Sayema Naznin
BRAC University
A recent piece in The Oniket Bulletin, titled Can SAARC Be Revived, and If So, Under Bangladesh’s Leadership, makes a useful contribution by tracing this year’s wave of regional unrest, from Bangladesh’s 2024 uprising to Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya and Nepal’s youth protests, back to a shared institutional vacuum. Its central claim is compelling: a functioning SAARC could have offered coordinated crisis response, shared labour markets, and financial support that individual states could not master alone.
The article contends that Bangladesh is well placed to lead this revival, pointing to its status as a founding member, its current chairship, and its balanced relations with both India and Pakistan. Even so, the analysis relies heavily on political dynamics and charter mechanics, leaving the underlying economic rationale for integration, along with its longer-term implications, largely unexamined.
What the Article Gets Right, and Where It Stops Short
The article rightly points to two structural barriers standing in the way of revival: the ongoing India-Pakistan security dispute and SAARC’s largely powerless charter. Its use of the World Bank finding, that intraregional trade currently sits near nineteen billion dollars against a potential of sixty-two billion dollars, offers a genuinely strong empirical anchor for the argument. Yet the piece treats this striking gap almost as an aside rather than giving it the central place it deserves.
It stops short of asking why that gap persists beyond simple political mistrust. Tariff and non-tariff barriers, weak cross-border infrastructure, inconsistent customs procedures, and the absence of a functioning regional payments mechanism all compound the effect of political tension, yet none of these receive real scrutiny. Nor does the article examine what closing that trade gap would mean for the region’s long-run growth trajectory, in terms of manufacturing competitiveness, foreign investment flows, or job creation across South Asia’s large working-age population. Without that deeper economic accounting, the forty-three-billion-dollar shortfall reads as statistics rather than the powerful case for integration it could be.
The Economic Case the Discussion Should Be Leading With
Regional integration of this kind brings real, measurable benefits: trade creation through lower tariffs, economies of scale for smaller economies like Nepal and Bhutan that currently can’t reach markets beyond India, reduced transaction costs from harmonized customs and standards, and labor mobility that could help absorb the youth unemployment fueling the unrest the article describes. For long-run growth, the theoretical case rests on convergence, the idea that smaller, less developed members stand to gain disproportionately from access to larger markets, capital, and technology spillovers, provided institutions are strong enough to enforce commitments.
This is exactly where the costs come in, and the article doesn’t weigh them. Integration is never free. Domestic industries in protected sectors face real adjustment shocks once tariff walls come down. Gains from a South Asian Free Trade Area also tend to flow asymmetrically toward the largest economy, in this case India, unless smaller members negotiate specific safeguards, which is precisely why Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, and Afghanistan harbor legitimate concerns about domination rather than genuine partnership.
There are also real fiscal costs to building regional institutions with actual enforcement power, something the article correctly notes is missing from SAARC’s current charter, but never actually costs out. A serious discussion of revival needs to lead with this full ledger, benefits weighed explicitly against adjustment costs and asymmetric gains, rather than treating the political dispute as the only variable that matters.
What Else Must Be Addressed
Two notable gaps emerge. The article barely touches on climate and disaster cooperation, despite it being the one area where all eight members share clear, symmetric interest, unlike trade or security. A coordinated flood and cyclone response framework would meet far less political resistance than overhauling the charter, yet the piece never proposes it as a starting point. Second, it assumes Bangladesh’s leadership credibility without question, overlooking that a government still consolidating domestic legitimacy after unrest may struggle to sustain the diplomatic authority regional revival demands.
The China Dimension
Perhaps the most consequential omission is geopolitical. The article treats SAARC’s dormancy as purely a South Asian internal matter, yet every year of continued paralysis pushes individual member states further toward bilateral infrastructure and financing arrangements with China instead of collective regional bargaining. A second failed revival attempt would likely accelerate that trend, deepening China’s already substantial footprint in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and increasingly Bangladesh and Nepal through individually negotiated projects rather than multilateral engagement.
This matters for long-run growth because bilateral dependency on a single external financier typically yields less favorable terms than a coordinated regional bloc could secure collectively. A fragmented South Asia, unable to present unified positions on trade or infrastructure financing, becomes structurally more vulnerable to great power leverage, undermining the very economic bargaining position regional integration was meant to strengthen. This dimension deserves equal billing alongside the India-Pakistan dispute, not the passing mention it currently receives.
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