to say, so this issue came to prominence along the border areas, but it didnt spread and the rest of the country. Does that tell us anything about how deeply embedded in religion this was or was it a local fact having to the more of a territory and advantage and revenge . I think thats right. I think this was easy to think of as a hindu muslim conflict, but you have to remember the leaders were completely secular. They werent religious at all. He barely knew the cron. He drank alcohol and was for bidding by islam. He was a man of fine taste. And he was a cambridge socialist and he didnt believe in any of this mumbojumbo as he sought. It wasnt about religion for them. It was again about territory and community. It was fear that was driving them. They were afraid that they were going to be massacred. The other thing thats interesting to remember, too, is that the strongest drive to create pakistan was not in the areas that eventually became pakistan. In northwestern northeastern india, they were the majority. They were in power. They didnt have to fear what would happen after the british left. It was the muslims in central india and other places who really pushed the idea of pakistan. Some of them moved when it was created. Many others did not. Many muslims never wanted to move and live in india now. So a personal anecdote on this issue, a lot of muslims felt about not creating another country called pakistan so my dad at that time was an upandcoming screenwriter and he hadnt yet made a big movie. People, he was very young and he was having a hard time and he had an offer from pakistan to produce movie. He said great, this this will be my big opportunity and my mother, she was a Freedom Fighter in india and she said not on the good life. Youre not going to that horrible country to start a movie. He said we dont have any money and we have two children and he came back and told me that when we were going up, my mother had her suitcases packed and he said what are you doing in she said youre going to pakistan to make money and im going back to my mother. Thats how intensely, the family felt. The question i have for you then is, i want to focus on the importance of leaders and the importance of the british. Do you think that if the british had stuck it out and said no, as they had many times over hundred 5200 years or if the leaders themselves had stuck it out, do you think there is a failing on either side, the british side . I definitely think there were mistakes made on all sides. I think there were failures and guilt to be assigned to everyone. Now you cant prove it counter factually. Even if it hadnt happened, theres no proof that india, unified india wouldve stayed unified. These pressures still would have been there. These fears, possible five or ten years later it couldve broken up along different lines. The other thing to remember is that in 47, the british only directly controlled half the continent. The other half were independent kingdoms ruled by monarchs who legally were independent and could choose to join india or pakistan if they had just left them unified. All the leaders made mistakes. They did try to compromise. The british, for a year had tried to bring the two sides together and about a year earlier, they had come up with a compromise. It was a very complicated rickety compromise where you have a unified india with a very weak Central Government and the muslim areas would have a certain degree of autonomy and individual providence would have other powers. It was a facesaving way for everybody to agree. And they did agree. But, then, almost immediately almost immediately after they agreed to it, the party leader at a press conference and he was being pressured by people from his party thing why are you giving up all this economy to muslim areas. We have fought for decades to keep the british out and this is our time to roll. He said something stupid like, you know, dont worry its not the same now and we will do whatever we want. Of course for anyone hearing this, you had to think how can we trust these people . Once the british leave they will be in power and they will turn on us. So they then backed out of the agreement and then it became virtually impossible to bring them back together again. They kept trying up until the summer of 47. They tried to get back to that, the americans are putting heavy pressure on them. They wanted a united india. They didnt want the army to be broken up. Between the time they struck that compromise and the summer of 47, thats when these riots started to spread. So feelings were getting him bettered in pittard. They had knowing each other for 30 years. They had argued with each other, they had friends in common, you would think they could have found common ground. So im going to open it up for a moment and let people ask questions. I want us now to close this part of the conversation to think about history. I had the pleasure of interviewing gordon sullivan, the chair of trustees a few weeks ago and he impressed on me how important it was at norwich to get this major in a huge, liberal education. He said without an understanding of history, he said theres very little that you can do in making sound decisions of any chain of command. I wanted to take us forward now, we spent trillions of dollars and the Strongest Army in the world has not been able to prevail against the enemy the, the caliban who has no gdp. Same thing in iraq. You can carry that through. My question to you is that in america, we have the saying, thats history. When someone says something, you say oh thats history. I want you to take what happened , im raising the pressure here so you go out and buy multiple copies of the book. Christmas is not that far away. You need to buy at least six each. We take us forward and connect us to whats happening in afghanistan. Its important in two ways, for americans, in particular, you mention afghanistan. The reason were still fighting in afghanistan, 15 years later is because they get a certain degree of support from the Pakistan Military and theyre allowed to regroup and the leadership is safe there and so on. They can keep it alive forever as long as they have that. Why does pakistan do this . Why do they support the taliban, why do they support terrorist groups and why are they building up their Nuclear Arsenal so rapidly. They do all of this because they view india as a mortal threat. Seventy years later, they they dont believe, they dont believe the military, they still treat them as a threat and a country that doesnt believe in their threat and doesnt want them to be surviving. That mentality is nothing new. That came out of just a few months, and that was cemented in the establishment among ordinary pakistanis. Its why the militaries have been able to rule for half of the existence because every time they take power they say they need you need us to defend against your enemy. That is their justification and the justification for the majority of the budget is that you need us. So for americans in outside power, its important to understand this mentality. You have to understand where it comes from. You also have to understand how its changed over the years. You cant start to unwind it until you know where it came from. You have to accept that at least when it was created there was a certain degree of legitimacy to it. They would be happy to see it fail within a year or two and be reabsorbed. Its not entirely crazy. Indians have no interest in taking over pakistan. Quite the opposite. But it did come out of Something Real that we have to accept and understand. Its interesting you bring up the saying, in the end americans also have a very healthy ability to examine our own history and examine be selfcritical and not feel like they have to hide things or sugarcoat them or ignore them. They can admit what happened in the civil war and their shelves and shelves of books. Then they can move forward. We can move forward. They still have trouble with this. The majority of population is young. They shouldnt have any personal connection to this, yet the phrases they use, the way they talk about pakistan is no different than in 1947. There still a sense of paranoia. Its because there taught a version of history. The indians get one version and the pakistan get another version in their mutually incompatible. They want to admit that they couldve been at fault. Maybe they did make mistakes and they can say maybe he wasnt such a nice guy and he was powerhungry and so on. Until they can come up with some sort of joint narrative, i dont think they are going to be able to move forward either. That is dangerous for the rest of us. We have to hope that they can get their. Before i open it up for questions, i want to give you an opportunity, was there a time when you wrote the book where you sat back and said this really came out well and im glad i did it. Besides the only moment that happened when i got to my first ridgeview in the new york review of books and they called it superb. That was the only time. It was a long process. I started working on this book five years ago. I had been working at Newsweek Magazine for about ten years and ive left my job. My wife and i sold our apartment in new york and i put all the stuff in my inlaws basement. I lived out of a suitcase for year as i did research in india and london. I had no idea where this was going or what i wanted to accomplish. I was in a library ten hours a day just pouring through telegrams, paperthin telegrams and personal diagrams and letters and you vacuum it all up and you try to see patterns in it. At the time youre really just trying to get as much information as possible. Then i sat down and try to make sense of it all. It is very important to me that this book was to write for a general audience. This wasnt meant for professors. I hope they find new scholarship in it, but i wanted to make a narrative narrative that would be appealing to everyone. To try and find the narrative in this massive material, i cannot say there was a moment while i was doing at that i was fully confident that i succeeded. That was until it was published in somebody else told me it was all right. So we have a few minutes left. We can take a few questions. Just tell us who you are