India
hunts down deeper Tajik
links By Robert M Cutler
MONTREAL - India's S M Krishna,
underlining his country's deepening involvement in
Central Asia, this month paid the first visit to
Tajikistan by an Indian foreign minister in nine
years, using his trip to discuss both foreign
policy and economic issues.
Tajikistan
holds a significant strategic place in Indian’s
view of the world, despite its relatively small
size (143,100 square kilometers) and population -
7.6 million. Its immediate borders are with
Afghanistan, China, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan,
but they also run close to Pakistan's
Gilgit-Baltistan (part of historical Jammu and
Kashmir claimed by India) and Khyber Pukhtunkhwa
(formerly North-West Frontier Province).
India maintains its only foreign military
base in Tajikistan, the
Farkhor Air Base, which
India rebuilt and refurbished at a cost of US$10
million two years ago. The bas is sometimes called
Ayni, after the nearby capital of the eponymous
province.
While India's strategic
cooperation with Tajikistan in areas such as
counter-terrorism and defense have grown deeper
especially over the course of the last decade,
bilateral relations and direct meetings with
Tajikistan's leaders were only one reason for
Krishna's visit to Dushanbe.
He also
addressed a regional conference of Indian
ambassadors to 11 of the 15 the former Soviet
republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. (Only the
three Baltic Republics and Moldova are not on this
list.)
At the bilateral economic level,
Tajikistan's enormous potential for generating
hydroelectric power is of interest to Indian
industry, which is already helping to develop the
Varzob-I hydropower station. Tajikistan produces
more hydroelectric power than any other Soviet
successor state except Russia, yet is is compelled
to import natural gas from Uzbekistan to meet its
own energy demand.
In Dushanbe, Krishna
outlined India's new "Connect Central Asia"
strategic direction announced last month. This
strategy seeks increased economic cooperation with
the region, and concomitant political and
strategic penetration. It was first announced
publicly in Bishkek by his deputy, E Ahamed, in a
keynote address at the first meeting of the
nongovernmental, civil-society oriented
India-Central Asia Dialogue.
There Ahamed
described a plan to use distance education and
"tele-medicine" to link the five Central Asian
states together with one another and with India.
He noted that this was modeled on a Pan-African
"e-network" that India was developing jointly with
the African Union.
So far, India's trade
with the whole region is estimated at an anemic
US$500 million per year, so when Krishna sought to
put more flesh on the Connect Central Asia policy
skeleton, he emphasized enhancing India's access
to Central Asia's natural resources under the
mnemonic "Four C's" of "Commerce, Connectivity,
Consular, and Community".
To move towards
these goals, India looks to extend its "soft
power" in the region, for example by setting up a
Central Asian University in Kyrgyzstan to focus on
information technology (IT), management,
philosophy, and languages. India thus seeks to
include human, rather than just information,
networking into the Connect Central Asia
initiative through people-to-people and cultural
contacts.
Whatever progress is made in
that direction through expanded numbers of airline
flights and deployment of IT, however, will be
unable to overcome the formidable natural barrier
represented by the Himalayan mountains.
Perhaps understandably, therefore, the
Indian initiative towards Central Asia does not in
practice exclude Afghanistan (the north of which
has an important ethnic Uzbek population). Just
two weeks ago, New Delhi was the venue for an
international investors' conference attended by
over 270 enterprises and consultancies from India
and Afghanistan.
For India, Afghanistan's
significance is as a potential bridge between
South Asia and Central Asia. New Delhi
consequently has a special interest in ensuring
peace and security there, with economic
development as an instrument of such a strategy.
Long negotiations over the
Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI)
natural gas pipeline project are only the most
evident sign of such an approach. Converting
Afghanistan into a trade and energy hub is a key
component of India's foreign policy strategy in
the region looking beyond the scheduled withdrawal
of US troops in 2014.
Even before the
launch of the Connect Central Asia initiative,
India has been trying to gain entry directly into
Central Asian energy developments. Last year, an
agreement with Uzbekistan set the possibility for
India's ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) to cooperate with
Uzbekneftegaz in prospecting for oil and gas in
the country, and an agreement with Kazakhstan made
it possible for OVL to acquire a one-quarter share
in the latter country's offshore Satpaev block. An
OVL-led Indian consortium declined, however, on
purely economic and commercial grounds, to buy out
ExxonMobil's stake in the larger offshore Kashagan
development.
India has sought Tajikistan's
support for becoming a full member of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO), but the current
SCO members - China, Russia, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - have been
unable to agree even on the rules and requirements
for admitting new states.
Also, given
Russia's and China's joint diplomatic hegemony
within the SCO, it is difficult to see India
joining the organization without Pakistan
simultaneously becoming a member. Russia and China
have a two-decade head start on India as regards
the economic penetration of Central Asia and this
fact, together with geophysical obstacles,
represents a very difficult obstacle as New Delhi
seeks, not for the first time, to expand its
strategic horizon northwards.
Dr
Robert M Cutler (http://www.robertcutler.org),
educated at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and The University of Michigan, has
researched and taught at universities in the
United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and
Russia. Now senior research fellow in the
Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian
Studies, Carleton University, Canada, he also
consults privately in a variety of fields.
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