India's South Asia challenge

Politics and Geopolitics: Decoding India’s Neighbourhood Challenge

Author: Harsh Pant

Publisher:   Rupa

Pages: 224

Price: Rs 423

The political, economic and strategic landscape in South Asia has changed dramatically in the last two decades, due to the phenomenal rise of the People’s Republic of China and the rise of the Republic of India. The two neighbours have often jostled for influence in the region. India considers South Asia its strategic sphere of influence. It shares a border (land or maritime) with every South Asian country. In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Neighbourhood First” initiative aimed to boost regional integration, trade, investment and reduce geopolitical tensions in the subcontinent. As in the past, however, India’s efforts were undercut by the presence of extra-regional power, China this time, which has come to aid India’s neighbours. As Harsh Pant argues, “India’s China challenge in South Asia is beyond anything that it has encountered since independence.” This edited anthology details India’s approach to its neighbourhood since 2014 and the challenges it faces while manoeuvring its interests within the region.

The book is a descriptive analysis of India’s foreign policy vis-a-vis nine neighbouring countries. But the book could also be understood in one major and two minor themes: India’s China challenge in South Asia and the combination of limitations to India’s interests in the region due to South Asian countries’ domestic politics and India’s over-promises and under-deliveries to its neighbours.

Although South Asia is not China’s traditional or primary sphere of influence, under President Xi Jinping, its neighbourhood policy has changed from engagement to proactive efforts to shape the regional order. Under the flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Beijing has massively invested in infrastructure and development programmes in the subcontinent. Every South Asian country except India and Bhutan have confirmed its interest and participation in the BRI. Thus, as multiple authors have highlighted in the anthology, India’s neighbours have steadily reaped the benefits of China’s expanding and deepening economic and military clout. To a varying degree, these smaller countries view their engagement with China as a hedge against India’s dominance. For instance, Manjeev Singh Puri argues that “the China card” has always been important for Nepalese politicians to deal with India. The relationship has materialised in Mr Xi’s second term in office as China and Nepal signed a memorandum of understanding on co-operation in the building of the BRI in 2017, and Mr Xi visited the country — the first by the highest Chinese leader in more than two decades — in October 2019.  

Similarly, China’s increasing security and economic footprints in Bangladesh have become a concern for India, though India-Bangladesh relations have been a success story in India’s neighbourhood policy in the past one and half decades. However, Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty highlights that Bangladesh’s overwhelming dependence on China for military hardware, China-Bangladesh cooperation in maritime sectors and Chinese proposal to fund, build and manage the Teesta basin project — which would allow Chinese presence on the south of the narrow Siliguri corridor — worries India. Such behaviour by smaller countries could be summed up as “an omnidirectional foreign policy, trying to be friends with everyone and alienating no one,” claimed a former Sri Lankan foreign minister Mangala Samaraweera. In other words, the smaller countries will try to balance India with China’s rising footprints to make the best of their regional environment.

In recent years, China has also influenced the domestic politics of South Asian countries. Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives are three recent examples. This is besides Pakistan, which describes its relation with China as “higher than the mountains, deeper than the oceans, stronger than steel, dearer than eyesight, sweeter than honey,” and so on. In Nepal, China cashed on the delay in the supply of goods, including petroleum products, through key transit routes from India during the 2015 Madhesi protests. The 2017 Nepal elections resulted in the first-ever communist (not socialist) party’s victory in a multi-party democratic set up in the world. India’s patience was tested recently when Nepal, possibly under Chinese influence, issued a new map and laid claim to around 350 sq. km of Indian territory in areas traditionally used by Indians for the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage.

Similarly, as Indrani Bagchi highlights, India’s relatively limited delivery capabilities, its confused policy of voting with the western bloc over the LTTE human right violations in 2012 and 2013 and China’s massive infrastructure investments have stressed the India-Sri Lanka relations. The western popular discourse highlights China’s “debt trap” diplomacy with Sri Lanka as an argument to caution other smaller countries against Chinese loans and investments, especially under the BRI. Notably, China is addressing this by moving towards syndicated loans from 2020, meaning the recipient government would have the freedom to use the money to carry out any project it wants. Likewise, in the Maldives during President Abdulla Yameen years, the new policy underscored the need for the nation to grow economically strong and self-reliant, to be able to have a “foreign policy that is independent (of India)”.  However, since the turn of the regime, Maldives has been a success story in India’s neighbourhood policy under the Modi regime.

Thus broadly, the anthology highlights that despite China’s increasing footprints, India has strengthened its relations with the select South Asian countries, namely Bhutan, Maldives and Bangladesh. But it is also coming to the reality that the China challenge in India’s backyard is changing the nature of engagement in the region. As Mr Pant concludes, India needs to creatively re-imagine its strategic geography and evolve the terms of engagement with its neighbours to survive and thrive in the changing geopolitics of the South Asian region.