Political Modernization in the States of South Asia: Historical Trends and Current Models

Abstract

The article focuses on the analysis of the realities of political and modernization processes that determine the historical and political development of modern countries of the South Asian subregion. The political process in the states of South Asia is considered in the context of the main milestones of state and nation-building. In this regard, the article touches upon the following significant subjects: the shift in the emphasis of nation-building in modern India as the largest non-Western democracy, the departure from the policy of isolationism in Nepal, the influence of the military-bureaucratic apparatus on instability in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the influence of the ethno-national conflict (Sinhalo-Tamil armed conflict) in Sri Lanka on the political process, “training democracy” in the Kingdom of Bhutan, attempts at democratic reforms in the Republic of Maldives. It is noted that despite the ethnic, confessional and political-cultural diversity, the Southern countries have points of contact in the common past: firstly, for a long time (until the late Middle Ages) they existed within the framework of a single socio-cultural community of Indian civilization; secondly, most of them share a common colonial past, which made a kind of “inoculation” of Western political institutions. The main trends of the modern historical and political development of South Asian countries are revealed: the potential instability of political systems, the asynchrony of the temporal experience of political modernization processes, the pendulum-like legitimization of power (from strengthening national identity to returning to democratic transformations, and vice versa), the deideologization of mass political consciousness. The political modernization processes of South Asian countries are also considered in the context of strengthening religious identity and the success of religious nationalisms in the political life of states. It is concluded that the lack of demand for moderate reformism in modern South Asian countries over the past decades can be explained in several socio-philosophical perspectives: firstly, as a result of a natural rollback of forced institutional modernization, followed by a new round of modernization according to the type of the most effective Western model of socio-political development, which is universal; secondly, as one of the variants of the plurality of modernity, when religious revival is perceived as one of the possible interpretations of modernization, taking into account the socio-cultural context, in which there is no place for secular cosmopolitanism.