South Asia Daily

India and its boiling neighborhood

On May 6, I wrote about South Asia’s perpetual mutinies, whose central point was about how India sits in the middle of three totally unrelated but equally unsettling conflicts in Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Not that there was anything brilliantly original about it but that point had to be highlighted for those who are too close to these conflicts might have missed out on the broader picture.

Tarun Basu, the chief editor of the Indo-Asian News Service, has an excellent story about how India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is deeply worried about the neighborhood being on the boil. “Manmohan Singh is understandably worried that lack of strategic vision in a future government in New Delhi could result in a "strategic encircling" of India with long-term consequences,” Tarun writes as if echoing the growing concern among many discerning Indian experts that China is fishing in troubled waters of South Asia.

Tarun’s story makes a significant point about why it is important for India not to allow neighbors such as China and Pakistan to hijack the agenda there.

“India is worried that if the next government does not address Sri Lanka's economic and strategic concerns in the immediate aftermath of the war, lurking neighbors like China and even Pakistan could "step in to help" to fill a strategic vacuum.

"There is a lot of international interest in the Trincomalee oil farms. If India does not look out, we'll soon have China soon nesting there," a senior official told IANS, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

China has demonstrated growing interest in the South Asian region (it has sought observer status in SAARC), not just in Pakistan, with whom it has close ties, but in Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives as well.”

It is in this context that it is imperative that India has a government that is not just domestically competent but internationally astute as well. There is no other region in the world where geostrategic fault lines crisscross as much as they do in South Asia. While there may be individuals who see the broader picture of the emerging shifts, I am afraid New Delhi still does not seem to show any signs of having factored in this dynamic in its over foreign policy framework. No wonder Manmohan Singh is worried. 

700,000 and counting

Tamil refugees fleeing Sri Lanka's northeast (IANS Photo)

On a Sunday morning for about half a dozen or so of my blog’s readers, including me, what could more uplifting than talking about terrorized refugees fleeing for their lives in Pakistan and Sri Lanka? As the militaries in these two countries continue their assault on those who challenge the sovereign writ of their respective countries, over 700,000 civilians have been forced into virtual destitution.

My friend C. Uday Bhaskar has written a compelling perspective piece on the refugee crisis unfolding in the Swat Valley in Pakistan and the northeast in Sri Lanka for the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS). The Pakistan’s military’s belated if now assertive assault on the Taliban in the picturesque has pushed some half a million people out of their homes in what is being described as the biggest humanitarian crisis since the exodus of refugees in 1971 that attended the birth of Bangladesh.

“The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has described these two events as catastrophic and together they are unprecedented by way of macro human suffering and the loss of life will be colossal - when more accurate reports come in. Furthermore, Afghanistan is under steady attack from US and NATO forces in their single-minded focus on the war against the Taliban - which has received fresh impetus after the Obama-Zardari-Karzai tri-lateral summit in Washington last week,” Uday writes.

In regions such as Swat in Pakistan or the northeast in Sri Lanka, which are in a state of disrepair during even normal times, this dislocation and decimation of ordinary people is bound to create serious discontent. At a time when the world community wants to lure ordinary people away from misanthropic movements such as the Taliban, it is possible that the result of this dislocation could be exactly the opposite.

Uday’s point is that while all this is going on India has been seriously distracted by its general elections, during which no government can function to its full capacity. Whichever political alliance takes over in New Delhi on May 16, its hands will be full with this monstrous crisis. While the typical official response to any such mass human dislocation in the past has been apathy, it is in everybody’s interest if this time around governments look at this crisis as a potential source future troubles. 

South Asia's perpetual mutinies

India sits in the middle of three totally unrelated but equally unsettling conflicts in Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. While Pakistan is battling a violent Islamist jihad, Nepal is up against a somewhat more insidious Maoist "revolutionary counter-attack." In Sri Lanka, it seems like the last throes of one of the world’s bloodiest ethnic conflicts. 

In all three cases, the conflicts are a direct consequence of the state gravely mishandling the socio-religious (Pakistan), socio-economic (Nepal) and ethnic (Sri Lanka) challenges early on. It is nobody’s case that these disasters could have been averted altogether but their magnitude could have been very significantly reduced had the respective states managed to deliver development more efficiently. It is astonishing that one single region can witness such diverse conflagrations on such a prolonged basis. It is fair to assert that evenly distributed development gains may not necessarily have prevented religious lunatics in Pakistan. However, it is not my case that such insurgencies can be fully pre-empted by good governance but that they can at least be contained to a level where they do not threaten to overthrow democracies.

The “integration” of the Maoists in Nepal created among its people a sense of relief but now it turns out that the Maoists had a very different plan. A video tape of the country’s outgoing Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda, which was broadcast on Nepali television, revealed that the peace plan that the Maoists signed was merely a different strategy to continue with their “revolutionary counter-attack.” That revelation has shaken up Nepal to its core.

In Sri Lanka, long years of institutionalized discrimination against the minority Tamil population gave birth to what turned out to be one of the world’s most ruthless and bloodiest separatist campaigns led by Vellupillai Prabhakaran. Although according to the latest reports he is now cornered in a barely four square kilometer strip, it has taken the Sri Lankan state nearly three decades to accomplish that. This is the closest that Colombo has come to wiping out the Tamil Tigers guerillas but it is anybody’s guess whether that military triumph will resolve the ethnic animosities.

In Pakistan, the country’s army finally appears to be taking on the gravest threat to its existence from the Taliban. I am not sure if it fully realized that this time around the Pakistani army has to decimate the Taliban rather than indulging in half measures and deal making. This is a great opportunity for the army and Pakistani state to establish its primacy over the region. Unlike in Sri Lanka, where the adversary is clearly identifiable and containable, in Pakistan it is so amorphous and uncontainable.

India has its own serious threats internally which it has managed to put a lid on with perceptible measure of economic progress. However, as the Indian intelligence agencies well know there are subnationalist movements, caused by economic disenfranchisement, brewing across the country.