India and the ASEAN gambit

India and the ASEAN gambit

The importance of a positive ambience for ASEAN's exchanges with India cannot be exaggerated. It is worth recalling how ASEAN had taken a dim view of the nuclear weaponization experiments that India conducted in May 1998. At an ARF meeting held in Manila about two months later in the same year, India made a dramatic pitch for a confidence-building measure by offering to acknowledge and respect the sanctity of Southeast Asia as a nuclear-weapons-free zone. If, however, India has not yet been able to accede to a relevant protocol, the reason simply is that ASEAN's prevailing diplomatic culture and existing mechanisms call for such a commitment by the five designated nuclear powers and not India or Pakistan. Yet, peace between India and Pakistan is a matter of abiding importance to ASEAN in the larger regional and global context.

India's "look East" policy, whose centerpiece consists of the relationship with ASEAN and its sub-regions, has for most part remained a matter of high intentions. Yet, some definitive new beginnings may take shape. Mr. K. C. Pant, India's chief delegate to the meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the annual dialogue with the South East-Asian outfit, has now offered to intensify New Delhi's interactions with ASEAN in the information technology sector (IT), a well recognized area of India's strength.

In line with the normal practices of ASEAN, its latest ministerial-level meetings were dominated by economic issues. On the political front, ASEAN remained eager to fashion a code of conduct in the South China Sea and reaffirmed that peace in East Asia would depend on the triangular power-equation involving the U.S., China and Japan. Not surprisingly, the U.S.-China engagement was the bilateral event that attracted the greatest attention on the sidelines of the latest ARF meeting in Hanoi.

Now, although India is generally seen as a factor for stability in South-East Asia, ASEAN surely has many political considerations to sort out before it can respond positively to New Delhi's bid to engage the association in summit-level talks in the manner of China, Japan and South Korea.

-- The Hindu, New Delhi