How Southasian regionalism could chart the course beyond subcontinental strife

There are those who believe that the concept of Southasian regionalism will lead to peace and social justice in this part of the world holding one-fourth of humanity.

Then there are those like political scientist Happymon Jacob. His essay, “The End of South Asia: A Region in Name Only”, published in Foreign Affairs on July 22, represents a powerful section of New Delhi academia that defends and feeds off “Indian exceptionalism”, promoting a kind of Monroe Doctrine for the Subcontinent.

Jacob’s pronouncement of the death of Southasia seems in service of the “nation-statism” that has supplanted British colonialism in Southasia, and in particular India, whose rulers have taken on the powers of the departed “sahibs”. Like the colonials, the New Delhi policy makers would like to regard all of Southasia as their playing field, rather than be constricted by the sovereign borders.

The region of Southasia desperately needs conceptualisation that offers alternative paths to the future – where the borders between the existing nation-states are softened, people can mingle, there is economic collaboration, and our shared history helps cement relationships. To perfunctorily declare “the end of South Asia” when in fact efforts to develop an ontology of “Southasia” have barely begun is unhelpful.

Jacob’s views will please those who want to command centralised authority, from the generals in Islamabad to autocratic politicians from Kabul to Colombo, and of course the “India the dominant” lobbies in New Delhi.

Southasian regionalism does not begin and end with SAARC – the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. The region’s peoples constitute an entity far vaster and more dynamic than the hobbled organisation run by eight foreign ministries. The organisation’s failures as dictated by autocrats does not certify the “obsolescence” of Southasia as a concept, as Jacobs pronounces.

How can regionalism be deemed a failure when it has not really been tried? What we need is daring scholarship that seeks to overcome the tropes of ultra-national thinking that have kept subcontinental camaraderie at bay.

India has the strongest academia in the region, including in the arena of strategic affairs and geopolitics – Jacob himself is the founder of the Council for Strategic and Defence Research in New Delhi. This category avoids addressing regionalism because their realpolitik prefers the nation-state straitjacket that has Southasia all tied up.

In the era of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, New Delhi scholars are even less likely to propose Southasian regionalism as the answer to so many woes, including those of India.

The Modi era

Indeed, Modi’s decade in office has seen SAARC asphyxiated, starting with the scuttling of the 19th Summit, slated for Islamabad in November 2016. Back at the last summit of 2014, Modi said, clearly pointing his finger at Pakistan, that inter-country cooperation would proceed “with all of us or some of us”. But he has failed to contribute to the success of alternative exercises, whether it is Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation – BIMSTEC – of the Bay of Bengal littorals, the Indian Ocean Rim Association or the Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, or BBIN, the roadway connectivity exercise.

Modi’s slogan of “Neighbourhood First” has been limited to bilateral outreaches, which have seen little or no success. When he does announce something regional, he does so without consulting other heads of government, as when he launched the South Asian Satellite (GSAT-9) in 2014, a communications satellite built by the Indian Space Research Organisation to provide communication services across the region.

“Geo-strategists” like Jacob think that the concept of “Southasia” is the product of feverish imagination of romantics and elites. He refers denigratingly to the “elites and civil society” who uphold humanistic regionalism, as if realpolitik is the god of New Delhi-centric vision.

In reality, what could be more elitist than disparaging the idea of Southasia in the service of the politicians and generals in power?

The long list of fine individuals upholding Southasian regionalism, which must start with India-Pakistan amity. includes public intellectuals like the late IK Gujral, Kuldip Nayar, IA Rehman, Mahbub ul Haq, Mubashir Hasan and Admiral L Ramdas – who believed the nation-states could move towards a win-win for the people at large through soft borders and economic linkages.

If SAARC represents an “elite-level desire for greater connections within South Asia”, as Jacob posits, he should have proposed alternative ways of “meaningful integration” instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

He is quite mistaken when he claims that none within Southasia would “consider themselves South Asians in the first place”.

There is no other term that has evolved to describe the region or its inhabitants in the modern era after 1947, when “civilisational India” was replaced by the nation-state ‘India’.

Penumbra spaces

Being Southasian is not a primary identity for most (also true for the nation-state in this plural and diverse region) but peoples of the region often self-identify as being from/in Southasia, Dakshin Asia, or Junoobi Asia. There is no other available term.

“Southasia” is now an accepted term within academia and media, lay persons and professionals, in India, the larger Southasia and overseas. The usage is now trending everywhere in the mainstream discourse when there is a need to collectively consider the region encompassing India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the rest.

Jacob concedes that “tens of millions living in diaspora around the world” do consider themselves Southasians. He doesn't ask “why”. The answer is clear, the moment we seek a collective ascription, we revert to the primordial (pre-Partition) identity, for which the logical present-day descriptor is “Southasian”.

The rivalries and animosities get diluted in diasporic communities. This would also likely happen within the region if you reduced the ultra-nationalist rhetoric and removed the border barriers. People would revert to age-old affections and fellowships.

The bland suggestion that “the dream of a united South Asia is over” must be challenged. Firstly, scholars have not adequately “theorised” Southasia as a construct. Secondly, a rigorous conceptualisation would hardly propose a united region with a supra-national government, as many seem to fear. That would be regressive.

One such concept is to regard Southasia as a region of “penumbra spaces” that reflect syncretic historical evolution and experiences, from Balochistan to the Arakan. Another suggestion is to provide true autonomy to the supposedly federal units of India and Pakistan (states and provinces), a devolution exercise that would ipso facto deliver Southasian regionalism from the bottom up.

Bottom-up Southasia

Jacob terms the South Asian University in New Delhi as a doomed undertaking typical of SAARC and Southasia. But as he himself notes, the onus of this lies with New Delhi, given that visa restrictions and financial constraints are the main difficulties faced by the University. He ignores the fact that India’s Ministry of External Affairs treats South Asian University as an appendage, whereas the University was envisaged as being independently Southasian in its governance structures, a place to intellectually chart the region’s future.

The reason Southasia has not built security, economic collaboration and policy cohesion is the “mistrust and enmity…between India and Pakistan”, states Mr Jacob. True. But rather than accepting this as fait accompli, we need to go a step further to expose how destructive this mistrust and enmity is for the people of India and Pakistan.

Jacob correctly states that as a term “South Asia has its origin far from the subcontinent” – when Western academics in the 1950s and ‘60s began using it as a necessity to address the region after the largest part was bifurcated into the nation-states of India and Pakistan. Interestingly, it was the Indian president, Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan who advised the German government "to establish a South Asia Institute rather than an Indo-Asia Institute at Heidelberg University”, notes the political scientist Rahul Mukherji. The South Asia Institute was set up in 1962.

Further, because Western scholars began popularising “Southasia” does not mean that we did not need a term post-1947. Even those who critique the concept of Southasia, like Jacob, use the term.

This relatively dull, neutral geographical phrase had the possibility of broader acceptance compared to other historically fraught names like: “Jambudweep”, “Gondwana”, “Hindustan”, “Bharat” and “(Indian) Subcontinent”.

Jacob refers to the asymmetry – which he calls “lopsidedness” – of Southasia's nation-states. Indeed, India is far larger than the other countries in terms of landmass, population and economy. Even the shape of the peninsula delivers the shape of India; Pakistan and Bangladesh have relatively non-descript coastlines. There is no avoiding this asymmetry, but under the Westphalian system, the sovereignty of individual nation-states must be accepted regardless of size and population – relatively or in absolute terms.

One may see the asymmetry as an insurmountable problem only if we disregard the fact that India is an inordinately large centralised nation-state for its geographic expanse and demographic diversity. Such “asymmetry” can only be tackled through true federalism, in India and in Pakistan.

There is a fatalistic element to Jacob’s arguments, a plea to accept as inevitable and unalterable the capital-centric statecraft and inter-country animosities that mire the region. These arguments are a road to disaster, and not just because Southasia is a nuclear-armed region.

The media and academia pillory as fancy romantics the activists who arrive at the Wagah-Attari border to light candles for India-Pakistan peace. They dismiss anti-nuclear activists as anti-nationals. Political scientists ignore the fact that there is no way outside of Southasian regionalism to tackle evolving global challenges like the looming climate crisis, with its rising oceans, plastic pollution, mass-migration and scores of other urgent matters that cannot be tackled by a single country or government.

Fear of Beijing

When it comes to China, New Delhi's geo-strategists seem as confused and confusing as Jacob who clearly reflects India’s fear of Beijing, writing: “An ambitious and aggressive China seeks to relegate India to the rank of a second-rate power in South Asia.”

Nothing will convince these “think-tankers” that no Southasian neighbour seeks to come under the Chinese geopolitical sphere of influence or copy its state structure even as they want to maintain links with the world’s most dynamic economy, far larger than India’s. Interestingly, while India’s biggest trading partner is China, New Delhi does not want Colombo, Dhaka or Kathmandu to deal with Beijing.

Jacob laments that “South Asia is no longer the India-centric region” it used to be. “Smaller countries,” he writes, are “strengthening economic, political, diplomatic and cultural ties with China and drifting away from India”.

Rather than trying to identify India’s responsibility for this situation, he blames its neighbours for undermining “the coherence and potential unity of South Asia”.

The individual Southasian countries’ relationship with Beijing is not zero-sum, nor does it undermine the idea of Southasian regionalism. Presenting China as a straw figure, Jacob, like many Indian strategic analysts, is unable to get over New Delhi’s Beijing paranoia originating in the 1962 debacle along the Himalayan frontier.

The fear is that China will roll down to the Ganga plain. Really? Has the nature of warfare not evolved dramatically in the age of satellites, drones, missiles, cyber weaponry and artificial intelligence?

Meanwhile, after decades of suspicion about anything Western/American, many New Delhi’s “statist” analysts are now pandering to the West by presenting India as the bulwark against Chinese adventurism. Meanwhile, they rely on China for the supply of everything from solar panels to pharmaceutical raw material.

When will they realise that even to challenge Beijing on the world stage, New Delhi needs healthy relationships with its neighbours? India cannot go it alone, even on its long-standing but standstill desire for membership in the UN Security Council.

India’s neighbours are watching the India-China military standoff in Ladakh, as well as Delhi’s strategic challenges vis-à-vis Modi’s bluster. Going by India’s “dissident” online press, the Modi government cannot stand up to Beijing following the Ladakh skirmishes of 2020. There are telltale signs of a weakened Indian military vis-à-vis China’s capabilities and deployments on the Tibetan plateau. This weakness is also evident in the hurriedly introduced Agniveer recruitment scheme, meant to extract savings for the exchequer on the back of military salaries and pensions.

While New Delhi is itself in a quandary over the “Indo-Pacific” siren call, undecided as to where it stands on Russia-China, a trial balloon is up to drag Southasian neighbours into the Western embrace. Jacob proposes that India rope its smaller neighbours into the “Quad” security partnership – Australia, India, Japan and United States – to neutralise Beijing. He suggests “encouraging forms of cooperation between the Quad and Maldives, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Nepal” (Bangladesh is not included) to widen India's “sense of its own backyard and check the Chinese quest for hegemony”.

The idea that New Delhi would act as the Quad’s recruiting agent within the region is outlandish given New Delhi’s own meandering path towards its preferred global alliance. With India’s distrust and Pakistan's China tilt, it is futile to speak of Pakistan in the same breath but India’s other neighbours are equally unlikely to join a strategic bloc to tackle Beijing.

Land borders

By lamenting about the “very clear impediments to travel” within South Asia, Jacobs implicitly concedes India’s role in these impediments but doesn’t mention the thousands of kilometres of border fencing it has installed along the eastern and western frontiers. He also ignores New Delhi’s stinginess in granting visas to citizens of next-door countries.

All neighbours are culpable to some extent, but if blocking the movement of people and goods has impacted Southasian integration, it is the large economy at the cartographic centre that is the most responsible. As Jacob himself writes, “New Delhi’s decision to open or close borders determines the fate of intraregional connectivity in South Asia.”

The campaign for “Southasia” is aspirational; it seeks to evolve a region where inter-country animosities are reduced and reducing military and other expenditures yields a peace dividend. The rigid nation-state matrix, with its capital-centrism, cannot manage the vast geography and multiplicity of identities in this region, or minorities and micro-minorities. The political scientists and geo-strategists of Colombo, Dhaka, Kathmandu, Islamabad, and most importantly New Delhi, should be presenting alternative visions. Instead, we get polemics like Jacob’s that suit the ruling establishments and mislead the public.

The people know where economic growth and good governance are happening within Southasia. Large parts of India’s Hindi heartland report the lowest on the Human Development Index. India has over the past decade lost its shine as a democratic exemplar that its neighbours once admired and sought to emulate. Today, Modi’s autocracy and anti-minority position mars India's image as the beacon of liberty, inclusion and pluralism in our region. It will take some doing to revive it.

We do not need diatribes upholding the worldview set by New Delhi’s state apparatus and fail to address alternative and cross-cutting visions that will help usher in a better future for two billion people. The current administrators of centralised India want for themselves the mantle of Indic civilization. But in the era of sovereign states, that is something that must be shared. The India of yore has been split among some large and some smaller countries – of Southasia. This reality cannot be ignored.

Kanak Mani Dixit is a writer and activist based in Lalitpur, Nepal. He is founder-editor of Himal Southasian magazine, and is on the Advisory Council of Sapan News Network.

We use “Southasia” as one word, “seeking to restore some of the historical unity of our common living space, without wishing any violence on the existing nation states” – Himal Southasian.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature.

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