Saran's bombshell

The speech on the whole seemed to indicate a frustration with the regional body and some of the member countries that had never before been expressed, albeit not openly.

The message delivered was clear enough. In the first place, India pointed to the hostility towards it as the main impediment keeping Saarc from being effective. In the second, it made it quite clear that India would henceforth demand that the member countries address its concerns if Saarc were not to wither on the vine.

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Frankly, we feel that these issues would have been better ventilated at the aborted summit, where they could have been discussed and debated at some length and concrete grievances addressed. If this is how India felt, then it was all the more necessary to have held the summit as scheduled. Another point of concern is that Mr. Saran's statement seems to represent quite a break from the advances made at the Islamabad summit in 2004 which had seemed to mark a turning-point in the history of regional cooperation.

The question is, what has happened between then and now to occasion such statements.

The failures of Saarc as pointed out by the Indian foreign secretary has to be seen in the context of India-Pakistan relations, which before the present thaw, literally held regional cooperation hostage to the Kashmir issue. It is quite unfair to suddenly blame Saarc's smaller neighbours for all its failures. India could do well to examine its own role in it.

Further than that, if there are fissures, they are caused precisely by the mind-set suggested by Mr. Saran that if Saarc is to transform into an effective regional body then the rest of the countries need to fall in line with India's preeminent position in South Asia. There might have been some reason for the frustration articulated by Mr. Saran, but India also needs to think about addressing the grievances of the other member countries.

It was good to see the call for greater responsibility on India's part in the speech but the speech didn't acknowledge any level of failing on India's part for the state of affairs. Interestingly, the subtext of references to issues such as cross-border terrorism and using Saarc to try to contain India and 'narrow nationalism based on hostility to India' seemed to be quite clearly aimed at some countries, who we suspect were the intended audience for the speech.

There is no doubt that India has raised some points about the future of Saarc that must be addressed together with the concerns of the smaller nations in order to strike a balance in their approaches to Saarc so that it can emerge as an economic powerhouse in its own right. It is a pity that the summit in which these issues could have been debated, at the very least in the traditional retreat, was called off by India.