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| Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Insouciant diplomacy | | We need to go beyond golf and the social circuit |
| Sunanda K Datta-Ray / New Delhi Jan 16, 2010, 00:34 IST |
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It’s become a ritual at international conferences to pay obeisance to India’s growth and quickly move on to China dazzling — if not dominating — the world. I heard Chris Patten do that in Calcutta. I heard it again at the recent Regional Outlook Forum(ROF) 2010 organised by Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS). If a speaker bracketed India with China, it was a token genuflection. India soon faded out of the discussion.
An Indian diplomat in the audience might have pulled India back into focus but there wasn’t one at this 13th annual ROF though the 500 participants included European diplomats galore from all over the region. Bangladeshis too. Y Venugopal Reddy, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, was the only speaker from India. He is a distinguished economist gifted with a sense of humour and philosophic understanding (“Ideas are more important than interests and institutions”) and could have commented knowledgeably when someone asked about China’s investments in other Asian countries. But being averse to public controversy, Reddy let the question pass.
I am reminded of another ISEAS function in the early nineties when an American academic bracketed China’s seizure of Mischief Reef with Indian “intentions” in Fiji. A slim young man sprang up to challenge the assertion and spoke forcefully and at length. I got to know Bala Shetty, India’s deputy high commissioner (DHC), well because he never missed seminars and panel discussions where he had an opportunity to speak up for India. I last heard of Bala leaving Bahrain — Gulf Weekly called him “the well-loved and highly respected Indian ambassador” — with his wife Vasundhara for Sweden.
Now, India announces her presence with resounding silence. It’s been like that for some years. I recall Bala’s successor chatting to a fellow Indian outside India’s stall at an important exhibition in the then newly-opened Suntec City when a Singapore minister and his entourage did the rounds. The minister was received with ceremony, shown around and given a souvenir at every stall. But no one took any notice of him while he spent a few minutes looking round India’s display. Our DHC continued to chat with his chum, his back to the minister.
Lack of courtesy is matched by lack of interest. No one from India House bothers to follow trends in Southeast and Northeast Asia or listens to the expositions of distinguished regional experts. One diplomat used to boast he had better access than the British high commissioner. But that was not his doing. It was because Singapore prizes the Indian connection: Lee Kuan Yew has sought since the fifties to engage India in the region. I would not be surprised if Singaporean activism goes to the head of envoys who feel it’s beneath them to interact with their equals at public occasions.
It was left to a private Indian at the ROF to ask Eisuke Sakakibara, a former vice-minister for international finance in Japan who now teaches at Tokyo’s Waseda University, why he did not dwell more on India’s prospects after claiming in the keynote address that in the 19th century India and China jointly accounted for 45 per cent of the world’s GDP. Asia had been the world’s centre for 4,000 years, Sakakibara argued, and the 21st century would be the “Age of Asia”. But from all that he and others said, Asia might as well be China.
Sakakibara told the questioner that India had the choice of belonging to either a stagnant South Asia or a dynamic East Asia. He had started an India Economic Institute at Waseda University. He also felt the ASEAN Plus Three (China, Japan and South Korea) grouping whose formation was seen as an attempt at reasserting Asian regionalism after the Americans “torpedoed” his plan for an Asian Monetary Fund and Mahathir Mohamad’s East Asia Economic Caucus (“Caucus without Caucasians”) should be enlarged to AseanPlus Four. But including India could not mean Pakistan and Bangladesh too.
Countries cannot choose their geography. South Asia’s nuisance value alone may hold India back. But countries can and should choose diplomats whose interests rise beyond golf, the social circuit and duty-free loot. Indifferent representation abroad is not responsible for ROF participants wondering if BRIC (Brazil, Russia, China and India) is giving way to VISTA (Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey and Argentina). But effective diplomacy should anticipate threats and dispel fears. There can be no better venue for doing so than high-powered informal international gatherings such as the ROF. India ignores it at her peril.
sunandadr@yahoo.co.in
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