South Asia's dictatorships are becoming par for the course

South Asia's summiteers have been saying nice things to each other for so long that the presence, for the first time in 22 years, of five outsiders - China, Japan, the US, the European Union and South Korea - at their 14th summit in New Delhi last week both startled and breathed new life into the conference. Clearly, China's Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing, representing Asia's greatest success story, was the star of the show. And there was nothing modest about his speech. Li offered workshops for South Asian diplomats in diplomacy and offered to establish a mechanism for poverty alleviation in these nations.

Truth is, even before it came to the conference, China had already organised a workshop for South Asian diplomats on diplomacy in Beijing.

In Delhi, too, Li was completely unabashed about projecting great power status. Clearly, too, his confidence came from China's runaway economy. What better way to gently rub it in than to offer South Asia, among the poorest regions in the world, lessons on poverty alleviation?

Certainly, New Delhi couldn't have been pleased with the offer, even if it has never been India's style to openly disagree with the opposition. In fact, India's diffidence about rejecting the Chinese offer to teach it, the world's biggest democracy, can only be contrasted with the supreme confidence of the Chinese in making the offer.

Assertiveness

The Chinese assertiveness can also be contrasted with the complete absence of impact one other observer, the US, made at the summit. The South Asian foreign ministers had decided that only those observers who were being represented at the foreign minister level would be allowed to make a speech. Since America was represented by Richard Boucher, only an assistant secretary of state in the State Department, he wasn't allowed to get on to the stage.

Not that Boucher's presence did not make a difference. The fact that he was there, as was Foreign Minister Taro Aso of Japan, made it clear to the Chinese that India had two big friends in the region.

The Japanese, much more subdued, were also hardly going to be left behind. Aso offered certain sums of money to improve the abysmal state of infrastructure in the region, and thereby connectivity with each other - the theme for the summit - as well as disaster preparedness, especially in earthquake prone areas. Aso said Tokyo was working on an initiative that would advance the "arc of prosperity", and said he hoped cooperation with the South Asian nations would be in "line with this". In his view, South Asia as a region was now more stable than ever.

With Japan already part of America's economic and nuclear umbrella, and India currently in the act of negotiating a nuclear agreement with the US, the troika of India, Japan and the US is easily understood.

The Chinese interest in getting a stronger foothold into South Asia is also clear. In keeping with its special relationship with Pakistan, the Chinese built the Gwadar deep-water port in Balochistan a few weeks ago. On India's east, Beijing already has a listening post in the Coco Islands, close to the Andamans, while it seeks to expand its influence in both Myanmar and Bangladesh. And yet, the heart of South Asia, India, has already been taken by the Americans. Clearly, a new great game for influence in this region is on the cards.

So much so that both Russia and Central Asia are believed to have shown interest in becoming members of this regional association. Iran was admitted this year and will begin to participate from next year. When that happens, this summit will become the only place where the US and Teheran will publicly sit together inside the same hall.

So is South Asia coming of age? What with Afghanistan having returned to its South Asian roots, Kabul is once again astride a confluence of civilisations, between South and Central Asia. Problem is Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai remains such a weak leader, and Afghanistan so unstable, that the presence of Afghanistan only adds another element of uncertainty to the organisation.

Still, with the return of Afghanistan to the fold, some of the attention from the India-Pakistan bilateral could easily get competition from the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship. While Pakistan's Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz publicly linked Kashmir to improvement in relations with India, Karzai did not hide his displeasure over Pakistan aiding and abetting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan.

Perhaps the summit really belonged to Bangladesh, whose caretaker head, Fakhruddin Ahmad, came to New Delhi. With the army in control in Bangladesh, Ahmad's government has been using a big, strong broom to uncover some of the messiest scandals of the recent past. So far the people at home are applauding - as was India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during his meeting with Ahmad.

The fact that South Asia's dictatorships are becoming par for the course must be the moral of this summit's story. Maldives, Pakistan and Bangladesh are recreating their own brands of democracy. China, meanwhile, is teaching the region the ultimate lesson in realism: It doesn't matter what you believe in, as long as you have the power to defend it.

Jyoti Malhotra is the Diplomatic Editor of The Telegraph newspaper, India.