Editorial 1: Substance and subtext: On India-Bhutan ties
Introduction:
- Bhutan’s fifth king, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck’s visit to India this week had both substance and subtext.
Outcomes of the visit:
- The joint statement detailed cooperation in many areas.
- India has agreed to support Bhutan’s next development plans and extend additional standby lines of credit.
- Hydropower, the “cornerstone” of India-Bhutan ties, also received a boost, with the government agreeing to consider Bhutanese requests for expediting long-delayed projects (Sankosh and Punatsangchhu), revising upwards the tariff on Chhukha, the oldest project, and buying power from the Basochhu power project.
- New infrastructure projects include an integrated checkpoint for trucks at Jaigaon, a checkpoint for third country nationals and a cross-border rail link from Kokrajhar to Gelephu.
- Future partnerships could include space research, skilling, startups and STEM education, and a new Internet gateway for Bhutan, in keeping with the Bhutanese king’s new “Transform Initiative”.
- The Bhutanese government is also worried about the number of Bhutanese migrating overseas as youth unemployment in 2021 reached 21%. India too needs to pay more attention to this brain drain, as, in the past, Bhutan’s elite would have been educated in India.
- India stands to lose its edge in Bhutanese policy making and public narrative, and thus the projects outlined stand to benefit Delhi and Thimphu in keeping the talent within.
Role of China:
- However, it is the visit’s subtext — after recent comments by Bhutan’s Prime Minister Lotay Tshering indicating progress in China-Bhutan boundary talks — that must cause concern.
- China has offered this demarcation as part of a “package deal” with Doklam, the area near the trijunction with India, and strategically sensitive given its proximity to India’s Siliguri corridor.
- While Bhutan is clear that all talks about the trijunction would be “trilateral”, India’s concerns extend to any change in the area surrounding it, so there needs to be full clarity on the issue. New Delhi must also not allow hyper-nationalism and its antagonism with China to pressure Bhutan.
Doklam stand off:
- The 2017 China–India border standoff or Doklam standoff was a military border standoff between the Indian Armed Forces and the People's Liberation Army of China over Chinese construction of a road in Doklam, near a trijunction border area known as Donglang.
- In June 2017, as part of Operation Juniper, about 270 armed Indian troops with two bulldozers crossed the Sikkim border into Doklam, to stop the Chinese troops from constructing the road. In August 2017, both India and China announced that they had withdrawn all their troops from the face-off site in Doklam.
- For a peaceful resolution of the conflict in such tri-junction areas, the role of Bhutan is important between Indo-China boundary negotiations.
Conclusion:
- India’s time-tested ties with Bhutan have been predicated on not seeing each other in terms of the difference in their size but in counting each country’s prosperity as a win-win for both. More importantly, they have always anticipated the other’s interests before taking any step that could affect their long-cherished partnership.
Editorial 2: A long view of the South Asian drama
Introduction:
- Uncertainty, a defining characteristic of South Asian politics, looks set to increase. In this context, K. Subrahmanyam‘s paper “India’s Relations with her Neighbours”, published by Strategic Analysis, the flagship journal of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), in 1987, offers an analysis of the long term view.
Recent developments in South Asia:
- The region is undergoing great upheaval:
- Political, economic and security crises, Pakistan seems to be undergoing an implosion.
- With successive elections throwing up a hung parliament, prospects of political stability in Nepal remain bleak.
- Ahead of elections in Bangladesh, an enfeebled Opposition is attempting to revert to agitation.
- In Maldives, a presidential contest that could tilt the balance between democracy and authoritarianism is in the offing
- Sri Lanka is slowly recovering from an unprecedented economic meltdown.
- The run-up to the 18th Lok Sabha election in India is slated next summer.
Subrahmanyam’s views:
Unique Indian values
- The South Asian region constituted an integrated civilisational area bound together by shared religions, languages, cultural traditions and blood ties and, in respect of the three largest countries — India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — shared historical memories as well. Yet, the values underlying the Indian state stood out in contrast to those espoused by several of its neighbours.
- These values — secularism, democracy, federalism and linguistic autonomy — were not matters of choice for India. They were compulsions, if Indian unity and integrity were to be preserved.
- India pursued these values because they were not just imported western values but because they were absorbed and internalised during India’s century-long freedom struggle.
- India had endured because of its enormous capacity to absorb, internalise, modify and transform, and yet retain its personality. In the 19th century, as democratic values emerged in western Europe, they were accepted on an eclectic basis in India.
India as a unity
- Some of India’s neighbours, supported by sections of western scholarship, questioned the very concept of Indian integrity and unity. According to them, India was never united before the British brought the whole country under a single administrative structure.
- What was overlooked by these sceptics was that three or four centuries ago, there were no nation states anywhere in the world; only tribes, principalities, duchies, kingdoms and empires.
- Be it the entity ‘Aah Sethu Himachalam’ (Kanyakumari to Himalayas) in the people’s mind, the concept of Sarva Bhauma (Lord of the Earth) who had performed Aswamedha, the epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Ashokan edicts or the mutts of Adi Sankara, the concept of India as a cultural, civilisational unity differentiated from its surroundings was several millennia old and formed the basis of our nationhood.
- It is such shared historical memories that bind a people together as a nation, not language and not religion. The unity and integrity of a nation have to be based on a social contract among the people to be formulated and sustained through representative structures.
- Nationhood by itself is a secular political concept which has to be based on territoriality and a vision of society proposed to be built. Harking back to social mores and societal values obtaining several centuries ago and confusing them with the eternal verities of religion cannot form a firm basis for modern nation states.
Keys to coexistence
- From the above flowed the ultimate keys to peaceful coexistence in the subcontinent. India should grow in economic and technological terms and, as it does, its neighbours will adjust themselves to the Indian reality and stop thinking in terms of invoking China and other extra-regional powers as countervailing factors. This will be a long-term process.
- India’s neighbours, especially Pakistan, want it to play a very low key role in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). India should do exactly that and exercise extreme patience till such time as its neighbours realise how much it can help them in their nation-building and development.
- Reciprocity is a basic requirement for cooperation on issues such as river waters and the use of natural resources, but once the principle of reciprocity is accepted, India should go the extra mile and be generous.
Conclusion:
- Written at a time when the world was a different place, Subrahmanyam’s words are both reassuring and cautionary. Amidst the polarised discourse of our times, they are more relevant than ever. Above all, they underscore the inextricable linkage between the foundational values underpinning Indian nationhood and the great power status that India legitimately aspires for.