Southasia exists – at different levels of intensity and urgency, yes, but it does exist. To many, the region provides the fourth or fifth level of identity, beyond the clan, language-ethnicity, province and nation state. Despite the overwhelming seductive, chauvinistic power of the national identity as a part of reality of the modern era, it does not provide psychological fulfilment to everyone all the time. In such a situation, while remaining a citizen and passport-holder of one or the other member of SAARC, the solution is to revert back to a provincial identity on the one hand, or to reach out towards the Southasian signifier on the other. And, actually, the two go together. After all, Southasia will be the strongest when it brings together not eight countries, but the many regions, provinces and districts that are subsumed within each of them.
Unfortunately, the discourse of Southasia has been locked not only within the seven-and-now-eight countries, but also, almost exclusively, within the English-speaking sphere. Simply because English allows crossborder communication, and the class background of the Anglophone makes the airline ticket accessible. Unless the Southasian agenda gets picked up by the 'vernacular' discourse, in all of its hundred tongues, it will not generate political strength to impact politics in a way to push regionalism from the bottom up. For now, both SAARC and Southasia (two very different concepts) are ideas floated from the top, and the roots are weak.
It is a fact that the force-fit of the national identity can sometimes be rather tight. At such times, for many, there is a need for a comfort zone beyond the nation state, while accepting the nation state. For this to happen at any scale, however, the individual national establishments themselves needed to develop confidence, a requirement that has held us hostage for decades. First we had to fight our wars. Through the writing of self-serving histories and the defining of majoritarian ultra-nationalist identities, development networks with the commercial-military complexes, and reaping of the rewards of inequitable economic boom, the capital elites seem now to have developed a confidence level that allows countenancing the Southasian region. By which ever way, they have got to this point, but now we must insist that Southasia be read as a region beyond the linking of the member countries of SAARC and their capital establishments.
The SAARC concept, with its endorsement by prime ministers, presidents, kings and dictators more than two decades ago, gave impetus to the idea of regionalism. That was an important start, but today we are required to go far beyond SAARC's capital-centric definition, which is the basis on which even civil society today functions. There are so many ways to inadequately define Southasia, from the geological (the 'Indian' plate, which hit the Asian landmass) to the climatological (whosoever is hit by the monsoon floods, though that ousts Afghanistan). One can also go beyond SAARC's boundaries and bring in the Tibet Autonomous Region and Burma, or one can seek to focus on the neglected borderlands between the various countries that cumulatively make up a kind of Southasia.