In Asia's Season Of Summits, India Can Make Unique Contributions

It's easy to understand why and how so many Asian institutions have taken form, not function, as their touchstone. Take the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. ASEAN’s members have historically lacked mutual trust for many reasons. So putting form first was not an alternative to putting some useful function first, but an important alternative to the member states’ continued near isolation, including from one another. Ritual, frequent meetings and an emphasis on form helped ASEAN countries, particularly the original six, become comfortable with one another and familiar with nearby leaders.

But forty years have passed since ASEAN was founded. And many of the other Asian groups that India has joined - or seeks to join - have already existed for decades.

When that much time has passed, the bar rises to produce functional results.

Just take the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which India is now set to join alongside Pakistan and Mongolia. Despite boasting the word “cooperation” in its name, the group’s six members have in practice found cooperation enormously difficult and regional rivalries abound.

In Central Asia, independence erected international borders where none had existed. It divided families and communities, and separated water from farmers and fields. In the Soviet period, settling disputes was easy. The disputants could simply look to Moscow to decide by administrative fiat. But independent Central Asian governments, no longer able to rely on Soviet diktat, have been forced to negotiate complex intergovernmental agreements on everything - from crossing a border to sharing water. And in most cases, they have failed utterly to reach effective, much less durable, agreements.

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