In Search of a Humanistic South Asia
From Creating Humanistic Borders to Ending Crypto-colonial Aid, SAARC has to offer a new vision for the world
Mallika Shakya
Department of Sociology
South Asian University
New Delhi
SAARC
is thirty years young and I am about a decade older – about the age when a mid-life
crisis is permissible. Mine came in the form of a search for a place called
home. It ended, for now, in South Asian University in Delhi.
I
was born and brought up entirely in Kathmandu, in Nepali medium schools and
government colleges. But my only Nepali employer was my mother who ran a small crockery-cutlery
shop in Patan. Since nineteen, I have been on the paychecks of the aid
industry, home and abroad. That changed when I made a concerted decision to
quit aid industry and take up jobs in Oxford and Pretoria.
My
current employer South Asian University (SAU) is partly Nepali. The class I
teach at SAU is also partly Nepali, but more importantly, it is only partly
Indian, while being also partly Afghan, Bangladeshi, Bhutani, Maldivian and Sri
Lankan. I am a lot more at home with this class than I would have been if it
was just one of any of these nationalities.
SAARC
does not control what I do at SAU but the idea of pan-national regionalism in
South Asia is common for us both. We at university are busy trying to figure
out what all is this ‘regionalism’ that dominates the SAARC talk. But first its
political cousin, or flip side of the coin, ‘nationalism.’ In Latin, the word
nation referred to a group of foreign students, congregating in a cosmopolitan
university from faraway regions. By extension, the word referred to a community
of opinion and purpose. Eventually, however, the word nation came to mean a body
of a people, bound by passports and flags, and at times unleashed as mobs to
keep what it considers ‘others’ out.
The death of humanistic nations
There
was probably a time when nations seamlessly spilled into regions in South Asia
through flexible borders and humanistic regimes. Ashis Nandy is one of many who
claimed that aggressive nationalism crept into South Asia, piggybacking first
on colonial hegemony and then on anti-colonial movements. Rabindranath Tagore,
an ardent pan-nationalist visionary who lived a century before European
scholars coined the term post-nationalism, warned Japan not to follow the
Western suit on narrow nationalism. But it seems, his own home region willingly
traded humanist borders with Westphalian, soon after it got its own independent
nation. Wagah between India and Pakistan is the epitome of Westphalian border
psyche. Wars might have given rise to the self-defeating logic behind this hyper-masculine
choreography of national muscle-power between India and Pakistan, but the Wagah
syndrome now dominates state policies and talks on many other frontiers where
India has never officially been at war.
Hyper-masculine
nationalism is exactly what is problematic about the choreographed expressions
of stately love like those of the SAARC summits. Instead of moderating
individual egos to make room for a collective Southasia, summits end up
triggering rivalries of nations -- be it about bulletproof cars or paranoiac
security arrangements. The idea of South Asia then gets reduced to a mathematical
summation of nations when it should have nurtured a common sensibility and belonging
for all Southasians.
Let Africa inspire
Let
us dig the history of regionalism elsewhere, especially from within the Global
South. Let me be provocative and suggest that vision
and leadership for this alter-national regionalism need not come only from big
and rich nations, but from the tiniest and poorest. Take for example, Aime
Cesaire and Franz Fanon – a teacher-student duo who launched the pan-Africanist
canon as we know it today, who were both from Martinique, a small Caribbean
island with a land area of about one thousand square kilometres and a
population of 386,000 inhabitants. In fact, an entire generation of pan-African
movement came from the small islands of the Caribbean, including George Padmore
and CLR James, who mentored Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana to lead the African
independence movement against the European colonization.
African regionalism did not dwell on the
statuses of GNP per capita or growth rates, let alone the sizes of army and headcounts
of nuclear missiles. Pan-Africanism flourished in the understanding that a
community belongs together if they have suffered a common injustice and have
risen against it together. It took roots in anti-slavery movement and
eventually culminated in an anti-colonial movement. It would not be far fetched
to claim that Gandhi fed indirectly off these movements during his two decades
in South Africa. Yes, Africa today has many problems including political
violence between each other, but it still sets the standard on regionalism for
the world. The first pan-national regional unit was not European Union, it was
the South African Customs Union which was achieved 1889 and has stayed in place
throughout Africa’s colonial and postcolonial turmoil.
Coming back to South Asia, there is
nothing bitter about statesmen wining and dining to sign joint declarations, but
SAARC will mean much only if it can influence the global order in a meaningful
way. Can the world be made more just and democratic, not only for Southasians
but for everybody else who has been disenfranchised by colonial history and its
postcolonial residues? This and the next generation of Southasians must concern
themselves with this central problem, than endless petty bargaining about aid,
hydropower and ego-massaging.
Problem of our century
Aid is a gone game. Half a century long bikas only made Nepal more desperate; the
definition of bikas itself needs to
be fundamentally altered for any hope to follow for things to improve on the
ground.
The main event of the twentieth century
was the anti-colonial revolution, but the twenty-first century world remains
marred in deeply flawed systems of international development. First of all I
want to emphasise that ‘development’ is not a neutral word. Although a
dictionary may define it in a certain way, its uses and interpretations are
pervasive, and it has come to acquire a political meaning that is clearly
hegemonic. It is in this political meaning that ‘development’ or ‘bikas’ of the
twentieth century is different from the ‘industrial revolution’ of the century before
and ‘enlightenment’ even earlier.
It would be fair to say that, just after
WWII, developmentalism replaced colonialism in giving rise to a new global
order. When the ‘new states’ in Asia and Africa became independent, development
came to be considered the new common goal and aspiration for humanity. There
was clearly a great deal of enthusiasm at the time for this. Over time,
modalities of development changed, starting from ‘two-sector’ model to a
‘take-off’ model to ‘protectionism’ to ‘economic liberalization’ of the 1990s.
Regrettably, however, enthusiasm has died along the way. Scholars like James
Ferguson have called today’s aid industry an ‘anti-politics machine’ because it
concerns only with technical-managerial projects that carve out jobs for elites
and technocrats while distancing itself from the big question of social and
political justice.
The reason cynicism took over enthusiasm
about development has a lot to do with the fact that this idea came from the
West and remained Western, as we see in the current ownership pattern of
largest aid organisations and the values they prescribe. Despite
calls that the aid industry must put meritocracy over citizenry superiority,
the West has stuck with the unwritten tradition that the head of the World Bank
is always an American whereas the head of the IMF is always an European.
Bilateral donors operate with an implicit two-tier membership. The broader aid
community remains bifurcated between ‘local’ NGOs and ‘international.’ In other
words, the aid world continues to operate with the logic that donors are always
right and poverty is the fault of the poor, in much the same logic that gave
rise to a situation where Mt Everest could only be climbed by a white
mountaineer and an America could only be discovered by a white explorer.
Does SAARC have a vision to offer to
counter this? Does it even care? Or is it just another Queen Victoria in a new
garb? Nepal’s new collaboration with anybody, starting with neighbours as we
talk of SAARC in this summit, should revolve around efforts that can alter the
rules of the game on how to liberate itself and the world from the shackles of
crypto-colonial aid.
This essay was originally published in The Record, Nepal (http://recordnepal.com/perspective/search-humanistic-south-asia)
