India and SAARC

India and SAARC

India and SAARC

Introduction

On December 8, 1985, the first regional organization of southern Asia, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), was born. It included India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Maldives and Bhutan. It was a bold gamble in an area facing many internal conflicts. The two principal members, India and Pakistan, had already clashed three times in 1947-1948, 1964 and 1971. This organization, which covers almost one and a half billion citizens, gave her a goal to be the ASEAN West and tried to exist mainly through trade agreements and cultural exchanges. However, SAARC, whose birth had been given by the leader of Bangladesh Zia-ur Rahman, whose headquarters are in Kathmandu in Nepal, does not adequately recognize the place now occupied by India in the region and certainly in Asia and the world. Indo-Pakistani tensions, due to disputes over Kashmir since 1989, clashes between the two countries in Kargil in 1999 and most recently international terrorism, the war between the Sri Lankan army and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) since 1983 and the decade of guerrilla war in Nepal (1996 to 2006), prevented a real regional cooperation. French geographer F. Landy and the Indian economist B. Chaudhuri refuse to see the pillar in the Saarc a real regional cooperation. They emphasize the disagreements that animate the South Asia and prefer to talk about the Saarc a series of "assemblages continental".

The base population of Asian Indians, from Thailand to Fiji, is still composed of descendants of coolies, joined gradually in the early twentieth century by Indian "free", mainly traders, and reinforced in recent decades by professionals and students. Especially with Africa and the Caribbean, Asia was the main destination of coolies sent to work on plantations. Most of them are from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Muslims are numerous among them, while the "passenger Indians" (Indians "free", that is to say the migrants who left India on their own outside the system of indentured labor) are mostly Sikhs, Hindus Sindhis, Gujaratis Hindus and Muslims. In Malaysia, the most important flows back to the years 1911-1930, but the expropriations that followed independence in 1948 and the military coup of 1962 led to an exodus. The descendants of indentured laborers, fortified since their arrival, left the country, where are the Indians remained the poorest. In this country, Indians are now a significant political weight, because of their lack of social and financial capital even as the 1,665,000 persons of Indian origin represent 7.3% of the population Total.

Today, countries that are the most scored by the indenture are Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Mauritius and Fiji, where much of the current population is of Indian origin. This story serves as a common base with the Look East Policy (the policy of looking to the East, introduced in the 1990s). The participation of India in the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation(IOR-ARC), an association for the development of trade relations founded in 1995 ...