POLITICS-SOUTH ASIA: Summit is Last Chance for Regional Grouping

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jan 2 2004 (IPS) - When Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee arrives in Islamabad Saturday for the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), will be carrying with him the trump card of a more promising economic grouping taking shape along India’s eastern flank.

The progress of the 18-year-old South Asian grouping, whose members are Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, have so far been held hostage by the rivalry between New Delhi and Islamabad, centred around a struggle to gain full control over Kashmir.

The Jan. 4-6 summit will be the 12th annual one mandatory for SAARC, although by now there should have been 18, thanks mainly to diplomatic or military standoffs between India and Pakistan, if not actual wars.

In an interview published in the influential ‘India Today’ weekly, released on Friday, Vajpayee said he was optimistic about the Islamabad summit but saw no meaningful discussions taking place until Pakistan changes its perception that ”because it (Kashmir) is a Muslim-majority state, it should be part of Pakistan”.

Meeting on Friday, SAARC’s foreign ministers have set the stage for the signing of a treaty on the long-delayed South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA), as well as an additional protocol on terrorism to bring an existing 1987 SAARC agreement more in line with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1373.

Signing the terrorism protocol would commit Pakistan to curb terrorist funding and money-laundering, and to pursue cooperation among law-enforcing agencies, customs and immigration departments, mutual legal assistance and extradition agreements.

So far, India and Pakistan have insisted on different definitions of terrorism especially in the context of Kashmir, which Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf has said is the ”unfinished business of the 1947 Partition”.

Few believe that the dispute over Kashmir, which has prompted three wars between India and Pakistan and driven the neighbours to build up nuclear arsenals, is about to go away suddenly at the end of the summit.

Despite the breakthrough on SAFTA, anti-terrorism and recent confidence-building such as resumption of flights between the two countries – suspended for two years following an attack on Indian Parliament that New Delhi blames on Pakistan – there has been no indication that Vajpayee will hold one-on-one meetings with Musharraf on the sidelines of the summit.

Meanwhile, there is much interest here in the first ever BIMSTEC (acronym for Bangladesh, India Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand) summit that is scheduled to take place in the Thai resort town of Phuket next month. Bhutan and Nepal will formally be accepted as new members of the group at the summit.

Bhutan, which recently send its army to crush anti-India militants on its territory and Nepal already have close ties with India. Myanmar and Bangladesh have indicated readiness to follow Bhutan’s example and crack down on anti-India militant camps.

”India has excellent bilateral relations with all the countries that form BIMSTEC, which has the potential of becoming a more dynamic trade grouping than SAARC,” said P R Chari, director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) a think-tank based in the capital. Economist and editor of the ‘Financial Express’ daily Sanjay Baru has suggested in an editorial on Friday that BIMSTEC be renamed BOBCOM, short for Bay of Bengal Community), and that the group invite other regional economic powers like Singapore to join in.

”Even as we pursue regional cooperation within the SAARC framework, we must do so more energetically within the framework of the more recent BIMSTEC,” suggests Baru in the editorial.

Baru is among those who think that if Pakistan does not respond to India’s overtures on the economic front, such as unilaterally according its neighbour Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status, the current goodwill is likely to be exhausted with grave consequences for the future of SAARC.

In all its years of existence, SAARC has failed on the main objectives outlined in its charter – such as improving the quality of life for 22 percent of the world’s population by accelerating ”economic growth, social progress, and cultural development in the region”.

The charter also called for promoting ”active collaboration and mutual assistance in the economic, social, cultural, technical and scientific fields”.

Intra-regional trade within SAARC now stands at less than five percent of total foreign trade compared to 22 percent for the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) and 63 percent in the European Union.

If SAFTA does come into being at the end of the Islamabad summit, it has the potential not only of stimulating economic progress in the region but also building ”stakes in peace” for the people and governments of India and Pakistan.

In his book ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ released in 2003, strategic analyst C Raja Mohan pointed out that the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan along religious lines in fact also resulted in an economic partition of the subcontinent – a split that need not have happened.