South Asians are long on rhetoric and short on performance. This adage was again confirmed during 2004 as the South Asian states struggled to overcome the challenges they faced both domestically and at the regional level. The rhetoric at the regional forum, when the 12th Saarc summit was held in Islamabad, sounded especially exhilarating at the beginning of the year. Considering that the regional association had overcome the preceding year's setback, when the summit scheduled for January 2003 had been scuttled by New Delhi, the hosts had good reason to chirp merrily.
General Pervez Musharraf was obviously happy to receive prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Islamabad and both vowed not to let memories of Agra and Kargil and an extended confrontation along their common border undermine the normalization process. The summit was hailed as a major breakthrough and the euphoria generated by the event was reflected in Foreign Secretary Riaz Khokhar's happiness in announcing "that the Saarc process has begun".
That the summit helped India and Pakistan to be on talking terms again was no doubt a valid ground for rejoicing, but much else happened that was welcome. Agreement was reached on the framework for Safta (South Asian Free Trade Area) and an additional protocol on combating terrorism was finalized.
The emphasis during the South Asian leaders' discussions was on the socio-economic issues faced by them, especially the imperatives of poverty alleviation. Perhaps the most important achievement of the summit was the adoption of the South Asian Social Charter. All countries in the region pledged themselves to fight poverty, meet peoples' demands in areas of health, education, and human resource development, and to concentrate on raising the status of women, the youth and children.
The Islamabad Declaration was full of messages of hope for the poor and the disadvantaged in South Asia. But it is doubtful if any of the South Asian states found the opportunity to take a second look at the declaration or the social charter. Nearly all of them had other priorities. When the 13th summit of the 19-year-old organization is held in Dhaka within the next few days, it will do well to address the causes of its consistent inability to translate its promises into action.
Still, South Asia was able to revel in the rhetoric of the Saarc summit. The main cause of cheer was the fact that India and Pakistan did not go back on the mutual commitment to go on trying for normalization of relations. But as the months passed it became more and more clear that political leadership in both countries was being held back by the all-powerful bureaucracies. Also clear was the fact that veteran warmongers did not know how to transform themselves into peace doves.
The crisis that continued to bedevil practically the whole of South Asia was caused by lack of progress towards evolving a workable system of representative and responsible governance, though the definition of such a system varied from country to country. Some of the problems faced by individual entities were as old as the states themselves.
The country that seemed to be facing fewer problems than its neighbours was Bhutan. Early in 2004 there were reports of trouble caused by dissidents and their suppression in the feudal tradition but the outside world only heard of the kingdom's distinction in enforcing a near-total ban on smoking. The king indicated that he was considering the possibility of his becoming the last monarch of the mountain state. The idea was given a definite form in the draft constitution circulated for public debate in the last quarter of the year. The Bhutanese could look forward to a change in the form of governance in 2005.
The decision to move towards reform of the political structure in the Maldives, however, came after a considerably serious confrontation between the government and the dissidents, who included some MPs, and eminent citizens, such as a former secretary-general of Saarc. The trouble had begun while the country's president was in Islamabad for the Saarc summit and he had to cut short his stay in Pakistan. Subsequently, the numerous arrests and imposition of emergency and curfew drew criticism from European Union and international human rights watchdogs. The situation seemed to have quietened down after the Majlis (parliament) resumed its sittings and the government announced a reform package. Whether the reform proposals can guarantee tranquility in the island republic remains to be seen.
The only country in the region that presented a model of peaceful, democratic movement in 2004 was India. Its electorate offered a stirring display of its exercise of sovereign power by rejecting the BJP's blurb writers of "Shining India" and surprised even the Congress by the measure of its success. The event again reflected on the short memory of the subcontinent's politicians. Had the BJP mind-controllers remembered the downfall of Ayub Khan in Pakistan after a decade of development and an impressive rate of economic growth or the defeat of Indira Gandhi after the "ghareebi hatao" drive, they would not have failed to realize that the masses are never won over by state triumphs that leave them as badly off as before, if not worse.
However, the new government faced quite serious problems in running a coalition of Congress's partners that included radical Marxists on one side and politicians of doubtful credentials on the other. It seemed to be relying somewhat excessively on increasing India's role in global affairs and steady economic growth and to some extent on signs of disarray in BJP ranks. The loss of power did upset the latter in the same manner as accession to power had gone to its head.
The challenge of governance in India still stemmed from the huge gap between the rich and the poor and the outcome depended upon the success of the economic managers in assuring the disadvantaged and the marginalized a fair share in the country's prosperity. The danger that failure in that area could revive the threat from rejuvenated and more rabid communalists persisted.
That a high rate of growth (estimated at 5.7 per cent for the year, somewhat higher than official expectations) and improvement in social indicators did not necessarily mean stable and otherwise satisfactory governance was the lesson Bangladesh again learned during 2004. The ruling party and the opposition remained locked in a feud that betrayed contempt for democratic norms and the imperatives of rule by consensus. The opposition stayed away from parliament for a long time and returned to it only to avoid losing seats as a result of absence from the house. Normal life was frequently disrupted by general strikes called by the opposition. There were 20 of them during the year.
Apart from its failure to use its two-thirds majority to establish a tradition of tolerance of the opposition, the government saw the rise of a force that threatened to destroy both the ruling party and the opposition, namely, armed religious militants. Life became more difficult for religious and ethnic minorities and women, several politicians and journalists were killed, and an attack on an opposition rally in August claimed 21 lives (Sheikh Hasina narrowly escaped). The fanatics' campaign against the Ahmadis and independent newspapers and their editors became virulent.
All this showed trends of intolerance in polity begetting intolerance in social life and putting a big question mark on the Bangladesh people's future.
The story of Pakistan in 2004 is covered elsewhere in the issue but its travail in the South Asian context also resulted from unnecessary and worn-out experiments in political husbandry. The military elite's faith in its own infallibility and its determination to persist in sharing power with elected representatives in name only was taking the country farther and farther away from good governance and also reviving the crisis of mismanagement of federal issues.Sri Lanka suffered a major political setback in 2004. The task before it at the start of the year was resumption of peace talks with Tamils and protection of economic gains brought by peace prospects. This task remained unfulfilled. Differences between the president and the prime minister led to the third parliamentary election in four years and rule by a coalition of disparate elements.
Two coalition groups, the JVP and the Buddhist monks, clashed openly and yet tied government's hands in the matter of the search for peace with the Tamil Tigers. The latter suffered a split and a long sequence of factional bloodletting that pushed the LTTE main group towards a harder posture than before.
The Norwegian peacemakers repeatedly tried to revive the peace talks but in vain and stopped short of giving up by sheer determination to stay at the job. The Japanese who had joined the peacemakers after offering Sri Lanka huge economic aid fared no better. The country's external friends were driven to despair, to the extent of telling the government to rein in the hardliners among its junior coalition partners. As the year ended, Sri Lanka appeared to be as far away as ever from a democratic solution to the problems created by raising the constitution of a unitary state to the status of immutable faith.
It was Nepal, however, that continued to pay a heavier price than any of its South Asian neighbours for the crisis of governance. The Maoists, who had withdrawn from the ceasefire accord in August 2003, escalated their attacks on the government and extended their operations to the capital, Kathmandu, in August 2004. According to a western media report they had established themselves in 68 of the country's 75 districts.
At the same time the palace came under heavy pressure from opposition political parties. In May the combined opposition succeeded in forcing Prime Minister Surya Bahadur Thapa to resign and the king was obliged to install as prime minister the man he had sacked in 2002 - Sher Bahadur Deuba. The government also promised a general election in November 2004 but was persuaded to defer the contest till the spring or summer of 2005.
With no end to civil war in sight, the death toll in the eight-year-old conflict jumped from about 8,500 at the beginning of 2004 to 10,000 by the end of the year. The government told the rebels to join negotiations by January 13, 2005 after which no talks would be possible while the Maoists continued to reject talks except on their own terms. What made the situation worse was the fact that by branding the Maoists as terrorists the western nations ruled themselves out as possible mediators or peace-makers. Apart from an increase in cases of disappearance, extra legal killing and torture, the people's economic hardships multiplied.
During the blockade of Kathmandu the poor had difficulty in getting even food items. At the end of the year Nepal seemed to have moved farther away from the ideal of democracy the peaceful revolution of 1990 had heralded.
As the South Asian states continued to increase the problems of governance, they found themselves without the means or the will to push the region forward. There was little evidence of a realization that uplift of South Asia as a whole and completion of its states' domestic agendas had to be addressed simultaneously and not one after the other.
South Asians are long on rhetoric and short on performance. This adage was again confirmed during 2004 as the South Asian states struggled to overcome the challenges they faced both domestically and at the regional level. The rhetoric at the regional forum, when the 12th Saarc summit was held in Islamabad, sounded especially exhilarating at the beginning of the year. Considering that the regional association had overcome the preceding year's setback, when the summit scheduled for January 2003 had been scuttled by New Delhi, the hosts had good reason to chirp merrily.
