Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s trip to Islamabad in January 2004 to attend a summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) hosted by Pakistan marked a powerful breakthrough in the recurrent India-Pakistan logjam. While regional cooperation was the backdrop, the bilateral importance of the visit more or less pushed everything else to the margins.

The summit went down in history, and even more so in popular perception, as one of the most successful ever. This was partly due to the decisions made during the event that pushed forward the regional cooperation agenda. However, the real reason was that regionalism in South Asia achieved one of its important, but generally unstated, objectives: advancing bilateralism. Much of this same sense had been invoked in December 1988 when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited Islamabad for a SAARC summit.

That a SAARC meeting had facilitated or at the very least had been the platform for an India-Pakistan breakthrough seemed to offer an additional, if unintended, benefit of the organisation’s existence.

The situation has changed a great deal since 2004. The last SAARC summit was held almost a decade ago in Kathmandu. Pakistan was meant to be the next to occupy the position of Chair and host the following summit. India-Pakistan differences have, however, meant a freeze on SAARC summitry and high-level meetings. The organisation continues more or less unchanged as a bureaucratic entity, and functional-level meetings and some activities take place. But in the absence of summit-level endorsements, it appears rudderless, devoid of ambition, and almost like an appendage whose best days are over.

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SAARC’s decade-long comatose condition has gone largely unlamented in India. For most people, the argument that Pakistan’s obstructionist approach towards India rendered SAARC largely ineffective as a mechanism for regional cooperation was logically acceptable. Their contention was, why expend efforts on SAARC when Pakistan’s objections—often raised for no conceivable reason except to stymie any Indian proposal and initiative—would outweigh arguments on merits because of the principle of decision-making by consensus. Added to this was the toxic bilateral relationship that makes even a multilateral or regional engagement with Pakistan a political liability.

BIMSTEC facing headwinds

Against this backdrop, BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation), whose ambit covers Nepal and Bhutan alongside Bangladesh and Sri Lanka from the SAARC countries, seemed to be a more suitable platform to pursue regional connectivity and economic cooperation. BIMSTEC was for long regarded in some circles as a rebound from SAARC, in the sense that India took an interest in BIMSTEC when the interface with SAARC became problematic. After 2016, it seemed to acquire a new relevance and energy as SAARC sank into inactivity.

BIMSTEC’s advantages were numerous. First, its focus was a geographical and topographical region: the Bay of Bengal. Second, it straddled South and South-East Asia, and the connectivity corridors across it were full of possibilities since they opened up transport networks into continental South-East Asia. Above all, connectivity with South-East Asia and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations)countries meant linking to a region that was more forward-looking in orientation than the north and north-west of the subcontinent with its numerous legacy issues and unresolved conflicts. Myanmar and Thailand as members meant that this South-East Asian and ASEAN flavour would be strong.

Yet BIMSTEC is increasingly facing headwinds, and its prospects are visibly eroding. This is for reasons not related to India’s or any other country’s foreign policy; it is largely on account of Myanmar’s internal dynamics since 2021. The intensification of the civil war there and the visible weakening of the country’s central government has meant that Myanmar’s role as a bridge between South and South-East Asia stands somewhat compromised. BIMSTEC connectivity projects will inevitably be impacted. The political flux in Bangladesh, and the fact that India-Bangladesh relations have entered a more uncertain and tentative phase, will also impact BIMSTEC’s overall functioning.

Quite apart from the deep slump in India-Pakistan relations that has impacted SAARC or the Myanmar dynamic that erodes BIMSTEC’s viability, there is a wider stress factor that South Asian regionalism has been subjected to: a cluster of geopolitical developments impacting different parts of South Asia. The return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan in August 2022 amidst a chaotic US withdrawal meant the overthrow of a two-decade-old governance architecture which had seen Afghanistan being admitted to SAARC as a full member in 2007. The universal non-recognition of the Taliban regime means that it is also excluded from SAARC meetings. Sri Lanka’s deep financial and political crisis of the first half of 2022 led to an overthrow of the government. The government in Bangladesh met a similar fate in August 2024. Additionally, there was a military coup in Myanmar in February 2021, and Pakistan witnessed a series of political upheavals in 2022-23. Each of these is a pointer to the wider crisis that has impacted South Asia in the COVID and immediate post-COVID phase.

For India, the shift of emphasis and attention away from SAARC and towards BIMSTEC was a conscious policy choice dictated largely by frustrations arising from the Pakistan interface. The challenges that BIMSTEC faces now could not have been anticipated, but the present situation implies that South Asia stands somewhat under-equipped to address issues of regional cooperation.

How should India view this pronounced trend of a decline in regionalism? From the mid-1980s, when SAARC was first envisioned and then established, a question much debated in India has been how to balance the emphasis between bilateralism and regionalism in its approach to South Asia.

There is a view, less significant now than in the 1980s but still there, that questions India’s investment in a regional approach, considering that the core of New Delhi’s neighbourhood policy is anchored in bilateralism. There is some substance to this view. In relations with Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, the scale of India’s bilateral investments far outweigh anything attempted through SAARC or BIMSTEC. Similarly, with Afghanistan in the first two decades of this century, bilateral commitments predominated, and the SAARC process and commitments were minuscule in comparison.

Alongside this there was, and sometimes still is, the argument that regional organisations have been a liability for India as they provide a platform for smaller neighbours to gang up and, if nothing else, embarrass New Delhi. Thus, the “why bother” approach has never completely died out; although it has led a subterranean existence, it has always had the potential to surface and be a force to reckon with.

Template of cooperation created by E.U. and ASEAN

The idea of regional cooperation gathered traction in the 1980s and 1990s. The evident successes of the European Union and ASEAN created a template and set a standard for South Asia that was too compelling to be ignored. An equally strong argument was that since the idea of South Asian regional cooperation had a wide acceptability in the region, it was desirable that India should be at the head of such initiatives.

This older debate has an obvious resonance in today’s context. With the founding of SAARC in 1985, India struck a balance in its policy about the neighbourhood: while pronounced bilateralism remained the core of its neighbourhood policy, it was supplemented by a regional approach. The regional narrative was popular, for obvious reasons, with the smaller neighbours. In howsoever limited a fashion, it also contributed to the idea of a South Asian fraternity.

A frozen SAARC process and BIMSTEC’s various headwinds mean that regionalism in South Asia is tottering. SAARC’s retreat into the shadows means that the narrative built around regional cooperation has weakened, and there is a vacuum building up around the concept. A vacuum means that there is potential for others to step in to fill it. China, for instance, has set up a China South Asia Forum—a low-key process, but the germ of a template for a new model for cooperation in South Asia that excludes India.

The China factor, apart from the crisis in South Asian regionalism, is problematic for India for other reasons. A regional narrative enables and facilitates bilateralism. Given the existing asymmetries in South Asia—of economy, political weight, and size—and considering how much they are weighted in favour of India, it is in India’s interest to constantly gauge how much a SAARC freeze has negatively impacted the smaller neighbours.

The issues that BIMSTEC will confront if the situation in Myanmar continues to deteriorate will be beyond the capacity of any policy toolkit that India may devise. Similarly, restoring some kind of balance in India-Bangladesh relations will take time and will be a function of some stability emerging in Bangladesh after the “Monsoon Revolution”. The internal flux in these two vital pillars of BIMSTEC raises many questions about the organisation’s effectiveness in the short and medium term.

With regard to SAARC, India has more options. The organisation’s retreat from active functioning is largely on account of India’s decision to stay away from the next summit that was to be held in Islamabad with Pakistan as Chair. To that extent India’s SAARC policy has become a subset of its Pakistan policy, and it may not be easy to separate the two, howsoever desirable that end goal may be. A rethink of this approach to SAARC would mean a clinical examination of India’s frustrations over Pakistan’s role in SAARC.

SAARC and the Pakistan factor

Pakistan’s approach to SAARC was, and is, premised to a large extent on the compulsion to resist any moves that could allow India to dominate the agenda. From this perspective, the next step of seeing every Indian or India-supported initiative as an advancement of New Delhi’s hegemony and, therefore, something to be postponed or blocked was inevitable. SAARC decision-making on the basis of consensus meant that delaying or blocking was a relatively easy, and invariably successful, tactic. Many SAARC meetings, even at times when India-Pakistan ties were on a relative upswing, were dominated by this approach. Quite apart from the slide in bilateral relations with Pakistan, such obstructionism and the success of Pakistan’s negative tactics contributed significantly to the growing Indian cynicism about SAARC.

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Is it possible and feasible for India to revisit its own approach and, if so, what could be the elements of a fresh perspective? Perhaps one lesson that can be applied from past experience is to keep South Asia’s asymmetries at the centre of the radar. The steep gap in bandwidth and capacities between India and its neighbours means that being extra conscious of their sensitivities is vital. A corollary to this is that India scale down its ambitions with regard to organisations such as SAARC and let smaller neighbours take the lead. India does not need to set the pace because it already has strong and vibrant bilateral tracks with all neighbours, barring Pakistan. The factors that make India the natural leader in South Asia are so powerful and so numerous that it need not work itself into a lather to demonstrate leadership. A more laid-back approach, in which India takes strong positions very selectively, may well make for a more productive policy mix, given the volatility of bilateral relationships in South Asia. All this may certainly imply a less ambitious and dynamic SAARC, but that is a better position for a regional organisation than being entirely dormant as it is today.

South Asia’s asymmetries are not unique. Neither is the cocktail of historical disputes and accumulated tensions that mark its politics. Fault lines similar to those that characterise South Asia today were seen in South-East Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. A question we in India should constantly pose to ourselves is why and how regional cooperation in South-East Asia through ASEAN has been so successful. What was the role that Indonesia played in ASEAN’s early years, notwithstanding all its differences and disputes with Malaysia and others? Perhaps the answers may reveal elements of a policy mix that could serve India as well.

T.C.A. Raghavan is former Indian High Commissioner to Singapore and Pakistan.