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India–ASEAN Relations at Seventy

Tan Tai Yong

Close Rapport through Shared Ideals

Relations between India and Southeast Asia have deep historical roots. On the day India became independent, most of Asia was still under colonial rule. Years later, when Lee Kuan Yew was delivering the Nehru Memorial Lecture in 2005, he recalled listening to Jawaharlal Nehru’s stirring ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech when he was a student at Cambridge. ‘I belong to that generation of Asian nationalists who looked up to India’s freedom struggle and its leaders, Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. [. . .] Nehru’s speeches resonated with me.’ Lee said. ‘[I] admired Nehru for his vision of a secular multiracial India, a country that does not discriminate between citizens because of their race, language, religion or culture.’¹ As the first Asian country to achieve independence from colonial rule, India was regarded by Southeast Asian nationalists, most of whom aspired to follow in India’s footsteps, as a natural leader of an impending free and resurgent Asia.

In the forties, as India headed towards political independence, Nehru had looked to Southeast Asia as a region whose history, fate and destiny were somewhat linked with India’s. For centuries, trade and human migration traversed the Bay of Bengal. Complex networks sustained by commerce, culture and community criss-crossed the Indian Ocean, connecting maritime Southeast Asia and the Indian Subcontinent. As a consequence large parts of Southeast Asia came under profound Indian influences, and great civilizations like the Srivijaya Empire and Majapahit Empire flourished in the region. All that remained in the colonial period were the networks that strengthened after the Indian subcontinent and territories to its east were brought under the British sphere of influence, underpinned largely by trade and commerce.

The end of the Second World War brought major political changes in the modern world. Nehru believed that in the twilight of European imperialism and the emergence of Asian nationalism, the peoples of India and Southeast Asia would rediscover their own identities again. While Nehru scrupulously avoided creating the perception that a greater India would replace the British Empire east of Bengal, he was keen on promoting a united Asia occupying its rightful place in the world. During a visit to Burma (now Myanmar), Malaya and Singapore in 1946, Nehru mooted the idea of India playing host to a gathering of Asian nations to signal that Asia was on the threshold of a new era. A year later, in March 1947, Nehru opened the Asian Relations Conference in Delhi with the pronouncement that ‘this conference [would] stand out as a landmark which [would] divide the past of Asia from the future’.² Nehru’s vision for India and Asia captured the imagination of young Asian nationalists captivated by his charisma and the ideals he espoused.

The Asian Relations Conference was attended by representatives from twenty-eight countries, including Burma, Malaya and Indonesia, and was seen as a form of ‘missionary outreach to the national struggles of large parts of Asia that remained colonized’. The largest individual contingents came from the still-colonized Southeast Asia.³ In these parts, especially in Burma, Malaya and Indonesia, Nehru personified the new mood of Asia; his leadership of India’s freedom movement, passionate commitment to anti-colonialism and vision of a new, free Asia inspired those agitating for independence from foreign rule. Nehru’s stock rose further when he actively roused international support for the Indonesian nationalist revolution against the Dutch. As long as large parts of Southeast Asia were still under colonial rule and regarded India’s experiences as a beacon of a future they could emulate, relations between India and Southeast Asia remained close. The Asian Relations Conference was perhaps emblematic of the special relationship India enjoyed with Southeast Asian states in the first decade following the end of the Second World War.

One could perhaps see this as an early expression of India’s ‘Look East’ policy, with Nehru laying the foundation of an Asian community in which India would exercise an important influence. A united Asia, Nehru envisioned, would eventually replace the Atlantic community as the future nerve centre of the world. Such an intent was again expressed at the Bandung Conference in 1955. Twenty-nine Asian and African states gathered in Indonesia to discuss their political agendas and to insist that the opinions of Afro-Asian states must have a role in the new international order. They rejected Cold War definitions of world affairs as representing a continuation of imperialistic control by the great powers. The Asian Relations Conference and the Bandung Conference were high points in early attempts of newly emerging Asian states to create a free and neutral pan-Asian identity and presence in the international order. In this, there was clear convergence of interests between an emerging India and the Southeast Asia nation states in waiting. Non-alignment and freedom from foreign domination were commonly held ideals and Nehru’s vision of an Asia uncommitted to either of the two power blocs appealed to like-minded Asian nationalists, most notably Aung San and Sukarno. But these ideals faded by the sixties, when Southeast Asian states, having attained independence to become nation states in their own right began articulating their own foreign policies in light of their respective national interests. With that, Indian interests and those of the new states of Southeast Asia began to diverge.

Geopolitics and the Cold War

In the sixties the international relations of Asian countries were inexorably shaped by the forces of the Cold War. Despite its avowed commitment to non-alignment in the early post-colonial years, India gradually distanced itself from the non-communist nations of Southeast Asia by shifting towards the Soviet Union. Nehru had long been an admirer of the Soviet economic system, and while not drawn to the concept of a one-party state, had an affinity with the socialist system of the Soviet Union. The once close relationship between India and Southeast Asia was further strained by the political distance that India consciously kept from the newly formed Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It saw the ASEAN grouping as a reincarnation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and was suspicious of an American conspiracy to use Southeast Asian states to serve its Cold War designs in the region.⁴ Irked by not being invited to join the regional grouping, India adopted a cool attitude towards ASEAN without openly criticizing it. Most importantly, India was not drawn to ASEAN because the latter was considered redundant to India’s immediate security interest. ASEAN was formed at a time when the war in Vietnam was spreading to Cambodia, and non- and anti-communist Southeast Asian states saw in the regional grouping a means to contain the threat of communist insurgencies (and to keep China’s influence at bay) in the region. India, for its part, saw no need to get close to ASEAN lest this be seen by Beijing as a hostile manoeuvre against China. While it was concerned with China’s influence in some parts of the region, it did not want to be seen to be doing anything that might be construed as anti-China and therefore pro-Western. That would also complicate its growing relations with the Soviet Union. While ASEAN members felt that American presence was necessary to contain China, India was suspicious that ASEAN would become a mechanism to serve American interests in Southeast Asia. ASEAN’s closeness to America and Japan—seen as a strategic economic triangle—did not make it easy for India’s entry into the region. Indeed, it began questioning the objective of ASEAN’s formation whenever security and defence issues were discussed in its forums. Gradually, the differing strategic interests between the ASEAN states and India drew them further apart.

By this time, Cold War considerations were beginning to have a major impact on India’s policy in Asia. Wary of Soviet intentions in the region, pro-Western Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore viewed India’s closeness to the Soviet Union with considerable unease. This complicated India’s relations with ASEAN members as it failed to de-link its relations with the Soviet Union on the one hand and ASEAN states on the other.⁵ Not unexpectedly, India’s proposal for a regional security convention received a lukewarm response from the ASEAN states as it was regarded as a loosely modelled Soviet proposal for collective security.⁶

The divergence of interests further aggravated in the seventies. ASEAN countries saw in India’s war with Pakistan in 1971—during which India depended on the Soviet Union to intervene in East Pakistan—a betrayal of its non-alignment policy as well as an outright violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. India–ASEAN relations were made worse with the signing of the Indo-Soviet Treaty. Member states were worried that the Moscow–New Delhi alliance would allow the Soviet Union to use its influential status in South Asia to advance its interests in Southeast Asia, despite India’s assurances that the treaty was not a defence pact, but an agreement for peace and friendship. India was seen as practising double standards when it criticized American activities in Diego Garcia while backing Soviet presence in the Indian Ocean by claiming that it was ‘reactive development’.

Throughout this period, the only Southeast Asian state to remain on good terms with India was Vietnam. By backing Vietnam, which was then locked in mortal conflict with the US, India demonstrated its obvious pro-Soviet tilt and got its own back against the Americans for supporting Pakistan in 1971. This worried ASEAN, which regarded Vietnam as the main source of the communist threat in the region. India saw no need to address ASEAN anxieties as it had, by that stage, decided its relations with the Soviet Union and Vietnam were more important than those with ASEAN. Its interaction with ASEAN during the Cold War era mostly took the form of bilateral relations with individual countries rather than with the association as a whole, and even then, bilateral trade agreements with the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand were not significant in terms of economic benefits.⁷ The incentives for India to get closer to ASEAN, and vice versa, were simply not there.

Matters reached a head in the eighties when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi chose to recognize the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin regime in Cambodia, much to the consternation of the ASEAN states. The failure of India to establish any meaningful relationships with Southeast Asia despite its cultural and geographical affinity with that region,⁸ stemmed largely from the dictates of regional geopolitics and the Cold War regime. It has been argued that India’s relationship with ASEAN was considered secondary to its more fundamental security concern involving Pakistan and China, which was in turn intensified by the circumstances of the Cold War.⁹ The situation was perhaps best summed up by an Indian analyst who commented that during the Cold War, India was regarded by the ASEAN countries as ‘politically suspect, economically unimportant and, at times, even militarily threatening’.¹⁰ However, the change in geopolitical realities following the end of the Cold War forced India to reassess relations with its neighbours in the east. A reorientation took place in India that gradually led to a ‘renaissance in relations’ with Southeast Asia.¹¹

India’s Economic Liberalization and the Look East Policy

In the early nineties, compelled by a severe economic crisis, India took decisive steps towards economic liberalization, leading to a strategic shift in its foreign policy that was subsequently articulated as the Look East policy.¹² This new eastward tilt was driven primarily by India’s trade and investment needs, of which ASEAN became a primary platform. The Look East policy led to closer diplomatic ties with ASEAN: in March 1993, India was accorded sectoral dialogue status within ASEAN, and in 1995, India–ASEAN relations took a significant step forward when it was made a full dialogue partner. Following a period of ‘benign neglect’, growing convergence of security and economic interests in the post-Cold War period brought India and ASEAN closer again.

Changing geopolitics made it easier for the forging of closer ties. By the late eighties, India was no longer regarded by ASEAN as a potentially threatening maritime power. Cuts in defence spending, leading to the gradual reduction to its fleet of principal combatants, led to a shift in the Indian naval doctrine from ‘sea control’ to a more defensive ‘sea denial’ role.¹³ This was accompanied by several confidence-building measures, which included the opening up of its facility at Port Blair to visits from regional military attachés, as well as initiating naval exercises separately with Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. When ASEAN decided to institute the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) to serve as a conclave for annual dialogues with major powers with interest in Southeast Asia, there was little question that India would need to feature prominently in it at some stage. Through its eventual involvement in the ARF, India became part of regional deliberations representing the changing and expanding regional security architecture. It had broad agreement with the ARF’s basic agenda, and, more importantly, over China and Myanmar, the two countries with which the interests and security concerns of India and the ASEAN countries overlapped.

An engaged India offered many strategic advantages to Southeast Asian countries. They were aware that unbridled rivalry between India and China would have potentially ominous consequences for the region. It was, therefore, important for ASEAN to get India to share a common approach of adopting a constructive engagement policy as the best way of dealing with China.¹⁴ Similarly, in the case of Myanmar, India supported the ASEAN approach of ‘constructive engagement’, which represented a significant change from its erstwhile policy of no dialogue with it. India’s longer-term perspective remained the restoration of democracy to Myanmar, but in the short term, it would promote economic links for countering China’s influences in Myanmar.

Shared interests in pursuing economic development for the region as a whole drew India and ASEAN closer. India primarily looked to Southeast Asia for markets and sources for investments, and ASEAN, for its part, understood that sound economic and diplomatic relations with India would form the basis of long-term, secure bilateral relations. While India’s trade with ASEAN improved significantly since 1991, the trading pattern varied, determined largely by the existing levels of economic complementarities between India and the individual ASEAN countries. Singapore and Malaysia dominated bilateral trade between India and ASEAN, accounting for over 80 per cent of India’s imports from ASEAN countries, and absorbing more than 60 per cent of India’s exports to ASEAN countries in the early nineties.¹⁵ There was, however, hardly any bilateral trade between India and Brunei, whilst trade with Indonesia and the Philippines remained unsubstantial.¹⁶

There were other forms of economic complementarity. India became an important source of trained and skilled labour for the manpower needs of the economies of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. India, for its part, saw countries like Singapore as a bridge to the economies of the broader East Asian region. As Indian skilled manpower increasingly found their way into Southeast Asia, India began opening up as an important business destination, offering market potential, communications networks and skills availability at competitive prices.

There was a clear upswing in economic cooperation between India and ASEAN from 1991. But, despite early enthusiasm and some gains, the initial promise did not lead to the significant momentum of trade and investment that was anticipated. Concerns over political instability and confusion, as well as policy inconsistencies, and in some cases, reversals, made potential investors adopt a cautious, wait-and-see attitude.¹⁷ Unfortunately, ASEAN continues to see India as bureaucratic and inherently protectionist, with an absence of political will, coupled with poor infrastructure and complicated land and labour policies. This meant India, despite its huge economy and tremendous promise, was not seen as an easy or attractive place to do business. Stifled by red tape and bureaucratic inertia, the frustrations faced by some of the regional consortia from Southeast Asia on lack of progress in their Indian projects hardly encouraged new ventures.¹⁸

Close Ties through Converging Interests

The lack of momentum notwithstanding, successive Indian governments signalled their commitments to the Look East policy. Trade and investment continued to be prime movers of the relationship, but other factors soon came into play. First, Delhi had begun taking note of the potential dangers posed to regional security by the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism and extremist groups in Southeast Asia. There were concerns that a destabilized Indonesia and rampant piracy activities in the Bay of Bengal area and the Straits of Malacca might threaten India’s shipping lanes to the south and east of the subcontinent. In 2000, the Vajpayee government began articulating the importance of maritime security. Second, India has been concerned over the possibility of Pakistan spreading its influence in some ASEAN countries through likely linkages of terrorist groups (e.g. Lashkar-e-Taiba) with emerging extremist Islamist groups in the region. Third, India needed to keep up with China in its engagement with ASEAN. China was already part of the ASEAN+3 (China, Japan and Korea) cooperation framework. Economic and trade cooperation between China and ASEAN had grown rapidly. Not wishing to lag behind, the Vajpayee government began making similar offers to ASEAN countries, leading to the signing of a Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) with Singapore in 2005. This was preceded by a bilateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Thailand in October 2003. Other initiatives like the Mekong–Ganga Cooperation (MGC) project launched in November 2000 to forge closer ties with India’s eastern neighbours—Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—demonstrated India’s interests in the region.

The change of government in 2004 did not affect India’s orientation towards Southeast Asia. The Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government continued with many of the economic reform initiatives undertaken by the Vajpayee government. For instance, the idea of an Asian economic community that was first mooted by Vajpayee in 2003 featured in the new government’s foreign policy plans. Not wishing to be outmanoeuvred by China, and seeing that trade with East Asia had risen from USD 8 billion in 1990 to USD 67.6 billion in 2005, accounting for nearly 30 per cent of India’s total external trade,¹⁹ India remained keen to participate in the East Asian economic integration process. It was thus regarded as an important step in the right direction when India was invited to the East Asia Summit (EAS) in 2005. Thereafter, several new initiatives were announced: further pursuing an open skies policy that was proposed by Singapore; early operationalization of an India–ASEAN Science & Technology Fund to enhance collaborative R & D between India and ASEAN; developing annual training courses for ASEAN diplomats; and launching of special tourism campaigns in India and ASEAN.

India and ASEAN relations, based primarily on economic ties, grew gradually to encompass military and security cooperation. Membership in the EAS has accorded India the status of a legitimate player with a major role to play in the region’s evolving security architecture. Through its membership of the ARF, India’s engagement with ASEAN also paved the way for its involvement in other important regional organizations such as the EAS and the Asia–Europe Meeting (AEM). ASEAN countries came to see India ‘as a potentially important economic partner that could provide a useful balance and a hedge [as well as a potential security provider] against . . . unilateralism by the big powers . . .’²⁰

Regardless of the desire for closer ties, the degree of cooperation has varied widely among the grouping’s member countries with a view that the full potential of India’s partnership with ASEAN remains unrealized. Momentum had stalled and progress was lacklustre, particularly in the area of trade and India’s eastward connectivity. Figures from 2015 revealed that India’s trade with ASEAN amounted to only one-seventh of ASEAN’s trade with China, and is, therefore, proportionally low.²¹ This has led to the view that in the latter years of the Look East policy ‘India’s approach to ASEAN looked tired, if not stale’.²²

In November 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at the India–East Asia Summit in Myanmar that the Look East policy would henceforth become the ‘Act East’ policy. The change was meant to reinvigorate India’s stagnating relations with ASEAN and expand India’s engagement beyond the region to include the whole of East Asia to Australia and New Zealand in the south, and from neighbouring Bangladesh to Fiji and Pacific Island countries in the Far East.²³ Later in 2015 in Singapore, Modi reiterated his pledge to deepen India’s focus on the countries to its east. He stressed the need to ensure freedom of navigation in Asia’s waters and the need for cooperation in areas including oceans, cyberspace and space.²⁴

One of the motivations behind the Act East policy can be attributed to India’s concerns over China’s growing ambitions in Asia. The policy can be regarded as a ‘hedging strategy’ (the key element in this strategy being the search for strategic partners to defuse a threat) rather than an outright challenge as India lacks the wherewithal to contest an assertive and sometimes belligerent China. ASEAN remains the main pillar in India’s Act East policy. However, the efficacy of the policy remains hindered by the inability to translate ideas and policies into concrete actions and investments. Infrastructure projects in India’s northeast is one such idea. If implemented successfully, these projects (e.g. the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway) would significantly improve connectivity between northeast India and the ASEAN countries.²⁵

Acting East

India’s relations with Southeast Asia have been marked by false starts and unfulfilled promises. More than half a century has passed since Nehru first attempted to build a regional identity that would galvanize the new and emerging states of India and Southeast Asia. Nehru’s vision for Asia, built on idealism, hopes and aspirations, was nearly wrecked by geopolitical conditions created by the Cold War. His non-alignment policy, which still exists as a statement of policy, was for the most part nothing more than a mirage. In the post-Cold War period, globalization and transnational challenges have made Asian regionalism possible again. In a world that is headed towards multi-polarity and global connectedness, India’s non-alignment would have to mean an openness to seek convergence and cooperation, an open and flexible approach of inclusion and engagement. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, India has taken a major step forward in the realization of its earlier vision for ‘Pan-Asianism’ through regional cooperation. India’s place in the new Asia is predicated, since the nineties, on a pragmatic approach that is grounded in common economic and security interests.²⁶

ASEAN will remain an important region to India for several reasons. Parts of Southeast Asia are socially and ecologically linked to northeast India, and this conduit offers India immense possibilities of an east-through-northeast approach. Several ASEAN countries have become important investment and joint venture destinations for Indian businesses, while at the same time being an important source of commodities to feed India’s economic growth.

The rise of an economically powerful and stable India, with close ties to the US, and confident in its dealings with China, adds immeasurably to the stability of the region. Southeast Asia stands to be transformed by the rise of China and India, and this strategic relationship, if managed properly, is set to determine the future of the Asia-Pacific region.