Big India and her small neighbours

Big India and her small neighbours
Rajan Philips
Founded by Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in 1985, and
joined by Afghanistan in 2007, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation should by now have become not only a force among the
global trading blocs but also a supranational plane for political and economic cooperation for the member states. SAARC has the population,
the essential institutional framework at the national level with the exception of Afghanistan, and enviable location on the Indian Ocean that is
rapidly replacing the Atlantic and the Pacific as the main global highway of trade and prosperity. But SAARC has been a disappointing
behemoth, undercooked and underachieving.
When the SAARC leaders gather in Colombo for their 15th summit this week, they will not have much to review by way of collective
achievements or much to consider as goals and targets for the future. Although the theme for the summit is reported to be "Partnership for our
people" no great groundwork seems to have been done on the theme in preparation for the summit. It will not be the people who will be on the
minds of the leaders, but the political predicaments that they and their governments are facing in their respective countries.
The Indian Prime Minister has just survived a chaotic confidence vote in the Lok Sabha over India’s unnecessarily controversial nuclear deal
with the US. Making much dogmatic ado for nothing about the nuclear deal, the CPM-led Left Parties have withdrawn their four-year long
support for the governing Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and further fractured the political party formation at the Centre. Although
the government remains in power for now, its prospects for the elections due next year are anything but certain. The outcome of the elections
might well be a Lok Sabha hung between the Congress, BJP and the emerging Left-Mayawati groups. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will
have all of this on his mind and he might use the Colombo visit more as a get-away from the machinations of New Delhi than as an occasion
for contributing anything meaningful to SAARC.
The Indian preoccupation at the Colombo summit is about visitors’ security and not about trade or policy; and the one-sided ceasefire
announcement by the LTTE is not going to change anything. As for trade and policy, Indian foreign ministry officials appear to have been
giving more importance to their free trade talks with ASEAN officials in Singapore last week. India is all set to enter into a free trade
agreement with the ASEAN group of countries that has become a successful trading bloc while being less than half the size of SAARC in total
population. Given half a chance, every SAARC country would like to join ASEAN while retaining nominal membership in SAARC as a token
to its geographic location.
Keys and impediments to SAARC’s progress
The ASEAN countries have a more graded pattern in terms of size, political stability and economic development in comparison to SAARC
countries. The older members of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore and Brunei blend with the newer members including the
rapidly developing Vietnam and Laos, and the still struggling Cambodia and Myanmar. SAARC countries despite their overarching cultural
similarities vary significantly from one another in terms of size, stability and economic development.
Although dwarfed by the enormity of India’s 1.1 billion people, Pakistan and Bangladesh are not small countries by other comparisons. At
164 million and 159 million respectively, they are the sixth and seventh largest countries in the world. All three account for 95% of the total
population of the SAARC member countries, with the remaining five countries making up the balance 5%. At 1.5 billion, the eight South Asian
countries account for 22% of the world’s population and 38% of Asia’s population. Excluding China’s 1.3 billion people, the South Asian
countries have more population than all the other Asian countries together.
India stands apart from the rest not only on account of its size but also in terms of national consolidation, a consistently constitutional polity,
and the strong foundation for economic take-off. The effects of the partition of British India would seem to have been grossly uneven with
India assimilating most of the benefits while Pakistan and its offshoot Bangladesh ended up with all the negatives. Afghanistan is in a state
disrepair of its own, and Nepal is navigating its transition from old monarchy to neo-Maoism. Bhutan and Maldives are quiet and soporific
while Sri Lanka, once a model both as a colony and for its smooth passage to independence, is showing its creative capacity not to prosper
but to self-destruct.
The commonplace explanation for SAARC’s ineffectiveness and underachievement is the nature of the bilateral relationship between India and
Pakistan. The fact of the matter is that the two countries have been consistently focused on improving their relationships over the last two
decades after the meaningless tit-for-tat nuclear weapons testing in 1998 and the brief standoff in Kashmir around the same time. Since
February 2004, the two governments have been holding "composite dialogues" involving foreign ministry officials to address a number of
bilateral issues. The fifth dialogue in that series was concluded last week in Islamabad, despite earlier fears that the July 7 bomb attack on the
Indian embassy in Kabul might scupper the talks.
The talks touched on a number of issues including terrorism, water-related disputes, Kashmir, economic cooperation, confidence building
measures (CBMs) such as cross-border truck and bus operation services and drug trafficking, as well as friendly exchanges in several other
fields. India has been expending resources on similar initiatives - Entrepreneurial Development Centres, English Language Training Centres,
providing training for ASEAN diplomats etc. - to promote friendly relationships among ASEAN countries. The key to moving SAARC
forward is for India to enthusiastically promote and for others to willingly cooperate on such initiatives on a programmatic basis at the
multilateral level within SAARC.
The real stumbling block to moving SAARC forward is not so much the nature of the relationship between India and Pakistan but the global
projection of the hangover from their old rivalry. They continue to rival over the relationship each has with the US, China, Europe and even Sri
Lanka. India gets upset when Pakistan provides weapons and military assistance to the Sri Lankan government to fight the LTTE. Pakistan
plays a contradictory role in Afghanistan – with sections of Pakistan’s establishment and society opposing the Taliban in Afghanistan and other
sections supporting the Taliban – and this has immediate ramifications for its relationship with India, not to mention the implications for the
government in Afghanistan.
India is already concerned about the US military aid to Pakistan to fight the Taliban being used in procuring weapons to enhance Pakistan’s
military balance with India rather than to engage the Taliban in Afghanistan. This week’s decision of the Bush Administration to use $230m of
the US $300m military funding to Pakistan to upgrade its ageing F-16 fighter jets is not going to please India at all. Washington’s decision has
been linked to the visit there next week by the new Pakistani Prime Minister Yosuf Raza Gilani. At the same time, in Colombo, President
Musharaff will have to use his charm to distract the Indians from Washington’s gift of fighter jets to Pakistan.
It would be counterproductive for India and Pakistan to pursue "composite dialogue" with each other on the one hand, and persist in
conflicting international relationships with other countries at the same time. The composite dialogue represents the way to the future and reflects
not only the interests of economic elites in both countries but also the desire of a majority of Indians and Pakistanis. The conflicting
international relationship, on the other hand, is a legacy from the past and serves the interests of fundamentalists and extremists in both
countries. SAARC could be the framework for fighting fundamentalism and extremism in all member countries and in the process could serve
its historic purpose of promoting the common interests of all South Asians regardless of the bilateral relationships between their governments.