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Restoring sanity in South Asia: India and Pakistan''s moves towards a peaceful solution offer economic opportunities for one of the world''s poorest regions.

Article Excerpt
South Asia comprises seven countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and Maldives. It is an ancient land with majestic mountains and abundant natural resources. There is immense cultural diversity and human potential in this part of the world. Yet there have also been many problems in the area, which have diverted concern away from human development needs towards the use of suppression and coercion to retain social control. The serenity of Nepal, for example, is blemished by years of insurgency. Sri Lanka, too, has seen its fair share of troubles given the long-standing rivalry between the Tamil and Singhalese, which implicated India in the imbroglio and resulted in the assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in the mid-eighties.

India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have shared a bloody past since the partition of the Subcontinent by the British in 1947, which resulted in two million deaths due to the communal violence that erupted at the time. India and Pakistan have since fought three major wars over the disputed territory of bifurcated Kashmir. The 1971 Indo-Pak war resulted in the breakaway of East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. It was persisting tensions between the two neighbours that led to the covert pursuit of nuclear technology and a declaration of their nuclear capacity at the end of the 1990s. A decade of shimmering tensions coinciding with the rise of insurgency in Kashmir in the 1980s has kept the...

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