India’s Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar has begun his South Asian yatra starting with Bhutan, then Bangladesh and Nepal, and followed by Pakistan and Afghanistan. He will visit Sri Lanka and the Maldives twice–the first time accompanying Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his trip to India’s neighbours to the south.
This visit should be seen as a separate string of interactions without planned reciprocal official exchanges. By focusing on SAARC’s development agenda, the yatra could surmount the diarchic entropy with which the organistion remains afflicted.