Such charming simplicity!

SAARC came into existence in 1985, at a time when there were no visionaries left among the political class of the Subcontinent. That is itself eloquent testimony to the irrelevance of the project as it was envisaged then, because when Southasia did have statesmen of vision, none of them suggested a regional arrangement of this kind. Clearly, they had enough acumen not to succumb to the delusion that such a thing would work in an acrimonious neighbourhood. The people of municipal competence who followed, rushed in to do what better men had disdained, and SAARC was born.

The beast was born dead, but feigned life. The pretence of being alive was sustained by various equally stillborn attempts to show signs of life. The most impressive of its achievements so far was SAPTA, which was unveiled in 1993 as a South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement. SAPTA stood still for so long that it resembled a mystic in an inscrutable trance. It failed comprehensively to generate a preference for each other's goods and the quantum of trade within SAARC countries remained more or less static. As the successive attempts at regional co-operation failed, more and more grandiose schemes for intensifying economic integration were proposed, culminating, at the recently concluded SAARC summit, in the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA). But even before SAFTA was discussed at the summit came the quirky proposal to introduce a common currency in Southasia.