A more harmonious clash August 2008
By: Siddiq WahidA Southasian concept of ‘Southasia’ would accommodate all the differences running through the region.
Over years, the concept of Southasia has evolved and expanded to advocate for regional inclusiveness and plurality, not just economically but in its politics as well. The idea of Southasia received a setback in the mid-1990s, however, around the time when the political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote his seminal piece in Foreign Affairs, followed by his book, The Clash of Civilizations. His findings seemed to militate against new forms of thinking about international relations, entrenching them deeper and more radically in the conventional notions of power politics, with Islam and China portrayed as being on one side of the fence, and the US and the rest of the world on the other. Although deeply flawed in its historical interpretation and analysis, Huntington’s ideas remain an empirical statement on the state of the world as ethnic, religious and other forms of identity continue to assert themselves with renewed vigour and violent demand.
The phenomenon, in a sense, argues that despite trends in thinking amongst some, god, indeed, is not dead, and communitarian identities are not imagined. It also seems to have anticipated that history has not actually come to an end. Where the ‘clash theory’ went wrong, at least in part, was that it read like a policy statement for empire. Empires, to quote Eqbal Ahmad, need “ghosts and an enemy”; and once the Soviet enemy was destroyed, the erstwhile opposition needed another enemy and another ghost. For the last 15 years, clash theory has generated much debate and undergone many changes. Predictably, the theory of why there are wars between civilisations and cultures, taken to its logical conclusion, has resulted in a virulent form of radical civic nationalism, which openly denies the values of plurality.
In contrast to clash theory, the idea of Southasia was instinctively and instantly attractive to me. Its advocacy of an expanded canvas of coexistence that is not confined to state borders, its focus on resource caring and sharing, its endorsement of common norms in our expectations of civic rights and duties, and its suggestions of an identity that is very plausibly wide and diffuse, yet practical – surely these are things towards which we need to strive. To achieve them, however, some hard questions will need to be asked and answered. Who, for instance, should define Southasia? It is ironic that the three oldest nation states in the region are also its smallest; Afghanistan, Bhutan and Nepal all have histories of modern formation that are much older than those of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The baggage of direct colonial experience is either absent or muted in the case of the former countries. Surely exchanges between these two historically disparate groups of SAARC member states will hold some unique answers for what a formation called Southasia could mean, if we can do so without prejudice to geographic or demographic size.
Demographic formations
This brings us to the question of whether the idea of Southasia has been overtaken by ‘globalised time’. The answer to this lies in how we address the concept. If the idea of Southasia is one that mimics North American or European attempts to form regional blocs, it has indeed been overtaken – and, more pertinently, we will run into difficulties. It is not possible to debate the difficulties comprehensively here, but one warrants a brief discussion; namely, the flow and force of history. The North American political formations are the result of wave upon wave of immigrants who came to the land on its terms; this meant, largely, leaving many of their social, political and cultural inheritances back where they came from. The arrival of these immigrants had catastrophic effects on North America’s indigenous populations, of course, but that resistance was easily broken. Since then, there has emerged a definite social, religious and political culture that is identifiably ‘North’ American.
In Europe, similarly, the perceived needs of cultural self-determination have more or less been fulfilled in the last 250 years, and so it is possible to talk about a greater union. Southasia, meanwhile, cannot afford to mimic these formations, because any attempt to ‘melt’ any part of it into a common ‘pot’ would result in fierce resistance, even while multiple simmering demands for self-determination have yet to be addressed fairly or comprehensively. Hence, there is a critical need for an ‘original’ Southasian conception of Southasia, one arrived at through a discourse that takes into account both theoretical need and accepted praxis.
The recent histories of the three major demographic formations of Southasia – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – are drenched in blood. Arguably, this was caused not so much by colonial opposition as by political contradictions within the postcolonial states. More recently, political contradictions in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan have also paid in blood to maintain the status quo, sometimes termed political ‘stability’. The strife in almost all of these cases was caused because the threatened cultural, religious and political identities in each case are more ancient, more important and inherently ‘conservationist’, as opposed to the larger formations that are barely six decades old, still evolving and inherently ‘liberal’.
The success of Southasia as a concept will lie in the ability of all stakeholders to develop a formation that successfully communicates the values of civic nationalism, without making it yet another radical fundamentalism, and instead allows for ethnic and religious identities to exist in smaller homogeneous formations. For better or worse, a challenge to one’s ethnic, religious or political formations, especially if they are millennia old, will inevitably meet with resistance, particularly if civic nationalism is posited at the expense of any other identity. The results of such an argument can be deadly. Thus, the early modern experiments in Japan during the Meiji Reformation, Iran under the Shah, and Egypt and Syria under the Ba’athists, each had ‘coiled like an anaconda inside’ a nativist reaction that sought to restore an ancient spiritual purity from an upstart soulless modernity.
Southasia is not exempt from this same critique. Nehru’s description of dams and factories as the new temples of India has certainly produced its own reaction in Hindu nationalism. Similarly, Syed Ahmed Khan’s experiment with modernising Islam has produced an Abul ala Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami, in reaction. Southasia will have to find a way around such pitfalls by allowing for multiple identities and – an even more delicate task – allowing for freedom to choose amongst these identities depending on the place, context and time.
Siddiq Wahid is Vice-Chancellor at the Islamic University of Science & Technology, Awantipora, Kashmir.
Over years, the concept of Southasia has evolved and expanded to advocate for regional inclusiveness and plurality, not just economically but in its politics as well. The idea of Southasia received a setback in the mid-1990s, however, around the time when the political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote his seminal piece in Foreign Affairs, followed by his book, The Clash of Civilizations. His findings seemed to militate against new forms of thinking about international relations, entrenching them deeper and more radically in the conventional notions of power politics, with Islam and China portrayed as being on one side of the fence, and the US and the rest of the world on the other. Although deeply flawed in its historical interpretation and analysis, Huntington’s ideas remain an empirical statement on the state of the world as ethnic, religious and other forms of identity continue to assert themselves with renewed vigour and violent demand. The phenomenon, in a sense, argues that despite trends in thinking amongst some, god, indeed, is not dead, and communitarian identities are not imagined. It also seems to have anticipated that history has not actually come to an end. Where the ‘clash theory’ went wrong, at least in part, was that it read like a policy statement for empire. Empires, to quote Eqbal Ahmad, need “ghosts and an enemy”; and once the Soviet enemy was destroyed, the erstwhile opposition needed another enemy and another ghost. For the last 15 years, clash theory has generated much debate and undergone many changes. Predictably, the theory of why there are wars between civilisations and cultures, taken to its logical conclusion, has resulted in a virulent form of radical civic nationalism, which openly denies the values of plurality.
In contrast to clash theory, the idea of Southasia was instinctively and instantly attractive to me. Its advocacy of an expanded canvas of coexistence that is not confined to state borders, its focus on resource caring and sharing, its endorsement of common norms in our expectations of civic rights and duties, and its suggestions of an identity that is very plausibly wide and diffuse, yet practical – surely these are things towards which we need to strive. To achieve them, however, some hard questions will need to be asked and answered. Who, for instance, should define Southasia? It is ironic that the three oldest nation states in the region are also its smallest; Afghanistan, Bhutan and Nepal all have histories of modern formation that are much older than those of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The baggage of direct colonial experience is either absent or muted in the case of the former countries. Surely exchanges between these two historically disparate groups of SAARC member states will hold some unique answers for what a formation called Southasia could mean, if we can do so without prejudice to geographic or demographic size.
Demographic formations
This brings us to the question of whether the idea of Southasia has been overtaken by ‘globalised time’. The answer to this lies in how we address the concept. If the idea of Southasia is one that mimics North American or European attempts to form regional blocs, it has indeed been overtaken – and, more pertinently, we will run into difficulties. It is not possible to debate the difficulties comprehensively here, but one warrants a brief discussion; namely, the flow and force of history. The North American political formations are the result of wave upon wave of immigrants who came to the land on its terms; this meant, largely, leaving many of their social, political and cultural inheritances back where they came from. The arrival of these immigrants had catastrophic effects on North America’s indigenous populations, of course, but that resistance was easily broken. Since then, there has emerged a definite social, religious and political culture that is identifiably ‘North’ American.
In Europe, similarly, the perceived needs of cultural self-determination have more or less been fulfilled in the last 250 years, and so it is possible to talk about a greater union. Southasia, meanwhile, cannot afford to mimic these formations, because any attempt to ‘melt’ any part of it into a common ‘pot’ would result in fierce resistance, even while multiple simmering demands for self-determination have yet to be addressed fairly or comprehensively. Hence, there is a critical need for an ‘original’ Southasian conception of Southasia, one arrived at through a discourse that takes into account both theoretical need and accepted praxis.
The recent histories of the three major demographic formations of Southasia – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – are drenched in blood. Arguably, this was caused not so much by colonial opposition as by political contradictions within the postcolonial states. More recently, political contradictions in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan have also paid in blood to maintain the status quo, sometimes termed political ‘stability’. The strife in almost all of these cases was caused because the threatened cultural, religious and political identities in each case are more ancient, more important and inherently ‘conservationist’, as opposed to the larger formations that are barely six decades old, still evolving and inherently ‘liberal’.
The success of Southasia as a concept will lie in the ability of all stakeholders to develop a formation that successfully communicates the values of civic nationalism, without making it yet another radical fundamentalism, and instead allows for ethnic and religious identities to exist in smaller homogeneous formations. For better or worse, a challenge to one’s ethnic, religious or political formations, especially if they are millennia old, will inevitably meet with resistance, particularly if civic nationalism is posited at the expense of any other identity. The results of such an argument can be deadly. Thus, the early modern experiments in Japan during the Meiji Reformation, Iran under the Shah, and Egypt and Syria under the Ba’athists, each had ‘coiled like an anaconda inside’ a nativist reaction that sought to restore an ancient spiritual purity from an upstart soulless modernity.
Southasia is not exempt from this same critique. Nehru’s description of dams and factories as the new temples of India has certainly produced its own reaction in Hindu nationalism. Similarly, Syed Ahmed Khan’s experiment with modernising Islam has produced an Abul ala Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami, in reaction. Southasia will have to find a way around such pitfalls by allowing for multiple identities and – an even more delicate task – allowing for freedom to choose amongst these identities depending on the place, context and time.
Siddiq Wahid is Vice-Chancellor at the Islamic University of Science & Technology, Awantipora, Kashmir.
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