Bangladesh leads SAARC revival push while resetting ties with India

South Asia has spent more than a decade without a functioning regional summit. SAARC’s last gathering was in 2014, frozen ever since by the rivalry between India and Pakistan. Into that vacuum has stepped Bangladesh, and the timing is not incidental. A government that survived a student-led uprising, an interim administration, and a national election in the span of eighteen months is now the region’s loudest advocate for cooperation, while simultaneously managing the most consequential bilateral relationship in its foreign policy, the one with India.
That two-track effort defines Dhaka’s current position: rebuild a regional institution that others let atrophy, and recalibrate a neighbor relationship that nearly broke down entirely under the previous interim government. Neither task is simple. Both are being handled with more discipline than the region has seen from Dhaka in years.
The reason SAARC has gone twelve years without a summit sits squarely with New Delhi and Islamabad, not with the smaller states trying to keep the platform alive. The India-Pakistan relationship deteriorated further after the April 2025 killing of 26 tourists in Pahalgam, which India blamed on a Pakistan-based militant group. India’s response went beyond military retaliation, it suspended the Indus Waters Treaty “in abeyance,” a treaty that had survived every prior war between the two countries. Operation Sindoor followed in May 2025, strikes and a ceasefire within days, and by mid-2026 India was still holding the water treaty hostage to demands that Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” end cross-border militancy, the same language it now applies whenever regional cooperation is on the table.
That posture explains why India has spent the last several years building alternatives that exclude Pakistan entirely: BIMSTEC, which held its sixth summit in Bangkok in April 2025, and the smaller BBIN connectivity grouping. These forums let India set terms without Pakistan able to block them. It is a rational strategy for India’s narrow interests. It is also precisely the kind of fragmentation that leaves smaller South Asian states with less collective leverage, which is why Bangladesh’s push to keep SAARC alive matters.
Bangladesh founded SAARC in Dhaka in 1985 under President Ziaur Rahman, built on the idea that South Asian states have more to gain together than apart. That founding instinct has resurfaced. Under the interim government, SAARC revival was named a top priority; under the elected BNP government since February 2026, that position has held, with Dhaka explicitly framing SAARC and BIMSTEC as complementary rather than competing, a position designed not to force India into an uncomfortable choice, but to keep every door open.
Bangladesh is not carrying this alone. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar pledged cooperation on SAARC revival during a 2025 Dhaka visit. The Maldives, under President Mohamed Muizzu, has twice called publicly for SAARC’s return, offering to mediate among members. And a striking, if unplanned, moment of thaw came at Khaleda Zia’s funeral in early 2026 in Dhaka, where Indian and Pakistani officials reportedly shook hands for the first time since their 2025 military clash, a reminder that shared occasions, even solemn ones, can open doors that formal diplomacy cannot.
A full summit-level revival remains unlikely while the India-Pakistan rivalry stays this hardened. But SAARC does not need summits to be useful. It remains the only table where every South Asian state sits together, giving smaller states leverage they cannot generate alone. Its charter already permits “SAARC-minus-X” arrangements, letting willing states move ahead on shared projects like energy grids or climate-data sharing without waiting on unanimous consent. And “low politics” cooperation, disaster response, public health, climate adaptation, food security, can advance even while high politics stays frozen, building habits of trust that eventually make bigger breakthroughs possible. Keeping the secretariat and technical bodies running, rather than letting the organization die outright, preserves the option to scale back up quickly whenever the India-Pakistan freeze eventually breaks.
Bangladesh’s expanding ties with China have drawn attention in India, and they are worth stating plainly rather than apologizing for. China has become a major source of investment and infrastructure financing across South Asia, and Bangladesh’s engagement with it including the CETC drone manufacturing facility deal in Chittagong, and Prime Minister Tarique Rahman choosing Malaysia and China for his first foreign trip in office, where he called Beijing a “most valued and trusted partner”, reflects a country expanding its options rather than picking sides. Every serious middle power in the region does the same calculus. Diversification is not confrontation; it is ordinary economic diplomacy, and Dhaka has been careful to keep it framed that way rather than as leverage against any single partner.
Since Prime Minister Rahman was sworn in on February 17, 2026, the relationship with India has visibly stabilized, and it is worth recording how much of that stabilization has come from Bangladesh’s own restraint and initiative. Rahman avoided anti-India rhetoric throughout the campaign, a discipline that earned early goodwill in New Delhi, Modi was reportedly the first foreign leader to call and congratulate him. India’s Foreign Secretary and the Lok Sabha Speaker attended the swearing-in. Bangladesh resumed full visa services for Indian nationals as an early gesture of good faith. External Affairs Minister Jaishankar attended Khaleda Zia’s funeral. Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman made the first ministerial visit to New Delhi under the new government, covering visas, energy, border management, water-sharing, and trade in one sitting. An invitation for Rahman to visit India, potentially around the September 2026 BRICS Summit in New Delhi, remains open, and Indian officials have said publicly that they expect his visit to unlock further progress.
This is a government choosing engagement deliberately, not one reacting to pressure. That distinction matters, because it means the reset can be sustained on Bangladesh’s own terms rather than dictated from outside.
Not every part of the relationship has moved forward, and where it hasn’t, the responsibility largely sits with New Delhi. Sheikh Hasina remains in India, having refused Dhaka’s extradition requests even after being sentenced to death in absentia in late 2025 for her role in the 2024 crackdown that the United Nations estimates killed up to 1,400 people. On August 5, 2026, the second anniversary of her ouster, Hasina delivered her first public address since fleeing, by video link, from an event held in New Delhi. Bangladesh fo…