South Asia maps its own development destiny

Thalif DEEN

When Pierre Trudeau, a former prime minister of Canada, was once asked what it was like to share space with a “giant” neighbour like the United States, he said the Canadians always felt they were living next to a monstrous elephant.

“One feels the beast’s every twitch,” said Trudeau, even as the United States continues to influence its neighbour politically, economically and culturally.

Ernest Corea, a former Sri Lankan Ambassador to the United States, draws a similar political parallel between India, a potential Asian superpower, and the 23-year-old South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), which holds its fifth summit meeting in Sri Lanka next week.

Asked if India’s preeminent role in the region will continue to determine and influence the decisions of SAARC, he said that possible domination of SAARC by India was raised at many informal bilateral discussions in the month’s preceding SAARC’s establishment in December 1985.

India’s neighbours feared that it would lurch from being a “big brother” to a “big bully”, Corea told IPS.

Comprising Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, SAARC is described as one of the world’s biggest regional organizations, accounting for more than 1.5 billion people, of which a little over a billion are Indians.

The tiny Indian Ocean island of Maldives, the smallest of the SAARC members, has a population of only about 380,000.

Corea said Indian bureaucrats, on the other hand, were concerned that smaller countries in the region, including Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, would gang up against India within the SAARC context.

“Eventually, all South Asian countries felt that the long-term benefits of regional cooperation were worth seeking, whatever other problems might be encountered in the process,” he said.

“Its unilateral decision to waive duty on imports of all goods from the five least developed SAARC countries (Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, and Afghanistan) is a sign of the directions in which Indian policy could move,” said Corea, who served as an adviser to former Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Shahul Hameed, during the run-up to the creation of SAARC.

As of now, SAARC is credited with several achievements, including the creation of a South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA); a 300-million-dollar SAARC Development Fund for poverty alleviation; a SAARC food bank; and a proposed South Asian university to be located in India.

Rohitha Bogollagama, the Foreign Minister of Sri Lanka, the country hosting the SAARC summit Jul. 27-Aug. 3, says South Asia is an active partner in the dynamic process of South-South cooperation, which is creating new trade geography”.

As never before, he pointed out, the borders in South Asia are opening, paving the way for greater people-to-people connectivity. Intra-regional tourism is booming and increased exchanges between youth, civil society and parliamentarians are taking place.

“The establishment of the South Asian University will strengthen the dialogue between academics, experts, policymakers, students and teachers as well as promote inter-institutional cooperation and partnerships,” Bogollagama told IPS.

However, he said these positive developments “are being challenged by global crises of food and energy security, together with climate change, which are impacting on the daily lives of our people.”

“One of the key challenges for SAARC this year will be to oversee an urgent expansion and investment in agriculture, with a view to providing food security, based on home grown produce,” Corea said.

By 2015, the 10 economies of the 40-year-old Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) — comprising Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam — will be merged into a single market and production base.

ASEAN was formed in 1967 — 18 years before SAARC formally came into being — and initially lumbered along, but has made substantial progress since then, he said.

“Only an astrologer in a region dominated by astro-politics would dare to predict what course SAARC will take in the future,” Corea added. At the political level, the SAARC Charter specifically bars any discussion of bilateral or contentious issues in a region overwhelmed by disputes — specifically between India and Pakistan.

Asked whether this is justified, in the context of a regional organisation, Corea said keeping bilateral issues out of regional discussions makes practical sense.

“The exclusion of contentious issues from SAARC discussions, however, stands logic on its head,” he said.

One of the advantages of regional cooperation is that it provides opportunities for contentious issues to be jointly tackled and resolved.

Asked whether SAARC’s longstanding principle of taking decisions on the basis of unanimity wouldn’t fly in the face of a cardinal principle of majority rule in a democracy, Corea said reaching unanimity on any issue, in any context, involves a strenuous process requiring time, patience, mutual respect and, above all, a genuine commitment by all parties concerned to settle the issue under consideration.

“When unanimity is, in fact, achieved, the decision reached is solid, because it does not create a disaffected minority,” he said. IPS