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.