WHAT HAPPENS IN PAKISTAN...

If America is serious about fighting the jihadi challenge that the San Bernardino terrorists pose, then it needs to focus its attention, not on Iraq and Syria, but on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan — the two major state sponsors of terror that it has mollycoddled for long

A day after the gruesome San Bernardino attack, US President Barack Obama’s address to the nation was ostensibly designed to reassure the American people that the Government was doing everything to keep them safe. Yet, it left many at unease — and rightly so. Early on in his speech, Mr Obama makes clear that, even though one of the attackers had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State hours before going on the rampage, there was nothing to link the attack in material terms to any foreign terrorist group. This is correct. But having made this assertion, oddly, the President then goes on to explain how his Government is working to defeat the Islamic State, while glossing over the fact that both terrorists, Tashfeen Malik and her husband Syed Rizwan Farooq, had links to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, where they were presumably radicalised!

To be fair, Farooq’s path to radicalisation is still unclear. Born and raised in America, he seemed like a well-adjusted citizen, with a decent middle-class job    who raised no red flags — except that he sought and married a conservative woman like Malik. In fact, it increasingly seems like even though Farooq was, of course, also radicalised, it was Malik who was the mastermind.

Malik was born in Pakistan’s Punjab Province but taken to Saudi Arabia as a child in 1989, and raised in that country. While in Saudi Arabia, Malik’s father notably moved away from the relatively liberal Barelvi school of Sunni Islam that his family practiced in Pakistan and adopted the more puritanical Deobandi school. He also gradually distanced himself and his children from their family in Pakistan. Nevertheless, in 2007, Malik returned to Pakistan to study pharmacy at the Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, also in the Punjab Province. After graduation in 2012, she enrolled at the conservative Al Huda International School in the same city where she studied Islam for a year. In 2014, she married Farooq, whom she had met online, and moved to the US.

Malik’s time in Multan, Punjab, in general, and the institutions she attended there in particular, offer some interesting clues about how she may have been radicalised. Once the spiritual heartland of South Asian Sufi Islam, Pakistani Punjab, especially its much poorer southern parts, has seen a steady flow of Saudi money in recent decades — an estimated $100 million — which has been used to destroy the region’s moderate brand of Islam and create in its place a hotbed for Sunni terrorism.

US diplomatic cables sent from Pakistan between 2009 and 2011, and released by Wikileaks, document how maulanas from radical madarssas, bankrolled by the Saudis, approached poor families with multiple children, convinced them that their poverty was the result of the un-Islamic worship of idols at Sufi shrines, and finally persuaded the parents that the only way to return to the path of true Islam was to give up one of their children to the cause — for which, of course, they were paid a fair amount of cash. This is how the radicals recruited children as young as seven or eight years of age, indoctrinated them, and then either sent them off for further jihadi training or employed them as preachers for the next generation of Islamists.

When the situation began to grow out of hand, with extremists imposing no-go zones in some parts etc, local leaders sought to intervene but found their hands were tied by the conservative elements within the bureaucracy that had been planted by the Zia-ul Haq regime in previous years. Additionally, Punjab was also the jihadi nursery where the ISI raised its anti-India outfits such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Jaish-e-Mohammed. In fact, JeM chief Azhar Masood, who was released by India after the hijacking of IC-814, belonged to southern Punjab while Ajmal Kasab, coming in a generation later, was repeatedly mentioned in US diplomatic cables as a typical example of how the vicious cycle of Saudi-funded jihadi terror turns.

Malik’s own story mirrors this phenomenon as well — the small town of Karor Lal Esan where she was born, in Layyah district of south Punjab, was named after the mystic Hazrat Lal Esan who is believed to have recited a Quranic verse 10 million times while standing on one leg. However, the Multan that a the Saudi-bred Malik returned to in 2007 was already notorious for radical sectarian activity. So much so, that The New York Times reports, university officials in Multan cooperated with law enforcement and intelligence authorities to “monitor for extremist activity on campus”.

It was also during this time in 2007 that the bloody siege of Lal Masjid happened — according to official estimates, the confrontation between the radical clerics of the mosque and the Pakistani military led to 154 deaths (although unofficial figures are much higher). Tensions between the pro-Taliban Lal Masjid clergy, supported in no small measure by women militants of the adjoining Jamia Hafsa madarssa, were brewing since 9/11 when then President Pervez Musharraf announced Pakistani support for the US war against terror. Matters came to a head when Jamia Hafsa militants abducted Chinese nationals among others for running a neighbourhood brothel in 2006. The Musharraf Government had no choice but to crackdown — there was a week-long siege and intense firefights between Pakistani soldiers and the heavily-armed militants. The campus was secured after eight days but the episode sparked a fresh wave of militancy across Pakistan.

The Lal Masjid story is important here because it has been reported that Tashfeen Malik had connections with the mosque’s head priest, Maulana Abul Aziz, and his wife, who now leads Jamia Hafsa. US authorities have brought this to the notice of Pakistani officials through Mr Shahbaz Sharif, the Chief Minister of Punjab and the Prime Minister’s brother. The Sharifs have a long history of protecting Abdul Aziz who has also pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. On paper, he is a wanted man in Pakistan but that hasn’t stopped him from delivering public sermons and leading mass campaigns, as the Dawn newspaper reported last month.

There is no evidence yet to suggest if the Lal Masjid gang from Pakistan, instead of the Islamic State butchers from Syria or Iraq, provided material support to Malik and her husband for the San Bernardino attack but the possibility cannot be ruled out. Also, even if there was no direct support, there can be no two ways around the fact that Malik and Farooq derived their ideological nourishment from the putrid Sunni extremist eco-system that Saudi Arabia has spawned around the world and Pakistan cradled with special care.

If America is serious about fighting the jihadi challenge that the likes of Malik and Farooq pose, then it needs to focus its attention on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, not Iraq and Syria (which, arguably, are just symptoms, not the cause of jihadi terror). For too long, Washington, DC has mollycoddled these two major state sponsors of terror because first, they served its geo-political interests (although the disastrous Afghan campaign shows even that’s not entirely true) and second, the luxury of distance meant that America, unlike say India or Afghanistan, didn’t quite have to suffer the blowback of Saudi and Pakistani terror policies.

However, as global trends are change — the House of Saud, for example, is feeling the heat from the drop in oil prices — and America is, hopefully, realising that even its strongest homeland security systems cannot keep out the insidious jihadi ideology flowing from Saudi Arabia or that, in the words of a sharp Pakistani commentator, what happens in Pakistan no longer stays in Pakistan, there is an opportunity for a change in tact and policy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the Obama Administration at least is ready to take it up.

(This article was published in oped section of The Pioneer on December 10, 2015)

TOO MANY COOKS FOR SYRIAN BROTH

The Russia-Turkish confrontation on Tuesday won't spark a war but it may disrupt the global coalition that’s slowly coming together to fight the Islamic State. The situation is fast evolving, and India must decide if it's comfortable sitting out of the defining conflict of this time

The downing of a Russian military jet by Turkish forces on Tuesday was only the latest flashpoint in the increasingly internationalised Syrian crisis, which, of course, is fundamentally linked to the global threat posed by the Islamic State terror group. The confrontation came less than two weeks after the Paris attack, which claimed more than 130 lives and the aftermath of which continues to unravel with France and neighbouring Belgium on high alert. In between, a Russian commercial jet that had just departed from the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh was bombed over the Sinai peninsula. Before that there were terror attacks, linked to the Islamic State, in Lebanon and Turkey.

Though the incident sent alarm bells ringing in world capitals — after all, it was the first time since the end of the Cold War that a Russian fighter plane was shot down by a Nato member state — and sparked a flurry of World War III headlines, it was actually not that surprising. There had been a similar scare in October when Turkey brought down what was thought to be a Russian aircraft but turned out to be a drone. More recently, Turkey has repeatedly complained about Russian jets, carrying out missions in Syria, violating its airspace. Besides, given how crowded the Syrian airspace is these days, with American, British, French, Arab, Turkish and Russian jets in the sky, it was only a matter of time before such a kerfuffle transpired.

But while this is a matter of concern, it is unlikely to lead to an escalation between Turkey and Russia. Sure, Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken a hard stance against Turkey, calling the attack a “stab in the back” and accusing the Government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of conspiring with the Islamic State, but it makes no sense for him to launch a full scale attack given that he already has his hands full with the mess in Ukraine and consequent Western sanctions. Besides, if Russia really wants revenge, its much more likely to do so indirectly — by propping up the Kurds. And so it is no surprise that on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said in no uncertain terms that Moscow does not “intend to wage a war on Turkey”.

Similarly, US President Barack Obama statement supporting Turkey’s right to protect its sovereignty in this context notwithstanding, there is no reason to worry that Nato will jump in to battle to defend Turkey — this is simply not that big an issue. Also, if Turkey had a problem with its airspace being violated, it has more than made its point by shooting down a Russian jet. Hence, immediately after the emergency meeting that Turkey called with its Nato allies, Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg, while expressing support for Turkey, also called for “de-escalation” and “diplomacy”. 

The more serious concern following Tuesday’s incident is, therefore, not a Nato-Russia confrontation but the atmosphere of acrimony and brinkmanship that it has fuelled. In recent days, following the Paris attack, the West and Russia have been inching towards greater cooperation against the Islamic State: Russia, which had mostly been attacking rebels groups fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since it began military operations in September, had begun striking Islamic State targets as well. The Vienna talks, held a day after the Paris attack, had also made more progress than expected.

Meanwhile, French President  François Hollande has been lobbying world powers, with some degree of success it would seem, to put up a united front against the Islamic State. He will be in Moscow on Thursday and visited Washington, DC, on Tuesday to discuss greater cooperation (though, notably, Mr Lavrov cancelled his trip to Istanbul after the shooting). Importantly, the UN Security Council also passed a resolution earlier this week, calling for all necessary action to be taken against the Islamic State. Though this was a goodwill gesture rather than a firm commitment, it indicated a rare convergence of interests.

The current Turkey-Russia episode threatens these gains — and one can hardly write off the possibility that this precisely may have been Ankara’s game plan all along. There can be no two ways about the fact that the Islamic State was able to grow into the monster that it is today because Ankara facilitated the transfer of arms, funds and foreign fighters to rebel groups in Syria, including the Islamic State, in a desperate bid to bring down the Assad regime. Some Turkish officials have also been found to have links with Islamic State leaders and there have been strong allegations of elements within the Turkish Government benefitting from the Islamic State’s illicit activities particularly in oil trade. Moreover, Ankara has used the Islamic State as a weapon in its longstanding dispute with the Kurds, who are the only force on the ground that have been able to push back the Islamic State.

This brings us to the fundamental differences between Turkey and Russia in their approach to the Islamic State and the Syrian conflict: While Turkey’s primary aim is removal of the Assad regime, Russia’s is the exact opposite. Fighting the Islamic State is not a priority for either, though Russia doesn’t mind bombing the terror targets these days while Turkey has been strengthening them all along. Yet, it’s hard to imagine how a solution can be crafted without Russia and Turkey on the same page — and this is just looking at two of the many stakeholders in the conflict.

On a different note, it might be worth asking: What, if any, is India’s role here? Even if one assumes that India is not directly impacted by the conflict, at least for the time being, it still has major interests in West Asia, be they trade and investments, diaspora and remittances, and of course oil and energy security. Moreover, India is an aspiring Great Power that wants to have a say in the international system and is actively campaigning for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council.

Yet, in the five years since the war in Syria broke out, India has contributed precious little to the conflict resolution process. It has made clear that it is opposed to foreign military intervention and regime change from the outside, and that a political solution is the only answer; it has also maintained its diplomatic relations with Damascus, an old Delhi friend. But while these are wise policy positions, they are not prescriptive measures.

At the multilateral level, India participated in two major initiatives regarding the Syrian conflict. In both cases, there was little to write home about. First, in 2011, it joined hands with its IBSA partners — Brazil and South Africa, all of whom were temporary members of the UNSC at that time — to push for a statement calling for the immediate halt of violent in Syria. The statement was the first that the world body had issued on what was then a six-month-long conflict and, to that extent, was a modest success for all three members. However, the delegation that they led to Syria soon after was a failure. In early 2014, India was one among the 30 countries that participated in the Geneva-II talks but here too, then External Affairs Minister, Mr Salman Khurshid, mostly just reiterated New Delhi’s known positions on the issues. Perhaps, it is no surprise then that India hasn’t been invited to the ongoing Vienna talks.

To be fair, India has good reason to not want to get its hands dirty: The situation is a mess and India doesn’t really face any immediate pressing threats that it cannot handle from home. That said, India has strong relations with almost all the regional and major powers, enormous goodwill in much of West Asia, and finally, civilisational ties with the region. Should it not leverage these assets to making meaningful contribution? Equally importantly, can an aspiring global power afford to sit out of what is possibly the defining crisis of our times?

(This article was published in the oped section of The Pioneer on November 26, 2015)

RE-DEFINING INDIA-AFRICA TIES

Perhaps it is early to conclude about the India-Africa summit, but one thing is sure: The forum gave an assessment of ties as they exist today, and also indicated of what the relationship will look like in the years to come

As the curtains are drawn on the Third India-Africa Forum Summit, New Delhi’s largest diplomatic outreach in several decades, we need to ask: Was this just another grand gathering of world leaders or will the conference emerge as a milestone that redefined India’s engagement with the African continent? Of course, it is still too early to offer a definitive answer, given that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is having bilateral consultations even today (October 30), but it will be fair to say that the summit produced a fair assessment of India-Africa ties as they exist today, and also offered some important indicators of what the relationship will look like in the years ahead.

In the first case, there was an honest acknowledgement of the fact that, while India’s ties with the African continent go back thousands of years and have grown enormously in recent years, they are still under-developed. As Mr Modi himself said at the plenary session on October 29, India hasn’t always been as attentive towards its African partners as it should have been, and on some occasions it has fallen short of expectations. Consequently, India hasn’t been able to fully leverage its inherent advantages in the continent.

That said, there was also genuine appreciation for India’s role in the emergence of a post-colonial Africa and its continued support as a development partner. As is well-known, Indian and African leaders worked together to fight against foreign rule and bring freedom and prosperity to their people. In fact, at its 1928 annual session in Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), the Indian National Congress officially linked the Indian freedom struggle to the global fight against imperialism. Later, a newly-independent India, under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, continued to lead the global anti-colonial struggle from the front. It promoted the African cause at international forums, placed the anti-colonial movement at the heart of the Non-Aligned Movement and also provided active support to African liberation groups.

By the time most African nations gained sovereignty, India had also established itself as a strong development partner within the model of South-South cooperation. The ITEC programme, which continues with much success till date, has trained and skilled hundreds of Africans in a wide variety of fields and subjects, in India. In fact, many African ITEC alumni are national leaders today — for example, the President of Nigeria, Mr Muhammadu Buhari, was trained at the Defence Services Staff College in Wellington, Tamil Nadu; and so was Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, who governed from 1999 to 2007.

The other, more recent, tool of Indian diplomacy in Africa has been the concessional lines of credit. Launched in 2004 and disbursed through the Export Import Bank, these soft loans have a host of activities — from mega infrastructure projects, such as roads, railways and power plants, to relatively smaller projects in food processing and IT training, and everything in-between. For example, in Angola, a $40 million Line of Credit has helped modernise the country’s rail system workshop and improve the supply of railway rolling stock, while in Malawi, a $30 million LOC is funding the One Village One Product Programme and the Small Holder’s Irrigation Programme, which bring agricultural plants and equipments from Indian factories to Malawian farms. Similarly, Indian lines of credit have helped set up a hydro-electric plant in Burundi, rice and maize plantations in Cameroon, a technology park in Cape Verde and a cement plant in the Central African Republic.

This brings us to the second aspect: Where does the India-Africa partnership go from here? Of course, we will continue to upgrade some of the core elements such as education, skill development, agriculture and medicine. We can also expect to see, for example, heightened cooperation in the energy sector. Already, in the decade between 2005 and 2015, India’s oil import from Africa has gone up from zero to more than 25 per cent of its total import bill. India is also investing in the Africa’s emerging oil and gas sector. State-run Oil and Natural Gas Corporation has stakes in an offshore gas field of Mozambique, in the Greater Nile Oil Project in Sudan and in one of the blocks of the joint development zone of Nigeria-Sao Tome and Principe.

Another area that should open up for greater cooperation is defence. Peacekeeping will, of course, remain an important element, but direct military ties must get a boost. Currently, India has military-to-military cooperation (mostly training) with more than 30 African nations. Indian defence training teams are deployed in countries like Botswana, Zambia, Lesotho and Seychelles. In Namibia, two ITEC experts are on deputation from the Ministry of Defence as advisors in civil and ICT-related works while in Nigeria, India helped set up the defence academy. Gradually, the private sector is also joining in — mostly with non-lethal military supplies.  Another aspect of defence cooperation includes anti-piracy missions and counter-terrorism operations. India has already played an active role in the former. 

A fairly new dimension to the India-Africa partnership will be cooperation in the related fields of climate change and renewable energy. It will be interesting to see how India and the African nations negotiate their positions at the upcoming UN climate change conference in Paris. Prime Minister Modi announced on Thursday that a Solar Group of nations (comprising states that have huge potential for solar energy, and this includes almost all of Africa) will be introduced at that summit. There have also been reports of a similar grouping of coastal nations, focusing on blue economies. These are interesting ideas, but only time will tell how they are implemented on the ground.

This article was published in the Oped page of The Pioneer on October 30, 2015

A TIGHTROPE WALK IN WEST ASIA

President Pranab Mukherjee’s visit to Palestine and Israel, the first by an Indian head of state, is a diplomatic milestone that is equally reflective of how much India’s foreign policy has changed since 1947 and how much it hasn’t

President Pranab Mukherjee’s trip to Palestine and Israel is, of course, historic, given that no other Indian head of state has ever visited either before. While the trip to Palestine was important to reiterate India’s continued support for the Palestinian cause and its commitment to a ‘balanced’ West Asia policy, especially when bilateral ties with Israel are growing strong, the tour of Israel was a natural development. Ties between India and Israel have not only become robust, expanding from defence into agriculture and water management, education and hi-tech, but also more open, particularly under the Modi Government.

Even security cooperation is no longer brushed under the carpet, as is evident from Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s India’s visit in February and the first joint military exercise, announced only days before President Mukherjee’s visit. Importantly, in his address to the Knesset, Mr Mukherjee expressed his gratitude to Israel “for rushing critical defence supplies in 1999”. While Israeli assistance to India during the Kargil war — a turning point in the bilateral which was established only in 1992 — is well-known, this is the first time that there has been such a high-profile, public acknowledgement of the same by the Government of India.

Similarly, in the backdrop of a spate of terror attacks in Israel, President Mukherjee’s blanket condemnation of all forms of terrorism was befitting the situation. It focused on the big picture but without taking sides in a complicated regional issue.

While these are welcome developments, if you were, however, looking for signs that the visit signalled an evolution in India’s foreign policy or a maturation of its world view, you’d be disappointed. Indeed, if there is one major takeaway from the President’s tour, it is this: The more things change, the more they stay the same. And so it has been, that despite the geo-politics of West Asia and the international order in general having changed significantly, that despite India’s relatively recent establishment of ties with Israel having added an entirely new dimension to the narrative, the President of India’s foreign policy pronouncements seem to have been mothballed since 1947.

Sample this: In this speech at Al Quds University in Ramallah, Mr Mukherjee reiterated how India has always been at the “forefront of promoting the Palestinian cause” and noted with pride that, “India voted against the partition of Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly in 1947” — in other words, India voted against the establishment of the State of Israel. While the vote is a fact of history, did the President really need to highlight it, given that Israel has emerged as one of India’s most important partners, and that, only hours later, Mr Mukherjee himself was to travel to the Jewish state? Some may argue that it was important for Mr Mukherjee to highlight India’s pro-Palestine stance to ‘balance’ India’s ties with Israel. Even if this is the case (it isn’t, for President himself said that India’s ties with Israel and Palestine are independent of the other), surely there are better ways to do the ‘balancing act’ without highlighting one’s own mistakes from the past.

India’s vote on the UN partition plan (which came only six months after India had favoured the minority plan at the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine which recommended an Arab state and a Jewish state) was the result of the Congress’s ideological support for the Arabs at the time. Two factors had led to the crystallisation of this ideological tilt within the party and thereby within the Indian foreign policy establishment: First, Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t comfortable with the Zionist movement and viewed the establishment of Israel as a colonial project, being imposed on the ‘Palestinian people’, by the same British empire that he was fighting at home. In doing so, he ignored the well-established fact that Jews had continuously lived in the region for thousands of years and were as much ‘Palestinian’ as the Arabs; but given the Mahatma’s political stature at the time, his views set the tone for all. Second, worried that the Congress would lose public support to the Muslim League, already a veritable political force at that time, the Mahatma and other senior leaders of the party resorted to several Muslim appeasement tactics: Pandering to the Arabs, without any diplomatic reciprocation from Arab states was one of them.

Almost 70 years later, India has made some course corrections — establishing diplomatic ties with Israel being the most significant. Yet, it is disappointing to see that even as we acknowledge these new developments, we refuse to do so wholeheartedly. And so it is that we hold on to outdated policy pronouncements in public, even though in practice, we have all but discarded them. It is true that India’s support for the Palestinian cause today is mostly lip-service, limited to routine budgetary allocations, the occasional gift or two, and some grandstanding at the UN. It is equally true that even though sometimes this posturing takes on anti-Israel hues, Israel itself isn’t particularly perturbed, partly because its own take on the Palestinian issue isn’t that much different from India’s (both want a two-state solution in keeping with the relevant UN resolutions etc) and partly because the Palestinian issue isn’t a really an irritant in bilateral ties. However, this issue isn’t about Israel or even Palestine. This is about the Government of India being pragmatic and confident enough to stand up for its own interests.

Again, some may argue that maintaining lip-service to the Palestinian cause is in India’s interests but that argument also stands on a slippery slope, particularly since Indian politicians often tend to over-compensate. For example, during the last Gaza war, some Left parliamentarians demanded that India snap diplomatic ties with Israel. Before that, in 2011, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh while addressing the UN General Assembly, had called for the establishment of a Palestinian state — with East Jerusalem as its capital. This was an unnecessary addition to India’s official position that has been carried forward till this day. It is not in keeping with ground realities and will prove to be a diplomatic headache for India, if and when there is a resolution to the Palestinian question.

Similarly, President Mukherjee underlined how India had “spearheaded” the international campaign for UN recognition of Palestinian statehood in 2012, and congratulated the people of Palestine on the unfurling of their national flag at the United Nations on September 30. No doubt, both of these were symbolic victories for the Palestinian leadership but they were also meaningless in terms of delivering peace and prosperity to the Palestinian people.

Of course, none of these pronouncements will change the ground realities in New Delhi, Jerusalem or Ramallah, but at some point, India needs to ensure that in its efforts to maintain its policy status quo, it doesn’t become party to a farce.  

This article was published in Oped page of The Pioneer on October 15, 2015

INDIA AFRICA FORUM SUMMIT: EMERGING POWERS ON THE PROWL

The third India-Africa Summit, to be held in New Delhi in October, is expected to mark a new phase in India’s relations with Africa. India has some inherent advantages over other world powers courting Africa, but the partnership remains under-developed

In just about two months from now, India will be hosting one of its biggest diplomatic events in recent memory: The India-Africa Forum Summit. The scale of this event is unprecedented, with all 54 African heads of Government having been invited. The last time such a major diplomatic summit was organised by this country was in 1983, when leaders from around the world converged in New Delhi for the seventh meet of the Non Aligned Movement. Later that year, the Commonwealth Heads of Government meet was also held in Delhi and attended by 44 world leaders including Queen Elizabeth.

The October event will be the third meeting of the India-Africa forum. The first was held in 2008 in New Delhi and the second in 2011 in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. Both events were attended by about 14 to 15 African leaders, who had been selected by the African Union to represent the entire continent. Though productive in their own ways, both were generally low-key and didn’t necessarily mark an evolution or development in India’s policy towards Africa. This is where the October summit promises to be different.

Apart from the fact that all African heads have been invited, there is reason enough to hope, especially given the Modi Government’s glamorous foreign policy record, that the summit will indicate a new chapter in India’s ties with Africa, marked by greater and more robust engagement at bilateral and multilateral levels, and across a wide spectrum of fields and industries. That said, it has to be kept in mind that India will be playing catch-up to some extent in its efforts to woo Africa.

Other world powers, particularly China, are far ahead in the race. In fact, China’s big Africa conference, its sixth outreach since 2000, will be held soon after the India meet — and it will be interesting to compare the list of attendees from both events. The EU also has a similar conference and America hosted its first one last year in Washington, DC. Even in terms of real, on-the-field engagement, India isn’t exactly at the top of the pack though it remains well-positioned to be Africa’s partner in a wide variety of fields.

An important factor that India will hope to leverage in its favour during the summit is it historical ties with Africa that go back 2,000 years when commercial ties were first established between traders from the Indian west coast and the African east coast. The sea-borne trade was facilitated by the direction of the monsoon winds and a whole host of items were traded back and forth. In fact, the cotton and silk in which the Egyptian mummies were wrapped are believed to have come from India.

Though not many Indians settled in Africa at this time, some did make their home in the African trading towns of modern day Kenya, Zanzibar, Mozambique and the Comoros Islands, while some Africans made their home in Gujarat. In fact, one of the most famous ancient African traders, Bava Gor, is today worshipped by India’s Siddi community which descended from Africa’s Bantu tribe.

During medieval times, Africans served as soldiers in Indian royal Armies and later, under the British crown, thousands of Indian workers travelled to South Africa, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania to build roads and railways. Some stayed back in their karma bhoomi and their descendents have today emerged become integral part of the African population. More recently, Indians and Africans have worked with each other to overthrow oppressive regimes and fight for freedom and equality in the post-colonial world. Mahatma Gandhi is the most recognisable figure in this regard, but those familiar with Indian and African history know that he is not alone.

Looking ahead, there are some key areas of cooperation that both India and Africa will be looking to build upon. At the top of the list is trade. Though commercial ties have strenghthened significantly in recent years, there is still a lot of ground to be covered. India-Africa trade grew by nearly 32 per cent between 2005 and 2011 (including through the years of the economic crisis). In 2013, India’s overall trade with Africa stood at a promising $70 billion. It is estimated that the India-Africa trade will increase to $90 billion by the end of this year and $200 billion by 2020. That will be a five time increase in just about five years — but that’s not all.

These figures are conservative estimates from Government sources. Industry sources have an even more ambitious target: A $500 billion by 2020! Already, several Indian businesses — and this includes medium-scale enterprises and not just large corporate — have a significant presence in African markets. And their business models, which includes employing locals, have not only brought profits for the Indian economy but also generated jobs and helped improved living standards in African countries.

Strategic Engagement: The importance of east African countries, which are part of the extended Indian Ocean neighbourhood, cannot be undermined. The Modi administration has sought to beef up India’s presence in the Indian Ocean region and is seeking to emerge as a major security provider here. India already has a considerable naval presence in the region and also defence cooperation agreements with Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, South Africa and Tanzania. Here too, India is being challenged by China and it will be interesting to see how Africa section of the India-China détente plays out. 

Energy Security: This is one of the most important elements in India’s Africa policy. If India has to continue on its growth trajectory, oil and coal are necessary to fuel the economic engine. India’s energy consumption is expected to rise by at least 3.6 per cent annually, and its energy demand double by 2025, by which time India will be importing 90 per cent of its petroleum needs, according to the International Energy Agency.

Oil-rich Nigeria is already becoming one of India’s largest suppliers while state-run ONGC Videsh has oil exploration ventures in Libya, investments in Sudan’s hydrocarbon sector and offshore drilling plans in the Ivory Coast. Private-player Reliance Industries also has tie-ups with some African nations.

Technology Cooperation: The show-stopper here is the Pan-African e-Network, an Indian project implemented on a continental scale in Africa. Delivered through the African Union, this initiative focuses on tele-medicine and tele-education. The India Africa Science and Technology Initiative is another good example in this sphere.

However, the big story in technology cooperation is shaping up in the private sector. India’s top software services companies have made major investments across the Africa and their market share is growing at an impressive pace. For example, Finacle, the core banking software package developed by Indian technology giant Infosys has a long list of more than 30 African clients. Most Indian companies are currently based out of South Africa but there is also an emerging Indian footprint in fast-growing African economies such as Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia.

The India-Africa partnership is a natural and equal partnership, built on a civilisational bonding. At the First India Africa Forum Summit in New Delhi in April 2008, this partnership was consolidated; at the second, its values reiterated; at the third, the relationship should be taken to the next level.

This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on August 20, 2015

A NEW FUTURE BUILT ON ANCIENT BONDS

As preparations for third India-Africa Forum Summit begin, here’s an overview of India’s ties with one of the fastest emerging nations in east Africa — Kenya

As New Delhi prepares for the third India-Africa Forum Summit,   it offers a good opportunity to underline the strong historical ties that bind the two partners as well the immense potential for close cooperation in the future. This is especially true for India’s ties with emerging African nations like Kenya which have made significant progress in recent years. Though in contemporary popular imagination, there is little that connects India with Kenya, relations between the two littoral states can actually be traced back several centuries.

Indians, primarily from Gujarat, were known to be travelling to and trading with east African nations, even before the Europeans came and colonised that area. For example, a Greco-Roman guidebook on trade in the Indian Ocean region, written sometime in the middle of the first century, documents in detail the presence of Indians in east African nations including modern-day Kenya. While the vast majority of these early traders and sea-farers did not settle in region, they nonetheless left an indirect civilisational imprint.

Large-scale migration of Indians to Kenya happened hundreds of years later when European powers began their ‘Scramble for Africa'. The British got control of Kenya and brought thousands of labourers from India to build what was then known as the Uganda Railway project. Today, the original rail line between Mombassa and Kisimu lies entirely in Kenya while the British-era company has been split into three national railway corporations. About 6,000 of the Indian workers who came to build Uganda Railway stayed back in Kenya, establishing one of the first Indian communities in east Africa. Some of them continued to work for the railways while others step up shop in the newly developing trade towns and ports.

Even though social integration took its time, especially as race relations went through a turbulent phase in the 20th century, several persons of Indian origin contributed significantly to Kenyan independence and development. For example, the India-born Makhan Singh was the first to establish a trade union in Kenya while the Kenya-born, India-educated journalist and politician Pio Gama Pinto played an active role in the Kenyan freedom struggle.

Later, Jawaharlal Nehru had dispatched the erudite Diwan Chaman Lall from India to defend the Father of the Kenyan nation, Jomo Kenyatta, at his 1953 trial. Notably, the defence team also included two other persons of Indian origin, FRS DeSouza (he later became Kenya's Deputy Speaker) and AR Kapila. Today, several Indian-origin Kenyans hold positions of power and influence in their country — Manilal Premchand Chandaria, for example, is one of Kenya's biggest industrialists while Pheroze Nowrojee is a renowned human rights lawyer. 

Overall, Kenya is now an important trade and investment partner for India which is seeking to establish a larger commercial presence in the African continent. For Kenya, India is now its biggest source for imports with local markets responding well to Indian products which are seen as affordable and of better quality. In fact, for the year ended March 2014, bilateral trade between the two countries was pegged at $4.019 billion with Indian exports accounting for $3.77 billion. The latter includes a wide range of items from pharmaceuticals and steel products to machinery, yarn, vehicles and power transmission equipment.

From the political point of view, relations between the two countries have been strong and stable. While their shared history of British colonialism meant they were supportive of the others' nationalistic  aspirations, today both countries acknowledge the other's position as major regional power houses.

This article was published in the oped section of The Pioneer on August 6, 2015

THE IRAN DEAL ISN’T ABOUT A BOMB

Iran can still get the bomb if it wants to, but the deal incentivises Tehran to restrain itself from doing so, by giving the West Asian power a stake in the global economy. However, it doesn’t tackle the issue of Iran’s subversive terror activities across the world

Last week, world powers signed a landmark deal with Iran that aims to rein in the controversial Iranian nuclear programme in return for relief from debilitating economic sanctions.  Much of the commentary about the deal has focused on the technical aspects: How many centrifuges are being removed? How much of the uranium stockpile is being destroyed? To what percentage can Iran enrich the remaining uranium? What kind of verification processes have been built into the deal? Are these good enough to ensure that Iran won’t cheat on the deal?

While this focus on the technical minutiae is understandable, and one can expect continued hairsplitting on the issue, it must not take away from the larger picture of what the deal means for Iran as a regional power and how it will affect the chronically unstable geo-politics of West Asia. In this context, let’s get one thing straight:  The Iran deal is not really about the bomb.

The Obama Administration wants us to believe that the deal closes all of Iran’s pathways to the bomb but in reality, it only contains the Iranian nuclear programme for a period of 15 years. For these years, Iran’s breakout period — the time needed to produce a bomb — has been increased from three months to a year. Some of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure will still be in place, and 15 years later, if Iran chooses to produce a nuclear bomb, it will be able to do so. Ultimately, Iran is an intellectually sophisticated and scientifically advanced country, and its ability to produce a bomb has rarely been under any serious doubt — deal or no deal.

So, if the bomb is not the issue, then what is the deal about all about? The deal is about two issues. On one hand, the sanctions were hurting the Iranians and the regime in Tehran understood that its interests were better served if it put aside its bomb-making ambitions and negotiated for sanctions relief. On the other hand, world powers, having acknowledged that Iran could get a bomb either way, realised that their best chance of preventing such a development was to incentivise Tehran to restrain itself — by lifting the sanctions and gradually giving it a stake in the global economy, in the hope that once within the international system, Iran will behave in a more responsible manner.

Now, this doesn’t seem like a fool-proof mechanism. What if Iran cheats? In all probability, Iran will try to push the boundaries of the deal and test the limits of the verification process. It isn’t clear at this point how world powers will react to this. Yes, they say that the sanctions will snap back at the slightest hint of bad behaviour but that’s far easier said than done. There will be punitive action, of course, for large-scale violation but there is lot of gray area in the case of low-level mischief. Expect Iran to play around here a bit but it is unlikely that it will go completely overboard because that makes no sense at all.

To better predict if Iran will be faithful to the deal, it may help to compare, as another columnist Abhijit Iyer-Mitra suggested in his column in The Pioneer earlier this week, the Iran deal with the Indian nuclear deal. Signed exactly a decade ago in July 2005, the Indian nuclear deal brought India, a non-signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that had tested nuclear weapons, under the global nuclear tent. This cleared the pathway for not just better relations with the US but also India’s deeper integration into the global system. The Iran deal works on a similar idea: Resolve one nuclear issue to better engage on all other issues.

However, the Iranian case and the Indian case differ in two key aspects: First, unlike India, Iran was a signatory to the NPT and broke the rules of the nuclear club when it announced its nuclear weapons programme. Second, India’s entry into the nuclear regime was based on its spotless non-proliferation record and the acknowledgment that it is a responsible and rational power. Iran, however, has a long record of using regional proxies to secure its interests in an already unstable neighbourhood. Also, its repeated calls for the annihilation of Israel make it extremely difficult to accept Tehran as a responsible power.

Indeed, it is this kind of bad behaviour that actually makes the rest of the world jittery about Iran. Except for perhaps a handful of nuclear non-proliferation purists who are automatically opposed to any new power acquiring nuclear weapons, the thought of Iran getting the bomb would possible not have got the rest of the world so riled up had only ayatollahs in Tehran come across as more trustworthy folks.

Instead, the world sees the kind of de-stabilising influence that the Iran-supported Hezbollah has had in Lebanon; it sees the cravenness of Hamas, also supported by Iran, which uses Gazans as cannon fodder against Israel; it sees how the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are propping up the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria while supporting the Houthis in Yemen, not to mention stoking some ‘revolutionary fire’ in Bahrain. 

Over the years, Iran and Iranian proxies have been implicated in a series of terror attacks across the world. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Hezbollah, for example, was involved in a series of bombings and assassination of American and Israeli targets; it also had an understanding with Al Qaeda and the Taliban for training jihadis; the elite Quds force was involved in the war in Iraq. The hey-days of Iran-sponsored Shia terror (as opposed to Saudi-sponsored Sunni terror) may be behind us but it will be foolish to assume that hey won’t make a comeback.

Since the late 2000s, Iranian proxy groups have become more active with terror attacks planned across the world, from Azerbaijan and Cyprus to Jordan and Turkey to Thailand and even India. Most, including the 2011 bungled assassination attempt on the Saudi Ambassador to the US in Washington, DC, were foiled. But the extent of the criminal conspiracy was underlined with the serial attacks of February 2012 — a foiled attack on the American Ambassador to Baku; followed by the bombing of an Israeli diplomat’s car in New Delhi; followed by another bombing in Tbilisi in Georgia; followed by an explosion in Bangkok in a home rented by Iranians. The attacks were part of one big conspiracy and even though they were all operational failures, they did not dissuade the terrorists who tasted success with the July 18 bombing of Burgas airport in Bulgaria in 2012.

With the lifting of all (not just nuclear) sanctions, it is expected that about $100 billion will pour into Iran, at least some of which will most definitely be used to support these proxy groups, UN resolutions notwithstanding. Iran’s rival powers in the region know this, and they have already been the turning up the heat in response (think of the utterly pointless Saudi operation in Yemen). At least in the short term then, one can expect more instability in West Asia — as an ascendant Iran consolidates its position in the region.

Does this mean that the Iran deal was a bad idea? Not necessarily. The deal doesn’t guarantee peace but its still the best chance that the world has, to forge a change for the better. The alternative would have been maintaining the status quo which would have only alienated Iran further. This would have strengthened the hardliners in Tehran and made the bomb even more easily accessible to the ayatollahs. The deal is an opportunity to bring Iran into the global mainstream and give it one less reason to go rogue.

Also, in the immediate future, a rapprochement with Iran opens the door for more seamless Western cooperation with Tehran is some key strategic areas like the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and in efforts to improve Afghanistan’s economic prospects. In fact, it will be interesting to see if Iran can eventually emerge as a counter-balance to Saudi Arabia, the fountainhead of Sunni terrorism wreaks havoc across the world today.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on July 23, 2015)

THE POWER OF YOGA AND GOOD PR

The Modi Government deserves full credit for launching the International Yoga Day and celebrating India’s soft power. But the related talk about India redefining its global role and position will be just that, if not buttressed by at least a decade of double digit economic growth 

Now that the International Day Yoga is well behind us and our newsfeeds are slightly less crowded by photos of people doing yoga in the far corners of the world, it is time to take a holistic, larger-picture view of the event and see what it really means for India in terms of securing national interests abroad and promoting public priorities at home. First, the fact that the Government has been able to successfully deliver this project in a relatively short time is important in its own right. The Government gains more confidence from the domestic public, which has suffered under a near paralysed regime in recent years. At the international level, such an initiative helps announce India’s reinvigorated presence under a new regime. 

In recent years, India has been reluctant to take on a global leadership role, even though after independence it had sought to position itself as the voice of the newly-decolonised developing world. IYD marks a change in that approach. It is a good start towards becoming a more visible power although it is still too early to say if this will result in India pursuing a more determined and purposeful foreign policy on hard issues such as humanitarian interventions and multi-lateral trade pacts. The second major takeaway from IYD is the cultural narrative that it has generated. IYD helps India take effective ownership of one of its most important civilisational contributions to mankind. It is also the distinctive trademark of a Government that is unabashed about its indigenous identity. Put together, these factors have led to IYD being hailed as a potent symbol of Indian soft power. This is fine but it’s important to issue a cautionary note: Soft power means little, if it is not backed by hard power in terms of economic growth and military might.

This is where the Modi Government still needs to fill in the blanks. While it deserves full credit for the diplomatic success that was the IYD, let there be no illusions that all the talk about India reclaiming its position and redefining its global role will be just that, if not buttressed by at least a decade of accelerated economic growth in the double digits. Yes, the Modi Government has kickstarted the reforms process necessary for development and progress, but there is still a long way to go and many already feel that it is not doing enough. This raises the question: Should the Government be spending its precious resources on promoting soft power when its hard priorities are still to be addressed? There is no one correct answer here, especially since this is not a zero sum equation. But it’s important to ensure that the Government does not conflate putting up a good show with good governance.

The people see through that. Also, it is important to understand the limits of soft power in achieving hard goals. For example, China was one of the first co-sponsors for the IYD resolution at the UN but that did not stop Beijing from also blocking India’s efforts at the UN to censure Pakistan for releasing 26/11 mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. In this, China was guided by its own hard-nosed geo-political imperatives, primarily propping up Pakistan as a foil to India in South Asia. Similarly, there is nothing to suggest that America will give any concessions to India, in say, defence negotiations or US visas for Indian workers, even though the US is the second home of yoga. 

Let us also keep in mind that Indian soft power is not a new phenomenon. Long before the Modi Government launched the International Yoga Day, Swami Vivekananda had taken yoga, along with Eastern spirituality, to the West. Today, yoga is practiced all over the world. It is a multi-billion dollar industry and universally acknowledged as an Indian export. Almost all of this has happened organically at the people-to-people level. Bollywood has also been an important source for Indian soft power. The Indian diaspora has played a crucial role in giving Hindi films a large overseas market. Indian films in general are quite popular in the sub-continent. Similarly, Indian fashion, cuisine, the arts and literature all have a global footprint. India’s vibrant pluralistic democracy offers yet another source of soft power. But while each of these may have won the Indian people much goodwill and admiration around the world, they haven’t really helped further Indian interests per se.

In fact, studies show that despite the country’s increasing soft power around world, global opinion about India hasn’t really changed as much as it could have. A 2006 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed that American attitudes towards India, for example, were in fact slightly negative. On major foreign policy concerns for India — such as a permanent position at the UN Security Council, the involvement of foreign troops in India-Pakistan conflicts and global trade practices — there was little support from the American public. A 2012 Pew Global Attitudes survey that looked at how India’s neighbours viewed the country produced a mixed record. Analysts from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka observed a “trust deficit”; those from Pakistan and Nepal criticised India for having a big brother attitude. Only Bhutan and Afghanistan had strongly positive views of India. 

Princeton scholar Rohan Mukherjee adds more depth to this study. He argues that “the impact of a country’s culture and domestic institutions” can be measured in the number of individuals visiting the country for education, immigration and tourism. In each of these cases, he finds that “although the influx of international students, migrants, and tourists has been growing over time, it is still far short of the pull that other major powers exert on these international flows.” He also notes that, “A similar picture emerges when one looks at India’s relative attractiveness as a destination for investors, a metric that speaks to the quality of India’s domestic institutions, political culture, and business climate”.

One important reason for this poor show is that post Nehru, the Indian Government did not much of make an effort to incorporate soft power as a foreign policy tool. It is only in the past two decades or so, since liberalisation in the 1990s, that the state has again taken an interest in promoting India’s soft power. In 2004, the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs was set up to manage relations with the Indian diaspora and in 2006, the public diplomacy division under the Ministry of External Affairs was established. The Indian Council for Cultural Relations has been around since the 1950s but its centres around the world are not a patch, on say, China’s Confucius Institutes that came up much later but already have a much bigger global footprint. And there’s nothing in India to even begin the comparison with America’s Peace Corps, the UK’s British Council, France’s Alliance Francaise and Germany’s Goethe Institut. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi is serious about Indian soft power, this is a good place to start. 

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on June 25, 2015)

Gateway to a Bright Future

Building Tripura’s trade ties with Bangladesh is part of India’s efforts at boosting friendly neighbourly relations. This will help integrate the rest of North East into Indian economy and open way for trade with South East Asia

Generally, political freedom betters economic opportunities. However, there are cases when newly independent regions find themselves worse off. This is what happened to India’s North East in 1947. The country gained Independence from British rule and awoke to “life and freedom” as India’s first Prime Minister put it, but Partition and the consequent establishment of East Pakistan (liberated in 1971 to become modern-day Bangladesh) meant a large part of the new nation found itself cut-off from the ‘mainland’, almost overnight. 

The erstwhile kingdom of Tripuri received a raw deal. Part of the ancient kingdom directly under the British crown became present-day Bangladesh in 1947 while the rest of it joined the Union of India in 1949. So Tripura, as we know it today, is landlocked on three sides by Bangladesh while other North Eastern states are left with a tenuous geographical connect to the rest of the country through the ‘chicken’s neck’. 

The economical implications of these changes have been devastating. The new lines disrupted the old business patterns and nearly destroyed the region’s commercial eco systems. Road links from North East, which passed through East Pakistan, were severed; the Assam Railway segment was cut off from Indian Railways; Bengal’s jute industry was decapitated and the loss of Chittagong Port meant that Indian tea and timber industries had to take a circuitous route to Calcutta (now Kolkata) Port. 

It is only when one understands the scale of disruption during Partition can one appreciate the importance of the first India-Bangladesh border haat set up in Tripura. The marketplace has the potential to revolutionise bilateral trade and dramatically improve living standards of border populations in both countries. 

Inaugurated on January 13 by Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Commerce & Industry, Ms Nirmala Sitharaman and Bangladesh’s Commerce Minister Mr Tofail Ahmed, this market is located in the southern Tripura district on Indian side and Feni district on Bangladeshi side. It opens once a week and nationals from both countries living within a 5 km radius can trade locally produced goods and crops. 

The specialty – currencies of both countries are accepted and no local taxes are imposed on the sale of 16 designated items which includes crops, spices, minor forest products (excluding timber), fish, dairy and poultry products and cottage industry items. Four other border haats have been planned in Tripura – one in Sipahijala district, two in Dhalai and a fourth in north Tripura. 

It is no coincidence then that Tripura is being prepared as a nodal point. The region has historically been one integrated economic unit and it is in the fitness of things that pre-Partition trade and communication links be restored to leverage the full potential of the region. Political stability (in India and Bangladesh) and infrastructure development (such as AkhaurahAgartala rail link) will be other key factors. If these factors can be aligned and Tripura-Bangladesh ties strengthened, the whole project that can be quickly scaled up to bring the rest of the North East under its ambit. This, in turn, can serve as India’s gateway to South Asia as envisioned in the North East Vision Plan 2020. 

This article was published in the May-June edition of India Perspectives, the flagship magazine of the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India

CRUCIAL INDIA-VIETNAM BILATERAL

Defence cooperation between the two nations has not received the public attention it deserves. The previous regime had taken important steps to strengthen ties, and the present Government has continued with the thrust. It’s part of India’s growing global maritime footprint

Amidst all the hullabaloo over the Modi Government’s first anniversary, the three-day visit of Vietnamese Defence Minister Phung Quang Thanh received little attention. But that should not take away from the growing importance of the India-Vietnam bilateral, for both countries, particularly in the security sector. Vietnam is engaged in a bitter territorial dispute with China, which is looking to turn reefs in the South China Sea into islands that can host airstrips and other military facilities, according to aReuters news report. Vietnam would like India, the other big regional power, to stand up to Chinese belligerence in the South China Sea.

India, on the other hand, is trying to restrain China from taking full control of some of the world’s busiest sea-lanes as well keep the dragon out of its own immediate neighbourhood, the Indian Ocean Region. China had made the stunning revelation last year that it had sent submarines into the Indian Ocean. And more recently, the Pentagon in its report on the South China Sea also noted that Beijing is looking to increase its presence in the Indian Ocean region.

It is plausible that China is seeking to do so through ‘logistics’ overtures, rather than obvious military means (though that must not been ruled out either; only last year, China moved an oil rig, flanked by its naval and coast guard ships, into Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone, sparking a major diplomatic crisis) but the end result that it has in mind is the same.

Hence, with China’s assertive strategies in mind, India and Vietnam have now agreed to strengthen their defence and military cooperation. On Monday, at the end of delegation-level talks, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and his Vietnamese counterpart General Phung Quang Thanh signed a five-year-long vision statement as well oversaw the signing of a memorandum of understanding for cooperation between the Coast Guards of the two countries.

Notably, while Gen Thanh was meeting with Indian officials on Monday, four Indian warships set off for the South China Sea. The Eastern Fleet deployed stealth frigate INS Satpura, anti-submarine warfare corvette INS Kamorta, the destroyer INS Ranvir and the INS Shakti fleet tanker to the region, to participate in a four-day maritime exercise with Singapore’s Navy. The four Indian warships will also be making port-calls in Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia.

But that’s not all. On Tuesday, China released a White Paper on its military strategy which emphasises increasing the country’s naval reach to “open seas protection”. This is the first time that China has officially taken on the role of regional security provider so far from its shores and called for “active defence”. Clearly, this is a thinly-veiled threat to its smaller neighbours such as Vietnam but also the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei, all of whom have maritime disputes with China. It is equally a challenge to India’s dominance in the Indian Ocean region. 

Notably, the Chinese White Paper also outlines plans to build lighthouses in disputed islands in South China Sea — and just in case anyone thought that Beijing wasn’t serious about implementing these measures, the Chinese transport Ministry conducted a groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of two multi-functional lighthouses in the Spratly Islands (which Vietnam claims as its own) on the same day that the Defence Ministry launched the White Paper.

That China released its White Paper less than 24 hours after Vietnam signed a defence pact with India was, of course, coincidental, but it does underline the immediate import of the situation. The Vietnamese are reportedly keen that India train their submarine personnel and there is already some joint military exercises that are ongoing. India is also looking at selling the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile to Vietnam. But the deal is yet to be finalised. Meanwhile, India is continuing with its oil and gas explorations in Vietnamese blocks in the South China Sea, despite recent Chinese objections.

Last year, there were at least three high-level interactions between India and Vietnam in as many months. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj visited Hanoi in August 2014, and President Pranab Mukherjee made a high-profile state visit in September. During Mr Mukherjee’s visit, India extended Vietnam a $100 million line of credit specifically for defence procurement. In October 2014, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung came to India and it was during this trip that New Delhi agreed to supply four patrol vessels to Vietnam to improve the latter’s maritime security capabilities.  Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also been invited for a visit later this year.

The deepening of ties with Vietnam started with the Manmohan Singh Government. There were several high-level visits during the UPA Government’s second term and there was a strong political push to deepen military ties, despite the Government’s general penchant for playing safe and not doing anything that might upset China. The incumbent NDA regime has thankfully continued with the UPA’s efforts to improve ties with Vietnam and will hopefully do so with more vigour and decisiveness, of the sort that has become the hallmark of Mr Modi’s diplomacy.

As such, India and Vietnam have   traditionally had strong bilateral ties,  even if the people-to-people connect has somewhat waned in recent years. Indians today may no longer chant slogans such as ‘Amaar naam, tomaar naam, Vietnam Vietnam’ which was popular in the 1970s Bengal, but political support has remained steadfast. Vietnam has emerged as an important regional partner for India in South East Asia and can be expected play a prominent role in the Modi Government’s Act East policy. India and Vietnam already cooperate in various regional forums such as the Association for South-East Asian Nations, the East Asia Summit, the Mekong Ganga Cooperation and the Asia Europe Meeting

Apart from India, Vietnam has also been looking to firm up its defence ties with other powers including the US. In fact, the US has agreed to partially lift its arms embargo against Vietnam, specifically permitting the sale of American defence equipment.

This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on May 28, 2015