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