Maintaining that the experience of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was not encouraging, Vice-President M Hamid Ansari said here on Wednesday that the proposed new structure would have to be voluntary and devoid of overt or covert coercion and it would have to be accommodative.
Speaking at a function after releasing the book August Voices: What they said on 14-15 August 1947 authored by Sudheendra Kulkarni, Ansari said, “The practical approach (to the possibility of a South Asian Union) would be to make haste slowly, to be accommodative rather than exclusionary so that negative perceptions are allowed to fade away.”
Dwelling specifically on means to resolve the pending issues between India and Pakistan, Ansari said, “Political commitment and modalities have to surface to resolve outstanding areas of disagreement. Foremost amongst these is what the Simla Agreement of 1972 called ‘a final settlement of Jammu and Kashmir’. Its domestic dimensions, as well as the trans-lOC incursions, have been in the news of late”.
“The State is doing all that is necessary to confront and repel terrorism. The State also has a duty to ensure that the rights and dignity of our citizens in the State are respected and ensured and shortcomings effectively addressed. Alienation of any segment of the citizen body within our land does not contribute to the overall health of the Republic,” Ansari said.
lamenting that the experience of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was not encouraging, the Vice President said, “The proposed new structure would have to be voluntary and devoid of overt or covert coercion. There may be lessons to be learnt from other regional organisations”.
Alluding to the theme of the book that is the possibility of the formation of a South Asian Union with the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh Confederation at the core, Ansari said that the author in effect laid focus on the “possibility and desirability of an India-Pakistan rapprochement”.
“Our focus is on three nation-states of recent origin, of different sizes And capacities, differing versions of the past, conflicting ideologies and national security perceptions, but sharing geography, ecology and wider human security challenges,” the vice president said.
Dwelling upon the ‘cultural and spiritual confederation’ of the three-nation States proposed by Kulkarni, Ansari said, “Idealism, however lofty, has to be tempered with realism. Common action is easier done on areas of convergence than of divergence. This convergence is to be sought by moving beyond the traditional paradigm of conventional security into those of human security and human wrong.
“Both (human security and human wrong) are ignored by the governments and societies in our region; there is a crying need for the recognition and implementation of both. Only then would we develop the perception and capacity for correctives,” he said.
The vice president called for regional co-operation with a focus on human security problems, on movement of people and on trade without unreasonable restrictions. “The common traits in cultural traditions and historical narratives needs to be transmitted to a younger generation through conscious promotion rather than studied prevention of cultural exchanges, films, and other cultural activities,” he said.
Kulkarni’s book explores what eight eminent personalities from the era of the freedom struggle–Mahatma Gandhi Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Maharshi Aurobindo, Swami Ranganathananda, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Anand Coomaraswamy-said, wrote or did on 14-15 August 1947.
The author also offers suggestions about how negative outcomes of partitions could be overcome through compromised based solutions, provided Pakistan eliminates the scourge of terrorism.