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

Badrul A. Khan South Asia and Regionalism 83
moved to a more privatized economy with input from an ever expanding IT
industry and lucrative investment opportunity. There are suggestions that by
2050 India will overtake China and Japan in gross national product.
However, India’s galloping developmental pace has created new problems
for intra-regional relationship. Most states in South Asia unlike India have
not been able to overcome the weight of colonially inherited systems and
remain economically backward. The asymmetry is so extensive that South
Asia may well have acquired a centre-periphery pattern whereby the structural
division of wealth and labour has gained a relation of dependency. While in
the past the relationship between the global and the local as a philosophical
problem of the general and the specific would be explained from a structural-systematic
division of the global order, regions and South Asia in
particular may well be coopted in the same paradigmatic framework so that
a localised version of centre ⎯ periphery relation with India as the centre
while the rest as the periphery takes place. A regional division of labour with
periphery as the supplier of raw materials and centre exporting manufacturing
good to the extent that periphery is dependent upon centre is now unfolding.
This micro-political change complicates the traditional region versus centre or
centre ⎯ periphery relationship of the global and with it the very integrative
process of South Asia.
Apart from economics two more areas may be identified as relevant in
the extension of this asymmetry. India’s military is one of the largest in the
world (PINR, 2004) and presently undergoing a quantum leap in modernization.
Modernization plan has placed specific focus on reshaping India’s air defence
system (S -300VM), with nuclear capable long-range bombers and technology
such as unmanned reconnaissance aircraft and air launched munitions,
supplied mostly by Russia and Israel. Earmarked for the next 15 years, the
$95 billion allocated for the modernisation will fund project “Seabird”
consisting of the Karwar naval base, “an air force station,” a naval armament
depot, and missile ⎯ silos, all to be realised in the next five years (PINR,
2005). More importantly, perhaps is the strategic 10-year defence agreement,
which India has signed with the US setting itself distinctively away from its
regional competitors. The regional countries have always been apprehensive
of being swamped by Hindu religion, by which India is described culturally
and which acts as a powerful tool of restless disjuncture for other countries
where identity relies on religions other than Hindu (Islam and Buddhism).
This fear had found further reflection in the cold war politics played out
between states during the early post-colonial period. India’s policy of
friendship towards Soviet Union in the 50s had led Pakistan to ally with
China and the USA, which further intensified this fear by the continuance of
Vol.1, No.2 2008 pp.77-93