India’s Vietnam outreach must extend to rest
In popular perception, India's near abroad is restricted to South Asia, when, in fact, this country not only shares maritime borders but also strong historical and civilisational ties with much of South East Asia. New Delhi has long sought to change that perception and strengthen ties with that region through the look East policy but has had only limited success. In recent years, however, there has been a renewed emphasis on the look East policy, and now the Modi Government has promised to upgrade it to the Act East policy and take it to a new high. It is against this backdrop that Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung's visit to India, which begins today, must be viewed. The visit comes on the heels of President Pranab Mukherjee's three-day tour of Vietnam in September, preceded by Union Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj's trip in August. When viewed together, it makes for a rare diplomatic gesture. But what is really ‘special’ is that high-level diplomatic engagement between India and Vietnam has become quite the norm in recent years. In 2013, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Mr Nguyen Phu Trong, was on a state visit to India while Prime Minister Dung was here in 2012 for the India-Asean Commemorative Summit. In 2011, it was President Truong Tan Sang's turn to come calling.
Unfortunately, the bonhomie that was apparent at the Government level didn’t effectively percolate to the masses, even though the two countries have always been good friends. Indians today may have almost no connection with the Vietnamese, but in the 1960s and 1970s, slogans testifying to solidarity between the two peoples, such as “Amaar naam, tomaar naam, Vietnam Vietnam”, were commonly heard. As the Vietnamese fought for the reunification of their country, their aspirations were echoed in university campuses in Bengal where students cried out at anti-war demonstrations, “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh, we will win, we will win”. India was also one of the few countries that supported Vietnam when it sent its Army to Cambodia at the end of 1978 to end the genocide being committed by the Pol Pot regime. Interestingly, when China, which was supporting the Cambodian regime, retaliated by attacking Vietnam in 1979, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee was in Beijing to ‘normalise' India-China ties that had been frozen after the 1962 war. When he heard of the Chinese attack, he called off his meetings and returned home in protest.
Decades later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is now faced with balancing that same India-China dynamic vis-à-vis South East Asia. And from all available accounts, he will be pursuing India's interests with all parties on a bilateral basis, outside of a conflicting binary framework. Just like China continues to be Pakistan's all-weather friend while it also does business with India, Mr Modi, who recently offered a grand reception to the Chinese President, is clear that India will strengthen ties with not just Vietnam but also Japan, Indonesia and Myanmar, irrespective of how many feathers that ruffles in China. India and Vietnam have already been doing good business together — India is among Vietnam's top 10 trading partners and the two countries have a bilateral trade target of $15 billion by 2020. It has also extended a $100 million credit line Vietnam and hopes to finalise the sale of the Brahmos supersonic cruise missiles to Hanoi during Prime Minister Dung's visit. It is to be hoped that the outreach by India to Vietnam will be replicated to other key countries such as Indonesia.