Amitava Mukherjee
With the possibility of India refusing to attend the 20th South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation( SAARC) summit scheduled to be held in Pakistan this year, there is a chance that Islamabad may effect a change in its strategic policy and try to create a new power equation in South Asia by creating a new bloc involving itself, China and the Central Asian states. It is obvious that China is now Pakistan’s trump card not only in south Asian politics but in larger strategic chessboards also. It had already tried to make China a permanent member of the SAARC in the last summit meeting in Kathmandu in 2014 with support from Maldives and Sri Lanka. But New Delhi had put its foot down at the last moment and thwarted the move.
All the eight members of SAARC must keep it in mind that since the 1990s i.e. after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, strategic scenario in South Asia has taken a fragmented character and many cross currents are in operation in several regional groupings. This was recently manifested in BIMSTEC affair when Nepal refused to participate in a joint military drill with India held in Pune but at almost the same time took part in a same kind of exercise with China. But continuous provocations from Pakistan should not goad India to write off the SAARC altogether as the same Maldives and three other countries had supported New Delhi in 2016 when the latter chose to boycott the SAARC summit proposed to be held in Pakistan after terrorist attacks in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir.
But in April last, during the visit of the Nepalese prime minister K.P. Oli, the government of India left enough indications that it may boycott the 20th summit also.At present ground realities have deteriorated further with beheading of a BSF jawan by the Pak army and India’s fitting response to such barbarity. Therefore chances of an Indian participation in the summit have receded although Nepal and Sri Lanka have already expressed their support to the Pakistani initiative to hold the next SAARC meeting. But the general run of thinking in India is that Nepal and Sri Lanka have only tried to conform to diplomatic protocol. But New Delhi should keep in mind that there is something to worry about the situation in Nepal also as K.P. Oli, the prime minister there, is known to be overtly pro-China. Similarly in Sri Lanka also Maithripala Sirisens, the President belonging to the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, is not as popular as before. China has dug its heels there. The Sri Lankan government has handed over the Hambantota port to Beijing. Although India still enjoys influence over Hasina Wazed in Bangladesh, yet Dhaka is equally interested in maintaining strategic relations with China.
In such a scenario SAARC certainly gives New Delhi a platform for making its presence felt in south Asia because India has 70 percent of total SAARC area and population. But there is certainly a diplomatic failure on the part of all SAARC constituent countries because the charter of the organization prohibits it from dealing any bilateral or contentious issue. As a result SAARC has failed to play any role in Indo-Pakistan conflict, the Afghan imbroglio or butchering of democracy in Maldives.
In order to make SAARC a meaningful organization the two abovementioned deficiencies must be attended. It may not be a difficult task for New Delhi as India still has support from the numerical majority in the organization. This became evident in 2016 when India was supported by Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Bhutan and Maldives in its decision to boycott the proposed summit in Pakistan. However this joint support to India’s cause brings to fore another uncomfortable truth- India, the largest constituent of the SAARC, has failed to give a proper orientation or build the ideal framework for making the organization relevant in South Asia’s strategic scenario.
Right now taking Pakistan on board will be a difficult task for not just India but Afghanistan too. Islamabad’s relations with the Afghan government is soured, to say the least. But it is time still to keep a watch on Imran Khan’s attitude towards China. Perhaps the Pakistan prime minister is not very comfortable about the China Pakistan Economic Corridor(CPEC) out of fear of a debt trap. Already Islamabad has decided to prune the budget of the ML-1 railway line connecting Karachi with Peshawar, an important segment of the CPEC, by more than USD 2 billion.
For reviving the SAARC increase in mutual economic activity should be the path. It is understandable that the SAARC member countries enjoy only 2 percent of the world trade, given the fact that all the countries here have either developing or backward economies. But how can one explain the abysmally low level of intra regional trade which is only 5 percent of the total trade volumes of the member countries of South Asia. For the European Union countries the figure is 60 percent while 29 percent of the total trade of the ASEAN countries is intra regional in character.
All these point out towards an absence of professionalism during the time of the SAARC’s birth in 1985. It is upto India to take the lead in rectifying all these shortcomings. After all the eight SAARC countries possess 21 percent of the global population. They have a right and duty to shape the destiny of South Asia in a positive manner.
(The author is a senior journalist and commentator)
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