This strong diplomatic push comes as India emphasises ASEAN centrality 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Lao PDR last week to attend the India-ASEAN summit was an important message for allies in the Indo-Pacific region regarding shared interests and common goals. PM Modi laid out a ten-point action agenda plan for upgrading relations with the ASEAN member countries, covering technology cooperation, trade, people-to-people ties, education, health, green energy and a focus on the global south bunch of nations. This comes at a time when External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar visited Pakistan (a first-in-line visit by any Indian External Affairs minister in the past 9 years) to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit. PM Modi during his inaugural address at the ASEAN India summit mentioned “Ten years ago, I announced India’s ‘Act East’ policy. Over the past decade, this initiative has revitalised the historical ties between India and ASEAN countries, infusing them with renewed energy, direction and momentum. Giving importance to ASEAN centrality, we launched the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative in 2019.” Clear references were made regarding the Indo-Pacific’s centrality for India’s foreign policy interests. India has under the current government’s foreign policy priorities, kept the Indo-Pacific as a centrepiece. It has joined one of the most significant multilateral platforms, QUAD with the US, Australia and Japan and also entered into an economic partnership framework with the US and several countries in Asia under IPEF (Indo-Pacific Economic Framework).

The QUAD even though not a security alliance is focussed on maintaining a rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region. India managed to include several crucial pointers inserted in the Chairman HE Mr Sonexay Siphandone’s, (also, the Prime Minister of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic) statement during the summit. The statement read “We reaffirmed the importance of maintaining and promoting peace, security, stability, safety, and freedom of navigation in and overflight above the South China Sea.

We reaffirmed the need to enhance mutual trust and confidence, exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities that would complicate or escalate disputes and affect peace and stability and avoid actions that may further complicate the situation. We further reaffirmed the need to pursue peaceful resolution of disputes in accordance with the universally recognised principles of international law, including the 1982 UNCLOS. We emphasised the importance of self-restraint in the conduct of all activities by claimants and all other states, including those mentioned in the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) that could further complicate the situation and escalate tensions in the South China Sea.

We underscored the importance of the full and effective implementation of the DOC in its entirety and committed to maintaining and promoting an environment conducive to the negotiations of an effective and substantive Code of Conduct in the South China Sea (COC) that is in accordance with International Law, including the 1982 UNCLOS.”Meanwhile as expected India did not engage in any bilateral dialogue with the SCO host country, Pakistan. Relations with Pakistan have been on the edge, for nearly a decade now, with an escalation, when India removed Article 370, regarding a special status for Kashmir. A couple of Pakistan-based terror attacks and India’s surgical strike on terrorists on Pakistan soil ensured the relationship has been frosty. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s national economy has plummeted in a post-Covid era. The guardian country for Pakistan in the region is India’s other real problem, China. However, the binding economic packages China offers, are sure to make Pakistan a colony in the long run. While EAM’s visit to Pakistan could be seen as a good goodwill gesture, in the long run, economic bilateral ties and the human bridge between the two nations, would be the only saviour for Pakistan.

(The writer is a policy analyst; views are personal)