South Asia on the move

• Eisenhower Foundation South Asia Conference 2012 kicks off in Colombo

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

Bringing together Eisenhower Fellows from across the world for networking and deliberations in Colombo, the Eisenhower Fellowships, Philadelphia and conference organising teams from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka hosted the three-day Eisenhower Foundation South Asia Conference 2012 which kicked off on Thursday.

Themed ‘South Asia on the move: Achieving its full potential in the 21st century,’ the inauguration of the event also tied up with the Eisenhower Day celebrations. Amongst the participants were 18 young business leaders from Sri Lanka, members from Sri Lanka Unites and interestingly, veteran author and illustrator Sybil Wettasinghe who was involved in a special project embarked upon to mark the celebrations.

Welcoming the new Fellows

In his opening remarks, former Assistant Secretary of State and President of Eisenhower Fellowships, Philadelphia John Wolf expressed his gratitude towards the organising committees for the great work done. “It is great to see the passion with which ideas are exchanged, good friends meet again and strangers meet and become good friends – this is all part of what makes the Eisenhower Fellowship experience so meaningful. I would also like to thank the speakers who have come from all over the region and add a special welcome to our new 21 Fellows,” he stated.

Wold added that he first came to the region in 1981 and since then has seen for himself the massive progress that has been made but noted that there is room for much more progress up ahead. “My hope is that through your experiences and interactions, we will help strengthen your abilities to help this region,” he said, while addressing the new Fellows.

Chief Guest at the event Ambassador of the United States of America Michele J. Sison also mirrored his thoughts, adding that the new Fellows who would be going to the States shortly should understand that while it is an experience of a lifetime, they should also think beyond that and use the opportunity to act as ambassadors for their country.

This was followed by a video address by the US Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake who pointed out that the Eisenhower foundation is renowned for identifying and connecting outstanding leaders from around the globe helping to make the world more just, peaceful and prosperous through the power of collaboration and dialogue.

“The US Department has long been a strong supporter of these kinds of people-to-people linkages. We know that the connections facilitated at events like these are crucial to addressing both our shared challenges and opportunities,” he said.

“The Asia Pacific has become a key driver of global politics. During my travel to South Asia earlier this month, I was once again reminded of the dynamism of this entire region in my meetings with officials and community leaders in Nepal, Maldives and Sri Lanka. We discussed how the US can help these nations and their neighbours address road blocks to progress, become players in the global marketplace and ensure a democratic, secure and prosperous future for their people.”

Eisenhower Day celebrations

Eisenhower Foundation Association of Sri Lanka Chairman Chandra Jayaratne up next made the announcement about the book compiled specially for the occasion. Illustrated and written by Sybil Wettasinghe, the book has been put together by the organising committees from all four countries. Currently available in English, Sinhala and Tamil, the book will be available online for free downloads via bookhub.lk.

“Lots of books have been written about General Eisenhower and have spoken of his messages to the world in battle and politics but we thought of targeting a new generation of people and bring about something that could be replicated by 103 nations. We are dedicating the book to Eisenhower fellowships tonight,” Jayaratne explained.

“This can be converted into any language and it will be available to be downloaded for free across the world through bookhub.lk through their own voluntary contributions – it is an initiative of the four countries something that has never been done before.”

Illustrator and author of the book Sybil Wettasinghe, speaking about her own contribution, stated that she was greatly privileged to be present at the celebrations. Having written over 300 books, she noted that this one is completely different. She has written it in verse rather than in prose, understanding that children nowadays prefer lyrical content.

Opening sessions

The first sessions of the three day conference also kicked off on the night of the inauguration featuring UNESCO Science Laureate Professor Atta-ur-Rahman UNESCO Science Laureate and MP Shashi Tharoor and were moderated by NDTV Editor Sreenivasan Jain.

NDTV Editor Sreenivasan Jain commenced with a colourful presentation on science, technology and innovation: imperatives for socio economic development through which he shared some delightful new insights into some of the latest scientific developments and spoke of Pakistan’s own progress in the field of science and technology.

“We live in a world where truth is really stranger than fiction – with cloaking devices used for cloaking submarines and tanks and such. Nanotechnology has come to the fore and there are now cars running on air, luminescent orchids, nano-machines that can run through your blood vessels – it really is a world where the truth is stranger than fiction,” he said.

MP Shashi Tharoor spoke on the theme of the forum and some of the leadership challenges facing South Asia, noting that if the region had more leaders like Professor Atta-ur-Rahman across the border in Pakistan, that there would be less challenges to worry about.

Regional challenges

He commenced by narrating an interesting story based in the year 1410, during which a Chinese admiral erected a stone tablet with the message to the world in Galle. His inscription was in three languages: in Chinese, Persian and Tamil and his message was even more remarkable, according to Robert Kapman’s 2012 book ‘Monsoon,’ it invoked a blessings of the Hindu deities for a peaceful world built on trade.

“600 years ago, a Chinese sailor statesman called on Indian gods as he set out to develop commercial links with the Middle East and East Africa through the Indian subcontinent. It was this endeavour which we should embark upon now.”

The South Asian subcontinent has long been the centre of Asia’s most vital trade groups and India’s commanding position at the heart of South Asia places it in both an enviable and much-resented position.

No one loves a huge neighbour. India cannot help the fact that it accounts for 70 per cent of the population of the eight countries that make up the subcontinent, or of SAARC, and accounts for 80 per cent of the region’s collective GDP. It’s by far also the most militarily powerful member, he observed. Whenever India gets together with its neighbours, it occupies more space and displaces more space than the rest of them combined.

“Even the most adroit diplomacy would not be able to skirt the implications of this inescapable reality. Now the notion of leadership given in the title by the organisers makes the challenge all the more apparent for there is a widespread perception which would be unwise to ignore that India’s relationship with the countries neighbouring it have been poorly managed. Its recent rise in like China is largely seen around the world as benign, India’s neighbours hardly constitute an echo chamber for global applause,” Tharoor said.

Of the eight nations it shares land and maritime borders, Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, there has been a history of problems of varying degrees of difficulties with six and to add on to the list, India’s nine countries in its direct neighbourhood which are all in varying degrees vital to its national security.

Rising India has an obvious interest in the success of its neighbours since a stable neighbourhood contributes to an enabling environment for India’s own domestic objectives while disturbances on India’s borders can act as a constraint on India’s continued rise.

As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh remarked during his October 2011 visit to Bangladesh, India would not be able to realise its own destiny without the partnership of its South Asian neighbours. The charge that the relations between them have been mostly unsatisfactory is not untrue. It is partly due to circumstances beyond India’s control.

First, most of these nations only share borders with India so the pangs of proximity affect each of them only in relation to India and not to each other. Many of them have had to define their identity in relation to India. The sustaining historical narrative underpinning their national identity has often been derived from their anxiety to differentiate themselves from the Indian narrative.

If India as a civilisation should construct embracing unity amidst vast diversity, each of its neighbours has to accentuate its own particular reasons for if separateness is not established, what distinguishes each of these countries from any Indian state.

This anxiety to demonstrate not-Indianess is often the root of their concerns about Indian hegemony. In many cases, India became a factor in some countries’ domestic politics with India bashing often and easy route to cheap popularity in the hothouse politics of many South Asian countries.

Turmoil in the past

More tangibly, each of these neighbouring nations has had to cope with internal crises whose effects spill over into their relationships with India. Just a few years ago, the picture across South Asia was bleak. Afghanistan battling the forces of a resurgent Taliban, Pakistan in turn worried over the assassination of and chaos in the streets, Bhutan managing a delicate transition from absolute monarchy to constitutional democracy and Bangladesh under military rule.

 Myanmar continuing to imprison Aung San Suu Kyi and her fellow democrats while keeping the country in isolated tyranny, Sri Lanka convulsed by a brutal and bloody civil war that was well into its third decade and even the Maldives facing mass disturbances in the lead up to elections – the subcontinent certainly has its internal issues.

Yet over the last couple of years, there has been progress almost everywhere – Nepal’s civil war is over and the coalition government holds the reins, Bhutan’s political experiment of a managed transition to a multi-party democracy under a constitutional monarch is coping remarkably well. Bangladesh is having a free election and restored civilian democratic government.

“In Sri Lanka, the military victory over the murderous forces of the LTTE was followed by elections by the triumphant government. The Maldives have elected the former dissident as president until he was forced to resign in a bloodless transfer to his vice president earlier this year.”

“Even Myanmar held a relatively free election albeit with severe restrictions and freed its principle dissidents. Though there are difficulties in Pakistan, we have heard about their remarkable progress in science and higher education and after an entire existence in which no civilian government has ever completed its term of office uninterrupted, they look as if they are about to have that new record being set by the current government. Only Afghanistan is still in fundamental difficulties persist and that too is a country much more at peace than it was a couple of years ago so the prospects for peace, security and development look promising everywhere else in the subcontinent.”

Sub continental dis-functionalities

Now listing the problems in these countries is not to imply that India has been blameless in its own conduct. India’s geopolitical strategists both inside and outside of government have tended to see interest globally with the attention paid to relations with the United States or India’s own UN non-aligned movement. In the neighbourhood, they are mostly focused on the threats to the nation’s rise from the Pakistani military and the state of its proxies and to a somewhat lesser degree, from the emergence of China and its impact on India’s stature in the region.

The result has been that the rest of the neighbourhood is sometimes being treated with neglect rather than with close attention. Of course it would be wrong to place the entire for any sub continental dis-functionalities on India alone.

When you speak of the challenges of fulfilling its potential in the 21st century, we have to recognise that large parts of South Asia have made progress economically, socially and politically over the last few decades. Yet there are a number of challenges that continue to persist in the region and they hold back the true potential of our countries, individually as well as collectively.

These include terrorism and extremism and the use of these as instruments of state policy and the daily terror of hunger, unemployment, illiteracy, disease and the effects of climate change. Less are these but equally potent are the restrictions on trade and transit that belong to an older century.

“Many Indian states and Indian policy have serious issues with their neighbours’ concerns have been expressed about the movement of goods and people from Bangladesh and Nepal respectively, or the treatment of Tamils of Sri Lanka which affects Tamil Nadu in our country, the onetime Pakistani support for the separatist Pakistani militancy of Punjab just as examples has injected domestic political compulsions into New Delhi’s thinking, particularly an era of coalition governance with the use of political allies in the states must be taken imperatively into account.”

Pix by Upul Abayasekara