The recent news of Pakistan and Bangladesh being in talks with china over forming a regional organization is disturbing and alarming. The organization is supposed to replace SAARC. If this happens it would seriously damage our strategic and security position and practically destroy our regional power aspirations. Over the last two decades china through its encirclement policy and string of pearls initiative has been trying to isolate us in our neighborhood. China is already the biggest investor, lender and arms exporter for all our neighbors. While the situation is serious, we need to accept our follies. Saarc has long been held hostage to India-Pakistan relations and rendered redundant. No summit has been possible since 2016. Our efforts to move forward without Pakistan through BIMSTEC has also failed. Be it Bangladesh, Myanmar, Srilanka or Maldives, our relations are at their lowest. The Chinese Belt and Road policy appears lucrative for much of Asia. In this context the dissolution of Saarc would affect multilateralism as a whole and would be harmful for the interests of the entire global south. India losing space would mean there’s no balancing force between the belligerent superpowers. Our foreign policy has long been in a slumber. We don’t contest elections over foreign policy, this is because there has been a general consensus over it, this has meant that the masses have not been duly informed and educated about foreign affairs. In such scenario if a government decides to make major changes to the foreign policy, it needs to convey its idea of national interest, identification of allies and commitment of resources to the public and the opposition. We have not witnessed any of these. It can be attributed to incompetence, arrogance and lack of any coherent idea of national interests. It’s time for the opposition to raise the national discourse around foreign policy.
A disaster for foreign policy
