Prime Minister Narendra Modi needs to give more teeth to BIMSTEC. Keep SAARC on the back burner. In any case the charter of SAARC stipulates if one of the leaders of SAARC member states is absent the summit cannot be held.

India needs to think out-of-the-box if it wants to deal with a nearly three decade regional outfit South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). The body has perpetually remained in a declaratory phase, but never in an implementation one. It has been a talk shop, full of sound and fur, signifying nothing. Consider the following famous quote from Shakespeare’s immortal classic Macbeth: “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Just substitute “Life” with “SAARC” and the message remains so hauntingly true.

The event has always been dominated by India-Pakistan politics, leaving little room for any concrete deliverables. Of late SAARC has woken up to the crying need for South Asia emulating the European Union model and focus on infrastructural connectivity and foster better intra-regional trade.

This has alarmed Pakistan because if SAARC were to have seamless movement of passenger and cargo traffic across the region, Pakistan will lose its strategic leverage it enjoys in Afghanistan by denying India transit rights.

India has been forced to take a circuitous route and reach out to Afghanistan through Iran. This comes with costs as India has to pour in billions of dollars worth of investment in Afghanistan and Iran and connect the land-locked Afghanistan with a network of modern roads and highways and connect this road network with ports in Iran, like Chabahar.

No wonder then that Pakistan blocked three major connectivity projects initiated by India at the 18th SAARC summit in Kathmandu on 26 November. These projects pertained to setting up an electricity grid, starting trade in electricity in a big way and creating road and rail connectivity across the 8-nation SAARC.

Pakistan threw the spanner in the works saying “internal processes” on all of these were still pending among the various member states.

The bottomline, seen from the Pakistani perspective, is this: economic prosperity emanating from better regional connectivity will not be acceptable to Pakistan as long as it benefits India also and dries up the Pakistani leverage over Afghanistan.

Besides, there is another irritant that has been snowballing for India as far as SAARC is concerned. China is increasingly getting more and more restive and demanding full membership of the body. Pakistan has been vociferously batting on behalf of China.

The Chinese move is not acceptable to India. Apart from the fact that China is not a South Asian entity (and SAARC is a South Asian grouping), entry of China in SAARC will mean that the regional outfit would be hijacked by China-Pakistan combine for all times to come. This is a big no-no for India and New Delhi can never agree to this.

But at the same time, the Chinese clamour for full membership of SAARC has been steadily rising. India can no longer keep the issue on the back burner because the next SAARC summit will be in Pakistan and as the host nation Pakistan will do its best to push the Chinese case. How to handle this situation?

There is an effective solution: India should forget SAARC and focus on BIMSTEC instead.

BIMSTEC is by and large SAARC minus Pakistan. Afghanistan and Maldives are also not there in BIMSTEC but then with both these nations India has been pro-actively engaged on several platforms.

Besides, an added advantage of BIMSTEC is that it has two more crucial countries from Indian perspective: Myanmar and Thailand.

When Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation ((BIMSTEC) comprising Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand was formed in June 1997 in Bangkok, the idea was to intensify cooperation among member states in the Bay of Bengal region on such key issues as transport, communications, tourism, counter terrorism and transnational crimes, environment and disaster management, energy and trade and investment.

The fact that Pakistan is not a member and the entire BIMSTEC grouping is homogeneous augurs well for the future of this outfit.

However, despite the political utility of BIMSTEC and inanity of SAARC, India has failed to take advantage of BIMSTEC.

The very little importance top leaders of member countries have given to BIMSTEC is evident by the fact that the outfit has held just four summits in 17 years of its existence.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi needs to change this. Give more teeth to BIMSTEC. Keep SAARC on the back burner. In any case the charter of SAARC stipulates if one of the leaders of SAARC member states is absent the summit cannot be held.

Modi can use this to his advantage when 19th SAARC summit is held in Pakistan.