Vajpayee's single-vote defeat in a confidence vote on Saturday has only strengthened a belief that summits of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) bring bad luck to attending leaders. The last summit of the grouping, which comprises Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal and Pakistan, was held in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, last July. Vajpayee attended that summit just two months after nuclear tests by India and arch-rival Pakistan and stole the limelight with a historic meeting with his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif, who himself had previously fallen victim to the curse. When India's former premier Inder Kumar Gujral attended the ninth SAARC summit in the Maldives in May 1997, he was also in the spotlight, following a landmark meeting with Sharif. Six months later, Gujral's governmentcollapsed.

The less superstitious can point to the fact that Vajpayee was leading a similarly shaky coalition to Gujral's.

Nevertheless, since the group was formed in December 1985, many leaders have fallen from grace after its meetings, with one going straight to jail after a summit and another getting assassinated.

After the then Bangladeshi President Hussain Muhammad Ershad attended the November 1990 summit in the Maldives, he fell from office and went to jail.

Five years later, his successor Khaleda Zia was also toppled after attending the eighth summit in New Delhi, but was luckier than Ershad and stayed out of prison. Pakistan's Sharif, who attended his fourth summit last time round, had his share of SAARC bad luck after the April 1993 summit in Dhaka, when he was sacked by the President.

Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa lived less than three weeks after attending the seventh SAARC summit in Bangladesh in 1993. He was killed by a suspected Tamil suicide bomber.

``I don't think thegovernments will look at summits from a superstitious point of view, but the pattern must be quite disturbing to many,'' an Asian diplomat here said.

Insulated from the bad luck could be Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, in office since 1978, and Bhutan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuk. Both are founding members of SAARC, but the Bhutanese king stayed away from the last Colombo summit because of constitutional changes at home. Perhaps the bad luck that befalls their leaders is the only silver lining for the SAARC members' 1.2 billion people, whose lives are yet to be improved through regional cooperation.

During the 1991 meeting here, the authorities bundled all urchins and beggars out of the way, while President Premadasa made a strong case for ending poverty in the region, one of the poorest in the world.