Bangladesh asks India to allow SAARC meet blocked since 2016 Uri attack

Bangladeshi Foreign Adviser Touhid Hossain on Sunday urged India to consider a meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation standing committee that has not taken place since 2016, reported the state-run Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha news agency.

Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Hossain met in Oman on the sidelines of the Indian Ocean Conference.

“Both sides recognised the challenges the two neighbours are facing in terms of bilateral relations and discussed the necessity to work together to address those,” the news agency quoted a press release from the Bangladeshi foreign minister as saying.

The foreign adviser in Bangladesh’s interim government heads the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the position is equivalent to the foreign minister.

Hossain also “emphasised the need for convening the SAARC Standing Committee meeting and requested India’s support on the matter”, the report added.

SAARC is a regional intergovernmental organisation comprising India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan and the Maldives.

The standing committee of the SAARC comprises the foreign secretaries of member states who meet during the biennial summit and whenever a council meeting is convened between two summits. The last time the committee met was in March 2016 in Nepal’s Pokhara.

The cooperation under SAARC has largely fallen apart since 2016. The SAARC leaders’ summit, which member nations took…

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