Relevance : GS Paper II
Theme of the Article
Routine meetings between leaders will liberate the Subcontinent from formalism of summits.
Informal diplomacy: India
- Five years ago, in 2014, PM Modi surprised the region and the world with his invite and spent the first day in office talking to the visiting leaders from the neighbourhood, including the eight South Asian countries as well as Mauritius.
- If it is repeated in 2019, it would make it a custom and an integral part of Delhi’s political renewal every five years.
- The purpose of having an open-house for leaders from the neighbourhood at the launch of a new government in Delhi is about informal diplomacy — of establishing or renewing personal contact, building mutual trust and generating the political will for resolving the multitude of problems that exist between neighbours.
- Beyond the formal visits, Modi found opportunities to drop by in the neighbourhood — to pray at the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu during 2014 and visiting Nawaz Sharif at his home outside Lahore on the occasion of his birthday at the end of 2015
Informal diplomacy: Other Nations
- Others in our neighbourhood too seem to like the idea. When he was sworn in as president of Maldives last November, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih invited the Indian PM to be present.
- Earlier in August 2018, when Imran Khan was taking charge as Pakistan’s Prime Minister, he toyed with the idea of emulating Modi by inviting foreign leaders for his swearing in ceremony. But the proposal did not fly and Imran limited himself to inviting friends from India.
- There is also the tradition of South Asian leaders making unofficial visits to temples and dargahs in India.
Overcoming limitations of SAARC
- If PM Modi used the invitation in 2014 to signal his commitment to South Asian regionalism, he was also quick to see the limitations of SAARCat the Kathmandu summit in 2014 because Pakistan chose to pull out at the last stage.
- Since then Delhi has emphasised other multilateral mechanisms — including sub-regional cooperation between Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal and trans-regional cooperation in the east — the littoral of the Bay of Bengal including Burma and Thailand.
- PMModi also revived the bilateral engagement with countries like Sri Lanka.
Way forward
- The Subcontinent can do with more of this kind of engagement — leaders seeing each other on short notice for informal consultations or just watch a cricket match or join a social or spiritual occasion.
- Informal diplomacy in South Asia will make it easier for India to sustain high-level engagement with the neighbourhood, given the increasingly crowded formal diplomatic calendar of the PM.
- There is already speculation on the prospects of a meeting between Modi and Imran on the margins of the SCO summit in Central Asia next month. Is it not much simpler to meet Imran in Delhi next week rather than Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan at the end of June?
- If meetings with Pakistan’s leadership become routine and informal, Delhi will be able to prevent each encounter seem like a gladiatorial contest that must address all issues and produce joint statements, every word of which is analysed to death.
- While Pakistan is a special case, informal high level diplomacy could also help liberate the region from the stuffy and unproductive formalism of the SAARC.
Conclusion
Rather than pray for the success of SAARC, the new government in Delhi should double down on informal diplomacy that could help pave the way for more purposeful regional cooperation — both bilateral and multilateral.
