Talk like a South Asian

Talk like a South Asian

Context:

• Watching South Asia, one senses India lacks of a sense of neighbourhood and region as a component of our imagination.

Explanation:

• The similarities between India and Nepal are immense, and yet India lacks any comprehension of Nepal’s fierce sense of itself.
• India repeatedly displays a lack of sense of the diversities around which need a new sense of unity.
• It issues warnings to the Maldives or Nepal, threatening them not to be seduced by the Chinese imperative, but it does little to sustain the reciprocity and autonomy of the relationship.

Time for renewal:

• In the South Asian context, India must start inventing and reinventing the neighbour every day
• Firstly, it has to invent a South Asia which is civilisational, reciprocal, local in its diversity.
• One of the most exciting of these regional ideas was the creation of the South Asian University (SAU), with a faculty from all South Asian countries.
• What India lacks is a South Asian theory of culture and knowledge which should anchor this imagination.
• Secondly, the availability of eccentricity as dissent, alternatives, minorities has to be reworked constitutionally so the focus is not on trite obsessions with India-Pakistan but a genuine exploration of voices and theories.
• Thirdly, diversity becomes the next axis of the South Asia imagination.
• One has to allow for tribal, ethnic, nomadic and pastoral groups moving freely without being hounded by the panopticon called the boundary.
• Fourthly, India needs a movement from muscular diplomacy, which we are poor at.
• Democracy in India cannot exist without the extension of the democratic imagination to the region.