India is missing Hindu Kush for the Pacific

Through the past couple of decades, the concept of ‘extended neighbourhood’ got woven into India’s foreign policy formulations. The concept has acquired a rare bipartisan character. Broadly, the SAARC region constitutes India’s immediate neighbourhood, while the regions beyond make up the extended one.

Indian strategists miss the point that it is in Central Asia and Afghanistan that the Indian subcontinent’s core interests lie.

The UPA-1 government gave a geographical dimension to the concept of extended neighbourhood as stretching from the Suez Canal to the South China Sea, encompassing West Asia and the Gulf, Central Asia, South East Asia, East Asia, Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean Region. The seeming absurdity of such a ‘universal’ definition of the concept highlights the paradox — while geography has been thrust upon the concept as an explicit element of India’s concerns, geo-economic considerations and, more importantly, their actual practice do not bear that out.

Of course, the then Manmohan Singh government was exceptional in its focus on economic development as a driver of foreign policy. A Canadian diplomat assigned to New Delhi at that time even authored a book to share his admiration for the visionary outlook of Manmohan Singh. Unsurprisingly, the centrality ascribed to economic development in shaping India’s strength, interests and relationships came to be known as the ‘Manmohan doctrine’. We miss him today.

However, looking back, the pattern of trade shows that India’s record remained patchy in both its immediate and extended neighbourhoods. Admittedly, trade has improved with West Asia and the ASEAN regions to some extent, but it is ridiculously minuscule in the Horn of Africa or the Indian Ocean littoral. Ironically, India takes credit for the coinage ‘Indo-Pacific’, which has gained worldwide currency, but its trade with the Pacific Islands (which Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited last week) is in real terms negligible; we promote the Indian Ocean Rim Association and ecstatically tom-tom the India-Pacific Islands Cooperation grouping of 14 Pacific islands, but that is paying lip service. The international community, including China, must be viewing the intriguing mystery of it all with amusement and wonder.

Equally, trade remains low with the Central Asian region despite episodic bursts of enthusiasm. Central Asia has become highly strategic as the western strategy towards Russia (and China) has veered towards Halford Mackinder’s heartland theory — the idea that whoever gained control of eastern Europe controlled the heartland or the pivot area (Eurasia), and whoever controlled Eurasia could easily gain control of the ‘World Island’.

Because of a multi-layered process of intercontinental reception and adaptation of Mackinder’s theory in Germany and the US, the term ‘heartland’ became a generic spatial denomination detached from the geographical region of Eurasian landmass it originally prescribed, which is, of course, integrable with various geopolitical concepts as the centre of an imagined world order. Indeed, Mackinder himself laid out the flexibility of his theory’s interpretive possibilities by reflexively adapting it to the history of events over the course of the first half of the 20th century. At any rate, in consequence, the generic spatial denomination ‘heartland’ and the associated adopted theory came to serve as a geopolitical argument for the strategic narrative, legitimising the US foreign policy in World War II and also the containment strategy against the Soviet Union pursued under the rubric of the Cold War.

It needs no emphasis that the entire arc of countries in Central Asia (Inner Asia) is turning into a battleground. While Indian strategists are besotted with the idea of the US’s island chain strategy against China in the Pacific, which has now taken PM Modi to those tropical islands with sandy beaches and coconut trees, they miss the point that it is in Central Asia and Afghanistan — the ‘pivot area’ — that the Indian subcontinent’s core interests lie in the making of the world order. We are wasting our time when the AUKUS is already there for the US to give underpinning to the island chain strategy. The Indian Navy isn’t going to be terribly missed in the vast Pacific Ocean.

That is why it is truly unfortunate, even exasperating, that the Indian radar missed two back-to-back summits involving China in the run-up to and overlapping the cacophony of events and flurry of photo ops in faraway Hiroshima — the summit (May 6) of the foreign ministers of Pakistan, China and Afghanistan in Islamabad, the first such ministerial since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, and the China-Central Asia Summit (May 18-19) in Xian, chaired by President Xi Jinping.

If the Pakistan-China-Afghanistan ministerial amounts to a big leap forward for the Belt and Road Initiative and the consequent legitimisation of the Taliban rule in Kabul, the Xian summit signifies a historic shift in the axis of Central Asia as China steps in to reformat its cooperation with that region in consultation with Russia on the basis of common concerns and coordinated strategies. In geopolitical terms, what is of profound significance here is that the Xian summit was preceded by the meeting in Moscow on May 9 (Russia’s Victory Day) between President Vladimir Putin and the heads of the five Central Asian states.

The Xian summit heralds the creation of a new ‘5+2’ strategic axis (Central Asia plus China and Russia) for the first time in the tumultuous history of the Silk Road, which, of course, had defined through centuries the history, culture, politics and economy of our subcontinent. We are missing the Hindu Kush for the Pacific’s coconut trees, aren’t we? How did this happen? Policymakers with uncluttered minds would know how to separate the wheat from the chaff, as the Bible says.