THE “Live History India” website has opened the New Year, narrating how, around 1200 years ago, in 731 CE, a 12-year-old boy sailed all the way from Champa, the present day central and southern Vietnam, to Kanchipuram, the powerful Pallava capital of that time, where he was anointed king.
The new monarch, Nandivarman II was not a home-grown prince. When King Paramesvaravarman died without an heir and the kingdom was in turmoil, the nobles decided to look east and get one of his distant relations ruling in Champa. India’s close links with Vietnam and Cambodia, then called Kambuja-desa, are well-known.
Indian merchants traded regularly with Burma, Indonesia and Malaysia, and some even settled there. My own school-time vision of Southeast Asia was based on stories of trade, adventure and cultural ties with Brahmadesa (Myanmar), Java, Sumatra and other places.
Hence, it is heartening to see New Delhi being spruced up along with some other select cities. A heritage walkway in the Old City in and around the historic Chandni Chowk is being readied. Urgent measures are being undertaken to improve the environment in the smog-hit city. Air pollution level, partially “good” and better than last year, was, however, “severe” on New Year’s day.
Nonetheless, the flavour this winter is definitely Southeast Asia with all its 10 top leaders coming.
Straddling a combination of religion, trade, commerce, culture, security and tourism, and aiming to promote greater people-to-people contacts, Indian and Southeast Asian leaders will meet for a commemorative summit on Jan 25 to mark 25 years of their relationship.
To discuss the agenda, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj is currently touring Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore.
A day after the summit, all 10 Asean leaders will be chief guests at India’s 69th Republic Day. Usually, there will be one chief guest, with two guests on three occasions. But, having 10 chief guests is unique.
India will be putting up its grandest show at the Republic Day parade that combines military weapons, soldiers marching past, along with cultural tableaux representing each state and with schoolchildren, followed by a fly-past. Some 20 events are planned before the summit. Among them, an interfaith meet at Rajgir, one of the key Buddhist sites and the Asean-India Hackathon and Startup Festival in Hyderabad.
India-Asean ties go back to over two millennia. Ramayana, the epic, remains an important link, as much as for its content and message, as for the different forms and narrations that have evolved over the centuries. In a unique “homecoming”, all Asean nations have sent in their “Ramayana” troupes to perform in India.
Of the contemporary tasks, India-Asean leaders have a fairly heavy agenda on their table that can best be summed up as the 3Cs — commerce, culture and connectivity.
As part of the summit’s preparations, New Delhi hosted an Asean-India Connectivity Summit (AICS) last month, themed “Powering Digital and Physical Linkages for Asia in the 21st century”. It visualised not just maritime and road connectivity, but also the “soft” connectivity. The trilateral highway that will link India’s northeast to Thailand via Myanmar is expected to be completed next year.
At the trade level, India is looking to integrate itself into textile manufacturing, agriculture and tourism. It also wants to promote its companies held by private individuals that are investing in various infrastructure projects. Together, Asean nations form the fourth largest trading partner of India with trade at US$70 billion (RM280 billion).
In the Indian scheme of things, Asean’s importance is a given. Only two key policies have remained constant in India in the last 25 years — economic reforms and the Look East Policy. The latter, started by P.V. Narasimha Rao, and sustained by succeeding premiers, has been aggressively redesigned as Act East Policy by the Modi government.
“The election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi created a unique window of opportunity to shift the Asean-India relationship”, Kishore Mahbubani and Jeffery Sng write in the recently published book, The Asean Miracle: A Catalyst for Peace.
Things have changed radically since Lee Kwan Yew described India and China as two wings of the aircraft called Asean. India’s late-coming has seemingly tilted that aircraft.
The authors point out that even as Asean’s trading partner, India, which began to “look east” only after the end of the Cold War, stands seventh, way below China, the European Union, Japan, the United States, South Korea and Australia. They yet see a role for India.
As some of the Asean countries are locked in territorial dispute with China in the hydrocarbon rich sea, Mahbubani and Sng fear that the worst-case scenario for Asean would be a schism resulting from member countries being forced to choose between China and the US.
“As Asean comes under renewed stress from the growing geopolitical rivalry between the US and China, India could provide a strategic balance. If this rivalry intensifies, the only power that can provide Asean with a geopolitical buffer is India. No other partner, not the US, not Europe, and not even China, can match India’s long historical association with Southeast Asia,” they opined.
A lot, however, needs to be done. Stating that the India-Asean relationship rested on the three pillars of culture, economy and geopolitics, the book adds: “A tripod is stable when all its legs are equally strong, but the tripod supporting the Asean-India relationship still needs a great deal of work.”
It will be difficult, but doable.
NST's New Delhi correspondent, Mahendra Ved, is the president of the Commonwealth Journalists Association 2016-2018 and a Consultant with Power Politics monthly magazine. He can be reached via mahendraved07@gmail.com