Why do ethnic conflicts and insurgencies continue to remain major impediments to regional cooperation in South-Asia? (2023, 10 Marks)
South Asia’s political map and its ethnic map were drawn by different hands. Bengalis, Tamils, Pashtuns, Baloch, Nagas, the Kuki-Chin-Zo peoples and Madhesis all have kin across a frontier. That fact turns a domestic failure of accommodation into an inter-state quarrel, which is why the problem persists rather than fading.
Roots: nation-building that produced its own minorities
- Urmila Phadnis (Ethnicity and Nation-building in South Asia, 1989) showed that a homogenising state nationalism provokes sub-nationalisms that resist assimilation from above: Urdu as Pakistan’s sole national language (1948), Sinhala Only (1956), Nepal’s 2015 federal map.
- Uneven development keeps the grievance alive; resource-rich but deprived Balochistan fits Ted Robert Gurr’s relative deprivation (Why Men Rebel, 1970).
- Electoral outbidding: Donald L. Horowitz shows why leaders who mobilise one community cannot later concede.
Mechanisms that carry conflict across borders
- Sanctuary: North-East groups used Bangladesh in 2001–06 and still use Myanmar’s Sagaing region; TTP havens in Afghanistan drove Pakistan into open fighting with the Taliban from October 2025, renewed in late September 2026.
- The leverage temptation: states arm a neighbour’s rebels cheaply. India trained Tamil militants in the 1980s; Pakistan sponsors groups in Kashmir. Pahalgam (April 2025) brought Operation Sindoor, a trade ban and the Indus Waters Treaty held in abeyance.
- Refugees and kin-state politics: Myron Weiner showed how refugee flows become inter-state security issues. Bangladesh hosts over a million Rohingya; Mizoram shelters Chin refugees as kin.
- Identity fused with territory: Kashmir and the Durand Line convert ethnic claims into boundary disputes.
Why regional institutions cannot absorb it
- The SAARC Charter excludes bilateral and contentious issues, so the disputes that matter have no regional forum; no summit has met since 2014, and the 1987 convention on terrorism stays on paper.
- Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver (Regions and Powers, 2003) treat South Asia as a conflict formation; ethnic overlap is the belt that turns internal disorder into external threat.
- Securitised borders, such as the scrapping of the Free Movement Regime with Myanmar (2024), choke the border economies integration needs.
Conclusion
The impediment endures because grievance and sanctuary are rarely tackled together. Where both were, conflicts ended: the Mizo Accord (1986) followed the MNF’s loss of East Pakistani bases, and ULFA’s 2023 settlement followed Dhaka’s closure of camps. Bangladesh’s new government talks of reviving SAARC, but cooperation will hold only with inclusive governance at home and sanctuary denial across borders, which BIMSTEC and BBIN can support but not replace.