9

A Common Future

Every country in Southasia has gone through the excruciating process of invention, imagination, organization, mobilization and independence. Each one of them is engaged in the challenging exercise of national integration. Differences between states are being exaggerated; similarities between people understated. Emotional stakes in nation-states are high. Patriotism has been elevated to the status of religion. In these charged times, the very mention of Southasian unity raises suspicion. Questions that any aspiring Southasian is faced with are confounding: why Southasia, why now and how can it happen when such deep animosity exists between states? However, the sequencing of questions often suggests that even doubters have a hope hidden in some corner of their heart that the plural unity of Southasia is a desirable objective.

The instrumental purpose of imagining a Southasian unity is perhaps the clearest. Any unit of governance is created to face challenges that are similar in nature. Some of the challenges that the entire Southasia faces may vary in degree, but are almost the same everywhere in the region.

Crises in the Region

A quiet moment of reflection by any Southasian anywhere will show that his or her destiny will be affected to a large degree by some of the crises faced by everyone in the region.

1. Food Security

The population of Southasia is still young and rising. Twenty per cent of the population in South Asia is between 15 and 24. Consumption of food is on the increase. Production of cereals, especially coarse grain, the staple of the poor, is declining. Prices have been climbing for years. At least three Southasian countries— Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka—are net importers of food. India, the largest country of Southasia, is barely self-sufficient, and has been sporadically importing foodstuff including wheat to fight scarcity. Even an institution not really known for its love of the poor reports,

The International Monetary Fund has taken a microscope to rising global food prices, and found that food price inflation is significantly higher in poor countries than in rich ones. And since food makes up more of a typical household’s budget in a developing country, the impact on the poor is magnified. The IMF found that food inflation was an annualized 4.5 per cent worldwide in the first quarter of 2007, up from a 3 per cent pace a year earlier. For developing countries, however, food inflation was 9 per cent.¹

Food security has four dimensions: food availability, supply stability, access for all and nutrition for healthy living. According to an assessment, ‘Judged by the criteria of food insecurity and poverty, South Asia has the distinction of being the worst affected region.’² Food crises and pathologies associated with hunger create conditions for human trafficking, child labour, flesh trade and violence in society. No Southasian country can contain such challenges alone. However, a concerted effort can substantially reduce risks for all.

2. Water Scarcity

The looming water scarcity in Southasia is prompting individual governments to adopt reckless measures. Uncontrolled mining has plummeted groundwater levels in much of the Ganga plains. Dams are being built in ecologically fragile regions of the Himalayas. And yet, there is a perennial shortage of safe drinking water in cities and insufficient water for irrigation in rural areas. These problems are likely to get worse as Himalayan glaciers melt due to the effects of global warming.³ Like the food crisis, water crisis too hits the poor first.

The prospect of ‘water wars’—incessant bickering over division of water in Haryana and Punjab in the north and Tamil Nadu and Karnataka in the south, for example—perhaps prompted the Indian government into a proposed linking of rivers with scant regard for the ecological catastrophe that such an enterprise is likely to bring in its wake. But even if such a grandiose scheme were possible, close cooperation between Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and India will be necessary. On the western front, sharing of the Indus water or other possible schemes of such nature will require greater understanding between India and Pakistan.

Water needs will grow: for a rising population, higher standard of living, more intensive irrigation and industrialization, Southasians will consume more water. Water scarcity in Southasia is too complex an issue to be handled by even India alone. But together, Southasia can develop strategies for survival.

3. Energy Security

The world stock of fossil fuel is not going to last forever. As prices increase due to fluctuations in supply, the poor of Southasia will be badly hit. Even though per capita energy need of the Southasian poor is not substantial, it is significant for survival. Energy security in Southasia has necessitated different collaborative measures such as a pipeline between Iran and India through Pakistan, hydroelectric cooperation between Bhutan and India, talks of joint efforts for natural gas in the Bay of Bengal. These solutions suffer due to a nationalist thinking that dominates the mindset of negotiators. A regionalist approach—thinking like a Southasian—will accelerate the process of finding amicable solutions to the trickiest of problems.⁴ Searching for alternative energy sources, economical energy use strategies and sharing of surplus will require the ability to think and act Southasian.

4. Ecological Stress

Human–environment interactions have exacerbated the stress on land, water and air in Southasia. Soil erosion and rise in salinity affects land productivity adversely. Water pollution has reached alarming levels in the holy Ganga, and rivers along densely populated cities resemble open sewers. But it is the air pollution that joins the poor of Southasia in their misery during winters when dense haze⁵ robs them of the only source of heat they can easily access—rays of the sun—for drying grains or keeping warm. Climate change has been a matter of concern, but the enormity of a looming crisis necessitates immediate cooperation at least between countries of Southasia which can then raise their collective voice at global forums.⁶

5. Natural Calamities

Nature does not recognize any political or administrative boundary. This reality is even more pronounced in Southasia. Tsunamis, earthquakes and floods that periodically devastate Southasia require collective disaster preparedness, sharing of data, cooperation during relief and rehabilitation and collective effort in reconstruction.

The Development Dilemma

It’s neither aid nor trade that has helped the poor of Southasia break free from the shackles of un-freedom. Remittances from Southasians working abroad has begun to benefit certain sections of Southasian society, but its impact is uneven; for example, it has been estimated that Kerala and Tamil Nadu together account for almost half of all Indian migrant workers. Apart from that, what has been called the ‘money order economy’ is volatile and is an undependable source of livelihood. Development efforts have to be directed towards capacity building. However, that’s an area where most of Southasia lags behind even many developing nations of the world.

Education for all is still a dream in Southasia. With nearly a third of its population below 15 years, enormous public investment in basic education in the region is necessary. However, expensive private schooling and poor public education is widening the gulf between the privileged and the marginalized. Primary schooling in India is more expensive than university education;⁷ the situation is somewhat similar elsewhere in the region too. Gender justice suffers due to Southasian parents’ inclination of prioritizing schooling of the boy-child over the girl-child.

Health services are an even bigger scandal. Government hospitals are poorly funded, ill-maintained and suffer from a severe shortage of trained personnel. Concerns over HIV/AIDS, though slightly exaggerated, are probably justified. But simple communicable or non-communicable ailments and easily treatable diseases claim more innocent lives than high-profile maladies. The tragic paradox seen in Southasian cities is poignant; fearful of lifestyle diseases that afflict the sedentary section of population, the upper crust sweats it out at expensive health clubs while the scraggy poor scramble for thrown leftovers in the waste bins of swanky restaurants.

Landlessness remains an unaddressed issue in most of Southasia—the concept of Special Economic Zone (SEZs) is making the plight of the displaced and dispossessed worse. Housing for the poor in most parts of Southasia is abysmal and sanitation facilities despicable. India has more TV sets than toilets.⁸ But where do Southasian states spend their money? Apparently, on ‘defence’—a catch-all term for unbridled militarism. It has been reported that India’s estimated annual expenditure on defence is roughly the same as the remittances it receives, which is about five times the estimated expenditure on education in 2007–08.⁹

The overall impact of unequal distribution and lopsided priorities has been the exacerbation of latent tensions in society visible most clearly in the rise of religious fanaticism and left-wing extremism. It has been estimated that the fanaticism in the name of Khalistan in Punjab claimed the lives of 21,043 people—11,594 civilians, 8,003 ‘terrorists’ and 1,746 security personnel—between 1981 and 1983.¹⁰ But its impact has been wholly negative for the Sikhs till now—the community has lost its earlier prestige in Indian society. The left-wing extremism by various groups of Maoists affects at least nine states of the Indian union, but they are no closer to political success than they were thirty years ago.

Amidst the enveloping darkness, there have been notable successes. Amartya Sen has pointed out that democracies are less prone to famine-induced catastrophes. ‘Banker to the Poor’ Muhammad Yunus has transformed the way credit can be forwarded and managed in the developing world. Sri Lankan peace activist A. T. Ariyaratne persists with his Sarvodaya, a community-based movement inspired by Buddhist–Gandhian values of truth, non-violence and self-sacrifice. But all these are candles in the storm. Ranged against them is nothing less than the looming catastrophe of nuclear confrontation and slow strangulation of the poor by the beneficiaries of free-market fundamentalism.

With China in the north, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and India and Pakistan in between—not to mention the Soviets and Israelis—Southasia has turned into a possible nuclear flashpoint. Unlike conventional weapons, the mere being of nuclear arms is a security risk for people living in the vicinity. This was the fear that made Einstein advocate abolition of all nuclear weapons from the planet and replacement of competitive nation-states with one integrative world government. Abolition of nuclear weapons from Southasia and replacement of squabbling Southasian states by a Southasian confederation will perhaps be a positive step towards Einstein’s utopian goal.

Free-market fundamentalism has charmed influential Indians into drawing prejudiced conclusions. S. Narayan is a former Finance Secretary and Economic Adviser to the Prime Minister of India. He participated in an international conference on South Asia where conflicting perceptions about India’s rise and its role in Asia were presented by Professor Yang Dali, Director of the East Asian Institute, the National University of Singapore. Narayan heard, for example, that

Chinese public perceptions of India seem to be generally benign, bordering on neglect. In terms of global influence, the Chinese ranked China second behind the US now, but catching up in 10 years. But they ranked India at the bottom of the top nine countries (US, China, Russia, EU, UK, Germany, France, Japan and India). And Indians ranked India as the second most influential after the US. Further, 56 per cent of the Chinese respondents didn’t consider India as a rival—a far greater proportion in India did. In terms of ability to resolve conflicts in Asia, 69 per cent of Indians feel positive, but only 30 per cent of the Chinese feel that Indian intervention would have any major impact.¹¹

He also found that the Chinese model, with its unmistakable emphasis on state initiative and collectivism, ‘… has been better at providing employment as well as eradicating poverty’. And yet, what does he suggest, but ‘continued growth and trade’—the favourite mantra of free-market fundamentalists in Southasia.

A rediscovery of economic collectivism, an ideology that perhaps influenced the philosophy of Gandhi, is necessary to lift Southasia from the present morass. The sequence of exigencies—the Second World War, the consequent long Cold War, the hegemony of the triumphant West for a short while, and then the rise of the allconsuming religious extremism since the disastrous USSR–USA confrontations in Afghanistan—have distracted the attention of the world away from the fundamental reality of human existence: human being is a social animal and it can survive and progress only through moderated competition and mediated cooperation.

It needs to be reminded that the patron, promoter and protector of free-market fundamentalism got its original strength by practicing collectivism.

Perhaps no observer could have predicted the rapid advances in collectivism actually achieved by the United States in 1933, in execution of the “new deal” for the common man advocated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Submitting to the President’s vigorous leadership as well as to pressure from numerous private groups, Congress enacted a series of measures bringing the government at Washington into a direct and extensive control of labour, wages, working conditions, prices, the rationing of production, the safeguarding of bank deposits, and the making of securities. The control was to be exercised in cooperation with private industry; and associations in the several industries were invited to propose their own regulatory order; but the government had the final decision both as to the “truly representative” characters of the “voluntary” associations and as to the acceptability of their codes; and it could in any instance impose a code of its own, wrote an imminent professor of governance at the prestigious Yale University.¹²

The spectre of a nuclear holocaust and the necessity of evolving Southasian consensus for collective survival make democratic governance and plural unity of Southasia a moral imperative.

Democratic Choice

There is no guarantee that adoption of a democratic system, assurance of human rights and institutionalization of responsive governance will create conditions for plural unity of Southasia or lift the poor of the region from their misery overnight. However, the democratic choice can ensure at least five things for the creation of a better Southasia.

It is said that elections in democracy are the substitutes of funerals of rulers in authoritarian regimes. Smooth and orderly transfer of power can raise the legitimacy of the state. Confident states will be more open to the ideas of a Southasian confederation than usurpers perennially worrying about their perilous position and power. This proposition is not without an important caveat though—demagogic politics of leaders addicted to populism can fan jingoism and hatred. However, popular mandate is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the ultimate unity of Southasia.

Tyranny of the majority is not uncommon, but in principle, democratic regimes are more amenable to the aspirations of the minority. If difference and diversity begin getting the recognition they deserve within the boundaries of individual states, it will be much easier to advocate the cause of regional unity. The day Ahmadiyyas in Bangladesh and Pakistan, Christians in Nepal, Muslims in India, Hindus in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and atheists everywhere aren’t made to feel inferior, Southasian solidarity will begin to emerge.

The development agenda of a democratic state is more likely to be pro-poor than those of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. Even in absolute terms, contrary examples from East Asia notwithstanding, democracies are no worse, if not better, than fostering development.¹³ Participatory politics can be a precursor of participatory development.

It is possible to argue for and against democracy’s ability to ensure social justice, but no debate is required to conclude that rule of the social, cultural, economic, administrative, military or political elite is the fundamental principle of all authoritarian regimes. In totalitarian regimes, it is whim rather than rational decisions that sway public policies.

Perhaps the most important gain of democratic transformation would be for the people at the margins. Prakash Karat, General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), one of the most influential left-of-the-centre political forces in the world, suggests that,

The struggle to make the political system more meaningful in the lives of Indian people requires that the struggle to restructure Centre–State relations to move towards a more federal system is carried forward. Decentralization of power and decision making needs to be pushed forward at all levels.¹⁴

Decentralization and the resulting devolution will not automatically ensure gram gwaraj of Gandhi’s imagination, but it will certainly shift the emphasis away from unbridled consumerism to the sustainability of ‘small is beautiful’.

Southasian Futures

The obsession most Southasians have with the future is a telling sign of their dissatisfaction with the way things are. Millions of Southasians read astrological predictions, consult tarot card interpreters, go to fortune tellers, resort to vaastu, feng shui or numerology and listen to soothsayers and saints. But uncertainty is the only certainty of the future. It is not apprehension but aspiration that will create a desirable future for all Southasians.

The midnight’s children of 1947 are now disillusioned sexagenarians. The offspring of the rebellion of 1971 have entered adulthood. It is true that the nationstates of Southasia have had to endure a lot of hardships because of each other. But the challenge lies in going beyond those nightmares and dream of collective peace and prosperity with social justice for all. A new and united Southasia free from hunger, disease, ignorance and resulting conflicts is not just desirable but imminently possible. The time for a United States of Southasian Region (USSR) composed of independent and confident states, cultures and peoples under a resurgent civilization has arrived. The alternative is a continuation of fractious region destabilising each other and hurting themselves and all of Southasia in the process. Everything— environment, insurgency and human deprivation—has ‘cross-border’ dimensions in Southasia.

However, obsession with an unpredictable future isn’t a uniquely Southasian trait. According to a report,

Probably the most ambitious and serious attempt to hunch the future was the Carnegie Corporation-financed Commission on the Year 2000, a gathering of distinguished scholars directed by Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell. It met in the ‘60s but petered out by 1972. “It makes no sense to predict the future,” says Bell. “There are too many contingencies. What you can do is identify relevant frameworks, and identify problems—but you don’t know what will be done about them, which is the function of political will.”¹⁵

Indeed, it would have taken a leap of faith in the sixties to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany or the unbridled capitalism of the ‘communist’ regime in China. But these eventualities, as Daniel Bell would have assessed, were outcomes of identifying ‘relevant frameworks’ and problems, and political will to pursue the desired policies, without being too worried about immediate results.

Historian Bipan Chandra notes that the Indian nationalist movement was based on ‘a brilliant and detailed investigation and an all-sided analysis of the economic roots and motive forces of colonialism’¹⁶ before the end of the nineteenth century. Analyses and preparation of even wider magnitude and more depth are necessary to lay the foundation of a plural and united Southasia free from the yoke of neoimperialism in the guise of free-market fundamentalism.

Is it too early or too late to propose a United States of Southasian Region (USSR)? No one knows for sure. Philosopher Will Durant says that when William James, one of the founding fathers of the philosophy of pragmatism and pluralism died, a paper was found on his desk on which he had written his most characteristic sentence: ‘There is no conclusion. What has concluded that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told and there is no advice to be given. Farewell.’ Constant seeking and ceaseless striving—for truth—are inescapable imperatives of meaningful life. The more Southasians dedicate themselves to the plural unity of Southasia, the sooner it will materialize; and better would be the prospect of democracy, human rights and governance under the new supranational structure. However, as Victor Hugo is often quoted: ‘There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.’ The time for the idea of the plural unity of Southasia has come. Fewer and fewer people would wish to be left behind and miss the promised future of a United States of Southasian Region that is sure to evolve.