The reality of proximity (or not)

SAARC, that infelicitous acronym, has many fathers. At least in Bangladesh. The conventional wisdom in Dhaka is that SAARC was the brainchild of the assassinated president Ziaur Rahman. However, Hossain Mohammad Ershad, the other army strongman turned president, also lays claim to the credit, on the rather shaky grounds that SAARC was inaugurated during his tenure in office. Shah A M S Kibria, the assassinated ex-finance minister of Bangladesh, who was foreign secretary at the time the original concept note for SAARC was prepared, also has his backers. And, last but not least, another ex-foreign secretary, who was Kibria's junior at the Foreign Office at the time, has confided to this writer that he was the one who actually drafted the damn thing..Why anyone would want to claim paternity for such an unloved and unlovely stepchild is, perhaps, the more pertinent question in all of this. This grouping of Southasian countries has signally failed to achieve what it set out to do. Intra-regional trade remains a joke, the organisation has no common external policy on anything, no preferential treatment for group members, and no unity on international affairs (see, for example, Sri Lanka and Pakistan voting against the interests of its Least Developed Country brethren Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives and Nepal at the World Trade Organisation)..There is really no reason for SAARC to be operating so poorly. There is remarkably little difference, as these things go, in per-capita income and lifestyle among the countries of the region. Disparities within each country dwarf those between the countries. But one can see how little the grouping has caught on in the popular imagination by how little it is used or recognised. ASEAN, by contrast, is used and readily understood as a collective noun, and has supplanted the less-than-accurate 'Southeast Asian' as an identifier, whereas SAARC has yet to supplant 'South Asian'..Then again, what does it even mean to be 'Southasian' in the year 2008? As an identifier and touchstone of identity, the nomenclature has always been suspect. The notion that Southasians had some kind of shared culture and history has never really been able to withstand close scrutiny. One could, perhaps, argue that Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have a shared history, though this is a claim that would start arguments in history departments the length and breadth of the Subcontinent. But certainly no such claim can realistically be made for the other Southasian countries. As for a shared culture, India alone does not have a common culture, without even trying to find commonality between the Maldives and Bhutan – and don't get me started on Afghanistan.. Then again, there is no reason to posit some kind of shared history or cultural affinity for the term to be applicable as a signifier. 'Southasian' need not be anything other than a geographic signifier. After all, what is Europe? Culturally speaking, do the British have more in common with, say, Latvians, than with, say, Canadians? It would be absurd to suggest any such thing. People may talk about European sensibilities when it comes to matters such as human rights and the welfare state, but the truth is that the differences between European countries are as great as those between them and other countries. Even less intuitive is the divide between European states that are members of the European Union and those that are not. Such groupings, be it Europe or the EU, are certainly not ones of either shared history or culture, but rather are ones of geographic contiguity – and, with the EU, one of shared economic opportunity. That is all.. Default hostility Let us forget the mystical bhai-bhai stuff, the notion that we share anything other than geographical proximity. Instead, let us look at our Southasian-ness in pragmatic and unsentimental terms. Frankly, and without doubt, we all wish that we were in a better neighbourhood. But we're not. One has to play the hand one is dealt, and this is ours. Human beings cannot choose their families, and countries cannot choose their neighbours. Grouping ourselves together as Southasia, or SAARC, should be seen as nothing more than a pragmatic reflection of the unhappy reality in which we all find ourselves.. That said, one is not sure whether, moving into the future, even that much is true. After all, where one chooses to draw lines is open for discussion. From the Dhaka perspective, Burma and Thailand are closer than a number of Southasian countries with whom we are supposed to share greater affinity. Pakistan and Afghanistan, on the western edge of SAARC, might feel the same way with respect to Iran and the Central Asian nations. Frankly, they do have other options, as well.. Let's call a spade a spade. The underlying reason that SAARC has not worked as any kind of a grouping (to say nothing of whether 'Southasian' is a meaningful signifier) may be due to the tension between India and Pakistan. Certainly, this tension has waxed and waned over the years, but the default position between them remains hostility. And you simply cannot sustain a meaningful bloc of any kind if the two largest members are at loggerheads with one another. Either they need to bury the hatchet, or SAARC, to say nothing of Southasia as a concept, is dead. It seems a bit much that the rest of us have to suffer because of these two intractable foes.. Certainly this is not the only problem. If we are to make a go of it, we have to act like a team, putting common good above the narrow national self-interests. Since we oftentimes have a hard time even putting national interest above petty personal interest, this may prove onerous. But, once again, we do not really have that much of a choice. Ultimately, so many of the issues that continue to bedevil us, from water resources to security to energy, will need to be addressed – indeed, can only be addressed – on a regional basis. Meanwhile, the understanding of what exactly constitutes our region could change as the world changes. There already exist groups such as BIMSTEC (consisting of Bangladesh, India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan) and the South Asia Growth Quadrangle (Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Bhutan), which seem to make more sense economically as well as geographically than does SAARC. And with the growing influence of China in the region, to say nothing of the forces of globalisation, we might soon find that Southasia as a concept is itself outdated.. In retrospect, it is difficult to say whether Southasia ever really did exist as a meaningful concept. Regardless, I have a hunch that in the future it won't – at least not in its present form. And good riddance, too. A single currency, common policies, external tariffs, free trade (despite SAFTA), open borders – we have been waiting for these for a quarter century, and they still have not happened. In the increasingly inter-connected globe, our inability to form a workable regional grouping has contributed to the continuing backwardness of all of us. It is time to pull the plug, to look to more effective groupings and to consign the term Southasian – which has only existed for 60 years, anyway – to the ash heap of discarded nomenclatures that has in the past provided a final resting place for such terms as 'Near East' and 'Orient'.. ~ Zafar Sobhan is the opinions editor for The Daily Star, Dhaka.