What India needs to do to revive SAARC
What India needs to do to revive SAARC
WRITTEN BY MINAAM SHAH
25 April 2020
When COVID-19 first began taking the world by storm in late January, the majority of countries around the world decided to combat the pandemic along nation state lines. Aside from the World Health Organisation, the various branches of the United Nations were sidelined by events with the Security Council only meeting to first discuss the pandemic on April 9. Even the member states of more successful international groupings like the European Union and ASEAN initially chose to fight the disease solo, opting for cooperation only once national borders and institutions were secured.
Surprisingly India, which inhabits one of the world’s least integrated regions of South Asia, chose a very different path. As early as March 15, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi convened a joint video conference with leaders of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) member states to discuss strategies about developing a united front against COVID-19. This was the first time since 2014 that a SAARC summit (albeit a virtual one) had taken place. The meeting led to the establishment of a COVID-19 Emergency Fund with India contributing nearly half of the total share.
Clearly, Narendra Modi wanted to seize the diplomatic opportunity presented by the prospect of a major pandemic in South Asia. Rallying neighbors to New Delhi’s side has been a major plank of Modi’s regional foreign policy since 2014, especially in wake of terrorist attacks eminating from Pakistan and growing Chinese influence across the Indian Ocean region. India-Pakistan tensions and the region’s long history of mutual distrust however has ensured that there has been limited progress in India’s ‘Neighborhood Policy’. A deadly pandemic however supersedes all other diplomatic considerations. Thus, when Narendra Modi called the meeting, even the otherwise truculent Pakistan joined the huddle.
However, since that March meeting very little has been heard of SAARC except for a virtual training programme for region’s healthcare professionals organized by India.
If India wants SAARC to succeed, it has to give its neighbors a reason strong enough to cooperate. Any sense of collective South Asian identity has to originate under the pressure of an external force. As long as South Asia does not see China as a threat, any Indian efforts to revitalize SAARC will inevitably fail.
In the meantime, China has extended a financial assistance amounting to $500 million to Sri Lanka for fighting the pandemic. It is also helping Pakistan with setting up a specially-dedicated hospital to treat coronavirus patients. Impressed by the Chinese aid to the region, even India’s staunch ally Bangladesh could not resist from seeking Chinese help. It urged China to send a team of medical professionals to treat COVID-19 patients and also turned to Beijing to request a deferral of payments against all Back-to-Back Letter of Credits opened in favor of Chinese suppliers for one year.
And in this way, all the gas left in what remained in the engine of India’s newly found pandemic diplomacy. So why has New Delhi failed to revive SAARC even at a time when all its members were all united, at least in principle, in defeating COVID-19. Traditionally, India has always conveniently passed the blame for SAARC’s failure on to Pakistan. But on this occasion, Islamabad was also forthcoming. Not only did it attend the joint conference but also contributed an equal share of money to the COVID-19 Emergency Fund. Yet, there has been a lack of substantial enthusiasm towards a SAARC led effort to combat the pandemic.
This is because the problem is much bigger than Pakistan. Otherwise, why hasn’t the BIMSTEC too which was established in 1997 and bypasses Pakistan not able to realize its potential.
India has a misconception. It wrongly assumes regional integration as a logical process and an idea that should not impose itself naturally. However, this is not true. The key point is that regional organizations are designed to fail. Even if these neighboring countries do enter an institutional framework like SAARC, they do so by the compulsions of geography not choice. Particularly, smaller countries are more skeptical about regional groupings because they fear larger countries will usurp their decision-making autonomy and flood their markets.
This is one of the reasons why China has been more successful when dealing with South Asia. Even though it would have seemed natural for China to enter into regional groupings to compliment its Belt and Road Initiative, it chose to do things bilaterally. In this way, China avoids getting into the turbulant negotiations and delays which are a common feature of multinational blocs.
The question for India then is why have then EU and ASEAN enjoyed relative success in contrast to SAARC? The answer to this is precisely where lessons for India lie. Both the European Union and ASEAN did not emerge on their own. It was only with the lingering threat of Soviet Communism did European and South East Asian countries forget their respective quarrels and unite, since as nation states they were incapable of competing alone against the larger Soviet Union. Europeans and South East Asia, each in their own right, entered into a common institutional frameworks not because they favored integration but because it was the only way to defend themselves against Soviet intrusions. Even today, ASEAN is bound together by the need of its members collective need to balance the weight of China and the United States, rather than any sense of collective regional identity.
So if India wants SAARC to succeed, it has to give its neighbors a reason strong enough to cooperate. Any sense of collective South Asian identity has to originate under the pressure of an external force. So far, the concept of SAARC is antithetical to the region’s larger players. SAARC needs to be defined in relation to an external actor: China. As long as South Asia does not see China as an economic or diplomatic challenge in the way New Dehli does, any Indian efforts to revitalize SAARC will inevitably fail.
The key question is then, do South Asian countries, with the exclusion of Pakistan, see China as a challenge to the region? The big mistake in New Delhi’s regional diplomacy in recent years has been to assume that South Asian countries have no agency in their relations with China and this is a mistake. Recently the Sri Lankan President told media that he wanted to renegotiate the agreement with China on the Hambantota port which the island country has leased to China for a 99 year period in 2017. Similarly, former Maldives President and speaker of People’s Majlis of Maldives, Mohammad Nasheed was also critical of Chinese ‘debt traps’ in his country. He referred to Chinese investments in Maldives as “imperialism, as colonialism, and land grab” last year.
It remains to be seen whether China’s recent conduct in South Asia leads to a wider disillusionment with Beijing, so far as India itself has yet to decide whether it is unsure about China. India has failed to fully join Quad members and other Western states in calling out China over its complacency to contain the spread of COVID-19 in Wuhan. It is important for Indian policy makers to understand that as long as India remains undecided over the major challenge presented by China in South Asia, it cannot convince other states to come to the same conclusion. So far, India as always has conveniently decided to sit on the fence on the issue of Beijing’s rising power. But if India is unwilling or unable to depart from its past of hanging back while raising the specter of China as a leading power, it may come to symbolize India’s incapacity to shape its own region and fully revive SAARC as an instrument of Indian diplomacy.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Minaam Shah is a researcher of India's India's neighborhood policy. His works regularly appears in The National Interest and The Diplomat. Image credit: Ministry of External Affairs (India)/Flickr.