By Sanchet Barua
The Northeastern region is India’s gateway to East Asia said Dr. Prabir De, a Fellow of the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS) and one of the organizers of a recent conference in Kolkata on economic ties with the Mekong riparian nations, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. But the region plays little part in India’s Look East policy. The most effective means of changing that and fleshing out Dr. De’s statement would be to give regional state governments an active role in establishing commercial links with foreign countries.
Revolutionary though it may sound where foreign affairs are a jealously guarded central preserve, sub-national relationships are not unknown abroad. An Assamese trade office in Thailand, perhaps, or a Sikkimese representative in Tibet could do wonders for the region if New Delhi had the confidence to trust them to pursue economics and not politics.
But little in the wealth of statistics and information Dr. De and other scholarly speakers presented at the two- day event in Kolkata titled Mekong- India Cooperation: Linking Markets, Fostering Trade indicated much desire to exploit the Northeast’s strategic advantages. The area comprises 9 per cent of India’s total, accounts for 4 per cent of the population and 3 per cent of GDP. It borders Bangladesh, China, and Myanmar.
But in some senses it is frozen in time. Economists and academicians can’t be blamed for the gulf between vision and reality. As Dr. Biswajit Dhar, RISs Director- General, candidly acknowledged, economic paradigms follow a trajectory of their own independent official policy.
Presumably, governments listen to what is said at these events and remember them when shaping policy. The Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian and Thai ampmdash; why no one from Myanmar? Presumably, they would report back on the proceedings to their respective governments. That is what Track Two diplomacy is all about. But I wish the conference had also heard something from a small bunch of students of Calcutta University’s Institute of Foreign Policy Studies sitting inconspicuously at the back.
The RIS organized the conference in collaboration with the Institute and chatting with them informally during the coffee break, I felt many of those young men and women had more positive ideas and relevant responses than some stellar speakers. They were certainly better informed on the flourishing contraband trade between the Northeastern states and Thailand and China via Myanmar that should have been brought within the conferences purview.
This commerce is not included in the $ 2.79 billion India- Bangladesh trade that Dr. De mentioned, and certainly not in the official figure of a mere $ 0.97 billion for trade with Myanmar. The regions international borders ampmdash; 4,097 km between India and Bangladesh and 1,643 km between India and Myanmar ampmdash; are among the worlds most porous, with material slipping through as easily as men. I was told of Indian medicinal tablets that are in great demand in China not for their advertised virtues but for extracts that are used for other purposes.
One of Dr. De’s charts showed raw materials leaving India via Bangladesh and Myanmar for South- East Asia and China, and finished products being sent back in return.
Impressive plans have been drawn up for economic corridors and trilateral highways. ESCAP, which sent two delegates to the conference, is involved in studies, construction and repairs. But, generally speaking, connectivity plans seem to bypass the Seven Sisters ampmdash; Assam, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Manipur and Tripura.
A road is planned from Kaletwa in Myanmar to somewhere on the Mizoram border, and the Mekong- India Economic Corridor (MIEC) is expected to link Kohima in Nagaland with Bangkok. But many more routes are either through Bangladesh or by sea from Kolkata and Chennai to South- East Asian destinations. Sittwe, the old Akyab, 539 km across the Bay of Bengal from Kolkata, is a favourite destination.
There is little in all this to bear out the optimism that flared up in November 2000 when Jaswant Singh as external affairs minister flew in a special Gulfstream jet from Delhi to Hanoi and thence the short hop to Vientiane in Laos to inaugurate the Mekong Ganga Cooperation project. When Jaswant Singh first proposed this imaginative and pioneering scheme on the sidelines of the ASEAN Dialogue Partnership in Bangkok in July 2000, he was inspired by the romantic notion of linking two of Asia’s great rivers. Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were to be India’s partners.
I was living in South- East Asia at the time and recall the excitement and high expectations set off by his unorthodox journey to the inaugural. It encouraged hopes of regular air services from Imphal or Guwahati to various South- East Asian capitals. That would have opened up the Northeast as well as established new connections with South- East Asian cities other than Singapore and Bangkok. But it was not to be. The MGC, launched with high hopes of promoting new linkages in knowledge- based sectors as well as in old economy areas like transport corridors, infrastructure development, culture and tourism, without a time frame but with the aim of restoring India’s ancient footprint in a region that had acquired modern geopolitical importance, seems to have sunk into a political coma.
Despite the change in government since the MGC was launched, that might not have happened if state governments had a direct stake in its welfare. The idea has been mooted before. Kerala promised in November 1993 to be the first Indian state to station an official in Singapore to woo investors throughout the ASEAN region. Nothing came of it, possibly because New Delhi thought Trivandrum was getting above itself.
But 11 -years later, Dr. Manmohan Singh told the third India- ASEAN business summit that India profited from the autonomy enjoyed by littoral states with little interference from groups that would not have understood the needs and demands of the predominant activity of commerce. He quoted Sinnappa Arasaratnam, author of Maritime India in the Seventeenth Century. Dr. Singh added that mutually beneficial business links between India’s coastal states and South-East Asia would lend meaning to the Look East policy and eventually give shape to the idea of an Asian Century. The principle applies just as much – if not more ampmdash; to landlocked states and regions.
No global player can base policies on suspicion. A more relaxed approach in encouraging initiative, promoting exchanges, inviting investors and entrepreneurs, permitting the sale of goods and services, and facilitating human movement might bring unexpected rewards.
Despite its stated interest in the east, India is still reluctant to accept two things. First, that economics and not rhetoric is the lifeblood of diplomacy.
And second, those who would benefit most from closer ties have the strongest motive for pursuing them. Not a Centre that is more concerned with Mumbai than with Itanagar and whose diplomats would much rather go to Paris than Phnom Penh. INAV