Why it’s time to let SAARC go

Terminally Ill: Anyone with a minimal rational understanding of international relations and the functioning of multilateral organisations would know that South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has gone the same way the Non-Aligned Movement had gone before. That is, to total oblivion and inconsequence. Maintaining these organisations today is a waste of taxpayers’ money from countries which can hardly afford extra cash for inconsequential diplomatic performances. In June 2026, amidst an official visit to Colombo, SAARC’s outgoing Secretary General, Md. Golam Sarwar made several public statements about the future of the organisation during engagements at the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies and the SAARC Cultural Centre. It is instructive to see what he said. He did recognise the organisation was in trouble when he noted the need for member nations to engage more proactively with each other to overcome the present difficulties the organisation faces and “re-ignite” it. He also noted at Colombo’s RCSS that “an inspiring momentum is emerging as visionary leadership across the region works to keep broader cooperation at the heart of the conversation.” He further said, “when member nations champion this collective vision together, they can successfully elevate the dialogue around shared progress, ensuring that deep, meaningful regional integration remains a vibrant and lasting priority for all.” But where exactly is this wonderful world of cooperation and visionary leadership emerging in the messiness that typifies domestic and international relations in South Asia? Where exactly can one see this inspiring momentum? Not on the ground for sure. In more realistic terms, what he has articulated is not fact or what is possible, but hope, against hope. What he outlined also does not constitute ongoing action on the ground. The reality beyond diplomatic sound bites is something very different. That reality merely mirrors the fractured history and dysfunctionality of SAARC over the last four decades. In an essay titled ‘As SAARC Faces Unprecedented Setback, Time to Rethink the Rigid Boundaries of Its Nation States’ published in 2016, my former colleague Ravi Kumar and I noted the need to rethink how actually SAARC works. We wrote at a time when India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Bhutan refused to attend the 2016 SAARC summit scheduled to be held in Islamabad affectively scuttling the important meeting. Despite its forty-year history, the last summit took place twelve years ago in 2014 in Katmandu indicating the utter dysfunctionality of the organisation. What organisation can function when it cannot even successfully hold regular mandatory summits? This inability comes fundamentally from the India-Pakistan rivalry that flows into decision-making and more crucially, due to the unpractical expectation of 100 percent consent across all nations to proceed with all significant programmes. In this background, when Mr Sarwar claims SAARC is the “irreplaceable beacon of hope” for the 2 billion people in South Asia, it means nothing more than utter naivety. It is precisely this ostrich attitude of its leaders and officials which have at one level ensured SAARC’s established dysfunctionality and track record in relatively unimaginative programing. That is, they have not moved beyond the practices and hurdles so typified by nation states and mere sound good rhetoric as in this case. Beyond this, SAARC should never have been merely focused on a geographic grouping led by nation states with their often-irreconcilable idiosyncrasies and rivalries. This is what Ashish Nandy had referred to as “garrison states.” Where are the region’s people, their collective organisations, their cultural productions and their hopes and histories beyond the overused rhetoric of people-to-people relations? This is what Kumar and I raised in 2016. That is, whether it was possible, “from the continued existence and overall usefulness of the regional grouping, to the foundational concern of how to work out issues of regional cooperation.” In this situation, mere “politics and economics of nation states” have “become the most significant dimension of the hegemonic discourses of regional cooperation.” Unfortunately, “in this process, it loses track of the actual sites inhabited by people, which are the messy cultural and emotional spaces beyond these territorial boundaries.” Moreover, “this has become evident in the way states have to work through their own formal bureaucratic mechanisms, while the initiatives of the people, and the imagination of scholars and creative people of the region, have often been very different and more inclusive than that of the state.” Beyond the matter of leadership, the other area where SAARC has failed is in its lack of creative imagination in the way it should work. If it could put in place a process beyond the usual bureaucratic performances where there is more grounded involvement of people, there can be some hope. However, as Kumar and I had noted in 2016, “these non-hegemonic approaches have not been recognised at the level of formal statecraft. The obvious disconnect between the people and the nation is reflected in the constitutive character of the SAARC.” This is why even when visual artists, singers, dancers and sometimes scientists take part in purportedly SAARC-led initiatives, they are drawn from lists of supporters maintained by individual national governments and constituent political parties rather than from repositories of people who have actually worked tirelessly and excelled in their respective fields. The result is consistent mediocrity. Mr Sarwar reportedly noted at RCSS that the “SAARC Cultural Centre in Sri Lanka” is “a vital node of technical expertise driving a practical, bottom-up approach to regional problem-solving.” Since when does this organisation do this kind of thing? While this is certainly possible when it comes to discourses on issues such as heritage management and preservation, the Centre’s mandate is to “promote regional unity through cultural integration and intercultural dialogue” and to “contribute towards preservation, conservation and protection of South Asia’s cultural heritage within the framework of the SAARC Agenda for Culture.” In any case, this organisation as well as SAARC more generally have never been about working through a bottom-up approach to address regional problems. Given their bureaucratic personalities, they are top-down by definition like all such multilateral organisations. Notwithstanding that the SAARC Cultural Centre has become far more active in very recent times than it ever has been in the recent past due to changes in its leadership affected under the auspices of the Sri Lankan government, it is nevertheless reduced to run programmes mostly online. The inability to undertake more proactive programming despite the Centre’s present enhanced interest comes from both funding restrictions as well as the unnecessary rivalry between member states, particularly between India and Pakistan that percolates into the way the Centre is expected to function. It also does not help when the ability to be creatively independent in its programs is severely curtailed by unpractical norms of consent across member nations. The Secretary General’s observations on the South Asian University in Delhi were far more disappointing as were they also completely wrong. Referring to the University’s now meaningless slogan, “knowledge without borders,” he described the university as a “visionary investment in our collective intellectual capital” that inculcates a shared regional consciousness by functioning as a “living bridge of mutual trust and academic collaboration” transcending political boundaries. Clearly, despite being the current Secretary General of SAARC, Mr Sarwar is completely unaware of what the university has become in more recent times, and particularly under his own watch. What he has outlined are the expectations and hope upon which the university was established, which was also put into practice in the first decade or so of its existence. However, this is far from the reality now. Under its present and continuing India-appointed leadership, where no other South Asian nation has been able to appoint a President, the university has not only become completely North Indian (not even simply Indian) for all practical purposes in so far as its discission-making apparatus is concerned, but it has also become an organ of Hindutva and upper caste dominance. This transformation has affectively made it a mere extension of domestic Indian politics. It no longer admits students from Pakistan and Afghanistan. And students from countries beyond India that include Sri Lanka and the Maldives hardly show any interest in joining the university given its seriously dented reputation and toxic environment as regularly reported in the Indian press. Even the number of students joining from Nepal – compared to early years – has also come down for the same reasons. This is an unfortunate but conscious deviation from its original intentions. What has happened in the process is its mandated South Asian identity and consciousness that the Secretly General himself referred to, has been violently uprooted. All this has happened officially under the auspices of SAARC and unofficially under the guidance of the Indian government while all member states have remained silent. The university’s deterioration into what is at best a mediocre regional ‘coaching centre’ has been well-documented in the Indian press over a long period of time. In this context, the Secretary General seeing the failed South Asian University experiment as a “living bridge of mutual trust and academic collaboration” is truly shocking. In this overall situation, as opposed to the Secretary General’s over-optimistic and naïve assessment of SAARC’s future not grounded on regional realities, it is creditable that some of the Sri Lankan participants did bring up the South Asian University’s deterioration as well as what actually is meant by rhetoric such as South Asian identity and consciousness. Ceylon Today of 28 June 2026 quoted the Secretary General as asking rhetorically, “without SAARC, what is the alternative?” This is indeed an important question. The answer to this question has been provided by the Secretary General’s own public pronouncements of naivety. Rather than a dynamic diplomatic institution, SAARC has become a moribund entity that merely reemploys retired diplomats and officials from the region, appoints others on secondment and employs junior officers on an unenviable pay scale, none of which have effectively contributed to serious and long-term institution-building. It is merely a burden on the region’s hapless taxpayers. All this suggests the necessity for SAARC to radically and completely reinvent itself if it is not to become even more irrelevant than it already is. Its only hope is to rediscover itself within a “sense of embedded subversiveness in the acts of reasonable people” which cannot be done within the shackles of officialdom and dysfunctionality SAARC and the nation states which reluctantly fund it are straddled with. To be functional, the organisation also must be rescued from the India-Pakistan rivalry and its consequences. We know, all this is impossible as things stand today. This is why SAARC should be formally put to rest while its functioning organisations can be reinvented – where necessary and if it makes economic and financial sense – in the national personalities of the countries where they are located as South Asian University has already done. Let me conclude by answering in plain terms the Secretary General’s question, “without SAARC, what is the alternative?” South Asia’s future is clearly not with SAARC. It lies squarely with individual nation states and their ability to forge bilateral and multilateral relations in areas that matter to them and in ways that benefit their national interests while at the same time self-consciously remaining out of the shadows and devious plans of any single hegemon.