Maldives’ plea to restart South Asian bloc hits India-Pakistan brick wall

The Maldives recently called to revive a South Asian grouping, which has been suspended for over a decade. But given the tensions between two of the most influential countries in that region – India and Pakistan – that request is likely to go unheeded, according to observers. Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu said on July 26 that his country was ready to help resume the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) meetings. The last one was held 12 years ago. Describing the bloc as an important regional organisation, Muizzu said reviving it was essential for peace and stability in the region. “The Maldives stands ready to serve as a mediator” to get Saarc member states to return to the negotiating table, he said. Tarique Rahman’s government in Bangladesh issued a similar call last month, saying the bloc’s revival was a core foreign policy priority. Dhaka argued that revitalising the Saarc would unlock untapped economic potential, boost regional connectivity and address shared transnational challenges. Saarc comprises India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. Shafi Md Mostofa, an associate professor at the University of Dhaka, said the primary obstacle to reviving Saarc remained the India-Pakistan deadlock. “For any meaningful revival, both countries must perceive strategic incentives to re-engage. At present, India appears to have limited political incentive to do so.” New Delhi currently places a strong emphasis on national security and views Islamabad as a “persistent security challenge”, according to Shafi. “A major policy shift towards normalisation could carry domestic political costs, making a revival of Saarc unlikely in the near term.” Family fights The last Saarc summit was held in Nepal’s Kathmandu in 2014 while the next was set to be held in Pakistan two years later. That was cancelled after India boycotted it following a deadly terrorist attack in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir, which Delhi blamed on Islamabad. Pakistan, and not India, is the culprit behind Saarc’s collapse, according to Delhi. External Affairs Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said at a briefing last month that everyone in South Asia was aware which country was responsible for stymieing Saarc, stressing that regional cooperation required goodwill. India’s reluctance in reviving the bloc was “quite obvious”, said Aditya Gowdara Shivamurthy, an associate fellow with the Strategic Studies Programme’s Neighbourhood Studies Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation. “With the nature of bilateral relations and India’s policies to isolate Pakistan, terror and talks cannot go hand in hand,” he said. Last year’s Operation Sindoor was proof of this breakdown in relations, Shivamurthy said. India conducted a four-day military campaign against targets in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir last May in response to a terrorist attack that killed 26 civilians in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir. In the aftermath, India expelled Pakistani diplomats and withdrew its own envoys from Islamabad, cancelled the issuing of visas, and imposed a strict travel ban on Pakistani nationals wishing to enter India. “While the number of countries asking for Saarc’s revival has definitely increased, it is unlikely to take off,” Shivamurthy said. “That would need a significant and immediate structural shift in the world order, or an improvement in India-Pakistan ties.” Over the past decade, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Nepal have spoken about the bloc’s revival, arguing that doing so would foster broader regional trade, energy, and climate cooperation. Instead of Saarc, India has relied on other regional forums that do not include Pakistan – such as the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, and the Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal Initiative. More recently, India turned to the Colombo Security Conclave (CSC), a regional security grouping of Indian Ocean nations focusing on maritime safety, countering terrorism and disaster relief. The group is made up of India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Mauritius, Bangladesh and Seychelles. “However, all of them have had their own limitations, and the progress has been slow,” Shivamurthy said. India’s approach was to double down on bilateral cooperation, he added. These include promoting energy as well as rail and road connectivity between Bhutan, Bangladesh and Nepal, and integrating Sri Lanka’s energy grid with these countries. ‘A mistake’ Saarc’s “paralysis” reflected how unresolved historical and geopolitical divisions continued to shape South Asian regionalism, Shafi said. The India-Pakistan rivalry, rooted in the colonial partition and its enduring political legacy, has prevented the development of regional institutions that can function independently of bilateral disputes. “Unlike Asean, South Asia has struggled to separate political conflicts from functional regional cooperation,” he said. The main reason why Saarc had failed to develop itself as a regional institution was that members looked beyond South Asia and India for their identity, said Balaji Chandramohan, a research scholar with the University of Madras. “This is a mistake.” With India accounting for roughly 80 per cent of the region’s GDP and sharing land borders with almost every other member, smaller states and Pakistan have long sought external counterweights. Under its “look west” policy, Islamabad has anchored its identity within the Islamic nations of the Middle East and Central Asia. Nations such as Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives have also welcomed China as a critical extra-regional anchor and signed on to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India’s engagement with regional multilateralism had increased, Chandramohan said. Some of the new groupings Delhi has joined include the Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation, India-Central Asia Dialogue and the India-CARICOM, an economic and political grouping of 15 island and coastal nations in the Caribbean. “Other Saarc countries might take a leaf out of the initiatives,” he said.

Maldives’ plea to restart South Asian bloc hits India-Pakistan brick wall

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Calls for reviving Saarc are likely to fall on deaf ears as long as the two neighbours are at loggerheads, analysts say

Calls for reviving Saarc are likely to fall on deaf ears as long as the two neighbours are at loggerheads, analysts say