The self-realisation of Southasia as a single, cohesive space inhabited by multiple peoples took a beating with the partition of the Subcontinent in 1947. 'Nation state-ism' arrived along with that great divide, straitjacketing identities by citizenship. The national establishments that emerged in every country thereafter championed, nurtured and calibrated a particular type of chauvinism that is now up to regionalism to undo.
While providing a powerful sense of national identity and purpose at the 'centre' of each country, the separate exclusivist nationalisms have not always served the interest of the larger populations, particularly the millions living in the peripheries in relation to the capital regions. A formula has yet to be found in which the particular genius of the Southasian (the majority of them 'Indian' before 1947) peoples is allowed to become dynamic. Such a formula surely resides in a political and economic evolution of the Subcontinent (and the island of Sri Lanka) in which the nation states and their individual sovereignties would remain inviolable, yet where the people would be able to engage with minimal restrictions, allowing an instinctive remoulding of identities. This would energise society and usher a kind of socio-economic advance that can only be imagined.
Southasian cohabitation is the ideal, but despite the ongoing Indo-Pakistani rapprochement, the trend today is towards a blocking-off of borders, with barbed wire fences as the barrier of choice. The nationalist animosities reside just under the surface, ready to be exploited by the ultra-nationalist, often fundamentalist, phalanxes in every country. There is no doubt that the people at-large would welcome a crossborder opening with wide arms, were it not for the tacit collaboration of the capital power elites and the national rightwing in every member state.
It is important to seek a formula for regionalism in Southasia that would not threaten individual, sacrosanct sovereignties, and yet would bring together people from across borders as a natural outcome of their shared histories, religions, worldviews, sensibilities, tastes, languages, accents, habits and even gestures. The setting-up of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in 1984 was a search for just such a formula. In Dhaka that year, under the guidance of can-do leaders, in particular Gen Ziaur Rahman, the governments of the seven countries decided to bond. Their association would meet every year at summits, while a secretariat in Kathmandu would be manned by bureaucrats from the seven foreign ministries. It was a good beginning, as far as it went.