It is a pity, though, that neither New Delhi nor Washington has seen fit to use India’s continuing Iranian connections diplomatically. A still-engaged India might have proved a more useful mediator in Iran’s row with the West than the European Union (EU) countries currently engaged in the task, but no such initiative has been pursued.
A different set of conditions explains India’s policy on Syria, which has seen New Delhi simultaneously affirm its friendship and regard for the secular regime in Damascus, with which it has long enjoyed good relations, in preference to any likely Islamist alternative. But without comparable economic incentives at stake, India, while opposing any military intervention against the regime, has voted with the West in the UN Security Council to call for the Assad government to negotiate a peaceful transition. In this it differs from Syria’s neighbour Turkey, another secular regime in the region, which openly condemned Assad’s repression of dissent, the sort of position India has been chronically reluctant to take (both because of its respect for Syrian sovereignty and for fear that such condemnation could be used to justify foreign military intervention, as happened in Libya).
Turkey itself represents an underexploited opportunity for India: a secular democracy with a fast-growing economy, it ought to be a close ally, but has been locked for decades in a pro-Pakistan policy crafted under successive military regimes in both those countries. This is gradually changing, and with burgeoning trade (currently over $7.6 billion and growing), a distinct note of warmth has been creeping into the relationship. This is a story only beginning to unfold, but I see New Delhi’s relations with Ankara as having immense potential in the immediate future. The question that comes to mind, as BRICS emerges as a body with an alternative view of the world, is: could Turkey, a NATO member with a mind of its own, join them? There are no signs yet, but no country offers a more natural fit with the incipient new grouping than Turkey. BRICST won’t be easy to pronounce, but the entry of Turkey would fill a hole in the geographical centre and enhance the group’s geopolitical centre and enhance its potential. It’s well worth thinking about.
India’s closer ties with the countries of Southeast and East Asia are the result of our ‘Look East’ policy, first enunciated by the government of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao at the end of the Cold War in 1991 and pursued faithfully by all his successors. Jawaharlal Nehru had referred, in his classic The Discovery of India, to Southeast Asia as ‘Greater India’, but that heady romanticism foundered amid mutual suspicions during the Cold War, and relations remained sparse. The end of the superpower standoff — and thus of the obligation of states to determine their international allegiances in relation to Cold War loyalties and commitments — widened India’s foreign policy options, permitting New Delhi to look beyond the conventional wisdom of its non-aligned years. ‘Look East’ followed.
Initially aimed at improving relations with the member states of the ASEAN at a time when India had embarked upon economic liberalization, and indirectly at enhancing strategic cooperation with the United States (‘looking East to look West’, as the author Sunanda Datta-Ray termed it), the policy has succeeded beyond the vision of its initiator. ‘Look East’ has not just become an end in itself, cementing enhanced economic cooperation with a long-neglected region, but it has signalled India’s return — some might say arrival — in a part of the world increasingly anxious about China’s overweening influence. That the policy continues to bear fruit two decades after it was launched is reflected in such recent developments as India’s admission as a full dialogue partner of ASEAN, its acceptance as a member of the ASEAN Regional Forum and as a full participant in the East Asia Summit (even though by no stretch of the geographical imagination can India be said to be an East Asian power). In 2003 Yashwant Sinha, then India’s minister of external affairs, described the ‘Look East’ policy as having evolved through two phases, the first ‘ASEAN-centred and focused primarily on trade and investment linkages’ and the second ‘characterized by an expanded definition of “East”, extending from Australia to East Asia, with ASEAN at its core’. The latter phase, Sinha explained, ‘also marks a shift from trade to wider economic and security issues, including joint efforts to protect the sea-lanes and coordinate counter-terrorism activities’.
In the first few decades after 1947, India’s establishment, shaped by the long colonial era, was inevitably Western in its orientation (if ‘orient’ation is not too paradoxical a term). This was ironic, since India had long had a major impact on Southeast and East Asia. Hinduism and Buddhism spread throughout the Asian continent from India, the former being carried by traders and missionaries across much of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, while Buddhism was taken to and through Tibet to China and Korea, whence it reached Japan and Vietnam (it also flourished, of course, in countries closer to India, such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Thailand). As Indian trade (and very limited military conquest) expanded the culture’s horizons, the religious message and Indian spiritual practices were not the only export: language (particularly Sanskrit), social customs (including reverence for Brahmins), styles of art and architecture, and dance, music and epic narrative, all travelled from India as well. The Ramayana became an Asian, not just Indian, epic, with versions being told and performed from Indonesia to the Philippines. This was a remarkably peaceful process: aside from the invasion of the Srivijaya kingdom in Sumatra by the South Indian raja Rajendra Chola in the eleventh century CE, India did not evince any imperialist ambitions in Southeast Asia. Instead, as David Malone describes it, ‘great Indianized kingdoms arose over the centuries throughout Asia and particularly Southeast Asia … [following] Indian court customs, administrative organization on the Indian pattern, and laws based on the Code of Manu, the Indian lawgiver. Indianization also included the alphabetical basis of Southeast Asian scripts, the incorporation of Sanskrit in vocabularies along with the adoption of the Hindu-Buddhist religious beliefs, and an Indian concept of royalty.’ The spread of Islam to the region was in its turn facilitated by Indian sources, including Indian Muslim traders and missionaries. Thus Indonesia underwent successive layers of Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim conversion, all intermediated by Indian influences. Even Japan was not immune to Indian cultural influence, having been taken over by the spread of Buddhism that had come from India, as evident in the absorption of the Hindu goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati into Japanese Buddhism as guardian-deities.
Given this history, it was not surprising that, even prior to independence, the interim government led by Nehru organized in March 1947 a ‘Conference on Asian Relations’, bringing to Delhi delegates from twenty-nine countries, some still under colonial rule, to promote cooperation among Asian countries and express solidarity with the freedom struggles in other parts of Asia. Nehru’s India saw itself as the leader of Asia’s progress towards independence, a self-image reflected in its leading roles in both the special Delhi ‘Conference on Indonesia’ in 1949 and the Bandung ‘Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference’ of 1955. But this emphasis was lost in Cold War politics. Nor did the Southeast Asia of the early post-independence years encourage much interest; for the most part, it was just as backward, diseased and conflict-ridden as the subcontinent itself, and slow to unveil its potential. India’s own economic policies, shaped in reaction to the fact that the British East India Company had come to trade and stayed on to rule, were protectionist; looking for trade opportunities did not feature high on New Delhi’s list of priorities. It did not help either that India’s natural overland linkages to Southeast Asia were blocked by post-colonial politics: Myanmar shut itself off from the rest of the world in the early 1960s, while India’s natural land routes eastwards ran through the suddenly foreign — and hostile — territories of East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). Neither was particularly inclined to provide transit facilities to Indian goods. Global geopolitics also intervened, with the countries of Southeast Asia clearly choosing a side during the Cold War, while India remained non-aligned, with a pronounced tilt towards the Soviet Union that was looked at askance by much of the region. India’s closest Asian political relationship in the 1980s was with communist Vietnam rather than ASEAN.