A resounding failure

FOR once the SAARC leaders assembled at Thimphu to attend the regional bodys summit have spoken the truth: they have admitted to their collective failure to make it do what they had set out to do 25 years ago, and what they and their predecessors have been committing in their high-sounding declarations, issued at the end of their concourses. The remarks of the Bhutanese Prime Minister, while inaugurating the summit on Wednesday, are a telling indictment of SAARCs poor performance, raising serious questions whether the expenditure of money and effort on maintaining its institutions, undertaking travels and holding periodic meetings were worth its while. Mr Jigme Thinley rightly said that it was time for the bloc to take a long and critical look at itself. (For) fractious and quarrelsome neighbours do not make a prosperous community. Even in the half-full-or-half-empty-glass example cited by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, referring to SAARCs 'achievements, there appears a big streak of failure. Prime Minister Gilani also chipped in with his view, For many years, real progress remained stalled, as if he was labouring under the misconception that now things were different. The truth is that whatever strides individual member countries have been able to make, the SAARC, as a body, has had very little role in them. The underlying idea of the regional body was to collectively achieve in terms of development of the region - socially, economically and politically - what countries would find it hard to do on their own; the common stock of wisdom and resources available here were to be brought to bear in aid of that objective. Helpful policies would be formulated. Uplift of the downtrodden; development of basic infrastructure; promotion of industry and agriculture; provision of health care and educational facilities to all and sundry - and in all this enterprise the willing cooperation of SAARC members would always be at hand. One does not need any testimony to make the point that in achieving these objective the organisation has miserably failed. The principal cause why the SAARC failed to take off and progress, unlike other thriving regional bodies like the EU and the ASEAN, has been the existence of political disputes, particularly between two of its biggest countries, India and Pakistan. Even on the common issue of terrorism, they are at odds with one another. India keeps engineering acts of terrorism within Pakistan, but persistently accuses it of instigating or being directly responsible for such incidents in India. That is hardly the way for a regional body to function.