BIMSTEC is an important vehicle to promote regional cooperation and economic integration in a range of areas in our region. I would like to see BIMSTEC develop as a vibrant organization effectively making the North-East our country’s gateway to Southeast Asia. I have often argued that in today’s globalized world the distinction between the national and the foreign is increasingly irrelevant. BIMSTEC provides an opportunity for India to advance its national developmental priorities in this region and its foreign policy interests in the wider region in one seamless approach. Given the obvious political and security interests that are also at stake, it is an opportunity that must be seized in our fundamental national interest.
All is not unrelievedly good news. The limitations of India’s ‘Look East’ policy are nowhere more apparent than in Timor-Leste (formerly known as East Timor), the former Portuguese colony which won its independence from Indonesia in 2000. ‘Embassy Row’ in the capital, Dili, occupies much of the capital’s sparkling seafront. All the embassies have majestic views of the Indian Ocean. The imposing US embassy is set far back from the street in fear of possible truck bombers; the Chinese one practically hugs the pavement; the Japanese and Koreans appear to jostle with the Portuguese and the Australians for the most desirable oceanfront space. Now Pakistan has announced it is opening an embassy in Dili. Of India, there is no sign: the newest member country of the United Nations is covered from Jakarta by our ambassador to Indonesia, whose brutal twenty-five-year occupation, ending in 2000, has not yet been forgotten in Timor-Leste. The fact that the only Indian flag flying in Dili was one placed in the foyer of my hotel, in honour of this visiting MP, reflects our country’s inexcusable failure to engage with the great potential of Southeast Asia’s youngest nation.
I was in Dili in early 2011 at the invitation of my good friend and then president Jose Ramos-Horta, whom I had first met a decade and a half ago as a Gandhian-minded human rights activist, whose advocacy of his people’s freedom won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. Ramos-Horta has held every position of international heft in his country—foreign minister, prime minister and president—but retains a disarming modesty. My wife and I were astonished to be picked up by him personally at the airport and driven (by him, not a chauffeur) to our hotel in his quaint six-wheel Mini Moke. His message was clear: an Indian visitor, even one far removed from the corridors of power, was a welcome indication of interest, to a nation uncomfortably being wooed by both China and Pakistan.
That Timor-Leste should be the object of so much international courtship is hardly surprising. This small country of just over a million people sits on an enormous quantity of oil and natural gas, whose revenues have already helped build a reserve fund of $6 billion, growing every year. The half-island nation (its other half is Indonesian West Timor) is also home to significant quantities of gold and manganese, and its shores teem with fish. But it’s not just Timor-Leste’s natural resources that attract outsiders. Its needs are significant as well. The country, once dirt-poor, was devastated by a vengeful Indonesian withdrawal that left much of the capital in ruins. The task of building infrastructure—including support for the country’s exploitation of its own offshore oil and gas—is enormous, and calls for enterprising investors. Given its own increasing prosperity, Dili is not looking for handouts, but for help.
Timor-Leste is the kind of place in which one would imagine India being far more active than Pakistan, and yet it’s Islamabad that has leapt at the prospect, not New Delhi. Our woefully understaffed foreign service has been noticeably reluctant to open new missions without the qualified and experienced personnel available to run them. Despite a Cabinet authorization two years ago to double the strength of our diplomatic corps, little progress has been made to increase available numbers, given the unwillingness of the establishment to open itself up to mid-career recruitment from outside the foreign service. This means that a number of pending recommendations for new missions are still languishing, and new recommendations simply aren’t being made.
But if Delhi won’t stir itself, Dili will. President Ramos-Horta had already won Cabinet approval to open an embassy in India and was about to embark on the necessary procedures to implement it. He was grateful for China’s huge contributions to his nation—Beijing has already built the foreign ministry building and the presidential palace in Dili, as well as a headquarters building and staff quarters for the military—but remained wary of being enveloped solely in the dragon’s embrace. Timor-Leste hopes to join ASEAN soon, and would like nothing better than for China’s blandishments to be balanced by an attentive India. Non-alignment between two big powers is still, after all, the wisest option for a small and newly independent nation.
The Indian private sector has been quick to wake up to the possibilities. Reliance Petroleum is spending a million dollars a day drilling in an exploratory block off the country’s southern coast, and if it strikes oil, the proceeds could be astronomical. Builders, road developers and exporters are also beginning to take interest. Timor-Leste imports almost everything: its trade imbalance is startling, featuring imports of $828 million and exports of just $8million (consisting entirely of what President Ramos-Horta insists is the world’s best coffee). Opportunities abound, and it won’t be the first time Indian entrepreneurs take initiatives before our government does.
Not that South Block has been entirely asleep at the switch: there are uniformed Indians, both military and police, in the United Nations mission in Timor-Leste, and our government has offered Timorians a number of scholarships for study in India. For the most part, though, the scholarships have gone abegging, since Timorese students don’t have the grounding, or the English, to take them up. The President would love to have Indian help in building up his country’s human resource capacities. An Indian IT training centre in Dili, he says, would be a wonderful start.
India has started putting diplomatic and financial energy into its traditional talk of South–South cooperation; we are offering foreign aid, grants and loans, to a number of African countries. Timor-Leste is a more self-reliant nation than most, so we will not need to be out of pocket much to help it. But if we send a few experts over to train young Timorese to take advantage of all that the twenty-first century offers them, we can make an impact out of all proportion to its cost. When the prime minister, the heroic Xanana Gusmao, developed cervical pain, he had to fly to Singapore to be treated: a good Indian hospital would be welcomed by every Timorese. Agriculture, mining and the development of small and medium enterprises are also things we are good at that the Timorese sorely need. It’s time for New Delhi to plant an Indian flag in new Dili.
The story of Admiral Zheng He, with which I began Chapter Three, is a marvellous evocation of cultural eclecticism, but it is also a wonderful illustration of the age-old cosmopolitanism of the Indian Ocean region, centuries before the word ‘globalization’ had ever been coined.
Zheng He’s travels six hundred years ago stand as a reminder of the economic potential of the vast waters of the Indian Ocean, which wash the shores of dozens of countries large and small that straddle half the globe, account for half of the planet’s container traffic and carry two-thirds of its petroleum. But far more interesting, perhaps, are the strategic implications of the Indian Ocean region. The American writer Robert Kaplan’s premise, in his 2010 book Monsoon, is that the ‘Greater Indian Ocean’, from the Horn of Africa to Indonesia, ‘may comprise a map as iconic to the new century as Europe was to the last one’ and ‘demographically and strategically be a hub of the twenty-first century world’. As an American analyst, he argues that this makes the Indian Ocean ‘the essential place to contemplate the future of U.S. power’. Perhaps that is what President Obama was doing in early November 2010, as he flew from India to Indonesia and contemplated the vastness of the Indian Ocean beneath. But surely it is even more vital for India to see its eponymous ocean as the locus of its own strategic power calculations.
From an Indian point of view, though, the s
trategic importance of an ocean, at whose central point our subcontinent stands, is easy enough to grasp. The Indian Ocean is vital to us as the place through which most of our trade is conducted; keeping it safe from the depredations of pirates or the dominance of hostile foreign navies is indispensable for our national security. Our coastlines represent both points of engagement with the world and places of vulnerability to attack from abroad (as we saw most recently on 26/11). What should we be doing about it?
One way of dealing with the Indian Ocean is to see it through a security prism, and that, I am sure, our defence ministry and our navy, in particular, are already doing. The creation of an ‘Indian Ocean Naval Symposium’ that brought together over fifty countries to talk about the ocean is testimony to that. Another way, though, is to see the Indian Ocean’s potential for constructive diplomatic action. I am a believer in doing this through a subregional organization that India did a great deal to start, and needs to do a lot more to sustain.
What international association brings together eighteen countries straddling three continents thousands of miles apart, united solely by their sharing of a common body of water? That’s a quiz question likely to stump the most devoted aficionado of global politics. It’s the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Co-operation, blessed with the unwieldy acronym IOR-ARC, which bids fair to be the most extraordinary international grouping you’ve never heard of.
The association manages to unite Australia and Iran, Singapore and India, Madagascar and the UAE, and a dozen other states large and small—unlikely partners brought together by the fact that the Indian Ocean washes their shores. As India’s minister of state for external affairs in 2009, I have attended their ministerial meeting in Sana’a, Yemen, and despite being used to my eyes glazing over at the alphabet soup of international organizations I’ve encountered during a three-decade UN career, I find myself excited by the potential of this one.
Regional associations have been created on a variety of premises: geographical, as with the African Union; geopolitical, as with the Organization of American States; economic and commercial, as with ASEAN or Mercosur; security driven, as with NATO. There are multi-continental ones too, like IBSA, which brings together India, Brazil and South Africa, or the better-known G20. And even Goldman Sachs can claim to have invented an intergovernmental body, since the ‘BRIC’ concept coined by that Wall Street firm was reified by a meeting of the heads of government of Brazil, Russia, India and China in Yekaterinburg in 2009, and has continued since, with South Africa joining the grouping in 2011. But it’s fair to say there’s nothing quite like the IOR-ARC in the annals of global diplomacy.
For one thing, there isn’t another ocean on the planet that takes in Asia, Africa and Oceania (and could embrace Europe, too, since the French department of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, gives Paris observer status in IOR-ARC, and the Quai d’Orsay is considering seeking full membership). For another, every one of Huntington’s famously clashing civilizations finds a representative among the members, giving a common roof to the widest possible array of worldviews in their smallest imaginable combination (just eighteen countries). When the IOR-ARC meets, new windows are opened between countries separated by distance as well as politics. Malaysians talk with Mauritians, Arabs with Australians, South Africans with Sri Lankans, Iranians with Indonesians. The Indian Ocean serves as both a sea separating them and a bridge linking them together.
Regional associations have a wide variety of uses, and it’s fair to say they have not all been successful. Many would argue we haven’t fully exploited the potential of IBSA (India–Brazil–South Africa), or that BRIC, despite annual meetings of the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China, and the 2011 admission to it of South Africa, remains little more than a clever idea of an analyst at Goldman Sachs. So why try and make much of the IOR-ARC?
Well, I can’t think of many other groupings in which Madagascar can exchange experiences in such a small forum with the UAE, and both with India. For another, the potential of the organization—as a forum to learn from each other, to share experiences and to pool resources on a variety of issues—is real. There are opportunities to learn from each other, to share experiences and to pool resources on such waterborne issues as blue-water fishing, maritime transport and piracy (in the Gulf of Aden and the waters off Somalia, as well as in the straits of Malacca). But the IOR-ARC doesn’t have to confine itself to the water: it’s the member countries that are members, not just their coastlines. So everything from the development of tourism in the eighteen countries to the transfer of science and technology is on the table. The poorer developing countries have new partners to offer educational scholarships to their young and training courses for their government officers. There’s already talk of new projects in capacity building, agriculture and the promotion of cultural cooperation.
The IOR-ARC was, in many ways, India’s brainchild. To let it languish is not just to write off another bureaucratic institution; it is to give up on our leadership of a region that, whether we like it or not, is indispensable to us. To engage with it and seek to revive it will take time, effort, energy and some resources—not more than twenty-first-century India can afford. The IOR-ARC could be the diplomatic arm of a two-pronged strategy to make Indian Ocean security and political, economic and cultural cooperation two sides of the same glittering coin.
This is why we should not write off its immense possibilities. India, its chair as of 2012 (for a two-year term), must pledge itself to energizing and reviving this semi-dormant organization. As vice-chair I persuaded Australia to agree to be next in line, thus giving two active democracies a combined four-year stretch leading the IOR-ARC.
We haven’t made much of it so far. The IOR-ARC has been treading water, not having done enough to get beyond the declaratory phase that marks most new initiatives. The organization itself is lean to the point of emaciation, with just half a dozen staff in its Mauritius secretariat (including the gardener). I visited the rather forlorn-looking headquarters in Port Louis and was concerned at the staff’s perception that the member states had not yet accorded adequate priority to the association.
It is clear that the IOR-ARC has not yet fulfilled its potential in the decade that it has been in existence. As often happens with brilliant ideas, the creative spark consumes itself in the act of creation, and the IOR-ARC has been neglected by its own creators. Indian policy-makers have remained focused on the immediate challenge of Pakistan and the headline-grabbing relationships with the United States and China rather than spend time on an area they see as complex, inchoate and anything but urgent. The IOR-ARC’s formula of pursuing work in an academic group, a business forum and a working group on trade and investment has not yet brought either focus or drive to the parent body.
But such teething troubles are inevitable in any new group, and the seeds of future cooperation have already been sown. Making a success of an association that unites large countries and small ones, island states and continental ones, Islamic republics, monarchies and liberal democracies, and every race known to mankind, represents both a challenge and an opportunity. This very diversity of interests and capabilities can easily impede substantive cooperation, but it can also make such cooperation far more rewarding. In this diversity we in India see immense possibilities.
The brotherhood of man is a tired cliché; the neighbourhood of an ocean is a refreshing new idea. The world as a whole stands to benefit if eighteen littoral states can find common ground in the churning waters of a mighty ocean.
CHAPTER SIX
Red, White, Blue and Saffron: The United States and India
As presidential elections loom in the United States of 2012, perhaps the most striking aspect of them from an Indian point of view is that no one in New Delhi is unduly concerned about the outcome. There is now a widespread consensus in Indian policy-making circles that, whoever wins, India–US relations are more or less on the right track.
Democrats and Republicans in the Wh
ite House have both been responsible for this development. President Obama’s successful visit to India in 2010 and his historic speech to a joint session of Parliament capped the most significant recent milestone in India–US relations. This was his sixth encounter with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in various forums since his assumption of office eighteen months previously, but his first in New Delhi, and it set the seal on the consolidation of a relationship that has changed dramatically over the last decade.
Throughout the Cold War, the world’s oldest democracy and its largest were essentially estranged. America’s initial indifference was best reflected in President Harry Truman’s reaction when Chester Bowles asked to be named ambassador to India: ‘I thought India was pretty jammed with poor people and cows round streets, witch doctors and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges … but I did not realize anybody thought it was important.’ If that was bad enough, India’s political orientation was worse. The American preference for making anti-communist allies, however unsavoury, tied Washington to a series of increasingly Islamist dictatorships in Pakistan, while the non-aligned democracy drifted towards the secular Soviet embrace. Non-alignment was regarded with distaste in Washington; the views of Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, cited in Chapter One, were simply blunt expressions of general sentiment. In a world divided between two uncompromising superpowers, India’s temporizing seemed like appeasement at best, and providing aid and comfort to the enemy, at worst. Pakistan, on the other hand, became an essential element in the United States’ containment of the Soviet Union and in its later opening to China. From India’s point of view, the United States’ indulgence of Pakistan turned into overt hostility when Washington sent the Sixth Fleet into the Bay of Bengal in support of Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh in 1971. Tempers cooled soon enough after that, but New Delhi was always regarded as tilting towards Moscow in its general inclination, hardly a recommendation for India in American eyes.
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