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Introduction

The past, present and future coalesce to create an amalgam of actuality and aspiration. The history of South Asia shows that the foundation for creating South Asian unity still exists, though in a dilapidated condition. The base laid by the Mauryan and Mughal empires continues to bind the peoples of South Asia together. There are more commonalities in art, architecture, dance, music, religions, cultures and many more things than leaders of the region dare to admit in the face of present realities of equally multifarious conflicts within and across national boundaries. But the present is hardly discrete—it is an intersection where the past and the future meet. The present is more important for what can be done with what vexes the mind rather than what exists.

The year 2007 marked 250 years of the Battle of Plassey, 150 years of the Revolt of 1857 and 60 years of Independence from the British Rule in India, Pakistan and what was to later emerge as Bangladesh. All these momentous events of South Asian history had repercussions elsewhere on the globe. The battle in the marshes of Bengal transformed the British East India Company into a commercial enterprise with political power. Among one of the unintended consequences of the uprising in the Ganga heartland in 1857 was the emergence of Britain as an empire without a sunset. The dawn of independence in the subcontinent in 1947 was to become the dusk of the British Empire all over Asia and Africa. For all these reasons, the year 2007 has caused mixed emotions among a lot of South Asians. The region has come a long way from the embarrassment of Nawab Mirza Muhammad Sirajuddaula of Bengal in 1757, the angst of Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh in 1857 and the frustrations of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1947, but the yearning for a better collective existence for everyone in the region is still great. Perhaps the year 2007 is as important and appropriate a historic moment to Imagine a New South Asia as any other, but there is a sense of urgency to create, reinvent and rediscover the lost collective identity of the region.

Afghanistan has its own reasons for being part of the new imagination as it tries to come out of the debris of old tribal loyalties, the brutal rivalries of the Cold War era, the religious extremism and the pain of being ‘shocked and awed’ into abject submission. Democratic aspirations are still alive in Burma despite decades of military rule. Bhutan struggles with the anomaly of having two kings simultaneously in the twenty-first century. Maldives is making determined efforts to modernize itself with insignificant success. Tibet’s rail link with mainland China has brought challenges to its culture and opportunities of economic growth in its wake. Sri Lanka has yet to resolve the violent conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese. Almost all countries of South Asia appear unhappy in their own ways. A vision of a common democratic, humane and just future carries the possibilities of inspiring all peace-loving people in each of these countries.

The rationale for imagining a new South Asia has internal as well as external dimensions. Imagining a new South Asia is a regional imperative, a historic necessity to lift the poor out of the vicious circle of poverty, illiteracy, ill-health, disparity, violent conflicts, depravation and degradation. The quality of education and health care in South Asia remains worse than all other parts of the world except sub-Saharan Africa even though the region has two nuclear-armed defence forces, a vast pool of scientists and technologists, and abundant natural resources.

It has been rather easy to blame colonialists for all the ills of South Asia until now. But 150 years since the First War of Independence and 60 years since the ‘tryst with destiny’, perhaps it is now time to examine what went wrong with the dreams of emancipation and chart a new and collective course for the future. Humane governance has intrinsic value, but its instrumentality in establishing sustainable peace is equally important.¹ Thus, the means and ends are intertwined.

The external dimension is no less compelling. Immediately after the end of colonialism, Cold War machinations pushed countries of the region into opposing camps. This intensified internecine rivalries. However, interventions in the past were indirect. In the wake of the 9/11 catastrophe, the hyper power has formally entered South Asia through Afghanistan. This provokes a sense of urgency towards forging better understanding between peoples of the region.

Unity between peoples is also necessary to resist, redirect and utilize the forces of globalization for regional advantage. The threats of a new form of imperialism were never as real as in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Fortunately, a concurrent people’s movement in every country has been ignited largely due to the intensification of marginalization. Linkages can improve the effectiveness of these movements. But only a unity of purpose can make them decisive. This requires identification of common values, and shared aspirations and formulation of collective agenda for action.

Imagining a better future for nearly one-fourth of the global population is too huge a task to be accomplished in a hurry. But as the old adage goes, it is better to light a lamp than curse the darkness and show the courage of taking the first few steps towards the giant leap into the desirable future.

The main thesis of this study is that South Asian unity is necessary and possible. It seeks to establish the primacy of human rights, democracy and governance for the establishment of a just society in the region. Envisioning regional institutions to pursue common goals of the region is an inalienable part of Imagining a New South Asia. However, future prospects will have to be grounded in past experiences and contemporary ground realities. Thus, it is by necessity rather than choice that this study has to take a panoramic view and say something about several things rather than follow the scholarly practice of presenting everything possible about something very specific.

Background

The expression ‘South Asia’ is now well established. This term is recognized and often used by academic institutions, civil society organizations, government agencies, the media and the market. However, its meaning is not the same for all. For governments of the region, ‘South Asia’ stands for member countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) initiative. To most academic institutions of the West, it usually implies the Commonwealth countries that emerged out of the British India. For people on the streets, a vague sense of belonging and commonalities that bind one another make them South Asian, but boundaries of the region are yet unclear. However, the stigma of South Asia being a manufacture of ‘Area Studies’ programmes of the universities of USA at the height of the Cold War years² has now been replaced with the positive concept of a common region.

Demarcating a region within a continent, even when there is an established subcontinent, is not an easy task. It implies recognition of existing commonalities and identification of shared aspirations. While similarities are no guarantee of inclusion, dissimilarities are not a disqualification. To a certain extent, it is a subjective decision based upon realities on the ground and preferences of the moment. Increasingly, ‘South Asia’ has come to include the region between Afghanistan and Burma, and parts of Tibetan Plateau to island states of Maldives and Sri Lanka. The official SAARC process has already admitted Afghanistan as a full-fledged member. China has an observer status in the organization. But considering the importance of Tibet for the water security³ of South Asia, the direct presence of Tibet Autonomous Region or its representation through Beijing in any South Asian process has become extremely important. Despite Tibet’s present political status as an autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China, Tibetan culture has closer ties with South Asian civilization than with the Han Chinese.

South Asia could have been called the Subcontinent⁴ or just India as the region has been known to the rest of the world for millennia. In deference to the political sensibilities of member states, the SAARC process chose the name with caution and preferred a seemingly neutral expression of South Asia. This is the way it continues to be referred in all regional discourses. However, a need is being felt to think about the name afresh based on what has already been achieved. Joining two words to create a single term ‘Southasia’ seems to be an option worthy of adoption. This study uses South Asia and Southasia interchangeably with a preference for the latter.

Joining two words to create a sense of unity was first attempted by Himal magazine published from Kathmandu, perhaps the first periodical that described itself to be Southasian. However, the term Southasian is slowly gaining popularity. There is also a collaborative effort between several television channels of the region that call themselves Southasian and telecast under that banner. But the concept of Southasia as a unified entity has yet to catch popular imagination. In fact, there is a need to imagine it afresh to prepare the ground for the eventual creation⁵ of Southasia. It has to be imagined in order to be pursued and achieved.

The challenge of imagining Southasia is complex because it already exists and yet is not a reality. The first challenge is to see if what is believed to exist is indeed so: Does Southasia have a shared sense of civilization that can support its aspirations of unity? If civilizational unity of the peoples is conceded, what is it that keeps them apart? Is it possible to outline common aspirations rather than interests to build upon? The nature of these questions demands reflections and deliberations rather than description.

No matter how ancient, resilient and vigorous a civilization, it doesn’t exist in isolation and can’t remain impervious to global currents. Conceiving the entire planet Earth as one interdependent family of states, nations, races and communities—Vasudhaiva Kutumbkam in an ancient Sanskrit formulation—has been a longstanding desire of all humanity.⁶ Conceptualization of regions as families is a stepping stone towards that direction. Until the world emerges as one family, it has to make do with being a community of regional entities.

Universalism, however, needs to be based on the sanctity of individuals in order to be accepted by all. Even though tolerance of dissent⁷ isn’t as recent as it is believed to be, it has to be accepted that detailed enunciation of human rights, conceptualization of democracy and articulation of institutional structure, to ensure such conditions, is of relatively recent origin. This work has to traverse through the intricate web of shared civilization, contested history, national conflicts, aspirations and sensibilities of individuals and sometimes contradictory expectations. But before such complexities are tackled, the depiction of reality is necessary.

Depiction of reality, however, is in itself a contested terrain. There are at least three levels of reality. The first, second and third order of showing things are their presentation, representation and meta-representation. The first is based on observation; the second is an act of interpretation while the third calls for imagination.

• Presentation comes from the experience of sensory organs. The ear learns how the dog barks which then the sound can mimic. The eyes convey how the dog looks which the hand can then draw.
• Representation is a creative composition of reality to accentuate its specialty. A dog that roars like a lion and looks like a horse and a fish and a woman merging together to form a mermaid are some popular compositions created to represent desired reality.
• Meta-representation⁸ is imagination: representation of things as they should be, could have been, or are likely to be. Meta-representation is grounded in reality but has to go beyond it.

Imagining a new Southasia requires the use of techniques of presentation and the creativity of representation. But most of all, it needs the courage of conviction to look at the possibilities of meta-representation—the act of imagination. After all, every imaginative conception is a new vision and a new creation in itself.

This endeavour isn’t pure research, though considerable research is needed to understand the task at hand, that of imagining a new Southasia. It is not complete creativity either, even though peeping into an unpredictable future is essentially an act of creativity. This is an attempt to fuse the two to portray a picture of what is possible for the ‘common good’ of all Southasians. The kind of research used for formulating Southasian identity is neither pure basic research that aims at nothing more than advancement of knowledge nor the applied research used for preparing a ready-to-implement agenda of action. Instead, it falls in the category of what is sometimes called the strategic-basic research that provides a background for applied research.

There exists a respectable body of academic work about Southasian history, society, economy and politics. The SAARC process and civil society initiatives have produced extensive documents about the possible agendas of action. This study aims to connect the two for policy entrepreneurs and activists alike. It may seem premature to pessimists, redundant to optimists and contestable to pragmatists, but unity of Southasia without impinging upon the sovereignty of states within the region is an idea worth pursuing for its own sake. Changes in geopolitics and economics brought about by the rise of a hyperpower and globalization of business have made it necessary. But the imagination of a new Southasia has to go beyond what is achievable or appears possible. In the soul-stirring lines of Robert Browning, ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?’ Heavens may be higher up, but creation of a more humane Southasia for all Southasians as an important, responsible and responsive member of the global community is a possibility worth pursuing and a goal imminently achievable.

Space and Time

Geography offers descriptions of location, locale, human-environment interaction, movement and region. History narrates time, period and context of ideas, events and personalities. These separate but interrelated disciplines dealing with space and time mingle to present a reality with all its complexities. It sounds somewhat rhetorical, but the geography and history of entire Southasia are so intertwined that unity seems to be the ultimate destiny of the region despite all the present predicaments.

It is said that there are three essential characteristics of geographical work:⁹ emphasis on location, importance of society–land relations and regional analysis. If geosophy¹⁰ is to geography what historiography is to history, a holistic study of Southasia will probably show that contra-contemporary cartographic divisions of the subcontinent is a geographical reality. The very creation of the landmass of Southasia bound the region into a distinct entity. In some Southasian myths, Bharat was once part of an island that was called the Jambu Dwip. Science confirms the myth with a twist: Some 225 million years ago, Southasia was indeed an island off the coast of what is now Australia. Moving slowly northwards—some estimates put the speed at nine metres per century—it hit the Eurasian plate sometime around forty to fifty million years ago. Such a terrestrial smash of epic proportions between two rock masses of almost equal density lifted up the colliding face, somewhat like the raised hoods of two cars hitting each other head-on. What was once the bed of the Sea of Tethys was forced up to become mighty mountains. Thus were created the majestic Himalayas. The Indian plate slid under the Eurasian plate, folding the land mass and creating the Karakoram and Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was the process that also created an expanse about four and half kilometres high known as the Tibetan Plateau—the ‘roof of the world’ of Southasian imagination. Geologists estimate that the Himalayas continue to rise as the Indian plate pushes northward for a closer fit.

Movement and collision of massive plates induced planetary climatic changes, the most important of them being the monsoons. The giant Tibetan Plateau absorbs the atmospheric heat forcing the warm air to rise further up. Moistureladen cooler air rushes in from surrounding oceans to fill up the low-density surface. This creates monsoon rains. Tibet is thus an integral part of the Southasian life system.

Rains cut through mountain slopes creating river systems that rush down to the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Some of the most fertile plains in the world have been creations of the Tibetan Plateau, the Eurasian plate, monsoon rains, mighty rivers and surrounding seawater of Southasia working together. Considering the way they are so closely interrelated, perhaps it would have been more appropriate to call the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean as the Indus¹¹ Sea, Bay of Himalayas and Southasian Ocean respectively. The Southasian penchant for renaming needs to be resisted for one simple reason: it will create cartographic confusion of Himalayan proportion.

It is a short hop from geosophy to historicism. Civilizations have flourished for millennia in several river valleys of Southasia as elsewhere in the world. River systems with their turbulent tributaries and feeders of the Indus in the west, Ganga in the north, Brahmaputra in the east, Narmada, Godavari and Mahanadi in the central region and the Kaveri and Krishna in the south have witnessed and sustained the rise and fall of some of the mightiest empires in the world. Irrawaddy in Burma and Mahavali Ganga (all perennial rivers are Ganga in Sri Lanka) have similarly helped create thriving cultures. But nothing symbolizes the eternity of Southasians as the history of the Indus—the river that gave birth to words such as Hind, India and Indic.

Any search for the tenacity that has helped Southasians survive the ravages of time should probably begin with the history of the Indus Valley. In Tarana-e-Hind, Allama Iqbal sings:

Yunaan-o-Misr-o-Roma sab mit gaye jahaan sey

Ab tak magar hai baaqi naam-o-nishaan hamaara.

Kuchh baat hai key hasti mit-tee nahin hamaari

Sadion raha hai dushman daur-e-zamaan hamaara.

This stanza has been translated in different ways, but Khushwant Singh’s rendition¹² is perhaps the closest to the essence of Iqbal’s passion:

For centuries we have survived the world’s hostility

While glories of Greece, Egypt and Rome have faded into the background

Our name and deeds in the world’s corridors still resound.

There is something that has given us immortality

For centuries we have survived the world’s hostility.

From the existence of irrigation, agriculture, granaries, houses, settlement patterns, burial grounds and artefacts found at sites like Mehrgarh in the Indus Valley, it is estimated that settlements probably began in that area around 12000 BC, acquired sophistication seen at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa by 2500 BC and collapsed somewhere around 1200 BC, sometime before the composition of the hymns collected in the Rigveda, the oldest historical document of Southasia.

There are several theories that attempt to explain the sudden ‘extinction’ of the Harappan civilization. Tectonic changes, a shift in the river course, climatic changes and desertification, ecological degradation and Aryan invasion from the north-west are some of the causative factors explained by various archaeologists. A combination of all these factors that pushed the Harappan people towards the south-east sounds equally probable. But more than the causes that led to the collapse of the cities in the Indus Valley is their inherent character that offers inspiration for the future. The distinguishing features of the Indus Valley civilization include:

• No emperors or high priests
• No evidence of epic battles or warfare
• No large temple complexes or palaces
• No slavery

All the above features point towards the existence of a peaceful, egalitarian and secular society. Then there are evidences of a civilization that had built:

• A sophisticated irrigation, agriculture and animal husbandry system
• A reliable system of measurement, currency of exchange, markets, trade and taxation
• A trade and transaction system with contemporary civilizations
• A form of writing
• An urban civilization based on planned towns with roads in cardinal directions, public platforms and well-laid houses

Apparently, settlements of the Indus Valley were well administered, prosperous and its people lived in harmony for millennia. It is difficult to imagine that a society with such a level of complexity and sophistication just disappeared. The probability of its dispersion throughout the subcontinent appears to be much higher. All Southasians share the heritage of this ‘once great’ civilization.

The unity of the Southasian people continued with the rise of great cities along the Ganga, thriving coastal towns of the Deccan peninsula, and agricultural communities in the fertile delta of Brahmaputra that blended into the pastoral societies of the Himalayas. The epic of Mahabharata is much more than the story of human passions; it also tells the tale of the churning that the region went through as it faced the challenges of change.

Cauldron of Cultures

The religions of the region—choice of plural intentional—have survived and evolved with the times. It is said that many seers before Buddha had said the same thing; the reason his sermons survive to this day has to be seen in the invention of paper and ink that allowed his teachings to spread throughout Asia. Overt support of Emperor Ashoka in the propagation of Buddhism cannot be discounted, but had it been only the court patronage that made or broke religious movements, the Bhakti and Sufi movements wouldn’t have taken the subcontinent by storm. The Bhakti and Sufi movements were essentially subversive of the established order and their appeal lay in the way they challenged the status quo.

The unity of Southasian cultures is even more prominent. Claims have been made that a Muslim from Bangladesh is somehow on more familiar grounds at the home of, say an Indonesian or a Somali Muslim, because their ummah is one. But in reality, a person from Dhaka perhaps bonds relatively more easily with someone from Kathmandu or Colombo or even Jakarta despite their religious differences. If culture is a way of life— food habits, customs, traditions, manners, values, etiquette and unexpressed sentiments of solidarity—then the distinct Southasian identity becomes clearly discernible in any alien surrounding. On home ground in Southasia, differences are more discernible, but that is probably because those differences have been known to each other for millennia.

In the case of languages, symbols of commonality in languages abound. The legacy of Prakrit, Pali and Sanskrit is the common heritage of almost all languages in Southasia. Persian was the court language of rulers in Delhi for so long that its influence can be found as far apart as Kathmandu and Chennai. Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil and Nepali are shared languages of people across international borders in the west, east, south and north of the subcontinent. But it is Hindustani, Hindi or Urdu that truly binds the region together in suffering, struggles and joy.

Urdu is said to have emerged at the cantonment of Mughals where the royal tents in military camps were called urd and edicts emanating from there were termed urdi. The hybrid that emerged from Mughal rulers’ interactions in various parts of the then Hindustan emerged first as the language of cantonments and then the lingua franca of the vast Southasian landmass. Urdu’s emergence later as the language of love, longing and belonging was a slow process of evolution of Allama Iqbal’s celebrated tarana: Sare Jahan se Achcha Hindostan Hamara.

Folklores sound strangely familiar wherever one travels in Southasia. The stories of Ramayana and Mahabharata are known with its variations in most parts of the region. The Mahabharata connects rugged Kandahar of Afghanistan with Indraprastha on the banks of the Yamuna. Ramayana’s rebirth as a religious tract has overshadowed its importance as an epic of a civilization that once spanned from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean.

The teachings of Buddha, the directives of Mahavir and the system put in place by Shankarcharya have coexisted for centuries. The Jews of ancient Israel, the Zoroastrians of early Persia and the Islamic preachers from latter-day Arabia all found a welcoming land that was once India. Interacting with indigenous religious practices, all these great faiths of the world gave birth to two uniquely Southasian beliefs—Bhakti and Sufism. The Sufi celebration of the spiritual overlord and the Bhakti submission to the will of god are variations of the same theme: it is love and not hatred that sustains the creation of the Supreme.

Livelihood in the region has been intertwined due to reasons of topography, climate and connectivity. Itinerant traders from Afghanistan, farmers of the Indo- Gangetic plains, herders of the Brahmaputra basin, warriors of the Himalayas, seafarers of Malabar, teachers and preachers from Bengal, craftsmen of the Deccan and merchants from Sindh found hospitable climate for sustenance and growth wherever they went within the region. Their interactions over the millennia gave birth to a Southasian civilization which is diverse and distinct. Unlike the Han Chinese identity that was forged at the courts of various emperors, Southasians have been able to maintain their diversity due to the voluntary nature of their relationships. Somehow, this loose confederacy of cultures under myriad rulers of a shared civilization began to change with the arrival of the British in the region.

Unlike the Maurayan Empire (322 BC–185 BC) and the Mughal Empire that evolved from ambitious monarchies to great empires, the East India Company came to Southasia as merchants with profit as their primary motive. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British achieved political power. But political power for the rulers from abroad was meant to maximize commercial earnings rather than to govern well and ensure the longevity of the regime. Pious pronouncements from Western apologists notwithstanding, the British rule was no civilizing mission. The Resistance of 1857—variously called the Mutiny, the Revolt, the Rebellion and the First War of Independence by different historians—was essentially an uprising against increasing exploitation of the traditional peasantry, landowners, traders, soldiers and priests by rapacious adventurers from abroad. The resistance failed in military terms, but it became the catalyst that changed the course of history. Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1 November 1858 declared that India would be governed in her name through the Secretary of State of the British government. The policy of British rulers then shifted from maximizing profits from a colonial outpost to building an empire.

But Queen Victoria’s assumption of the title of Empress of India failed to change the fundamental character of the British rule which was to administer the territory as outsiders rather than to assimilate into the society and govern it as stakeholders. In part, this difference arose from the European template of empire which visualized farflung colonies as suppliers of cheap produce and labour rather than possible territories worthy of integration. Perhaps, this perception was a factor that created a sense of alienation among educated Indians and gave birth to the independence movement.

Unlike the Revolt of 1857 that had brought the rulers (kings and nawabs), intermediaries (merchants, maulavis and priests) and the ruled (farmers, craftsmen, soldiers and labourers) together, the Indian independence movement of the early twentieth century was essentially an agenda of the intelligentsia. Its pioneers were the westernized elite either educated abroad or Macaulay’s Children,¹³ products and propagators of the European concept of state, based on the Peace of Westphalia. In the Westphalian notion, primacy of state is based on the principles of independence, sovereignty and international law. The stalemate created by the treaties in the midseventeenth century Europe is sometimes called the ‘Peace of Exhaustion’ as it ended the Eighty Years War between Spanish warriors and the Dutch as well as the Thirty Years Germanic War but failed to produce enduring bases of peace. The Westpalian definition of state sovereignty downplays the importance of interaction of cultures and the resultant diversity. The emergence of the ‘two-nation theory’ that led to partition of British India can partly be attributed to the very nature of the independence movement: if it was the authority of the Empire that kept perpetually warring nations and tribes hanging together, then it had to fall and disintegrate once the rope from above was removed.

Given the disgrace of deaths, disappearances, destruction and displacement in the wake of partition of the subcontinent, all discussions about the division of territory and consequent dislocation in the region tend to be emotional. But any dispassionate examination of the independence movement of the early twentieth century would perhaps show that the eventual partition of the subcontinent was a foregone conclusion. ‘Leave India to God and if that be too much, leave her to anarchy, necessity for withdrawal lies in its being immediate’, Gandhi had thundered in the aftermath of the failed Cripps Mission.¹⁴ This sense of urgency hastened the process of independence, but it also prepared the ground for immediate resolution of longstanding grievances by making whatever compromises necessary. From an option of last resort, partition became the most convenient way of resolving the question of Hindu and Muslim nations.

Despite the erudition and eloquence of Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech, celebrations of independence in Pakistan and India in 1947 were sombre affairs tinged with a sense of foreboding. With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to argue that eventual independence of Bangladesh was built into the very ideology of nation-state inherent to partition: if it was permissible to part ways on the basis of religion despite sharing the same civilization, perhaps it is equally plausible, if not more so, to desire political autonomy based on distinct cultural identity. Governance systems of Southasia are still struggling with the legacy of partition: a lack of consensus over justifiable reasons for peaceful separation between mistrustful communities or a widely shared sense of community between distinct national identities.

Social structure in most parts of Southasia was shaken to its very core by independence and partition. People uprooted from their ancestral homes in various parts of the region were expected to replace old ties of culture with freshly minted loyalty towards religion-based states. It has been an agonizingly slow process to get over the legacy of living together for millennia and adapt to the European notion of nation-state.

An expression like ‘a devout secularist’ will probably be considered a contradiction anywhere else in the world; in Southasia people who fit that description abound. Bankers in beards, lawyers offering ritual prayers in court premises, nuclear scientists with caste marks on their foreheads and surgeons with sacred threads dangling down their shoulders are not uncommon in Southasian cities. Asghar Ali Engineer, a modern traditionalist, would have been considered almost an oxymoron anywhere else. In Southasia, he is one of the high priests of secularism espousing the possibility of harmony between devotion to different faiths and coexistence as equals in society. Engineer argues somewhat pensively that the idea of religious nationalism was mooted for the first time in the Indian subcontinent, much before anywhere else in the world.¹⁵ It is too early to dismiss the idea—but neither Israel nor Pakistan has been able to live up to their initial promise of emancipation of all believers.

The case of Israel is different in the sense that the Jewish migration towards their promised homeland did not disturb power relations in Europe. In Southasia, large-scale transfer of population—perhaps the biggest, in terms of affected population, in human history, changed social structures, altered power relationships, shook economic activities and created alienation and animosity of massive proportions. The social self-correcting mechanism has since taken over - human adaptability and endurance surmounts seemingly impossible odds. However, intellectual and institutional enterprises of establishing newer bases of possible integration are still lacking.

Celebration of diversity in the region is perhaps the necessary condition for creating unity in Southasia through economic integration, political accommodation and socio-cultural understanding. Unlike the European Union that has evolved out of Two World Wars and the unnerving Cold War, Southasia has the advantage of not repeating the same mistake of going through the creation of nation-states, endless conflicts and prolonged negations to discover the advantages of a union of equals. It is not necessary to follow the path of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) either—an entity clearly created by one of the superpowers to counter another in the region. Southasian unity will have to be based on human values rather than politics or economics. It will have to be a collective enterprise for human dignity and justice. Its success will depend upon the sincerity of its proponents; people are quite ready for being what they have always been—inheritors of a common civilization with shared yearning for coexistence, dignity, peace and prosperity.