Security in South Asia: A Nepali Perspective
"What vision for Security Future in South Asia?"

While thinking through the security problematique of South Asia a question arises in the sphere of governance in relation to the success of the state centric approach to security policies of South Asian states in their state building process. Evidences of Pakistan's secession from India and the emergence of Bangladesh through bifurcation of Pakistan show that the state building strategies following the hegemonic construction of national identity of the dominant or majoritarian elites in South Asia have failed miserably. Contrarily, the state building process has germinated the seeds of conflicts as this pursuit reflects the predatory nature of the state.

This paper, thus, argues that the centralized states in South Asia are hollow in their rhetoric. They have neither engaged nor influenced, nor responded to nor restored the trust of the people they govern. Consequently, South Asia is littered with the bloody handiwork of the political elites whose fundamental objective remains the security of the regime they control rather than the basic ingredients of the much-abused term, national security. This has led to repression, resistance, rebellion, and realignment of forces within the domestic political spheres of all the South Asian countries encouraging perpetual violence in different forms. Managing domestic chaos, therefore, has become a critical challenge to the security of South Asian states. The unresolved problems of national integration have, therefore, become the central concern of security in South Asia.

The first section presents a portrait of the two oldest democracies in South Asia-India and Sri Lanka-where stark dependency on security forces in increasing to maintain the territorial integrity of these states. Section two constructs the dilemma of state making when the political elites in South Asia tried to unimaginatively replicate the Western experiences in their alien setting to become modern. The third section assesses the failure of state building to cope with the challenges breeding within the juridical states. It also discusses the repression and resistance as phenomena observed in the course of secessionist movements. And it concludes that violence can neither achieve the desired national integration nor facilitate the aspired secessionism. Finally, this paper assesses the implications of security strategies of South Asian states to posit some thinking considering the probable and possible measures to enhance the security stakes of South Asian states.

Governance and security: The collapse of the Soviet Union and its subsequent political and territorial fragmentation invoked the possibility of a similar threat to multinational states around the world. As secessionist movements mire South Asia, a majority of states are concerned over the consequent repercussion of political disintegration, which many of them have averted in their state building process. Such a concern was genuinely expressed during the debates held and conclusions drawn while assessing the burgeoning militancy seeking secession in India. The strategic elites participating in the debates, however, were reportedly unanimous in drawing the conclusion that the Indian military power could maintain a unified nation.

Two specific as well as general conclusions can be discerned from the above report. First, despite its superpower status, the Soviet armed forces were politically emasculated to prevent its breakup and disaster. Thus the Soviet elites let the states go out of its control. This scenario may not be repeated in the case of India. The Indian strategic elites as central decision makers will not allow the separatists to make their project feasible at the first instance and will be dead against any claim of secession impinging on the integrity of the Union Republic. Secondly, the Indian armed forces will be alert to the situation and are prepared to face the challenges. The army will be mobilized to quell the secessionist challenges whenever necessary. Democratic India thus seals its fate on the armed forces to maintain national integrity and not only from the exogenous but also from the indigenous forces challenging its political survival. The use of armed forces to aid civil authority has thus become a common phenomenon in the security decision making in the state.

India has a record of military deployment since 1947 both for internal security and national integration, along with numerous counter-insurgency operations. In the course of its military operations to date, India has fought four wars, besides the Kargil fighting in the summer of 1999, and numerous insurgencies beginning from the Telangana insurgency leading to "32 military operations of consequences in a period of 50 years". This is fairly an indication of domestic turmoil in which India's national integrity is repeatedly tested more than other regional countries, though others are also not immune to internal conflicts, exacerbating their sense of insecurity. The region, over the past several decades, therefore, has become a mosaic of crises including insurgencies, secessionism, ethnic and sectarian conflicts, terrorism, irredentism, and civil and conventional war. Ironically, the South Asian wars have claimed fewer lives compared to ethno-communal violence. According to a conservative estimate, there were 2.4 million dead from four wars and sporadic violence in South Asia. Of these only 0.54 million were war dead. The remaining 1.86 million were massacred during the ethno-political violence between 1947 and 1989, not to mention more than 30,000 Kashmiris killed by Indian troops since the flare up in 1989 to date.

Sri Lanka is another country immersed in the ethnic conflict where the death tolls number around 60,000 by the year 2000. Like India, Pakistan has also a record of a "million mutinies" with political killings buttressed by the "Kalashnikov culture". Ethno-political conflicts between the Mohajirs and the Sindhis, Baluch nationalism and the Pashtun rebellion undergirded by the Shia and Sunni religiosity have posed a pervasive threat to the integrity of Pakistan. The Punjabi dominated Pakistan has articulated the myth of a mono-ethnic state demanding the compliance of other ethnic groups and labeling their grievances as cancerous to the national health. They have single-mindedly pursued the partisan state policies against the "others". Exclusion from influential positions of non-Punjabis in the centralized state structure remains pervasive. Eroding state legitimacy has not stifled the skewed posture of the Pakistani elites so long as the loyalty of the armed forces retains their hold on power.

As a result, South Asia today has become a region of unending conflicts and violence. Some data related to India show, that there were only 12 out of 500 districts in the country experiencing communal riots and violence in 1960. The Hindu-Muslim riots then numbered 60. By 1985 such occurrences increased by eight-fold. Naturally, the frequency in the deployment of the armed forces for internal security maintenance became an imperative. Between 1951 and 1970, the army was deployed for maintaining "law and order" on 476 occasions. This pace accelerated between 1980 and mid-1984 manifold deploying army for 369 times. In between the period of Operation Blue Star in June along with the subsequent assassination of Indira Gandhi in October 1984 and the Bombay riots in January 1993, India became a portrait of communal frenzy. With this increase in communal violence the size of security apparatus also increased. Besides the army, the paramilitary and armed police forces were built and consolidated. During the 1980s, the paramilitary personnel increased by 230 percent with the number increasing to 702,000 persons. Refurbishing the police and a 13,000 strong Rapid Action Force added up to the expenditure of $104 million for the 1985-89 period. Expenditure on police rose by 410 percent between 1984 and 1992. The increase in the expenditure in defense forces during the same period was 280 percent.

Fighting insurgencies, in other words, fighting its own people, cost India tremendously both in cash and kind. Though India has not fought any interstate war since 1971, its armed forces remain the most "over-stretched" militarily in the peacetime fighting its own people. Its preoccupation with Punjab, Kashmir and the Northeast have transformed the Indian military into an "occupation force" in the eyes of its own people. About 60 percent of the security forces, including paramilitary personnel, are presently engaged in fighting one type of rebellion or another in these states. Available data on fighting separatists in Kashmir since 1989 put a figure of $ 22 billion for the government of India.

In Jammu and Kashmir alone, for example, there are more than ten divisions of permanently stationed armed forces. Likewise, around 6 to 7 divisions of army are posted in the Northeast for combing operations. In addition to this, about 80-85 percent of presently available 1,090,000 paramilitary forces are deployed in these states. Despite such a massive deployment of security personnel in these "disturbed areas", the government of India is reportedly feeling the inadequacy of the available forces to cope with the challenges posed by insurgents. Against the backdrop of Kargil tragedy, the Home Ministry in India has planned to raise another 117 battalion of paramilitary personnel in the near future. Thus the security related expenditure in India is about to increase simultaneously with the spread of domestic conflicts. Some unofficial reports suggest that the Union government alone in India is bearing the cost of domestic conflicts which is well above Rs. 12,000 crores per annum.

Comparable figures for defence expenditures, as per the budget estimate, were Rs. 45,694 crores for 1999-2000. This estimate, however, does not include other hidden costs for defence preparedness like Paramilitary, Coast Guards, Research and Development, mainly rocketry and nuclear arms, Intelligence and procurement costs, to name but two, that constitute over Rs. 20,000 crores. Thus the gross defence expenditures altogether total an amount of Rs. 70,000 crores for India in the last year of the twentieth century. By the year 2000, the Union Government budget increased India's defence allocation by $ 3billion to a total of $13.5 billion. This accounts for 3.2 percent of the GDP, which is 28.2 percent more than the budget allocation of the previous fiscal year. This, in no uncertain term, is the largest increase in military spending in India's history. The new defence budget announced for the fiscal year 2001-2002 on February 28, 2001 increased the allocation by $1.6 billion or 13.4 percent over the previous year.

Understandably the Kargil episode became a turning point for India to reassess its security situation in considering both domestic and foreign threats. India's defence budget at 2.28 percent of the GDP was thought to be lower in 1999 even in comparison to its adversaries like Pakistan (99 4.86 percent) and China (3.90 percent) in 1997. The immediate release of Rs. 7,000 crores as supplementary defence allocation in the post-Kargil period was an indication of the government's preparedness to respond to its military needs. Numerous estimates put the cost of maintaining an armed presence in Kargil at Rs. 100 million per day. And the government feels that given the buoyancy of the national economy growing at 6 percent it would be feasible to meet the increasing cost of defence.

Besides nuclear weapons' test and the transient costs spent to acquire a credible nuclear power status, India also transacted the transfer of major conventional weapons between 1995 and 1999. As the SIPRI 2000 report indicates, Russia was the largest arms supplier to India amounting to $ 3,469 million of the total $ 4,637 million's worth of Indian imports. Pakistan had imported arms worth $ 2,873 million during the same period. A comparable figure for China was $ 3,994 million between 1995 and 1999.

The case of Sri Lanka-another country long drawn by the ethnic conflicts and unending civil war-is no less pathetic. Both the Indian aided rebellion and the Indian aided peace efforts have critically impaired the domestic situation against which the Sri Lankan government's efforts towards ending the conflict have failed so far. Initiating overt diplomatic pressure with covert destabilization process that destroyed the prospect of domestic peace in Sri Lanka, India was later willingly involved physically by committing some 10 divisions of armed forces, 70,000 AK-47 assault rifles especially bought by RAW from POLAND to be used there, spending 967 days at a reported cost of Rs. 300 crores, loss of 1,155 lives with three times as many wounded. But India failed to achieve both its political and military objectives.

Since 1983 the annual cost of civil war in Sri Lanka has been estimated to reach $400 million. The total cost till 1998, according to IISS, amounts to $ 6,800 million. Perhaps this was an underestimate as sources closely watching the ethno-political crisis in Sri Lanka privately suggest that the annual cost of civil war may be nearly double the amount if one were to add expenditures under the heading "law and order" during the same period. The LTTE's spending can best be guesswork gioven the types of armament they use and the support bases they exploit from around the world. Comparably sophisticated arms found in possession of the LTTE guerillas and the lethality of weapons they use to frustrate the Sri Lankan army's efforts to suppress them lend credence to the guesstimate provided by the indigenous academics in Colombo that the LTTE has access to considerable funds to spend on arms. As one report suggests, the LTTE has evolved tremendously from a small band of 1000-2000 persons into a force of 7000 brigades, armed with artillery, armor, radios with encryption devices…"They have a 1000 cadre guerilla force in the Eastern province, which specializes in ambushes and mortar attacks". Besides their terrorist outfits with suicide bombers, they have extensive propaganda networks. The Sri Lankan government guesses that the LTTE receives around $ 80 million from external contributors a year.

When the Sihalese-Tamil conflict flared up in 1983, Sri Lanka had a standing army of around 11000 regulars supported by 2000 to 4000 volunteers. Sri Lanka today has not only become one of the heavily militarized countries in South Asia, but also the one which spends more per capita on security forces than others. One estimate concludes that Sri Lanka spent to the tune of $ 1 billion, a little over 6 percent of GDP for defence, in the fiscal year 2000/2001.

Again Sri Lanka, besides being the richest and the most highly educated country in South Asia, finds itself at odds with a large segment of population in the shape of Tamils constituting approximately 20 oercent and the JVP, Janatha Vimukhti Peramuna, largely composed of the Sinhalese population itself who had dissociated themselves from the state. When, in April 1971, the JVP took the then Ceylonese government to task through large scale insurrection, Sri Lanka was aided by India, Pakistan and even China in destroying the JVP as a political force, though these three countries were simultaneously at odds with each other over the issue of the Bengali rebellion in the then East Pakistan. Consequently, with international support, including that of the super powers, the rebellion was crushed within five weeks with the officially estimated killings of 12000 to as high as 50000 people. Again, when the JVP rebellion resurrected with ferocity during the 1987/1989 period with an anti-Indian outburst the human cost of the governmental campaigns numbered some 60000 dead. People killed then are almost forgotten as Sri Lankan history progressed with new rounds of massacre and genocide. Between 60,000 and 70,000 Sri Lankans of both Sinhalese and Tamil ethnicity are estimated dead, nearly equal numbers are wounded and disabled, and hundreds of thousands rendered homeless. Still there is no end to killings.

Comparably, Indians dead in Kashmir-both Jihadists and security personnel-are officially put at around 30,000-40,000. But if one were to believe the data provided by a retired military official from Pakistan in 1991, within a year of Kashmiri uprising in 1990, Indian troops have massacred over 28,000 Kashmiris. One is still not sure about the number of deaths in Kashmir involving armed insurrections as the data provided by the jihadists/independent/human rights groups and the official sources vary greatly. But guns in Kashmir have yet to be silenced and people are getting killed when these lines are being written. The Government in India has unilaterally announced ceasefire since November 2000, and the contending party is not observing this. The BJP government has gone even one step forward by seriously contemplating on a plan for "trifurcation" of the Jammu and Kashmir state to resolve the impasse, which was never an agenda considered by the Indian government before. Though there are some reservations on the issue it is nevertheless a progressive measure to sort out the long and distressful problem imperiling the Indian republic.

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