It was business as usual at the two-day Summit of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) that concluded in Nepal. Predictably, the meeting of the Heads of State and Government went through the motions and dispersed after adopting the inevitable Kathmandu Declaration. The document mostly reiterates the conclusions that had been arrived at in the previous three Summits as also at the Retreat Summit in Goa in 2016.
Despite pious pronouncements in the build-up to the Nepal meeting that definite progress would be made in this stuttering regional organization’s endeavours, nothing substantial has come out this time as well. This is in line with what we have seen, ever since the grouping was set up in June 1997 as BISTEC, which then comprised Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The same year, in December, Myanmar too joined, making it BIMSTEC; Nepal and Bhutan joined in 2004, though the grouping’s nomenclature wasn’t changed. The membership rationale is that these are countries lying in the littoral and adjoining areas of the Bay of Bengal, constituting a contiguous regional entity. The region has about 22 per cent of the world population – almost 1.6 billion people; the combined GDP is approximately 2.8 trillion dollars, and the countries together claim to sustain an average 6.5 per cent economic growth trajectory.
It is repeatedly stressed by the member states that the organization works as a bridge between the South Asian Sub-continent and South East Asia; it is also often argued that BIMSTEC offers a platform for intra-regional cooperation between SAARC and ASEAN. In principle, all these read well, and if their laudable objectives are taken to the logical conclusion, needless to say, the seven members have much to gain from such coordination, considering the huge potential that together they hold. But in real terms, this has not happened, as the experience of the last twenty-one years shows.
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