India often demands that it should not be conflated with Pakistan but who is really doing the ‘conflating’? From cricket pitch and hockey ground to the battlefields of Kargil and Siachen, few things seem to give us greater delight than our victories over a miserable messed up country with a sixth of our population and one which is steadily going under.

If anyone is making Pakistan appear much more formidable than it really is, and a country worthy of its attention, it is only India. To the rest of the world an unstable nuclear-armed terror-exporting Pakistan is now viewed with the same suspicion long reserved for inscrutable and unpredictable North Korea and that is the way it will be for a long time to come. India no longer need burden the point.

Global warning With jihadists crawling all over its territory murdering school children and civilians at will, taking on its army, assassinating its politicians and killing people across the world, Pakistan is no longer an Indian concern but a global nightmare. Not many will dare to walk Karachi’s streets or take a holiday in the Swat Valley. It takes a brave woman to risk death standing up for her rights in Pakistan. The country is not the world’s favourite investment destination and Pakistanis can no longer expect easy passage to any country since their nationality and their passports set alarm bells ringing everywhere.

It is time India absorbed these realities about a neighbour that it has long been obsessing over and against all reason giving a disproportionate amount of its attention to. If Pakistan’s nuclear policy is India-specific, try as we may, our foreign policy after occasionally straying elsewhere, returns to one where we shrilly inveigh against Pakistan and do little else.

Pakistan loves all this attention. Against all reason, we seem to revel in giving Pakistan a profile way beyond what it deserves when we ought to be moving on while carrying a big stick and ignoring it altogether; we have a world to gain starting with our neighbourhood.

South Asia is crying for India’s attention. As the largest economy in the subcontinent, India presents immense opportunities for every country in the region to buy into our growth story and prosper. Our country has to move beyond a Saarc where we end up sparring with Pakistan and take the lead in developing a South Asian community without it, and building an economic union heralding a kind of prosperity that will have Pakistan salivating on the sidelines and positively anxious to join. Here we would do well to take a leaf out of China’s book.

Chinese lessons For all its military posturing in the South China Sea, China has become an indispensable partner to all countries constituting Asean. It (including Hong Kong and Macau) has pumped in over $30 billion in Vietnam making it the second largest investor in a country it has even gone to war with not too long back. China’s trade with Thailand is slated to touch $100 billion by 2020 — about the same as much larger India’s — and is closing in on half a trillion with the Asean region as a whole. Every country in South-East Asia is tied to China economically and not one of them can hope to prosper by annoying it. Even the Philippines which won a maritime case against China has chosen to downplay its victory and for good reason — it absolutely needs China to prosper.

India, if only it will set its mind to it, has the big chance to be for South Asia what China is to South-East Asia. As a region it has more young people than any other in the world waiting for opportunities that will give them a better life if only these came their way. India has a huge responsibility to create these opportunities not just for itself but for the region as a whole.

Culturally integrated, South Asia is waiting for India to take the lead in integrating it economically and making it a powerful force in the global economy which it is not today. For a region with much more people than South-East Asia, South Asia remains an economic pygmy.

With so much at stake it is a pity that India’s Pakistan-focused leaders have repeatedly failed to rise to the occasion and give all the countries of South Asia a grand and realisable vision of what economic integration can do for them.

Having missed the opportunity on Independence Day to do so, one can only hope that Prime Minister Narendra Modi can persuade our President to seize the chance on Republic Day to sensitise Indians and talk to our South Asian neighbours on the immense good that an economic union can bring for the region, very possibly within his lifetime.

The writer is visiting faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, IISc, Bengaluru

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