Even serious news junkies find it hard to keep track of what it is that the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) actually does. Purely for its global consequence, the SAARC ought to have become one of the most productive blocs. But as it completes 25 years on December 8 it largely remains a South Asian photo op on whose sidelines suspicious neighbors sharpen their daggers.
The eight-member SAARC bloc contains India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives and Afghanistan and is supposed to represent and harmonize the aspirations over 1.5 billion people practicing six major religions, speaking close to 20 languages and hundreds of dialects. The leaders of these countries are currently in Thimphu, the capital of the unremittingly beautiful Bhutan, for their annual summit. Expectations about the outcome of the summit are predictably low other than the short-lived atmospherics of bonhomie it generates.
India’s former foreign secretary Shyam Saran unwittingly underscored the very thin success of the bloc when he told IANS’ Sarwar Kashani, "SAARC has the potential….You see this is the only forum where South Asian leaders still meet, shake hands, talk in spite of their mutual disagreements." This is as low a benchmark as it gets for such regional blocs. For someone to say that a regional bloc “has the potential” in its 25th year is a fairly candid admission of its unmitigated failure.
It would be reasonable for other SAARC members to blame the historic animus between India and Pakistan as the primary cause of the bloc’s inability to make any meaningful multilateral gains in a region which has been so strikingly diverse and yet so seamless for at least a couple millennia. Most SAARC summits in the past ten years or so have been upended by the bilateral conflicts between India and Pakistan. Even the current one is watched more for what India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani might talk about on the sidelines. When the sidelines corner more importance than the summit you know things are not going right.
India’s rapid economic growth in the past decade and half would have had an enormously transformative effect from Bangladesh to Afghanistan and from the Maldives to Nepal had SAARC members chosen to put aside their internecine rivalries and concentrated on trade and commerce within the region. The time is always right to make a fresh beginning, and in its 25th year the SAARC countries have an extraordinary opportunity to choose just one agenda which can leave an impact lasting centuries—knowledge.
The SAARC can create a South Asian Knowledge Environment (SAKE) that could leverage a vast diversity of knowledge base. India has the means, technology, human resource and motivation to take a leadership role in announcing such a multi gigabit network which would connect universities and other knowledge institutions throughout the region. There are such obvious benefits of such a network.