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THE 25th council of ministers of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) ended last Wednesday in Islamabad. Looked at from the point of view of success, especially if one wants to compare the just-held meet with other events in the case of similar regional forums in the immediate neighbourhood, for example, the ASEAN, the Islamabad event cannot be said to have been an extraordinary one. But given the history of bitterness between the two nuclear members -- India and Pakistan -- of this seven-nation South Asian club, the latest meeting of its foreign ministers has at least held out a promise for this otherwise star-crossed forum since its creation about two decades ago. The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan, as usual, had stolen the show of the event and everyone was happy.
Before the thaw in the relationship between the arch rivals -- India and Pakistan -- had set in seven months back, when the then Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf met and shook hands, the spectre of nuclear war had been looming large over the South Asian horizon. The two nuclear neighbours were on the verge of war as mistrust was then at its worst between them after the bloody attack on the Indian parliament building by Islamic militants thirty months before. The cloud of uncertainty was again in the political firmament of South Asia after a new Congress-led, left-leaning government was sworn in, in New Delhi. But all such misgivings proved to be pure speculation as the foreign ministers of the two long-standing rivals again smiled and gave their word to carry forward the cause of SAARC. They have at last promised to work more closely for a shared destiny of the 1.4 billion people of the South Asian region. The Foreign Minister of India -- the most populous as well as the industrially advanced member of the SAARC -- has come forward with the proposal of constituting a 'high economic council' to pave the way for the proposed South Asia Free Trade Area (SAFTA) in the region to become a reality. The ambience of the entire event was again one of conviviality and cooperation.
The foreign ministers of all the member nations of this regional body talked of paradigm shift in the nature of the economic relations in the region and the integration of the economies through a phased manner until the ultimate dream of South Asian Economic Union is fulfilled by the year 2020. None of these is a lofty dream or an order too tall to achieve. Other regions of the world -- for instance, the European nations -- where the people had to suffer the worst tragedies of history and where they hardly ever had the occasion to enjoy a period of uninterrupted peace over the millennia, have turned that wildest dream into a reality.
In this era of globalisation, that is the only path to continued growth and development. But as it has always been, economic development among the nations is, even if they share a common history and geographical frontier, never an even one. And it is true of the South Asian region, too. The weaker economies of the SAARC region like Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives would need a level-playing field before the free trade zone is created by pulling down the tariffs as well as other kinds of barriers. Its stronger economies can and should afford such compensatory measures in order that their less fortunate partners in the SAARC may overcome the temporary inadequacies.
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