India has effectively entered into a General election year, a year where decibel levels, rhetoric, hyperbole would reach a crescendo and invective would fall to a new nadir and governance would be an obvious collateral casualty. A critical aspect that would get further neglected amid this din is the continued isolation of India in its neighbourhood. A remoteness that has been steadily creeping on us since 2014 threatens to overwhelm us now. How did we come to this pass? Can certain correctives be applied before the situation reaches a point of no return? The jury is out on this.
The worst casualty has been our relationship with China. There is an unprecedented Chinese build up taking place in Doklam. Far from the standoff being resolved, it is getting perpetuated. Permanent facilities, new supply routes, heavy weaponry and state-of-the-art communications’ infrastructure has been put in place just hundreds of metres short of the flashpoint. Nothing has come out of the latest round of border talks between the two NSAs held in December 2017. On the Belt and Road initiative, the distance between both the countries has widened since India boycotted the Bejing conference earlier this year. It was only three years back that the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi-Jingping were swinging together in Ahmedabad.
The only silver lining to this otherwise grim scenario is that the bilateral trade between the two countries has been growing. Today, China is India’s largest trading partner, with a bilateral trade upwards of $71.5 billion. The total imports from China during the last fiscal stood at $61.3 billion against India’s export to China worth $10.2 billion. But the trade deficit which stood at $37.2 billion a few years ago stands at a whopping $51.1 billion today. India must put this relationship back on the track.
Closer home, the relationship with Nepal has not recovered from the economic blockade of 2015. The NDA government at the Centre may argue that this was not the first time that the government of India had resorted to this tactic. An earlier government had done the same thing in 1989. However, the difference between the two is the times we live in. South Asia in the late 1980s and the region now are vastly different. The physiological blow, thanks to mobile telephony, Internet and the social media, to the people of Nepal because of the blockade has been far greater this time than ever before.
Bhutan has been a trusted friend over the decades. It is the only country in the neighbourhood that stood with India when we boycotted the Belt and Road Forum held in Bejing in May 2017. The relationship with Sri Lanka isn’t good either. The Chinese presence in that country is underpinned by huge infrastructure development projects in the form of ports and waterfronts. China is constructing the Port in Hamabantota and an entire new port city on the waterfront in Colombo. It is expected to attract investment worth $13 billion over the next 30 years. The Hamabantota Port was formally handed over on a 99 year lease to China in the December of 2017. The implications of having the Chinese sitting on the head of the Indian Ocean, a short distance away from the Indian shores will have portentous consequences.
A little to the South East lie the coral islands of Maldives. India, over the decades, has nurtured a very special relationship with this breathtaking archipelago. Back in November 1988, India had sent its special forces to ward of a coup attempt against the then President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Operation Cactus was a smashing success. From there we have reached a pass where three local Maldivian Councillor’s were suspended for as much as meeting the Indian Ambassador. Far more galling for India is the fact that Maldives has signed a Free Trade Agreement with China completely ignoring India’s sensitivities on the issue. It is the second country in South Asia in addition to Pakistan that has signed such an agreement.
Moreover, Maldives has reportedly signed 12 more agreements with China, including a pact to jointly promote the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative. The agreements with the Maldives are part of Beijing’s persistent exertions to persuade South Asian countries to embrace the OBOR initiative, and confer infrastructure construction projects on Chinese companies. Earlier, Maldives had allowed three Chinese warships to dock in Male, a first for the island nation.
Finally, moving to Pakistan. There has been a lot of exultation and self-congratulatory backslapping in India over a 4.42 am tweet by the US President Donald Trump on the first day of 2018 that skewered Pakistan. It would be appropriate to reproduce the tweet in full “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!” The irony is that there is no mention of India in this tweet.
This is notwithstanding the fact that Pakistan-sponsored terrorism roughly coincides with Pakistan becoming a frontline ally of the US in the Afghan Jihad in the early 1980s to free Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion of December 1979. In fact, it was the wash of weapons into the region to overpower the Soviet that were used by Pakistan to arm semi-state terrorists that have been wrecking mayhem in India since 1980. Mr Trump’s diatribe would push Pakistan into the welcoming embrace of China while Russia would be all too happy that a nation that bled them during the Afghan occupation bled the US equally through its chicanery and double dealing. This takedown of Pakistan should be off no strategic consequence to India, as it does not better India’s influence in the neighbourhood. For serious students of India’s strategic interests, the question is how did we skid down this un-slippery slope so rapidly?
