More players in SAARC could mean increasing mistrust in the already divided South Asian bloc.

The 14th SAARC summit in New Delhi has ended on the usual hopeful note, with the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, saying that he felt "a new sense of purpose and determination" among the assembled member-nations whose number, incidentally, has been increased by the admission of Afghanistan in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. Among other things, Dr Singh said the summit had given him the hope that "we can live in peace and amity and the confidence that we can make SAARC work."

This is no doubt a happy note on which to conclude the summit, but the nagging point is that the situation on the ground, by way of promising more fruitful work, is perhaps not as rosy as the Prime Minister has made it out to be. Certainly, there is no harm in being optimistic about SAARC's future, but it would appear that — with an increase in the membership and the inclusion of, among others, China and Washington as observers — the chances of intra-regional cooperation getting a shot in the arm have in fact become weaker than before. This is not to underplay the importance of the decisions taken at the summit, such as the operationalising of the SAARC Development Fund, the establishment of the South Asian University, the creation of a food bank, and the setting up of an arbitration council. As building-blocks of closer regional cooperation, they no doubt have great value. But it is the undercurrent of a continuing `trust deficit' among the major players which is of utmost concern, made worse by the feeling that the mistrust is set to increase, not least because of the induction of Afghanistan (which has a strong line on terrorism, a touchy subject in SAARC's universe) and the grant of observer status to Washington and Beijing, both of which have select friends in the grouping. Indeed, the Chinese have raised eyebrows by getting quickly off the mark to make an impact within the association by announcing a couple of initiatives that may be a harbinger of things to come (not excluding a request for full membership).

A good antidote to this note of cynicism would have been the reporting of definite progress at the summit on the implementation of the South Asian Free Trade Area, with Islamabad agreeing to extend the Most-Favoured Nation status to India and scrapping its positive list approach to bilateral trade. Not only did this not happen, Pakistan hardened its stand by linking trade with the resolution of the Kashmir dispute. The 14th summit's exhortation of moving SAARC from the "declaratory to (the) implementation phase" (after 22 years of the association's founding) should be seen against this background, the suggestion being that the task could become even more difficult now with new fingers in the SAARC pie.

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