The stranded cyclist

Regional connectivity was the lofty theme at the SAARC Summit in New Delhi last year. To underscore its importance, Southasia's summiteers flagged off a car rally that would touch base with all member states. Cars were even transported to Sri Lanka by ship, in order to keep the commitment. Suppose that the rally was to be held this year, in the midst of the raging oil crisis. Would it still make sense to the summiteers, if it ever did in 2007, or would they risk becoming a laughingstock with their people?

Without meaning to heighten the irony in any way, a well-meaning cyclist set off at about the same time from a Sufi shrine in India for a similar one in Pakistan, on a one-man peace mission. The hapless rider was inevitably stranded at the Wagah border: Islamabad had turned down his visa plea. Come hail or high water, the peacenik was not going to be allowed to alter the India-Pakistan arrangement. Of the other lessons that flowed from the cyclist's ordeal, the loudest was that fuel-guzzling jalopies flagged off by SAARC heads of state and other dignitaries had a better chance of traversing Southasia's volatile borders than did an eco-friendly cyclist – still more so if he were a dreamer of peace, and that too in the mystical mould.

As Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama hopped between Southasian capitals recently, handing out official invitations to the Colombo SAARC Summit slated for August, he was keen not to reheat moth-eaten clichés of the previous summits. So, the main theme this time round, he told me during a brief stopover in Calcutta, would be about people. "Partnership for the betterment of the people," said Bogollagama, would be the clarion call of the upcoming summit. How would that alter the unequal tussle in Southasia between the cyclist and the car racers? Which more fully represented 'the people' – the universally acclaimed classic of Italian director Vittorio de Sica, rooted in poverty and hope, or Henry Ford's futurist vision, which has fuelled a perpetual global crisis, crowned by lacerating wars?

Urge versus desire
Neither physical nor intellectual connectivity were issues when ancient India cradled some of the great religions, and boasted an advanced scientific temper. It was large-hearted then, sharing an amazing largesse with the far corners of the world. However, by the time the Afghan chronicler al-Beruni visited India during the 10th century, he observed with sadness that the country's fabled scientific inquiry, architecture and other accoutrements of a formidable civilisation had become laced with a "haughty and foolishly vain" regard of others. Allama Iqbal's famous words – Saare jahaa'n se achha, Hindosta'n hamaara (My India is greater than any other place in the world) – became a national marching song for India, whether its neighbours liked it or not.

In a way, and not by convoluted logic alone, this may have triggered the first impulse for SAARC's creation. "We were all allergic to India," confessed General Hossain Mohammed Ershad to me in 1997. That was 12 years after he had hosted the first SAARC Summit, in Dhaka. "So we decided to bring India into it," he said. The reference was to others in the club, barring Bhutan, who had an axe or two to grind with India. The fact that India was on the 'wrong' side of the Cold War also played a part in the construct. This is not to say that New Delhi was unaware of the SAARC plan, which it saw had attracted the interest of at least one if not two foreign minders hostile to it. But the Cold War ended 18 years ago. Have SAARC's prospects for a happier denouement improved with its end? Going by the connectivity theme and what's become of it, there seems to be a conflict between SAARC's urge and desire to progress. There is an urge to come together, but the desire to follow it up is evidently lagging behind.

Much of this is, of course, nobody's deliberate doing. It is rooted in the ethnic conflicts that have been raging, almost sui generis, both within the borders of SAARC member states and across their sovereign boundaries, often spewing the scalding lava into the neighbour's alley. While India has enough difficulties with practically all of its immediate neighbours, this does not seem to have deterred it from wading into the quagmire of Afghanistan as well. Matters came to a head when a 7 July terrorist attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul killed more than 40 innocent people, including a defence attaché and a diplomat. Senior officials blamed Pakistan and, in an unusually brazen appeal, even called for the destruction of its spy agency, the ISI. Other SAARC states have not done too well in cultivating good neighbours, either. The Bhutan-Nepal standoff and the Pakistan-Afghanistan dispute are centred on ethnic hostilities, though the scale of violence involved in one is incomparable with the other. All of this mistrust is not going away anytime soon, which leaves the problem of connectivity up in the air.

And the mistrust has had other fallout too, mostly adverse to SAARC's projected journey. It has impeded the oft-discussed vision of a Europe-like union of sovereign states, confederated by a common currency and with a shared political impulse. India's off-and-on drive to evict suspected Bangladeshis is as good an example as any of how Fortress Europe may be a distant dream for Southasia. Fears instilled by official strategy to combat terror attacks within the country, which is more akin to road rage than a tenable policy, serves to demolish the very idea of soft borders. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may support the "irrelevance of borders" as a great idea, but finds himself in no position to implement it.

Naturally, there is confusion about how India (which, because of its location and size within the SAARC community, forms the fulcrum of the fragile group) will give meaning to its own idea of connectivity – surely not by fortifying its fences and, in fact, raising them higher, as is currently happening. Rohitha Bogollagama perhaps sincerely wishes to bring SAARC's people – who hopefully include Sri Lankan Tamils, too – into the frame in Colombo. But the people, like the stranded cyclist at Wagah, appear too severely handicapped to win the steeplechase of impregnable fences and unyielding mindsets.

~ Jawed Naqvi is the Delhi-based correspondent for Dawn of Karachi.