By IANS
New Delhi : Lamenting lack of sufficient political will to infuse momentum in India-Bangladesh cooperation, Vice-President Hamid Ansari Monday called for an alternate approach to achieve inter-state cooperation.
“We have to admit that the traditional paradigm of politics and security has reached an impasse. The imperative of survival calls for an alternate approach. Would participants in this seminar respond to the challenge – for the common good of the people of Bangladesh and India?” queried Ansari inaugurating a seminar on “Politics and Security” being held as part of Indo-Bangladesh dialogue.
At the 14th SAARC summit held in New Delhi in April, leaders of the grouping agreed to build a partnership for prosperity and work towards shared economic cooperation and equitable distribution of benefits and opportunities of integration among the peoples and the nations, Ansari said.
“Despite these, and other official proclamations, and considerable civil society pressure and persuasion, the honest truth is that institutional structures and systemic constraints come in the way of their realization,” he said.
“Our delivery mechanisms remain a major impediment.”
At the inter-state level, as many as 40 instrumentalities exist for dialogue between India and Bangladesh on matters that are of common concern and depend for success on inter-state cooperation, said Ansari.
“The missing element in these is sufficient political will. How to infuse this into the dialogue?”
In Ansari’s reckoning, there needed to be fresh thinking and new approaches to the problem.
“For long, much too long, the paradigm of security and politics has been state-centric. The state was at the centre of the discourse. All politics revolved around it and was judged in terms of the interests of the state as defined by the wielders of state power. Experience, however, demonstrated the limitations of this approach,” he said.
“Today, sheer necessity has propelled thinking to bring into focus two new paradigms of politics and security – the first, at the sub-national and micro-level, is the concept of human security; the second, at the supra-national and macro level, is the quest for solutions to problems of human security that transcend national boundaries and thus necessitate regional cooperation and structures imperative for its realization,” said Ansari.