The End of South Asia

For decades, policymakers and scholars have been trained in the West and elsewhere to think of the countries of the Indian subcontinent as part of a coherent region: South Asia. Home to around a quarter of the world’s population, the region consists of eight countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Its diverse peoples speak hundreds of different languages and follow numerous different religious traditions, but they have shared histories, including the experience of British colonialism, and shared cultural connections, including a love of the sport of cricket and Bollywood films, ethnic ties, and musical and culinary practices, for instance. In the late twentieth century, South Asian leaders sought to deepen links within the region, with the greater goal of integration in line with that pursued in nearby Southeast Asia under the auspices of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or in Europe under the European Union. South Asia, too, they imagined, could become a consequential regional bloc in global geopolitics.

But that never happened. In the last four decades, South Asia has managed to build little security, economic, or policy cohesion. Mistrust and enmity, notably that between India and Pakistan, have made integration a pipe dream. Worse, at the most fundamental level, the notion of belonging to South Asia has lost any of the traction it ever had. South Asians no longer look to one another for connection and solidarity but rather gaze farther afield, to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, or the West. Not many South Asians (outside those tens of millions living in diaspora around the world) would even think to consider themselves South Asians in the first place. The term today does not denote a coherent regional identity but is merely a mundane geographical demarcation used mostly by those outside the region. The dream of a united South Asia is over, with important implications for geopolitics on the subcontinent that policymakers and analysts of the region have yet to fully grasp.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

As a term, “South Asia” has its origins far from the subcontinent. Academic analysts and policymakers in the West began using the term in the late 1950s after the emergence of independent postcolonial states from British India in 1947. During the Cold War, when the United States maintained closer ties to Pakistan than it did to ostensibly nonaligned India, the term allowed Washington to speak about the region without underlining India’s local predominance. Universities in the West followed suit, with academics using South Asia as a neutral term to describe India and its neighbors. Over time, Indians themselves started using the term in certain rarefied circles, but few people in the region conceived of themselves as South Asian.

In the late 1970s, General Ziaur Rahman, who had come to power in Bangladesh through a military coup in 1975, started floating the idea of a regional organization. Although the smaller states immediately warmed to the idea, India and Pakistan were initially more skeptical but decided to entertain the Bangladeshi proposal. The proposal found formal expression in 1985 with the creation of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, a group that included Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. SAARC sought to create a “better climate of understanding” and foster cooperation among member states.

As a term, “South Asia” has its origins far from the subcontinent.

For around three decades, SAARC enjoyed considerable support in the region, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Indian leaders became more receptive toward SAARC beginning in the late 1990s, particularly Prime Ministers Inder Kumar Gujral (1997 to 1998), Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1998 to 2004), and Manmohan Singh (2004 to 2010). They pushed ahead even as many in New Delhi warned that India’s rivalry and disputes with Pakistan would severely curb SAARC’s ability to function, never mind its ability to integrate the region. For their part, Pakistani leaders have long been wary of SAARC, fearing it could become a vehicle for the exercise of India’s influence, but Islamabad still participated in the summits and other platforms associated with the group. Smaller states in the region, such as Bhutan, the Maldives, and Nepal, were the keenest advocates of SAARC, convinced that their membership in such a multilateral platform granted them greater geopolitical agency.

But after an initial period of activity, SAARC has crept perilously close to obsolescence. Of the 18 SAARC summits held so far, six were staged during the first six years of its existence. The group has held only six summits between 2005 and 2014 and none at all in the last decade. During the group’s heyday from the 1990s into the first decade of the twenty-first century, member countries set up and explored several ambitious ventures, including the South Asia Free Trade Area (a free-trade agreement signed in 2004), a customs union, a common regional market, and a common economic and monetary union. But over time, these grand ambitions have fallen by the wayside. The partial progress achieved in implementing the free-trade area has been stalled since 2014, when Pakistan blocked the signing of an agreement about motor vehicles. Other closer forms of regional integration remain pipe dreams.

The South Asian University, set up by the SAARC countries in New Delhi in 2010, is today a ghost of what it was originally meant to be. Visa restrictions and financial constraints have hampered its growth, and the institution has not helped foster a sense of regional identity through higher education as its founders imagined it would. Attempts by the region’s elites and civil society to encourage regionalism in South Asia through nongovernmental organizations, such as the South Asia Free Media Association and South Asians for Human Rights, or think tanks, such as the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, have not gained much traction either. SAARC and these organizations express an elite-level desire for greater connection within South Asia, but that desire has failed to produce meaningful integration in the region.

THE CENTER DOES NOT HOLD

Part of South Asia’s problem is its lopsidedness. India is the region’s biggest and most powerful country. Its dominance has had a paradoxical impact on the development of regional structures. At its core, South Asia consists of India and six countries that share a border with India but not with one another. (The exception is Afghanistan, which shares a border with Pakistan but not with India.) In that sense, South Asia is primarily the sum of interactions among India’s neighbors with India and India with its neighbors.

The fact of Indian centrality has meant that New Delhi does not always see the value of building regional structures, as such structures cannot add to the predominance India already enjoys in the region. Even though a number of Indian prime ministers saw merit in SAARC, the Indian bureaucracy and strategic establishment have never been convinced of its value. They have long feared that the creation of regional structures could potentially check India’s dominance in its own backyard. Since SAARC functions based on consensus, India’s vote on affairs on the subcontinent would count as much as that of Bhutan and the Maldives, the smallest countries in the region. As a result, it makes little sense for Indian decision-makers to support the creation of structures that could undermine their country’s influence in the region. That sentiment has a corollary among Indian strategists and foreign policy analysts; they, too, look beyond the region and think of South Asia’s inherent conflicts as a millstone around India’s neck.

That South Asia is increasingly becoming an arena of geopolitical competition not only makes further regional integration less likely; such competition also threatens to undo even the limited regional cohesion that exists today. In recent decades, China has built up its influence among India’s neighbors. Take Sri Lanka, for instance, whose largest bilateral creditor is China and to whom China has provided loans to build highways, an airport, and a port. In Bangladesh, China has been using loans and infrastructure development assistance to gain influence. And China is jostling there not just with India but with the United States. In 2021, the United States placed sanctions on an elite paramilitary unit in Bangladesh for its alleged human rights violations and extrajudicial killings. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin rebuked this policy when he reiterated in 2023 that the Chinese “firmly support Bangladesh in safeguarding its sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity, upholding independent domestic and foreign policies, and pursuing a development path that suits its national realities.” In sum, China’s growing profile in South Asia marks a clear change from Beijing’s initial decision, dating back to the inception of the People’s Republic of China, of leaving the region to India. Today, China no longer sees India as a peer, nor is it willing to accept India’s primacy in the subcontinent.

Intraregional trade in South Asia is meager: it contributes to only five percent of the region’s overall trade totals—by contrast, intraregional trade among the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations accounts for 25 percent of the region’s overall trade. Moreover, China’s fast-growing trade with South Asia is eclipsing India’s own trade with its neighbors.

In recent decades, China has built up its influence among India’s neighbors.

The inhabitants of the region themselves are not clamoring for stronger ties. Indeed, a shared history and cultural heritage doesn’t necessarily produce strong connections, let alone thriving bonds. India’s growing, prosperous middle class has little interest in South Asia, nor does it feel that it has much in common with people in neighboring countries. In the minds of this aspirational class of around 430 million people, many of whom have connections to diasporic communities in the West, the Middle East, and elsewhere in Asia, India is meant for bigger things than its immediate neighborhood.

Cultural exchange within the region is also on the wane. In 2019, Pakistan banned Indian content on local television and FM radio channels. Turkish TV shows increasingly fill the vacuum in Pakistan left in the absence of content from India. In India, there are hardly any Pakistani artists in the Bollywood film industry, and Pakistani cricketers no longer play in India’s money-spinning Indian Premier League, the sport’s most lucrative league.

South Asians are not working or studying in one another’s countries as much as they used to. Since 1990, there has been a consistent decline in intraregional migration. For instance, India has long been a favored destination for Nepali workers, but they now are venturing to the Gulf countries and Malaysia, with India often serving just as a transit point. People across the region are going to places where they can secure higher wages than they can in South Asia, namely Australia, Malaysia, the Middle East, western Europe, and North America.

Few South Asians study in one another’s countries, except in India. South Asian students still make up half the total foreign student population in India, but these numbers have stagnated in the past decade. A 2020 Brookings India report showed that the annual growth rate of foreign South Asian students in India decreased from 30 percent in the 2011–12 academic year to just nine percent in 2018–19. India’s loss has been China’s gain. The number of students from India’s neighboring countries studying in China increased by 176 percent between 2011 and 2016, the Brookings report stated. In 2016, for example, there were three times as many Bangladeshis studying in China as in India.

South Asians face a very clear impediment to travel within the region: hard borders. Only the tourist-friendly Maldives offers visas on arrival for all SAARC member countries. Bhutan and Nepal have a visa-free travel agreement with India. But apart from these deals, regional travel is difficult. Given that India is the only geographical connection among many of the countries of the region, New Delhi’s decision to open or close borders determines the fate of intraregional connectivity in South Asia. The decrease in intra-South Asian connectivity in trade, tourism, and education is, unsurprisingly, being made up for by China: consider the growing amount of connectivity in trade, tourism, and education between China and Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The more India neglects South Asia, the more China embraces it. It’s not a zero-sum game; it’s a walkover for China. And it may well be too late for India to reassert itself as a regional hub.

A REGION UNBOUND

Thanks to the decision of many South Asian states to leverage China to balance India’s primacy, South Asia is no longer the India-centric region it used to be. Paradoxically, however, India’s loss of regional primacy also means that South Asia is losing its salience as a geopolitical entity, with smaller countries strengthening economic, political, diplomatic, and cultural ties with China and drifting away from India. In other words, the smaller South Asian states that once hoped to benefit from greater regional integration have made such integration more unlikely; by using China to balance India, they have undermined the coherence and potential unity of South Asia.

The end of South Asia as both a geopolitical entity and an epistemological category has implications that go beyond university departments or nongovernmental organizations that might have to reimagine how they frame their agendas. Despite India’s primacy in the region, Indian thinkers have come to believe that entanglement in South Asia limits the country’s ambitions. In the last decade, India has reoriented its strategic focus from Pakistan to China and from the continental theater to the maritime one. It has embarked on a wider economic journey by signing and negotiating several important free-trade agreements with countries farther afield, such as Switzerland. New Delhi seeks a larger geopolitical space for itself. In contemporary Indian strategic thinking, South Asia is at best a small place and at worst a limitation.

There is little value for India in pouring in resources to either regain exclusive primacy or balance China in a space in which it is geopolitically weaker and somewhat contained. Although New Delhi’s concerns about Beijing’s growing power are understandable, frantic attempts to win back South Asia or compete with China for regional dominance are unlikely to work. Another option available to India is to work with China in the region, as many of India’s neighbors would prefer, but it won’t be too long before an ambitious and aggressive China seeks to relegate India to the rank of a second-rate power in South Asia. Already, India has struggled to set and enforce redlines among its neighbors, for example, with Chinese spy ships docking in Sri Lanka in recent years.

Indian thinkers believe that entanglement in South Asia limits their country’s ambitions.

A wiser option for New Delhi would be to think more broadly and see South Asia as only a part of its neighborhood rather than the entirety of it. This doesn’t mean that India should give China a free hand in South Asia. On the contrary, it should encourage countries and groupings outside South Asia to take a more active role in the region. It could, for instance, invite friendly and wealthy Gulf states to work with India in South Asia to help address climate change or provide disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. It could take a more active role in the security partnership known as the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), that brings together Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, encouraging forms of cooperation between the Quad and smaller South Asian island states, such as the Maldives and Sri Lanka, as well as landlocked ones, such as Bhutan and Nepal. India could proactively engage partners such as Japan, the United States, the EU, and other like-minded powers to help curb China’s growing influence in the region by countering Chinese economic and political narratives and providing alternative transparent development models. In so doing, India would widen its sense of its own backyard and check the Chinese quest for hegemony.

The end of South Asia is a key marker in the history of the region and offers geopolitical opportunities and choices for India and its partners. For India, finally relinquishing the region and not worrying about primacy there allows it to forge a dynamic geopolitical relationship between South Asia and regions and countries farther afield. It is not that India should stop engaging with its neighbors but that it should see them in a wider geopolitical context, not merely as denizens of the subcontinent they happen to share.

The same is true for the United States and its allies. Although they may have viewed smaller South Asian countries as irrelevant or at best marginal to their wider interests, they should understand that the likes of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are enmeshed in the broad geopolitical competition. Encouraging the participation of these smaller countries in larger frameworks and coalitions, such as the Quad, will help rein in Chinese influence and give these countries alternatives to the political and economic support offered by China. The countries of South Asia may not compose a coherent region, but they will play integral roles in shaping the wider Asian balance of power in the years to come.