India, Indonesia & the shared vision of Middle Powers

EVER since I spent a year as India's Ambassador to Indonesia in 2001-02, I have had the impression that this archipelago nation to our east occupies less space in Indian minds than it should. Few Indians are aware that Indonesia is a close and contiguous neighbour. The last island in the Nicobar chain is barely 80 km from the northernmost Indonesian island of Sumatra. The two countries have a defined maritime boundary.

Indonesia straddled the old maritime routes leading from ports on the Indian peninsula to those on the eastern seaboard of China. But there was a flourishing trade between India and the Indonesian islands themselves. Indian cottons were a major item of trade, but among the elite, the exquisite patolas from Gujarat were prized and preserved over generations.

I recall that the Sultan of Jogjakarta had, as family heirloom, jackets and flared pants made of patola, which were a few hundred years old. They were exclusively worn by the princesses of the royal court for the sacred dances performed by them once a year to ensure a bountiful harvest. In Sumatra, a masjid I visited had the holy Koran wrapped in a piece of patola.

Indian traders bought large quantities of spices from Indonesia in return and the ports of the Malabar coast, such as Kochi (Cochin) and Kollam (Quilon) became the entrepots for the spice trade, in particular pepper. With trade, cultural exchanges followed as did religious ideas and rituals. But it is the innate genius and aesthetic sense of the Indonesian people which transformed these cultural infusions, not intrusions, into something uniquely their own. One may see the colours and hear the sounds of India across the islands, but this is not India. There is affinity but not identity. A culture which has celebrated its own expansive plurality through the ages welcomed its multiple transformations in distant lands.

In the 11th century, a dean of the famed Vikramshila University, Atisa Dipamkara, braved the elements and sailed to Palembang in Sumatra to learn at the feet of Dharmakirti, an Indonesian Buddhist master, revered across the Buddhist world. How these transformations took place and enriched the interacting cultures over time would be a fascinating historical inquiry.

But this sense of affinity is not only rooted in the past. Very quickly, through my assignment, I found that Bollywood films were a rage throughout the country and Indian film songs were on everyone's lips, even if the words were not always understood.

A Shahrukh Khan extravaganza in a stadium packed with thousands is still remembered with excitement. Indian television serials are repackaged in the Indonesian idiom and are hugely popular. Culture could be a powerful instrument of diplomacy throughout Southeast Asia, but is underrated and underinvested in.

I was in Indonesia recently after a gap of more than a decade. The country has become more prosperous and its capital Jakarta pulses with an energy I had not witnessed before. The infrastructure has greatly improved and so has the once notorious traffic. There is an efficient metro and a cross-city sky-train. A Chinese-made fast train takes one from Jakarta to Bandung in just 40 minutes. It used to take at least a couple of hours by road.

Despite being the most powerful among the 11-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Indonesia has been a somewhat reluctant leader even within the grouping. And yet, there was a time when Indonesia and India worked closely together to convene the historic Bandung Conference in 1955, with several of the newly decolonised countries declaring their intent to safeguard their hard-won political freedom and to work together for their economic emancipation.

The Non-Aligned Movement, which was established in 1961, was the creature of Bandung, building upon the spirit of solidarity that had pervaded the summit. It was unfortunate that post-Bandung, Indonesia went through a prolonged political crisis, which eventually ended with the military coup in 1965 and the coming to power of a military-led government under General Suharto.

Relations with India became dormant. It was with the return to democracy in 1997 that the two countries began to reconnect again. The Act East policy, announced by India in 1992, brought Southeast Asia and its largest country, Indonesia, back on India's radar.

During the recent visit, I found a more confident and self-assured country, ready to play a more active role beyond its immediate region. There is an interest in promoting the role of Middle Powers as distinct from the Global South. I was part of an interaction among several Middle Powers, which not only included the relatively more powerful countries of the Global South but also several from Europe, Australia and Canada. Since Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney had spoken at the Davos Forum in January this year about the need for Middle Powers to come together to safeguard international peace and security against US assault, Indonesia appears to have taken up the cause, though still at the non-governmental level.

It was argued that unlike at Bandung, the Middle Powers had greater agency today. They had both the need and the ability to resist coercive action by great powers. They could also play a mediating role to prevent or stop armed conflict. Pakistan's role in helping bring about a two-week ceasefire in the Iran war is the most recent example of what a middle power can achieve.

Middle Powers are evidence that the world is moving towards a diffusion of power and multipolarity. But multipolarity is a state of being. It is not an alternative order. To qualify as an alternative order, there must be some shared vision, some sense of solidarity among those aspiring to constitute a stable order, with a consensus on its norms, the nature of its institutions and processes.

Bandung had a clear vision of what Afro-Asian solidarity would aim for — a more equitable and just international order with development at its centre. Is the world ready for another Bandung and could India and Indonesia come together again to articulate a shared vision for the Middle Powers? This could be an initiative worth exploring in our troubled and dangerous world.