For the last few years India has refused to attend the SAARC summit, when Pakistan tried to hold that as a Chair of the SAARC. India did so by making lame excuses that until Pakistan stops the so called support of terrorism in the region, it will not attend the SAARC summit in Pakistan. This is the allegation, which India has been airing about Pakistan, mainly to get the sympathy of the US and other western countries on the issue of terrorism in Afghanistan, to denude the people of Jammu and Kashmir of the western countries’ support in their freedom struggle, by terming that struggle as terrorism.
India’s game plan of blaming Pakistan for supporting terrorism is also aimed at undermining Pakistan’s credentials for successfully fighting terrorism along its borders, spilling over from the Afghan soil. India also did so to distort Pakistan’s international standing and image to get it declared as a terrorist state to bring it under the UN sanctions. In this game plan, India has already very badly failed, and now it is making futile efforts to move Pakistan in the black list of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), to bring it under international sanctions.
Another major reason for India not attending the SAARC summit arranged by Pakistanis China’s increasing influence among SAARC member countries, which India did not like, as India’s aspired hegemony in South Asia would not be realized. India became more conscious of this fact, when in the last few years, almost all SAARC member countries started supporting that China should be made a regular member of the SAARC. Knowing that in the next some years, other SAARC member’s countries’ willingness to make China a regular member of the SAARC will build a moral pressure on India either to agree on this, or explicitly put its veto, India has started scuttling the SAARC functioning.
With a view to avoiding a China becoming a full member of the SAARC that will further increase its influence among SAARC member countries, probably India has decided to permanently ditch the SAARC by refusing to attend its summits in Pakistan and also by pressuring some other countries like Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan to decline to attend these summits. India has also done so to curtail China’s ever increasing economic cooperation with other South Asian countries on a bilateral basis. And, in this context, India is conscious that in the area of economic investments in South Asia, it cannot match China because of its huge resources.
Moreover, to fail the SAARC, and to distance the other SAARC members from China, India is now focusing on sub-regional organizations like the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), with Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Thailand as its members, and the South Asian Sub-regional Economic Cooperation (SASEC), comprising Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal and Sri Lanka. India is trying to have a project based investment and trade related relations with these countries. In this context, India wants its monopoly of decision making in these organizations to establish its influence and diminish China’s influence in these countries. It is a different story that China’s influence is still increasing due to its huge economic investments being made in other smaller South Asian countries.
India’s opposition to China’s Bridge and Road Initiative (BRI), the CPEC and the BCIM is also for the same reason that it wanted to curtail China’s influence in South Asia. In this context, India also tried to influence other smaller South Asian countries to also oppose these projects of China. Likewise, as already stated, India’s efforts to make the SAARC redundant is meant to isolate Pakistan in South Asia and also to reduce China’s influence in this region.
In view of India’s above stated objectives, it appears that it would continue with its efforts to make the SAARC redundant and dysfunctional. Therefore, to expose India’s designs of undercutting the significance of the SAARC by preferring to work with the sub-regional organizations, it is necessary that Pakistan should continue to make efforts to make the SAARC functional, by convincing other South Asian countries to attend its summit (less India) due to be held at Islamabad.
Along with these efforts, in coordination with other South Asian countries, Pakistan should also look for other alternatives of economic cooperation in South Asia, which will be useful, if India continues to keep the SAARC dysfunctional. In this context, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and China can think of mutually cooperating to form an organization, like China-South Asia Economic Cooperation (CSAEC), which can be later joined by Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives and even Bhutan.
The writer is a former Research Fellow of Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI), Islamabad and Senior Research Fellow of Strategic Vision Institute (SVI), Islamabad