SAARC, BIMSTEC and South Asian Regionalism

South Asia is the least economically integrated region on earth, and the reason is not that it lacks institutions. It has a charter, a summit, a secretariat, a free trade agreement, a development fund, a university and a shelf of conventions. What it has instead is a founding bargain that traded away the organisation’s capacity to act in exchange for getting it founded at all.

The puzzle: institutions without integration

• South Asia holds roughly a quarter of humanity and conducts about five per cent of its trade with itself — the lowest intra-regional share of any major world region, and it has barely moved in three decades.
  • The share runs at roughly a fifth to a quarter within ASEAN and around three-fifths within the European Union.
  • The World Bank puts South Asian intra-regional trade at about $23 billion against a potential near $67 billion.
• The shortfall is not explained by poverty. These are contiguous economies with shared rivers, rail gauges inherited from a single colonial network, and populations that lived inside one customs territory until 1947.
• Nor is it explained by an absence of machinery.
  • A charter, a summit, a council of ministers, a standing committee, technical committees and a permanent secretariat.
  • A preferential trading arrangement, a free trade agreement and a services framework.
  • Conventions on terrorism, narcotics and trafficking; a social charter, food and seed banks, a development fund and a university.
• The gap between this machinery and its output is the problem the topic poses. Naming the India–Pakistan rivalry and stopping identifies the largest cause and skips the harder half — why one bilateral dispute can shut down an entire multilateral organisation when comparable disputes elsewhere have not.

The institutions were not missing. They were designed so that a single unresolved quarrel would be enough to stop all of them.

The idea before the institution

An older conversation than the republic

• Regional cooperation in South Asia was discussed before India was a republic: the Asian Relations Conference at New Delhi in March–April 1947 raised it while the transfer of power was still being negotiated.
• The Cold War and two India–Pakistan wars then closed the possibility for three decades: Pakistan’s alignment with the United States through CENTO and SEATO, and India’s tilt to Moscow after 1971, placed the region’s two largest states in opposed security systems.
• The result was a region geographically contiguous and politically incoherent — trade routed outward, transport links severed rather than built, and no trust on which to build institutions.

Ziaur Rahman’s initiative and the smaller states’ motive

• President Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh is the author of the SAARC idea in its operative form. He circulated a working paper on regional cooperation in May 1980, then toured the region’s capitals and wrote formally to each head of government.
• His motive was structural: Bangladesh was a new state facing famine risk, flood exposure and an unresolved water dispute with a neighbour many times its size, and a multilateral forum was a way of meeting India as a formal equal.
• The same logic recommended it to Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives — each borders India, none borders more than one or two of the others, and a regional table converts asymmetric bilaterals into one setting where numbers partly offset size.
• India was initially suspicious for exactly that reason, reading the proposal as a device by which the smaller neighbours would combine and internationalise bilateral questions.
• Pakistan was suspicious for the opposite reason — that a body with India at its centre would institutionalise Indian primacy and supply a platform for Indian positions on Kashmir.
• Both agreed only after the terms were set: bilateral and contentious issues excluded and nothing decided except by unanimity. That is the founding bargain, and what the organisation has since done and failed to do follows from it.

From the foreign secretaries to Dhaka

• The foreign secretaries met at Colombo in April 1981 and identified five initial areas — agriculture, rural development, telecommunications, meteorology, and health and population activities.
• Preparatory meetings followed at official and then ministerial level, building the organisation from the technical layer upward. In August 1983 the foreign ministers met in New Delhi, adopted the Declaration on South Asian Regional Cooperation and launched the Integrated Programme of Action; India’s External Affairs Minister was P. V. Narasimha Rao.
• The first summit met at Dhaka on 7–8 December 1985, where Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka signed the Charter. Afghanistan acceded in April 2007 at the fourteenth summit, taking membership to eight.
• The Secretariat was established at Kathmandu in January 1987, headed by a Secretary-General drawn from member states in alphabetical rotation — currently Md. Golam Sarwar of Bangladesh.
• Nine observers attend: China, Japan, the United States, the European Union, Iran, the Republic of Korea, Australia, Myanmar and Mauritius.
  • Pakistan has proposed upgrading China to full membership; India objected and it has not advanced — an early illustration of the veto working in both directions.

The Charter, and the two provisions that decided everything

The stated objectives

• Article I lists eight objectives: the welfare of the peoples of South Asia; economic growth, social progress and cultural development; collective self-reliance; mutual trust; collaboration in the economic, social, cultural, technical and scientific fields; cooperation with other developing countries; coordination in international forums; and work with other regional organisations.
• The phrase collective self-reliance places SAARC in the Third World economic diplomacy of its era — the milieu that produced the Group of 77, UNCTAD and the New International Economic Order, and shaped the founding vocabulary of ASEAN and the OAU.

The principles: cooperation as supplement, never substitute

• Article II states the principles: cooperation rests on sovereign equality, territorial integrity, political independence, non-interference in internal affairs and mutual benefit.
• Two further clauses matter more than they appear to. Cooperation shall not be a substitute for bilateral and multilateral cooperation but shall complement it, and shall not be inconsistent with bilateral and multilateral obligations.
• Read with Article X, these convert SAARC from a body that pools sovereignty into one that explicitly does not.
  • On Balassa’s ladder the organisation sits at the bottom rung and has never securely occupied it: no supranational law, no direct effect, no transfer of competence, no institution able to bind a member against its will.

Article X(1): decisions at all levels by unanimity

• The text is short and absolute — decisions at all levels shall be taken on the basis of unanimity.
• “At all levels” is the operative phrase. The rule governs not only the summit but the Council of Ministers, the Standing Committee, the Programming Committee, the technical committees and the working groups.
  • There is no level at which a majority can carry anything, and therefore no level at which an obstruction can be routed around.
• The practical consequence is that any one of eight states holds a veto over every item of business, including procedural business such as the scheduling of a meeting or a budget line.
• It also makes the Charter self-locking: amending Article X would itself require unanimity, so the provision that produces the paralysis is protected by the paralysis it produces.

Article X(2): bilateral and contentious issues excluded

• The second clause states that bilateral and contentious issues shall be excluded from the deliberations of the Association.
• The intention was protective. If Kashmir, water, borders and terrorism could be tabled at a South Asian summit, no summit would ever convene; ring-fencing them would let cooperation proceed in technical sectors.
• The effect was the opposite of the intention.
  • Because contentious issues cannot be discussed, the organisation has no capacity to resolve them, and no member has any incentive to bring a dispute into a forum where it is out of order.
  • Because unanimity applies to everything else, an unresolved dispute does not stay in its box: it expresses itself as a block on whatever business is available — a transit agreement, a motor vehicles protocol, a summit date.
  • The clause therefore does not insulate cooperation from conflict; it removes the only tool that might have reduced the conflict while leaving the conflict free to travel into every other file.
• Hence SAARC has no inter-state dispute settlement mechanism, because the class of dispute most likely to arise is the class the Charter forbids it to consider; the SAARC Arbitration Council of 2005 was built for commercial arbitration and has been largely inactive.

“Bilateral and contentious issues shall be excluded from the deliberations of the Association.” — SAARC Charter, Article X(2)

• SAARC took the most restrictive option available on both axes at once. The European Communities conceded qualified majority voting in defined fields and built a court to enforce it; ASEAN softened consensus with a practice of proceeding among the willing. SAARC did neither.

The institutional machinery

The organs

Organ	Composition	Function
Summit (Article III)	Heads of state or government	Highest decision-making body; envisaged as annual, held roughly biennially, not convened since 2014
Council of Ministers (Article IV)	Foreign ministers	Policy formulation, review of progress, new areas of cooperation; last full session March 2016
Standing Committee (Article V)	Foreign secretaries	Overall monitoring and coordination, priorities, resource mobilisation
Programming Committee	Senior officials	Scrutinises the secretariat’s budget and calendar; the layer at which SAARC still meets
Technical Committees (Article VI)	Sectoral representatives	Formulate and implement programmes in each area of cooperation
Action Committees (Article VII)	Willing members only	Projects involving more than two but not all members — the Charter’s own, unused, opening for variable geometry
Secretariat (Article VIII)	Secretary-General and directors	Coordination, servicing of meetings, communication; no power of initiative

• The Action Committee provision is routinely overlooked. The Charter itself contemplates cooperation among a subset of members, so the instrument for sub-regional flexibility exists inside SAARC and has never been used — the barrier is political will, not legal text.
• The Secretariat is deliberately weak: it coordinates and services, it does not propose, and it has no right of initiative comparable to the European Commission’s. An organisation whose secretariat cannot table a proposal depends entirely on member states to generate business, and its members are not.

Regional Centres and specialised bodies

• SAARC once operated eleven Regional Centres. The eighteenth summit at Kathmandu in 2014 decided to rationalise them and the closures took effect through 2015–16, cutting the number to five with several merged into a single environment and disaster management centre.
  • The stated grounds were duplication and expenditure; the substantive grounds were non-performance. That an organisation had to shut most of its own operational arms for want of output is itself evidence about the whole.
• The survivors are the Agriculture Centre (Dhaka), the Energy Centre (Islamabad), the Cultural Centre (Colombo), the Tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS Centre (Kathmandu) and the Disaster Management Centre, whose interim unit India hosts at Gandhinagar.
• The specialised bodies are separately constituted and have fared better.
  • The SAARC Development Fund (Thimphu, inaugurated April 2010), with social, economic and infrastructure windows, authorised capital of $1.5 billion and a paid-in base near $672 million.
  • The South Asian University, proposed by India in 2005, agreed by inter-governmental agreement at New Delhi on 4 April 2007 and teaching from August 2010, with India providing the entire capital cost and the largest share of operating expenditure.
  • The South Asian Regional Standards Organisation (Dhaka), whose mandate on standards and conformity assessment addresses the non-tariff barriers that now restrict regional trade, and the SAARC Arbitration Council (Islamabad).
• The university compresses the whole problem into one institution. Because the summit has not met its Governing Board has not met, and scholars associated with it, among them Sasanka Perera, argue it has drifted towards an Indian institution. A regional body deprived of its regional governance becomes national by default.

The record: what SAARC actually built

A note that only criticises is half an argument. SAARC’s output is thin relative to its ambition, but the instruments it created are the assets any revival would work with — and the evidence for the one useful finding the organisation has produced, that narrow technical cooperation can survive political disagreement in South Asia.

The trade instruments

• The SAARC Preferential Trading Arrangement (SAPTA), signed at Dhaka in April 1993 and in force from December 1995, worked by product-by-product concessions rather than across-the-board cuts; four rounds produced long lists of commercially insignificant items.
• The South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) was signed on 6 January 2004 at the twelfth summit in Islamabad and entered into force on 1 January 2006, the trade liberalisation programme beginning that July.
  • It was framed as the first step towards a customs union, a common market and eventually an economic union.
  • Its programme was differentiated: India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka to cut tariffs to 0–5% on a shorter horizon, the least-developed members — Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, Afghanistan — on longer timelines with revenue-loss compensation.
  • Tariffs did in fact come down. SAFTA’s failure is not a failure of the tariff schedule, and treating it as one misdiagnoses everything after.
• The SAARC Agreement on Trade in Services (SATIS), signed at Thimphu in April 2010 and in force from November 2012, went nowhere: the schedules of specific commitments were never concluded despite a decade of expert group meetings, and offers where made were often below members’ own WTO commitments.
  • Mode 4, the movement of natural persons, is where the real complementarity lies and is the hardest thing in the region to concede — which is why the negotiation stalled.
• The SAARC Currency Swap Framework of 2012, revised in 2019 with a standby facility of up to $400 million, is among the few instruments actually used, principally by Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives.

Conventions and normative instruments

Instrument	Adopted	Substance
Regional Convention on Suppression of Terrorism	Kathmandu, 1987	Depoliticises listed offences so they cannot be treated as political crimes for extradition purposes
Additional Protocol to that Convention	Islamabad, 2004	Extends it to terrorist financing, following UN Security Council Resolution 1373
Convention on Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances	Malé, 1990	Regional cooperation on trafficking and precursor control
Convention on Preventing and Combating Trafficking in Women and Children for Prostitution	Kathmandu, 2002	The region’s first binding instrument on cross-border trafficking
SAARC Social Charter	Islamabad, 2004	Poverty, health, education, gender and population commitments with national coordination committees
Agreement on Rapid Response to Natural Disasters	Addu, 2011	Standing arrangements for regional disaster assistance
SAARC Food Bank	New Delhi, 2007	Regional reserve of foodgrain for emergencies
SAARC Seed Bank	Addu, 2011	Regional germplasm reserve and varietal exchange
Framework Agreement for Energy Cooperation (Electricity)	Kathmandu, 2014	Cross-border electricity trade — the last substantive SAARC agreement concluded

• The pattern in that table matters. The instruments cluster where no member’s core interest is engaged — child welfare, seeds, food reserves, disaster response — and thin sharply as they approach trade, transit and security.
• The terrorism convention is the exception that proves the rule: a binding regional instrument from 1987, strengthened in 2004, with almost no operational effect, because the disputes it would have to address are the ones Article X(2) excludes.

Connectivity: the agreements that were blocked

• At the eighteenth summit in Kathmandu in November 2014 three agreements were tabled: a motor vehicles agreement, a regional railways agreement and a framework agreement on energy cooperation.
  • Pakistan withheld consent from the first two, and only the electricity agreement was signed, at the eleventh hour after direct intervention at the summit.
  • This is Article X(1) in a single frame: two agreements with seven willing signatories stopped by one.
• The workaround came within seven months. In June 2015 the transport ministers of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal signed the BBIN Motor Vehicles Agreement at Thimphu — the same instrument, minus the veto.
  • Bhutan’s National Council declined to ratify it, on environmental grounds and concern about vehicular traffic in a carbon-negative economy, and Bhutan subsequently let the other three proceed without it.
  • India, Bangladesh and Nepal have run it trilaterally since, with passenger and cargo protocols finalised in 2025 after a decade of negotiation and trial runs on routes such as Kathmandu–Kakarvitta–Panitanki–Siliguri.
  • BBIN is the most important single fact about SAARC’s future: it shows the willing can proceed, that the connectivity deficit is not technical, and that the price of variable geometry is the exclusion of the west.

The one thing that worked after 2014

• On 15 March 2020, at India’s initiative, the SAARC leaders held a video conference on COVID-19 — the first and so far only leader-level SAARC engagement since 2014.
  • India announced a SAARC COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund with an initial $10 million, to which others contributed, and a COVID-19 Information Exchange Platform (COINEX); the Disaster Management Centre’s unit at Gandhinagar ran a regional website.
  • Video conferences of directors general of health services followed in March 2020 and of trade officials in April 2020.
• It shows that functional cooperation framed narrowly enough — a pandemic, a technical exchange, a bounded fund — can survive a political relationship that will not permit a summit.
• Pakistan participated at ministerial rather than head-of-government level and raised Kashmir on the call: the exclusion clause holds only as long as everyone observes it.

Summitry and corridor diplomacy

• Eighteen summits were held between 1985 and 2014, three in India — Bengaluru in November 1986, New Delhi in May 1995, New Delhi in April 2007.
• Declared outputs were often thin, but the real product was frequently the meeting held in the corridor: India–Pakistan leader-level contact repeatedly happened at SAARC summits when no bilateral visit was politically possible — Malé 1990, Colombo 1998, Kathmandu 2002, Islamabad 2004 — the last opening the composite dialogue.
  • A venue where adversaries can meet without either government appearing to concede a visit is a genuine function, and its loss since 2014 is a real cost rather than a symbolic one.
• The SAARC Visa Exemption Scheme, running since 1992, covers a short list of categories — judges, parliamentarians, officials, business people, journalists, athletes. Its size is the point: a scheme covering a few thousand people is what passes for freedom of movement in a region of nearly two billion.

South Asia as a free trade area: why SAFTA underperformed

Tariffs came down and trade did not go up. That single sentence is the diagnostic core of the topic, because it forecloses the explanation most readily reached for and forces attention onto the things that actually restrict trade in South Asia — exemption lists, standards and certification, the absence of transit, and the cost of crossing a border.

Sensitive lists

• A sensitive list is a schedule of tariff lines that a member exempts from the liberalisation programme altogether. Every SAFTA member maintained one.
• The lists were long and commercially targeted, covering a share of intra-regional trade far larger than their share of tariff lines, because members listed precisely the products their neighbours were competitive in — close to half of Bangladesh’s imports from South Asia once fell within listed items.
• Successive rounds of pruning reduced them, and India cut its list for least-developed members, but the reductions came late and missed the products that mattered most.
• The sensitive list was a protective transitional device that became a permanent instrument of exclusion.

Non-tariff and para-tariff barriers

• Non-tariff barriers now restrict South Asian trade more than tariffs do — standards, testing and certification, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, licensing, port restrictions and customs procedures.
  • A consignment may face testing that duplicates testing already done in the exporting country, because there is no mutual recognition of conformity assessment — the gap the standards organisation was created to close and has not.
  • Limited laboratory capacity, working hours, parking and warehousing at land customs stations turn a procedural requirement into a multi-day delay.
• Para-tariffs — border charges levied under names other than customs duty, such as regulatory duties and cess — are a specifically South Asian problem, because SAFTA addressed customs duty and left the rest standing.
• The consequence is that average protection in South Asia remains well above the world average even after the tariff cuts.

No services and no investment

• SAFTA covers goods. SATIS produced no schedules, and there is no regional investment agreement at all — which is where the complementarities are most obvious and most unexploited.
  • Indian health care, higher education, IT and professional services have natural regional markets; Nepali and Bangladeshi labour mobility is already large but almost entirely informal or bilateral.
  • Tourism is the most obvious single case: a region containing the Himalaya, the Buddhist circuit, Mughal and Dravidian architecture and long coastlines cannot sell a joint itinerary because visitors cannot cross its borders.

The missing transit regime

• There is no regional transit regime, and this is the most consequential structural gap of all.
  • Afghan goods cannot cross Pakistan freely to India. Pakistan has permitted Afghan exports to reach the Wagah–Attari crossing but not Indian goods to move the other way, so the corridor runs in one direction and intermittently.
  • Nepal and Bhutan are landlocked and reach the sea through a single corridor — Siliguri and the Indian and Bangladeshi ports beyond it — so their trade costs turn on an arrangement they do not control.
  • India’s own north-east is a transit problem inside a member state: the shortest route from Kolkata to Agartala runs through Bangladesh, and the route used runs around it.
• A region in which goods must travel around a neighbour rather than through it is not a free trade area, whatever its tariff schedule says. Hence the estimate that it is cheaper to trade with Brazil than with Pakistan — distance is irrelevant and institutional friction is everything.

Visas, transport links and the cost of the border

• South Asia’s visa regimes are among the most restrictive anywhere: India and Pakistan issue city-specific visas with police reporting requirements, and business travel between most pairs takes weeks.
• Direct transport links are thin — limited air routes, rail links repeatedly suspended, and shipping between regional ports frequently transshipped through Colombo, Singapore or Dubai.
• The result is that transaction costs at the border exceed the tariffs SAFTA removed. Cutting a 10% tariff achieves nothing if compliance and delay add 20%.

Political interruption

• Pakistan never extended most-favoured-nation treatment to India, despite India having extended it in 1996. A 2012 plan to grant “non-discriminatory market access” — the formulation adopted to avoid the politically charged phrase — was announced and then not implemented.
• Trade was suspended after 2019. Pakistan downgraded relations and suspended bilateral trade following the constitutional changes in Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019; India had already raised duties on Pakistani goods to 200% after the Pulwama attack in February that year.
• The suspension was extended in April 2025, after the Pahalgam attack, to cover indirect trade through third countries as well, and the Attari–Wagah crossing was closed.
• Official bilateral trade has consequently fallen close to zero: Pakistani exports to India collapsed from over $500 million in 2019 to well under a million dollars a year.

The informal trade that the official figure hides

• A large share of India–Pakistan commerce continues, routed through Dubai, Singapore or Colombo, relabelled and re-exported under a changed country of origin; trade research places this indirect trade at several billion dollars a year, an order of magnitude above the recorded figure.
• Similar unrecorded flows run along the India–Nepal and India–Bangladesh borders.
• This strengthens rather than weakens the case for integration, and it is the point most often missed.
  • It shows demand for regional trade exists and is met at a premium; the detour is a deadweight loss borne by consumers on both sides.
  • The official five per cent therefore understates real interdependence, so the claim that these economies have nothing to offer each other is empirically wrong.
  • And gains from a working transit regime would be realised quickly, because the trading relationships already exist and would simply move onto a shorter route.

Tariffs were never the binding constraint in South Asia. The binding constraint is the cost of crossing the border, and SAFTA did not address it.

The paralysis: from Kathmandu 2014 to the fortieth Charter Day

The last summit

• The eighteenth summit met at Kathmandu on 26–27 November 2014. It signed the electricity framework agreement, lost the motor vehicles and railways agreements to a single withheld consent, and adjourned.
• The nineteenth summit was scheduled for Islamabad in November 2016.
  • Following the attack on the Indian Army brigade headquarters at Uri on 18 September 2016, India announced it would not attend, citing cross-border terrorism and an environment not conducive to a successful summit.
  • Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan withdrew within days, and Sri Lanka and the Maldives followed. Under SAARC’s rules a summit cannot be held if any member is absent, so the summit lapsed.
  • The organisation has not met at leader level for more than a decade, and the Council of Ministers has not held a full session since March 2016.

Dormant at the top, alive underneath

• The distinction between dormancy and dissolution is the important one. The Secretariat at Kathmandu continues to function: its budget is approved, its Secretary-General appointed in rotation, its technical calendar maintained.
  • The Programming Committee met at Kathmandu in February 2026; expert-level and official-level meetings, working groups and the regional centres continue at low intensity.
  • The Charter’s fortieth anniversary was marked on 8 December 2025, SAARC Charter Day, with a reception at Kathmandu at which the Secretary-General called on members to reinvigorate cooperation.
• The specialised bodies are the most active surviving layer: the Development Fund continues to approve projects, the university continues to teach, the food and seed banks exist on paper.
• What has stopped is precisely the layer at which political decisions are taken — not dead, not functioning, and retaining capacity that cannot be activated.

The 2025–26 revival push

• A coalition of the smaller and middle members has pressed for revival through 2025 and 2026, and the pressure is genuine rather than rhetorical.
  • Bangladesh’s interim leadership under Muhammad Yunus has been the most persistent advocate — seeking an informal leaders’ meeting on the margins of the UN General Assembly, raising revival at BIMSTEC, and pressing again in Dhaka in January 2026.
  • Pakistan has consistently called for the summit to be convened, since it is the state whose exclusion the present arrangement effects; Nepal and the Maldives have done the same.
• India’s position has not moved: revival is not possible while cross-border terrorism is unaddressed.
  • It was stated at the informal meeting of SAARC foreign ministers in New York on 26 September 2019, where India argued that SAARC’s problems were not only missed opportunities but deliberate obstacles. Officials have repeated through 2025–26 that the obstacle is a member state’s conduct, not the format.
• A reported China–Pakistan interest in an alternative grouping has run alongside the revival push, and the reporting is contested enough to require attribution rather than assertion.
  • Press accounts from mid-2025 described a trilateral meeting at Kunming in June 2025 of Chinese, Pakistani and Bangladeshi officials at which a new South Asian organisation was discussed; Bangladesh’s foreign ministry called it an official-level exchange, not the launch of a bloc.
  • Pakistan’s foreign minister later reiterated interest in a Pakistan–China–Bangladesh grouping in Dhaka. What is verifiable is the interest, not a formed alternative — but if SAARC stays frozen, the space it occupies will be contested by an arrangement built around Beijing.

Why SAARC failed: an ordered explanation

The India–Pakistan dyad, and how it becomes an organisational veto

• The dyad is the largest single cause, and it is not the whole cause. Its mechanism, rather than its existence, is what needs stating.
  • Article X(2) puts the dispute formally out of order, so the organisation cannot work on it.
  • Article X(1) gives each party a veto over everything else, so the dispute is expressed through obstruction of unrelated business.
  • The relationship’s ruptures — Kargil 1999, the 2001 Parliament attack, Mumbai 2008, Pathankot and Uri 2016, Pulwama 2019, Pahalgam 2025 — each reset the calendar, so cooperation restarts from zero rather than accumulating.
• Two Indian formulations capture the effect: S. Jaishankar has described SAARC as a jammed vehicle, and C. Raja Mohan has written of Pakistan as the camel in the SAARC caravan that slows the whole column.
• The counterfactual matters. Franco-German enmity was deeper and more recent in 1950 than India–Pakistan enmity in 1985, and the European institutions were built around it rather than in avoidance of it. The design choice, not the hostility, is what differs.

Asymmetry

• India is roughly three-quarters of the region’s population and about four-fifths of its GDP, and holds the largest share of its territory.
• The geography compounds the arithmetic. India borders every member except Afghanistan and the Maldives; most members do not border each other. The region is a hub-and-spoke, not a network.
• This makes cooperation feel like dependence to the smaller states: liberalisation with an economy of India’s size produces structural trade deficits legible as exploitation, and connectivity running through India creates leverage — Nepal’s 2015 blockade being the case its politics reaches for.
• Asymmetry is a structural problem for regionalism in general. Where one member dominates, the others must either accept its leadership as legitimate or resist it, and the bloc is stable only if the largest state binds itself.
  • The European solution was self-binding by the largest states: Germany accepted rules and a court that could rule against it, and its neighbours accepted its weight in exchange.
  • India never accepted an equivalent constraint and the smaller states never accepted its leadership. Compare Brazil in Mercosur, where dominance breeds the same resentment, and Indonesia in ASEAN, which deliberately underplayed its weight — the closest available model for India.

The absence of an external unifying push

• Western Europe integrated under Marshall Plan conditionality, a Soviet threat and an American patron that wanted integration; ASEAN was founded in 1967 against communist insurgency and the Vietnam War, with a threat perception that made regional solidarity an internal-security necessity.
• South Asia had no equivalent — no external patron demanding a regional body, no shared threat, no aid architecture routed through a regional institution.
  • Worse, superpower rivalry ran through the region rather than around it, with the two largest members in opposed camps. The external environment divided South Asia instead of consolidating it.
• Today the external factor is China, and it divides rather than unites.

Low complementarity and the outward turn

• South Asian economies were inward-looking for their first four decades, industrialising behind high protection, so there was little to trade even had the borders been open.
• Their export baskets compete rather than complement — textiles, agricultural commodities and low-end manufactures sold to the same third markets.
• When they liberalised from the late 1980s, they liberalised outward. Growth came from connecting to the United States, the European Union, the Gulf and East Asia, not to each other.
  • A region whose members’ growth model does not require the region has weak incentives to build it.
• The complementarity that does exist is in services, energy and labour, precisely the set SAFTA does not cover. The energy case is strongest: Himalayan hydropower, Indian and Bangladeshi demand and seasonal complementarity make a regional grid the highest-return project available, and it is where cooperation has quietly advanced.

Charter design, restated as a cause

• The design failures compound one another: unanimity at all levels; the exclusion of contentious issues, removing both the capacity to resolve disputes and the incentive to bring them in; a secretariat without initiative power; no dispute settlement or supranational law; and no compliance mechanism, so ratification lags for years.

Domestic politics

• Concessions to a neighbour are electorally costly in every member state, and no member has a domestic constituency for whom regional integration is a first-order interest.
  • In India, Bangladesh policy runs through West Bengal and Assam, and Sri Lanka policy through Tamil Nadu; a federal system gives states a practical veto over the concessions the centre would need to offer, the Teesta agreement being the standing example.
  • In Pakistan, normalisation carries an institutional cost as well as an electoral one, since the army’s claim on national resources rests on the threat perception.
  • In Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, distance from India is an established mode of political mobilisation for whichever party is out of power.
• The states are young and their identities were defined against one another, in several cases by partition, so sovereignty is held tightly because it is recent — Pakistan’s self-definition as an Islamic state and the parallel debates in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh make pooling it ideologically costly.
• Political instability compounds it. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bangladesh have all had governments fall or constitutions change during SAARC’s life, each transition resetting negotiating positions.

Extra-regional involvement

• Chinese lending, infrastructure and port development across the littoral — Gwadar, Hambantota, Chittagong, Kyaukphyu, and lending across Nepal, the Maldives and Sri Lanka — is now a structural feature rather than an episode.
• Its effect on regionalism is indirect and important it gives the smaller states an alternative. A state that can finance a port without India need not trade a political concession for it, which raises the price of every concession it might make and lowers the cost of refusing.
• China is also an observer with a membership application sponsored by Pakistan and blocked by India — the extra-regional actor is a live question inside the organisation’s own membership politics.

The trust deficit as the product of all of them

• The trust deficit is not an additional cause; it is what the others generate. Its expressions are concrete: visa refusal rates, trade routed through third countries, signed agreements left unratified, and connectivity treated as a security risk.
• Sanjaya Baru has argued that regional organisation historically requires a market-driven economy, movement of people across borders and political convergence — all three absent in South Asia, which therefore suffers not a trade deficit but a trust deficit.
• Happymon Jacob has argued the deficit is partly of India’s own making, drawing lessons for Indian conduct: handle sensitive transitions diplomatically rather than coercively; do not intervene in neighbours’ domestic politics; follow through on promises; and invest in institution-building and soft power rather than competing with China on infrastructure.
• Santosh Poudel has made the sharper Nepali claim: that the India–Pakistan rivalry combined with India’s isolation of Pakistan killed the organisation, noting that India’s 2019 governing-party manifesto mentioned BIMSTEC but not SAARC.
• Beyond governments, Track Three activity — civil-society networks such as the Pakistan–India Forum for Peace and Democracy — carries much of what regional contact survives, because it runs outside the frozen official channel.

BIMSTEC: the Bay of Bengal alternative

Origins and membership

• Founded at Bangkok in June 1997 as BIST-EC — Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand Economic Cooperation. Myanmar joined later that year, making it BIMST-EC; Nepal and Bhutan acceded in 2004, producing the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation.
• Seven members: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand — five South Asian, two Southeast Asian.
• Its secretariat was established at Dhaka in 2014, seventeen years after founding; the Secretary-General is Indra Mani Pandey of India.
• It is an inter-regional rather than a regional organisation, which is its defining characteristic and the source of both its strengths and its limits.

Why India invested in it

• It excludes Pakistan, and is therefore not subject to the veto that paralyses SAARC — the first and largest reason, and there is no purpose in disguising it.
• It connects South and Southeast Asia, making it the natural vehicle for Act East, and gives India’s North-East a regional rationale: a landlocked, insurgency-affected region with a narrow corridor to the rest of India becomes a transit zone between two dynamic economies.
• It is Bay-of-Bengal centred, aligning with the maritime and Indo-Pacific framing of Indian strategy as a continental body does not. C. Raja Mohan’s formulation is that BIMSTEC brings India closer to three regions at once — the Bay of Bengal, the Mekong and the sub-Himalayan belt.
• The elevation was deliberate. BIMSTEC leaders were invited to the BRICS outreach at Goa in October 2016, weeks after the Islamabad summit collapsed, and to the swearing-in in May 2019 — each time in the place SAARC leaders had occupied.

Structure and the seven pillars

• BIMSTEC is five-tiered: the Summit; the Ministerial Meeting of foreign ministers; Sectoral Ministerial Meetings; the Senior Officials’ Meeting; and the Permanent Working Committee of national focal points.
• Cooperation was reorganised from fourteen scattered sectors into seven pillars, each with a lead country — a genuine design improvement on SAARC’s technical committees, because it assigns ownership and creates a domestic bureaucratic stake.

Pillar	Lead country	Sub-sectors
Trade, Investment and Development	Bangladesh	Blue economy
Environment and Climate Change	Bhutan	Mountain economy
Security	India	Counter-terrorism and transnational crime; disaster management; energy
Agriculture and Food Security	Myanmar	Agriculture; fisheries and livestock
People-to-People Contact	Nepal	Culture; tourism; poverty alleviation
Science, Technology and Innovation	Sri Lanka	Technology; health; human resource development
Connectivity	Thailand	Transport, energy and digital connectivity

The record

• The Charter is the most significant achievement. Signed at the fifth summit in Colombo in March 2022 and in force from May 2024, it gave BIMSTEC international legal personality twenty-five years after its founding — a striking measure of how informal it had been.
• The sixth summit met at Bangkok on 4 April 2025 under Thailand’s chairmanship, adopting the Bangkok Vision 2030, rules of procedure for BIMSTEC mechanisms and an Eminent Persons Group report. Bangladesh took over the chairmanship.
• The Agreement on Maritime Transport Cooperation, signed at that summit, entered into force in 2026 on Myanmar’s ratification — the grouping’s first substantive operational agreement in years.
• Earlier outputs: the Grid Interconnection Memorandum (2018); a Master Plan for Transport Connectivity (2022); disaster management exercises; a Convention on Combating International Terrorism, Transnational Organised Crime and Illicit Drug Trafficking (2009); and a security track at National Security Adviser level.

The weaknesses, stated honestly

• The free trade agreement framework of 2004 remains unconcluded after more than two decades, still at the level of technical working groups on rules of origin, customs cooperation and trade facilitation.
  • This is the single most damaging fact about BIMSTEC, because trade is the pillar on which the case for an economic grouping rests.
• The secretariat is very small for a seven-pillar mandate and existed only from 2014; summits have been infrequent, six in nearly three decades against a notional two-year cycle.
• Myanmar’s crisis has stalled the land connectivity the grouping’s logic depends on — the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway and the Kaladan multi-modal project are held up by the conflict. Thailand’s engagement is episodic, ASEAN being its primary framework.
• Intra-BIMSTEC trade remains around six per cent of members’ total trade — better than SAARC’s five, far below ASEAN’s roughly twenty-two — having grown from about $46 billion in 2019 to roughly $53 billion in 2023 without the share moving.
• Its members are all developing economies with low per capita incomes and weak social indicators, so resources for institution-building are limited on every side.
• Measures proposed to strengthen it, notably by Joyeeta Bhattacharjee, are instructive because so basic: regular summits; a better-staffed secretariat; tangible projects in tourism, digital and energy connectivity and disaster relief; and a dispute-resolution capacity.

Does BIMSTEC replace SAARC?

• It does not, and the argument is geographic before it is political. BIMSTEC is a Bay of Bengal body that includes most of South Asia; it is not a South Asian body.
  • It cannot deliver anything involving Pakistan or Afghanistan, which hold a very large share of the region’s population and its security agenda, and it does not cover the western half of South Asia at all — no amount of Bay of Bengal cooperation addresses the Indus basin, Afghan transit or the Durand Line.
  • It does not cover the western half of South Asia at all. No amount of Bay of Bengal cooperation addresses the Indus basin, the Afghan transit question or the Durand Line.
  • It adds two Southeast Asian members and changes the unit. BIMSTEC is a Bay of Bengal body that includes most of South Asia; it is not a South Asian body.
• The complementarity runs both ways: BIMSTEC offers a route to ASEAN that SAARC never did, and SAARC retains a membership BIMSTEC cannot reach. The official Indian position is that BIMSTEC complements rather than replaces SAARC — read by many as diplomatic cover, but also the analytically correct statement.

	SAARC	BIMSTEC
Type	Regional — South Asia only	Inter-regional — South and Southeast Asia
Founded	1985, a late Cold War creation	1997, in a post-Cold War environment
Members	8, including Pakistan and Afghanistan	7, excluding both; adds Myanmar and Thailand
Decision rule	Unanimity at all levels, contentious issues excluded	Consensus in practice, with no exclusion clause
Political climate	Mistrust and an active dyadic conflict	Relatively friendlier; no comparable rupture
Power balance	Single dominant member	India and Thailand provide two poles
Trade	Intra-regional stuck near 5%	Around 6% and slowly growing
Trade agreement	SAFTA in force since 2006, underperforming	FTA framework of 2004 still unconcluded
Status	No summit since 2014	Six summits; the most recent April 2025

The impediments to regional cooperation

Several impediments the syllabus names have already appeared as causes of SAARC’s failure — the India–Pakistan dispute, asymmetry and the trust deficit, connectivity and transit, and extra-regional involvement. Four more are distinct enough to need separate treatment, and each has the same structure: a domestic constituency inside one state that makes an inter-state settlement unaffordable.

River water disputes

• South Asia’s major rivers are all transboundary, and water is the region’s most reliable generator of grievance because it is zero-sum in the dry season and the upstream state is almost always India.
• The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, brokered by the World Bank, gave the eastern rivers — Ravi, Beas, Sutlej — to India and the western rivers — Indus, Jhelum, Chenab — to Pakistan, with limited Indian run-of-river hydropower rights on the western rivers.
  • It survived three wars. Its dispute machinery — Permanent Indus Commission, Neutral Expert, Court of Arbitration — is more elaborate than anything SAARC possesses.
  • Disputes over the Kishenganga and Ratle projects have run since 2016, with Pakistan seeking a Court of Arbitration and India a Neutral Expert, both activated in parallel over Indian objection.
  • India placed the treaty in abeyance with immediate effect on 23 April 2025, the day after the Pahalgam attack, stating it would remain so until Pakistan verifiably abandons support for cross-border terrorism.
  • The Court of Arbitration at The Hague has continued to sit, holding in a supplemental award of 27 June 2025 that the abeyance did not affect its competence, with further awards in August 2025 and 2026. India does not participate and regards the proceedings as without legal basis.
  • The treaty remains in abeyance through 2026 — nothing more consequential has happened to South Asian regional cooperation in a decade.
• The Teesta is the standing India–Bangladesh grievance: an interim agreement finalised in 2011 and never signed, because West Bengal withheld consent — a federal veto operating on a foreign-policy question.
• The Ganga Waters Treaty of 12 December 1996 shares the dry-season flow at the Farakka barrage on a ten-day-cycle formula from January to May, monitored by a joint committee at Farakka and the Hardinge Bridge.
  • It runs for thirty years and expires in December 2026, renewable by mutual consent, with renewal discussions under way through 2025–26.
  • Bangladesh’s grievances — shortfalls in dry years, siltation, effects on the Sundarbans — will shape the renegotiation, as will West Bengal’s position. The renewal is the most immediate test of whether South Asian water diplomacy still works.
• Nepal’s treaties are a study in perceived inequality: the Kosi (1954), Gandak (1959) and Mahakali (1996) agreements are held in Nepali politics to have sent benefits downstream, and Mahakali’s Pancheshwar project remains unbuilt.
• The Brahmaputra adds an upstream China, making India at once an aggrieved downstream state on the Yarlung Tsangpo and a resented upstream one for Bangladesh.

Cross-border migration

• The Assam movement and the Assam Accord of 1985 set a citizenship cut-off of 24 March 1971, and undocumented migration from Bangladesh has structured Assamese and increasingly national politics ever since.
• The National Register of Citizens exercise in Assam and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 were bilateral in their implications and received in Dhaka as such, even where India called them internal matters.
• Rohingya displacement from Myanmar into Bangladesh — roughly a million people at Cox’s Bazar — is the region’s largest current refugee situation, with secondary movement into India.
• The India–Nepal open border under the 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship is the region’s one genuinely open frontier, and also a security concern and a periodic irritant in Nepali politics.
• South Asia has no regional refugee or migration framework. No South Asian state is party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, and SAARC does not deal with refugees or internally displaced persons at all — sovereignty and non-interference having taken precedence over the rights of forced migrants.

Ethnic conflicts and insurgencies

• Every major South Asian insurgency has had a cross-border dimension, which is what converts an internal security problem into an impediment to regional cooperation.
• The Tamil question in Sri Lanka drew India in through Tamil Nadu’s politics, the 1987 accord and the Indian Peace Keeping Force, and still shapes Indian policy on devolution.
• North-East insurgent groups historically held sanctuaries across the Myanmar and Bangladeshi borders; Bangladesh’s action against them after 2009 is a clear case of bilateral cooperation delivering what no regional body could.
• The Baloch and Pashtun questions in Pakistan, and the Afghanistan–Pakistan dispute over the Durand Line, generate mutual accusations of sponsorship that make counter-terrorism cooperation impossible even where a convention exists.

Border disputes

• Sir Creek with Pakistan in the Rann of Kutch; Kalapani, Lipulekh and Limpiyadhura with Nepal, incorporated into a revised Nepali map in 2020; and the Line of Actual Control with China, unresolved and periodically violent.
• The counter-example is instructive. The India–Bangladesh land boundary was settled by the 2015 exchange of enclaves and the maritime boundary by arbitral award in July 2014, which India accepted despite losing much of what it claimed.
  • That is the model of a settled dispute in South Asia — possible where the relationship permits and both sides accept adjudication.

Impediment	How it operates	Illustration
India–Pakistan dispute	Blocks SAARC through unanimity; excluded from discussion by Article X(2)	Motor vehicles and railway agreements blocked, 2014; summit lapsed, 2016
Asymmetry and trust deficit	Cooperation reads as dependence; smaller states hedge	Hub-and-spoke geography; trade deficits with India
River water disputes	Upstream–downstream zero-sum in the dry season	Indus in abeyance since April 2025; Teesta blocked since 2011; Ganga treaty expiring December 2026
Cross-border migration	Domestic identity politics blocks bilateral management	Assam Accord 1985, NRC and CAA; Rohingya displacement
Ethnic conflict and insurgency	Sanctuaries and diaspora constituencies cross frontiers	Tamil question; North-East groups; Baloch and Pashtun questions
Border disputes	Unresolved boundaries sustain mutual suspicion	Sir Creek; Kalapani; the LAC — against the settled Bangladesh award of 2014
Connectivity and transit	No transit regime; a decade to ratify a protocol	Afghan goods cannot cross Pakistan; BBIN unratified by Bhutan
Extra-regional involvement	Alternative finance changes the bargaining position	Chinese port and infrastructure lending across the littoral

India’s position

From champion to sceptic

• India was a reluctant founder and then the organisation’s principal underwriter — hosting three summits, funding the largest share of the budget and proposing the university. The pivot after 2014 was rapid: the 2014 swearing-in invited SAARC leaders; the 2019 swearing-in invited BIMSTEC leaders, as the 2016 Goa outreach had done.
• The declared frame is Neighbourhood First, articulated as a consultative, non-reciprocal and outcome-oriented approach — India offering more than it asks in return, and delivering bilaterally rather than through the regional body.
  • Its instruments are bilateral: lines of credit, the South Asia Satellite launched from Sriharikota in May 2017 with terminals in six neighbouring states, extension of the National Knowledge Network, cross-border power trade, and first-responder disaster relief.
• SAGAR — Security and Growth for All in the Region (2015) was recast in March 2025 in Mauritius as MAHASAGAR Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions, extending the same logic to the wider Global South.

Under-investment before obstruction

• The critical Indian case is not that the pivot was wrong but that India’s own conduct helped produce the conditions that made it necessary.
  • India’s delivery record on announced neighbourhood projects has been slow and frequently unfulfilled, so promises accumulate faster than completions.
  • India has treated neighbours’ domestic politics as a field of influence often enough to make non-interference a contested claim, Nepal’s 2015 constitutional crisis and the ensuing blockade being the case most often cited.
  • India treated SAARC as a diplomatic stage rather than an economic project, never pushing for the transit and services liberalisation that would have made it consequential.
• The counter-argument is that unanimity made investment pointless. Why should the largest state, paying the largest share and offering non-reciprocal concessions, accept a rule under which the most hostile member can veto the result? That question has no good institutional answer.
  • It is why India’s interest declined even before 2016.

Strategy or rationalisation?

• Indian scholarship divides on whether the BIMSTEC pivot was a considered strategy or a post-hoc justification for a policy of isolating Pakistan.
  • One reading is strategic realignment: South Asia’s economic future runs east, the Bay of Bengal is the natural unit, and BIMSTEC is where Act East and Neighbourhood First converge.
  • The other treats it as rationalisation: India wanted a South Asian forum without Pakistan, BIMSTEC was available, and the Act East framing came afterwards — a tactic dressed as a strategy, its weakness visible in how little India has invested in the FTA.
  • The evidence supports both partially: the symbolic elevation was tactical and timed to the SAARC rupture, while the connectivity and maritime logic is real and predates it.
• S. Jaishankar’s own formulation has been that there is an appetite to grow under BIMSTEC that SAARC lacks — BIMSTEC has problems, Myanmar prominently, but a will to cooperate.

The wider architecture around SAARC

• BBIN — the sub-regional connectivity arrangement of 2015 among Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal, operating trilaterally, and the clearest working demonstration of variable geometry in South Asia.
• SASEC — South Asia Subregional Economic Cooperation, an ADB-supported, project-based partnership since 2001 among Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal and Sri Lanka, with close to a hundred financed projects worth roughly $26 billion in transport, trade facilitation, energy and economic corridors.
  • It is the most materially productive regional mechanism in South Asia, and it works because it is technical, bank-led, project-specific and needs no summit.
• IORA — the Indian Ocean Rim Association, founded 7 March 1997, secretariat in Mauritius, 23 members and ten dialogue partners, with India taking the chair from November 2025.
• The Colombo Security Conclave, formalised in 2020 around India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Mauritius, with Bangladesh and Seychelles joining as full members in 2025 and a Centre of Excellence for maritime security at Colombo; its pillars are maritime security, counter-terrorism, cyber security, disaster relief and the blue economy.
  • It is the closest thing to a functioning South Asian security organisation, built on the principle SAARC lacks — a coalition of the willing, minus the veto.
• Together these describe the actual shape of South Asian regionalism: a dormant comprehensive body, an inter-regional body doing the political work, a bank-led programme doing the physical work, and a plurilateral conclave doing the security work.

Prospects: what can be revived and what cannot

Two easy answers are available and both are wrong. SAARC is not dead: it retains a membership, a secretariat, a treaty corpus and functioning specialised bodies that no other arrangement reproduces. Nor can it be revived as it stands, because the provisions that froze it are charter provisions and amending them requires the unanimity they impose.

Why it cannot simply be replaced

• It is the only body containing all eight South Asian states. Anything involving Pakistan or Afghanistan can happen nowhere else, and those two hold much of the region’s security agenda and a quarter of its people.
• Its instruments exist and function at low intensity — the university, the food and seed banks, the development fund, the standards organisation, the regional centres — and rebuilding them elsewhere would take decades.
• Regional public goods do not respect the political boundary. Disease surveillance, disaster response, air pollution over the Indo-Gangetic plain, water and flood data and antimicrobial resistance cannot be handled in a forum excluding half the region’s population.
• Dormancy costs the smaller members most, since SAARC was the one forum in which they met India as formal equals — which is why they, not India, have driven the revival push.

Why it cannot be revived unchanged

• Unanimity and the exclusion clause are the disease and also the immune system. Any reform of Article X requires the consent of every member, including the one whose obstruction the reform would neutralise.
• The India–Pakistan relationship shows no sign of permitting summitry: trade suspended, the Indus treaty in abeyance, and India’s stated precondition a change in Pakistani conduct rather than in the format.
• A summit convened without a change in the underlying relationship would reproduce 2014 — a communiqué, a blocked agreement, and a longer gap afterwards.

The realistic path

• Variable geometry. Cooperation among the willing without waiting for consensus is already the region’s operative practice, through BBIN, BIMSTEC, SASEC and the Colombo Security Conclave. The Charter’s own Article VII Action Committees provide for exactly this and have never been used — reviving them is the least legally demanding reform available.
• Narrowly framed functional cooperation. The March 2020 COVID initiative is the proof of concept: a specific problem, a technical channel, a bounded fund, no political agenda. The candidates are disease surveillance, disaster response, flood data, air quality, food reserves and energy trading — each a shared cost rather than a contested benefit.
• Keeping the institutions alive at official level. The Programming Committee meeting of February 2026 is worth more than it appears: an organisation with a functioning secretariat can be restarted, and one without cannot.

Specific reforms, if a window opens

• Qualified majority for non-political matters — budget, calendar, technical output, secretariat appointments — leaving unanimity for anything a member declares politically sensitive.
• A secretariat with a power of initiative and a budget adequate to independent analysis, so business can be generated when member states will not.
• A dispute settlement mechanism for trade and treaty interpretation, which need not touch Article X(2) because commercial disputes are not the contentious issues it excludes.
• Trade facilitation and transit before further tariff cuts: a regional transit agreement, mutual recognition of conformity assessment, harmonised customs procedures and better land customs stations.
• Services and investment, beginning with the schedules SATIS never produced, with tourism and health as the least politically exposed entry points, and visa liberalisation beyond the exemption scheme’s few categories.
• A regional energy market, building on the 2014 electricity framework agreement and the trade already running between India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh — the one area where the economics are unambiguous and the politics manageable.

Conclusion

South Asia’s regional problem is a design problem with a political cause. The founders wrote a charter that could work only if the region’s central conflict were resolved elsewhere, and it was not. Unanimity then converted one state’s grievance into everyone’s paralysis, while the exclusion clause ensured the grievance could never be worked on inside the institution built to contain it. The response has been to build around the veto rather than remove it — real outputs, and a confirmed limit.