Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century

by Shashi Tharoor

  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.

  If the most clichéd slogan about India is ‘Unity in Diversity’, there are places in the country that vividly demonstrate diversity within India’s unity. The north-eastern states of the Indian Union, populated mostly by people ethnically kin to their neighbours to the east and south of them, have been bountifully endowed by nature. The region features rich biodiversity; its hydro potential is unparalleled; it has petroleum and natural gas along with other minerals; and it also has great forest wealth. But more than these rich natural endowments, the region is blessed with great (and underdeveloped) human resource wealth, emerging from the confluence of various ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural and educational currents.

  Although industrialization was brought to this region by the British East India Company in the early nineteenth century with the cultivation and first export of tea way back in 1839, the rapid development of industry has not taken place here. Even coal was found here soon thereafter and exploited, which led to the development of the railways. The first oil refinery of Asia was set up in 1901 in Digboi following the discovery of oil in Upper Assam. It is also important to remember that in the past, during times of acute foreign exchange scarcity, Assam’s tea and jute exports were sources of much-needed foreign exchange for India. So it is all the more ironic and disheartening that today this region is yet to benefit fully from the industrialization and economic development of post-liberalization India, and that significant differences in terms of some development indicators have emerged with other parts of India. Happily, various initiatives are in place to correct the discrepancies and BIMSTEC is a key part of these efforts. New Delhi must give the organization greater support as part of its strategic obligation to bring economic development to this geopolitically crucial region of India.

  With the paradigm shift that has been taking place in New Delhi from a state-centred approach to one of interdependence and global and regional cooperation, we have become all the more aware of the geo-economic potential of the north-eastern region as a gateway to East and Southeast Asia. I am convinced that by gradually integrating this region through cross-border market access, the north-eastern states can become the bridge between the Indian economy and what is arguably the fastest growing and most dynamic region in the world. While we live with the geographic fact that our north-eastern region is landlocked, the geographical location of the North-East makes it the doorway to Southeast and East Asia and vice versa, a doorway for these economies into India.

  Let us consider some basic facts. A glance at the map of the northeastern region reveals that the region is almost entirely surrounded by foreign states and the seven sisters of the region are internally landlocked with concomitant locational disadvantages, despite the fact that each of these states has at least one international border. The north-eastern region is cradled by five Asian states—China, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and Bangladesh—and connected to India only by a narrow strip of territory, 21 to 40 kilometres in width, running north of Bangladesh, the so-called Chicken’s Neck. Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland share a 1643-kilometre-long border with Myanmar; Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram share a 1880-kilometre border with Bangladesh; Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Sikkim share a 468-kilometre border with Bhutan; Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim share a 1325-kilometre border with the Tibet Autono
mous Region of the People’s Republic of China. The region’s difficulties following from the loss of connectivity and market access as a result of Partition in 1947 are well known, though recent discussions with Bangladesh augur well for changing that narrative of deadlock and denial. Traditional transportation routes—rail, road and river, linking the Chittagong and Kolkata ports—suddenly became unavailable in the 1960s and alternative routes were prohibitively costly. To cite an example, the distance between Agartala and Kolkata port is 1700 kilometres, whereas earlier it was just about 375 kilometres through the territory of what became East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The result, therefore, was massive market and logistical disruption, from which the North-East of India still suffers.

  The Manmohan Singh government has taken a number of initiatives which will have a long-term economic impact on the region, including the launching of a ‘North-Eastern Region Vision 2020’ by the prime minister himself in 2008 and the setting up of a coordinating ministry dedicated to the development of the north-eastern region, focusing particularly on important infrastructure tasks, such as rail and road development and power projects, the development of services in sectors like hotels, adventure and leisure sports, nursing homes and vocational training institutes. Considering the rich biodiversity of the region, biotechnology has been brought under the purview of the new policy.

  This may sound like an internally focused approach, but it is part of a larger picture. India’s ‘Look East’ policy, as explained earlier in this chapter, was not merely a matter of external policy; it was also a strategic shift in India’s vision of the world and India’s place in the evolving global economy. Most of all, it was about reaching out to our civilizational neighbours in the region and availing of the economic opportunities presented by these countries for our own domestic development.

  Several projects have been proposed, and some beginnings undertaken, under the aegis of the ‘Look East’ policy, specifically to uplift North-East India. Among these are the Asian Highway, the proposed Asian Railway link and various schemes for a natural gas pipeline across the area. The Kaladan Multimodal Transit Transport facility is aimed at establishing connectivity between India and Sittwe port in Myanmar (formerly Akyab) through river and road links from Mizoram. With the Mekong–Ganga initiative, the intention is to permit direct flights between Guwahati in Assam and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and between Imphal in Manipur and Hanoi. When completed, the Asian highway project is expected to provide a land route from Singapore to New Delhi through Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar. India has already taken the first step in this direction and has built the road linking Tamu in Manipur to Kalemyo, a key communication junction in the centre of Myanmar.

  As an earnest gesture of its intent to improve linkages between India’s North-East and Southeast Asia, India organized an India–ASEAN car rally in 2004, which started in Guwahati and ended in Indonesia’s Batam Island off Singapore after crossing Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore. The event was greeted with much enthusiasm in all of India’s north-eastern states, with mini rallies held in all the seven sisters to great public acclaim. Though the initiative sparked hopes of ending the North-East’s isolation from the rest of India and their immediate neighbours to the east, it was not followed up with concrete policies and the implementation of many schemes outlined earlier remained inordinately slow. Projects to create a Delhi–Hanoi rail link and a trilateral highway linking India, Myanmar and Thailand have made little headway; had they done so, they could also have encouraged Bangladesh to join the bandwagon, instead of remaining a sole obstacle to India’s eastern connectivity. Given the continuing political sensitivities in Bangladesh over seeming to be giving in too much to India, it might be easier for Dhaka, too, to cooperate on issues of transit not as a purely bilateral matter but as part of an overall regional arrangement.

  For once, the Government of India recognizes that it does not have all the answers: the Vision 2020 document makes it clear that private-sector investment is indispensable for the long-term economic development of the North-East. It does not go far enough, however, to assure the private sector that the government will create the infrastructure, or the conditions of security in the face of insurgency, to make their investments worthwhile. It remains an axiom that the private sector will move in only where the government has first established the basic platform for them to pursue their profits. This remains a huge challenge.

  Nonetheless, India’s engagement with BIMSTEC is a key component of our ‘Look East’ policy. Indeed, BIMSTEC is a forum where New Delhi’s ‘Look East’ policy meets Bangkok’s ‘Look West’ policy. BIMSTEC is a unique link between South Asia and Southeast Asia. From the very beginning, it has been considered a powerful mechanism to promote opportunities for trade, investment and tourism between these two regions. Since its inception with just four members in 1997, the combined GDP of the BIMSTEC countries has almost tripled, reaching nearly $2 trillion. At present, connectivity among the members is far more than it was in 1997, and intra-BIMSTEC trade turnover and investment and people-to-people exchanges have multiplied. A free trade agreement within the BIMSTEC framework is being discussed.

  If India takes advantage of the experiences and strengths of the member countries in a concerted way, it is possible to have a far-reaching impact on poverty reduction and on the overall development of the region. For this to happen, tremendous effort and investment will have to be made in the north-eastern states to benefit from the doors that are being opened. There needs to be greater focus on capacity building, especially in building up human resource capacity, by preparing the people of the seven sisters for the opportunities that will open up in the commerce, tourism and services sectors. As already suggested in Chapter Three, major new projects to rebuild the overland linkages between this region and neighbouring countries will help create the physical integration from which economic integration will flow.

  The overlap between the internal and the international makes it also essential that we dovetail the development strategies of the northeastern region with the BIMSTEC initiative. Pursuance of the ‘Look East’ policy for over fifteen years has put in place certain diplomatic and political structures. There is now need to make these structures work for the north-eastern region. Diplomatic initiatives urgently need to be converted into commercial, touristic and investment opportunities. This will require greater coordination than we have seen so far between the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Development of North-Eastern Region, the Planning Commission, the assorted economic ministries and the seven state governments.

  Bilateral relationships are also vital in strengthening our collective efforts. The increased momentum of the strengthening of India’s relations with countries like Bangladesh and Thailand will inevitably contribute to our effective cooperation within BIMSTEC as well. This is a mutually reinforcing process.

  However, practical progress will require much more by way of the development of transportation and communication linkages and greater connectivity among the members. Tackling constraints and bottlenecks in transportation and communication identified by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is essential. As part of the ‘Look East’ policy, India strongly supports the various initiatives taken to improve comprehensive physical connectivity between countries in the region. From our perspective, the most critical link would be to create road connectivity from the North-East of India through Myanmar into Southeast Asia. A trilateral highway project between India, Myanmar and Thailand is under construction. Thailand and India in fact have completed construction of the link roads on either side. Some portions of the internal road connectivity in Myanmar remain to be completed, and Myanmar has made requests for grants and funding to enable this project to proceed. Once this road is completed, it would conveniently link us with the Asian highway network and the new East-West highway project running from Vietnam through to Myanmar.

  India is involved in a variety of cross-border
development projects with Myanmar in diverse fields such as roads, railways, telecommunications, IT, science and technology and power. These initiatives are aimed at improving connectivity between north-eastern India and western Myanmar and are expected to give an impetus to the local economies as well as bilateral trade. Probably among the most important is the Kaladan Multimodal Transit Transport facility already mentioned, which envisages connectivity between Indian ports on the eastern seaboard and Sittwe port in Myanmar and then through riverine transport and by road to Mizoram, thereby providing an alternative route for transport of goods to India’s North-East. In fact, given the importance that the Government of India attaches to this project, New Delhi has decided to fund it completely. Several projects are on the anvil to provide road, rail and river transportation routes from the north-eastern states through Myanmar into Thailand and the rest of ASEAN. Once these are completed—which would require energy, political will and commitment from all BIMSTEC countries and most of all from India—one can truly turn the term ‘landlocked’ into ‘land-linked’.

  In any case, ‘landlocked’ is a geographical concept whose applicability in the twenty-first century is contestable. In today’s IT age, land is not necessary for countries to be linked. That is why India must put more effort into enhancing digital connectivity with this region, starting with an optical fibre cable link between the towns of Moreh in Manipur and Mandalay in Myanmar.

  Similarly, India’s excellent relations with Bhutan and its involvement in the development and growth of Bhutan’s economy also translate into direct benefits for the north-eastern states. Recent increases in the export of raw material and agricultural produce from this region to Bhutan have meant better opportunities for agriculturists and industries in the North-East. In fact, Jaigaon on the Indian side of the border across from Phuntsoling on the Bhutan side has grown and become prosperous with its position as the nodal point for trade with Bhutan. Mutually beneficial development of water resources between India and Bhutan has already been described earlier in this chapter, and most of the hydroelectric power that is being generated as a result is for the use of the eastern and north-eastern states of India.