Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (30 page)

In the first few decades after 1947, India’s establishment, shaped by the long colonial era, was inevitably Western in its orientation (if ‘orient’ation is not too paradoxical a term). This was ironic, since India had long had a major impact on Southeast and East Asia. Hinduism and Buddhism spread throughout the Asian continent from India, the former being carried by traders and missionaries across much of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, while Buddhism was taken to and through Tibet to China
and Korea, whence it reached Japan and Vietnam (it also flourished, of course, in countries closer to India, such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Thailand). As Indian trade (and very limited military conquest) expanded the culture’s horizons, the religious message and Indian spiritual practices were not the only export: language (particularly Sanskrit), social customs (including reverence for Brahmins), styles of art and architecture, and dance, music and epic narrative, all travelled from India as well. The Ramayana became an Asian, not just Indian, epic, with versions being told and performed from Indonesia to the Philippines. This was a remarkably peaceful process: aside from the invasion of the Srivijaya kingdom in Sumatra by the South Indian raja Rajendra Chola in the eleventh century
CE
, India did not evince any imperialist ambitions in Southeast Asia. Instead, as David Malone describes it, ‘great Indianized kingdoms arose over the centuries throughout Asia and particularly Southeast Asia … [following] Indian court customs, administrative organization on the Indian pattern, and laws based on the Code of Manu, the Indian lawgiver. Indianization also included the alphabetical basis of Southeast Asian scripts, the incorporation of Sanskrit in vocabularies along with the adoption of the Hindu-Buddhist religious beliefs, and an Indian concept of royalty.’ The spread of Islam to the region was in its turn facilitated by Indian sources, including Indian Muslim traders and missionaries. Thus Indonesia underwent successive layers of Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim conversion, all intermediated by Indian influences. Even Japan was not immune to Indian cultural influence, having been taken over by the spread of Buddhism that had come from India, as evident in the absorption of the Hindu goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati into Japanese Buddhism as guardian-deities.

Given this history, it was not surprising that, even prior to independence, the interim government led by Nehru organized in March 1947 a ‘Conference on Asian Relations’, bringing to Delhi delegates from twenty-nine countries, some still under colonial rule, to promote cooperation among Asian countries and express solidarity with the freedom struggles in other parts of Asia. Nehru’s India saw itself as the leader of Asia’s progress towards independence, a self-image reflected in its leading roles in both the special Delhi ‘Conference on Indonesia’ in 1949 and the Bandung ‘Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference’ of 1955.
But this emphasis was lost in Cold War politics. Nor did the Southeast Asia of the early post-independence years encourage much interest; for the most part, it was just as backward, diseased and conflict-ridden as the subcontinent itself, and slow to unveil its potential. India’s own economic policies, shaped in reaction to the fact that the British East India Company had come to trade and stayed on to rule, were protectionist; looking for trade opportunities did not feature high on New Delhi’s list of priorities. It did not help either that India’s natural overland linkages to Southeast Asia were blocked by post-colonial politics: Myanmar shut itself off from the rest of the world in the early 1960s, while India’s natural land routes eastwards ran through the suddenly foreign—and hostile—territories of East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). Neither was particularly inclined to provide transit facilities to Indian goods. Global geopolitics also intervened, with the countries of Southeast Asia clearly choosing a side during the Cold War, while India remained non-aligned, with a pronounced tilt towards the Soviet Union that was looked at askance by much of the region. India’s closest Asian political relationship in the 1980s was with communist Vietnam rather than ASEAN.

With all these factors in operation, it took New Delhi some time to recognize that India’s economic interests are best served by greater integration with Southeast and East Asia, whose countries are natural trading partners with whom links had flourished millennia ago. This is why ‘Look East’ took so long in coming into existence. But ‘Look East’ goes well beyond economics. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has declared, the ‘Look East’ policy is much more than an external economic policy; it reflects a changed understanding of India’s role in the world economy and signals a significant strategic shift in India’s vision of international affairs. It is instructive that no Indian political party—and several have had turns at government since Narasimha Rao—has questioned either the underpinnings or the manifestations of the ‘Look East’ policy.

One factor helping drive the policy was undoubtedly China’s early interest in the region. During the Cold War, Southeast Asia saw itself threatened by the risk of communist expansion, but once China opened up its economy to the outside world and became a major trading power, the prospects of military adventurism receded. Nonetheless, China’s
growing economic and military might cast a shadow over a region that had traditionally been wary of Beijing. India’s interest in engaging more deeply with them offered the nations of Southeast Asia the prospect of a democratic and non-threatening counterbalance. For years India had been bogged down in its own neighbourhood, and dismissed by most—especially by Beijing—as at best a subcontinental power. ‘Look East’ began with trade but soon expanded to include diplomatic dialogue and strategic and military cooperation. It helped that both sides of the equation enjoyed a shared colonial experience, cultural affinities going back to antiquity and, despite the estrangement of the Cold War years, a striking lack of historical resentments to come between them.

The India–ASEAN free trade agreement on goods, adopted in August 2009 in the face of critical domestic opposition from farmers in India, is perhaps the most striking evidence of the strategic priority accorded by New Delhi to commercial relations with the region. Part of the Framework Agreement on Comprehensive Cooperation signed with ASEAN in 2003, the FTA was India’s first multilateral trade agreement outside GATT/WTO. Indian bureaucrats had wanted to delay signing an FTA on goods until ASEAN members had agreed to conclude an FTA on services and investment, but they were overruled by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was trying to use the FTA to send a political, and not just economic, signal to the region. (These negotiations are making slow progress, since India’s overwhelming advantage in the services sector causes some anxiety in Southeast Asia.) Nonetheless, in 2009 only 2.5 per cent of ASEAN’s trade was with India, compared to 11.6 per cent with China. In the three years since the FTA was signed, trade with ASEAN has gone up by 30 per cent.

In addition, a host of bilateral agreements has been signed with individual countries: FTAs with Sri Lanka and Thailand, comprehensive economic partnership agreements with Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia and Japan, and an early harvest scheme with Thailand, as well as strong commercial, cultural and military ties with individual ASEAN members, notably the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam and Cambodia. Relations have been strengthened (and upgraded to ‘strategic partnerships’) with Japan and South Korea, seen previously as too close to Washington to be of interest to non-aligned New Delhi, and even with Taiwan, a country
which India had traditionally kept at arm’s length out of skittish deference to Beijing’s sensibilities. With Japan, there has been a flurry of high-level exchanges, with every one of the country’s succession of prime ministers making a beeline for New Delhi early in his term. Tokyo tends to see the utility of building up India as an alternative Asian centre of attraction, if not quite a counterweight, to Beijing. India, not China, is now the top recipient nation of yen credits. Japan and South Korea clearly began to take India more seriously after the India–ASEAN relationship improved and India began engaging with the region’s leaders at summit level.

Japanese FDI in India is continuing to grow and has crossed $5.5 billion; Japan is also a generous purveyor of official development assistance, albeit in the form of loans, not grants, which are focused on infrastructure development (particularly power and transportation). One of the most important current Indo-Japanese projects is the Delhi– Mumbai industrial corridor, calling for an estimated total investment of $90 billion, which will transform a vast stretch of territory between the nation’s administrative and commercial capitals, involve a dedicated container freight rail line from the capital to India’s western seaports, vastly improved transport links and the creation of greenfield townships along its route. India and Japan elevated their relationship to a ‘strategic and global partnership’ in August 2007. The regular bilateral naval exercises already alluded to reflect the fact that more than 50 per cent of India’s trade and more than 80 per cent of Japan’s oil imports transit through the Strait of Malacca, giving both countries a significant stake in the security of the Indian Ocean. The exercises also reflect wariness about the likely need for understanding between the two countries in the event that China’s major military expansion begins to acquire unfriendly overtones.

Also in East Asia, South Korea has developed an increasingly important relationship with India, its entrepreneurial multinational corporations having made striking inroads into the Indian market. South Korean brands dominate India’s advertising billboards, and have cornered impressive shares of the market for cars and consumer goods. The steel company POSCO even launched a $12-billion project in Orissa, but this has fallen afoul of political and bureaucratic resistance by local tribals and Delhi environmentalists, so that the project’s long
wait for approvals and clearances has been dragging on since 2005. An active India–Republic of Korea foreign policy and security dialogue has been established, and the prospects for defence cooperation appear bright, especially since India and South Korea decided to enhance their relationship to a strategic partnership in 2010.

These changed relationships offer a striking contrast to the days in the late 1950s when the Thai prime minister complained to an Indian journalist of New Delhi’s characterization of his country as a ‘Coca-Cola economy’, and Nehru’s foreign policy ideologue, V.K. Krishna Menon, when approached by Japan’s UN Ambassador Matsushima seeking collaboration, ‘shooed me [Matsushima] off, remarking that the policies of India and Japan were so different that collaboration was out of the question’. India kept ASEAN at arm’s length since its inception, seeing the organization as a surrogate for American interests during the Vietnam War. Its own increasing proximity to the Soviet Union, crystallized in the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation signed as war clouds with a US-backed Pakistan loomed in 1971, did not help enhance its image in Southeast Asian eyes. The decision of the Indira Gandhi government to recognize the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin regime in Cambodia prompted further alienation between ASEAN capitals and New Delhi. India even rejected an invitation to become an ASEAN dialogue partner in 1980. But these difficulties were temporal and not structural ones. The estrangement ended swiftly when New Delhi wanted it to, in 1991.

In India’s new pragmatic view of its foreign policy, it was important to improve relations not only with ASEAN but with East Asian lands beyond the association’s reach—with Japan and South Korea, for instance, because they are major sources of foreign investment to speed up India’s economic development. But equally, New Delhi saw an increasing strategic convergence with these two democracies, in the face of China’s impressive rise. ‘Look East’ has acquired tangible content in such areas as cooperation on counterterrorism and anti-piracy, maritime and energy security, keeping open the sea lanes of communication in the region’s waters and joint humanitarian relief operations (notably after the Indonesian tsunami, when the United States asked India, along with Japan and Australia, to constitute the core group of countries to deliver relief).

A military and security dimension to the policy has also been emerging. With more than half of India’s trade traversing the Strait of Malacca, the Indian Navy has taken on a role in the joint patrolling of the Strait, and established a Far Eastern Naval Command at Port Blair on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Indian territory that lies closer to Sumatra than to Surat. It organizes a gathering of naval fleets, code-named ‘Milan’, in Port Blair biennially since 1995, to conduct combined exercises with eleven regional navies and also promote social and professional interactions among them. Defence cooperation has strengthened since 1993 with Malaysia—which, with over 2 million persons of Indian origin, is home to one of the largest Indian diaspora communities in the world—and has featured annual meetings of the two countries’ defence secretaries, military training and the supply of defence equipment.

Bilaterally, India has cooperative arrangements with several countries stretching from the Seychelles to Vietnam, many of which have acquired security dimensions. Multilaterally, India has been an active participant in the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP), and maritime security has begun to loom larger in the consciousness of Indian decision-makers after the terrorists of 26/11 hijacked an Indian ship and transported themselves to Mumbai. A counterterrorism agreement with ASEAN reflects the region’s increasing worries about Islamic fundamentalism after the Bali bombings. Joint naval exercises have been conducted with Singapore also since 1993, with Indonesia since 2002 and occasionally, since 2000, with Vietnam; other exercises have featured Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. One joint exercise that involved India, Singapore, Japan and Australia sent the alarm bells ringing in Beijing and prompted a nervously Sinophile Canberra to pull the plug. New Delhi has shown little regret about the end of what many had seen as an incipient strategic alliance of these four countries (with a benign United States looking on) in East Asia.