Business as usual

The 14th Saarc (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, to give it its full name) summit has gone off along more or less expected lines. India made some host-like announcements, such as a liberalised visa regime for students and some minor trade concessions. It also did not make a big fuss about terrorism, although that remains as much a core issue for it as Kashmir does for Pakistan""which too didn't make a song and dance about it but did make the point effectively. Since terrorism, albeit not of the cross-border variety, is a problem for the others as well, the T-word (meaning different things to different countries) was prominent in the draft communique. This was business almost as usual. What was not was the participation of Afghanistan as a full member and that of China, Japan and South Korea as observers who also spoke. Whether this is good or bad for Saarc remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: India's dominance of the organisation is not what it used to be.

The key issue (as was pointed out by both Afghanistan and Pakistan) is that there is a trust deficit and the dominant driver of attitudes and policy is mistrust and disputes, some of which have no easy solutions. No one, however, was prepared to say that it would be easier to convert rhetoric about co-operation into reality if some of these issues are relegated to the backburner and progress made on economic and other types of co-operation. Pakistan still does not give India the standard trade status of a most favoured nation, as it is required to do by its treaty obligations under the WTO, although the two countries manage to work closely in negotiations on textiles and agriculture. India for its part feels obliged to not play big brother""the role in which the others have cast it. The last time Nepal cocked a snook at India when, prodded by Pakistan, which was prodded by China, it proposed that China be given observer status. Rather than play hardball, India countered weakly by getting Japan and South Korea in.

Given that even such anaemic attempts at regional co-operation are better than no attempts at all, and if one is not to give up hope entirely that at some stage the countries of the sub-continent will manage a genuine coming together, it is to be welcomed that the region's governments meet every now and then and go through the motions. But can Saarc ever be effective as a regional organisation? On current form, you need to be a die-hard optimist to believe in such an outcome because of two factors, one old and the other relatively new. The old factor is India's size. Few other regional organisations face the problem of a gorilla on the block. Those that do have the same sort of problems as Saarc. Second is the issue of economic complementarities. India has drawn far ahead of the others and today finds it far more profitable to deal with East Asia than with its immediate neighbours""despite the free trade agreement with Sri Lanka. So, notwithstanding the official communiques, Saarc is meandering along. The world, and indeed the countries of the region, would be very surprised if this were to change any time soon.