The SAARC summit to be held in Islamabad in November was cancelled after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan pulled out following India’s refusal to participate. This South Asian economic bloc was created to give a reprieve for the rotting capitalist economies of the region by expanding markets. Even the advanced European Union’s (EU) capitalist economy plunged into a severe crisis with the catastrophic economic crash of 2008. The EU itself seems to be disintegrating. The non-developed and rutted SAARC economies never stood a chance to come out of the crisis relentlessly pulverising these societies.
The summit cancellation exposed the fragile nature of this South Asian alliance, and its seething economic, social and political crises. Diplomatic wrangling, missile launches, sabre-rattling, flaunting of armoury and threats of a nuclear holocaust haunts the region. Violence, bloodshed and reactionary tendencies are ravaging societies in this land that was the cradle of civic human existence, chiefly, the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Military skirmishes across the Line of Control in Kashmir have escalated. Inspite of the pleas of the Chinese and the US regimes the subcontinental stalwarts are, at least for the time being, posturing aggressive stances. Corporate media on both sides is going hysterical. However, their imperial masters who will not allow an outright war are also opposed to sustained and durable peace, as it is detrimental for the massive profits of their military-industrial complex. The native state and political elites get their shares in this plunder of imperialist armaments.
The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was created as a regional intergovernmental organisation with Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as its full members. It was founded in Dhaka in 1985. However, after 31 years of its existence none of its proclaimed politico-economic objectives could be achieved. There has hardly been any progress in the integration; rather, the differences have aggravated and relations are far more hostile than in 1985.
Taking a cursory look at these countries it is obvious that factors of instability and turmoil are worsening. Afghanistan has been under imperialist occupation since 2001, and is riven with violence and warring fiefdoms of various fundamentalist and tribal warlords in their hot pursuit of plunder and extortion. Vast swathes of the country are beyond the control of Ashraf Ghani’s puppet regime. Its own existence is subject to imperialist military presence. Its antics of independent policy claims are farcical. Pakistan has been in the throes of terrorist violence and sectarian bloodshed for decades now. With two-thirds of its economy categorised as ‘black’ or ‘parallel’, the social control of the sequential regimes in government is questionable. The masses are suffering the economic onslaught, and the ruling classes are corrupt and reactionary to the core.
India, the biggest and the most powerful country in the region, with its tag of the ‘largest democracy’, is inflicted with the largest concentration of poverty in the world. Vidal Gore once described India as “the most organised anarchy in the world.” The plight of the oppressed nationalities, caste prejudices, massive corruption, xenophobia, religious pogroms, superstition and misery plague today’s India. The reactionary BJP regime faces the challenges of a renewed class struggle with the general strike of 2nd September, and the heroic resilience of the revolt of the Kashmiri youth. These movements have shaken India to the core, hence the belligerence and beating of war drums to defuse and deflect it on the traditional enmity with Pakistan.
Nepal is a landlocked country being squeezed by the Chinese and the Indian giants. Bhutan is another state-let, not much more than an Indian satellite. Bangladesh has a despotic ‘democratic’ regime where present government came into power with elections without any opposition party contesting them. Its animosities with Pakistan are entrenched in the past and used as distractions for its brutalities against the workers and the youth. Deaths of garment workers burnt in factory fires are most prevalent in Bangladesh. The regime has its own feuds with India, from water distribution of the rivers to the Bangladeshi refugees in Assam.
Sri Lanka is being torn apart by the Chinese-Indian rivalry in the Indian Ocean. A ferocious ethnic conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamils scourged for decades. Apparently, the Tamil Tigers have been defeated, but the national question in Srilanka is far from resolved. It will sprout up again as the crisis worsens.
Authoritarian regimes dominate the Maldives, but the state is fragile and its significance in the SAARC equation is minimal.
Every member of SAARC is going through increasing social, economic and political turmoil. Territorial and economic conflicts across frontiers are rampant. The ruling classes need external conflicts and xenophobic nationalism to deviate the recurrent revolts by the suffering masses.
However, inspite of religious and nationalist venom spewed by states and media, the destiny of emancipation of the teeming millions has a common path and objective. It is in the class unity and struggle that cuts across all divisions and poisonous prejudices imposed by imperialism and bourgeois. The victory of working class through a socialist revolution in any one of the major countries can start a whirlwind of revolutionary upheavals throughout the region. On a capitalist basis the unity of the so-called SAARC countries is a hoax. The plunder and lust for profit under the financial oligarchy of the market exacerbates social turbulence and bloody conflicts.
But the geographical proximity, shared histories and cultural similarities are a basis of a greater unity. The ultimate liberation and unity of the region can be attained by the creation of a socialist federation of South Asia. The divisions of the South Asian subcontinent by the bloody boundary lines drawn by imperialists to cleave living cultures and societies for their policy of divide-and-rule shall be wiped off the face of earth. Only a planned economy sans the motive of profit, obliteration of deprivation and exploitation, a voluntary union of the oppressed nationalities, gender equality in all fields of life, and a genuine regime of workers’ democratic control and management to run this socialist federation can emancipate the oppressed masses.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]