Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (31 page)

India’s diplomats have been kept busy as New Delhi stepped up its active presence in the region. India became a ‘sectoral dialogue partner’ with ASEAN in 1992, a full dialogue partner in 1995, a member of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific the following year;
it participated in the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting, the Post Ministerial Conference and the ASEAN Regional Forum in July 1996. India became a ‘summit level partner’ (a status accorded previously only to China, Japan and South Korea) in 2002. ‘ASEAN+3’ became ‘ASEAN+6’ to include India (in order, Japan made clear, to balance China’s strength in the +3 format); and India was made a full member of the East Asia Summit by leaders in Singapore and Indonesia who shared much the same concerns. (India is not yet in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, APEC, despite the best efforts of Japan and the United States, because China stubbornly persists in pointing out that New Delhi doesn’t actually have any visible connection to the Pacific.)

In all this, it is difficult to see the same India that had failed—indeed refused—to get in on the ground floor when ASEAN was created in 1965. In the ARF, India has focused on a number of key activities such as peacekeeping, maritime security and cyber security, where its undeniable strengths are of great value to the other members. India has also involved itself in several infrastructure projects that serve to tie it closer to Southeast Asia: the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific’s plans for an Asian highway network and a trans-Asian railway network, and the intermittent attempts to reopen the Second World War–era ‘Stilwell Road’ which would link Assam with China’s Yunnan province through Myanmar. While such ventures are still largely schemes on the drawing board, the government has been kept busy hosting India–ASEAN business summits, pursuing its obligations under ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asis (to which India acceded in 2003) and arranging a series of high-level visits to and from ASEAN countries. Trade with the region accounts for some 45 per cent of India’s foreign trade, and remains vital for the country’s future prosperity.

The Stilwell Road may in fact be a somewhat premature idea, given that a road link with a China that still does not recognize Arunachal Pradesh as a part of India would open our country up further to Chinese irredentist claims, not to mention flooding the region with Chinese products at a time when Indian goods are struggling to reach northeastern Indian markets. A bigger priority ought to be to connect the rest of India better to the state and to the north-eastern region as a whole,
which will require New Delhi to do much more to develop infrastructure in the state than to establish a road link with China. If India starts thinking strategically about its North-East, it will have to make some investments in domestic infrastructure before it thinks of expenditure abroad.

Nonetheless, India has played a crucial role in developing multilateral organizations in the region, notably the Mekong–Ganga Cooperation (MGC), the IOR-ARC and BIMSTEC, the latter pair of which we will discuss in greater detail below. Such associations of countries around a common purpose have two attractive features: they permit progress to be made on developmental, environmental and security issues, while benefiting from the exclusion of strategic rivals like Pakistan and China. Pakistan has systematically obstructed all of India’s efforts to forge meaningful progress in SAARC, as noted in
Chapter Three
. Despite China being an Upper Mekong riparian country, it has been omitted from the MGC, giving credence to Beijing’s view that India’s intentions in devising this organization are deliberately to counterbalance China’s influence in the area. (In all fairness, however, it should be pointed out that China refuses to be part of the Mekong River Commission, claiming that it is not an Upper Mekong riparian state.)

As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made clear when speaking about the strategic shift embodied in India’s ‘Look East’ policy, ‘most of all it is about reaching out to our civilizational neighbours in Southeast Asia and East Asia’. This outreach was essential if India was to avoid being confined to its immediate subcontinental environs and establish itself as a regional power; it was also necessary if India was to take advantage of the huge economic advances made by the Southeast Asian nations, whose successes in many respects pointed the way for India’s own progress and prosperity. Six of the twenty members of the G20, as the Indian prime minister noted—Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea—belong to the East Asia Summit. With talk of the twenty-first century being the ‘Asian Century’ as the twentieth was America’s, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s vision of an integrated Asia stretching from the Himalayas to the Pacific Ocean, in which one could travel, trade and invest freely throughout the region, is an admirable objective, if still—given geopolitical realities—largely a dream.

For despite all the encouraging developments, there is still a long
way to go. India–ASEAN trade is not yet at $50 billion; with a few exceptions like Singapore, the visa regime between India and ASEAN members remains complicated and difficult; despite the liberalization of air services agreements with ASEAN members, India’s airlines still do not enjoy a comprehensive open skies policy with ASEAN and vice versa; and tourism from ASEAN (and for that matter from East Asian countries like Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan) to India does not begin to compare to that in the opposite direction, reaching barely 10 per cent of Indian travellers to the East. It is startling that the land that gave birth to Buddhism has not been able to attract more Buddhists to places like Bodh Gaya, Sarnath and Nalanda (or for that matter to the much else that India offers, from the Taj Mahal to golden beaches, nature parks and resorts and places of historical interest, none of which has been marketed well in the region). Visa restrictions continue to apply on both sides; tentative moves to promote visas on arrival in India were scuttled after the terrorist attacks of 26/11 revealed the country’s vulnerability to malign outsiders. The kind of cooperative projects being discussed—launching an India–ASEAN health care initiative aiming to provide low-cost drugs, or creating an India–ASEAN Green Fund for Climate Change projects—are underwhelming. In contrast, the China–ASEAN FTA is the third largest regional agreement in terms of economic value, after only the EU and NAFTA. India has also been seen to be considerably less active than China or Japan across the ASEAN region.

There are, however, some evident Indian comparative advantages that can be leveraged through its ‘Look East’ policy. The excellence of its institutions of higher education, notably the famed Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and of Management (IIMs) have given it a reputation in human resource development that makes it an attractive resource not just for developing countries like Cambodia, Laos or Timor-Leste, but even for relatively advanced nations like Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, each of which has solicited the establishment of Indian educational institutions on their territories. Information technology remains a key selling point, but by no means the only one.

While India has never shown a great deal of enthusiasm for exporting its democracy, it remains willing to offer technical assistance in such areas of democracy promotion as public administration and the conduct of
free and fair elections. As the motherland of much of Southeast Asia’s culture and the crucible of the Buddhism widely practised across the region, India begins with a storehouse of respect that it has sometimes seemed to squander. Where imagination has been allied to public policy and governmental support, the results can be spectacular, as in the Nalanda project, which revives a fabled international university in Bihar, a lodestar for students from the Far East for centuries before Oxford and Cambridge were even dreamed of. The active participation of China, Japan and Singapore in Nalanda’s revival is a noteworthy example of the use of culture to strengthen political relations across the region.

On the other side of the ledger is the failure to use the scattered Indian diaspora in the region as levers of Indian policy. Unlike the Chinese diaspora, the Indian is less cohesive, more generally working class in origin (going back to the importation of plantation labour by the colonial regime) and less influential in their societies—there is no Indian equivalent of the ethnic Chinese generals in Indonesia or prime ministers in Thailand. The Indian diaspora in Southeast Asia, differing visibly from the indigenes around them, also tends to be more anxious to demonstrate their loyalty to their countries of residence, overtly eschewing any political affinity to their cultural motherland in India. This is gradually changing, though, as India itself is seen as more acceptable to the countries of the region; some prominent Singaporean Indians, for instance, who at one time went out of their way to criticize India sharply and publicly, now speak openly in misty-eyed terms of their Indian origins—a clear reflection of the changing esteem in which the new, post-1991 India is held.

This discussion of Asia has omitted Australasia and the Pacific, which must be briefly mentioned. India has a complex relationship with Fiji in view of the endemic tensions between the indigenous majority there and the large population of Indian descent (some 44 to 46 per cent of Fijians, a number declining with increasing emigration). Fiji has often been quick to accuse successive Indian high commissioners in Suva of interference in the country’s internal affairs, while India has lobbied hard for sanctions against Fiji after the two coups there against elected Indian-dominated governments in 1987 and 2000. Relations have settled into an uneasy truce, with India providing some aid to Fiji and Fijian Prime Minister Qarase making a successful visit to New Delhi in 2005.
New Zealand has modest defence links with India, featuring pleasant interaction between their navies, with ship visits and naval exercises; India posted a former navy chief as its high commissioner in Wellington till 2012. Canberra’s is a more important relationship that can grow manifold, given the converging interests of both nations, reflected in a series of agreements in 2006 and 2007 (on joint naval exercises, increased maritime security cooperation, more frequent military exchanges, and joint training of the two nations’ armed forces) complemented in 2009 by the announcement of a ‘strategic partnership’. Australia has become the second most favoured destination for Indian students after the United States, with over 120,000 Indian students enrolled in 2009 (reflecting an average annual increase of 41 per cent since 2002). Though this has declined somewhat following the spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia in 2009–10, the reversal of that trend, and the positive portrayal of Australia in a number of Hindi films, may again see Indians flocking to the sunshine, cricket, nubile youth and job opportunities that a student visa to Australia gives access to.

Central Asia is also an increasingly important region within India’s ‘near abroad’. It is a region with which India has rich historic links and one that offers a wealth of natural resources, abundant transit options and a new geopolitical arena. The oil and gas resources of the region are of particular interest, having prompted ingenious proposals like the US-backed Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India (TAPI) pipeline, which remains on the drawing board as long as the territories of Afghanistan and Pakistan are insecure. Tajikistan, which shares borders with both Afghanistan and China, has emerged as an important strategic Central Asian partner for India, and has provided India its first external military airbase at Ayni. Several Central Asian governments, worried about Islamic radicalism and understandably suspicious of the close ties between Pakistani militant organizations and their counterparts like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), see in India a plausible sympathetic ally against violent Islamism. The potential of such alliances helps explain India’s intense interest in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), launched in 2001 by China with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in which India has been given observer status but not yet full membership.

The SCO has so far done little more than hold summit meetings, but its importance should not be underestimated. Two regional organizations in which India has a far more central role—BIMSTEC and the IORARC—are discussed in more detail below.

BIMSTEC is an international organization founded in 1997 and initially named BIST-EC, for economic cooperation among its original four members, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Its membership now also includes Bhutan, Myanmar and Nepal; Myanmar’s admission changed the acronym to BIMSTEC, and with Bhutan and Nepal coming in, the acronym was retained but its meaning altered (this is the kind of clever wordplay in which Indian diplomats specialize).

BIMSTEC offers an interesting opportunity to demonstrate my central thesis of foreign policy serving to benefit domestic publics, because its success will help transform India’s neglected and underdeveloped north-eastern states. India’s North-East is the bridge between two subregions of Asia—South Asia and Southeast Asia. Both regions are in the midst of tremendous positive change, spurred by economic growth and development. For various reasons, India has not so far been able to leverage the various opportunities that this subregion of India offers for the well-being and prosperity of the people who live here. Among the opportunities we should seize are not only the geographical factor of being a bridgehead between South Asia and Southeast Asia, but also the trade potential emerging from the natural and human resources of the seven sisters of the North-East. Today’s challenge is to harness these opportunities to ensure that growth and development does not bypass this region but passes by this region. BIMSTEC’s objectives as an organization will involve it in truly linking this region not only to other parts of India but beyond.