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Opinion | Can South Asia put India-Pakistan hostilities behind to unite for greater good?

  • Hostility between the two giants of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation has translated into disarray within the entire group
  • But common threats to its members, such as the coronavirus, poverty and threats to internal security, underscore the urgency to find shared solutions

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Narendra Modi and Imran Khan, the respective leaders of India and Pakistan, have much work to do to bridge the gap between the two countries. Photo: AFP
With nearly 1.9 billion people living in South Asia, the eight-member South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) is clearly among the biggest regional organisations in the world by representative population, yet it has failed to unite member states on common issues in the mould of the better known, and larger, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which has 10 members, or the 27-member European Union.
Instead, despite their shared histories and administrative and economic traditions inherited from the British Raj, integration within South Asia – comprising Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – has progressively weakened over the years. A major factor has been the constant hostility between India and Pakistan since their split into independent countries in 1947.

That hostility has translated into disarray within the entire organisation, whose members last got together in person all the way back in November 2014, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A summit scheduled for November 2016 in Islamabad, Pakistan, was cancelled after India decided to boycott it after a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir in September of the same year.

But with all eight Saarc countries facing common, intractable issues like poverty, threats to internal security and economic scarcity, the urgency to hold a summit and find solutions to their problems is now paramount. The grouping, which represents around 21 per cent of the world’s population, 4 per cent of the global economy and 3 per cent of the world’s area, also faces a shared fragility made worse by the coronavirus pandemic and climate change.
There are three ways Saarc leaders, in particular the prime ministers of India and Pakistan, Narendra Modi and Imran Khan, respectively, can rise to the challenge of promoting greater regionalism and economic development within the bloc – with the stronger economies in turn resulting in deeper social welfare programmes across South Asia.

The first goal should be to prioritise regional integration: India and Pakistan (and others) should not skip summit meetings even if their relations are fraught. The second: decouple trade with geopolitical relations, with a particular focus on normalising trade between India and Pakistan regardless of the state of ties. The third: As the largest country in South Asia (by land, population, economy and other indices), India should have a greater stake in strengthening Saarc. If regionalism is elevated to the status of a high-priority plank of India’s foreign policy, it would enhance the country’s global importance, influence and role.

Boxes of Covid-19 vaccine arriving in Dhaka, Bangladesh, from India. India provided 2 million jabs of the vaccine to Bangladesh, a gift that is likely to foster closer ties. Photo: AP
Boxes of Covid-19 vaccine arriving in Dhaka, Bangladesh, from India. India provided 2 million jabs of the vaccine to Bangladesh, a gift that is likely to foster closer ties. Photo: AP

India by itself accounts for around 75 per cent of South Asia’s total population, 63 per cent of its land area and 80 per cent of its economic product. Its position within Saarc is also distinguished by the fact that only the Maldives and Afghanistan do not share a border with it. Geography ensures that India is open to the influence of any major social and political forces sweeping its neighbours, and vice versa, for example Sinhalese-Tamil tensions in Sri Lanka and the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment.

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