India doesn’t need SAARC

Instead of getting caught in the pointless politics of SAARC, India should create a web of bilateral relationships

This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.

India doesn’t need the South Asian Association for Region Cooperation (SAARC). India’s neighbours wanted the outfit so that they could collectively pin down their bigger neighbour, something they cannot do individually.

Why New Delhi plays ball with this is unfathomable, for given India’s size, geography and power, it can achieve bilaterally everything that SAARC can achieve multilaterally. From freer trade to open skies, from counter-terrorism cooperation to join management of environmental resources, it is far easier for New Delhi to work out a web of bilateral arrangements than to attempt a big multilateral negotiation. It is hard to make a case for SAARC on the grounds of efficiency and effectiveness of subcontinental cooperation. [See this from the archives] Moreover, there is a lot of slack in the domestic policy environment before the neighbourhood becomes a constraint to India’s growth.

Some argue that India needs SAARC as a regional geopolitical bloc, on the lines of ASEAN or even a European Union. To accept this would be to ignore the history of the subcontinent’s political map looks the way it does. No country in the subcontinent needs regional solidarity to counter foreign powers. On the contrary, every one of India’s neighbours needs a foreign power to counter India’s influence. The dream for a ‘South Asian Union’ on the lines of the European Union is absurd, because Partition and Bangladesh were expressions of desires against being part of a liberal, democratic, secular, plural state. In fact, the EU took five decades to move towards something like the Indian Union (which is what the Republic of India is).

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was off on the right footing when he invited leaders of the subcontinent’s states to his swearing in ceremony. That was an expression of how India can unilaterally act to bring together the subcontinent. The SAARC summit, on the other hand, is at best a waste of time, and worst a perpetuation of an old mistake.

Related Links: We are not South Asian; and if Maldives is a neighbour, why isn’t Indonesia?

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