India's viability and stature as a power in global connectivity space evolves from the fact that it does not trample on political sovereignty, economic freedom, human rights and environmental sustainability of the recipient countries, writes Sreemati Ganguli
Debate around China-sponsored One Belt One Road (OBOR ) and more specifically, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor as a part of that project, has brought the focus on strategic connotations and implications of trans-national connectivity initiatives. This article, however, will focus on how India is entering this strategic space, globally.
Notably, the economic, political, cultural, and strategic importance of connectivity projects took a new momentum after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. An array of projects were initiated under the identical name of ‘Silk Road’ in Eurasia: The European Union-sponsored trade and transport corridor, the Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia; the integrated energy pipelines project of Southern Corridor, the West-sponsored Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Crude Oil Pipeline project; Nato-sponsored Virtual Silk Highway Project; the Iron Silk Road project; the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation-Asian Development Bank project on trade and transport corridors in Afghanistan and Central Asia and the like.
Interestingly, the OBOR is the new version of China’s earlier Silk Road venture in Eurasia — an extension of New Eurasian Continental Bridge project and the ‘look West’ Silk Road development strategy to build energy pipelines around Central and West Asia. Significantly, India was not a part of all these endeavours — though India is the co-sponsor (along with Iran and Russia) of the International North–South Transport Corridor that plans to connect Mumbai to Helsinki through Iran, Russia and Central Asia.
It has 11 member countries — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Turkey, Oman and Syria. Also, India possesses some unique geo-cultural advantages to re-christen this project as a Silk Road initiative. A number of routes (Tibet route, ladakh route, Gilgit route, Srinagar route, Burma route etc) of the ancient Silk Road went through India to reach Persia and Central Asia. Buddhist ideas were spread from India to Tibet and China through the Silk Road and in 2010, the Archaeological Survey of India applied to include 12 Silk Road sites in India in the UN World Heritage list.
But recent trend in India’s foreign policy approach suggests a coordinated effort to treat connectivity as a strategy in regional, inter-regional and global arena. India promotes the Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal transport corridor in South Asia, while stretching the arena of connectivity by launching the first Saarc satellite into the space, with building a ground station of this project in Vietnam, which will benefit other Asean countries too. In a similar push, the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway project is slated to be extended to Cambodia, lao PDR and Vietnam that is called the East-West Economic Corridor for better inter-regional connectivity.
India-Iran-Afghanistan project to develop the Chahbahar port in Iran adds the West-bound angle to this push — a project that allows India to provide an alternative connectivity gateway to the land-locked Afghanistan and Central Asian countries. India’s interest in joining the existing Iran-Turkmenistan-Kazakhstan railway project further enhances the possibilities of greater connectivity between India, Iran and Central Asia.
Japan’s involvement to jointly develop the Chabahar port along with India underlines the economic and strategic significance of connectivity projects — a dimension that got further boost from the joint Indo-Japanese ‘Freedom’ project to promote infrastructure ventures and capacity-building initiatives in East Africa, particularly in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, as well as to boost greater Asia-Africa cooperation, as was announced during the African Development Bank Meet in India last month.
The financial allocation in the recent US budget to revive the 2011 plan of the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, for the New Silk Road project involving Afghanistan and its neighbours and the Indo-Pacific Economic corridor linking South Asia with South-East Asia and the announcement that India will be an important partner in these two ventures signify India’s growing importance in providing an alternative option in global strategic space of connectivity.
It is to be noted that the main vector of any connectivity project is the route and Mahnaz Z Ispahani analysed the concept of a route as ‘both a geographical and a political idea, both an end and a means’ as that creates ‘access’. Jean Gottman also commented that access in the geographical as well as political space is “organised at all times in history to serve political ends, and one of the major aims of politics is to regulate the conditions of access. So, routes, access, economic mileage and geopolitics are interlinked and interconnected in ascertaining the strategic significance of connectivity projects. It is true that for India, investment potentials and procedural bottlenecks remain the problem areas, but India’s viability and stature as a power in global connectivity space evolves from the fact that India does not trample on political sovereignty, economic freedom, human rights and environmental sustainability of the recipient countries.
Thus, it offers an alternative choice for these countries to rely upon. From the Indian perspective, it is better to analyse the trend not from a narrow prism of rivalry with any other country, but through a wider angle of viewing it as an aspiring power spreading its wings to get involved and to stay relevant in a global context — to offer routes, to provide access to better infrastructure and technologies, to garner new friendships, to put new worth to old relationships and in the process, create better connectivity between India and the world.
(The writer is fellow, Institute of Foreign Policy Studies, University of Calcutta)