This backgrounder explores three issues: the strategic significance of the South Pacific for India, the advantages that India enjoys over China in the region, and the status of India’s relationship with Papua New Guinea in the light of the recent visit by President Mukherjee.
Ceding PoK as part of a settlement does not comport with India’s national and strategic interests, especially in terms of dealing with the challenge posed by China-Pakistan collaboration.
There is a conscious effort on the part of India to re-energise the INSTC. However, sustaining the momentum achieved remains a major challenge before the member countries of the North-South connectivity project.
India’s ministerial presence at the Shangri La Dialogue could have helped India to articulate the new government’s strategic thought and expand from the realm of military diplomacy to defence diplomacy. So, is India’s defence establishment blind to probable benefits of participating in the Dialogue or are they thinking differently?
China has reoriented its foreign policy strategy since Xi Jinping became president. This could significantly recast China’s relations with Asian countries. The process that began with Xi Jinping’s coming to power in 2012–2013 reached, in a sense, a definitive moment, with the Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs held in Beijing in November 2014.
India needs to shape the nature and scope of the projects the bank will finance to support the Asian Century and its own re-emergence as one of the two centres of gravity in Asia.
This article addresses the question of why regional cooperation among Afghanistan’s neighbours has been so difficult despite these countries’ common concerns. To answer this question, Afghanistan is conceptualised as placed at the core of overlapping regions: South Asia, the Middle East, Central Asia and, through China’s influence, East Asia. Over the past decade, interactions among different regions ‘through’ Afghanistan have increased, and overlap has intensified.
The US will continue to do what it can for blocking rapprochement between India and China or Japan and China for it knows the danger of its loss of a dominant role in Asia. Despite all the distortions of time and space, the hard geographic reality of Asia will triumph just as it happened in Europe.
India’s global policy strategy is on the verge of major changes. Non-alignment as a cornerstone of foreign policy has become outdated given the power shifts in a multipolar world, especially through the emergence of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), which has put India in the position of being perceived as a potential new global player.
