It is easy to define the problems that face the South Asian region. Educational opportunities for all must yet be provided, the gap between rich and poor is ever-widening; we still face severe shortages in food and healthcare. The battle for human rights and women’s rights goes on, while weak systems of governance have brought corruption and economic devastation upon our nations. The additional burden of fundamentalism, extremism, and terrorism seem to stem largely from these parts of the world.

Daunting as these conditions are, to define them as the key challenges of the region is a misnomer. These conditions are not the root causes of deprivation and misery, but rather the symptoms of the instability and stagnation of the area. They are caused by a mindset that our regions, its leaders, and its people have been trapped during three hundred years of colonialism and the half century following it. Our real challenge is to eliminate the Third World Mindtrap which has kept this region from realizing its full economic, social, and political potential.

The end of colonialism left much of the developing world in disarray and flux. In the Middle East, the colonizers installed puppet governments which continued to enact influence of the imperialists long after they had left the region on paper. Other countries were left in freefall, to find their own way through the quagmire of new nationhood. In India and Pakistan, the colonial power had created a class alienated from the common masses in values and culture, through which the colonizers continued to hold sway over the Subcontinent.

A short-lived hope that the new world powers, America and the Soviet Union, would help them get over the wounds of colonization were quickly dashed when the two superpowers used the region as an extension of their Cold War rivalries. Once the Cold War ended, globalization took over, which many saw as the reemergence of colonization and the Cold War power politics: the same game under a different name.

The mindset created by all of this has hampered this region’s development for over fifty years. This Mindtrap must be eliminated if our region is to emerge from the chains of colonization that still rattle around our ankles, weighing down our steps towards prosperity and peace.

The Mindtrap is made up of three key parts. The first is a huge fear that it is possible for a nation to lose touch with its traditions, culture, religion; indeed, its very identity. This had occurred during years of colonization, where we were taught that our own cultures, religions, and value systems were inferior to those of the colonizer’s. We were encouraged to give up our own identity and adopt a bastardized form of the colonizer’s identity. The fear that this will happen again, long after our nations have achieved independence, lingers on.

This fear is played out today all across the region. Some nations refuse to accept English as a national language or even a second language. Muslim countries believe their countries will prosper only if they return to the glorious days of the early creation of Islam and the time of the Prophet. Agrarian societies cling to their tribal and feudal traditions even though some are barbaric and medieval. We clutch blindly at our identity and values, resisting globalization, promoting closed-mindedness and isolation from the rest of the world, fearful that our cultures will become diluted and corrupted if left open to the influences of a Western-dominated world.

The second part of the Mindtrap deals with mistrust of the West and of everything associated with all things Western. The terrible legacy of colonialism and occupation, the violence and might that was exercised upon the conquered peoples, taught us that Western interest in our nations merely existed to see how much they could take advantage of, and profit from us. After colonialism, the industrialized countries played a negative role in setting the pattern of international economy, especially with respect to trade, which undermined seriously the social and political stability of the region and augmented the distrust held for the West.

The result: a lack of faith in all institutions with roots in Western civilization, most notably democracy, technological advances, and gender equality. Despite the probability that the region will benefit from democratic governments, equal access to education, work, and other rights regardless of gender, and opening ourselves to technology and the spread of information, we still cannot accept it. We see these institutions as examples of the West trying to assert their mores and values upon us. We end up with homegrown, mutant varieties of democracy, controlled by dictators or self-appointed leaders. We censor television and the Internet. We discourage girls from going to school and women from working because we do not want to follow Western social patterns.

The final element of the Mindtrap has to do with pride. For centuries our countries were made to feel humbled and humiliated by their colonizers. We were told we were inferior and worthless because of our color and our race. Our religions, our value systems, our languages and our traditions were rooted out and ridiculed, altered and outlawed. As an abused child grows up with terrible wounds to his self-esteem, his sense of security and well-being, so we grew up feeling belittled and battered.

The backlash to this has had perhaps the most severe repercussions for our region and its role in the global community. Never forgetting the times when we were seen as unworthy, many nations in our region have turned the other way, inculcating an obsessive national pride in their cultural, religious, or social identities. We have not been able to temper this newfound patriotism with realism. The failure of democracy and socialism as workable systems in the Subcontinent adds to the problem, leading to the emergence of fascist political movements, über-nationalism, religious extremism, and in the very worst cases, terrorism.

If we can root out this Mindtrap that permeates our thinking and our behavior at every level by promoting education in our region, then we have a chance for a successful existence. But the content and context of this education is of extreme importance; it must aim at eradicating the inferiority complexes and the addiction to failure that has overwhelmed us for generations.

It is no coincidence that the lack of education for all is the one thing that all countries across this vast region have in common. However, the commitment to qualitative education must go above and beyond improving literacy rates and conventional knowledge. We must aim to produce innovative thinkers, intellectual experimenters, people who can debate and discourse academically without any mental constraints. Only then will we be able to start seeing our way out of the Mindtrap.

First, we must teach our people to embrace modernity without fearing we will lose touch with our identity. Modernity can in fact be used to strengthen and clarify our cultural, religious, and national identity in accordance with today’s realities. We must choose modernity from a position of knowledge and empowerment, not weakness and ignorance. We have to reassure our people, especially in the Muslim nations, that modernity does not lead to immorality – a common myth – but instead can bring about dignified and honorable progress.

Second, we must learn to accept innovation – technological, political, social – without distrust of those who bring it to us. The West urges innovation not because they wish to take us over again, but because it is the only way forward, towards equality between all nations. We must take the advice of the West without fearing that we are falling into a new sort of colonialism; this requires an education that teaches us our past in an accurate way, but also informs us of the choices that we must make to move towards the future.

Third, pride in our religious and cultural identities can define and support us, but it should not limit us in any way. We must be able to stand back from our religion and our culture, and analyze it in a dispassionate way. We must judge whether we are allowing emotionalism and irrationality to hold us back from advancing, from benefiting our people, from emerging from the post-colonial fugue that still grips so many of our nations. This requires learning to change our perspective, our worldview and the way we see ourselves. We must stop envisioning ourselves as victims in order to avoid crushing minorities, women, the dispossessed, and all those of diverse backgrounds who enrich the fabric of our societies.

We must not be impatient with our progress, for it will be slow at first, but neither should we be self-indulgent and allow ourselves to falter or fall behind. Instead of letting the developed world dictate our timelines and evaluate our progress, we must be our own harshest critics.

We must prove, through our own mature decisions, the committed leadership of our governments, and the civic responsibility of our citizens, that we are responsible members of the global community. We must leverage our resources and our own strategic import to gain an equal place in the comity of nations. But we must teach ourselves to act as respectable players at the global table. Qualitative education can provide us with that confidence.

If we make the needed shift towards qualitative education, we will gain psychological strength as individual nations and as a region. We will tap into our collective psyche, heal the scars we bear, not waiting for an approval from the West that may never come.

Changes in our behavior are sure to follow. Resistance to strengthening our infrastructure, removing corruption and nepotism, democratizing our institutions, and improving our record in human rights and gender equality will all fall away. By teaching our people to think differently about ourselves and our region, we will be removing the impediments to improvement that have evaded us for so long.

By educating ourselves out of the Third World Mindtrap, we may not necessarily become wealthier nations, but we will definitely become healthier ones. This is crucial for the success and happiness of our citizens – the reason that our nations and the region exist in the first place.