Vajpayee's RI visit gives new direction

Vajpayee's RI visit gives new direction

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): Prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is scheduled
to arrive here this morning bringing with him greetings from one
billion Indians, over 120 million of whom are Muslims. India has
been home to Muslims for over a thousand years making them the
largest minority community in the world.

On the eve of his departure, the Indian prime minister
explained that he was visiting Indonesia to continue the process
of dialog initiated by President Abdurrahman Wahid who was in New
Delhi last February.

The two heads of state who have much in common, including the
challenge they face as leaders of coalition governments and their
effort to contain the discontent of religious groups in their
respective countries, will resume talks here before Vajpayee
leaves two days later for Bali.

Despite their different religious beliefs, both Abdurrahman
and Vajpayee are committed to a diverse, multi-religious and
multi-linguistic society. Apart from countless others, one of
Vajpayee's main concerns is the growing trend of intolerance
within India and in the world in general.

"Mutual tolerance and understanding leads to goodwill and
cooperation... Secularism is not an alien concept imported out of
compulsion after Independence. Rather it is an integral and
natural feature of our national culture and ethos," he said.

Abdurrahman who had the red carpet rolled out for him in New
Delhi and whose visit was hailed as a diplomatic event of the
highest significance by the Indian media, could not agree more
with this sentiment expressed recently by Vajpayee in a new year
message. Abdurrahman himself believes that multi-religious
societies must stick to a non-sectarian national agenda.

Both countries agree that if Indonesia, India and China are
able to work together, they will be strengthening not just each
other but also creating a multipolar world as opposed to the
unipolar one we live in today. The thought that the USA is the
only superpower left in our midst is a frightening thought to
many on this planet.

"The relationship between Indonesia and India dates back two
thousand years. The present visit of the Indian prime minister is
to give new direction to an old friendship and to see how it can
be utilized in this day and age for the mutual benefit of the
people of both countries," Muthu Venkatraman, Indian envoy told
The Jakarta Post.

The prime minister travels with a high level delegation of
senior officials from the ministry of agriculture, commerce,
science and technology and a group of businessmen who are
expected to sign several memoranda of understanding (MOUs) while
here.

However, the trip is seen mostly as an effort at this stage to
revive the civilizational and cultural links between the two
Asian giants.

"Here culture is not defined just as song and dance but the
act of reaching out to people, meeting them in the hope of
understanding them better before striking up a deeper
friendship," Venkatraman said.

The fact is that ever since the Cold War ended India has
looked for a more meaningful relationship with the countries of
Southeast Asia. New Delhi's "Look East" foreign policy was
formulated in 1991 when it asked to be a sectoral dialogue
partner of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and
then a full dialog partner in 1995.

After its participation in the Afro-Asian movement in the
1950s, India went missing in this region.

It was the defeat in 1962 in the war with China, preoccupation
with wars with Pakistan over India's northernmost province of
Jammu and Kashmir, estrangement with the USA and closeness to
Moscow throughout the Cold War period that isolated India from
the rest of Asia. After the death of Sukarno, an old friend, the
relationship between Indonesia and India further lost its spark.

Besides, the country's stubborn insistence on an inward
looking economy for over four decades made it economically
irrelevant to the emerging tigers of Southeast Asia.

It took the twin shocks of the collapse of Soviet Russia and
the terrible state of its own economy in early 1990 to shake
India out of its South Asian ghetto, to open its eyes to the
"Look East" policy and to rekindle the desire to awaken ancient
bonds, especially with countries similar to itself like
Indonesia.

After the democratization of Jakarta, it seemed the right time
to work together for a larger market configuration for making not
just each country strong but also Asia as a whole.

Already India does more trade with Indonesia than with
neighboring Pakistan, and with Singapore than with Bangladesh.
After the USA and Europe, it is the countries of ASEAN that are
India's major economic partners, particularly Indonesia where
just agro-based exports to India total US$1.6 billion.

India needs natural gas from Indonesia and hopes to have it
shipped from Aceh in northern Sumatra that is only 90 nautical
miles away from India's Andaman islands.

Indonesia hopes to benefit from the transfer of scientific
know-how, and information technology.

A bilateral partnership is also seen as a broader front to
ward off unnecessary western pressures often on human rights,
democracy or trade issues. Besides India needs to point out to
China all the friends it has in the region and as the home of
millions of Muslims it could do with an ally or two in the
Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) as well.

Vajpayee also encourages the overseas Indian community to
strengthen the emotional, cultural and spiritual bonds to the
country of their origin seeking the help of the Indian diaspora
to make India a knowledge superpower by 2010. Keeping this in
mind Abdurrahman had traveled to India with over 70 businessmen
as part of his entourage and some of them were of Indian origin.

"And what better time than now to strengthen all bilateral
relations in Asia while the Bush administration is still busy
settling down in Washington," points out Saeed Naqvi, television
journalist and foreign affairs expert to The Jakarta Post over
telephone from New Delhi.

The writer is a Jakarta-based Indian journalist.