Rethinking South Asia

By Madhukar S.J.B.Rana
Chairman, Shaligram Apartment-Hotel
Board Member, Institute for Development Studies & Institute for Foreign Affairs
30 January, 2003

Nepal holds the SAARC Chairmanship. It has been unable to move the process forward embroiled, as it were, in deep political instability at home. The absence of a fulltime Foreign Minister with political clout and expertise in foreign affairs did not help either.

A solid proof of the diplomatic malaise is the absence of ambassadors to Dhaka and Islamabad for several years at a stretch. And then the SAARC Summit is postponed. No one knows till when. Thus Nepal will continue to be the Chairman.

Significantly too, a high-level but informal China-SAARC seminar took place recently in Kathmandu that was quite inconclusive on whether there is some place for China in SAARC or not. The nearest definite conclusion that one can envisage, at this point in time, is that there may be a role for China in the distant future through some form of trans-Himalayan sub-regional cooperation.

Possibly in harnessing water resources of the Brahmaputra river basin and in developing tourism along the medieval silk route. Beyond this, China will have to go the bilateral way by developing closer investment relations with each SAARC country severally and, in doing so, match the Indian bilateral concessions to each of them in the area of trade. This China may find hard to match as it has so many immediate neighbours. Nor has China given any non-reciprocal trade preferential treatment to any of its immediate neighbours, many of whom are either least developed or landlocked states or both.

Actually, it would be useful to know how well regional cooperation has progressed between SAARC countries and China from the experiences of the only forum that they are together in, namely the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) established in 1983. It appears that beyond sharing of experiences for the transfer of knowledge on integrated mountain development and bio-diversity practices cooperation has not led to trans-border people-to-people contacts through flows of trade and investment.

In the wake of the doldrums that the SAARC process is at, it is good to rethink SAARC's future with new dimensions. Another fruitful dimension, may be, is to start visualizing the South Asian economy as having 4 grand parts linked inter-regionally to West Asia, Central Asia, Indo-China and Australasia. In ther words, go beyond intra-regional linkages derived through free trade (SAFTA) and sub-regionalism based on the agreed to formation of the south asian growth quadrangle (SAGQ) eventually..

Thus one can visualize one grand axis as comprising the western seaboard linking Maldives-Bombay-Karachi- Iran-Gulf region. The other grand axis comrpsing the eastern seaboard linking the SAGQ subregion to Myanmar-Thailand-Indo-China. The third grand axis comprising the southern seaboard linking Vizakapatanm-Chennai-Colombo region to Malaysia-Singapore-Indonesia-Australasia. The northern region could comprise the grand landmass of the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region stretching from Delhi-Islamabad-Kashmir-Kabul to link up with Central Asia.

When Afghanistan joins SAARC, since it is a country that is by geography and civilization an integral part of South Asia, then the SAARC process will be complete. This necessitates a change in the Charter of Association. This would be the right time to incorporate other changes like making provisions for associated membership of countries outside the region and moving out the rule of unanimity in all instances.

Nepal should take the initiative, as Chair, to give impetus to SAARC through a rethink by calling for expert studies and informal seminars to assess these ideas for their validity. It should also lead by reviving the dormant sub-regional cooperation process and by mobilizing support from the smaller members for the vital need to hold the SAARC Summit for regional peace and security in South Asia.