Asia Times: Part 1: How Asian is India?


	February 14, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Asia Times Online presents this series of articles in collaboration with Heartland. Issues that are to be covered include: One India, many Indias?; Doing business in India; Ways into the Indian market; The EU and India; Does India need nuclear weapons?; and Energizing India.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING INDIA
Part 1: How Asian is India?
By Sanjaya Baru

Geographically, the Republic of India lies in the belly of Asia. It is a nation of continental dimensions with civilization attributes. Its western reaches touch Central Asia and its eastern reaches lie close to China in the northeast and the Malacca Straits in the southeast. India's maritime neighbors include the states of the Persian Gulf and the nations of Indochina.

India is the place of origin of Asia's most widely practiced religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and has for centuries also been home to the world's other two great religions, Islam and Christianity. Christianity came to India directly from West Asia, crossing the Arabian Sea, long before Europeans set foot on the subcontinent. Buddhism traveled via Afghanistan and Central Asia into China and Mongolia, leaving behind historic monuments in Bamiyan and Bokhara, in Samarkhand and Sinkiang. Hinduism spread across the Himalayan mountains and the plains below and into peninsular India, from where it set sail into Java, Sumatra, Indonesia and the kingdoms of Indochina. Hindu temples are found even to this day in Vietnam. Islam spread across many parts of Southeast Asia from India. India's cultural imprint is visible all over Asia.

So the question in civilization terms, if one is permitted journalistic license, is not "how Asian is India?" but "how Indian is Asia?" But who cares for history and civilization? This is the age of economics and of per capita income. Evaluated against the score of economic growth and trade openness, India lies in the penumbra of the Asia that North America discovered after World War II and integrated into its own economic growth process. It is for this reason that "Asia" for many in the Americas has come to mean East and Southeast Asia.

India has, for the worshippers of the market, been priced out of Asia. Having been woken up by Asia, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor off its Pacific coast, and finding so many Chinese, Japanese and Koreans on its west coast, the United States quite understandably began its discovery of Asia from the east. Never mind that Europe, in the form of Christopher Columbus, stumbled upon America in search of India. The latter remained a distant land for the Yankee, Europe's "Far East" was America's "Near East", its Asia.

Geography
Geography textbooks are quite clear about where India lies. Dudley Stamp, the distinguished Australian geographer, reminds us of what European geographers have suggested for a long time, namely that the world is divided into seven continents - Europe, North and South America, Asia, Australasia (including the islands of the Pacific), Africa and Antarctica. The geographer's Asia begins near Istanbul and ends near Hokkaido. It stretches across West Asia, Central Asia, Eurasia, the Indian subcontinent ("South Asia" is an Americanism, perhaps invented in the US State Department after World War II), through China and "Indochina" (mark the concept) all the way to Japan.

The French historian Fernand Braudel refers to the "Malacca peninsula" (present-day Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore) and the islands of Java and Sumatra as the "center of gravity of the Far East" (F Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: The Perspective of the World, Collins/Fontana Press, 1988). Add to this region Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and you get what Stamp and many other geographers have for long called "Indochina". Why Indochina? Therein lies the answer to the question of the Asianness of India. India and China were the dominant civilization entities of Asia impacting on the culture and life of the people of this region for centuries. Note the origin of the name "Indonesia" itself. Little wonder then that this region is called Indochina. It is the heart of Asia, of which China is the expansive chest and India the enormous belly. But the purely geographical basis of India's Asianness is all too evident to anyone who looks at a map.

History and politics
To be sure, though, the geographical aspect of India's Asianness is not purely cartographic. It is both geopolitical and geoeconomic. History bears witness. Consider again Braudel's reflections: "The Far East taken as a whole, consisted of three gigantic world economies: Islam, overlooking the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and controlling the endless chain of deserts stretching across Asia from Arabia to China; India, whose influence extended throughout the Indian Ocean, both East and West of Cape Comorin; and China, at once a great territorial power - striking deep into the heart of Asia - and a maritime force, controlling the seas and countries bordering the Pacific. And so it had been for many hundreds of years."

Braudel notes the depth of India's economic integration with Asia and its central position in the history and politics of the continent thus: "The relationship between these huge areas was the result of a series of pendulum movements of greater or lesser strength, either side of the centrally positioned Indian subcontinent. The swing might benefit first the East then the West, redistributing functions, power and political or economic advance. Through all these vicissitudes, however, India maintained her central position: her merchants in Gujarat and on the Malabar or Coromandel coasts prevailed for centuries on end against their many competitors - the Arab traders of the Red Sea, the Persian merchants of the Gulf, or the Chinese merchants familiar with the Indonesian seas."

Having conducted his monumental and comprehensive survey of world capitalism, Braudel had no doubt at all in his mind that India was an integral part of the "super world economy" of Asia. However, Braudel also reminds us that it was with the arrival of the Europeans as a maritime force into the waters of the Indian Ocean that India "gradually lost control of the 'country trade' routes throughout Asia".

The conquest of India by Europe started a process that disrupted the links between the subcontinent and the rest of Asia. The bountiful subcontinental economy and its prosperous trade was disconnected from ancient and long-standing links with West and Central Asia, China and Indochina and linked to Europe and to the wider British Empire. Where India's Asian links were kept alive it was more to destroy Britain's rivals in Asia rather than strengthen India's links with the mother continent. Consider for instance the opium trade with China. Here India was used as a springboard for the conquest of the Chinese market. For centuries India and China had lived as friendly neighbors. There is no recorded history of conflict between any Indian kingdom and the Empire of China. It is the British who sowed the seeds of conflict. The same was the case with Indochina. Historically India's links with this region were benign. Even when Hinduism, Buddhism and later Islam spread to this region the process was largely benign, with rarely any conquest and conflict.

However, the colonial control of the "spice route", the desire to establish entrepots and commercial monopolies, created relationships of inequity in the region that to this day influence Indochina's attitudes toward India and Indians in the region.

In sum, India's links with Asia to its east were disrupted for the first time in history by the arrival of Europeans in the region. Europe pursues much the same policy by its not-so-subtle policy of "divide and engage" when the European Union creates a forum with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and dubs it a "Europe-Asia" forum and India is kept out. How can "Europe" engage "Asia" without India's participation? Until even half a century ago this would have been unthinkable - in India, in rest of Asia and the whole of Europe.

The most important factor contributing to this disruption in the second half of the 20th century was the Cold War. Asia to India's east was drawn deeply into the Cold War and India's "non-aligned" status contributed to a weakening of her political links with Asia. This was not the case to begin with. Indeed, in the 1950s India, under Jawaharlal Nehru's leadership, and Indonesia, under Sukarno's leadership, actively pursued the idea of a new Asia. The Asian Relations Conference was part of this attempt to forge a new post-colonial Asian identity. Nehru was obsessed by India's Asian identity and Indochina's Indian roots. The politics of the Cold War, on the one hand, and India's own "inward-looking" model of industrial development, weakened India's interface with much of Asia.

Economics
It is the economic dimension that, in the final analysis, appears overwhelmingly to influence post-World War II perceptions of India's Asianness. Four distinct factors have shaped this perception.

First, after World War II the United States established strategic relations with Japan and South Korea and with some Southeast Asian nations such as the Philippines, thereby emerging as an Asian strategic power. Since India was not part of this anti-communist alliance and opted to remain "non-aligned" in the Cold War, US relations with East and Southeast Asia accelerated at a pace that diminished India's profile in North America. Europe's preoccupations with its own post-war reconstruction, its focus on the trans-Atlantic relationship, the impact of the Cold War on Western European relations with Asian nations and the process of decolonization together combined to reduce Europe's interest in the Indian subcontinent.

Second, the outward orientation of Southeast Asian economies, their decision to pursue an export-oriented growth strategy and their dependence on Western markets increased the interaction between the ASEAN member nations and the trans-Atlantic economies.

Third, the "new relationship" between China and the United States and the early pursuit of outward-oriented industrial development by China, after 1978, increased the interaction between China and the trans-Atlantic, especially North American nations.

Finally, India's pursuit of an inward-looking model of import-substituting industrialization reduced its own interaction with the industrial market economies of Western Europe and North America.

It is obvious that the Cold War was an important element influencing the first three factors above, and India's self-imposed isolation was a second element. India's share of world trade was 2 percent in the 1950s and declined to 0.5 percent by the 1980s. Indeed, as late as 1975 India and China had similar shares of world trade but by 1995 India had a share of 0.7 percent while China's share was close to 4 percent. Asia to India's east witnessed a similar expansion in its share of world trade through the 1980s and 1990s until the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s.

India's inward orientation and the small share of its exports in world trade, as well as the geopolitical and geoeconomic dimensions of the Cold War, reduced its profile in the West. Little wonder then that a new generation of postwar analysts in the West ask the historically ill-informed question whether India is in fact an Asian power. We are as Asian as China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Iran. But it is our economic isolationism of the post-war period that has diminished our visibility until recently.

The 1990s were a turning point. Not only did the Cold War cease to shape Western attitudes about India, but also our own increased outward orientation has helped to reduce our marginalization. India's "new economic policies" of the 1990s, emphasizing greater trade and investment liberalization, and the high-profile migration of skilled Indian workers and professionals to the West, especially North America, have helped increase India's economic and cultural profile abroad. In short, India's increased globalization is shaping Western perceptions about her once again.

Conclusion
We shall be indiscreet and also suggest that another factor has forced the West to rediscover India's Asianness. This is the emergence of China as a strategic competitor to the West. China's impressive economic performance in the 1990s and the momentum its economic has gained have woken up the West to the possibility of a new "superpower" taking shape in Asia. China has begun to impact on the politics and economics of almost all its neighbors, spread across the length and breadth of the Asian land mass. From Iran, Pakistan and Central Asia to the west, Russia and Mongolia in the northwest, to the countries of ASEAN in the South and Japan and Korea in the east, China is today a major strategic and economic player. Both North America and Western Europe appear concerned by China's relentless pursuit of economic growth and power and its rising military profile.

If the trans-Atlantic nations persist with their myopic post-war and Cold War view of Asia, then it would seem that the whole of Asia has been already linked to the growth engine of the Chinese economy and has come into the shadow of China's power and influence. Perhaps for this reason there is now a willingness to recognize that Asia is larger than China and its southern and eastern neighbors. That Asia includes another nation of a billion people, a nation that has lived as an equal with China for at least 3,000 years of recorded history. India and China have been civilization entities and peaceful neighbors through all recorded history. Buddhism traveled to China from India and communism traveled from China to India. Today China stands as a self-confident power, almost a superpower, but through all history we were equals. We were Asian; we were as a civilization Asian.

India is Asian but is also rediscovering her Asianness. In 1992, the government of P V Narasimha Rao launched a policy of greater economic and political engagement with East and Southeast Asia dubbed the "Look East Policy". This has unleashed renewed interest in India's historical and civilization links with Asia, but it has also helped promote greater economic relations today.

The economic links with ASEAN, Japan and South Korea have been on the increase. India's trade with Asia has grown faster than its trade with the rest of the world over the past decade. South Korea emerged as the fastest-growing source of foreign direct investment into India in the late 1990s. India's European links, forged in the era of colonialism, are fading. It is with the United States and with Asia that India is increasingly interacting. Indian software professionals are eager to pursue a professional life in North America or in developed Asia and Australia. There are no takers for continental Europe. Europe must ponder this trend and ask itself why it has allowed this to happen.

India's Asianness is no longer merely historical or geographic - it is increasingly reacquiring an economic content, restoring the kind of relationship that, according to Braudel, the Europeans encountered when they first arrived in the waters of the Indian Ocean, the only ocean named after a people and which washes the southern shores of Asia.

((c) Heartland. This version has been edited by Asia Times Online.)
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