Playing a losing game

The recent back-to-back summits India and China had with Central Asian Republics (CAR) indicate that the Great Game is very much on. Whether we should be playing it at all, or have the capacity to do so is another matter.

The CAR is far more important for China than for India. There indeed could be a legitimate question why India should even bother with the region.

The Indian media had hyped the summit as some kind of a major achievement. India had invited the leaders of the five Central Asian Republics — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan — to be joint chief guests for the 2022 Republic Day. This didn’t pan out, and so it was decided to hold the summit virtually, which was done on January 27.

Even as the planning and the hyping reached fever pitch, there was an announcement that Xi Jinping would be also holding a joint summit with CAR leaders to commemorate the 30th anniversary of their diplomatic relations, and that too, two days before the Indian meet. The two meetings have inevitably led to comparative assessments that do not particularly favour India.

PM Modi’s public remarks at the summit were short and concise and nothing really stood out. His theme was regional security and stability, while Xi focused on economic ties. The context of the PM’s remarks appeared to be the developments in Afghanistan, which, in his view, affected India and the CAR equally.

The lengthy Delhi Declaration issued after the summit provided a significant overview of the India-CAR relationship. This suggests that there seems to be significant similarities between New Delhi and Beijing’s approach to the region. Both view ties as being important from the point of view of security and regional stability in the context of the Afghan developments. Both are active in providing assistance to the region through aid and training programmes and both are conscious of the importance of energy resources of the region. And, both are linked to the region through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

But the substance of the China-CAR relationship is very different from that of the Indian one. The most important difference arises from contiguity, which makes China-CAR relations far more consequential than the India-CAR one. China shares a 3,300-km border with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and its troubled Xinjiang province. The region is also an important fulcrum of China’s Belt and Road Initiative which sees a thousand trains a month running between Europe and China through Central Asia.

India lacks any contiguity and the Pakistani blockade prevents easy access to the region. Our efforts to develop alternative routes from Chabahar, or through the Ashgabat Agreement, are still a works in progress. Indeed, in a number of areas, India’s efforts to enhance ties with the region are more aspirational than anything else.

In the last 30 years, China has developed dense ties with the CAR. Trade between them stands at some $41 billion, as compared to just around $2 billion for India. China has three pipelines taking Central Asian gas and oil to China, and work is in progress on the fourth pipeline. Chinese investments in the region total nearly $55 billion, with half of it going to Kazakhstan. Some 7,700 Chinese companies are active in the region. As for Indian investments, they are trivial, though in 2020 India extended a $1 billion line of credit to the region.

According to a recent Carnegie Endowment study, the days of big infrastructure investments in the CAR funded by China are over. Now CAR governments have pushed Beijing to focus on industrial projects to make value-added products for export. During the China-CAR summit, Xi offered $500 million of additional assistance to the region for skill enhancement, along with 50 million vaccine doses. He made it a point to call for greater cooperation in the area of AI, big data, cloud computing and other high-tech sectors. He also called for speeding up work on the troubled China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway project. Once the Kyrgyz part of CKU is completed, China will have the shortest route to western Europe and Iran.

China has three key interests in Central Asia. First, to ensure a stable source of hydrocarbons; second, to ensure that the region neighbouring its own sensitive province of Xinjiang remains stable; and third, obtain the support of the governments there for China’s larger global agenda.

What are India’s goals? In his opening remarks, the PM said cooperation between India and the CAR ‘is essential for regional security and prosperity…Central Asia is crucial to India’s vision of an integrated and stable, extended neighbourhood.’ But he also seemed to acknowledge that we are yet to develop a structure for enhanced relations and that there was need ‘to create an ambitious roadmap for our cooperation’. Substantive ties remain in prospect, rather than now. India is simply hoping to ride into Great Game 3 with a little Russian help. The Chinese, though, have been careful to watch their own footing in relation to Moscow.

Certainly, the CAR is far more important for China than for India. Indeed, there could be a legitimate question why India should even bother with the region. Accessing Central Asian oil and gas through the TAPI pipeline is likely to remain a pipedream, given the Pakistani blockade. Afghanistan’s importance to Indian security is being needlessly exaggerated. The Taliban have shown no inclination to export their brand of Islam and whatever danger we face from that direction comes from Pakistan. India would be better off deploying its already scarce resources to shoring up its ties with countries in the South Asian or Indian Ocean Region.