The title to this article is not meant as advice to the people of Southasia. It is merely a summing-up of the conduct of their governments and leaders over many decades, which has bought misery to millions upon millions of them. A hundred years ago, nearly the whole of Southasia, except for Nepal to a certain degree, was a British colony, much acclaimed for its quiescence. The privileged among the population were getting richer and happier, while the masses were engaged in a grim struggle to keep the wolf away. To prevent the latter from revolting, the colonial power decided to make the former stronger. This was also deemed necessary in order to charge the Southasians more dearly for the mission to ‘civilise’ them. The method was to offer what were described as measures for the subjects’ transition to self-rule. This process led to a gradual break-up of the traditional harmony among communities inhabiting Southasia, while it was claimed that bondage to the colonial power was the only force keeping them together.

The travails of British India provide the best illustration. The moment the imperial rulers started talking about India’s constitutional advance, the two major communities, Hindus and Muslims, started reaching for each other’s throats. Each time a constitutional proposal was mooted, they fought one another more determinedly than they chose to fight the common adversary. They did try to come together – in 1916, in 1928 and finally in 1944 – but eventually they chose to have their fates decided by those who had been agents of their exploitation for over a century and a half. The whole of Southasia has since been paying the price for the failure of the political parties of the late colonial era to read the future.

This is not the time to debate the merit or otherwise of Partition, for among other things the generations that benefited from this extraordinary surgery are too strong to permit a debate that is rational. What matters is that, for more than 60 years, India and Pakistan have been playing the hate-thy-neighbour-love-thy-enemy game, at a horrible cost to their people. The syndrome we are talking about is not visible in relations between Southasian states alone; it is evident in intra-national shenanigans, too. Pakistan’s case is too well-known – how its political factions have brought the country to ruin by hating each other heroically, and then prostrating themselves before their common tormentor. But what is happening in Sri Lanka? The Sinhalese and the Tamils, neighbours within a political entity, cannot resolve their politico-cultural differences by themselves, and keep falling for one outside arbitrator after another. Bangladesh, born out of Pakistan’s folly in hating a part of itself and loving distant patrons, had no traditional targets of hate, particularly after the sizeable Hindu minority had been reduced to an insignificant element. But it chose to fill the void by dividing the population between Bengalis and Bangladeshis, and now they expect succour from a force that can be friendly to neither of them.

Of course, one need not mention the destruction of Afghanistan, where the parties to a domestic political dispute put their fate in the hands of busybodies from faraway lands who could by no means be their friends.

Born-again imperialists
The Southasian states’ tendency to attach priority to the hate-thy-neighbour creed has made them so myopic that they cannot take a correct measure of the extent to which they have fallen, notably on three counts. First, there was a time was when Southasia set the tone and tempo of the anti-colonial movement, when it was at the vanguard of national liberation struggles worldwide. Today, the Southasian governments are among the foremost attackers of the right of self-determination. Second, Southasia has failed to recover from the blows it has been receiving from born-again imperialists. It once had reason to be proud of the India-China Panchsheel agreement and non-alignment; today, however, the region is home to some of the most aligned countries anywhere. Southasians were the driving force behind the Group of 77, today gone and forgotten; likewise, today hardly anyone remembers the North-South dialogue. International finance capital decided to talk to the individual Southasian states, and conquered them by telling each that its neighbour had already surrendered.

Third, while throwing off the colonial yoke, the major Southasian states did not realise that they had perforce to discard the imperialist culture they had acquired from their erstwhile masters. Proudly owning the legacy of its paramount status, Pakistan took Afghanistan for granted (and long toyed with the idea of recruiting all of West Asia for its confrontation with a stubborn neighbour), just as India took for granted not only Nepal and Sri Lanka but, to a certain extent, China as well. As a result, the other neighbours of these larger mavericks have lost the hope of receiving from them selfless affection, to say nothing of justice.

After decades of persistent policies of hating neighbours and embracing enemies, the peoples of Southasia today face a bleak future. While their capricious elites, working in alliance with like-minded elites in the neo-imperialist camp, are rolling in luxuries, describing themselves as ‘shining’, ‘radiant’, high-flying entities, the huge mass of citizens is becoming increasingly impoverished and desperate. The whole of Southasia is writhing in pain under the deadweight of decrepit, corrupt and anti-people state structures.

No situation, however, is ever beyond redemption. Southasia can still turn the corner, provided the leaders of its countries take matters in their own hands, and stop hating their neighbours and loving their enemies. Perhaps it was about Southasia as a whole that Mir, the great Urdu poet, wrote:

Mir kia sada hain beemar huay jis kay sabab.
Usi attar kay launday say dawa laitay hain?

What a simpleton Mir is.
He tries to buy a cure from the same pharmacy boy who is the cause of his affliction.

I A Rehman is Director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

In the issue, Laxmi Murthy writes on the legacy, and the continued relevance, of the Women's Movement, but Ashley Tellis faults her for mischaracterising the history of the feminism and defends the new spaces of liberation feminists of late have created.

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