Statehood in South Asia.

• Author: Embree, Ainslie

In the vast region now known as South Asia at the beginning of 1997, most of the major states--including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka--have some form of democratic government for the first time since the formal British withdrawal in 1947. All of these nations are engaged in measures of economic liberalization, moving away from government control of resources toward a market economy. All are also seeking, however tentatively, to increase and strengthen interregional relationships.(1) Although democracy, economics and foreign policy have been important, the overarching concern in all the states and the one that shapes all the other issues is the quest for national unity. The process of decolonization that led to the formation of the separate states of South Asia meant that the externally imposed unity of the colonial state had to be replaced by policies that required the assent of the governed.

It is this theme of the search for national unity that will be analyzed in this article through brief examinations of three of the states, with a fourth, Bangladesh, being noted in relation to India and Pakistan. More attention will be given to India, since the same factors that give India a special prominence within the region make it an excellent starting place for considering the South Asia region in general.

The first factor that explains India's prominence in the region is its overwhelming dominance in population, industrial development and military power. Equally important is the geographical factor. Since the state of India comprises almost three-quarters of the subcontinent, which is bound by mountains and seas, it is an "intelligible isolate." A third factor is that the civilizations and cultures of India have made an impression on all the states of the region, despite the other states' own strong indigenous cultural and religious characteristics, such as Islam and Buddhism. A fourth factor giving India a special importance is that all the states in the region, especially the four largest ones, have experienced political trends rooted in what is now the state of India. Beginning with the Mauryan Empire in the fourth century B.C. and continuing into the modern era, political forces have emanated from India throughout the region.

India had a special importance for the British empire and had a legal and political status different from any of the other colonies. It was regarded as the dominating power in the region. Lord Curzon, as governor general, expressed a grandiose but widely held vision of India's hegemony in 1909 when he wrote:

On the west, India must exercise a predominant influence over the destinies of Persia and Afghanistan; on the north, it can veto any rival in Tibet; on the north-east it can exert great pressure upon China, and it is one of the guardians of the autonomous existence of Siam.(2) This was a dangerous legacy for the Government of India to leave to its successor state, the Republic of India, as the world discovered when India and China quarreled over the borders that had been left by the British. Upon British departure in 1947, India's influence in the area continued when it began to interact with the new border states of Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Sikhim.

The word "empire" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "the aggregate of many states under one common head." The British viewed their empire in these terms. Britain had conquered and brought under one rule what was a hackneyed congeries of states and kingdoms in the geographical area that Europeans had called "India" since ancient times. That the official and legal documents usually referred to the "Government of India" and not "India" reflects that the British perceived India as a government, but not a state and certainly not a nation.

Looking back over 50 years of independent statehood in South Asia, one can identify dominant issues and concerns in each of the states. First, a variety of economic strategies emerged, all of which required an active role for the national government. These strategies were devised to address age-old problems of poverty while providing for the infrastructure of a modern state, including defense, communications, education and health services. These strategies were a post-colonial rejection of the laissez-faire economic policies that had characterized British rule.

Second, dominant trends have emerged from the function of religion in national life in all the countries of South Asia. Religion has been closely related to the question of national language. Third, democratic forms of government according to the Western model were established in all the states, although with many modifications. Fourth, foreign relations have been a constant preoccupation. Only recently has cooperation been embraced with the creation of the functionally-limited South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in 1983. Despite South Asia's limited independent history, post-independence regional animosities and the fear of Indian hegemony have prevented the growth of normal economic and cultural contacts. Relations with the wider international community during the Cold War era were focused on the United States, the Soviet Union and China. As noted above, however, all of these concerns of the different South Asian states were deeply affected by the necessity of maintaining territorial integrity while fostering a sense of national consciousness.

India

During India's half-century of independence, the concern for national unity has had two broad aspects. One is the preservation of territorial integrity; which has been tested by wars with China and Pakistan and by internal insurgencies. The other aspect is the creation of a unifying national consciousness and this, in India as elsewhere, has been far more difficult than defending territorial integrity

Indian territorial integrity was challenged first in 1962 when China and India went to war over territories in the Himalayan borderlands. In 1959, Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai suggested that the borders of India were not legitimate because they were drawn by foreign imperialists. He told Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in an accurate and elegant phrase that the border issue was a complicated question left over by history."(3) This was unacceptable to Nehru, who believed the borders were integral to India's sovereignty and to its sense of nationhood.(4) In an official note, the Government of India declared its northern frontier "has lain approximately where it now runs for nearly three thousand years," and that the people within the area it enclosed have always regarded themselves "as Indians and remained within the Indian fold."(5) After the war started, Nehru told a New Delhi audience that it would begin "pushing us into the modern world and make us realize the hard realities."(6)

One of the hard realities for India was that it would be forced to reconsider its non-aligned status in foreign affairs, in order to obtain outside pressure to deflect the Chinese advance. Nehru wrote to U.S. President John F. Kennedy that India's situation was desperate, and asked for large-scale military assistance, including squadrons of supersonic fighters and B-47 bombers.(7) The Chinese ceased their advance, either because of the threat of American involvement, or because they believed they had humiliated India and proved that China, as they put it, "was one head taller than India imagined herself to be."(8)

The 1962 war with China was a turning point in defining India as a nation. Nehru spoke of it as a blessing in disguise because internal disunity had been swept aside by the Chinese threat and the new mood could be used to achieve industrial advances as well as military preparedness.(9)

A variety of militant insurgent movements within India also placed severe strains on the government during the past 50 years. By threatening to secede or demanding a degree of autonomy that the government felt would destroy the nation's unity, insurgencies challenged the government's legitimacy. Countering rebellions was expensive in material and human resources and left bitter memories of alleged brutalities and grave human rights abuses. All Indian administrations since 1947 have believed, however, that violent and secessionist movements should be crushed quickly. Although the numerous insurgencies had different local origins and agendas and affected widely separated areas, the common threads among them were a sense of grievance, often rooted in perceived economic discrimination.

Bonds of language and religion became important characteristics among insurgents because of their belief that the government, in seeking national unity; was trying to replace...