India and SAARC Past Performance and Future Prospects

South Asia is a region by geography, history and demography, and almost by nothing else. The organisation built to give it political form has not met at leader level since November 2014, and the state that constitutes roughly three-quarters of its people and four-fifths of its output has quietly moved its regional investment elsewhere. The question this topic actually poses is not whether SAARC failed — it plainly underperformed — but what India’s own choices contributed to that outcome, and what a large state does when the region it dominates refuses to behave like one.

The asymmetry that organises South Asia

Every argument about regional cooperation in South Asia begins with a single structural fact, and most bad arguments end there too.

• India’s weight in the region is without parallel. No other regional organisation contains a member of comparable relative size.
  • India accounts for roughly three-quarters of South Asia’s population — about 1.45 billion of some two billion people.
  • It generates close to four-fifths of the region’s economic output, at over US$4 trillion against a regional total of a little above US$5 trillion.
  • It holds the great majority of the region’s territory and an overwhelming share of its military capability.
  • India shares a boundary with every other member; no other borders more than two. Geography makes India everyone’s neighbour and nobody’s peer.
• Two consequences follow from that distribution, and they run in opposite directions.
  • For the smaller states, every domestic political question acquires an India dimension whether or not India acts. India becomes a variable in their internal politics by existing.
  • For India, a dominant state cannot be a neutral one. What New Delhi offers as assistance can be received as intrusion; what it withholds as restraint can be read as neglect.
• The small-state literature names the resulting behaviour precisely.
  • Hedging — cultivating an external power, principally China, for bargaining room against the regional centre — is the characteristic strategy; Rohan Mukherjee and Darren Lim describe it as deliberately ambiguous alignment rather than a choice between balancing and bandwagoning.
  • Anti-India positioning becomes an available electoral strategy, visible in the Maldives in 2023, Nepal at several moments, and Sri Lanka in the 2010s.
  • The “small state syndrome” — acute sensitivity to any asymmetry of treatment — is invoked in the Nepali and Maldivian literature to explain reactions that look disproportionate from Delhi and proportionate from Kathmandu.
• Indian practitioners have conceded the point rather than disputed it.

“Our size causes uneasiness to our neighbours. We need to be conscious of this and be sensitive to their concerns.”

V.P. Haran

The measured asymmetry and what each dimension does

Dimension	India’s approximate share	Consequence for cooperation
Population	About three-quarters of the region	Any liberalised movement regime is politically read as an Indian influx
Economic output	About four-fifths	A common market looks to others like absorption into the Indian market
Territory and borders	Borders every member; no other borders more than two	India is a party to every bilateral question; there is no neutral broker inside the region
Military capability	Overwhelming preponderance	Security cooperation is unavoidably hierarchical, so it is avoided
Trade balance	India runs a surplus with almost every neighbour	Liberalisation is presented domestically in the neighbours as one-sided

Why asymmetry alone cannot explain the failure

• A regional organisation with one dominant member is not automatically doomed, and the comparative cases prove it.
  • ASEAN contains Indonesia, which holds roughly two-fifths of the grouping’s population and a comparable share of its output, without producing paralysis.
  • The European Communities were built around a German economy that has always been the largest, and around a Franco-German bargain that converted preponderance into a joint managerial role.
  • North America is more asymmetric than South Asia on economic weight, and still produced a functioning free trade area.
• What distinguishes those cases is not the size ratio but three other variables.
  • An external threat that supplied a reason to cohere. Western Europe had the Soviet Union and American underwriting; ASEAN had communist insurgency and the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia. South Asia has no shared external threat, because its members’ principal security concerns are each other.
  • A prior settlement of the central dispute. Franco-German reconciliation preceded European integration rather than resulting from it; South Asia attempted the reverse sequence and formally excluded its central dispute from discussion.
  • A managerial bargain the anchor state was willing to strike. Germany paid disproportionately into the European budget and accepted supranational constraint; Indonesia accepted primus inter pares status without formal privileges. India has done neither consistently — it funds disproportionately but has resisted binding constraint.
• The honest formulation is conditional: asymmetry makes cooperation harder, and alongside an unresolved central conflict it makes it impossible; without one, it is manageable.

Asymmetry did not doom South Asian regionalism. The refusal to allow the region’s central dispute to be discussed did.

The lineage of India’s neighbourhood doctrine

India’s approach to its neighbours has never been a single policy. It is a sequence of doctrines, each a reaction to the failure of the one before, and the oscillation between primacy and generosity is itself the story.

Nehru and the assumption of regional primacy

• Nehru never seriously questioned the strategic frontier of the Raj, which treated the Himalayan rim as India’s security perimeter rather than as a set of foreign countries.
  • The Treaty of Friendship with Bhutan (1949) and the Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Nepal (1950) carried forward the practice of guiding the Himalayan states’ external relations.
  • Nehru told Parliament in 1950 that India could not permit the Himalayan barrier to be crossed, a formulation that made Nepal’s security an Indian interest irrespective of Nepali preference.
  • Sikkim’s protectorate status (1950) and its eventual merger in 1975 were the extreme expression of the same premise.
• The idealist register ran alongside the strategic one and complicated it.
  • The Asian Relations Conference of New Delhi, April 1947 — before the Republic existed — is the earliest institutional expression of a pan-Asian cooperative idea.
  • Panchsheel (1954) supplied a vocabulary of sovereign equality and non-interference that India applied to China and far less consistently to its own neighbourhood.
• The unresolved contradiction of the period is that India claimed the moral authority of anti-imperial solidarity while operating a security perimeter inherited from an empire, and the smaller states noticed. The charge that India was running a “Monroe Doctrine” for South Asia dates from here and has never been shaken off.

The Indira Doctrine and the decade of intervention

• The Indira Doctrine converted an assumption into a declared position, and it was articulated in its clearest form by the analyst Bhabani Sen Gupta.
  • Its core proposition: India would neither accept nor tolerate outside intervention in a conflict situation in any South Asian country where the intervention carried an anti-Indian implication.
  • Its corollary: a state needing external help should seek it from its neighbours, India included, and excluding India would itself be read as unfriendly.
  • Its method was bilateralism — regional problems settled bilaterally, which in an asymmetric region means settled on the stronger party’s terms.
• The record of the doctrine is a record of interventions, and it is a mixed one.
  • 1971 — the Bangladesh war is the doctrine’s founding success: an intervention that dismembered Pakistan, ended the notion of India–Pakistan equivalence, and created a state that has been India’s closest regional partner for most of its existence.
  • 1975 — Sikkim’s merger marked the doctrine’s outer limit and confirmed every small-state anxiety about it.
  • 1987 — the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord and the Indian Peace Keeping Force is the doctrine’s decisive failure. India brokered a settlement, obtained devolution to provincial councils through the Thirteenth Amendment, then found its forces fighting the very group whose grievances it had championed, and withdrew by March 1990 having satisfied nobody.
  • 1988 — Operation Cactus in the Maldives, by contrast, was rapid, invited, successful and locally welcomed, and remains the model India cites.
  • 1989–90 — the trade and transit disruption with Nepal under Rajiv Gandhi showed the doctrine’s coercive edge and produced a durable Nepali resentment.
• The lesson India drew, slowly, is that intervention buys a short-term outcome at the price of a long-term nationalism: the IPKF made Sri Lankan Tamil politics permanently suspicious of India and Sinhala politics permanently wary of it.
• Sen Gupta’s own defence of the doctrine was that India could not shrink to suit its neighbours’ comfort — the elephant cannot make itself a mouse — which is precisely the premise the smaller states found intolerable.

The Gujral Doctrine and the principle of non-reciprocity

• I.K. Gujral’s formulation, developed as Foreign Minister from 1996 and articulated at Chatham House that September, is the sharpest doctrinal break in the sequence and rests on five principles.
  • Non-reciprocity toward the smaller neighbours — India would give what it could without asking anything in return. This is the doctrine’s core, and everything else follows from it.
  • No state would permit its territory to be used against the interests of another state in the region.
  • No interference in another’s internal affairs.
  • Respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty.
  • All would settle disputes through peaceful bilateral negotiation.
• The logic was that in an asymmetric region, symmetry of obligation is itself coercion. A concession India can absorb painlessly may be unaffordable for Nepal or Bhutan, so demanding reciprocity guarantees stalemate.
• The doctrine produced real, dateable results within a very short window.
  • The Ganga Waters Treaty with Bangladesh, December 1996 — a thirty-year sharing arrangement at Farakka concluded without the linkage India had previously insisted on.
  • The Mahakali Treaty with Nepal, ratified in 1996, and a marked warming with Kathmandu.
  • The resumption of composite dialogue with Pakistan and the beginning of a bus and people-to-people track.
  • A rapid improvement with Sri Lanka, culminating in the free trade agreement concluded in 1998.
• Its critics attacked it from two directions, and both are worth stating.
  • The realist objection: unilateral generosity without reciprocity rewards non-cooperation, leaves Indian security interests unaddressed, and was read in Islamabad as weakness — Kargil followed within three years.
  • The neighbours’ objection, put most sharply by the Pakistani commentator Altaf Gauhar, was that a doctrine of giving without asking is still a doctrine of an unequal giving, and that its object was to secure acquiescence in Indian primacy by cheaper means.
• Why it lapsed is less about its merits than about its base.
  • It was the personal doctrine of a foreign minister who then held the prime ministership for under two years, in a period of coalition instability.
  • It had no institutional carrier — no cell, no budget line, no standing mandate — so it did not survive its author’s departure.
  • It survives instead as a standard of conduct that later policies invoke rather than as a policy anyone executed.

Neighbourhood First, SAGAR and MAHASAGAR

• “Neighbourhood First” dates from 2014 and was announced by gesture before it was announced by document.
  • SAARC leaders were invited to the swearing-in of 26 May 2014 — the first time the neighbourhood was staged as the opening act of an Indian government.
  • The first foreign visit was to Bhutan, followed by Nepal — a deliberate inversion of the usual sequence of great-power capitals.
  • The policy’s declared method is “consultative, non-reciprocal and outcome-oriented” — the Gujral principle restated with a delivery promise attached.
• Its instruments are development and connectivity rather than security guarantee. Lines of credit, currency swaps, grant projects, disaster response, vaccine supply, digital public infrastructure, and the internationalisation of UPI and RuPay.
• SAGAR — Security and Growth for All in the Region — was announced at Mauritius in March 2015 and gave the maritime neighbourhood a doctrine of its own: safeguarding Indian interests, deepening security cooperation with littorals, collective action against common threats, sustainable development, and engagement with extra-regional powers on shared interests.
• MAHASAGAR — Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions — was announced at Mauritius in March 2025, exactly ten years later, and is a widening rather than a replacement.
  • It extends the frame from the Indian Ocean to the Global South, which is both an ambition and an admission that the older regional frame had stopped generating results.
  • Its critics note that broadening a doctrine’s geography is a curious response to underperformance within the narrower one.
• The honest assessment is that its instruments are right and its execution uneven. The Italian scholar Filippo Boni has gone further, arguing that a decade of the policy has produced a gap between India’s self-perception as the region’s natural centre and its actual diplomatic returns.

Doctrine	Period	Core proposition	Instrument	Why it ended or stalled
Nehruvian primacy	1947–64	The Himalayan rim is India’s security frontier	Treaties of friendship, protectorate arrangements	1962 discredited the assumption of a secure north
Indira Doctrine	c. 1971–89	No extra-regional intervention; problems settled bilaterally	Military and political intervention	The IPKF experience made intervention unaffordable
Gujral Doctrine	1996–98	Non-reciprocity toward smaller neighbours	Unilateral concession, treaty-making	No institutional carrier; government fell
Neighbourhood First	2014–	Consultative, non-reciprocal, outcome-oriented delivery	Credit lines, connectivity, disaster and vaccine response	Delivery gap; political change in neighbours
SAGAR to MAHASAGAR	2015; 2025–	Security and growth for the littoral, then the Global South	Maritime capacity-building, hydrography, coastal radar, HADR	Widening scope while regional results remain thin

Whether the lineage amounts to a doctrine at all

• George Tanham’s claim that India lacks formal strategic planning, and therefore lacks a strategic culture, bears directly on this sequence.
  • On his reading the oscillation is not a sequence of doctrines but an absence of one — improvised responses that were named afterwards.
  • His critics reply that the charge applies a Western template which counts only military planning as strategy, and ignores an older tradition of statecraft.
• Kanti Bajpai’s distinction supplies the better test: a strategic culture consists of a central strategic paradigm — the basic assumptions about how orderly the world is — and the grand strategy that follows from it.
  • India’s neighbourhood policy has swung because the paradigm is contested between Nehruvian, neoliberal and hyperrealist schools, not because no paradigm exists.
  • What the lineage shows is a doctrine that keeps changing hands, not an absence of doctrinal thinking.
  • The oscillation between primacy and generosity has run for seventy years, and no Indian government has settled which of the two its neighbourhood policy is.

India’s own calculus on SAARC

The standard account treats India as the frustrated would-be leader of a body its neighbours obstructed. The record is more interesting: India was the most reluctant of the founders, and several features it now finds obstructive are features it insisted upon.

Why India was wary of the Bangladeshi proposal

• The proposal was Ziaur Rahman’s, circulated to regional capitals from the late 1970s, and India’s response was cool for reasons that were entirely rational at the time.
  • The fear of a caucus. New Delhi read a seven-member forum in which it faced six smaller states as a device for collectivising bilateral grievances and confronting India with a bloc position it would have to concede to or be isolated by.
  • The fear of internationalising Kashmir. Any forum in which Pakistan could raise disputes would become another venue for a question India had spent two decades confining to bilateral channels.
  • The preference for bilateralism, entrenched by the Simla Agreement of 1972, which India regarded as having settled the method as well as the substance of dispute management.
  • The suspicion of external sponsorship — that a grouping outside India’s control would attract extra-regional patronage.
• Pakistan’s reservations mirrored India’s exactly, which is the point usually missed: Islamabad feared a forum in which Indian economic weight would translate into political leadership and in which India could isolate it. The two largest members were sceptical for opposite reasons and converged on the same institutional solution.
• The smaller states’ motive was equally instrumental. Their calculation was that a rule-bound forum would constrain India more than it constrained them, which is why the claim that SAARC was founded “with a negative purpose” is only half right. It was founded with several purposes, most of them defensive.

What India obtained in return for joining

• India’s assent was purchased with two charter provisions, and both were also wanted by Pakistan and by the smaller states for their own reasons.
  • Decisions at all levels are taken by unanimity. For India this meant no bloc of six could outvote it; for everyone else it meant a veto against the giant.
  • Bilateral and contentious issues are excluded from deliberation. For India this kept Kashmir out; for Pakistan it kept Indian complaints about terrorism out; for the smaller states it kept their own quarrels off the table.
• A third safeguard was procedural: cooperation was to complement, not substitute for, bilateral cooperation, preserving the bilateral channel as the primary one.
• The sequencing was deliberately slow, and the slowness was itself a concession to Indian caution.
  • The foreign secretaries met from 1981; the foreign ministers adopted the Declaration on South Asian Regional Cooperation at New Delhi in August 1983.
  • The Integrated Programme of Action launched with five uncontroversial areas — agriculture, health, meteorology, telecommunications and rural development.
  • Only then, at Dhaka on 8 December 1985, was the Charter signed. India’s price was that the organisation begin with nothing that mattered.
• The core economic questions were excluded by political choice, not oversight — a point Muchkund Dubey has pressed. Money, finance, trade and manufacturing were kept off the founding agenda, which is why the trade instruments arrived a decade late and arrived weak.

India joined SAARC on terms that made it safe, and the terms that made it safe are the terms that made it inert.

The unanimity rule as India’s protection and India’s cage

• For two decades the unanimity rule served India’s interests exactly as intended. It guaranteed that no combination of smaller members could carry a decision India opposed, and it kept the Kashmir question out of the only regional forum in which Pakistan might have raised it.
• The rule became a liability once India’s interests shifted from defence to delivery. Once India wanted regional connectivity, transit and energy trading, the same rule handed Pakistan a veto over every one of them.
  • At the eighteenth summit, Kathmandu, November 2014, the motor vehicles and railways agreements were blocked; only the electricity cooperation framework survived, and it survived because it did not require the objecting member’s participation.
  • India’s response was to take the blocked agreements out of SAARC entirely — the BBIN motor vehicles arrangement of 2015, agreed by Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal, is a SAARC agreement executed by the willing after the unwilling had vetoed it.
• The institutional lesson of 2014 is the one India has acted on ever since: where consensus is unavailable, change the membership of the forum rather than the rule.

From reluctant member to principal funder

• India’s material contribution to SAARC is far larger than its reputation for indifference suggests, and it is the strongest evidence for the “reluctant leadership” reading rather than the “hegemony” reading.
  • The South Asian University was agreed by an inter-governmental agreement signed at the fourteenth summit in New Delhi on 4 April 2007, and opened to students in 2010.
    • India provides the entire capital cost and about 59% of the operating budget — a scale of subsidy no other member approaches.
  • The South Asia Satellite was launched in May 2017 as an Indian gift of communications capacity to the region; Pakistan declined to participate, which is why it is no longer called the SAARC satellite.
  • The interim unit of the SAARC Disaster Management Centre is hosted in Gandhinagar at Indian expense.
  • The National Knowledge Network was extended to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan.
  • India has hosted three of the eighteen summits — Bengaluru in November 1986, New Delhi in May 1995 and New Delhi in April 2007.
• The COVID-19 initiative of 15 March 2020 is the strongest evidence that the machinery still works when the framing is narrow enough.
  • The video conference of SAARC leaders was an Indian initiative, convened at very short notice, and Pakistan participated at official rather than head-of-government level without blocking it.
  • India seeded a COVID-19 Emergency Fund with US$10 million, followed with medicines, testing kits and equipment, ran video conferences of health and trade officials, and built an information exchange platform for the region’s health professionals.
  • The episode’s significance is analytical, not sentimental: a functional problem, framed narrowly, financed unilaterally and stripped of political content, produced cooperation in a year when nothing else did.

The turn to BIMSTEC after 2016 — strategy or reaction?

• The immediate trigger was the Uri attack of 18 September 2016. India withdrew from the nineteenth summit due at Islamabad that November; Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan followed, and later others, and the summit has never been rescheduled.
• The substitution was staged deliberately and symbolically.
  • BIMSTEC leaders were invited to the BRICS outreach at Goa, October 2016, weeks after the boycott.
  • BIMSTEC leaders replaced SAARC leaders at the swearing-in of 2019.
  • The Bay of Bengal grouping’s attraction to India is straightforward: it excludes Pakistan and therefore the veto, it connects South Asia to Southeast Asia and gives Act East a land bridge, and it is maritime and so aligns with the Indo-Pacific framing.
  • C. Raja Mohan’s formulation captures the geographic logic — the grouping brings India into contact with the Bay of Bengal, the Mekong and the sub-Himalaya at once.
• The case that this was strategy rests on the fact that the Bay of Bengal orientation predates 2016, that it fits the maritime turn in Indian strategic thinking, and that it connects the North-East to a regional economy rather than leaving it a landlocked periphery.
• The case that this was reaction is equally strong, and it is the more honest reading of the timing.
  • The elevation came within weeks of a terrorist attack, not out of a planning cycle.
  • The 2019 election manifesto of the governing party mentioned BIMSTEC and not SAARC — a point Santosh Sharma Poudel uses as evidence that the substitution was a political decision presented afterwards as a design.
  • India’s own government has never formally abandoned SAARC, maintaining that BIMSTEC complements rather than replaces it — which is what a state says when it has changed its behaviour but not its position.
• The strongest formulation is that it was both — a pre-existing preference that a crisis made costless to act on.

“India-Pakistan rivalry and India’s isolation of Pakistan contributed to the death of the South Asian regional organization.”

Santosh Sharma Poudel

Why cooperation has not worked

The impediments are individually familiar. What matters is the mechanism by which they convert into total paralysis rather than partial slowdown — and that mechanism is institutional.

One dispute, converted into general paralysis

• The India–Pakistan dispute is not one impediment among several; it is the impediment that makes the others unsolvable.
  • Because decisions require unanimity, an unresolved dispute between two members freezes every agenda item, including those on which the other six agree.
  • Because contentious issues are formally excluded from deliberation, the dispute cannot be addressed within the organisation either. It can neither be discussed nor bypassed.
  • The design was intended to insulate cooperation from conflict. Its actual effect was to insulate conflict from cooperation — to guarantee that the central dispute would never be touched by the habits of working together that regionalism is supposed to create.
• The functionalist premise was that low politics would spill over into high politics. South Asia is the clearest available refutation: spillover requires that low-politics cooperation be allowed to accumulate, and unanimity ensured it never did.
• The bilateral relationship has since deteriorated past the point where the question is academic.
  • After the Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025 and Operation Sindoor of 7 May 2025, India suspended all trade with Pakistan and held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance from 23 April 2025.
  • India declared that any future act of terrorism originating in Pakistan would be treated as an act of war; bilateral trade has been effectively nil since May 2025.
  • The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled on 1 September 2026 that the Treaty “remains fully in force” and that India must observe its obligations, rejecting every ground India had publicly cited.
  • India rejected the award within hours as the product of an “illegally constituted” court, and maintains that the abeyance stands.
  • Whatever else it settles, it confirms that the region’s central relationship is now conducted through legal and coercive instruments rather than diplomatic ones.

The impediments, grouped by what they actually do

Impediment	Mechanism	Illustration
The central dispute	Converts a bilateral quarrel into a regional veto	Summit blocked since 2016; transit denied to Afghan trade
Asymmetry and trust deficit	Makes every Indian initiative suspect by default	Bangladesh’s rejection of the gas pipeline; MFN never extended by Pakistan
River water disputes	Turns a shared resource into a zero-sum bilateral	Indus arbitration; Teesta unsigned since 2011; the Ganga treaty expiring December 2026
Cross-border migration	Converts demography into a security and citizenship question	Assam Accord 1985; Rohingya displacement; the open Nepal border
Ethnic conflicts and insurgencies	Gives each state a stake in another’s internal order	Tamil question; North-East sanctuaries; Baloch and Pashtun questions
Border disputes	Keeps sovereignty permanently live	Sir Creek; Kalapani–Lipulekh–Limpiyadhura; the LAC
Connectivity and transit	Denies the physical basis for any trade agreement	No regional transit regime; BBIN incomplete; restrictive visas
Extra-regional involvement	Supplies smaller states with an alternative patron	Chinese lending and port development across the littoral

• The impediments interact rather than add. A border dispute becomes a water dispute when the river crosses it; a water dispute becomes a migration question when livelihoods collapse; migration becomes an ethnic question when the migrants are a distinct community, and an insurgency when that community straddles the boundary.
• Three further constraints belong on any honest list, and are usually omitted.
  • Historically inward-looking economies. South Asia’s post-colonial development strategies were import-substituting and protectionist for four decades; the region’s states learned to trade with the world before they learned to trade with each other, and India’s liberalisation of 1991 was outward-facing, not regional.
  • Contested national identity. Several members were a single administrative unit until 1947, and each has defined itself partly in contradistinction to India. Sovereignty is newer and therefore more jealously held than in regions where the states long predate their organisation.
  • Domestic politics inside India. Federal veto players block national commitments — West Bengal on Teesta since 2011, Tamil Nadu on fisheries and Kachchatheevu — so India’s delivery record is hostage to state politics, which neighbours experience simply as unreliability.

The economic record, stated and left

• Intra-regional trade is under 6% of the region’s total trade on India’s own current official figure — against roughly a quarter in Southeast Asia and around three-fifths in the European Union.
• The World Bank’s estimate is that the region trades about US$23 billion with itself against a potential of US$67 billion, with India–Pakistan trade alone potentially worth US$37 billion against a currently nil figure; and that it is around a fifth cheaper for India to trade with Brazil than with Pakistan.
• The causes — long sensitive lists, non-tariff barriers, the absence of a transit regime, restrictive visas and the failure to cover services — are the substance of the free trade area question and belong there rather than here.

The 1994 proposition tested: ideological cohesion and economic interdependence

• The claim that cooperation requires either ideological cohesion or economic interdependence, and that SAARC has neither, is close to right on the facts and wrong on the theory.
• On ideological cohesion, the diagnosis holds.
  • The members’ founding ideas are not merely different but mutually contradictory: a secular federal republic and a state founded on the proposition that Muslims constitute a separate nation cannot both be right about the same territory.
  • Regime types diverge sharply and change frequently — continuous democracy in India, alternating civilian and military rule in Pakistan, a monarchy that democratised from above in Bhutan, a republic created out of a monarchy in Nepal, and a Taliban administration in Kabul that no member has recognised.
• On economic interdependence, the diagnosis also holds, but as a consequence rather than a cause.
  • Complementarity exists and is large — the World Bank’s potential figures measure exactly that. What is missing is the transit, tariff and visa regime that would convert it into trade.
  • The interdependence that exists is radial rather than lateral: Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are each substantially dependent on India, and almost not at all on each other. A hub-and-spoke structure produces dependence, not integration.
• Where the proposition fails is as a general law. ASEAN was founded by states with sharply divergent ideologies — a military-anticommunist Indonesia, a socialist-leaning Singapore, a monarchy, a Malay-Muslim federation — and with negligible intra-regional trade in 1967. Cohesion and interdependence were outputs of ASEAN, not inputs.
• The correct minimum condition is narrower: not shared ideology or existing trade, but a shared judgement that the principal security threat lies outside the region. That, and not ideology, is what South Asia lacks.

“Instead of a trade deficit, there is a trust deficit.”

Sanjaya Baru

• Baru’s larger argument gives the point analytical shape. He identifies three forces that have historically produced regional organisations — a market-driven economy, the movement of people across borders, and political factors including a shared security concern — and observes that in South Asia all three were absent or perverse at the founding moment.

Domestic turmoil in neighbouring states as a strain on Indian foreign policy

This is the least understood of the structural problems, and the most persistent. The mechanism is not that India’s neighbours are unstable; it is that India is a participant in their instability whether or not it acts.

The mechanism, stated precisely

• Asymmetry makes India an issue in every neighbouring election. Where one external power dominates the economy, the border and the labour market, the relationship with it becomes a domestic cleavage rather than a technical file.
• Every neighbouring government has an incentive to demonstrate distance from India, and oppositions to accuse incumbents of proximity to it. Anti-India positioning is cheap; pro-India positioning is expensive.
• India’s choices are constrained on both sides.
  • Acting is interference. Advice becomes pressure, assistance becomes leverage, and preference becomes intervention.
  • Not acting is neglect. Restraint is read as indifference, and the vacuum is filled by another power within a single electoral cycle.
• Continuity is the casualty. Because agreements are signed with governments and inherited by successors who campaigned against them, India’s regional commitments have a half-life set by the neighbour’s electoral calendar, not by the agreement’s terms.
• Domestic turmoil also imports itself physically into India through refugee flows, insurgent sanctuaries, smuggling and the disruption of connectivity projects — which converts a neighbour’s internal crisis into an Indian internal security problem.

Nepal: 2015 and 2025–26

• The 2015 constitutional crisis is the standard example of Indian mishandling, and Indian commentators have said so most forcefully.
  • India’s public unease with the new constitution’s federal boundaries, followed by the months-long disruption of supplies across the border from September 2015, was understood in Nepal as a blockade whatever its formal characterisation.
  • The effect was the opposite of the intention: it consolidated Nepali nationalism, strengthened K.P. Sharma Oli, and gave China its opening — the transit and trade agreements with Beijing followed directly.
  • Happymon Jacob has cited the 2015 handling as the clearest single case of India converting influence into resentment.
• The 2025–26 upheaval tests whether the lesson took.
  • The “Gen Z” uprising of September 2025 toppled the Oli government; Sushila Karki, a former Chief Justice, headed an interim administration and set elections.
  • At the general election of 5 March 2026, the Rastriya Swatantra Party won 182 of 275 seats — the first single-party majority under the 2015 constitution — with 52% of voters aged between 18 and 40.
  • Balendra Shah, the former Mayor of Kathmandu who defeated Oli in his own constituency, took oath as Prime Minister on 27 March 2026.
  • India welcomed the transition promptly and without conditions, which is itself the lesson of 2015 being applied. Commentary from May 2026 nonetheless reports New Delhi growing wary of a government whose nationalism is generational rather than ideological and therefore harder to read — a judgement that should be treated as contested rather than established.
  • Kalapani, Lipulekh and Limpiyadhura remain claimed under Nepal’s constitutional amendment and map of June 2020, and no new government has withdrawn the claim, because none can.

Sri Lanka: the 2022 collapse

• The economic collapse of 2022 — default, fuel queues, the occupation of the presidential secretariat and the flight of the President — was a domestic crisis that immediately became an Indian foreign policy problem.
• India’s response was the largest single assistance operation it has mounted in the region, of the order of four billion dollars in credit lines, currency support and deferred payments, delivered faster than any multilateral facility could move.
• The strain took three forms.
  • Scale. Emergency support at that magnitude is a fiscal and political commitment that Indian domestic politics does not automatically supply.
  • Timing. India was asked to underwrite a state whose previous government had leased Hambantota to a Chinese company for 99 years in 2017 — the assistance rewarded an outcome India had opposed.
  • Sequencing. Being first responder created an expectation of continued support and gave India little leverage over the political settlement that followed, including the unimplemented Thirteenth Amendment.
• The relationship has since been rebuilt on a new political basis.
  • Anura Kumara Dissanayake, elected in September 2024 from a party with a history of hostility to India, made New Delhi his first foreign destination, in December 2024.
  • Modi’s visit of 4–6 April 2025 produced the first-ever India–Sri Lanka defence cooperation memorandum, the Trincomalee energy hub with the UAE, and an assurance that Sri Lankan territory would not be used against Indian security.
  • That a JVP-led government delivered India’s best security outcome in Colombo in decades is evidence that turmoil is not uniformly bad for India.

Bangladesh: 2024 to 2026

• The fall of Sheikh Hasina on 5 August 2024 removed the single relationship on which fifteen years of Indian policy had been built, and exposed the risk of investing in a party rather than a state.
• The interim government under Muhammad Yunus pressed for SAARC’s revival precisely because it needed a regional platform independent of the bilateral relationship India preferred.
• The general election of 12 February 2026 completed the transition.
  • Turnout was 59.88%; the Awami League was barred from contesting; of 297 declared seats the BNP took 209, Jamaat-e-Islami 68 and the National Citizen Party 6.
  • Tarique Rahman was sworn in as Prime Minister on 17 February 2026.
  • A concurrent referendum on the July National Charter passed with about 60% “Yes”, introducing a bicameral parliament and prime-ministerial term limits.
• This ends the “two Begums” era on which every Indian assumption about Bangladesh rested, and replaces it with a “Bangladesh First” formulation whose content is not yet fixed.
• Three files make the strain concrete.
  • Sheikh Hasina remains in India, and the new government’s position that extradition depends on “the legal process” leaves the irritant standing rather than resolving it.
  • The Ganga Waters Treaty of 1996 expires in December 2026, with renewal talks under way — a thirty-year instrument reaching its term in the first year of a government that has no stake in its authorship.
  • The Teesta agreement has been unsigned since 2011, blocked inside India, and is the standing proof that Indian commitments can fail for Indian reasons.
• The analytical point is not that Bangladesh turned against India. It is that India’s Bangladesh policy had no design for a Bangladesh without the Awami League, and had to build one under time pressure.

The Maldives: 2023 to 2024, and the repair

• Mohamed Muizzu took office on 17 November 2023 having campaigned on “India Out” — the clearest case in the region of the India relationship being made the axis of an election.
• India withdrew its military personnel from the aviation platforms by 10 May 2024, replacing them with a civilian technical team: a concession that cost little operationally and defused the issue politically.
• The repair was rapid and instructive.
  • In October 2024 India extended currency swap support of US$400 million and ₹30 billion and agreed to open free trade negotiations.
  • Modi attended the Maldives’ 60th Independence Day, 25–26 July 2025, as guest of honour, extending a line of credit of ₹4,850 crore and signing six memoranda.
  • 2026 marks sixty years of diplomatic relations, and Malé is targeting signature of the free trade agreement by the end of the year.
• The lesson India drew is operational and transferable: in a small state, a visible military presence is politically usable by the opposition and financial assistance is not. India’s recovery came through the second instrument, and it came because India conceded on the first.

Myanmar since 2021

• The coup of 1 February 2021 and the civil war that followed are the case where a neighbour’s domestic turmoil has directly destroyed Indian projects.
• The junta’s staged elections from 28 December 2025 were widely rejected as neither free nor fair, and large areas remain outside its control, including much of Rakhine, held by the Arakan Army, and Chin State.
• The damage to India is concrete rather than reputational.
  • Paletwa fell to the Arakan Army in January 2024 and Sittwe’s hinterland is contested, so the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project is stalled at precisely the point that made it worth building, notwithstanding India’s assumption of operational control of Sittwe port in May 2023.
  • The India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway remains incomplete, with the Myanmar sections the binding constraint.
  • The Free Movement Regime was scrapped, announced by the Home Minister on 8 February 2024, and fencing of the 1,643 km border approved.
    • Mizoram and Nagaland oppose it because the boundary divides communities — a case in which a neighbour’s turmoil forced India to choose between border security and federal comity.
• India’s posture — engagement without endorsement — is criticised as accommodation of a junta and defended on the ground that disengagement would cede the field to China, which is the least satisfying and most defensible position available.

Episode	The domestic turmoil	The strain on Indian policy	What India learned
Nepal 2015	Constitution and Madhesi agitation	Supply disruption read as blockade	Visible pressure manufactures the nationalism it means to contain
Nepal 2025–26	Gen Z uprising; RSP majority	An untested government with generational, not party, roots	Welcome transitions fast and without conditions
Sri Lanka 2022	Default and mass protest	Four billion dollars of emergency support	First-responder status buys goodwill, not leverage
Bangladesh 2024–26	Hasina’s fall; the 2026 election	A relationship built on one party had no successor design	Invest in states, not incumbents
Maldives 2023–24	“India Out” and Muizzu’s victory	Withdrawal of military personnel	Presence is contestable; money is not
Myanmar 2021–	Coup and civil war	Kaladan and the trilateral highway stalled	Connectivity through a war zone is not connectivity

Every domestic crisis in a South Asian capital arrives in New Delhi as a foreign policy problem, because India is a participant in the internal politics of states it does not govern.

Why South Asia lacks “regionness”

A region is not a fact of geography. It is something a set of states become, in stages, and the vocabulary for describing how far they have got is Björn Hettne and Fredrik Söderbaum’s concept of regionness — the degree to which a geographical area has moved from being a passive object to an active subject able to articulate a regional interest.

The five levels applied to South Asia

Level	What it requires	South Asia’s position
Regional space	A geographically bounded area with physical and ecological coherence	Achieved. The subcontinent, the Himalayan watershed and the monsoon system are a single unit
Regional complex	Sustained social and economic transaction; interdependence for security	Achieved, but perversely. Interdependence exists as mutual security threat, which Hettne calls a “regional (in)security complex”
Regional society	Multiple actors — states, firms, civil society — cooperating across several dimensions	Barely begun. Trade under 6%, visas restrictive, no transit regime, and civil-society links severed by the central dispute
Regional community	A distinct identity, actor capability, legitimacy and a structure of decision-making	Not achieved. No shared identity project, no capacity to act as one, and a decision structure that produces nothing
Region-state	Voluntary evolution toward a new political form beyond the state	Not on any horizon. Sovereignty in South Asia is newer and more jealously guarded than in Europe

• South Asia is therefore stuck at the second level, and the diagnosis is more useful than a list of failures because it says why: the region’s interdependence is security interdependence of a negative kind, and negative interdependence does not automatically produce the positive kind.
• Regionness is a process, not a status, which is what makes the finding a diagnosis rather than a verdict. Southeast Asia was at the second level in 1967 and reached the third by the 1990s.
• The blockage is identifiable and singular. Movement from the regional complex to the regional society requires that transaction be permitted to accumulate — trade, travel, transit, exchange. Every one of those is throttled by the central dispute and by the veto rule that protects it.

The region as a conflict formation

• Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver’s regional security complex theory supplies the complementary frame, and their verdict on South Asia is explicit: it came into being as a conflict formation.
  • Their argument is that decolonisation converted a societal problem of religious conflict between the Muslim League and the Congress into an interstate, military-political one between Pakistan and India.
  • A security complex is a set of states whose security concerns are so interlinked that they cannot be analysed apart. South Asia qualifies emphatically — but the interlinking is antagonistic, not cooperative.
  • Buzan and Wæver identify three possible states of a complex: conflict formation, security regime, and security community. South Asia has never left the first.
• The regional complex is also permeated from outside. Chinese engagement across the littoral is now a structural feature rather than an episode, and its principal effect on regionalism is to supply the smaller members with an alternative to India — which raises the price of Indian leadership without producing an alternative regional order.
• Afghanistan’s position illustrates a further complication. It sits where the South Asian and the Middle Eastern complexes meet, and its inclusion in SAARC in 2007 widened the organisation’s geography without deepening it.

The measured facts behind “least integrated”

• Trade. Intra-regional trade below 6% of total trade — the lowest of any recognised region, and under 1% of the region’s combined output.
• Movement. No regional visa regime worth the name; the SAARC visa exemption scheme covers a few thousand individuals in designated categories, not ordinary travellers or businesspeople.
• Transit. No regional transit regime at all. Afghan goods cannot move freely to India across Pakistan; Nepal and Bhutan reach the sea through a single corridor; Bangladesh–Nepal and Bangladesh–Bhutan trade must cross Indian territory.
• Connectivity and institutions. Direct road, rail and air links between neighbouring capitals are thin; the secretariat is small and has no supranational competence whatever.
• Political integration. No common external position on any significant question; members vote separately in every multilateral forum.
• The one integration that has advanced is bilateral and radial — India–Bangladesh land connectivity, India–Nepal petroleum pipelines and rail links, India–Bhutan hydropower and grid integration, India–Sri Lanka maritime and energy links. The region integrates with India, not with itself.

The argument about India’s role

The scholarship divides on a single question: whether India’s regional record is one of hegemony insufficiently disguised or of leadership insufficiently supplied.

The critics

• Happymon Jacob makes the most systematic case against Indian conduct, and his five charges are worth taking separately.
  • India treats its neighbours as irritants rather than opportunities — a disposition that colours the handling long before any specific decision.
  • India handles delicate moments undiplomatically, and the 2015 Nepal episode is the case he names.
  • India meddles in the domestic politics of its neighbours with a consistency that no amount of denial disguises.
  • India does not follow through on its promises, and its track record on delivery is genuinely poor.
  • India should stop competing where China has the advantage — infrastructure spending — and invest instead in institution-building and soft power, of which the South Asian University is his example.
• Sanjaya Baru locates the failure structurally rather than behaviourally: the three preconditions for regional organisation were absent, and what South Asia has is a trust deficit rather than a trade deficit.
• Santosh Sharma Poudel writes from the small-state perspective and treats India’s isolation of Pakistan as a proximate cause of the organisation’s death — not because Pakistan is blameless, but because the tactic sacrificed the forum to win the quarrel.
• Filippo Boni argues that a decade of Neighbourhood First has produced a growing distance between India’s assumption of centrality and its actual returns, with the 2023–24 reverses in Malé and Dhaka as the evidence.

The defenders and the qualifiers

• The “reluctant leadership” reading, developed at length in the Indian literature, holds that India has behaved less like a hegemon than like a large state unwilling to pay the political price of leadership — powerful enough to be feared and not generous enough to be followed.
  • S.D. Muni has long characterised India within SAARC as a reluctant rather than a directive power, and has argued that India’s principal failing is the gap between its declaratory generosity and its administrative delivery.
  • The Pakistani scholar Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema puts the mirror-image case: the primary impediment is not asymmetry but the neighbours’ reading of Indian intentions, which precedes and shapes their reading of Indian actions.
• Achal Kumar Malhotra reduces the whole file to one variable.

“If I were to identify one constant factor in India’s relations with its neighbouring countries, I would describe it as some sort of trust deficit.”

Achal Kumar Malhotra

• Muchkund Dubey argues that India has historically under-invested in its smaller neighbours and should now invest far more, on the straightforward logic that a state which cannot match Chinese lending in scale must at least be present at all.
• Shyam Saran situates the neighbourhood within a longer civilisational and strategic frame, arguing that India’s security has always depended on the subcontinent behaving as a single strategic space, and that the partition of that space — not any policy error — is the underlying constraint.
• C. Raja Mohan frames the task as the reintegration of the subcontinent by other means: since political reunification is impossible and institutional integration is blocked, India’s realistic objective is to rebuild the economic and connectivity linkages that partition severed, bilaterally and sub-regionally, without waiting for the region to agree.
• Harsh V. Pant emphasises the change in method rather than in doctrine — the personalisation of diplomacy, the strategic use of soft power and diaspora, and a greater willingness to use hard instruments — while noting that the underlying structural forces have not been altered by any of it.

Where the two readings actually meet

• Both sides agree on the delivery gap. India promises more than it executes, and the distance between announcement and commissioning is the most frequently cited neighbour grievance.
• Both agree India cannot match Chinese infrastructure spending and should not try. The disagreement is over what to substitute — institution-building and soft power, or faster and better-targeted hard delivery.
• Both agree that India’s domestic politics is a foreign policy variable. A federal veto on Teesta and an electoral veto on Kachchatheevu are Indian constraints that the neighbours experience simply as Indian bad faith.
• The synthesis available is Gramscian rather than realist: leadership in an asymmetric region requires consent to predominate over coercion — paying more, asking less and delivering visibly. India’s record on the first two is better than on the third.

Prospects: what SAARC can and cannot become

The temptation is to choose between two clean positions — SAARC is dead, or SAARC can be revived. Both are wrong, and the interesting answer is the untidy one in between.

Why SAARC cannot simply be replaced

• It is the only body containing all eight South Asian states. Anything requiring Pakistan or Afghanistan can happen nowhere else, and the western half of the region is not a rounding error — it is close to 300 million people.
• The Bay of Bengal frame does not cover the region. BIMSTEC excludes Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Maldives; the Maldives is a SAARC member with no seat at the table India prefers, which is precisely why Malé has been among the loudest voices for revival.
• Regional public goods do not respect the political boundary. Disease surveillance, disaster response, air pollution in the Indo-Gangetic plain, glacial-lake risk in the Himalaya and hydrological data-sharing have the region’s geography, not a subset of it.
• Its instruments continue to function at low intensity — the university, the development fund, the food and seed banks, the specialised centres, the visa exemption scheme — and rebuilding them from nothing would cost more than maintaining them.
• Dormancy imposes an asymmetric cost on the smaller members.
  • SAARC was the one forum in which Bhutan, Nepal, the Maldives and Sri Lanka met India as formal equals, with an agenda, a chair and a record.
  • Its suspension returns them to pure bilateralism, the format in which asymmetry bites hardest — which, not affection for the institution, is why they keep asking for it back.

Why it cannot be revived unchanged

• The rules that paralyse it are charter provisions, and amending them requires the very unanimity they impose. The veto protects the veto.
• The India–Pakistan relationship shows no sign of permitting summitry. After April–May 2025 the relationship is at its lowest point since 1971, with trade nil, the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance and an arbitral award both rejected and unenforced.
• India’s stated position has not moved. Asked in August 2026 about revival, the Ministry of External Affairs restated that the reason for the body’s stagnation is well known and that one specific country is responsible — a formulation India has used consistently since 2016.
• Even a resumed summit would not restore the agenda. The connectivity and transit agreements blocked in 2014 would be blocked again by the same member for the same reasons.

“SAARC is on pause; we have not pressed a full stop on it. It is on pause because of Pakistan’s approach.”

S. Jaishankar

Variable geometry and sub-regionalism

• The functions are migrating rather than disappearing, and the vehicle is variable geometry: cooperation among willing members, at the pace the willing can manage, without waiting for consensus.
  • BBIN is the purest case — the motor vehicles arrangement that Pakistan vetoed inside SAARC, executed by four members outside it, and operating among three after Bhutan’s parliament declined ratification.
  • The Bay of Bengal grouping is the same logic at a larger scale, and its attraction to India is that it delivers the SAARC agenda minus the SAARC veto.
  • Sub-regional energy trading — the electricity framework agreement, cross-border transmission and the emerging India–Nepal–Bangladesh power trade — is where measurable integration is actually occurring.
  • The Colombo Security Conclave does for maritime security what BBIN does for road transport — it assembles the willing littorals around one function.
• The limitation of variable geometry is the one its advocates least like to state. A grouping defined by excluding a member has given up on the problem that member represents — and water, terrorism and transit to Central Asia do not go away by being unlisted.

Functional cooperation, framed narrowly

• The COVID conference of March 2020 is the template, and its features are replicable.
  • Narrow subject matter with no political content, unilateral Indian financing, short notice, and participation permitted at official level so that no leader had to be photographed with another.
  • It worked because it asked for nothing a member’s domestic politics could be embarrassed by.
• The candidates for the same treatment are identifiable: disease surveillance; seismic and cyclone early warning; hydrological data sharing, which is technical until it becomes allocative; food and seed reserves; and the standards and testing infrastructure that non-tariff barriers exploit.
• The institutional requirement is modest and unglamorous: keeping the secretariat, the specialised centres and the official-level machinery alive against a change in political conditions.
  • The Programming Committee met at Kathmandu on 11–12 February 2026, while the last formal Council of Ministers meeting was in March 2016.
  • The machinery is dormant at the top and awake at the bottom, which is precisely the condition worth preserving.

The renewed push for revival, and India’s response

• The pressure for revival now comes from the smaller members and from Dhaka, not from Islamabad alone, which changes its political meaning.
  • Bangladesh pressed the case under the interim government from early 2025 and has continued to raise it since.
  • The Maldives joined in July 2026, with President Muizzu offering Malé as a mediator on India–Pakistan differences — an offer whose significance lies less in its plausibility than in the fact that a state which campaigned on “India Out” now sees a functioning regional forum as its best protection.
  • Nepal and Pakistan have both called for a summit; the fortieth Charter Day on 8 December 2025 produced messages from every member reaffirming the Charter’s principles.
  • The secretary-generalship is being filled normally — Bhutan has nominated a successor as the current term ends in late 2026 — which is what suspended animation rather than dissolution looks like.
• India’s answer has been consistent and is unlikely to change. Revival would restore Pakistan a platform without restoring anything India wants; India has therefore invested in the Bay of Bengal grouping and in bilateral delivery, while maintaining that SAARC is paused rather than ended.
• The cost of that position is real and India rarely acknowledges it.
  • By declining to convene the only forum of formal equality, India confirms the small-state reading of its intentions.
  • It also hands the revival argument to whoever is willing to make it — which since 2025 has increasingly been Beijing’s partners rather than India’s.

SAARC’s future is dormancy with retained capacity, not dissolution — because geography will not permit South Asia to be reorganised around the Bay of Bengal alone.

Conclusion

The most useful thing that can be said about SAARC is that it did exactly what it was designed to do. It was built to be safe for a giant and safe for a giant’s rival, and the provisions that made it safe guaranteed that it would never do anything either could object to.

• India’s part in that outcome is not incidental. India wanted those provisions, extracted them as its price of entry, benefited from them for two decades, and discovered their cost only when its own agenda changed from insulation to integration.

What follows is neither revival nor replacement. The organisation’s political functions have migrated to formats that exclude the member who blocks them, its technical functions survive at official level, and its symbolic function — a forum of formal equality for the region’s small states — has no substitute and is being missed. The prospect for the next decade is a region that integrates radially with India while failing to integrate with itself, unless India concludes that the price of leadership is paying more, asking less, and delivering what it has already promised.