The Rocky Road Through Mandalay |
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 พ.ค. 2024
- Ambassador Gautam Mukhopadhaya, one of India’s finest diplomats, has served as India’s envoy to hotspots like Afghanistan, Syria and Myanmar. Apart from the conventional political and diplomatic assignments which took him around the world, his expertise and experience covers diverse domains like culture, human rights, social development, media, defence and security.
Asked whether India’s attempts to reach out its neighbours through various regional policies (like Act East and Neighbourhood First) and groupings (like the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, or BIMSTEC, the Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Nepal or BBIN, etc) and others were floundering because the Chinese could deliver infrastructure projects much faster, he said that while one could say there is a performance deficit in India’s connectivity projects, that is not the only problem.
In Afghanistan, for instance, India worked under extremely difficult and complex political circumstances, to complete The 215 Delaram-Zaranj Highway, also known as Route 606, at a time when the Taliban was making a comeback to Afghanistan around 2007-8. But in the case Myanmar, around the time India started the ambitious Kaladan multimodal project, which aims to connect Kolkata port with Sitwe port on Myanmar’s Rahkine coast, and then go northward by river and road all the way upto India’s northeastern state of Mizoram. This would not only save time, it would also cut India’s dependence on the Chicken Neck corridor to reach the northeastern states. But then the Rohingya issue came up to complicate things. Then there’s the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway Project, a proposed road link which begins in Moreh in India's Manipur state, and then goes through Myanmar to end at Mae Sot in Thailand. Since 2021, extreme political instability in Myanmar has essentially brought it to a standstill. The Thais have completed their section of the highway, but today, it is being used for military operations.
The other problem plaguing connectivity, he said, is perhaps a lack of a holistic approach, which examines how these connectivity projects would “actually be leveraged, the kind of industries that we hope to build or tap along the way, and the commercial activities involved…” We don’t seem to have the mechanism in place which links the connectivity track, the business track and the strategic track together as yet, he felt.
Also, it is not always India’s fault. For instance, Bhutan pulled out from the Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal (BBIN) Motor Vehicles Agreement after having signed it, ostensibly because it would impact their plan to be a carbon neutral nation. So they had signed up, and then had second thoughts.
Returning to the Chinese, they have a way of doing things, which we don’t necessarily need to emulate, he said. They may not have the checks and guards that we have, and they see many of these as strategic projects and invest accordingly, driven from the top.
However, India might want to consider tweaking the tendering process of at least certain strategic projects to incentivise timely delivery, and focus not just on cost but on other parameters too, he said .
One of the signs of this lacunae in thinking can be seen in the fact that while there is a integrated checkpost at Moreh which has an immigration desk, there is no customs desk there. So trade is limited to the standard limited barter system that has been there right from independence.
How is India’s Act East policy different from the Look East policy initiated by Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao? Does India’s attempt to connect with the Far East depend totally on the situation in Myanmar? And if that is the case, should we continue to focus totally on marine connectivity along the coastline and put the whole network of inland highways and waterways connecting our region on the back burner?
To get the answers to these questions and as more, as well as fascinating insights into how things work (or don’t) when it comes to regional connectivity, and the various opportunities and challenges involved, watch the entire interview.
#myanmar #afghanistan #syria
incredible insights. thank you for the interview.
no such valuable discussions in mainstream media
*India should step in NOW to either have some joint arrangements with Chin and Rakhine state insurgents up to Sittway port or to capture this region and install a friendly government or own government so that the North Eastern Indian states have direct land access to Bay of Bengal to solve the problem of chicken neck and also recapture the COCO Islands (part of British India until 1945) from Myanmar where Chinese have a listening post. This will vastly increase the maritime security and sea boundaries of India and restrict the enters of enemies in Bay of Bengal and secure Anadamen al the way up to Indonesia. This will discourage China to have a canal from Gulf of Thailand to Andaman sea and/or install a puppet government in the areas abutting their Yunnan state to all the way in Bay of Bengal. They have already been supporting insurgencies near their border. If China can make its boundaries safer why can't India with Buddhist and Christian cultural ties to the region?*
There is no doubt that India would "benefit" from the Act East Policy, given the diverse communities that it would impact and the intricate relationships that they share with Mainland India. However, when the land trade accounts for only around 1% of trade between India and South-East Asia atm compared to the Sea routes and when there are various humanitarian issues in the Northeast that have been left unaddressed by India, claiming that the Act-East Policy would benefit Mainland India would be a wrong assumption. However, if India learns humility from the Northeast and grants the claims of the Northeast fully, only then the rewards of the Act East Policy would be reaped by India through its sea routes, as it was done by the Cholas.
The political spectrum in the Northeast is as diverse as Mainland India. And according to the law of physics, the opposite sides attract while the same sides repel each other, but within the atom both sides exist harmoniously 😉
Summary: our tax rupees are not being utilized the best way.