India to take trade barriers Maldives, Bangladesh, Afahanistan and Nepal.

After decades of acting as the big bully of South Asia, India is now taking a good hard look at its neighbourhood policy and is doing a much needed course correction. This was evident during the SAARC summit, when New Delhi unilaterally announced lifting of all trade barriers for the least developed countries of the region, like Bangladesh, Maldives, Afghanistan and Nepal. India also announced visa free entry for students, patients and scholars from SAARC member states.

All these could have been unthinkable a few years back. This created much bad blood in business and official circles in Dhaka. In forums like SAARC, India always found one or the other of its neighbours ganging together against it. For decades, New Delhi had focussed on ties with either Russia and the Communist bloc or the US and Europe.

In a major speech at the Observer Research Foundation on Tuesday, Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon set out the broad parameters of India’s new outlook.

“The first area of focus for our foreign policy is naturally our neighbourhood, for unless we have a peaceful and prosperous periphery we will not be able to focus on our primary tasks of socio-economic development. We must, therefore, accord the highest priority to closer political, economic and cultural ties with our neighbours and are committed to building strong and enduring partnerships with all our neighbours,” he said.

India’s neighbours will be delighted with this new thinking. Over and above political and cultural links is New Delhi’s insistence in forging strong economic links with the region. “The hope must be that as our engagement with each of neighbours increases, the value of our bilateral linkages will outweigh the attractions of sterile confrontation,” Menon said.

Source: DNA