India has reacted very coldly to the attempt of the head of the interim government of Bangladesh (Chief Advisor) Professor Mohammad Yunus to bring the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) out of cold storage.

Yunus met Pakistan PM Shahbaz Sharif in Egypt a day ago and several bilateral issues as well as resumption of SAARC meetings were discussed. Earlier too, Prof. Yunus has spoken to the Pakistan PM about this.

Bangladesh is busy giving air

The summit of the SAARC organization was to be held in the year 2016 but all the other countries including India opposed it against Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and the meeting could not be held. After that, no country was even talking about SAARC, but after removing former PM Sheikh Hasina from power, the interim government of Bangladesh is trying to give it a boost.

Everyone knows why SAARC is on the back-burner: India

When asked, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal replied, "As far as regional cooperation is concerned, India has been continuously trying for it. For this, we want to move forward through many platforms. This includes BIMSTEC (an organization of India, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand) in which many of our neighboring countries are associated. SAARC is also one such organization but it has been cold for a long time and everyone knows why it is cold.

SAARC meeting was postponed due to this reason

Jaiswal did not say openly why SAARC activities were not taking place but it is well known that India had started showing disinterest in SAARC after the role of Pakistan-backed terrorists came to light in Pathankot and Uri terror attacks in 2016. Pakistan was busy preparing for the SAARC summit in Islamabad in November-December that year. Just before the meeting, India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives and Sri Lanka boycotted it.

India is encouraging BIMSTEC

Instead of SAARC, India started promoting BIMSTEC. A meeting of top officials of the member countries of this organization was also held on Friday. According to the Ministry of External Affairs, many priority issues of cooperation such as connectivity, security, people-to-people exchange were discussed in this meeting. The BIMSTEC summit is also going to be held soon. In this meeting, the preparations for the upcoming summit were also reviewed.