by Vinod Rai
Technological leaps affect political campaigns. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) won an unexpected victory in the vast state of UP in 2007 because its cadre was hooked up and widely organized for the first time through mobile phones. Five years later, everybody had the same idea, the faithful cadre was dispirited and the party lost heavily.28 Narendra Modi’s BJP used hologram technology to beam him into hundreds of small towns during the 2014 national elections and create jaw-dropping small-town spectacles that people came from miles around to see.
Perhaps more important for long-term change, the prevalence of the handheld communication device and the potential autonomy it brings, disrupt tens of millions of households and communities with the question: ‘Who should be allowed to have one and how should they be allowed to use it?’ The intrusion of the media into people’s lives leads to questions being asked and behaviour sometimes having to change. In 1993, a frustrated policeman in Andhra Pradesh explained why the rapid spread of Telugu newspapers made a policeman’s life more difficult. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘if one policeman went to a village, the people were afraid. Now, six police may go to a village and people are not afraid. Newspapers have made them know that police are not supposed to beat them.’29 What will the digital world let people know?
V
India–ASEAN Relations at Seventy
Tan Tai Yong
Close Rapport through Shared Ideals
Relations between India and Southeast Asia have deep historical roots. On the day India became independent, most of Asia was still under colonial rule. Years later, when Lee Kuan Yew was delivering the Nehru Memorial Lecture in 2005, he recalled listening to Jawaharlal Nehru’s stirring ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech when he was a student at Cambridge. ‘I belong to that generation of Asian nationalists who looked up to India’s freedom struggle and its leaders, Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. [. . .] Nehru’s speeches resonated with me.’ Lee said. ‘[I] admired Nehru for his vision of a secular multiracial India, a country that does not discriminate between citizens because of their race, language, religion or culture.’1 As the first Asian country to achieve independence from colonial rule, India was regarded by Southeast Asian nationalists, most of whom aspired to follow in India’s footsteps, as a natural leader of an impending free and resurgent Asia.
In the forties, as India headed towards political independence, Nehru had looked to Southeast Asia as a region whose history, fate and destiny were somewhat linked with India’s. For centuries, trade and human migration traversed the Bay of Bengal. Complex networks sustained by commerce, culture and community criss-crossed the Indian Ocean, connecting maritime Southeast Asia and the Indian Subcontinent. As a consequence large parts of Southeast Asia came under profound Indian influences, and great civilizations like the Srivijaya Empire and Majapahit Empire flourished in the region. All that remained in the colonial period were the networks that strengthened after the Indian subcontinent and territories to its east were brought under the British sphere of influence, underpinned largely by trade and commerce.
The end of the Second World War brought major political changes in the modern world. Nehru believed that in the twilight of European imperialism and the emergence of Asian nationalism, the peoples of India and Southeast Asia would rediscover their own identities again. While Nehru scrupulously avoided creating the perception that a greater India would replace the British Empire east of Bengal, he was keen on promoting a united Asia occupying its rightful place in the world. During a visit to Burma (now Myanmar), Malaya and Singapore in 1946, Nehru mooted the idea of India playing host to a gathering of Asian nations to signal that Asia was on the threshold of a new era. A year later, in March 1947, Nehru opened the Asian Relations Conference in Delhi with the pronouncement that ‘this conference [would] stand out as a landmark which [would] divide the past of Asia from the future’.2 Nehru’s vision for India and Asia captured the imagination of young Asian nationalists captivated by his charisma and the ideals he espoused.
The Asian Relations Conference was attended by representatives from twenty-eight countries, including Burma, Malaya and Indonesia, and was seen as a form of ‘missionary outreach to the national struggles of large parts of Asia that remained colonized’. The largest individual contingents came from the still-colonized Southeast Asia.3 In these parts, especially in Burma, Malaya and Indonesia, Nehru personified the new mood of Asia; his leadership of India’s freedom movement, passionate commitment to anti-colonialism and vision of a new, free Asia inspired those agitating for independence from foreign rule. Nehru’s stock rose further when he actively roused international support for the Indonesian nationalist revolution against the Dutch. As long as large parts of Southeast Asia were still under colonial rule and regarded India’s experiences as a beacon of a future they could emulate, relations between India and Southeast Asia remained close. The Asian Relations Conference was perhaps emblematic of the special relationship India enjoyed with Southeast Asian states in the first decade following the end of the Second World War.
One could perhaps see this as an early expression of India’s ‘Look East’ policy, with Nehru laying the foundation of an Asian community in which India would exercise an important influence. A united Asia, Nehru envisioned, would eventually replace the Atlantic community as the future nerve centre of the world. Such an intent was again expressed at the Bandung Conference in 1955. Twenty-nine Asian and African states gathered in Indonesia to discuss their political agendas and to insist that the opinions of Afro-Asian states must have a role in the new international order. They rejected Cold War definitions of world affairs as representing a continuation of imperialistic control by the great powers. The Asian Relations Conference and the Bandung Conference were high points in early attempts of newly emerging Asian states to create a free and neutral pan-Asian identity and presence in the international order. In this, there was clear convergence of interests between an emerging India and the Southeast Asia nation states in waiting. Non-alignment and freedom from foreign domination were commonly held ideals and Nehru’s vision of an Asia uncommitted to either of the two power blocs appealed to like-minded Asian nationalists, most notably Aung San and Sukarno. But these ideals faded by the sixties, when Southeast Asian states, having attained independence to become nation states in their own right began articulating their own foreign policies in light of their respective national interests. With that, Indian interests and those of the new states of Southeast Asia began to diverge.
Geopolitics and the Cold War
In the sixties the international relations of Asian countries were inexorably shaped by the forces of the Cold War. Despite its avowed commitment to non-alignment in the early post-colonial years, India gradually distanced itself from the non-communist nations of Southeast Asia by shifting towards the Soviet Union. Nehru had long been an admirer of the Soviet economic system, and while not drawn to the concept of a one-party state, had an affinity with the socialist system of the Soviet Union. The once close relationship between India and Southeast Asia was further strained by the political distance that India consciously kept from the newly formed Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It saw the ASEAN grouping as a reincarnation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and was suspicious of an American conspiracy to use Southeast Asian states to serve its Cold War designs in the region.4 Irked by not being invited to join the regional grouping, India adopted a cool attitude towards ASEAN without openly criticizing it. Most importantly, India was not drawn to ASEAN because the latter was considered redundant to India’s immediate security interest. ASEAN was formed at a time when the war in Vietnam was spreading to Cambodia, and non- and anti-communist Southeast Asian states saw in the regional grouping a means to contain the threat of communist insurgencies (and to keep China’s influence at bay) in the region. India, for its part, saw no need to get close to ASEAN lest this be seen by Beijing as a hostile manoeuvre against China. While it was concerned with China’s influence in some pa
rts of the region, it did not want to be seen to be doing anything that might be construed as anti-China and therefore pro-Western. That would also complicate its growing relations with the Soviet Union. While ASEAN members felt that American presence was necessary to contain China, India was suspicious that ASEAN would become a mechanism to serve American interests in Southeast Asia. ASEAN’s closeness to America and Japan—seen as a strategic economic triangle—did not make it easy for India’s entry into the region. Indeed, it began questioning the objective of ASEAN’s formation whenever security and defence issues were discussed in its forums. Gradually, the differing strategic interests between the ASEAN states and India drew them further apart.
By this time, Cold War considerations were beginning to have a major impact on India’s policy in Asia. Wary of Soviet intentions in the region, pro-Western Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore viewed India’s closeness to the Soviet Union with considerable unease. This complicated India’s relations with ASEAN members as it failed to de-link its relations with the Soviet Union on the one hand and ASEAN states on the other.5 Not unexpectedly, India’s proposal for a regional security convention received a lukewarm response from the ASEAN states as it was regarded as a loosely modelled Soviet proposal for collective security.6
The divergence of interests further aggravated in the seventies. ASEAN countries saw in India’s war with Pakistan in 1971—during which India depended on the Soviet Union to intervene in East Pakistan—a betrayal of its non-alignment policy as well as an outright violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. India–ASEAN relations were made worse with the signing of the Indo-Soviet Treaty. Member states were worried that the Moscow–New Delhi alliance would allow the Soviet Union to use its influential status in South Asia to advance its interests in Southeast Asia, despite India’s assurances that the treaty was not a defence pact, but an agreement for peace and friendship. India was seen as practising double standards when it criticized American activities in Diego Garcia while backing Soviet presence in the Indian Ocean by claiming that it was ‘reactive development’.
Throughout this period, the only Southeast Asian state to remain on good terms with India was Vietnam. By backing Vietnam, which was then locked in mortal conflict with the US, India demonstrated its obvious pro-Soviet tilt and got its own back against the Americans for supporting Pakistan in 1971. This worried ASEAN, which regarded Vietnam as the main source of the communist threat in the region. India saw no need to address ASEAN anxieties as it had, by that stage, decided its relations with the Soviet Union and Vietnam were more important than those with ASEAN. Its interaction with ASEAN during the Cold War era mostly took the form of bilateral relations with individual countries rather than with the association as a whole, and even then, bilateral trade agreements with the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand were not significant in terms of economic benefits.7 The incentives for India to get closer to ASEAN, and vice versa, were simply not there.
Matters reached a head in the eighties when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi chose to recognize the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin regime in Cambodia, much to the consternation of the ASEAN states. The failure of India to establish any meaningful relationships with Southeast Asia despite its cultural and geographical affinity with that region,8 stemmed largely from the dictates of regional geopolitics and the Cold War regime. It has been argued that India’s relationship with ASEAN was considered secondary to its more fundamental security concern involving Pakistan and China, which was in turn intensified by the circumstances of the Cold War.9 The situation was perhaps best summed up by an Indian analyst who commented that during the Cold War, India was regarded by the ASEAN countries as ‘politically suspect, economically unimportant and, at times, even militarily threatening’.10 However, the change in geopolitical realities following the end of the Cold War forced India to reassess relations with its neighbours in the east. A reorientation took place in India that gradually led to a ‘renaissance in relations’ with Southeast Asia.11
India’s Economic Liberalization and the Look East Policy
In the early nineties, compelled by a severe economic crisis, India took decisive steps towards economic liberalization, leading to a strategic shift in its foreign policy that was subsequently articulated as the Look East policy.12 This new eastward tilt was driven primarily by India’s trade and investment needs, of which ASEAN became a primary platform. The Look East policy led to closer diplomatic ties with ASEAN: in March 1993, India was accorded sectoral dialogue status within ASEAN, and in 1995, India–ASEAN relations took a significant step forward when it was made a full dialogue partner. Following a period of ‘benign neglect’, growing convergence of security and economic interests in the post-Cold War period brought India and ASEAN closer again.
Changing geopolitics made it easier for the forging of closer ties. By the late eighties, India was no longer regarded by ASEAN as a potentially threatening maritime power. Cuts in defence spending, leading to the gradual reduction to its fleet of principal combatants, led to a shift in the Indian naval doctrine from ‘sea control’ to a more defensive ‘sea denial’ role.13 This was accompanied by several confidence-building measures, which included the opening up of its facility at Port Blair to visits from regional military attachés, as well as initiating naval exercises separately with Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. When ASEAN decided to institute the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) to serve as a conclave for annual dialogues with major powers with interest in Southeast Asia, there was little question that India would need to feature prominently in it at some stage. Through its eventual involvement in the ARF, India became part of regional deliberations representing the changing and expanding regional security architecture. It had broad agreement with the ARF’s basic agenda, and, more importantly, over China and Myanmar, the two countries with which the interests and security concerns of India and the ASEAN countries overlapped.
An engaged India offered many strategic advantages to Southeast Asian countries. They were aware that unbridled rivalry between India and China would have potentially ominous consequences for the region. It was, therefore, important for ASEAN to get India to share a common approach of adopting a constructive engagement policy as the best way of dealing with China.14 Similarly, in the case of Myanmar, India supported the ASEAN approach of ‘constructive engagement’, which represented a significant change from its erstwhile policy of no dialogue with it. India’s longer-term perspective remained the restoration of democracy to Myanmar, but in the short term, it would promote economic links for countering China’s influences in Myanmar.
Shared interests in pursuing economic development for the region as a whole drew India and ASEAN closer. India primarily looked to Southeast Asia for markets and sources for investments, and ASEAN, for its part, understood that sound economic and diplomatic relations with India would form the basis of long-term, secure bilateral relations. While India’s trade with ASEAN improved significantly since 1991, the trading pattern varied, determined largely by the existing levels of economic complementarities between India and the individual ASEAN countries. Singapore and Malaysia dominated bilateral trade between India and ASEAN, accounting for over 80 per cent of India’s imports from ASEAN countries, and absorbing more than 60 per cent of India’s exports to ASEAN countries in the early nineties.15 There was, however, hardly any bilateral trade between India and Brunei, whilst trade with Indonesia and the Philippines remained unsubstantial.16
There were other forms of economic complementarity. India became an important source of trained and skilled labour for the manpower needs of the economies of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. India, for its part, saw countries like Singapore as a bridge to the economies of the broader East Asian region. As Indian skilled manpower increasingly found their way into Southeast Asia, India began opening up as an important business destination, offering market potential, communications networks and skills availability at competitive prices.
Close Ties through Converging Interests