It is easy to imagine the sensitive intellectual of Southasia wringing his hands in dismay at the peripheral place the region occupies in India's public discourse. You too would empathise with such an individual if you were to compare the Indian media's breathless, extensive reporting on the rise of Barack Obama in the United States to the relatively lacklustre, limited coverage accorded to the advent of democracy in Nepal and Bhutan, momentous developments both. Our sensitive intellectual would not be wrong in reaching a depressing conclusion: Indians have lost interest in their neighbourhood.
Policy wonks in New Delhi are likely to dismiss this perception as gross exaggeration, symptomatic of the neighbourhood's inferiority complex about India. Yet it cannot be denied that the middle-class Indian – the driving force behind India's foreign policy – has turned his gaze away from the impoverished neighbourhood, to look wistfully at those distant countries offering him opportunities to earn his millions. Globalisation and liberalisation has removed his fetters; his wealth and influence have grown exponentially; he struts around the world believing it to be his stage. The middle-class Indian has projected his aspirations as those of India's, exulting in the description of his country as an emerging power and an economic powerhouse of the future.
Effaced from this worldview is the plight of the teeming millions languishing in poverty. The middle-class Indian extends his callous insensitivity beyond the border to the neighbourhood: he feels that the countries of Southasia, like the poor at home, are a drag on his ambition, a burden he facetiously believes that he should not have to shoulder. And because he is in the thrall of the rich and powerful, he allows only a tangential place to the surrounding region in the national discourse.
But this is only part of his story. The insularity of the middle-class Indian is also due to his perception of the countries comprising Southasia as arrayed against India in varying degrees. For nearly a quarter of a century, he has seen Pakistan foment 'terrorism', the sweep of death and destruction spreading from the border states to envelop the country's heartland. He is alarmed to discover Bangladesh replicate Pakistan's insidious design; he finds it incredible that Dhaka should tacitly encourage millions to illegally infiltrate his country. Bangladesh's hostility is incomprehensible to him, given that the country was born with India's help. He asks himself, Is it because Bangladesh is predominantly Muslim? But then, he is left aghast at the sight of the 'Hindus of Nepal' likewise venting their sentiments against Delhi. He remembers vividly the price his country paid to broker a truce between Colombo and the LTTE in Sri Lanka.