Category: Foreign Policy Association (US)

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Foreign Policy Association (US) Journalism

Doklam: China’s War Drums and the India-Bhutan Treaty

 

This article was first published on the Foreign Policy Association blogs here.

Summing up the general state of awareness in the world that we are living in, an overwhelming majority of the world seems to be either unaware of or unconcerned about the potentially catastrophic confrontation building up in the last two months in the Himalayas between India and China, the world’s two largest countries, which also happen to be the world’s second and the fourth largest economies, and, most worryingly, two nuclear armed nations that have the world’s most well-oiled defense apparatus.

The standoff, which is threatening to spiral out of control from the Chinese side, started when the one-party led Communist nation’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) started constructing a motorable road from Dokola in the Doklam area towards the Bhutan Army camp at Zompelri on June 16, 2017.

Bhutan, which believes the area is its territory, swiftly reacted, and in a press release issued on June 29, 2017, stated clearly that “the construction of the road inside Bhutanese territory is a direct violation of its agreements with China“.

The Bhutanese foreign ministry further said:

” Boundary talks are ongoing between Bhutan and China and we have written agreements of 1988 and 1998 stating that the two sides agree to maintain peace and tranquillity in their border areas pending a final settlement on the boundary question, and to maintain status quo on the boundary as before March 1959. The agreements also state that the two sides will refrain from taking unilateral action, or use of force, to change the status quo of the boundary. Bhutan hopes that the status quo in the Doklam area will be maintained as before 16 June 2017.”

At the core of the dispute is the question of where the final tri-boundary point — the point at which India, China, and Bhutan meet — lies.

China argues that the India-China-Bhutan tri-junction is at Mount Gipmochi (Gyemo Chen), much south of Batang la, the place that India and Bhutan consider as the tri-junction.  China claims 89 sq km in Doklam (along Gamochen at the border, to the river divide at Batangla and Sinchela, and down to the Amo Chhu River) as its own.

But it is one of only four areas – as per Bhutan – over which China and Bhutan, who do not have diplomatic relations, have a dispute and have had 24 rounds of talks. China, however, claims much more than that and considers a total of seven areas as disputed areas.

China, it may be noted, has territorial disputes with virtually every neighbour of its. And if its conduct in the South China Sea and with Japan over Senkaku Islands is any indication, China does not really believe in giving in to other nation’s claims.

Therefore, much before the official press release by Bhutan, and just two days after the construction work by China began, on June 18, 2017, India sent around 270 troops, with weapons and two bulldozers and stopped the Chinese troops from constructing the road.

In a 15-page document released by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on the same day, Beijing said that “over 270 Indian soldiers, carrying weapons and driving two bulldozers advanced more than 100 meters into the Chinese territory to obstruct the road building of the Chinese side, causing tension in the area.”

It further accused India of raising the number of Indian soldiers to 400.

India’s ministry of defence, however, brushed aside the Chinese accusation of escalation and said that India has been maintaining 350-400 troops at Doklam ever since the stand-off began.

The Indian action is in accordance with the India-Bhutan Treaty of Friendship of 1949, which advocated India’s guiding role in Bhutan’s diplomatic and defense affairs.  Though the 1949 treaty was superseded by a new friendship treaty of 2007 that replaced the provision that made it mandatory for Bhutan to take India’s guidance on foreign policy.

The 2007 treaty provided broader sovereign rights to Bhutan by, for instance, not making it mandatory for Bhutan to take India’s permission in matters such as arms imports. But it did not alter much the inherent attached interests of the two nations.

Article 2 of the 2007 India-Bhutan Treaty says:

In keeping with the abiding ties of close friendship and cooperation between Bhutan and India, the Government of the Kingdom of Bhutan and the Government of the Republic of India shall cooperate closely with each other on issues relating to their national interests. Neither Government shall allow the use of its territory for activities harmful to the national security and interest of the other.

While sovereignty is the principal concern for Bhutan, the dispute for India beyond just the size of the territory in Doklam.

Picture Courtesy: Indian Defence Review

India is alarmed that if the Chinese do complete the motorable road in the Doklam area, it will give China an imposing access to India’s strategically vulnerable ‘chicken’s neck’ in the Siliguri Corridor, a 20km wide corridor that links India’s seven northeastern states to its mainland.

It may further be noted that Bhutan’s own administrative apparatus can get severely compromised if the Chinese inhabit Doklam as Bhutan’s communications network as it is connected through Siliguri in India.

At the moment, it is a stalemate. India is refusing to pull back its troops from the area that it says belongs to Bhutan. And China is threatening a bigger war every new day.

UPDATE:

As on August 28, 2017, India and China reached a consensus on disengagement of border personnel at the  faceoff site. A release by India’s ministry of external affairs said:

In recent weeks, India and China have maintained diplomatic communication in respect of the incident at Doklam. During these communications, we were able to express our views and convey our concerns and interests.

On this basis, expeditious disengagement of border personnel at the face-off site at Doklam has been agreed to and is on-going.

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Foreign Policy Association (US) Journalism

China’s ‘Colonial Investments’ Run into Rough Weather in the Indian Subcontinent

This analysis was first published on Foreign Policy Association (NY) Blogs here.

With protests against China’s investments taking a volatile shape in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Pakistan, it is safe to say that the country’s ambitious expansion via economics in the Indian subcontinent is not going as well as Beijing had imagined.

On February 2nd, one person died and more than a dozen got injured when a protest against a $2.4-billion Chinese-backed power plant in Bangladesh turned violent.

The protesters believe that the construction of the coal-fired plant 265 km south-east of Dhaka will cause widespread displacements, disturb graveyards, thereby snapping a sentimental link with the land (too), and damage the environment.

When the agreement was signed for the project, which was expected to begin power generation by the end of 2019, it was touted as the symbol of Chinese-Bangladeshi relations.

In the most recent violence linked to Chinese investment in Myanmar in the third week of February, Hundreds of workers in Myanmar attacked a Chinese garment factory in Yangon, destroying equipment and briefly making seven Chinese workers captive. It took joint efforts of the Chinese embassy and the local police to secure the release of the Chinese workers.

Though this particular incident was related to the sacking of an employee, anti-China sentiment has been rising recently in Myanmar, leading, for instance, the shelving of plans to build a huge dam on the Irrawaddy River.

Similar resistance is also seen in the construction of an oil pipeline in Myanmar, a country that had a good trade and political relations with China at a time it was facing international sanctions due to the military rule.

Elsewhere, a month earlier, in January, scores of people were injured in southern Sri Lanka during a protest against allowing China to build a port and surrounding industrial zone.

The project involved probable displacement of many thousands of people living in villages near Hambantota port, about 250 km south-east of the capital Colombo.

The protesters believe that the area is being turned into “a Chinese colony”. Giving credence to their fears is the fact that the Sri Lankan government is finalizing a 99-year lease of the entire port area to a Chinese-owned company.

In Pakistan, a country with which China’s friendship has recently acquired a proverbial turn, and is said to be “deeper than the seas and higher than the mountains”, the problems are two-fold:

A section of the intelligentsia share the fears of the Hambantota port protesters – that about Pakistan, as a matter of speaking, becoming a Chinese enclave by not negotiating well the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), an under-construction $54 billion economic corridor in Pakistan, that aims to connect Gwadar Port in Balochistan province in the southwestern Pakistan with Xinjiang in far-western China.

Then there is a more violent opposition in place too – that by groups that have long been demanding independence for Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province. Only this week, the Baloch activists blew up a part of a bridge that belonged to CPEC. More than 15,000 troops are designated by the Pakistan government to safeguard the corridor, and the 7,000 Chinese personnel working on it.

Pakistan squarely blames its neighbour India for all the violence in its country, especially that which targets the CPEC.

India, on the other hand, and while denying any role in Pakistan’s internal violence, has raised concerns about the CPEC passing through some areas of the Kashmir region, which it calls Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK), and claims it to be a part of its sovereign territory.

The incidents across four countries in the Indian subcontinent—especially the problems of the ports in Pakistan and Sri Lanka—reflect the probability of there eventually being a resistance to what experts like Brahma Chellany, a geostrategist and, among other, a fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, calls “China’s Debt-Trap Diplomacy”.

Addressed in other forms elsewhere by other experts, the term generally refers to China’s ploy to dominate geopolitics via economics, especially that part of economics that involves mega infrastructure investments in underdeveloped and often restive states where the need for investment outbids the need for geopolitical considerations.

For the purpose of brevity, let’s just focus on Chinese investments in Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

When the world was apparently against Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s then president, in his bid to brutally crush the deadly terrorist organisation Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), China had readily come forward with not just arms but also economic packages like Official Development Assistance (ODA) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) of nearly $14 billion in the decade spanning 2005-2015. ODA was offered for infrastructure, energy, and services projects at an interest rate of 2-5%. Hambantota Port Development was one of the biggest recipients of the assistance.

Unfortunately for Sri Lanka, Hambantota port, built in 2008, today generates almost no noteworthy revenue—while the adjoining Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport, which became operational in 2013, was dubbed as the “world’s emptiest airport” by Wade Shephard, author of a forthcoming book on China’s “One Belt, One Road”.

Writing for Forbes, Wade mentions that the cost of paying off the airport alone was topping $17 million per year.

In another article for the same publication, Wade mentioned, “All in all, the Hambantota fiasco is sending a clear message to Beijing: showing up with bags of money alone is not enough to win a new Silk Road”.

The twin issue of the port and the airport was enough for the opposition to topple Rajapaksa, almost a cult hero in the country for making it free of 26-year-old LTTE terrorism, in the 2015 presidential elections.

Things have not been smooth for Chinese investments in the country ever since. For instance, a deal about Chinese-owned companies (government proxies in general) taking over 80% of Hambantota port for a 99-year lease for about $1 billion, was scheduled to be signed in January—but has now been postponed indefinitely due to mass protests.

Pakistan poses even greater challenges to Chinese investments. There, China has to deal not only with Baluchistan militant factions that are calling for independence but also international considerations like India claiming a part of the Kashmir region that is currently held by Pakistan—and from where the much-touted CPEC highways pass—to the possibility of Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia fuelling the fire in Baluchistan for their own geopolitical and sectarian interests.

On the business side too, the history of Gwadar port does not inspire much confidence. Despite Phase II of Gwadar getting completed as far back as in 2008, barely any ships anchor there and little freight handling is recorded.

Then there are stray voices in the Pakistan intelligentsia too expressing doubts about the terms and conditions of CPEC, which remain shrouded in mystery, and often also about the host nation become a (notional) Chinese enclave or colony.

Some of the statements and concerns might be exaggerated but the fact remains that uneven usage of Chinese investments, local and social-political bearings of the investments, and, most of all, suspect ability of the financed projects in particular and financed nations, in general, are raising formidable questions to the Chinese steps in the Indian subcontinent. Bulldozing its way multi-billion dollar speed vehicles might not be the answer that Beijing might be hoping for.

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Foreign Policy Association (US) Indian Subcontinent Journalism

Muslim Refugees and a Muslim (Host) Nation in South Asia

Men walk at a Rohingya village outside Maugndaw in Rakhine state, Myanmar October 27, 2016. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun

U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive orders with regards visa restrictions for people from seven Muslim-majority states has generated heat across the globe. At the same time, Bangladesh—a Muslim majority state in the Indian subcontinent—is planning to send refugee Rohingya Muslims from neighboring Myanmar to a low-lying island in the Bay of Bengal that critics say is ‘unlivable’.

According to available records, nearly 70,000 Rohingyas from Myanmar’s Muslim-majority areas in the north have fled to Bangladesh ever since the Myanmar military launched a fierce crackdown last October that led to the killings of over 100 Rohingyas and widespread damage to their protests.

The government action was aimed at nabbing unidentified Rohingya insurgents who were alleged to have killed nine Myanmar police personnel on October 9th at three border posts in the district of Maungdaw.

About 2,500 Rohingya families have since taken refuge at a makeshift camp in eastern Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar near the border with Myanmar—taking the number of Rohingya in Bangladesh, both the old refugees and the current ones, to an estimated 500,000 as per some estimates.

But in January, Bangladesh brought out an old and much-maligned 2015 plan from the cold storage and proposed to move all Myanmar refugees, old and new, to the island of Thengar Char, which is totally isolated and gets easily flooded on high tide days.

Defending the move, Shahriar Alam, Bangladesh’s junior foreign affairs minister, said that the “move is temporary, as Myanmar would eventually take back its citizens”.

News agency Reuters quoted him saying, “After considering all aspects, we have taken a firm decision to shift them to the island.”

The move, however, does not have a clear timeframe currently—and might begin after proper shelters are in place on the island. But one thing that Alam was adamant upon was this: “Myanmar will have to take them back.” Read ‘soon’ between the lines.

More than the current place of residence, it is the question of their identity itself that has placed the Rohingyas between the rock and a hard place. The Myanmar authorities often call them ‘Bengali Muslims’, thereby inferring that they are actually (illegal) immigrants from Bangladesh. Bangladesh, in turn, refers to them as ‘Muslim nationals of Myanmar’.

Compare it with the global umbrage directed at non-Muslim nations for identifying refugees by their religion.

Giving a sense of déjà vu with regards the turmoil in the developed world about the issue of refugees, Bangladesh is resisting the prospects of the Rohingya refugees ‘mixing with Bangladeshi citizens’.

In a January 26th release on a Bangladesh government website, it was informed that several panels were being set up by the government to examine the influx of Rohingya Muslims, which the country fears could lead to law and order issues as they mix with residents.

“There’s a fear that the influx of Rohingya Muslims from time to time will lead to a degradation of law and order situation, spread communicable diseases … and create various social and financial problems,” the notice elaborated.

Going a step further, Alam said to Reuters in an almost Donald Trump style, “They are getting involved in drugs and other unlawful activities. If we could have confined them in the camp, it would not have happened.”

Apart from Trump, many of the nationalist leaders of Europe have said something similar. The outrage directed at them has been soul-numbingly deafening. Maybe it would have helped if they were all spokespersons of Muslim nations too.

Meanwhile, Myanmar says it is “ready to talk” about the repatriation of Rohingyas—but only of those who left the country after October 9th, 2016. It says it cannot take Bangladesh’s word about all the refugees being Myanmar nationals.

In other words, a certain group is being allegedly persecuted by its native administration. But when that group tries to seek refuge in another country, it finds itself unwelcome there. But then, there is no way back home either.

Sounds familiar?

And therein lies the point. This writing is neither about the actions of Bangladesh and Myanmar, nor the current and historical state of affairs of the Rohingya Muslims. It is about requesting all of us to stop being both savage and (savagely) holier-than-thou on the issue of refugees. It is a matter of a monumental human challenge, and taking sides blindly and fanatically would not be, well, human.

Listen to the opposing voices of the host nations too. It is not always merely about xenophobia/’religio’phobia.

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Foreign Policy Association (US) Indian Subcontinent Journalism

‘Eastward Ho’ for India-led South Asia?

Trade blocs across the globe have often been just as much, if not more, instruments of geopolitics as they have been about commerce. A gradual but definite swell in cooperation between the South Asian nations east of Pakistan currently is playing witness to the age-old truism.

With South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) currently lying comatose due to the India-Pakistan conflict, India is now citing the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) as an alternative that may potentially isolate Pakistan in South Asia.

India’s increased activities within and with BIMSTEC nations is a clear warning by India to Pakistan over the current deadlock of dialogue between the two countries because of the terror attacks on Indian soil, almost all of which emanate from Pakistan.

After pulling out of the 19th SAARC Summit in Islamabad in November 9-10, 2016, which led to pull outs by all the remaining member nations too, India – along with Bangladesh – did not attend a three-day regional conference held in Islamabad beginning December 19 to  promote innovation for sustainable development and discuss strategy of the Asian and Pacific Centre for Transfer of Technology (APCTT). The conference, significantly, was held under the aegis of the United Nations.

On the other hand, India went out of the way to promote BIMSTEC at the 8th BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) Summit in Goa, India on October 15-16. Dubbed as one of the highlights of the Summit by many in India, the host nation facilitated a BRICS-BIMSTEC Outreach Summit, where the BRICS leaders met the heads of government of the BIMSTEC countries.

The selection of BIMSTEC for engagement with BRICS was both significant and deliberate by India.

While it fits India’s long-term Act East Policy, which aims at strengthening trade and bilateral relations with the South-East Asian nations, with India’s northeast region as the transit base, the October invitation to BIMSTEC to the BRICS summit also suited India’s immediate concerns.

In a major victory for India against Pakistan, BIMSTEC Leaders’ Retreat 2016 Outcome Document reiterated its stand:

“We strongly believe that our fight against terrorism should not only seek to disrupt and eliminate terrorists, terror organisations and networks, but should also identify, hold accountable and take strong measures against States who encourage, support and finance terrorism, provide sanctuary to terrorists and terror groups, and falsely extol their virtues. There should be no glorification of terrorists as martyrs.”

The statement was a near replica of the one released later by the boycotting SAARC member states at the time of pulling out of the Summit in Islamabad in November.

In other words, by trade or by trick, India had managed to get all the South Asian nations—and indeed Thailand and Myanmar—together to send a message to Pakistan to put a lid on terror activities emanating from its soil.

It was as much a diplomatic victory for India as it was an expression of exasperation of the other nations with regards the comatose nature of cooperation in South Asia via SAARC due to the conflict between the two biggest member states of the Association.

The boycott of events and the pointed nature of joint statements is not an ad-hoc development. As stated earlier, it is India taking a lead out of the general exasperation of the South Asian nations – particularly India and Bangladesh—with the issue of Pakistani-originating terror completely bringing to halt any future-looking trade and development issues of the region.

To that effect, India in September 2016 approved $1.04-billion for constructing and upgrading 558 km of roads to link it with Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal and ease the movement of passengers and cargo within the region.

Funded equally by India and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the primary purpose of the Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal (BBIN) road initiative is to increase the intra-regional trade by over 60%.

A much more expansive project than BBIN is the  Mekong-Ganga Cooperation (MGC), which though was established way back in 2000 in Laos, is receiving renewed attention. Named after Ganga and Mekong, the two of the largest rivers of the region, the grouping is about building tourism, culture, education and transportation linkages between India, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

While MGC might not be moving as well as the promoters would’ve liked it to, there are other examples that actually are.

The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project has been identified for special focus by the BIMSTEC Transport Infrastructure and Logistics Study (BTILS). It will connect the eastern Indian seaport of Kolkata with Myanmar’s Sittwe seaport by sea in the first phase – and then link Sittwe to Paletwa in the same country via Kaladan River route, before connecting Paletwa to the Indian state of Mizoram by road. Originally scheduled to be completed by 2014, it is running behind schedule, but moving well now.

Another one identified by the BTILS is the India–Myanmar–Thailand (IMT) Trilateral Highway, an under-construction highway that will connect Moreh in India with Mae Sot in Thailand via Myanmar. The road had a trial run in November 2015 itself, with Indian vehicles traveling to Naypyidaw in Myanmar via the Imphal-Mandalay-Bagan-Naypyidaw route and back. Myanmarese vehicles had joined the Indian vehicles on the return journey.

With a clear view of expanding the India-ASEAN Free Trade Area trade, India has proposed extending the highway to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

The most interesting one, however, is the Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar (BCIM) Economic Corridor. The multi-modal (road, rail, water and air linkages) corridor will be the first expressway between India and China and will pass through Myanmar and Bangladesh—covering a total area of about 1.65 million square kilometers.

This is interesting because it brings together two traditional and intense rivals, India and China—and also because China has put all its eggs in the Pakistani basket in the longstanding India-Pakistan conflict, the very reason for which India is looking and leading other nations eastwards.

There remain many miles before all the mentioned projects lay the final brick. But it is amply clear that the terrorism emanating from Pakistan—and indeed the steadfast refusal by the Pakistani government to both stop supporting the terror groups and acknowledging their presence on its soil—has led to a steady rise in activities on the east of South Asia. At the moment, it is indeed ‘Eastward Ho’ for the India-led South Asia.

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Foreign Policy Association (US) Indian Subcontinent Journalism

The Tattered Mirage of a South Asian Union is Dying Fast – Pt. 3

This commentary was first published here.

The Stealth Disruptor

With most South Asian nations sharing a history that is marred by ethnic, religious and geographic disputes, forming a seamless Union of cooperating members was not going to be easy even in the best of circumstances. Increasingly dwarfing, however, all intra-SAARC issues is the escalating India-China rivalry in the region.

For the purpose of brevity, let’s restrict ourselves to the rivalry between the two giants with regards the three South Asian nations mentioned in the previous section.

Landing a blow to the recently growing bilateral relations between the two countries, Chinese President Xi Jinping on September 6 cancelled his scheduled visit to Nepal in October.

What was not lost upon the region’s analysts was the timing of the decision—coming as it did around the three-day India visit of the new Nepalese Prime Minister Mr Pushpa Kamal Dahal, also known as Prachanda.

While the ostensible reasons for the move appear to be the Chinese disappointment with Nepal’s apparent lack of preparedness and commitment to joining ‘One Belt, One Road’—a project connecting China with the rest of Eurasia – and the Nepalese administration ‘not implementing the agreements and understandings’ agreed upon between the two countries during former Nepal prime minister Mr. K P Oli’s visit to Beijing in March, it is understood that the Beijing is upset about the recent turn of events in Nepal that lead to the ouster of Oli, considered to be pro-China.

This, Beijing feels, after China quickly transported about 1,000 metric tonnes of petroleum to Nepal to allow it to tide over the severe shortage of fuel and other essential commodities during the Madhesi blockade of entry points with India. The Chinese government had also gone out of its way to pledge support to Nepal’s ‘geographical integrity and sovereignty’ during the crisis.

The Beijing-friendly Oli, shortly after resigning just before a trust vote that he was expected to lose, said that the opposition parties “hatched a conspiracy for narrow interests, and I am stunned by that”. The ‘conspiracy’, China believed, was the handiwork of India.

His ouster and Prachanda deciding to choose India for his official visit, even though a norm in the Indo-Nepalese context, is seen as a victory of sort by the Indian establishment, which expects Nepal to move closer to India again.

Meanwhile, the impoverished nation of 28 million awaits reconstruction and rehabilitation after the deadly 2015 earthquake.

A similar contest between the dragon and the elephant is active in Bangladesh too.

China has a deep interest in and is heavily invested in Bangladesh. It is, in fact, Bangladesh’s largest trading partner. It has bagged a $705 million contract for a two-lane tunnel under the Karnaphuli River and the $4.47 billion Padma Bridge rail link project. The Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) recently granted a $66 million loan for two power distribution projects and the improvement of transmission lines in Bangladesh.

China is also Bangladesh’s main supplier of military hardware, supplying five maritime patrol vessels, surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles, 16 fighter jets, 45 tanks and two corvettes in the last five years. The new Ming-class Chinese submarines are likely to be added to the Bangladesh naval fleet later this year.

However, China has recently suffered two stunning setbacks in the country.

India’s state-owned Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) bagged a $1.6 billion power station construction contract in Bangladesh after undercutting its Chinese rival, the Harbin Electric International Company. The 1,320MW thermal power station will be the largest foreign project by an Indian power company. The Indian government’s external lending arm, the Exim Bank, would provide more than two-thirds of the funding at the low soft interest for the project.

The deal is seen as the ‘second big win’ by India over China in Bangladesh, after the cancellation of the long-deliberated China-Bangladesh deal to build the huge Sonadia deep-sea port near Chittagong, the country’s major port.

The Sonadia port was seen in India as a part of China’s ‘string of pearls’, a network of Chinese military and commercial facilities in the Indian Ocean region. New Delhi views these ‘pearls’ as a Chinese strategy to encircle India. The port would have been dangerously close to India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a strategically important archipelago of 572 islands that houses a military base and surveillance and monitoring stations.

The Indian government has now expressed interest in building a $15.5 billion deep-sea Payra Port project, to the west of Bangladesh’s choked Chittagong port, and very close to the Indian coastline.

The Indian response to the Chinese presence in Bangladesh extends to other areas of cooperation too. Indian Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi, during his visit to Dhaka in June 2015, signed 22 agreements with the Sheikh Hasina government – including deals on ending a four-decade border dispute between the two countries, maritime security and the establishment of special economic zones in Bangladesh.

India and Bangladesh have also agreed to India building a transit route to its northeast region via Bangladesh by rail, road, and waterways.

At the Bangladesh Investment and Policy Summit in Dhaka on 24 and 25 January 2016, an Indian team of businessmen and investors promised over $11 billion for infrastructure projects in Bangladesh, including an LNG power plant and a gas pipeline from India to Bangladesh.

The last is yet to be written in the India-China geopolitical rivalry in Bangladesh.

But the biggest and the most volatile geopolitical theatre for the bitter contest between the two giants is the proposed $46 billion (41 billion Euros) China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).  The corridor is devised to link Pakistan’s southern Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea to China’s western Xinjiang region.

But it passes through what India claims is its territory illegally occupied by Pakistan (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, or PoK).

The area also serves as the home to two of the many Pakistan-based groups that the US and the European Union have designated as terrorist outfits – Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). Beijing’s refusal to designate JeM chief Masood Azhar at the UN Security Council in April 2016 had greatly irked India.

In a one-to-one meeting on September 5 with Chinese President Mr Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou city, Indian Prime Minister Mr Narendra Modi is said to have conveyed that New Delhi and Beijing “would have to be sensitive to each other’s strategic interests“.

Prior to the G20 Summit in China, Indian prime minister’s public mention of Balochistan during his Independence Day speech to the nation on August 15 had triggered a wave of alarm both in Pakistan and China.

A rather innocuous statement thanking the people of Balochistan (and not Pakistan, its parent nation) for good wishes to him was noted because CPEC, on the Pakistani side, ends in that restive province.

During a seminar in the Paroon area of Panjgur district on September 2, activists of one such group, the Balochistan Republican Party (BRP), said Islamabad wants to build the CPEC in the region “on the dead bodies of Baloch people with Beijing’s help“.

Pakistan has long accused India of creating trouble in the region via funding and arming insurgent groups that are fighting for independence for the region.

Talking to India’s leading news daily The Times of India recently, South Asia expert Hu Shisheng said:

“My personal view is that if India is adamant and if Indian factor is found by China or Pakistan in disrupting the process of CPEC, if that becomes a reality, it will really become a disturbance to China-India relations, India-Pakistan relations“.

In other words, one of the most serious global military escalations could just be a corridor away.

There is a heated game of one-upmanship going on between India and China in Sri Lanka and Maldives too. But about that at a later time.

Clearly, after being grounded by India-Pakistan tensions for the most part of its two-decade history, the Association has now been completely turned into a sideshow of the India-China geopolitical one-upmanship.

The contest, I’m afraid, is between two very ancient civilisations and current global powers. Everything suggests that it would outlast the India-Pakistan rivalry by a civilizational distance. And that can have far-reaching consequences for the utopian idea called the South Asian Union.

Note: This piece was written prior to a deadly terror attack on an Indian military facility on September 18, which killed 17 Indian army personnel. All the four killed terrorists belonged to the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad terror group. This led to India and five other nations pulling out of the 19th SAARC Summit, leading to the cancellation of the same.

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Foreign Policy Association (US) Indian Subcontinent Journalism

The Tattered Mirage of a South Asian Union is Dying Fast – Pt. 2

This commentary was first published here.

“Cooperation within the framework of the Association shall be based on respect for the principles of sovereign equality, territorial integrity, political independence, non-interference in the internal affairs of other States and mutual benefit.” -Point (1) of the ‘Principles’ subset of Article II of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) charter.

‘Respect for territorial integrity’ and ‘non-interference in the internal affairs of other states’, really?

The Indian subcontinent is chequered with a history of border and territory disputes. If there is no shared border, there are prickly issues related to shared ethnic and religious groups in each other’s territories.

Two very topical, and yet, off the cuff, examples here illustrate the intertwining and conflicting interests of the South Asian nations, whether or not with a shared border, and the consequent impact of the same on the functioning of SAARC.

Bangladesh expressed its strong protest against Pakistan’s reaction to the execution of Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) leader Mir Quasem Ali on September 3.

Ali, a prominent member of the pro-Pakistani militia during Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1971, was found guilty of torture and mass murders. Bangladeshi accounts say that the Pakistani army and its supporters in JeI had killed about three million people, though the number varies in other accounts.

Pakistan termed the trial as a ‘flawed judicial process’.

“The act of suppressing the Opposition through flawed trials is completely against the spirit of democracy,” Nafees Zakaria, Pakistan’s foreign office spokesman told the international media.

Quick to retort, Bangladesh called Pakistan’s acting high commissioner in Dhaka, Samina Mehtab,  and handed over a strongly-worded note verbale.

“By repeatedly taking the side of those Bangladesh nationals who are convicted of crimes against humanity and genocide, Pakistan has once again acknowledged its direct involvement and complicity with the mass atrocity crimes committed during Bangladesh’s liberation war in 1971,” read the communiqué.

The trial of Islamist leaders who took a violently pro-Pakistani stance in the 1971 war is going on for a while now—and the two countries have sparred all along.

In a different setting, the historical friction between the two nations had taken the turn of a very contemporary fight after the terror attack in Dhaka in July this year.

During the Muslim holy month of Ramzan, gunmen had entered a chic restaurant in the city’s diplomatic enclave on July 2 and killed 21 hostages and two police officers—before the Bangladesh security forces raided the restaurant and ended the standoff. Four terrorists were killed and one was captured alive.

Those killed were from around the globe, including one Indian, nine Italians, seven Japanese, one American and two local Bangladeshis.

Amid talks of the ISIS connection, while Bangladesh blamed the home-grown Islamist terrorists belonging to JeI group for the worst-ever terror attack in the country’s history, it also talked about the radical group’s connection with Pakistan’s spy agency ISI.

“They (Pakistani establishment) are openly supporting war criminals. So, politically they are with Jamaat-e-Islami, politically they are with the militants. So, that is a sad thing in the regional politics,” said Bangladesh Information Minister Hasan-Ul-Haq Inu a day after the attack.

“And recently few diplomats, who were working undercover at the Pakistan Embassy, were thrown out of the country because they were involved in armed networks,” he added.

The issue in his later statement relates to the two Islamic countries expelling each other’s diplomats in a tit for tat fashion in late 2015.

Following the Dhaka attack and the continuing strained relations, the home minister of Bangladesh ‘skipped’ the SAARC Home Ministers Conference held on August 3 and 4 in Islamabad.

This was followed by the finance minister of the country too opting to ‘skip’ SAARC finance ministers meeting in Islamabad on August 25, citing ‘domestic compulsion’.

On the other hand, and even before these latest snubs by Bangladesh, countless experts on Pakistani news channels have dubbed the former, a part of Pakistan for the first 24 years of the latter’s existence, as a colony of India. The view reflects the growing relationship between India and Bangladesh ever since the Sheikh Hasina government has come back in 2010.

That described the current relationship between two SAARC members who were once the same country. Today, leave aside a common goal, they don’t even share a border!

An equally telling example of churning with SAARC relates to two nations that do share borders—India and Nepal.

India’s Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi had the Nepalese lawmakers, and the people of Nepal, eat out of his hands during his rockstar-like visit in August 2014 to the Himalayan nation, and his address to Parliament.

“We have not come here to interfere with your internal matters, but we want to help you develop,” Modi said to his hosts.

His popularity hit the stratosphere when he said that India was open to accepting a revised version of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship signed by the two countries in 1950: “Kathmandu had only to bring forth the amendments and New Delhi would sign on the dotted line since it implicitly trusted Nepal“.

At that time, Nepal was busy framing a new Constitution, which was to take into consideration  the concerns of all communities of the nation.

The coming together of all parties for Modi’s speech and the surplus warmth towards the visiting leader suggested an era of good times for the two nations.

The bond of warmth got a shot in the arm after India reacted faster than all to provide expertise and relief material within a matter of hours after a massive earthquake hit Nepal in April-May 2015.

At that time the only sour note seemed to be local Nepalese’s anger towards a section of the Indian media for being patronizing and meddlesome during the rescue operations.

Problems started taking a serious nature after the adoption of a new Constitution by the parliament, followed by a 16-point agreement between the Government and the opposition, which spelled out the roadmap for the new Constitution.

There was an instant and violent rejection of the new Constitution by the various Madhesi (an ethnic group living in the Nepalese south) parties and Janjatis (essentially tribals) because of, what they called, non-representation of their aspirations.

At the same time, India felt that the outcome was contrary to Mr. Modi’s advice for a consensus-driven rather than a numbers-determined approach towards finalisation of the Constitution.

Nepal, on the other hand, viewed India’s reaction to the promulgation of its new Constitution, and a hurried visit by India’s foreign secretary, as a brazen attempt by India to meddle in Nepal’s internal matters.

The new Constitution was formally adopted in September 2015.

The Madheshi groups responded by blockading the border points between India and Nepal. Kathmandu saw it as Indian handiwork and accused its southern neighbour of deliberately worsening the embargo by not allowing vehicles to pass through even those check-points where no protests were held—a charge that was quickly, and predictably, denied by the Indian government.

A four-month border blockade by the Madhesis ended only after amendments to the constitution that sought to address their concerns about ‘rightful’ representation in Nepalese political framework were made.

India welcomed the amendments. It remains to be seen what kind of welcome Modi gets on his next Nepal visit, whenever that happens.

Is there any greater ‘interference in internal affairs’, whether real or perceived, than interference in matters related to judiciary or constitution of one nation by another—as highlighted by the squabbling SAARC members in the two examples?

In an atmosphere of such mistrust and misgivings, it is barely surprising that 95% of  trade of SAARC nations is with non-SAARC nations. The corresponding figure, for example, for the Southeast Asian nations within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region is about 25%.

Note: This piece was written prior to a deadly terror attack on an Indian military facility on September 18, which killed 17 Indian army personnel. All the four killed terrorists belonged to the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad terror group.

To be continued…