Security in South Asia: A Nepali Perspective
"What vision for Security Future in South Asia?"-2

Challenges to Replication: These two cases of India and Sri Lanka are particularly focused here to illustrate the state of governance in the two oldest democracies in South Asia. Democracy that has conceptually become a majority rule over the minority through the electoral process has ultimately led to dissociation of the people from the state. As a consequence, there is an increasing propensity to disintegration in the states in South Asia. The myriad conflicts are understood to have been the product of colonial legacies confronting the post-colonial reality fraught with the institutional decay. Again the precedent set by the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan based on the Bengali nationalism after 24 years of de-colonization suggests that other nations caught within the post-colonial states have their own rights to claim independence.

Furthermore the examples set by the erstwhile Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, in the post-cold war world by granting rights to self-determination and secession have fuelled the demands for such a practice in the South Asian states. But, as these examples show, self-determination can be realized and arrived at through negotiations and the consent of the central authority but not through violence. Chechenya, Bosnia and Kosovo have also exemplifies such cases where violence and suppression writ large. For instance, the virtual severance of Kosovo from Serbia with the declaration of the rights to humanitarian intervention by the Western powers in the internal affairs of other state in 1999 had certain resemblance to the Indian intervention in East Pakistan in December 1971. But, on the question of external intervention in resolving secessionist violence, India has presently found itself to be one of the most sensitive countries.

India's sensitivities against external intervention have their roots in the formation of the Republic itself. The image of India as a nation-state had a dubious start because of the disintegration of the country on August 15,1947, the very day the Republic as an independent country was born. With the partition and the creation of Pakistan, with was legally secession, India lost its first major battle for national integration. Though it did not lag behind in further bifurcating Pakistan through military intervention and creation of Bangladesh, when such an occasion arises, it sees that case as a never-again one.

Internally India had a record of partition while determining the frontiers of its states: The Northeast (Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura) where boundaries were redrawn on ethno-linguistic lines by folding Assam to the present size. Predominance of the Assamese ethnic clouts led to the separation of Nagaland in 1963 that was followed by Meghalaya in 1971 and Mizoram in 1986. Indian Punjab was also partitioned again into a Sikh-dominated Punjab and the Hindu dominated Haryana along with the creation of Himanchal Pradesh. Further partition of Assam with the demands for the Bodoland is in the Northeast, and Gorkhaland has already become autonomous. Recently India introduced two new states by partitioning Bihar to create Jharkhand, and by dividing Uttar Pradesh into Uttaranchal. Thus the motion is set for further division of the Indian Republic into different states to ease the challenges to governance.

South Asia therefore has been a case of both disintegration (Bangladesh) and integration (Sikkim). But the "national unity" of the South Asian states is still fraught with difficulties. The challenges to national unity and territorial integrity of the states are faced with overt inclination to the use of force and violence. None of the South Asian states is an exception to the tendency to a recurrence of violence. Violence has been the course taken during the formation of states in South Asia. In continuation to date also suggest that the task of state formation yet remains incomplete. Thus the violence from above is now met with the violence from below with destructive consequences. Evidently the persistence and continuity of violence without any recourse to resolution of enduring conflicts in the countries of South Asia is the stark case of the "nation-state" projects falling to pieces. Violence from above has continued to be used and justifies as the flow of authority to avert the process of fragmentation of the state. But when the people dissociating from the state contest this authority, the legitimacy of the given authority situates itself into the past. The use of state power by this authority will lose its relevance in the contending environment of the sovereignty of the state.

Assessing the nation building projects attempted by the ruling elites, one can be definitive in suggesting that these are, in fact, a majoritarian hegemonic project crafted for the mono-ethnic dominance by endeavoring to de-legitimize ethnic plurality in the multiethnic states fearing disjunction in their claimed unity and national integrity. Governance, in this context, is moreover tried to the preconceived notion of preserving security, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of the states they rule with a consideration of maintaining "law and order" as prima facie objective of the state. State as modern institutions have elements of violence built into their very structure. The structural violence, which is pervasive and intensive, has become a phenomenon of the state building process through eliminating or pushing the people at the margin, those who resist or disagree with the process.

The South Asian elites who undertook the responsibility of state building had unimaginatively tried to replicate the process called modernity as inseminated in the regional soils by British colonialism. The inheritance has been so deep in their mindset that they need not think but to borrow from the modern West. As the state building remains a Western concept, the elites in South Asia had inculcated allergic trait towards the native tradition in social practices whether in organizing societies or developing the state. Their love and carving for everything Western destroyed the social fabric that let loose the socio-political and economic anarchy in the body-politick of the South Asian states. Reproducing the nation-state modeled on the West has actually produced structural anomalies in the political process made technically possible but without serious efforts to assimilate the human elements and sensitivities in the state building. The repercussion therefore has been that the political process becomes susceptible to polarization and violent conflicts.

Critical to the state building efforts of the South Asian elites remain the political, economic and military spheres organized through hegemonic intervention of the state by controlling and commanding participation of the people, sometimes through consent and at others by the use of coercive measures. The first of these spheres concerns itself with the identity to define nationhood but in actuality consolidates the statehood. The identity is derived from the common heritage or the shared experience of those controlling the territory thus shaping up the state identity with selective process. Obviously this selective process contributes to the differences between and among the people sharing the same space. The emerging of casteism or roughly to suggest racism in the South Asian social space with Aryan and non-Aryan human species has much to do with this selective process. The social segregation politically induced has thus led to selective inclusion and exclusion that has produced alienation. Differences are prominently articulated with the categories of ethnic, religious, and linguistic as well as cultural divisions in creating social hierarchy. Assertion of caste or ethnicity, religion and language in most South Asian states is a political imperative for the dominant and powerful groups. By their use of religion and language to organize "national unity" as featuring every South Asian state upholding either Hindu, Islamic or Buddhist religious category along with the predominance of the majority languages by reproducing the Western experiences, these states cease to be secularists; instead, represent the communal identity of the majority. In other words, the communalization of nationalism generates alienation among those who are categorized as simply being different from the rulers in the hegemonic construct of the nation state. The Islamic fervor in Bangladesh and Pakistan, the transformation of Hinduism from a way of life to a single unifying conformist religion representing the national ethos in India and Nepal, Buddhism as the exclusivist religion in Bhutan and Sri Lanka are cases of states closely identified with "one nation", one religion and one language," despite all of them, more or less, being multiethnic, multilingual as well as multireligious states. As all these states represent unitary concept constructed by the forces of hegemony, they constitute the case of misrepresentation in social, political, and economic as well as human governance.

Perseverance of the feudalistic structure remains the norm in South Asian states although socialism, an experience adopted from the West, was the virtue, which has now been discarded in favor of market friendly liberalization and privatization, another Western experiment induced by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, IMF, on behalf of the Capitalist West. But the feudal lords, by their own virtue and vice, sustained by their wider international contacts, have transformed themselves into agents in the process called globalization in the name of development. They are at ease with prescriptions rather than innovations, which require spending energies and correct thinking. Precisely speaking, the Indian case is starkly revealing in this matter. India admitted the failure of socialist planning in 1991 with serious repercussions on its economy. In the absence of any alternative native thinking it again decided to adapt to the readymade "guidance" provided by the IMF-WB combine. The dramatic effect of this change in India's economic decision making, according to one study, has made a mockery of Indian democracy as its Union Minister of Finance reports directly to 1818 Street NW., bypassing the national parliament and the democratic process. Sensitive economic policy documents are drafted directly by the IMF and the WB, which carries the "American Script" against the habitual British spelling and syntax used by the Indian bureaucrats. For example, the Memorandum of Economic Policy drafted on August 27, 1991 had only one thing of Indian origin-its endorsement by the Ministry of Finance, India. Rhetoric of "'swadeshi" that the Bharatiya Janta Party has been so fond of raising lost ground to globalization in the process of integrating the Indian economy to the World market place.

The case of Nepal to secure the World Bank's assistance to build the Arun III Hydel Project Dam, despite the latter's firm commitment previously on account of the government's inefficacy, is presumably a failure at replication of the nation state that the developmentalists in the country had rhetorically endeavored for, Nepal is a case of failed development. The economy is moribund, poverty has increased twofold within the past two decades and the country is de-developing. Pakistan features another stigma of a failed state, which survives on the dole of the IMF and the WB. The foreign exchange reserve has dipped below $ 1 billion in 1998 to around $600 million in 2000 and the government has become critically vulnerable to rescheduling loans from creditors. The financially bankrupt Pakistan was saved from debt default with the disbursement of the IMF loan amounting to $200 million in the last week of November 2000. Economic performance in Sri Lanka was considered respectable despite the "shocks of war". But, as some say, the costs of war amounted to 200 percent of 1999's GDP. In the absence of war, the economy could have grown by 8% per annum rather than 5% on the average. Bangladesh, on the other hand, entered the new century with an election budget of the ruling party, which had not been able to even marginally improve the plight of the poverty-stricken people. However, the budget has failed to present any definite strategy on the issue of poverty alleviation.

Therefore the state intervention in the economy under the façade of socialism has turned out to be a pursuit of the excessive control of the majoritarian elites on the economic activities through "license raj", protectionism, and industrialization. Impetus to control national economy enhanced the power of the central elites in tangible form. Associations that the elites formed in regulating the economy have produced chronic economic inequalities. Ultimately, economic imbalances have led to social insecurities, environmental degradation, dislocation and dispossession of the people consequenting into large-scale migration. Dislocation, displacement and destruction of habitats are not only caused by wars but also by the unimaginative efforts towards development and industrialization. Bangladesh has a record of more than 100,000 people displaced as a consequence of the construction of Kaptai Dam at the Chittagong Hill Tracks, CHT, area. Continuing conflicts at CHT have ledthe government to deploy 80,000 security personnel, which forced the exodus of around 60,000 Chakmas, known as Jummas too, from their homeland to India in the 1980s. As per a report, about 80,000 Chakmas live in the refugee camp of Tripura state of India. Similarly, in India there are more than half-a million people internally displaced. The pathetic case of Sri Lanka caused by the unending civil war led to 800,000 number of people internally displaced whose rehabilitation remains an open question.

To be continued.

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