The Sri Lankan economic and political crisis has exposed the state of a country looted by its “democratically-elected rulers” after militarily suppressing the rights of the Tamil population. The Pakistan political crisis also has economic roots and serious lacunae of governance. Political commentator, writer and protagonist of Nations Without States, Coventry-based Jagdeesh Singh explains how in their very conception the countries of South Asia were imperialistic and how the new rulers continue that legacy to the detriment of the legitimate rights and aspirations of their populations.

Whether it is Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, Nepal or Bangladesh, they are all on fire, some simmering and some in a conflagration. The entirety of these dubiously constructed and utterly dysfunctional states have inflicted poverty, abject poor health services and education, rampant human rights abuses, police abuses and terror and corrupt and dire public facilities on the civilian populations that they are supposed to be serving. All of these states have failed to deliver dignified and qualitative welfare and governance to the hundreds of millions of peoples of South Asia, over the last 75-80 years, even after the seeming ‘independence’ from British imperialism.

Over the decades these states have been oppressive, authoritarian and undemocratic. The names of the rulers and their parties do not matter much. They have all been running the countries as plunderers. Without an iota of doubt, the people owe them nothing but contempt and rejection.

Each of these states has continued a combined and collective pattern of mass-scale corruption, state violence and murder, police brutality and torture, and public service failures (e.g. India’s phenomenal health failure on covid care and protection). The education, employment and health services given by these states to their wholly disempowered people remain a modern-day misery on a truly colossal and abject scale.

The states of South Asia are a direct continuation of former British Indian imperialism. They are designed by default to continue the same old enormous concentrations and abuses of power.

It is a matter of dire shame, that western states like Britain, USA and Canada continue to give colossal levels of funding, monetary aid and patronage and support to these diabolically dysfunctional and oppressive states; making the former wholly complicit.

These states are a direct continuation of former British Indian imperialism. They are designed by default to continue the same old enormous concentrations and abuses of power. The only beneficiaries from the existence and continuation of these states are the senior powerful elites who govern corruptly and abusively and make infinite amounts of money in the process.

The collaborative political classes who enjoy their exorbitant incomes in parliamentary positions give blind mechanical consent and approval to their government’s misdeeds and gain added monetary benefits and privileges including wonderous personal pensions. The criminal classes, simultaneously benefit and gain the ability to profit from their vast criminality in the midst of the enduring and rampant chaos and disorder that is so iconic of these states.

Each of the South Asian countries is individually and collectively, a bubbling volcano.

They are each, individually and collectively, a bubbling volcano. After 80-years of the same bubbling comprehensive misery and failures: the conditions are ripe and mature for a complete overhaul and popular uprisings, and a replacement of these over-sized, oppressive, centralised state structures with more localised, self-determining, democratised, smaller, manageable and operable territorial units based on actual countries and indigenous ethnic peoples, rather than the colonially-invented nations like India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka -each democratically and qualitatively failed states, causing their civilians to flee abroad in tens of millions in search of a quality of life that they yearn.

Why are states’ structures, laws and bureaucracy only for the people to endure and bear the burden of?  Why do people have to be ‘loyal’, ‘obedient’ and ‘compliant’ to the intrusive and imposing demands of these state powers? What little benefits and protections do the people gain from these states?