Bangladeshi Foreign Adviser Touhid Hossain on Sunday urged India to consider a meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation standing committee that has not taken place since 2016, reported the state-run Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha news agency.

Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Hossain met in Oman on the sidelines of the Indian Ocean Conference.

“Both sides recognised the challenges the two neighbours are facing in terms of bilateral relations and discussed the necessity to work together to address those,” the news agency quoted a press release from the Bangladeshi foreign minister as saying.

The foreign adviser in Bangladesh’s interim government heads the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the position is equivalent to the foreign minister.

Hossain also “emphasised the need for convening the SAARC Standing Committee meeting and requested India’s support on the matter”, the report added.

SAARC is a regional intergovernmental organisation comprising India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan and the Maldives.

The standing committee of the SAARC comprises the foreign secretaries of member states who meet during the biennial summit and whenever a council meeting is convened between two summits. The last time the committee met was in March 2016 in Nepal’s Pokhara.

The cooperation under SAARC has largely fallen apart since 2016. The SAARC leaders’ summit, which member nations took turns to host, was usually held every two years. The last SAARC summit was held in Kathmandu in 2014.

Islamabad was expected to host the summit in November 2016. But it was postponed after India withdrew from the event following an attack on an Indian Army facility at Jammu and Kashmir’s Uri in September that year.

India had said that the attack was orchestrated by a Pakistan-based militant group. Afghanistan, Bhutan and Bangladesh followed suit and refused to participate in the summit.

In a social media post after his meeting with Hossain on Sunday, Jaishankar did not mention SAARC and said that the discussion between the two focused on bilateral ties and cooperation under the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation.

The BIMSTEC is a regional organisation established in 1997. It includes most of India’s neighbours Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand, but excludes Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Maldives.

The meeting between the two foreign ministers came ahead of a possible meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bangladesh Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus at the BIMSTEC summit in Thailand in April, The Times of India reported. It would be their first meeting since Yunus took office.

Sheikh Hasina resigned as the Bangladesh prime minster and fled to India on August 5 after several weeks of widespread student-led protests against her Awami League government. She had been the prime minister of Bangladesh for 16 years.

Yunus, a Nobel laureate economist, took over as the head of Bangladesh’s interim government three days later.

Bangladesh’s request to New Delhi about SAARC also came amid efforts by Dhaka to improve relations with Pakistan following Hasina’s ouster, The Times of India reported.