NEW YORK (Diya TV) — Nobel laureate and Bangladesh’s interim Chief Adviser, Professor Muhammad Yunus, urged Pakistan to back the revitalisation of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) as he held a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York. The move is aimed at reinvigorating regional cooperation in South Asia amid a series of political and economic challenges.
Yunus, vocal pan-regionalist, believes that SAARC has a tremendous amount of potential to address common problems such as economic development, climate change, and political stability. “Reviving SAARC is an important step toward regional integration, ensuring that South Asia works toward common goals like poverty reduction and sustainable development,” Yunus said, reports The Daily Star and Times of India.
The SAARC was established in 1985 and currently comprises eight member countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. However, the organization has been dormant since 2016 with long-standing tensions between India and Pakistan. Still, Yunus refers to the requirement of igniting unity through SAARC cooperation as regional unity can create more potentiality in economic growth and stability.
In the meeting, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif demonstrated Pakistan’s desire to be on board with this initiative and emphasized that member states should go about overcoming diplomatic barriers step by step. Sharif argued that there was a need for a “new chapter” in Bangladesh-Pakistan ties while pinpointing an area of economic cooperation. He also evinced interest in investing in the textiles and leather industries, two sectors of major importance for the country’s economy.
They also agreed on fresh foreign secretary-level talks and reactivation of the bilateral joint commission, which was a willingness to take the ties between the two nations further. In his presentation, Yunus pitched for youth exchange programs as a way of encouraging cross-border engagement, focusing on developing the next generation of leaders for South Asia.
Despite these positive developments, challenges remain. The main challenge to SAARC’s revival remains on the strained relations between India and Pakistan. For many years, India has cited concerns over cross-border terrorism as a reason for its disengagement with SAARC activities. Whether Yunus’s efforts will persuade India to re-engage with the regional body remains unknown.
But Yunus’s call for SAARC’s revival does coincide with Bangladesh’s wider foreign policy of promoting regional cooperation alongside balancing relationships with immediate neighbors. Yunus in his meeting with Sharif has been following other diplomatic as well, where he had discussions with other international personalities including the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, which reflects the rising global status of Bangladesh
