After weeks of protests, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa stepped down this month, but that is not the only big political non-electoral change in the neighbourhood in 2021-22. Just a month ago, it was Pakistan; a year ago, it was Nepal. Power changed hands through more coercive means in Myanmar and Afghanistan. Their polities have yet to settle down. How should India react to these changes? Is there a common strain running across the region in these developments? Shyam Saran and Srinath Raghavan discuss these questions and more with Suhasini Haidar. Edited excerpts:
Are these changes in the neighbourhood because of similar political cultures? Or due to the economic crisis caused by the pandemic, the global downturn and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
Shyam Saran: A bit of both, but I would place more emphasis on a much more challenging external environment which all of us are confronting. The COVID-19 pandemic of two years has not only caused economic disruptions, but also social disruptions. More recently, there’s the impact of the crisis in Europe. We are today a globalised, interconnected world, and South Asia is not an exception. And in some cases, several challenges have come together to create a kind of perfect storm. A certain brittleness of the politics of some countries has made the whole effort to cope with these kinds of external challenges much more difficult.
