While sitting in Islamabad on September 30th, I received a call from a friend who said that the 19th summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) to be held in Islamabad from November 9th-10th, 2016 had been ‘cancelled’ because India has pulled out, and that such will be all over the media soon. “Modi is so predictable”, I thought to myself as I thanked my friend and hung up the phone to start flipping through Indian and Pakistani TV networks, scrolling through the online Twitter feed from the news outlets of member states, and looking at official press releases. It wasn’t unexpected at all for me to see India, along with the member countries like Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan, which are economically dependent on and militarily weaker than India, sabotage the summit in Islamabad by not participating. Instead, I was expecting this to happen ever since Pakistan pushed for fully-fledged SAARC membership for Beijing at the 18th SAARC summit held in Katmandu.

That evening, the Foreign Office in Islamabad issued a strong statement saying: “Pakistan deplores India’s decision to impede the SAARC process by not attending the 19th SAARC Summit at Islamabad on 9-10 November 2016. The spirit of the SAARC Charter is violated when a member state casts the shadow of its bilateral problems on the multilateral forum for regional cooperation. The decision by India to derail the Summit effectively contradicts Prime Minister Modi’s own call to fight against poverty in the region.”

The damage is done, I concluded.