Manish Tewari |Kathmandu, Islamabad and a Decade of Silence

A forum that cannot meet cannot fail, but it cannot succeed either. New Delhi has never been more present in the world’s councils, and never more absent from the only table its own neighbourhood has ever shared.

As the last Brics motorcade cleared Bharat Mandapam on September 13, with the SCO summit a fortnight behind and the G20 ahead, one could be forgiven for asking an impertinent question. When did an India last sit at one table with all seven South Asian neighbours? It was November 27, 2014, in Kathmandu. Everything since has been a chronicle of the empty chair.

The irony is sharp. The Prime Minister told the Brics leaders that the Global South sits in the front row of the world’s crises and the back row of its decisions, and that we must transform this “pyramid of privilege” into a “platform of partnership”.

South Asia, a quarter of humanity, has no row at all. An estimate by The Peterson Institute for International Economics, based on GDP per capita, suggests, “The Global South represents 85 per cent of the world's population and nearly 39 per cent of global GDP.” Saarc has held no summit in 12 years, and its foreign ministers last met formally in March 2016. Door ke dhol suhavane lagte hain: distant drums sound sweet. The drum in the neighbourhood has been silent for a decade.

Saarc was Bangladesh’s idea before it was anyone else’s, and its 1985 Charter made it, on paper, the most populous regional grouping on earth. On paper is where much of it has remained. Article III commits leaders to meet at least once a year. Article X requires unanimity at every level and excludes “bilateral and contentious issues”. India has roughly three-quarters of Saarc’s population and 75 to 80 per cent of its output. Unanimity, the price of admission, gave everyone a veto.

The founders did not foresee that a veto held by everyone is a veto held by whoever is angriest. The forum was fragile long before it was paralysed: Eleven of its 18 summits were postponed, all of them before the terror attack on the administrative base of the 12th Infantry Brigade in Uri, Jammu & Kashmir, on September 18, 2016.

Sri Lanka refused to host in the late 1980s until the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) withdrew; Maldives and Bhutan postponed due to infrastructure, financial, and political hurdles; and domestic instability across Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal caused further disruptions.

After the Uri terror attack, India told Nepal, the chair, that cross-border terrorism had made the Islamabad summit impossible, four other members followed within days, and Pakistan postponed it, promising new dates that never arrived. A summit cannot be held if one member opts out, and the agreements that matter need every signature. Uri was the Pakistan sponsored dastardly provocation. The charter supplied the lock.

What survived was a shadow. Foreign ministers met informally at the General Assembly until 2021, when the question of who speaks for Kabul ended even that. Nepal has held the chair since 2014. Committees meet at joint-secretary level and dues are paid.

New Delhi did what large powers do: it built around the forum. Within a month of Uri, India hosted the Bimstec Outreach Summit alongside the Brics summit in Goa. The Bay of Bengal grouping has five of Saarc’s eight members and not Pakistan. It cannot reach Kabul, Male or the Indus. Everyone found somewhere else to be. Nobody found a substitute.

The neighbourhood has stopped waiting politely. Bangladesh, the forum’s author, has been its loudest mourner. Muhammad Yunus said in December he would have settled for a Saarc gathering “even if only for five minutes”. Tarique Rahman’s elected government calls revival a foreign policy objective and says Dhaka need not choose between Saarc and Bimstec. The Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu has twice called for revival, offering Male as mediator. New governments, battered economies and a tariff war have reminded small states that a bloc is their only bargaining chip. New Delhi’s reply is unchanged: Everyone in South Asia knows which country is stymying Saarc; it is Pakistan that refuses to abandon terror as an instrument of state policy. For Saarc to take off again it requires cooperation and that requires goodwill. India’s reply is accurate and is addressed to Islamabad. The people asking are in Dhaka and Male.

Islamabad has begun shopping for alternatives. Pakistani, Chinese and Bangladeshi diplomats met in Kunming in June 2025, Pakistan has said regional groupings should not be “held hostage to anyone’s rigidity”, and Pakistani reporting describes an organisation, drawn up with Beijing, that could replace Saarc. Nature abhors a vacuum. Beijing in its current avatar is willing to fill it.

The charter’s Article VII already allows action committees of the members concerned, the minus-X formula under which the willing proceed and the unwilling join later. India has utilised this mechanism: the Reserve Bank’s Saarc currency swaps have given the Maldives about 1.1 billion dollars. India keeps Saarc’s plumbing in working order while declining to enter its drawing room. The case for revival rests on cold interest. Intra-regional trade remains under six per cent of the region’s total. The small states that once wanted Saarc as a shield against Indian size now want it against Chinese money. A country that speaks for the Global South at Bharat Mandapam does owe an answer to the South Asia outside its gate.

How, then? First, separate the process from the summit. Ministers and foreign secretaries can meet in Kathmandu under Articles IV and V without an Indian Prime Minister setting foot in Islamabad. Second, use Article VII: Action committees for the grid, disaster management and the food bank. Third, read Article X as written. Terrorism ceased to be bilateral in 1987, when the members signed the SAARC Regional Convention on Suppression of Terrorism, so India’s precondition can also be pursued inside the forum. Fourth, let Nepal hand over the chair. Fifth, accept minus-X with one proviso: the X may be absent from a project, never from the Charter, so that no substitute seats Beijing at South Asia’s table.

Prime Minister Vajpayee said it in 2003: “Friends can change, not neighbours.” Nothing since Kathmandu has altered the geography. The Islamabad summit will not happen soon, and perhaps it should not as long as Pakistan’s terroristic disposition holds the field. The forum can breathe again regardless, if the largest member concludes that presence is cheaper than absence. The Ganges Water Treaty lapses in December. Beijing is wooing, Dhaka is asking and Male is offering. Vajpayee was right that neighbours cannot be changed. He never said they cannot be lost.