This bewitching city of nine million attracts people from near and far. The strong Chinese community is centered on the massive Chinatown by the Chao Phyara River. The Indians spill onto all sides from the Phahurat Market, aka Little India. At least half a million Burmese refugees call the Sin City of Asia their home. Other countries in the region—and beyond—are equally well represented.But what surprised me the most about Bangkok was the ubiquitous presence of Nepalis everywhere we went: we found them selling clothes on the Khao San Road, peddling juicy fruits on the Pratunum Market, waiting tables at Bangkok's favorite watering holes, and if we were interested, we were reliably informed, there were plenty of fetching Nepali women ready to welcome us at Patpong, the heart of the notorious Bangkok sex industry.
So it was perhaps fitting that the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) should be born in this most cosmopolitan of Asian cities. The Bangkok Declaration to this effect was signed on August 8, 1967 by five ASEAN founding members: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. (The club has since expanded to 10.) The reason for their coming together was their common search for strength in unity against what they saw as the growing menace of communism at the height of the Cold War. Communism, they believed, would batter their nascent economies and only by hitching their future with the capitalist United States would they be able to protect their long-term economic interests.
Compare this with the inauspicious beginning of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in 1985 on the rather vacuous planks of 'non-alignment' and 'Panchasheel'. Without a sworn enemy (like communism for ASEAN) meaningful regional cooperation in South Asia was always going to be difficult. There were other hurdles, too.
ASEAN had no one overbearing power with complete economic and military dominance over the rest. This was the case even after it was later expanded to include Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. In comparison, India, making up 70 percent of the South Asian landmass with comparable population size, was the undisputed elephant in the room in SAARC. India thus believed it had little to gain from greater engagement with the minions in the region. If anything, its small neighbors, India feared, could gang up against it through regional forums like SAARC.
So India at the outset insisted that all SAARC decisions be based on absolute consensus among member states. Since such consensus has proven elusive, SAARC has little to show for the 30 years of its existence. In contrast, ASEAN member states had from the start made capitalist economic growth the central plank of their unity. As the club expanded, they also realized that absolute consensus on important issues was impossible and so decided on what came to be known as the "ASEAN Way".
ASEAN Way recognizes the need for broad consensus but allows individual member states to remain neutral when important regional issues are being discussed. This built in flexibility has been a big boon for regional integration. Another significant difference is that while ASEAN allows discussion of bilateral issues at the regional forum, SAARC expressly forbids it. Since all important dealings in South Asia are bilateral in nature—and invariably involving India—without a forum to sort out these bilateral issues, the idea of regional cooperation became meaningless.
The only way SAARC could have worked, under these circumstances, was if India was ready to voluntarily forego some of its privileges. Inder Kumar Gujral tried when he became the Indian prime minister in 1997. He believed that as the preeminent regional power the onus was on India to make the first move.
Any economic loss for India resulting from opening up of its markets and greater movement of people in the region, in Gujral's reckoning, would be more than offset by the resulting peace and stability in the region which India could leverage to carve out a global role for itself. But Gujral's radical doctrine found few takers in the hidebound Indian bureaucracy and it died an untimely death when he left office a year later.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a promising start to his prime ministership when he invited all SAARC heads to his swearing-in. After his inaugural Nepal visit in August 2014, when he charmed Nepali politicians and commoners alike, many commentators had started seeing a bit of Gujral in Modi. But Indo-Nepal ties have since steadily deteriorated.
Modi is also making a mockery of his 'neighborhood first' policy as India's relations with Pakistan (with which it's trading fire on the border as I write this), Nepal (on which it has imposed an unjust economic embargo) and the Maldives (with its President recently telling the meddlesome Indians to mind their own business) have hit historic lows.
SAARC, which is headquartered in Kathmandu, has not spoken a word about the Indian bullying in Nepal. Many are starting to question the relevance of SAARC if it can't do anything to protect the interests of its less powerful members like Nepal and Maldives. During the next SAARC Summit in Pakistan, slated for 2016, India will have a hard time convincing other countries it is serious about meaningful regional partnership. Their ties with India iffy, Nepal and Pakistan, if not other SAARC members, are also sure to make a case for greater Chinese involvement in the region, something New Delhi wants to avoid at all cost. Or does it?
If it did, it would perhaps not have pushed a strategically important ally like Nepal into China's open arms. For the first time in its history Nepal is no longer completely reliant on India for its fuel. If Chinese oil starts flowing in Kathmandu, other goods will, too, soon followed by CPC apparatchiks.
In Bangkok these days local newspapers extol the virtues of greater China-Thai partnership while the United States, the traditional ally, is increasingly looked upon with suspicion for the way it likes to lecture Thais about democracy and human rights. As Nepalis see that the biggest democracy in the world seldom practices what it preaches, they will also naturally look to deal with the strictly business-minded Chinese.
The troubles of Kathmandu seem puny from Bangkok, the capital of a country which, despite its perennially unstable polity, has been able to successfully reinvent itself as one of the most dynamic economies in Asia. Whatever its domestic troubles Thailand has benefitted a lot by embracing the ASEAN Way, making the country, in the words of the World Bank, "one of the great development success stories". Unfortunately, there is no comparable SAARC Way for Nepal to follow.
biswasbaral@gmail.com
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