On a visit this month to Dhaka, Bangladesh, Pakistani Foreign Minister ishaq Dar reiterated his government’s interest in forging a new regional organization that included Bangladesh, china, and Pakistan.the idea was first discussed during a trilateral meeting in Kunming, China, in June. If it materialized, the proposed grouping would sidestep the all-but-moribund South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
The brainchild of former Bangladeshi President Ziaur Rahman, SAARC was created in Dhaka in 1985 with the aim of fostering regional cooperation. The organization was partly styled after the successful Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Its original members were Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka; Afghanistan joined in 2007.
Despite joining SAARC, India was an early skeptic. The leadership in New Delhi feared that smaller states would use the new institution to gang up against the region’s principal power. India ensured that the organization’s charter asserted that “bilateral and contentious issues” would remain outside its remit. Nevertheless, over the years, policymakers from India and Pakistan held informal meetings on the sidelines of SAARC summits that helped ameliorate tensions.Unfortunately, for most of the last decade, SAARC has not provided a venue for such discussions and has become mostly defunct. The organization held its last summit in 2014 in Kathmandu,home of the SAARC Secretariat. The next meeting was scheduled for 2016 in islamabad, but it was called off after a terrorist attack in India caused a few members to pull out.
As then, the organization has been in the doldrums-mostly held hostage by the steady deterioration of India-Pakistan relations.And in recent years, India’s ties with Bangladesh and China have also taken a turn for the worse, leaving it with nettlesome neighbors on three sides and further shifting regional dynamics.
This year, a series of terrorist attacks on Indian soil attributed
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