Our oceans give us the opportunity to be a benign peace,
stability and security provider for a region as vast as the
African and Arabian coasts, to the Pacific Islands.
The dissolution of the erstwhile Soviet Union marked the end of the cold war, and the beginning of a unipolar world with the United States left as the lone hegemonic global superpower. Communist China, then the world’s most populous nation with the fastest growing economy had a very different form of government. However, their ascent till then was much aided by the steady flow of capital and technology from the West. Most of the collective West believed that the privatization and deregulation of the Chinese economy, opening them up to the winds of globalisation, international trade, and foreign capital investments would be harbingers of change in their political system that would make it more “democratic” over time, and that China would then seamlessly fit into the US-led rules-based world order.
Alongside the détente between the West and China, much was changing across the globe. India liberalised our own economy in 1991, thus accelerating our economic trajectory. Japan then was the second largest economy in the world. Other Asian economies, especially those in East Asia, including South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam started to spectacularly grow from this period. The global centre of gravity of the world economy as well as state power started moving eastwards from the Atlantic. Asia is now home to the three of the five largest economies, and just the Indo-Pacific region accounts for 63% of the world’s GDP.
With the rapid growth of the Asian economies, their energy requirements skyrocketed. Lacking self-sufficiency, they all turned to Russia, West Asia and Africa for their critical energy requirements. Most of the shipments are through the Indian Ocean sea lanes. Not to be forgotten, sea routes remain the backbone of global trade, with over 80% of the volume of international trade in goods carried via this medium. The Indo-Pacific waters itself handles 60% of this aggregate. A few days of blockade in these ship routes critically endangers the energy and economic security of each of these economies. In a world where data has become the new oil, the Indo-Pacific waters have undersea cable installations that carry over 95% of international data traffic, including telephone and data communications. Hostile actors damaging this vital infrastructure would wreak havoc on digitized nations.
By the end of 2010, China became the second largest economy in the world, and in 2012, Xi Jinping took over as the paramount leader in China. In 2013, he launched the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a grand plan of collaborating with nations spread over a vast geographic area including regions in Eurasia, Africa, South America, and the Pacific to finance and build infrastructure and capacity of all kinds, with the maritime leg of the BRI originating from the South China Sea to Europe via the Indian Ocean, and from South China Sea to the Greater and South Pacific. This was envisioned as the initiative that would catapult China as the Middle Kingdom around which the rest of the world would circle around. Despite collaborating with China in the BRICS and SCO forums, India stayed out of the BRI as some projects pass through regions in Kashmir illegally occupied by Pakistan.
149 countries still signed on to this highly ambitious initiative. Saddled with high interest loans, many of these countries have however fallen prey to coercive Chinese debt trap diplomacy. With increasing economic activity and prosperity, Chinese military spending and build-up also burgeoned. In 2020, the Chinese Navy (PLAN) surpassed the US Navy fleet as the largest in the world.
A resurgent Russia is challenging the established security constructs in the Eurasian region. South China Sea, the Indian Ocean Region and the Taiwan Straits could face similar pressures from a rapidly militarizing China, alongside their ally, a belligerent and unpredictable North Korea. The US, with their military capabilities spread across the world may no longer be the predominant military or naval power in the Pacific, which is making them more reliant than ever on allies and partners for maintaining their prominence in the region. They are reinforcing their commitments to the Malabar Exercise, and the newly constructed AUKUS framework.
The bonhomie between the United States and China is now well and truly over. With the Chinese economy inching closer to the US, the relationship is reshaping into full blown hostility with the nations sanctioning each other, putting tariff barriers, trying to deprive each other of critical technologies and resources. Quad and the newly formed Indo Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) have “de-risking” from China, high tech collaborations, common standards, and resilient supply chains including critical raw materials, and security structures among partner countries as key focus points. These trajectories present new opportunities for India.
India’s External Affairs Minister, Dr S. Jaishankar, while addressing a ministerial meeting at Stockholm, had remarked that a multipolar world is feasible only with a multipolar Asia. The Indo-Pacific represents the microcosm of this emerging multipolar world. Here, multiple actors including Asian giants India and Japan, the ASEAN countries, South Korea, Australia are all playing integral roles through their actions and choices vis-à-vis the two great powers, the United States, and China in maintaining a free, open and inclusive region, where national sovereignty and territorial integrity are respected, where smaller nations are not coerced against their interests, and where competition does not lead to conflicts. Russia expanding its Vladivostok port capabilities would mean that another great power would be increasing their presence in the Indo-Pacific waters in the coming years.
Our oceans give us the opportunity to be a benign peace, stability and security provider for a region as vast as the African and Arabian coasts, to the Pacific Islands. India had launched the FIPIC with 14 Pacific Island nations during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Fiji in 2014. India has accelerated the setting up of strategic bases in the Andaman and Nicobar Island chain, that are closer to Indonesia than our mainland. Very recently, Narendra Modi’s visit to Papua New Guinea was the first ever by an Indian Prime Minister, strengthening our ties with the Pacific Islands. These are all steps well aligned to our transformation as a prominent pillar in a fast emerging multipolar world.