Routine meetings between leaders will liberate the Subcontinent from formalism of summits | The Indian Express

Routine meetings between leaders will liberate the Subcontinent from formalism of summits | The Indian Express

Written by C. Raja Mohan |Updated: May 21, 2019 10:15:58 am

C. Raja Mohan is Director, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, and the consulting editor on foreign affairs for 'The Indian Express'. Before his association with The Indian Express began in 2004, Raja Mohan worked for The Hindu as its Washington correspondent and Strategic Affairs Editor. He was a distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.  In his academic avatar, Raja Mohan has been professor of South Asian Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. As a think tanker, he worked at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses and Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He is on the editorial board of various international affairs journals and is affiliated with the Institute of South Asian Studies, Singapore; the Lowy Institute, Sydney; and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC. He is the author, most recently, of Samudra Manthan: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Indo-Pacific.

Routine meetings between leaders will liberate the Subcontinent from formalism of summits

Rather than pray for the success of SAARC, the new government in Delhi should double down on informal diplomacy that could help pave the way for more purposeful regional cooperation — both bilateral and multilateral.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a press conference at the party headquarters in New Delhi. (PTI)

With Narendra Modi looking set to return as India’s prime minister, might he want to start his second tenure by inviting all leaders of the neighbouring countries for his inauguration? Five years ago, in May 2014, Modi surprised the region and the world with his invite and spent the first day in office talking to the visiting leaders from the neighbourhood, including the eight South Asian countries as well as Mauritius. If the 2014 invite generated much diplomatic buzz, it will certainly look less dramatic the second time around. But the invitation for the 2019 swearing-in would hopefully make it a custom and an integral part of Delhi’s political renewal every five years.