Re-thinking Our Borders

Saood Qaseem

Imag­ine the idea of the Euro­pean Union tak­ing root in the Indi­an Sub­con­ti­nent — a place where peo­ple could move freely across bor­ders with min­i­mal hin­drance. How it would alter the lives of the peo­ple who belong to this region; peo­ple who already share so much in terms of cul­ture, lan­guages and his­to­ry. Thou­sands of fam­i­lies that are cur­rent­ly scat­tered across bor­ders could have access to their rel­a­tives with­out fret­ting about ‘offi­cial’ per­mis­sions. The time and resources that this would save could be allo­cat­ed so much more use­ful­ly in oth­er areas.

An open bor­der would also encour­age free trade agree­ments which, in turn, would enhance busi­ness vol­umes and har­vest greater prof­its. Pre­cious resources are cur­rent­ly being wast­ed in long-wind­ed bureau­crat­ic pro­ce­dures. Trade bar­ri­ers such as tar­iffs and embar­goes restrict trade vol­umes, caus­ing loss­es worth bil­lions of dol­lars to the coun­tries’ respec­tive economies. And so we have a sce­nario where the peo­ple of the Sub­con­ti­nent are hav­ing to source prod­ucts present in their own neigh­bour­hoods from around the world; a process that involves major car­bon emis­sions into the earth’s atmos­phere and is con­tribut­ing to glob­al warm­ing (cit­ed by experts as a major cause of the floods that rav­aged Pak­istan in 2010).

The com­bined pow­er of the mar­kets of India, Pak­istan and Bangladesh would far sur­pass Chi­na, giv­ing a bar­gain­ing advan­tage to these coun­tries and help in win­ning mul­ti-lat­er­al trade agree­ments. ‘Big is Beau­ti­ful’ still holds true for con­sumer mar­kets. A free flow would also cre­ate more jobs and increase per capi­ta income. Work­ers would not have to move to far-flung places in search of jobs — it would be as sim­ple as knock­ing on a neighbour’s door. The oppor­tu­ni­ty to exchange skills and ideas would only add to our col­lec­tive strength and would help us realise the syn­er­gies that are cur­rent­ly not being exploit­ed.
With all these obvi­ous ben­e­fits, it seems sense­less to be delib­er­ate­ly depriv­ing our­selves of options that would only make the qual­i­ty of life bet­ter for the peo­ple of our coun­try. The enor­mous amounts we cur­rent­ly spend on defence are crip­pling our abil­i­ty to move for­ward. And the insta­bil­i­ty we live with due to a con­stant threat of war or aggres­sion from our neigh­bours is keep­ing us from real­is­ing our true poten­tial. Yes, there is Kash­mir, and there is water, and there is a his­to­ry of sus­pi­cion, griev­ances and con­flict that can­not just be wished away. But build­ing trust has to start some­where, and where bet­ter to start than with direct inter­ac­tion between our peo­ple?

Giv­en the tur­bu­lent his­to­ry of our region, my thoughts may sound like fan­tasies to some. For long we have har­boured an atti­tude that deems the cur­rent sta­tus quo as the only avail­able option. But exam­ples from the rest of the world prove that a new era is in fact pos­si­ble. The Ger­mans and the French fought each oth­er just half a cen­tu­ry ago (World War II), but today they both belong to the Euro­pean Union. The dif­fer­ence in this exam­ple and our own real­i­ty is that France and Ger­many have realised what we have yet to accept:
‘War is a game where both sides lose’.