Bishnu Pokharel

April 25, 2015 catastrophic wave occurred in Himalayas of South Asia. The epicentre was some 80 kilometers away from Kathmandu, capital city of Nepal. After eight decades, earthquake with the magnitude of 7.6 shaken Nepal and claimed the life of 10 thousand people and rendered thousands of people homeless. Most of the countries of this sub-continent including Tibet have also experienced same super-wave.

Even though, existence of many borders, boundaries, restrictions, official procedures, barriers and blocking, nobody could control that super natural wave to enter their territory.

The wave occurred with the epicentre Barapak village of Gorkha Nepal and it was felt at Bay of Bengal in South and Tibet in North. Even Mount Everest couldn’t be the exception of this tremor. The powerful and devastating wave came from deep of earth and didn’t take even single minute to destroy millions of infrastructures and thousands of human life. When that supra-natural wave occurred, all political boundaries have been collapsed. It didn’t care about strict visa and immigration rules. The interesting thing is that nobody dares to question the wave; though it had broken these immigration rules!

Comparing to Nepal, there has been less damaged of infrastructure and human life in India, Bangladesh and Tibet. But nobody deny that wave has crossed their strict borders and didn’t follow the ‘so called’ rules and regulations. These are very necessary for human beings when they try to cross any border.

When wave was moving from its epic centre, nobody demanded passport or visa with it! Everyone forgot about their strategic importance, diplomacy, core national interests and race of superpower. First, all states had started to think about their own people and infrastructure. When they realized that, there was not that much loss in their side, they started to think about others.

The small landlocked Himalayan nation Nepal has been massively affected by earthquake. Many countries urged for relief and assistance including neighbouring India, Pakistan and China. Assistance and relief activities started at Nepal, and everyone has taken it as pure humanitarian help. But some countries started conspiracy, competition and attempt to control sovereignty in the name of relief.

One may think, this is nothing more than jingoism and xenophobic paranoia, but certainly not. The debate on rescue and relief had been going along with issue of assistance and relief diplomacy at that time. Some international media analysed these incidents as ‘relief and rescue cold war’.

We saw ‘media war’ between India and China and India and Pakistan. We can easily feel the ‘media war’ but it is very difficult to understand what type of cold war was going on between these countries in the name of humanity. But, it was quit visible that two powerful member of South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) India and Pakistan tried to politicised this matter of relief and assistance. The relief and rescue was a humanitarian act, but unnecessary competition and show off was quite unnatural.

The question is, why some countries are doing such shameless and stupid act on the name of humanity? Everyone knows that these countries are powerful and influential member of SAARC but why they are too competitive for each other rather than having close cooperation to help?

SAARC has been characterised as failed regional organization and it doesn’t have effective impact on regional affairs. Activities of SAARC are not noticeable in grass root level and most of the population of South Asia don’t know about SAARC’s functions and importance. This is the bitter truth of South Asia. Officially SAARC is active but activities are overshadowed by the individual and bilateral interest of members. The evolution of SAARC started form suspicions and suspects between two powerful actors of this region India and Pakistan. Though, it was born as a regional organization and offered many things for cooperation but still not having capacity to minimize problems for the improvement on cooperation between member states is the lacuna of it.

The main conflict and confrontation between India and Pakistan is not allowing nations to come together in many areas of cooperation. Due to trust deficit SAARC region is not doing much trade inside region as two hostile neighbours India and Pakistan do not let any treaty to be signed. Therefore, we are only having less then than six percent of trade activities within the region.

In Every Summit, the speech given by the head of member countries   would focus on cooperation areas but after Summit no nation is showing any sort of enthusiasm for making their dream of cooperation come true.

According to the recent a news regarding 18th SAARC Summit held in Kathmandu last November, Pakistan is not ready to sign Motor Vehicles Agreement, where most of the member states have agreed in. The power politics of two nations is creating obstacle in cooperation.

We can smell the power politics of these two nations even in rescue and relief activities in Nepal. India and Pakistan are blamed by many for creating drama in rescue and relief activities. But the root cause of this relief war is the failure of SAARC and its components. There is no support and assistance provided by SAARC as a regional block, these are all the individual nations came up with their helping hands. SAARC as a regional organization didn’t even think of publishing a press release regarding deadly earthquake and didn’t realize to establish a relief fund.

Furthermore the SAARC Disaster Management Centre (SDMC) which established in 2006 is also not playing any role in disaster reduction and prevention. SDMC is functioning with very minimal resources. But, this earthquake has given message to all nations without cooperation individual state can’t cope with any disaster. Last week Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif telephoned Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and discussed about establishment of disaster management institution in SAARC.

This earthquake left the message that disaster doesn’t give any signal and it happens all of sudden. As we all know about reality of disaster why we are fighting with each other for nothing?

But the reality is, without political decisions and high level effort from all member countries SAARC can’t be successful. For making this regional bloc effective in every sphere all member countries have to take initiation and show their enthusiasm of ending their enmity to achieve the goal of SAARC. For minimizing risk of disaster and preventions all countries have to come together and make a permanent arrangement. It will be helpful for disaster risk redaction.

Note: This blog has written immediately after earthquake in Nepal so that there is some examples and statements may sound old.