When the dust settles and the photo-ops are past, it may well be that a statement issued by a group of young people who gathered in Colombo on July 25th is the most sensible long term vision that came out of last week’s kerfuffle and traffic commotion. SAARC is undoubtedly important; the imperative of regional cooperation, economic cooperation in particular, has become inescapable. The dynamics of global change makes each regional forum more significant than the one preceding; thus, this month’s 15th SAARC is the most important thus far. However, old people’s SAARC of national leaders and foreign ministers, is, after all, a bit jaded, isn’t it? Déjà vu, we have heard it all, haven’t we?

I cannot vouch for the credentials of SUNFO (SL United Nations Friendship Organisation) nor do I know anything more than what the newspaper reported of the Youth Meeting that SUNFO conducted in Colombo on July 25. The report writer (Dr Baptist Croos) even fails to update his readers on the most significant logistic - was there international (that is SAARC) participation in the youth meeting? Nevertheless, the declaration that was adopted at the meeting (page V of a special supplement accompanying the Island of August 2) drives home the truth that the young minds are less cluttered than old.

Connectivity

Manmohan Singh has championed connectivity for the next phase of South Asia’s progress. Connectivity takes various forms, first physical connectivity; roads and railways, border crossing facilities, communication networks and electric cables; then economic cooperation including trade, investment and free movement for employment. Connectivity also means freer availability of services across the border, especially access to education and health care; Cuban doctors are doing a wonderful job in Venezuela and Bolivia; better off people not only from the West but also from Asian destinations are cashing in on India’s advanced facilities in medical tourism.

The Youth meeting took these thoughts to its rational conclusion. The forum envisioned "The establishment of a common education policy to be met by all SAARC members which will set common minimum standards". This is a far sighted and commendable proposal and the best place to make a start is in the technological, medical and pure sciences. Free cross border movement for employment will not be meaningful unless it is pioneered by educated youth – shipping housemaids and unskilled labour around is hardly the objective – and this is not feasible without mutual recognition of education and training qualifications. Furthermore, the appreciation of both the commonality and plurality of knowledge will be the battering ram to break down intellectual insularity and debunk the counterfeit of hollow nationalism.

I think the third and fourth paragraphs in the youth declaration are worth reproducing in full. Let me quote in turn.

" 3. The establishment of a common market for the South Asian region, where not only free trade of good takes place, but also where services, capital and people are able to move freely within the region in order to exploit economic potential and contribute to regional economic development. We propose the strengthening of existing institutional frameworks, such as the South Asian Free Trade Agreement and encourage the establishment of a Common Economic Partnership Area in the area as an initial platform for the creation of a Common Market".

Closer European cooperation from simple concept (1950), to European Economic Community (1958), to European Union (1992), leading to a 27 nation single market and a partial common currency in the mid 1990s, took nearly 45 years, and the project is still far from complete. In any such enterprise hurdles have to be cleared and difficulties of individual nations ironed out; witness for example the inability of India and Lanka to get CEPA signed by Singh and Rajapakse on the sidelines of the SAARC meeting as originally planned. The yawning difference in the size of the eight SAARC countries from elephantine India to sprat sized Maldives, dictates a careful phase-wise approach. But unless a start is made now a SAARC common market cannot be achieved even within 20 years, which, surely, is the furthest acceptable timeframe. However, as Muttukrishana Sarvananthan points in a special report in The Nation (economics supplement) of 3 August, implicitly endorsing the youth declaration, up to now the failure of SAARC has been that it is more about political posturing than a workmanlike approach to economic coordination and integration.

Connectivity and language

The fourth point in the statement did take me by surprise though I have no hesitation in endorsing it.

"4. The recognition of a common or link-language in order to effectively communicate within the region, to maximise regional integration and mutual understanding".

Youth is bold enough to say the obvious with bland certainty. Imagine a congress of old fogies faced with this proposition. It will recoil in terror of pestilential Mahabaratha, Mahavamsa types and their ignoble regional counterparts, who would wield a chauvinist or Hindutva carving knife shrieking: ‘Treachery! Stooges of the colonial master!" Young people, of course, have the courage to show this lot the finger, pointed vertically upwards.

The link-language arrangement is statutorily in place in India. States can communicate with the centre in their own language, in Hindi or in English. The first two options are window dressing, except for the cow-belt Hindi speaking region. English is India’s formal Centre-State link language, its near universal medium of higher education and its communication link with the outside world. Whisky sipping, chain smoking Mohammed Ali Jinnah was a thoroughbred modernist and something of this has remained in the ethos of Pakistan’s educated classes. Neither Pakistan’s regional currents nor its Islamic ideology, turned anti-English in the way that Lanka’s dim-witted nationalists did. If the Chinese, the Thais and all Asia’s flotsam can make progress with English, what can’t South Asia with its head start do in growing English into a flourishing link-language?

The only way out for Lanka

My unchanging refrain these days is that this country will never overcome its economic shortcomings nor solve its national question within its own parameters and borders. The Indian economy has entered into a phase of sustained growth sometimes called "take-off". This is structural, meaning, emergence of a strong manufacturing sector, rising productivity and advancing technology, high rates of saving and investment, deepening financial markets, strong international trade and investment relationships, and improving education and English language skills. Lanka has missed this boat, now its too late, the global boat has left port and steamed away; we cannot pull ourselves up by our bootstraps at this late stage. The way out for this country is to latch on to the region and to India. Not simple minded integration but a phased and sustained programme for increasing economic and social interaction.

The primary lesson of the last sixty years for this war ravaged and ethnically suicidal country is that we are incapable of breaking out of our ethnic imbroglio, of solving the national question, on our own. If we could we would have done. Pointing at SWRD, JR, the 1972 and 1978 Constitutions, the burning of the Jaffna Public Library, the 1983 pogroms, Prabaharan, the LTTE, is missing the wood for the trees. These individuals and events are but the manifestations, the epiphenomena. But what is the reality? It is a meta-historical impotency to consolidate the nation state. To cut this Gordian Knot we have to turn and go another way.