South Asia’s political origins are in a little-remembered Summit: a forgetfulness ripened by nomenclatural confusions. This was in the early 1950s. Regions hadn’t yet coalesced into certainties. South Asia was then understood to be part of the broader Southeast Asian region, so the official title was: ‘Southeast Asian Prime Ministers’ Conference’, held in Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was called then) from 28 April to 2 May 1954. Less cumbersomely, it was called the Colombo Conference. Although a purist would frown that after spending the first three days in the tropical, coastal heat of Colombo, the participants journeyed inland to the cooler hills of Kandy, from where a final communique was issued. Attended by the premiers of Ceylon, Burma (now Myanmar), Pakistan, India and Indonesia, this Conference strove to lay the basis for periodic regional summits.
1954 was an eventful year for Southeast Asia. Hopes for regional peace were raised by the Geneva Accords on Indochina, which brought to an end, temporarily, the war between the French Indochina empire, backed by the United States, and Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, aided by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These hopes nosedived as drastically, however, with the founding of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) in Manila, which undermined the agreements reached at Geneva. The testy China-America relationship – or lack thereof – kept the world tethering on a nuclear brink. Amidst this, the ‘Colombo Group’ – a group of independent, democratic countries within the smaller South Asian region – briefly dazzled as the sane voice of moderation in world affairs. This piece focuses on retrieving the discussions that led to the formation of this group.
