The area and population are important factors, but it's not just the size that makes India the principal nation of South Asia. The geo-cultural range of the Indian subcontinent is believed to have once spanned the entire landmass between the Tibetan plateau to the north and the Indian Ocean in the south with the Siem Reap and the Arghandab rivers bounding the eastern and western frontiers respectively.

Even though Jawaharlal Nehru cautioned against romanticising the past, he claimed the legacy of the entire subcontinent through his magnum opus The Discovery of India. He questioningly glorified the Vedic Age and appropriated the greatness of the Buddhist Mauryan Empire by adopting the Ashok Chakra as the emblem of the coalescent nation.

The cultural glory and architectural magnificence of the Great Mughals were easier to adopt as they had primarily evolved in the heartland of north India. The inheritance was rounded up by giving continuity to the illusions of empire of the British Raj in opposition to the Hind Swaraj dreams of Mahatma Gandhi.

The Indian independence movement was the forerunner of the process of establishment of free regimes in South Asia. The founder of Pakistan and its Quaid-i-Azam Muhammed Ali Jinnnah was initially a staunch proponent of a unified India. The independence of Pakistan is an idea born out of the Indian freedom struggle.

The self-rule movement of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) and Burma along with several countries of Asia and Africa benefited from the Indian experience. The democratic movement in Nepal succeeded with the direct intervention of Indian Prime Minister Nehru. Unfortunately, the impact of illiberal regimes in the past have also been equally infectious.

When Indira Gandhi declared an Emergency to control "internal disturbances", its impact continued to be felt in the neighbourhood much after the draconian measure had been lifted. Upon his return to Nepal from self-exile in India, BP Koirala was arrested in 1976 on charges of treason and sedition. In Pakistan, General Zia-ul-Haq seized power in July 1977, became president in 1978 and introduced Islamic fundamentalism as the law of the land.

The total elimination of Marxist parties pushed the teardrop island into the pit of competitive Sinhala ethnonationalism. Ethnic cleansing of Rohingyas began to intensify with the Operation Dragon King which continues to this day. A hijack incident and an attempted coup brought a military ruler to the fore in 1977 as Bangladesh began to look more like its former tormentors in Islamabad.

History doesn't repeat itself, but even if it just rhymes, signals emitting out of the Indian capital should alarm all of South Asia. Indian democracy has been in continuous decline since 2014 earning it the dubious distinction of being an "elected autocracy". Parliament has become a showpiece. From a healthy 71 percent bills sent to parliamentary committees for discussion under the previous regime, the practice slid down to 27 percent under Modi I (2014-19) and is down to an ignoble 10 percent in the Hindutva reign of Modi II.

Heartless generation

An oft-repeated maxim holds that if you aren't a liberal when you are young, you have no heart; but if you aren't a conservative by middle age, you have no head.

Liberalism—broadly defined as willingness to respect behaviour or opinions different from one's own along with openness to new ideas—is wokeness with tolerance. An innate aversion to progressive politics and an instinctive affinity for the cancel culture has reduced activism to a witch hunt.

The Indian equivalent of the millennial will perhaps be the "consumerist generation" born between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the fall of the first Bharatiya Janata Party government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee within 13 days in 1996. This cohort was born in hope, grew up with aspirations of modernisation, and came of age in utter frustration of unfulfilled dreams.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh recognised the Nietzschean "ressentiment" of the Brahman aristocracy in Varanasi and the Vaishya plutocracy of Bombay against the political oligarchy in New Delhi. It began to mobilise its resources to deepen existing divisions. Premier Narendra Modi rode on the back of lumpenised and angry youths of the Hindu society that had nothing in its heart except an intense hatred for the Muslim other.

In Pakistan, children born in the boom years of the 1980s when the United States was funding Al Qaeda adventures, which some wags liked to refer to as Al Fayda (the profit) for the elite, suddenly found that they had become pariahs after 9/11 for doing Washington's bidding in Afghanistan. Among the powerful trio of the Allah, Army and America, the "conflicted generation" began to put more faith in the first two.

The Referendum Generation of Nepal aged fast and lost heart a little too early as it came of age in the confusion of the Narayanhiti Massacre, violent clashes between the army and the Maoists, and rampant corruption all around. By the late 2000s, the intense heat of the dignity movements had unsettled the comfortable class so much that its youths rushed into the cold embrace of the old ethnonationals.

The millennials of the region grew up with xenophobia, jingoism, chauvinism and an addiction to social media. Issues of social justice, liberty, equality, fraternity and secularism had stopped firing their imagination. Once leftism dies, it doesn't take very long for liberalism to swing towards libertarianism and conservatism.

The woke politics of tweeting solidarity with justice movements is all very well, but it doesn't really help in fighting majoritarianism by educating, organising and agitating for civil rights. Meanwhile, the energetic youngsters of mainstream politics across party lines have shifted rightwards in India, and its reverberations are likely to continue infecting the body politic of the subcontinent for quite a while.

Mindless liberals

In less than a decade of the Hindutva regime, India has fallen on almost all indices of fundamental freedoms. Freedom of the press has almost vanished. Dissent is being demonised to such an extent that very few dare speak the truth to power anymore. The US is no paragon of virtue, but when its State Department flags curbs on civil society of a friendly nation, it should be a cause of universal concern.

Academic freedom is being eroded, revision of textbooks is "saffron washing" of the composite culture of India, and the emblem of the Modi II regime is an excavating machine that is being used against Muslims as "bulldozers of hate". It took the courage of conviction of a leftist Brinda Karat to hit the streets against the demolition campaign of a vengeful regime.

Liberals need to realise that the political capture of the left can be reversed through elections, but the institutional capture of the right is almost impossible to correct through democratic processes. Unfortunately, even India is slowly turning into a Burma, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan of the recent past.

Civil society in South Asia needs to prepare for a long night and keep its matches of moral convictions and physical courage dry to relight the lamp of liberty. Vigilance and alliance-building is a necessity rather than a choice.