Even though the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is now in its 21st year, the current two-day Dhaka summit of leaders of its seven member states is unlikely to be celebrating the organization’s coming of age.
Since it was established, SAARC has been notable for an almost total lack of progress toward its stated goal of enhancing regional economic development. Some 40 percent of the region’s 1.4 billion inhabitants still live on less than a dollar a day. On the face of it, far from reaching maturity, SAARC has hardly begun to walk. Yet it is wrong to write off this regional group as a failure. What stymied its original program was political instability and violence.
Nepal is in the grip of a Maoist insurrection and Sri Lanka is still edging uneasily away from a long civil war. Until this year, India and Pakistan, SAARC’s two most powerful members were at daggers drawn over Kashmir. In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that there was neither the appetite — if there was ever the opportunity — to focus on economic cooperation.
Even now in Dhaka, high on the summit’s agenda is the threat posed by international terrorism. Nevertheless, the cautious but undoubted rapprochement between New Delhi and Islamabad could very well change the whole climate in which SAARC has been working, or rather not working, for the last two decades.
India’s explosive economic growth is unstoppable. Despite a reaction within some parts of the ruling Congress party against free-market reforms, the country is set to continue to grow as South Asia’s powerhouse. With a settlement over Kashmir, Pakistan’s own emergent economy could expect rapid benefits. It would also make more sense of the proposed admission of Afghanistan as the eighth member state. Trade and communications do not flourish across heavily fortified frontiers.
The point is that SAARC’s failures have demonstrated vividly just how much its members would have to gain if they can only settle their internal and external differences. Part of the problem is that the organization has always had high, top-down ambitions. It is now appreciated that a careful bottom-up approach is the only way to build lasting achievements. Yesterday the summit looked at the issue of regional disaster relief. After observing a minute’s silence in memory of the victims of December’s tsunami and last month’s Kashmir earthquake, the delegates agreed to look at greater cooperation in the event of further calamities. If this is not to be yet another vain hope, India and Pakistan, which have the largest emergency resources, need to set the pace on this initiative, producing an audit of everything and every one in each member state available to help out in a calamity. Then should follow planning and joint regional exercises to test the plans. From such small seeds, planted in the cause of common humanity and compassion, great things may grow.
Working together to counter the horrors of the next regional emergency will teach everyone about the benefits of cooperation on a wider, economic plane.
