NEW DELHI: The Saarc summit is so far expected to be held as scheduled from January 9 in Dhaka. Member nations India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, reeling under the impact of the tsunami , have not asked for the summit to be postponed and all are expected to attend the three-day event for which hectic preparations are on in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh Foreign Secretary Shamsher Mobin Chowdhury told reporters at Dhaka that there was no possibility of deferring the meet. Under the Saarc rules, the summit cannot be held if any one of the seven member nations decides not to attend.
Mr Chowdhury held a preparatory meeting with the heads of missions of the Saarc nations where no one reportedly suggested alternative dates for the summit. The Saarc programming committee will meet on January 3 and 4, the standing committee on January 5 and 6, and the council of ministers on January 7 and 8.
The summit is expected to take up real business at hand as it is the first in recent years that will not be under the cloud of India-Pakistan tensions. Room for dramatics has also been ruled out with Pakistan being represented by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and not President Pervez Musharraf.
At the Kathmandu Saarc summit, he had stolen the show with the dramatic handshake with then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. At the Islamabad summit last year, Saarc was virtually eclipsed by the bilateral meeting between the two leaders and the subsequent statement that committed the two countries to the peace process.
India's foreign policy, sources said, has taken an aggressively pro-neighbours turn. The question that is at the fulcrum of policy-making is: Can we give our neighbours a stake in India's development and prosperity, and if so, how? Several steps are being taken to address this issue, one being that of cross-border infrastructure which has been found by the government to be in "abysmal condition."
Foreign secretary Shyam Saran has visited India's borders with neighbours like Nepal to find that the basic infrastructure on the Indian side is non-existent. India's relations with the neighbours will no longer be based on "arrogance" but on an appreciation of their sensitivities.
As the sources said, often the best policies fall apart because the neighbours often feel that India is not sensitive to their problems. Bangladesh's resistance to cooperate on occasions is seen by New Delhi as a "cry for attention" and efforts are currently on to rectify this.
The shift will be visible at the Saarc summit where New Delhi is keen to convince the member nations of its good intent through concrete proposals, particularly in the area of free trade.
The "reorientation," as the sources described it, has come from the realisation that while "we are selling ourselves to the US, Europe, we have not been successful in getting the idea across to our neighbours." -By arrangement with Asian Age/New Delhi.