For the Ministry of External Affairs, the month of December was exceptionally busy, and this when External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj was on an extended leave of absence. Three heads of state – the President of Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmon; the President of the Kyrgyz Republic, Almazbek Atambaev; the President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo – and the Chairperson of the National Assembly of Vietnam, Madam Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan and the defence minister of Vietnam, Ngo Xuan Lich, visited India. It would be simple to slot these visits as courtesy calls after Narendra Modi’s visit to these countries — in July 2015, Modi became the first Prime Minister to call on all five of the Central Asian states and in September 2016, he stopped at Vietnam ahead of the G20 summit. Modi met with the Indonesian President Widodo, on the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit in Myanmar in 2014 and invited him to India. 

These visits could admittedly be seen as evidence of deepening bilateral ties between India and Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia and Indonesia and Vietnam in Southeast Asia. To have better relations with the neighbourhood has been a priority of the current government, which upgraded India’s ‘Look East Policy’ to ‘Act East Policy’ and has been trying to resuscitate the ‘Connect Central Asia’ policy. 

But all that would be missing the woods for the trees. For it is the strategic significance of these visits that makes them remarkable. China’s growing assertion of power has led to the build-up of intense rivalry in Asia. If we go over the pieces of the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative — which is sweeping across the continent of Asia and reshaping its infrastructure and connectivity with roads, ports, railways, pipelines, bridges — it becomes apparent that Central Asia and Southeast Asia are the crucial links to the Belt and Road initiative and the Maritime Silk Road that will connect China to Europe, the Middle East and Africa. 

Almost every country in Asia has been receptive to China’s advances and especially of OBOR, except for India, which has expressed its reservations. While the huge economic potential of OBOR makes it an offer too good to refuse, most countries need China’s largesse, but are wary of being in its debt and China potentially infringing on their sovereignty. “You have this Asian theatre which spreads from Central Asia to Southeast Asia, where India and China rub against each other, and where we see elements of competition and cooperation between both,” said Alka Acharya, director of the Institute of Chinese Studies. 

In a 2014 report published by the Lowy Institute, Sydney, foreign policy analysts Rory Medcalf and C Raja Mohan make the argument for “middle-power coalitions” as a way of countering China’s assertiveness and uncertainties about the United States of America’s response to it. The middle power coalitions are, “informal arrangements where regional players cooperate with one another on strategic issues, working in self-selecting groups that do not include China or the United States.” India and Japan have been in a tight huddle, but India has also been looking at ASEAN countries and Central Asian Republics.

In Central Asia, India is banking on its historical and cultural linkages that predate medieval times and continued through the Soviet era, though that hasn’t stalled China from making huge inroads in the region as its biggest investor and trading partner. India’s gambit in Central Asia is key for the success of the port of Chabahar in Iran to which India has pledged $20 billion and which will give India access to oil and gas resources in Iran and Central Asia. Chabahar being India’s answer to Gwadar, the port which China is developing in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, as part of the CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor). 

It is no coincidence that both the Chabahar Port and the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) a ship, rail and road trade route between India, Russia, Iran, Europe and Central Asia, which will integrate with Chabahar, featured heavily in talks between India and the leaders of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Also on the table were talks about India’s accession to the Ashgabat Agreement (a multi-modal transport agreement between Oman, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Pakistan) in 2016, bringing India closer to Central Asia. 

“The relationship with Central Asia is critical for India, for security and stability of the region, particularly for cooperation on Afghanistan, for access to natural resources and for trade and connectivity,” said Ashok Sajjanhar, former ambassador to Kazakhstan and Central Asia expert. India lost its lead he says, even though it was there for far longer than China, by withdrawing from the region in the past two decades. “India is perceived as the non-threatening presence that can balance against China,” he added. 

If we turn to Southeast Asia, the plot thickens with growing insecurity with the inevitability of China’s economic and military rise. “There is a far more dynamic element that China brings into Southeast Asia (vis-à-vis India) and it’s not as if it’s an entirely positive dynamism, there are negative elements also,” says Acharya. But, she says, we are viewed as the “good guys” who can potentially be useful. 

As in Central Asia, in Southeast Asia too India has been trying to counter China’s vast sphere of influence by boosting its presence and strategic interests through connectivity. An instance, the India-Myanmar-Thailand (IMT) Highway that Modi has recently proposed to be extended to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. 

The region, which has become the fulcrum for the rivalry between the US and China, was traditionally viewed as outside of India’s core interests, but that policy has been recalibrated. Increasingly, Southeast Asia has begun to figure prominently in India’s calculations for Asian coalitions, which explains India’s strong stand on the South China Sea dispute. Many policy hawks in India view Vietnam as India’s trump card against the China-Pakistan axis. Strategic affairs expert Bharat Karnad has long been a proponent of the theory of countering China and its rogue nuclear partners Pakistan and North Korea by arming the countries in China’s periphery, like Vietnam. With Modi’s visit to Vietnam and Widodo’s visit to India, defence ties between India and both Vietnam and Indonesia have been upgraded, with maritime cooperation at the crux. 

Even though it seems so, the competition in Asia is not exactly new. In the book, Restless Continent: Wealth, Rivalry and Asia’s New Geopolitics, published last year, Michael Wesley, an expert on Asian affairs, relates an amusing anecdote from the Asian Relations Conference in Delhi in 1947. Jawaharlal Nehru took to the stage and emphasised India’s cultural influence across Asia leading the Chinese to retaliate. “If you would like to know about India, you have to go to Afghanistan and Western Asia; to Central Asia, to China and Japan, and to the countries of Southeast Asia,” Nehru had said. The Chinese delegation, all het up, in turn talked about China’s considerable cultural influence on the continent. Wesley uses the undercurrents from the conference as presaging the current dynamic of confrontation and competition in Asia.

It is a good reminder in these times.