SAARC, that infelicitous acronym, has many fathers. At least in Bangladesh. The conventional wisdom in Dhaka is that SAARC was the brainchild of the assassinated president Ziaur Rahman. However, Hossain Mohammad Ershad, the other army strongman turned president, also lays claim to the credit, on the rather shaky grounds that SAARC was inaugurated during his tenure in office. Shah A M S Kibria, the assassinated ex-finance minister of Bangladesh, who was foreign secretary at the time the original concept note for SAARC was prepared, also has his backers. And, last but not least, another ex-foreign secretary, who was Kibria's junior at the Foreign Office at the time, has confided to this writer that he was the one who actually drafted the damn thing.
Why anyone would want to claim paternity for such an unloved and unlovely stepchild is, perhaps, the more pertinent question in all of this. This grouping of Southasian countries has signally failed to achieve what it set out to do. Intra-regional trade remains a joke, the organisation has no common external policy on anything, no preferential treatment for group members, and no unity on international affairs (see, for example, Sri Lanka and Pakistan voting against the interests of its Least Developed Country brethren Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives and Nepal at the World Trade Organisation).
There is really no reason for SAARC to be operating so poorly. There is remarkably little difference, as these things go, in per-capita income and lifestyle among the countries of the region. Disparities within each country dwarf those between the countries. But one can see how little the grouping has caught on in the popular imagination by how little it is used or recognised. ASEAN, by contrast, is used and readily understood as a collective noun, and has supplanted the less-than-accurate 'Southeast Asian' as an identifier, whereas SAARC has yet to supplant 'South Asian'.
Then again, what does it even mean to be 'Southasian' in the year 2008? As an identifier and touchstone of identity, the nomenclature has always been suspect. The notion that Southasians had some kind of shared culture and history has never really been able to withstand close scrutiny. One could, perhaps, argue that Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have a shared history, though this is a claim that would start arguments in history departments the length and breadth of the Subcontinent. But certainly no such claim can realistically be made for the other Southasian countries. As for a shared culture, India alone does not have a common culture, without even trying to find commonality between the Maldives and Bhutan – and don't get me started on Afghanistan.