South Asia as a region
S.D. Muni

Persisting conflicts in South Asia, at times, prompt observers to raise the question if South Asia is really a region capable of forging cooperative ties. A region is generally known as a cluster of geographically proximate countries that share common historical bonds, cultural and social identities and economic, political and strategic interests, with a desire to live in harmony and cooperation. From this perspective, there can be no doubt about the region-ness of South Asia. As a term, ‘South Asia’ has been in use only for the past five decades or so. It is the ‘Indian sub-continent’ that has been in longer use. The political division of the Indian sub-continent brought about at the time of the British withdrawal in 1947 gave rise to the use of the term South Asia for the ‘Indian sub-continent’. The American area studies programme popularised the use of the term South Asia and the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971, from what was hitherto East Pakistan, reinforced this usage.

Any historical and cultural narrative of South Asia is infact a story of the Indian subcontinent’s civilisational and historical evolution spread over a period of more than 5000 years. This narrative deals with the emergence, growth and erosion of the Indus Valley civilisation, of the rise of the State from the ‘Lineage’ in the Ganga valley as explored by the eminent historian Romila Thaper and of the rise and fall of empires. Many of the mysteries of the Indus Valley civilisation that flourished in Moen-jo-daro and Harappan valleys have not yet been satisfactorily deciphered. The question of the origin and role of ‘Aryans’ in the evolution of this civilisation is still being debated among the historians. The political evolution of civilisation saw the rise and fall of numerous empires. The first was established by the Mauriyan kings beginning somewhere in 320(s) BC and stretching up to 232 BC under the emperor Ashoka. This is considered as the ‘most extensive empire ever forged by any Indian dynasty’. After the disintegration of the Maurya Empire, the major landmarks in the political evolution of the subcontinent were the Gupta Empire (320-540AD) known as the golden period of ancient India, the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1528 AD), the Mughal Empire (1526-1857 AD) and the British Empire (1858-1947 AD).

Some of the characteristic features of this long political evolution deserve to be underlined. One was the extensive trading links and cultural exchanges between the Indus Valley civilisation and those of Egypt and Mesopotamia. There was an inherent outward looking orientation of the Indian civilisation during the rise and fall of many empires as a result of which economic and cultural contacts were nursed with the countries on the east as well as the west of India, until the arrival of the British, through the sea route from east. However, most of the external invasions to India came from the northwest. The civilisational and cultural resilience of India absorbed all these external invasions into its fold except for the likes of Alexander and the British that only came for the plunder and profits. India also had extensive trading and cultural contacts with countries of the east.

The influence of Hinduism flourished in Indo-China from the first to the 11th century even without any military campaign to back it up. It was a product of economic and cultural contacts. The sub-continental civilisation is also the birthplace of several religions, namely Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism. This civilisation also nursed other major world religions that came through invaders and occupants like Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and the Bahai faith. The South Asian countries today have people of most of these religious faiths living with each other. The basic instinct of engagement, absorption and accommodation synthesised the best and the sustainable from the diverse, even mutually conflicting sources, thus evolving a cultural context that was rich in its diversity and strong in adaptability and coexistence.

In the geo-political evolution of the present day South Asia, restructured as it was from the Indian sub-continent through the superimposition of state boundaries on a contiguous cultural landmass and economic space, the British imperial authority played a critical and decisive role. Both Burma (Myanmar) and Sri Lanka were separated from the British Indian Empire in 1937 as independent administrative units. The British did not incorporate Nepal and Afghanistan into the empire by default or design even after establishing their near-complete political sway on these countries. In fact Nepal's territorial boundaries, as they stand today, emerged after a series of adjustments, additions and encroachments to meet the British requirements in India.

This has left a debatable aspect of South Asian geo-politics in the form of the question of inclusion or exclusion of Myanmar and Afghanistan. The Indian rulers in the pre-colonial period had their political sway extending even beyond Kabul and Kandhar in Afghanistan. Both Myanmar and Afghanistan were considered for inclusion in South Asian Association for Cooperation (SAARC), established in 1985. Either or both joining SAARC in the future may still not be ruled out. However, generally Myanmar and Afghanistan are considered as South Asia's neighbouring states and not its parts.

We mentioned earlier that the concept of South Asia is a colonial contribution after India and Pakistan became independent. The real problem lay not in the creation of Pakistan but the manner in which this was accomplished. The new state was created, in two distant parts in the east and the west, with the huge Indian landmass in between. Culturally, the Bengali dominated East Pakistan had much less in common with the Punjabi, Sindhi, Pathan and Baloch mosaic of its western big brother. This cultural diversity and geographical monstrosity driven by the military’s authoritarian governance eventually led to the creation of yet another new state, Bangladesh, from within Pakistan in 1971.

Within three years of this momentous event, Sikkim, a Himalayan protectorate of India, became an integral part of the Indian Union. South Asia has also witnessed many territorial encroachments like the division of Jammu and Kashmir between ‘Pakistani-administered’, ‘China-possessed’ (since 1883) and ‘Indian-administered’ territories. These are unsettled issues between India and Bangladesh, India and Nepal and India and China. China also has claims on what Bhutan thinks as its territory. There are separatist movements in Sri Lanka and India's north-east, which, if not handled properly, may force yet another redrawing of state boundaries in South Asia.

The existing boundaries also have a specific characteristic, where South Asian countries do not share borders with each other, except with and through India. This makes the region geo-politically ‘Indo-centric’ and inherently bilateral in intra-regional interactions, with serious policy not only for regional cooperation but also in normal bilateral relations. The political and territorial boundaries imposed on cultural contiguities have added social complexities to bilateral relations.

There are matrimonial alliances, family ties and social associations across the borders between India and all of its South Asian neighbours. There are also spillovers of ethnic and social turmoil in each of these neighbours into India and vice-versa. There exist criminal networks, terrorists’ linkages and mafia gangs operating across the borders between India and each of its neighbours. And the boundaries being haphazard and landmass being contiguous and open, they allow easy flow of people, goods and ideas across the borders interfering with economic and political relations. The state cannot always and effectively control such movements, especially if any one side decides on a calculated policy of encouraging or conniving with them.

The 150 years of colonial rule on the Indian sub-continent also distorted its economic space. The British developed industrialisation and transport network only in the heartland and those areas of the Indian sub-continent that enhanced their profitability and facilitated the economic plunder. The periphery of the sub-continent was left undeveloped or underdeveloped. Bangladesh and Pakistan represented most of that underdeveloped periphery. So did India’s northeast and northwest, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives. This has naturally created a potential for economic restlessness and inequality in South Asia which is getting reflected strongly in some of its political conflicts and tensions as also in day-to-day bilateral and regional relations. The sense of inequality in interstate relations has also led to misunderstanding between neighbours, creating difficulties in regional cooperation. The smaller countries suspect that both in bilateral and regional economic engagements, the larger and stronger economy of India will secure more benefits at their cost.

Political dynamics in the South Asian countries for more than fifty years have evolved on the given infrastructure of cultural and historical inheritance, geo-political construction and economic space. The constraints of time and space do not permit a detailed discussion of political changes in each of the South Asian countries but some broad common features may be taken note of. While India's politics have remained generally stable and evolved smoothly, those of its neighbouring countries have been marked by two notable characteristics. One is the rise of a sectarian state. In case of Pakistan, its founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah's vision of a Muslim majority secular state, and not an Islamic state in South Asia, was shattered soon after his death. Sri Lanka unleashed a movement for a ‘Sinhala Buddhist state’ in 1956 and Nepal declared itself a Hindu state under the new constitution of 1962. Bangladesh’s secular culture also succumbed to the political exigencies of sectarian forces in 1978 and Bhutan asserted its Buddhist-Drukpa character by the beginning of the 1980s. Maldives has always been a homogenous Muslim state. It is unfortunate that in India also- though the state continues to swear by its secular credentials-over the past decade or so, sectarian forces have raised their heads and threaten to turn India into a Hindu state.

The problem of the rise of religious sectarianism in multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies is that it has led to the alienation of minorities and given rise to ethnic aspirations and separatist movements to seek their rights and identity preservation. In Sri Lanka both the JVP insurgency of the early seventies and the Tamil insurgency since the early Eighties have resulted from the politics of ethnic consolidation of the Sinhalese in the political system. The Tamil insurgency still remains a major challenge for Sri Lanka's unity and territorial integrity. Particularly so in the context of the now stalled peace process started in 2001. In Pakistan, the separation of Bangladesh was a consequence of the dominance of Punjabi ethnicity under the garb of an Islamic state. Similarly, the sense of deprivation in North Western Frontier Province, Balochistan and Sindh as well as the rise of the Shia-Sunni sectarian conflict are also the results of alienation caused by over centralisation and sectarianism. In Bangladesh, the Chakma unrest was a reflection of Bengali and Islamic assertion. In Nepal, the Terai movement of the Maoists insurgency of the late Nineties are manifestations of protest against the dominance of hill people, and against a Hindu state, respectively. In India, the unrest and ethnic turmoil in the northeast is a clear evidence of the failure of even a secular state to integrate its socially divergent groups. The sharpening of communal tensions in India that resulted in the demolition of the Babri Mosque (1992) and the carnage in Gujrat (2002) are the results of the rise of Hindu fundamentalist forces that are pursuing the politics of religious segregation.

South Asia, thus, is passing through a process of national integration in respective countries which is both violent and disruptive, creating problems of internal and regional insecurity. A sectarian state is the cause and a part of this crisis of integration. It cannot lead to the resolution of this crisis. It is difficult to precisely underline the factors that led to the rise of sectarian forces in the politics of South Asian states. But search of legitimacy by the authoritarian forces (like in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan) and struggle for democratic power (such as in Sri Lanka and India) have both led to the mobilisation of sectarian constituencies. This also has other complex dimensions related to the unleashing of globalisation, explosion of information, aspirations and identity and uneven distribution of the fruits of development.
The second characteristic of the politics of South Asian states is the cycle of democratic distortions and resurgence. Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh witnessed an erosion of democratic processes and assertion of authoritarian governance in 1958, 1960, 1978 and 1975 respectively. Bhutan has always remained a monarchy, though now there are signs of democratic processes being introduced. The beginning of the 1990s witnessed a democratic resurgence in all these countries of South Asia, but again in Pakistan and Nepal forces of regression have been on ascendance since the end of the 1990s. India also suffered a distortion in its democratic system for a short while in 1975, but its robust democratic institutions have been alive and vibrant since then.

The rise of sectarian forces and the democratic distortions in South Asia have both vitiated inter-state relations in the region. There has been a spillover of political turmoil in each country across the borders, involving India in most of the cases. The sectarian and undemocratic regimes have often been propelled by their sense of insecurity to arouse anti-India nationalism for their survival, because their political adversaries and ethnic rebellions have sought shelter and support in India, irrespective of the attitude of the Indian state. Conflicts of vested interests in economic, strategic and social fields have tended to reinforce the regime insecurity and anti-Indian strands of nationalism in most of India's neighbouring countries. Indian policy makers have worsened the situation by inept handling of such conflict spillovers. It may sound strange and paradoxical but the spillover of internal conflicts has, on some occasions, brought the affected neighbours together and at others, driven them further apart. The case of Indo-Sri Lanka relations on the Tamil question illustrates this paradox clearly. There have also been a number of instances of a state exploiting the internal turmoil in its neighbouring South Asian state to its advantage with impunity. India's complaints against Pakistan on sponsoring cross-border terrorism is the worst of such instances.

The inter-state tensions generated by the political dynamics of internal transformations and turmoil have caused strategic dissonance in South Asia. The smaller countries have reflected this dissonance by pursuing policies to counter-balance India. They have cultivated extra-regional powers in support of their strategic goals and the interested external powers have exploited this regional strategic dissonance to promote their specific interests in the region and around. One wonders, for instance, if Indo-Pakistan relations would have been the same on the Kashmir question had this question not been caught into the web of cold-war politics. Nehru was seeking a modus operandi on Kashmir with his counter part in Pakistan in 1954 when the cold-war oriented military assistance package entered Pakistan. And there were also strong political constituencies in Pakistan that preferred a negotiated, bilateral settlement of the Kashmir question then. Similarly, China exploited Indo-Pak differences to the hilt, to the extent of securing territorial foothold in Kashmir. China also took advantage, of the Indo-Nepal tensions resulting from the consequences of King Mahendra's dismissal of democracy in the Himalayan kingdom in December 1962. It must be mentioned here that regional strategic dissonance did not allow any joint front to be forged even when there appeared to be a common external threat to South Asia. The developments of 1962 in the context of Sino-Indian conflict, and of the 1980s, in the context of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan may be recalled here. Even the attempts of the Western powers (U.S. and U.K.) to bridge the regional strategic divide in South Asia during such external threats did not succeed.

It will be erroneous to conclude from these unfortunate past experiences that there cannot be any strategic harmony in South Asia. The region is a natural strategic unit surrounded by the Himalayas in the north and the Indian Ocean in the south, east and west. The South Asian countries have coordinated their approaches to the questions of disarmament, including chemical and nuclear weapons, in the United Nations and elsewhere. They displayed a strong consensus on some of the key aspects of the ‘Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace’ proposal during the early seventies. There are areas of bilateral security arrangements, understandings and concrete cooperation among the South Asian countries, notwithstanding occasional irritants and apprehensions in implementation. The only serious dilemma in South Asia's strategic harmony is that of India-Pakistan conflict, which seems to be erupting into more serious dimensions when the army becomes politically assertive in Pakistan.

The foregoing discussion underlines two mutually incompatible features of the South Asian region;
(i) its rich inheritance of historical evolution and cultural contiguity, its geo-political structuring and its economic aspirations and potential;
(ii) its intense dissonance as a product of its political dynamics, colonial legacies and regional spread of domestic conflicts.
It is indeed unfortunate that the ‘dissonance’ factors have not allowed legitimate and adequate expression to the 'inheritance' factors during the past fifty years of South Asian existence. The South Asian political and bureaucratic leadership must share the blame for letting this unfortunate situation prevail. There have been occasions and efforts to change this balance between ‘dissonance and inheritance’ in favour of the latter, as was evident in the form of responses to the well known ‘Gujral doctrine’ at the regional level or the ‘Lahore initiative’ between India and Pakistan, but internal political dynamics in the key countries brought the dominance of 'dissonance' to the fore sooner than later.
It is being widely recognised that this can no longer be allowed to continue, particularly if South Asia has to cope with the challenges faced by it. The peace initiative being pursued currently between India and Pakistan and statements made by the prime ministers of these two principal South Asian countries that the challenge of poverty has to be met in the region are an indication of this realisation. The civil society in South Asia is also clamouring for peace and constructive engagement to be given a chance, to let the inherent harmony of the region assert itself beyond contentious political pre-occupations.

There are three fold challenges confronting contemporary South Asia. They are the challenge of unipolar world and globalisation at the level of the world order, the challenge of upsurge in people’s aspirations and expectations from within the South Asian societies and the challenge of terrorism haunting most of the South Asian states. This is not the place to discuss, in detail, the South Asian strategies to these challenges, as they would differ from country to country. But all three create pressures for the South Asian region to not only recognise its inherent potential for harmony and cooperation but also to explore possibilities of harnessing this potential. The unipolar world would not let South Asian adversaries resort to war or use of force in intra-state relations for resolving their contentious issues. It is also common sense that the unipolar world would impinge less menacingly on them if they had greater harmony and understanding among themselves.
Similarly, globalisation has both positive and negative implications for South Asia; in terms of internal economic reforms, harnessing of common regional resources like water, creating and expanding trade flows within the region as also with the wider international community, coping with global trading regime, investment flows and technology transfers, and in terms of managing explosion of information and migratory movements. South Asian states are getting sensitive towards these opportunities and pressures. The discussions on SAPTA (South Asian Preferential Trade Area) and SAFTA (South Asian Free Trade Area) under the regional cooperative organisation, SAARC, indicate that. So also do the concept of growth quadrangle of India, Nepal, and Bhutan and the bilateral urge for Free Trade Agreements between India on the one hand and Sri Lanka and Bangladesh on the other. An operational Free Trade Area of India with Bhutan and Nepal already exists.

If the pressures for greater mutual understanding and harmony were only from the extra- regional sources, perhaps the internal dynamics of South Asian polities could afford not to respond to them adequately. But the internal pressures generated by rising aspirations and fractured expectations in each of the South Asian countries are something that has to taken serious note of. Or else they will feed into the forces of disruption. The Maoists rebellion in Nepal is a typical example of how the belied popular expectation can vitiate internal peace and stability both at the global and the regional levels, call upon South Asian states to work for the resurgence of the regions’ internal cohesion. The terrorist groups within South Asia have networked themselves with each other quite effectively. It is inevitable for the states to do so if the menace of terrorism has to be contained and defeated. The emerging situation simply makes it counter-productive for one state to sponsor, support or even acquiesce to the terrorist attacks on its neighbours. The international system as well as legitimate self-interests make such adventures prohibitive. One may hope that in the coming century, South Asia will rediscover its basic heritage and reinforce its cooperative moorings.

(S.D. Muni is professor of South Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University and India's former Ambassador to Lao Peoples Democratic Republic).