SAARC needs to walk the talk

By Chandani Kirinde in New Delhi

Indian film idol Shah Ruk Khan and cricketing hero Sachin Tendulkar made it to the headline news in India in the two days that leaders from eight South Asian nations were gathered in the capital New Delhi to discuss better co-operation among the nations in this impoverished region.

Hour after hour 24/7 Indian news channels flashed news of Shah Ruk’s Khans wax doll being unveiled at Madame Tussauds museum in London and the raging conflict between Sachin Tendulkar and his team mates and their coach Greg Chappell while the dignitaries attending the SAARC summit managed to get a few minutes of airtime in between. The print media too adopted a similarly step motherly treatment towards the summit pushing it out of the front pages in many publications.

One reason that SAARC leaders who represent more than one fifth of the world’s population get a lukewarm reception from the media and fail to attract the attention that they should is the grouping’s past record of being only a “talk shop’. “Will this be just another gabfest, all atmospherics and no substance, as has been the pattern with past meets?’, an editorial in The Hindustan Times queried on April 3, the second day of the summit.

The answer to that wont’ be known immediately but it as evident by listening to the leaders of the SAARC nations that they too are well aware of what ails the association. Its past record of talking the talk but failing to walk the talk is what the present torchbearers of SAARC want to see changed from now on. In their joint declaration issued at the end of the of the Summit on Wednesday, the Heads of State or Governments emphasised that in its third decade of existence, there was an urgent need to move SAARC from declaratory to the implementation phase.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa in his opening address to the summit emphasised the matter. “While endorsing and fully subscribing to the values of SAARC, we badly need to be action orientated rather than dependent on rhetoric.

Merely saying good things about each other and ignoring the reality will take it nowhere,” has said.

Indian Prime minister Manmohan Singh too underscored the need to translate words in action stating in his opening address that after several years of effort, the time has come to move SAARC from a declaratory phase to action and implementation while the Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said the time was right for a paradigm change in thinking and attitude among leaders in South Asia if the aspirations of the people of the region were to be met.

Terrorism was on top of the agenda for many of the South Asian leaders and on this all member nations agreed that terrorism was a threat to peace and security in the region and called for the implementation of international conventions relating to combating terrorism as well as the SAARC Convention on the Suppression of terrorism and for urgent conclusion of a comprehensive convention on international terrorism.

Another issue the leaders addressed was corruption which was viewed with serious concern and the leaders agreed to exchange information on national experience in combating corruption to effectively address the problem. This was included in the final declaration along with several ambitious pledges meant to overcome the challenges of poverty, disease, natural disasters and terrorism , better economic co-operation and a better life for the people of the region.

The problems are very real but do the leaders of these countries have the political will to act on the pledges. While there is unprecedented economic growth in the regions, there is also growing turmoil.

The India-Pakistan rift over Kashmir was the highlight on the sidelines of the summit with Pakistan once again stating that it as the key issue for better relations between the two neighbours. The induction of Afghanistan into SAARC was welcomed by all members but the opening remarks by Afghan president Hamid Karzai calling for a ban on extremism and terrorism in all forms and sources, including political sponsorship and financing, was an obvious veiled reference to the role of Pakistan whom the Afghan leader has accused of helping the Taliban to destabilise his government, an issue which received much media converge in India. Grappling among these countries, smaller nations like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Maldives and Bhutan had to work hard to get their grievances heard.

The founding fathers of SAARC envisaged co-operation among the countries to work together towards finding solutions towards their common problems in a spirit of friendship, trust and mutual understanding and to the creation of an order based on mutual respect, equity and shared benefits. It is time to make a concerted and genuine effort to build on these principals if co-operation among the South Asian nations is to reach the levels to which organisations such as the European Union (EU) and ASEAN have climbed and have in turn reaped immense benefits to their people.