India’s “myopic attitude” is turning SAARC “increasingly dysfunctional”, Pakistan has said, terming India’s approach “motivated by partisan reasons”, a day after New Delhi rebuffed Islamabad’s offer of hosting the SAARC summit this year.

Pakistan’s response came after India on Thursday said that there was “no material change since then (2016, when the 19th SAARC summit was canceled). It added there was “no consensus that would permit the holding of the summit.”

Speaking on Friday, Asim Iftikar Ahmed, spokesperson of Pakistan’s Foreign Office, said, “India’s obstruction of the SAARC process was an established fact."

“Motivated by its partisan reasons, and acting in violation of charter provisions requiring exclusion of bilateral issues, India was responsible for stymieing the 19th SAARC summit scheduled to take place in Pakistan in 2016," he added.

SAARC, a grouping of eight South Asian countries, has held its last summit in 2014 in Kathmandu. The 19th SAARC summit which was to be held in Pakistan was canceled after India—and later others—pulled out following a terror attack on a military camp in Uri, an Indian border town in Jammu and Kashmir, by Pakistani terrorists in 2016.

As a consensus-based platform, SAARC can’t hold meetings or a summit if a member country doesn’t agree. In September last year, a proposed SAARC foreign ministers level in New York couldn’t take place after Pakistan insisted on including the Taliban as the representative of Afghanistan—a proposal other members disagreed with.

The strained bilateral ties between India and Pakistan, and the latter’s avowed use of terrorism as a foreign policy tool, made SAARC’s functioning almost extremely difficult.

On Monday, Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi expressed his country’s readiness in hosting the SAARC summit this year and invited India. He said India could attend the summit virtually if it didn’t want to travel to Pakistan. New Delhi, he added, should not stop others from attending the summit.

(SAM)