Dragon throws its weight around in the sea

Abhijit Bhattacharyya

Author and Columnist

NOT too long ago, when the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) thundered that “the Indian Ocean isn’t India’s backyard”, the West maintained a stoic silence. Again, when the USA followed suit and said that “the Indian Ocean isn’t India’s Ocean”, the West kept mum. Today, the West and its spearhead, the USA, have woken up to realise their folly as China is spreading its wings simultaneously in the Indian Ocean Region and the Indo-Pacific waterfront, from Djibouti to Cambodia, thereby signalling the helplessness and decline of the US-led West in the sea. China is determined to extract its geostrategic pound of flesh from all through the sea.

Did India ever provoke China or the USA in the Indian Ocean? Never. It’s always been the other way around. From 1971 to the present times. First came the western naval bully, the fleet which chased and chastised distraught Delhi even as America’s own Vietnam War had not yet ceased.

And today, virtually every South Asian shoreline is dotted with Chinese-made warships as Beijing’s men, machines, management and money are causing a stir in India’s neighbourhood.

The initial altruistic façade of defence and development didn’t take long to drop off and turn into a debt trap, sounding the death knell for territorial sovereignty. India has never expressed any wish to make the Indian Ocean her ‘backyard’. In contrast, the CPC-PLA duo claims monopoly and irreversible ownership of the choppy South China Sea where ‘nine points’ have been earmarked, as if those are nine sentry posts, dug deep into a land border. In the Dragon’s dream, the high seas can be ‘fenced’!

Thus, the explicit Indo-phobic utterances of China and America notwithstanding, Delhi deserved appreciation for its remarkable foresight to establish the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) with the participation and membership of 23 states in 1997. It was a well-intentioned plan of action for the forum: maritime security, trade investment and facilitation, fisheries’ management, disaster risk reduction, academic and scientific cooperation, tourism promotion and cultural exchanges. The Indian initiative had a positive impact.

The IORA looked impressive as member countries genuinely brought together the Indian Ocean states for common cause and linking them to the vast waterfront. All 23 states were sea states, and none was remote or unconnected from or to the sea. Apart from the bigger Indian Ocean littoral states, important island states of Comoros, Seychelles, the Maldives and Mauritius made the quorum lively. Sea bound were the participants’ common interests, where none was a bully.

Thus, what India thought of doing 25 years ago to make the Indian Ocean a zone of peace and economic development for the littoral states, the USA came up with the Pacific Ocean-specific military Quad in the second decade of the 21st century and, thereafter, arrived in 2018 the CPC-PLA-masterminded China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA) as a supplementary military and imperialistic expansion scheme of the BRI, piercing through the Indian Ocean littorals, copying Captain Basil Liddell Hart’s ‘strategic indirect approach’. Money thrown in the front; the naval gun positioned in the rear. Suave diplomacy was the prologue, debt burden the epilogue.

Nevertheless, without inviting India to the recent CIDCA meet, the CPC-PLA slyly managed to lure some Indian traders who seem beholden to China for allowing them to make money. As if India’s development and prosperity solely depended on the shoulders of a few traders, even at the cost of territorial integrity, sovereignty and self-respect.

Can't India at least try to de-couple when the entire West (at last) is desperate to do so? Fifty years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger duo preposterously led their prosperous and industrial country down the garden path; and now, multinational corporations of both the USA and Europe (especially Germany) are constantly challenging the authority of their governments. No wonder the CPC-PLA cracked down on their home-grown multinational corporations' billionaire bosses who could very well challenge the Chinese government, too, through sheer might and weight of money bags.

In future, the very concept of nation-state can surely be further weakened because of the way the so-called globalisation bubble is bursting. The present all-round global turmoil, from commodities to commerce, proves that despite everybody being linked to everybody through various multilateral treaties, agreements, protocols and the supreme benches from Brussels to Geneva, New York to Paris, for the majority of the people, prosperity is going downhill.

Coming back to Beijing, note the name of the Chinese entity: China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA). It doesn’t have words like ‘sea’ or ‘ocean’. Why? Because the CIDCA is a ‘foreign aid agency’ of the home state, a former wing of the Ministry of Commerce, now reporting direct to the CPC State Council. Obviously, Beijing’s aim is self-development through all means, as can be seen from Xinjiang to Xizang (Tibet); Taiwan to trade; terror aid to Pakistan to usurping India’s territory. Owning ports of the West to the out-of-area fishing zones of South America, to the coast of Africa, all are under severe strain. Even Ratnagiri on India’s Konkan coast is under the scanner of the CPC-PLA fishing fleet with powerful intelligence penetration devices.

The CIDCA, therefore, unlike India’s IORA, is a muscle-flexing forum of unequal members consisting of perceived or potential client states whose ports and economies could be tapped for possession. One instance would suffice. According to the 2022 report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), “China delivered major arms to 48 states in 2017-2021, but 47% of its arms exports went to just one state, Pakistan,” which is a CIDCA member. Of the 19 'participating' member states, two (the Maldives and Australia) flatly denied their CIDCA ‘participation’.

Incidentally, the CIDCA consists of two remote, landlocked states amidst the Indian Ocean member-states. Why? Because they’re potential targets for Han subjugation and also for countering the IORA. “South China Sea can be China’s Sea”, but “Indian Ocean is not India’s Ocean” — the nefarious intention is to force the Indian Navy to move out to operate anywhere except the waters along the 4,104-nautical mile coastline.

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