Reorienting the regional discourse in South Asia: Vision for a people's SAARC

Abstract

The recent discourse on regionalism in South Asia has been marked more with the problems that hinder regional cooperation rather than the prospects that the grouping has in shaping the collective future of the region. Given the faltering steps the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has taken at regionalism in the last two decades, such pessimism is perhaps justified. As an institution, SAARC has remained an intergovernmental mechanism, which has had little relevance for the people of South Asia. The association has allowed the political logic to dominate over the economic, and therefore lags far behind several other regional and multilateral initiatives. The article revisits the existing regional discourse in South Asia and offers an alternative approach to the regional idea, the thrust for which comes from people below rather than the states at the top. According to this alternative paradigm, states must merely act as facilitators rather than initiators of regional initiatives and build upon evolving interactions in South Asia based on knowledge, technology, commerce and culture. This would require a reinterpretation of the operative mechanism of SAARC by modifying its original mandate and procedures. Secondly it would need greater accommodation and acceptance of each other's concerns by all South Asian countries and an approach that looks beyond the traditional notions of dominance and dependence.