The 18th South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit has concluded Thursday with a 36-point Kathmandu Declaration. The two-day summit held in Kathmandu from 26-27 November mainly emphasized on the regional cooperation for security and anti-terrorism network, mutual trade and energy cooperation.
The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaj Sariff did not speak to and shake hands with each other on the first day of the summit. However, they shook hands and exchanged words on the second day. They had been heavily criticized through media for maintaining their cold war even during the regional summit.
Since its foundation in 1985, the SAARC governments have been pledging their people’s development. Despite more than 400 decisions taken during their previous 17 summits, their non-implementation has deepened public despair. However, they have reiterated their promises in the 18th summit as well.
The Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, the Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, The Bhutanese Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Maldives President Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom, the Nepali Prime Minister Sushil Koirala, the Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaj Sharif and the Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksha were the major participants in the 18th SAARC summit. Besides, observers from Australia, Burma, China, the European Union, Iran, Japan, South Korea and the United States participated in the summit.
While the heads of states and governments presented their elitist talks as usual in the summit, it is an apparent truth that the political and socio-economic power in South Asia has been overwhelmingly concentrated in the few elite groups while living conditions of the majority of toiling masses remain extremely poor. Deep-rooted social hierarchies and discriminations, massive labor exploitation, rampant feudal culture and practices in cities and villages, manipulation of market prices by cartels with political nexus, and blind chauvinism seriously imply that no victimological perspectives have been utilized in their national and regional politics and development strategies.
So far South Asian leaders have mainly lingered to good-looking terminologies while still unable to manage their flagrant home contradictions. Empirical observations always prove that minimum democracy lacks at grassroots levels in South Asian countries.
The brain drainage of South Asian intellectuals into Europe, America and Australia, and the exodus of active population into Gulf countries prove that the South Asian economic policies are concentrated mainly on the political demobilization of people and amassing wealth in the few hands with which to continue their hereditary politics.
Inhuman conditions, beyond the perception of human rights think-tanks, rampant in South Asia, imply that South Asian political forces face a tough challenge of de-feudalizing their democracy so as to develop peace and security through social justice in their own countries and in the region as a whole. Only then, peoples of South Asia will cease to consider the SAARC as the shark, ruthlessly, greedily and dishonestly troubling them.