India-A and India-B

 All regional groupings have their peculiarities, but none more so than SAARC. It may seem pedantic to ask how many countries constitute SAARC, since any  student of high-school civics would know the answer. Yet it could also be persuasively argued, by anybody with an average adolescent's social sensitivity, that SAARC is in reality made up of not eight, but nine members. The giant country that lies at the heart of Southasia is, after all, an amalgam of two distinct parts. It comprises the great Indian middle class, the stuff of much contemporary myth; but then there is the rest of India as well, a teeming mass of struggling, suffering humanity that does not even get to field a 'B-team' in international forums. That, though, is largely immaterial, since the 'A-team', the 'nation' at the heart of SAARC, is roughly the size of Britain, Germany, Italy and France put together.

Yet the 'nation' that, by all canons of geopolitical logic, should be the fulcrum around which SAARC revolves, is in fact a reluctant participant, since the 'India A' team entertains vaulting ambitions that go far beyond the narrow regional framework in which history has cast it. If priorities were to be assessed by media coverage, it would appear that 'India A' has little interest in the realities of life for the fifth of humanity that people Southasia. 'India A' would much rather engage in unending celebrations of the corporate takeovers engineered by the big-game hunters among its business community, for sums that just two decades back were roughly the magnitude of the entire country's balance-of-payments deficit.