Abstract
South Asia is going through a structural shift with far-reaching consequences for geopolitics and economics. The low intraregional trade among SAARC countries, which stood at 7.6 per cent compared with 21.9 per cent among ASEAN countries in 2015, has been simultaneous with the bevy of infrastructural projects coming up through bilateral and multilateral trade agreements. Of these, the most invoked is China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its lynchpin, the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), giving China easy access to the Arabian Sea and West Asia. China has started a number of similar bilateral projects with India’s neighbouring states such as with Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka to gain strategic leverage in the Indo-Pacific region and also to limit India’s influence in South Asia.
These emerging strategic equations have led India to create its leverages with large-scale projects. The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), comprising seven nations (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand), has been revived by India to promote trade and connectivity in the Bay region. The International North–South Transport Corridor alliance is designed to connect India, Iran and Russia through the ship, road and railway. In addition, the trilateral transit agreement between India, Iran and Afghanistan allows transit of Indian goods to West Asia through Iran’s Chabahar Port.
The changing political geography in South Asia may be attributed to two main factors. South Asia has been dogged by terrorism and territorial disputes between India and Pakistan as well as the politics around these issues. The failure of peace talks between India and Pakistan crippled the SAARC, and the substantive need to fast track the pace of development through sub-continental alliances remained unaddressed. The second critical factor that has propelled newer equations in South Asia is the spectre of de-globalisation, whereby the surge in interdependence and integration between nation states is now clearly saturated, and de-globalisation has even taken root as a political agenda item by political parties and governments of developed nations. In the United States, both the Bush and the Obama administrations responded to the financial crisis of 2007–2008 by instituting the ‘Buy American Act’ to privilege American-made goods over goods obtained through trade. This kind of protectionism and economic nationalism has reached a crescendo in the current trade crisis between the United States and China, or in the no-deal Brexit planned in the United Kingdom.
The current issue of SAS captures these tensions through the prism of the South Asian reality. Andrew Thangasamy, in his paper ‘The Missing Link in Regional Integration in South Asia: The Case for Regional and Sub-regional Political Institutions’, examines how regional governance efforts in South Asia have been missing strong political institutions. The paper makes the case that regional or sub-regional political institutions vested with decision-making authority can aid in better integration than forums or summit convening authorities that make decisions benefiting the interests of those whom they represent. Ross Conley’s paper has captured the spectre of terrorism that made South Asia a flashpoint ever since 9/11 happened. His paper titled ‘I Too am a Human: The Political Psychology of Pakistan’s Former President General Pervez Musharraf’ explores the political psychology of General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s most recent military dictator turned president. By analysing word choices in 55 interviews and press conferences given by Musharraf, the findings of the paper suggest that Musharraf maintained stable beliefs of a friendly political universe and a preference for cooperative strategies, but the largest changes in his beliefs came in the aftermath of 9/11. Pooja Chetry and Rekha Pande’s ‘Gender Bias and Sex Trafficking Interventions in the Eastern Border of India–Nepal’ looks at gender bias and sex trafficking interventions in the eastern border of India and Nepal to understand the socio-economic conditions and other influencing factors that circumscribe women’s migration.