Geopolitical churnings, in frequent measure, are not often commonplace in the world as nations pursue their interests with consistency and a selfish orientation. Wherever shortfalls exist in attaining national goals, countries try to forge alliances with friendly nations to turn the strategic environment to their benefit. South Asia, one of the world’s most politically stressed regions, is no exception to this diplomatic and political truism.
India, as the largest and most powerful nation in South Asia, since Independence in August 1947, has always strived to harmonise its neighbourhood, with mixed results. Way back in April 1947, just months before Independence, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru conducted the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi. After Independence, India reached out to its smaller neighbours time and again to assist them in myriad ways, like disaster management, soft loans or even outright financial grants, medical cover, educational facilities, assistance in power generation and connectivity by road/rail/water transport and favourable trade procedures.
However, India’s powerful northern neighbour, the People’s Republic of China, proved time and again to be the proverbial elephant in the room, with its consistent, direct and indirect, interference and disruption-oriented policies and actions against India. For decades, China has gone out of its way to adopt policies to box India in South Asia and curtail its endeavours and influence outside South Asia. Unfortunately, the same mindset of China still persists. It is paradoxical that for many decades, while the United States has been customarily anti-China, its own protege, Pakistan, has been firmly ensconced in the Chinese camp, deriving financial and military benefits, among other doles, from both China and the United States.
Though right from the time of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation not only endeavoured for global peace and warm relations between developing nations, which resulted in the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement, but also for peace in the neighbourhood.
However, the idea of regional cooperation in South Asia was officially first mooted by the then President of Bangladesh in 1980, Gen. Zia-ur Rahman. Accordingly, this led to the formation of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc), which was established on December 8, 1985 in Dhaka with the mission of promoting regional integration and economic development in South Asia. The organisation’s secretariat was based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Its seven member states were Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, with Afghanistan joining as the eighth member in 2007, primarily on India’s prodding.
Saarc, in its formative years, started off very well with many conferences and inter-ministerial meetings among its member states taking place and baby steps for economic cooperation. A special visa scheme for Saarc citizens was also initiated, to ease travel for certain categories of people within the bloc. One of its major achievements was the launching
of the South Asian Free Trade Area in 2006 and granting of observer status to the UN, European Union, US and China for enhancing its economic reach. However, Saarc failed to achieve its laid-down objectives primarily due to serious political differences between India and Pakistan. That Pakistan was acting against India even in Saarc at China’s behest is a well-accepted fact. Currently, Saarc’s key activities remain temporarily on hold and South Asia is bereft of any collective economic cooperation. Saarc has not been able to hold its annual conferences since 2019, when its annual summit scheduled in Pakistan could not be held.
With Bangladesh in flux after the August 2024 ouster of its pro-India Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the highly anti-India Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus as Dhaka’s caretaker head, both China and Pakistan have sensed an opportunity to expand their joint footprint in South Asia. Some media reports have indicated that both these nations are now collaborating on a new regional alliance as a potential replacement for Saarc, which is virtually dormant. This proposed alliance would foster enhanced regional engagement through greater connectivity and encouraging trade between the nations of this region. After the recent visit to Kunming in China by Bangladesh’s chief adviser Mohammad Yunus, the latter, quite unconvincingly, has denied that these three nations are working towards an alternative to Saarc. But strategic analysts believe that China, as it works to increase its influence in South Asia, will certainly work towards forging a new alliance and try to lure as many nations from South Asia as possible into an economic pact, to be followed by their getting into economic entrapment, on the lines of China’s famed debt trap diplomacy. In 2021, China launched the China-South Asia Poverty Alleviation and Cooperative Development Centre at Chengdu, but excluded India. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is another step aimed at perpetuating China’s influence in South Asia, with China also doing its best to marginalise India in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
Indian diplomacy in the past few months has been under great stress, especially after US President Donald Trump assumed office in January, and the Pahalgam massacre of 26 tourists in Kashmir by Pakistani terrorists in April, followed by India’s Operation Sindoor response the following month. China’s diplomatic machinations in the region are well known to the Indian establishment, and therefore the external affairs ministry has its task cut out to ensure that China doesn’t succeed in luring other South Asian nations into its camp and make the now-moribund Saarc completely irrelevant. Along with other like-minded nations — Afghanistan, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Maldives and other observer organisations — India must earnestly strive to revive the sluggish Saarc for the region’s benefit. Bangladesh can be discreetly warned to stay away from the Chinese camp or face additional economic blockades from the Indian side.
New Delhi, without compromising its national interests in any way, has to manage the complex India-China diplomatic chasms with determination, maturity and prudence.
The writer, a retired lieutenant-general, was the first head of India’s Defence Intelligence Agency, and is a strategic analyst
