‘You can have a national identity alongside a south Asian identity’

Historian Sharabani Basu says we need to learn from European Union’s success and start open trade in south Asia.

LAHORE:

“We need to learn from the European Union’s success and start open trade in south Asia which will help mitigate differences, bring farmers and businessmen at a single platform. We should also make the visa process easier and think about having a single currency to prosper as a region,” said historian Sharabani Basu.

She was speaking at a session Negotiating a South Asian Identity on the third day of the Lahore Literary Festival.

Sherry Rehman said regional economies needed to integrate. She said the travel barrier pivoted on visas, and people should be given visas so they could leverage that change. Rehman added that biases in Indian, Pakistan and Bangladeshi text books should be removed. She said the books did not agree on what happened in 1971.

Rehman appreciated the efforts of South Asian Free Media Association (SAFMA) to present different narratives and mitigate prevailing tensions among south Asian countries. She said its secretary Imtiaz Alam should have been one of the panellists.  K Anis Ahmed, a writer from Bangladesh said there are always multiple identies. “You can have a national identity along with a south Asian identity.”

Ahmed said one of the problems was unequal power. He said in the last 10 to 15 years there had been a decline in multilateralism.

Ahmed added that distrust must be overcome by opening borders in the region, for the people to move easily and interact with each other.

Ahmed said “we (Bangladeshis) don’t hold the people of Pakistan responsible for the incidents in 1971, but think that the responsibility for brutality falls on the shoulders of the military and political leaders of that time”.

Author Moeed Yousaf stressed the need to think beyond nation states. Yousaf said the people of South Asia needed a market-based approach to allow easy visas and open trade between countries.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 24^th, 2014.