ECONOMICS: India Courts Asia Tigers’ Poorer Cousins

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - by Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Nov 29 2004 (IPS) - As India embarks on its biggest eastward makeover to strengthen its kinship with Indochina, policy analysts expect New Delhi to concentrate on the poorer cousins of the ten-nation, Association of South-east Asian Countries (ASEAN) rather than the famed tiger economies.

”In ASEAN there are two levels of countries with Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Burma being far less developed when compared to countries like Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia and India’s policy is very clearly tilted towards the former group,” S. D. Muni, a Southeast Asia expert and professor at the Jawaharalal Nehru University told IPS.

ASEAN is an economic grouping that includes the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Burma.

Muni, who did a stint as India’s ambassador to Laos in the late 1990s, said India would have special focus on that country. The Laotian capital of Vientiane is currently hosting the two-day Indo-ASEAN summit that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh inaugurated on Monday.

India, Muni said, would be helping Laos, the least developed of the Indochinese states, in areas ranging from agriculture to defence and security. India has already started an information technology (IT) centre in the country.

Singh, who arrived in Vientiane on Sunday, set about meeting ASEAN leaders and renewing old alliances that go back to the cold war years. The premier is also making new friends in line with New Delhi’s policy of opening up India to the world as part of its programme of economic liberalisation.

In fact India’s current ‘Look East’ policy took off in the previous Congress party government that ruled India between 1991 and 1996, in which Singh was finance minister.

Singh promised Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai Indian help in upgrading Vietnam’s military hardware – a task easily done since both countries have for long sourced their defence equipment from the former Soviet Union and it’s post-cold war successor states.

The Indian premier also saw scope for revitalising and expanding Indo-Vietnamese ties in areas such as power, hydrocarbons, science and technology and nuclear energy, according to official reports of the tour here.

Since India first embarked on its ‘Look East’ policy almost decade ago, seeking institutional links with ASEAN and East Asia, there have been significant gains. The most recent and significant of them was the signing of the Indo-Thai Free Trade Agreement earlier this year.

India has simultaneously been extending its strategic reach beyond the Indian Ocean by signing defence agreements with countries like Singapore and taking on naval policing duties in the Straits of Malacca. The Indian navy has even had a presence in the South China Sea.

On Tuesday India will demonstrate the long forgotten fact that India and South-east Asia are linked overland when Singh will attend the flagging off of the second leg of the ‘Chalo- ASEAN’ Car rally from Vientiane which began in Guwahati, capital of the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, on Nov. 22.

Assam and India’s other north-eastern states, have borders with China, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Burma and ancient trade and pilgrim routes that had to be closed down because of cold war politics and insurgencies.

But Singh, who toured the north-eastern states, last week, was convinced that the cure for decades of insurgency in India’s north-east lay in economic development and revival of long-dormant trade and cultural links.

”The development of the north-east and its integration with the larger regional processes was one of the determining factors of India’s engagement with regional groupings like ASEAN and BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation ),” Singh, a former World Bank economist said during his tour to the north-east.

Singh also noted that India had deep cultural and historical ties with South-East Asia and the lands through which the ”Chalo-ASEAN” rally would traverse before finally ending up in Batam in Indonesia.

BIMSTEC, a new economic grouping, includes Thailand, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, India Nepal and Sri Lanka. New Delhi believes it could help leverage Indo-ASEAN trade from the present 13 billion U.S. dollars annually to 15 billion dollars in 2005 and 30 billion dollars by 2007.

The move is a departure from the days when India, strongly influenced by founding father Nehru’s Fabian socialism, refused to deal with ASEAN when it was first formed in mid-60s. The then India even disparagingly referred to the grouping as a ”Club of Coca Cola Countries.”

As strategic analyst C. Raja Mohan noted recently in a Nov. 21 article in the ‘Indian Express’ daily: ”In the name of socialism and self-reliance, India abandoned its traditional markets in South-east Asia and ignored its friends and immense good will for it in the region.”

”By the early 1990s much of East Asia had escaped from the tragic confines of the Third World and begun to deliver unprecedented prosperity to the people. When Indian went bankrupt in 1991 and initiated economic reforms, the first place it turned to was ASEAN,” Raja Mohan said in the article.

With wisdom finally dawning, India launched its ”Look East” policy that year and steadily graduated to becoming a sectoral partner to ASEAN in 1992, a full dialogue partner in 1995, a member of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in 1996 and finally a summit level partner in 2002 achieving parity with Japan, China and South Korea.

Ties between India and ASEAN are indeed moving towards new horizons. And this was reiterated by Laotian Prime Minister Bounhang Vorachit who said on Monday that ”relations (between India and ASEAN) have broadened and are headed for a brilliant and bright future.”