What SAARC is and how it works

The member that arrives from outside

Afghanistan is filed under Central Asia in this catalogue, and under South Asia by the association whose name it carries. Its record lists six neighbours: China, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Its other regional memberships run west as well, to the Economic Cooperation Organization it shares with Pakistan and Iran, while five of the members here also sit at a table on the Bay of Bengal that Afghanistan has never been part of.

The application was approved at the summit held in Dhaka on 12 and 13 November 2005, and the seat was taken at the summit in New Delhi on 3 and 4 April 2007. Every other member had signed the founding charter in 1985.

Since 2021 the seat itself has been unsettled. An informal meeting of foreign ministers, due on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2021, was called off when the members did not agree on who would occupy it.

A charter written around what it will not discuss

The charter was signed at Dhaka on 8 December 1985. Article X sets out how the association works in two sentences: "Decisions at all levels shall be taken on the basis of unanimity", and "Bilateral and contentious issues shall be excluded from the deliberations."

Both halves do work. Unanimity gives every member a veto over every decision at every level, from a summit communique down to the agenda of a technical committee. The exclusion takes the arguments between members off the table before a meeting opens, which is the provision that let states with unsettled borders agree to meet at all, and the provision that fixes the ceiling on what the meeting can do.

Article III says the heads of state or government shall meet once a year, or more often as the member states consider necessary. The secretariat opened at Kathmandu on 16 January 1987. The chairmanship rotates among the members in alphabetical order, which is why the association's calendar has no host of its own choosing.

The summit that was not held

The eighteenth summit closed at Kathmandu on 27 November 2014 with a declaration adopted by every member. The nineteenth was scheduled for Islamabad on 9 and 10 November 2016. India's Ministry of External Affairs records that it was postponed following communications from India, Afghanistan, Bhutan and Bangladesh, at a point when the chair was held by Nepal. There has been no summit since.

The charter provides for an annual meeting and for decisions taken by unanimity. It provides nothing at all for a meeting a member will not attend.

What has been agreed

The Regional Convention on Suppression of Terrorism was signed at Kathmandu on 4 November 1987, two years after the charter and at the third summit. The Agreement on South Asian Free Trade Area was signed at the twelfth summit, in Islamabad on 6 January 2004, and entered into force on 1 January 2006; each member files a sensitive list of goods that the tariff reductions do not reach.

Against that, the World Bank put intraregional trade at about 5% of South Asia's total trade in its 2018 study, A Glass Half Full. The instruments exist and the trade they govern is thin.

Where the integration is deeper, and who made it

The closest monetary ties in the group were not made by the association. Bhutan's ngultrum has been pegged at par to the Indian rupee since the currency was introduced in 1974, and the Royal Monetary Authority treats that peg as the anchor of its monetary policy. Nepal Rastra Bank has held the Nepalese rupee at 160 to 100 Indian rupees since 1993. Both are bilateral arrangements between one member and its neighbour, and neither passes through Kathmandu, where the secretariat sits, or through any instrument all the members signed.

Beside it, another table

The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation was established by the Bangkok Declaration of 6 June 1997, as a grouping of Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka carry it on their records here, alongside Myanmar and Thailand from outside South Asia. Afghanistan, Maldives and Pakistan do not.

Nine observers are seated with the association: Australia, China, the European Union, Iran, Japan, Mauritius, Myanmar, South Korea and the United States.

Where the records disagree

One border inside the group is recorded differently by the two records that share it. India's record lists Afghanistan among its neighbours; Afghanistan's record does not list India. The line at issue runs along territory administered by Pakistan and claimed by India, north of the Wakhan corridor, and it is exactly the class of question Article X keeps off the agenda. The catalogue prints both records and settles neither.