A Security Pact at a Half-Empty Chair: What the Delhi Declaration Must Deliver for BIMSTEC

A Security Forum Is Born

• Without Its Chair's Full Weight The first BIMSTEC Home Ministers' meeting was less about terrorism than about what kind of grouping BIMSTEC is becoming. The way to read it is to ask what each member wanted from the room.

The interest map India wanted a security platform in its neighbourhood that works.

SAARC has been frozen by India-Pakistan hostility. BIMSTEC, which excludes Pakistan, lets New Delhi put terrorism language on the table without a veto from across the border. The Delhi Declaration delivered exactly that: condemnation of terrorism in all forms, explicitly including cross-border terrorism and a call to implement UN Security Council sanctions, including those of the 1267 Committee. Bangladesh, the current chair and host of the BIMSTEC Secretariat in Dhaka, sent Senior Secretary Manzur Morshed Chowdhury.

Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed, a key figure in Prime Minister Tarique Rahman's government, did not attend. The text does not say why and it is wiser not to over-read it. But in diplomacy, who attends is itself a statement.

Dhaka endorsed the agenda while keeping a visible distance from New Delhi's leadership of it. The smaller members

• Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka - gain capacity-building and a seat at a table that does not force them to choose between larger powers. Myanmar and Thailand sit on the routes Amit Shah described as the new threat: drugs, human trafficking and what he called cyber slavery.

Where declaration ends and cooperation begins The meeting produced two kinds of output.

The Declaration is political: commitments to counter radicalisation, prevent misuse of new technologies, follow international standards against terror financing and condemn cross-border terrorism. The instruments are operational:

• a BIMSTEC Convention against Trafficking; - a Plan of Action on Drug Control; - an MoU on capacity building against money laundering. The difference matters because BIMSTEC has signed security texts before. Its Convention on Cooperation in Combating International Terrorism, Transnational Organised Crime and Illicit Drug Trafficking was adopted in 2009 and slow ratification has long held back its enforcement. Amit Shah's own list of five priorities names the real test. Two of them - repatriation of fugitives and legal cooperation
• are about extradition and mutual legal assistance. His point about criminals using encrypted messaging, drones, cryptocurrency and the dark web is about speed: intelligence that arrives after the money has moved is useless.

Where the

balance sits India has won the framing; it has not yet won the machinery. A declaration costs each member nothing. An extradition request that a member must actually honour costs a great deal, especially for governments wary of being seen to act on New Delhi's behalf.