What after the photo-op? : The Tribune India

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What after the photo-op?

PRIME Minister Narendra Modi had us decidedly in thrall with the India-ASEAN commemorative summit.

What after the photo-op?

In one frame: India should facilitate ASEAN ties and not be seen as a cog in the wheel.



Sandeep Dikshit

PRIME  Minister Narendra Modi had us decidedly in thrall with the India-ASEAN commemorative summit. Disbelievers will dismiss it as yet another extremely well-crafted event; that the PM got 10 times as much camera time greeting his chief guests than he would have had with one, unless a Trump or an Obama was on the Republic Day podium.

Like the 2015 Africa Union summit, this wasn’t a turnout of leaders from countries only the inveterate foreign policy wallah could relate to. Situated across the Indo-China cultural fault line, each of the ASEAN countries hosts Indian diasporas and the subcontinent’s cultural footprint. These are the places an average Indian, outside his shores, feels most comfortable in.

The enormous energy of the Indian state devoted to persuading 10 heads of state to simultaneously attend the Republic Day parade served well the government’s own description about its management of foreign policy. The New India definitely seems to be on the march: there were Netanyahu’s gushing words for India and Modi; Indian diplomats and military officials huddle with peers from the US, Australia and Japan as part of a Great Game in the South China Sea; the PM’s serenading of world leaders touches unexplored dimensions with equally hearty reciprocity.

The chink in this grand alliance-in-the making is the extraordinary focus on maritime cooperation with near-neighbours and the strained political relationship with two neighbours with disputed land borders. This brings with it factors that seek to limit Indian influence. Pakistan is a stumbling block only in Afghanistan. Its posture of inveterate hostility to India compels only a few Arab countries to recalibrate their ties: Saudi Arabia’s security ties with Pakistan, for instance, are too intimate to entertain a military dalliance with India. The China factor does not complicate India’s calculations in dealing with West Asia as yet, though that could change. India has a default advantage in Europe because of the EU’s proscription on military trade with China on human rights considerations.

But China does matter in the ASEAN. In fact, Trump’s presence at the previous ASEAN summit overshadowed its political turnaround since the US set it up as a grouping of nations under its military umbrella to check communist influence. The countries which ASEAN was supposed to counter — Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar and Cambodia — have joined the club.

The foreign travel itinerary of top leaders from Vietnam, the ASEAN member reckoned to be most at odds with China, reveals its careful balancing: every high-level Vietnamese visit to Washington, New Delhi or Tokyo is carefully set-off against a stopover in Beijing. In deference to China, Vietnam narrowed the terms of MoU with India promising it oil wells in the South China Sea. Vietnam had promised to allot the wells during the tenure of Manmohan Singh when Indian political management of ties with China was a key South Block priority. The narrowing of Vietnam’s offer took place when Sino-Indian ties were in a prolonged trough.

Despite a background of occasional military clashes with China on the South China Sea dispute, not one of the 10 ASEAN countries has shown inclination to be drawn in an adversarial alliance of extra maritime powers. The ASEAN’s feeble desire for a military option towards China grates uncomfortably against India’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Quad concept: four democracies with large navies ensuring a free Indo-Pacific. It began with the ASEAN summit that Trump attended. There was a veneer of a political alliance with no military overtones at the first Quad meeting because the conferrers were all career diplomats. But the symbolism about its military fist was not lost when naval chiefs from all the four Quad nations — Australia, India, the US and Japan — appeared together at an event generously underwritten by the Indian Foreign Office.

India’s troubled security and political ties with China have a spillover effect on the economic front in ASEAN. The Chinese projects on the north-south axis are at an advanced stage of implementation. India has proposed projects mostly on an east-west axis and needs to activate consultation channels with China to ensure they are not dead in water.

The Chinese advantage of being a much early entrant in ASEAN is visible in the form of the world’s biggest industrial supply chain that begins from East and South East Asia and terminates in China. India needs to integrate more of its industrial sectors into this supply chain just like its automotive industry that now provides quality employment to millions of skilled Indians.

Sometime in future, India will have to pay back ASEAN for its leaders taking the trouble of travelling to India in unison to boost PM Modi’s domestic rankings. A consultative approach with China to integrate Indian business into the global supply chain may not work out after New Delhi’s security managers badly misread the Chinese signals in Doklam.

The only other way India can accommodate ASEAN is by opening its traditional sectors. The Vajpayee government under NDA-I had explored a similar option with the framework Free Trade Agreement with ASEAN. Liberal imports of cash crops like rubber, black pepper, palmolein devastated rural households across South India. At a time of heightened farm distress and amidst BJP’s attempts to enlarge its presence in South India, a similar repayment for the favour by ASEAN leaders will be political suicide.

India has taken a position of violation of sovereignty with regards to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), thus shutting itself out from the project. This may not turn out to be a costly error because Pakistan’s capacity to sustain the required ecosystem for CPEC is uncertain.  However, ASEAN countries are old hands in the world of free economy and the route to India’s partial redemption from unemployment and want lies through these nations.

China, however, is the elephant in the room. It cannot be ignored because of its dominant position in ASEAN’s trading calculus. South Block has a lot of political ground to recover and demonstrate flexibility to get into the game in ASEAN.

India’s school headmaster approach with smaller neighbours like the Maldives, Nepal and Pakistan has already encountered a blow back. The joint photo event with heads of all SAARC countries during Modi’s swearing-in ceremony is now an embarrassing memory. It later emerged that some SAARC leaders were miffed because they felt used. ASEAN, like SAARC, is too critical to be permitted to suffer a similar fate. The security wallahs need to loosen their grip on India’s foreign policy apparatus if the Indo-ASEAN summit is not to end up as another lost opportunity.

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