Forty-five minutes on a flight out of Madras, the southern tip of India comes into view below the right wing. On the other side, a yellow sliver of land snakes out over the blue-green Palk Strait like a tendril. From this vantage point, geology, mythology and history of the Subcontinent merge into one. During the last ice age when sea levels were much lower than today, this formed the land-bridge between the southern Indian peninsula and Sri Lanka. But as the oceans rose, the rocky islands of Dhanushkodi were submerged and came to be regarded as a remnant of the Ramayana times—the bridgehead for the invasion of Lanka. And today, the Mannar region on the Sri Lankan side is the scene of fierce combat as the military carries out Operation Edibala to push Tamil Tiger guerrillas out of the western flank of its access routes to Jaffna. It is difficult to imagine that we are flying over a war zone. An estimated 85,000 people have been killed since 1983 in this South Asian conflict. Millions have been made homeless, and yet this war gets scant attention even in the rest of the Subcontinent. Daily body count journalism has numbed the region´s consciousness, and Sri Lanka scores a blip on the media´s radar screen only when a bomb devastates the heart of the country´s capital. And it remains on our screens only for as long as there is live footage of burning buildings.
It is not just Sri Lanka. The Subcontinent´s south, also comprising the Maldives and the Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, has always been treated as a periphery by the northerners. After all, the north is where 85 percent of South Asia´s 1.3 billion people live. This North-South divide is easily seen at SAARC gatherings where Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians get together in Hindustani huddles while the Maldivians and Sri Lankans stare at the ceiling.
Things have got so bad that one Maldivian diplomat calls his country a part of "South South Asia". In this sub-subregion, there is an unspoken but perceptible wish to be somewhere else—the feeling that it was a fluke of plate tectonics that plunked Sri Lanka and the Maldives offshore from the Subcontinent and not in the Straits of Malacca.
In 1977, when the United National Party of J.R. Jayawardene came to power in Sri Lanka, it dismantled controls and unleashed South Asia´s first economic liberalisation programme. Politicians openly voiced their admiration for Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad and said they were going to remake bi-ethnic Sri Lanka in the image of multi-ethnic Singapore or Malaysia. Mr Jayawardene even made a serious bid for ASEAN membership, but Colombo was just too far away across the Bay of Bengal for it to be seriously considered and the application was rejected in 1982. But hopes of emulating Southeast Asia´s economic miracle have not died.