South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation

• 1. Introduction

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  The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation was born on the 8th of December 1985, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, inside a hall where the leaders of seven nations put their names to a document they hoped would change the trajectory of an entire region. King Jigme Singye Wangchuk of Bhutan was there. President Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India. King Birendra Shah of Nepal. President JR Jayewardene of Sri Lanka. President Maumoon Gayoom of the Maldives. Together, they represented peoples who shared ancient connections but whose governments had spent decades regarding one another with suspicion.

  The organization they founded that day now represents about 21% of the world's population and roughly 5.21% of the global economy. Yet SAARC has not held a summit since November 2014. Its 19th summit, scheduled for Pakistan in November 2016, was cancelled after four member states refused to attend. The reasons stretch back decades, to a region where the ambitions of diplomats and the violence of militant groups have repeatedly collided.

  How did a body created in a spirit of friendship end up paralyzed? Who pushed hardest for it to exist, and who stood in the way? And what does its stalemate reveal about the fault lines running through South Asia today?

• 2. The Founder's Vision

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  President Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh first raised the idea of a South Asian bloc partly because his country had failed to join ASEAN. Rebuffed from one regional grouping, he turned his energy toward building a new one, writing personal letters to the leaders of neighboring states and making what the source describes as compelling arguments for co-operation.

  During a visit to India in December 1977, Rahman sat down with Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai to press the case. In the same year, King Birendra of Nepal used his inaugural speech to the Colombo Plan Consultative Committee, which met in Kathmandu, to call for closer regional cooperation on sharing river waters. Two leaders, two capitals, one converging idea.

  The USSR's intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 accelerated everything. The sudden deterioration of regional security made the case for collective diplomacy more urgent. By April 1981, foreign ministry officials from the seven inner South Asian nations met for the first time in Colombo to begin hashing out what such cooperation might look like.

  India and Pakistan were not enthusiastic at the start. India worried that a multilateral forum would give smaller neighbors a platform to gang up against Delhi or to raise bilateral grievances before an audience. Pakistan suspected the proposal was an Indian maneuver to lock in economic dominance across the region. These doubts did not disappear; they simply went underground, shaping how both countries behaved inside the organization for the next four decades. What finally moved the talks forward was a series of diplomatic consultations among South Asian UN representatives in New York, running from September 1979 through 1980, which produced an agreed framework for a working paper.

• 3. Building the Architecture

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  In 1983, an international conference hosted by Bangladesh's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Dhaka marked the moment SAARC moved from aspiration to institution. The foreign ministers of the inner seven countries formally adopted the Declaration on South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and launched the Integrated Programme of Action across five agreed areas: agriculture, rural development, telecommunications, meteorology, and health and population activities.

  The SAARC Secretariat opened in Kathmandu on the 16th of January 1987 and was inaugurated by King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah of Nepal, the same monarch who had helped plant the seed a decade earlier. The first Secretary-General, Abul Ahsan of Bangladesh, served from that January until October 1989. Since then, the post has rotated among member states in alphabetical order, with each country holding it for roughly two years.

  Over time, SAARC built a layered institutional structure. Specialized bodies now include the SAARC Arbitration Council in Islamabad, the SAARC Development Fund in Thimphu, the South Asian University in New Delhi, and the South Asian Regional Standards Organization in Dhaka. Regional centres were established for agriculture, meteorology, forestry, disaster management, tuberculosis, energy, and culture, among others, scattered across the capitals of member states. After the 31st of December 2015, six of those regional centres were closed by unanimous decision.

  Afghanistan's membership added a fresh complication. The country began negotiations in 2005 and formally applied that same year. Member states debated whether Afghanistan even qualified as a South Asian nation, given its geographic ambiguity, and required it to hold a general election before joining. Afghanistan became the eighth full member in April 2007. When the Taliban took power in 2021, no SAARC member recognized the new government, yet Afghanistan retained its formal seat. By 2023, when it was Afghanistan's turn to nominate a Secretary-General, all other members agreed to skip the rotation and award the selection to Bangladesh instead.

• 4. The Trade Promise

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  The South Asian Free Trade Area, known as SAFTA, was the organization's most concrete economic ambition. The process started in earnest at the Sixteenth Session of the Council of Ministers held in New Delhi on the 18th and the 19th of December 1995, when ministers agreed to set up an Inter-Governmental Expert Group to map the path toward free trade. The Tenth SAARC Summit in Colombo in July 1998 then tasked a Committee of Experts with drafting the actual treaty framework.

  The SAFTA Agreement was signed on the 6th of January 2004 at the Twelfth SAARC Summit in Islamabad. It entered into force on the 1st of January 2006, with the Trade Liberalization Programme starting on the 1st of July 2006. Under the agreement, member states committed to bring their import duties down to 20% by 2009.

  The numbers that followed told a mixed story. By 2012, SAARC exports had grown to $354.6 billion, up from $206.7 billion in 2009. Imports rose from $330 billion to $602 billion over the same period. But intra-SAARC trade, meaning trade between the members themselves, amounted to just over 1% of the bloc's combined GDP. ASEAN, a smaller economic bloc by total size, manages intra-bloc trade equal to 10% of its GDP.

  The Asian Development Bank calculated that the region was leaving $14 billion in agricultural export potential on the table every year. Against an estimated potential of $22 billion in annual intra-regional agricultural trade, actual flows had stayed around $8 billion. On foreign direct investment, the picture was similarly thin. Intra-regional FDI flows accounted for around 4% of total foreign investment into the region, a figure that pointed to a bloc whose members continued to look outward rather than toward each other.

• 5. Political Paralysis

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  The 2016 Uri attack by the Pakistani militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed on an army camp in Indian-controlled Kashmir became the proximate cause of SAARC's operational freeze. India withdrew from the scheduled 19th Summit in Islamabad. Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Afghanistan followed. For the first time in the organization's history, four members simultaneously boycotted a planned summit, forcing its cancellation. No summit has been held since.

  A retired Sri Lankan foreign secretary, speaking to The Diplomat in 2019, described how Pakistan would use SAARC gatherings to try to get other members to side against India. India, for its part, insisted that terrorism linked to Pakistan was a bilateral matter and resisted raising it in the multilateral SAARC forum. The result was a body that could not discuss the central problem dividing its two largest members.

  In the years since, Bangladesh under Dr. Muhammad Yunus's interim government publicly advocated reviving SAARC. India's External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar pushed back sharply. In a bilateral meeting with Bangladesh's Foreign Affairs Adviser Towhid Hossain in Muscat, Oman, on the 16th of February, Jaishankar told Bangladesh to stop trying to normalize terrorism through efforts to restart SAARC activities. MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal stated at a press briefing: "Everyone in South Asia is aware of which country and what activities are responsible for stymieing SAARC."

  Dr. Minendra Rijal, former Defence Minister of Nepal, stated that Pakistan's support for terrorism had contributed to SAARC's stagnation and blocked regional economic integration, causing substantial economic losses for Pakistan itself. Meanwhile, China, whose 2007 application for full observer status was accepted, has been promoting alternative regional frameworks. According to a research fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, China launched the China-South Asia Cooperation Forum in 2006, the Belt and Road Initiative Trans-Himalayan Connectivity Network in 2018, and the China-South Asian Countries Poverty Alleviation and Cooperative Development Centre in 2021, each seen as a way of building influence in a space where SAARC has stalled.

• 6. People, Awards, and Culture

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  Away from the high politics, SAARC built a set of institutions aimed at connecting ordinary people across borders. The SAARC Visa Exemption Scheme launched in 1992 after leaders at the Fourth Summit in Islamabad in December 1988 decided that certain categories of dignitaries should be able to travel across the region without visas. The current list covers 24 categories, including judges of higher courts, parliamentarians, journalists, entrepreneurs, and athletes. Each visa sticker is valid for one year.

  The SAARC Literary Award has been conferred annually by the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature since 2001. Recipients have included Shamshur Rahman, Mahasweta Devi, Jayanta Mahapatra, Mark Tully, and Abhay K. Nepali poet, lyricist, and translator Suman Pokhrel is the only person to have received the award twice.

  The SAARC Award carries a gold medal, a letter of citation, and a cash prize of $25,000. It was approved at the 12th Summit and instituted in 2004, but it has been awarded only once: posthumously to President Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh, the man whose letters in the late 1970s set the entire organization in motion.

  The SAARC Youth Award, given since 1992, has recognized individuals working on issues from population welfare to environmental protection to humanitarian response after natural disasters. Winners have come from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. Golam Sarwar of Bangladesh has been serving as Secretary-General since the 4th of March 2023, and the question of whether any SAARC summit will be held on his watch remains open.