Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali said on Friday that Nepal was working towards creating an environment conducive to holding the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation scheduled to take place in 2016.

At an interaction with media personnel in New York, Minister Gyawali said Nepal was not responsible for delaying the summit that was agreed to take place in Islamabad, Pakistan.

“Though the 19th SAARC Summit is yet to convene, other processes within the regional organisation have not stopped,” the Rastriya Samachar Samiti quoted Gyawali as saying.

Tensions between India and Pakistan have stalled the regional summit that has Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as members. India boycotted the 2016 Saarc summit accusing Pakistan of extending support to terrorist activities in India and the subsequent attack on the Indian Army base at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir by a Pakistan-based terrorist group.

Tension between the two nations was on display as External Affairs Minister of India Sushma Swaraj, according to the Indian media, sought to isolate Pakistan at a meeting of the South Asian Foreign Ministers on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York, accusing it of promoting terrorism. Islamabad countered the accusation saying that India had been impeding the regional summit and fuelling tensions.

The Indian minister left the meeting right after her speech on Thursday. Foreign Minister of Pakistan Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who took the forum chaired by Gyawali right after Swaraj, passed a comment that “the attitude of one nation is making the spirit of SAARC and the spirit of the founding fathers of SAARC unfulfilled”, without naming India.

India’s reluctance to take forward the SAARC process and its push for the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation that binds seven countries from South Asia and the South East Asia, according to a number of experts, is an attempt to isolate Pakistan in the region.

With a population of 1.78 billion, the Saarc forum has failed to realise its goals with intra-regional trade remaining at less than five percent of the total trade of the region, the World Bank reported in 2016, describing South Asia as the least integrated region in the world.