For the first four days of July this year, I was in Larnaka, on the island of Cyprus, observing a dialogue on interfaith issues between representatives of Asian and European countries. The group is called the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), to which none of the Southasian countries belongs. I also participated in a journalists' colloquium on media and interfaith issues hosted by the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) to coincide with the ASEM dialogue. In what can perhaps be seen as a reflection on the state of interfaith relations today, the ASEM dialogue collapsed, with the so-called Larnaka Declaration failing to achieve consensus among member states. Next year, the dialogue will be held in China, but it is not clear what document future participants will work from or build upon.
Even for an Indian, coming from a country rife with interfaith conflict, watching the Larnaka summit unfold and then fall apart was difficult. I was disturbed by the inability of states to manage or mediate the differences, prejudices and disagreements between the communities of faith – some of which are responsible for much of the violence in our world today. The small group of journalists brought to Cyprus by ASEF, an organisation based in Singapore, had a rich and productive conversation in a closed-door meeting on the sidelines of the ASEM event. But the diplomats, ministers and religious leaders participating in the formal inter-governmental dialogue could not so much as draft a two-page statement reflecting some common ground on how to lessen conflict, promote democracy and protect civil liberties in many countries of Eurasia.
Cyprus itself is not exactly a model of Christian-Muslim communal integration. Malaysia, this year's co-host, has its own trouble dealing with the mismatch between a booming economy and a still-conservative society that treats women, non-Muslims and immigrant populations unequally. Next year's host, China, is a country that takes the maximum economic advantage of globalisation, but leaves much to be desired in terms of how it manages internal divisions of religion, class, language and ethnicity. A certain lack of strong leadership on interfaith issues from any of these countries was perhaps to be expected. But that they would fail to steer the ASEM dialogue to any conclusion at all came as something of a shock – especially to the invitee journalists, who found a way to argue without anger, and managed to hammer out a statement of their own that reflected the concerns of the group.
Clarity from without