In two different countries, at two different places, different peoples have met to discuss their age-old problems and find a collective solution. One was the People’s SAARC at Colombo, the venue of official SAARC Summit, and the other was at Jaipur where people working at the grassroots gathered to pool experiences of their movements. How helpless did both feel in their fight against the vested interests?

Both meetings transcended boundaries, faiths and identities. Both challenged official policies, the mindset bureaucrats and the stock remedies. Both were anxious to confront the insensitive rulers on the one hand and the inhuman extremists on the other.

At the two-day conference of People’s SAARC, some 400 delegates from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives threw down the gauntlet to the official SAARC to do something concrete for bringing the member countries nearer to one another instead of holding sterile debates and their armies firing at one another on the border at the slightest provocation. The unanimous demand of the delegates was for a borderless South Asia, with no visa, no restrictions to enable people to travel and trade.

I recall how keen the late Benazir Bhutto was for a borderless subcontinent. When she talked to me at London a few months before her assassination, she said that if she ever returned to power, her first task would be to make borders soft. I wish the government led by her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) had pursued her dream. But the army and the bureaucracy appear to be having a better of the party. Were the PPP to take steps to have close contact with India, it would find Nawaz Sharif welcoming this. He has even proposed a unilateral move.

What comes in the way is too much emphasis on nationalism. This has made people set their sights on their own country and community, not on the bigger vision like South Asia Union on the lines of European Union. In that arrangement, nations will retain their sovereignty while having common trade, commerce and other avenues of economic development.

Before independence, Rabindranath Tagore wrote an article expressing his wish that India should not adopt nationalism as its creed. His fear was that nationalism would lead to chauvinism. This has more or less happened. Chauvinism is now leading to extremism and terrorism.

Terrorists have different front organizations in different countries. Somewhere, they call themselves Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), the Lakshar-e-Toiba (LeT), the Harkiat-ul-Jihad Islami (HUJI) or just mujahideen. In fact, they are religious fanatics, who want to create a theocratic state. They are essentially fundamentalists drawing inspiration from the Taliban, if they are not the Taliban themselves.

They are killers and do not spare even women and children. They target hospitals, as was seen earlier at Karachi and now at Ahmedabad. What Bangalore and Ahmedabad saw today was experienced at Karachi and Islamabad yesterday. Terrorism stalks in the region. It cannot be countered in piecemeal. A joint action by the SAARC countries needs to be initiated with the participation of scientists, technocrats and others. They have to have a long-term plan with new weapons to eliminate the menace because the general run of the police in the region is not adequate. The enemy has all the sophistication in the methods and they use modern technology of chips to control the blasts. 

It is heartening to find that India has not put the blame on Pakistan. But to name a particular orgnisation or an individual without sufficient evidence is like saying that the terrorists are from among the Muslims. This exposes them to all types of risk because the media holds trials against them long before the real trial begins. The Bajrang Dal, an organisation of Hindu fundamentalists, should not escape scrutiny because they have been found indulging in certain incidents to see that the blame comes to Muslims, for example the attack on the RSS headquarters.

India and Pakistan have not gone very far in the Anti-terrorism Coordination Committee. Both have yet to overcome their mistrust of one another. Now that a democratic government is at the helm in Islamabad, it should not allow the army to influence the policy matters. Bringing the ISI under the civil control was a good beginning. But this decision has been reversed and a status quo is maintained, with a Lt General heading the organisation.

The People’s SAARC also adopted a declaration to ask the countries in the region—the SAARC has been expanded to embrace Afghanistan and Myanmar—to enter into no-war pacts with one another. This, the delegates believed, would divert the funds allocated to the military to the departments working for eradicating poverty and ignorance.

Come to think of it, the official SAARC has nothing to its credit expect pious resolutions and laudatory speeches. The governments have tended to live under one illusion or another—illusion of being honest themselves. The fact is that they have never looked beyond their own territory and have seldom assisted neighbours at the time of need. The record is full of discords and hostilities. They talk of friendship but frame their policies to harm one another. SAARC is a club which outlived its utility within a couple of years of its existence. The spirit of togetherness demanded to give, not to take. But that dream has gone sour.

The second meet at Jaipur was that of civil groups, concerned citizens and some leaders of movements which, in the words of famous writer V.S. Naipaul, were like a “million mutinies.” The groups constituted the Lok Rajnitik Manch (People’s Political Platform) for making “political intervention” on the issues of livelihood, displacement, farm crisis and discrimination. The platform is meant to be an umbrella under which all organistions, engaged in arraying people against exploitation and fighting electoral battles, will stand shoulder to shoulder with their individual identity. Together, they will confront the established political order with which people are disillusioned. The effort is to evolve “a genuine interactive” restoring the democratic values that formed the basis of national polity after independence.

 Limited struggles throughout the region provide ample evidence of change at the grassroots. Yet, our leaders continue to indulge in the same old game of gaining ascendancy through politics of manipulation and money. Many among them are the ones who go in for ideological posturing and populist rhetoric. They have little respect for public interest or popular sentiment except to exploit for ensuring their political survival.

The crisis of politics is a crisis of change. It reflects the widening gap between the base of the polity and its structure. Are the SAARC countries willing to bring about the change? Peoples have little confidence in the establishments.