While much of South America continues to wrassle over whether free trade is of any benefit to them, Asian giant India – once an inward-looking, narrowly nationalistic state – has now called for a free trade pact for South Asia – or, SAFTA.

What a democratic revolution, given what India was in, say, 1970!

With perfect intellectual clarity, India’s prime minister has stated the facts on NAFTA, CAFTA and all the other recent trade agreements, citing a slew of data, from how third-country factories go up in free trade states, to statistics about the tripling of trade – and wholeheartedly he understands what it’s all about.

As a result, he calls for a free trade area of all the South Asian states – like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Maldives – into one great free trading zone that will bring peace, prosperity and sanity to one of the world’s poorest and most volatile regions. Already, some preliminary talks are happening. In short, India’s prime minister gets it.

Not for nothing is India becoming a regional economic powerhouse that inspires awe for its rapidly realizing potential. A vast new middle class is being created and it’s being noted all over the world.

Sadly, Asia is eating Latin America’s lunch as the latter hunkers down into leftist isolationism, its economies shriveling. As Pedro Burelli has notes, Latin America ten years ago accounted for 10% of world GDP. Today, it accounts for 4.5%, a direct result of its refusal to face free markets, and its wholesale rejection of changes of the 1990s as ‘neoliberalism.’ The reality is, the flawed advances toward markets that Latam achieved in the 1990s should be reformed, not scrapped.

Rising India is not making this mistake. iViva India!

UPDATE: Global Voices has an absolutely terrific blogger roundup here.