Head-on | Why reviving SAARC is in Pakistan’s interest, not India’s

There is nothing Pakistan would like more than bringing a comatose South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) back to life.

In an op-ed for a leading daily, academic Happymon Jacob argued that a reborn SAARC would “empower” Delhi. A revitalised SAARC would in fact empower Pakistan.

Pakistan craves equivalence with India. It has used every device possible since its defeat in Operation Sindoor to reinvent itself as a global peacemaker. But with a 35-year legacy of sponsoring terrorism against India, Pakistan in the West’s eyes remains an unpredictable interlocutor to be kept on a tight leash.

Jacob uses alibis to make his case: “In September 2025, at the UN General Assembly, Bangladesh’s chief advisor Muhammad Yunus called for reviving SAARC. In December, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif made the same case. And earlier this year, when South Asian dignitaries gathered in Dhaka for former Bangladesh premier Khaleda Zia’s funeral, Yunus remarked that the ‘SAARC spirit was still alive’.”

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It is a cast of characters whose worldview aligns with Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir, who has publicly called India Pakistan’s eternal enemy. Why would Jacob want to appease Munir? He makes an incongruous, rambling argument: “New Delhi has two specific neighbourhood dilemmas. One, the more it engages with and in the region, the more it is resented there, rightly or wrongly; the more it retreats from it, the more it loses in the region.

“Two, the more New Delhi focuses on its global mission, the more its importance will diminish in the neighbourhood; and the more it focuses on the region, its ability to pursue its global aspirations will diminish. These two inter-related dilemmas flow from three sources: the rise of China in South Asia, Washington’s engagements in the region that are increasingly at odds with New Delhi’s and its own limited diplomatic and political capital and attention. All this means that there is an instrumental case for reviving SAARC.”

Jacob is embarrassed enough to make a mea culpa towards the end of his tortured op-ed: “To be fair, a revived SAARC will not change the region’s geopolitical context overnight. It will not settle the India-Pakistan question, will not evict China from South Asia, and will not, on its own, lead to the integration of a region as complex as this. What it can do is more modest, but still useful. As for India, it can keep the neighbourhood from drifting further towards China while India’s attention is fixed elsewhere. It also gives India a regional organisation in which it will have primacy.”

India has plenty of multilateral options which serve its national and geopolitical interests. The Quad may not be a priority for US President Donald Trump, but he is anyway a declining force. After the November midterms, Marco Rubio and JD Vance will step up, placing the Quad at the centre of security in the Indo-Pacific. Japan and Australia remain committed partners.

Similarly, once peace returns to West Asia, both the I2U2 (India, Israel, the UAE, and the US) and IMEC (India-Middle-East-Europe Corridor) will give New Delhi significant opportunities to expand its geopolitical and geoeconomic footprint. BRICS, now an 11-member group, adds range and depth to India’s global engagement.

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi again a special invitee to the G7 summit in Nice, France, and a leading member of the G20, SAARC is the very last forum India would want to be associated with.

SAARC, however, is relevant to Pakistan, which is not a member of any significant global group apart from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Meanwhile, the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) is a proxy for regional cooperation across South and Southeast Asia. BIMSTEC members include India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Mayanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The only SAARC member nations missing in BIMSTEC are Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Maldives.

Pakistan would like nothing better than a revived, revitalised SAARC. It would use the forum to raise bilateral issues like the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) and Kashmir. No other forum gives Islamabad this opportunity. With Munir’s attempt to play peacemaker between Iran and the US coming up against an Israeli wall, Islamabad is seeking a reborn SAARC as a means to take centre stage regionally. It could well use SAARC to urge President Trump to intervene in Kashmir, playing on Trump’s weakness for flattery.

Pakistan has already taken its case against India on the IWT to the Hague-based Court of Arbitration (CoA) and has secured a favourable verdict. India has dismissed the CoA as illegal and boycotted its proceedings. Given a platform like SAARC, Islamabad would further internationalise the IWT issue, playing the victim card.

Jacob’s poorly argued op-ed offers India a carrot and a stick. The stick: “If India declines to set the neighbourhood top order, someone else will. Through SAARC’s long pause, China has steadily deepened its footprint across South Asia: Chinese ports, loans, power grids and ships now reach into nearly every capital except for New Delhi and Thimpu. Not that the revival of SAARC will stop Beijing in its tracks, but a working SAARC could potentially deny it a free run, and we may have a regional organisation collectively deliberating on the terms of the region’s engagement with extra-regional powers. China, after all, is not a South Asian power.”

Then the carrot: “SAARC offers India what other forums cannot. It needs no guarantees or attention from any external actor, and New Delhi can still set the terms of the organisation as and when it is revived.”

The shallowness is striking. Pakistan’s very raison d’etre is to be the antonym of India: faith, history and culture. And yet, perversely, it is pathologically obsessed with India. It craves recognition, even a handshake, and cohabitation as equals.

But it is not equal, and that is what frustrates Islamabad to the point of seizing India’s attention the only way it can, with terror attacks from Pulwama to Pahalgam. Operation Sindoor, however, has made terror an expensive option for Pakistan. Hence the SAARC ploy.

(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)