Peace and Security Review, Vol.1 No. 2 - International Centre for ...

80 Peace and Security Review Vol.1, No.2, Second Quarter, 2008
parlance equates and identifies South Asia as a blend of Hinduism, Buddhism
and Islam despite the differences in their teachings and mores. And across
South Asia this coexistence of religious faiths has kept all states incorporated
in the conglomerate despite natural borders dividing them. It is in this broader
sense that a unified entity called South Asia may be conceived.
However, in regions where development has been arrested, especially by
the experience of foreign domination and its aftermath, the past may well
continue to haunt the present, “weighing like a nightmare,” as Marx graphically
remarked (1970:79), “on the brain of the living.” Any adequate understanding
of South Asian’s complexities therefore, must address the psychological
cleavages, which its people have inherited from their history tied with British
rule. And paradoxically, challenges to regionalisation remain far deeply
rooted in this past, more specifically in South Asia’s modernity, which grew
within the microstructure of British colonial state than the division and
fragmentation which India had experienced during the medieval time.
Essentially rooted in Indian medievalism South Asian modernity gave way
to a complex interplay of forces, passing through the dialectics of union and
partition, whose causes remained latent in the past but gained credence as
India transformed into a centralised political structure with numerous princely
states herded into one rule. The economic integration during the early period
of British conquest, which according to Subhas Chandra Bose “gave the feeling
“that she had been conquered” (Bose and Jalal, 1998: 12) allowed the social
and economic deprivation of Muslim population to become more vivid as
the widening gap between Muslims and Hindus went on to be politically
institutionalised by the Indian Councils Act of 1909 with constitutional
recognition to separate electorates for Muslims and non-Muslims.
The arbitrary division and articulation of spatial units taking the parochial
form of nation states based on religious identity that today constitute South
Asia was designed to accommodate the policy of religion-communal division.
However, the displacement of 15 million people from their homes to administer
this division known as the greatest human migration in history with
Hindus in Pakistan moving to areas in Punjab and other bordering areas,
while Muslims leaving India to succeed in Pakistan (“Land of the Pure”),
and marred by large scale violence with death of a million (some estimate it
up to 1.5 million) citizens and countless others suffering was a “concentrated
metaphor of violence, fear, domination, difference and separation” (Tan and
Kudaisya, 2000:8). And a fall out from this traumatic history has been the
emergence of a regime of perpetual hostility between the nation states that
keeps previous unity disrupted, and changes the face of Bharatvarsha ⎯ once
an unified entity. This divide has been so powerful that South Asia’s alleged
Vol.1, No.2 2008 pp.77-93