Hope for regional coperation springd not from the state but from the independent non governmentel sector,which seeks to protect theweak from the strong all over. what is required, above all is a commitment to justice.
For reasons that are quite obscure, chronological turning points, no matter how arbitrary, mobilise and channel human aspirations. The special feature of this particular millennial moment is globalisation, an extremely powerful global I trend that is both a unifying and a fragmenting force. It is a force whose claims of ever-expanding human prosperity are countered by the experience of disintegration, violence, overpowering of local realities, and diminution of the scope of human freedoms.
In human society, the glue for sustained cooperation and integration is provided by the ideal of justice. Unfortunately, this is an ideal that has been wrung out of the political society over the last century, leaving cynicism, violence and corruption in its wake. The central organising ideologies of the region during this period — sequentially, colonialism, development and globalisation—have been based on the justification of injustice. They have inevitably produced fragmentation and exclusion, not cooperation and harmony.
The alternative loci for the invocation of justice, meanwhile, have moved out of the mainstream political arena into such movements as environmental conservation, poverty eradication and human rights. These movements therefore offer some fundamental insights into the possibility of regional cooperation in South Asia.
Systematic injustice
South Asia is a unique region —the oldest of the world´s major religious groups, Hinduism, and the youngest, Islam, met here. And indeed, the encounter of these two with an even younger religion that dares not call itself a religion yet: modernity. This is a region where the cultural synthesis of such an encounter is dominated by intense and irreconcilable fragmentation. Instead of harmony and synthesis between these overlapping sources of cultural identity, the experience is one of division between warring camps that base their self-definition on the explicit denial of at least one dime-nsion of this encounter.