Opinion Ram Madhav writes: India and the new world order

Therein lies a major challenge for India. It developed institutions and initiatives based on the premises of the old world. But the emerging order calls for a new way of thinking about its geostrategic priorities. During the ill-fated Cultural Revolution years in China, Chairman Mao Zedong used to call for the abolition of the “Four Olds” — old ideology, old culture, old habits and old customs. This might be a wrong analogy, but India, too, needs to come out of the mindset of the last century.

India has built a strong partnership with Europe over the past few decades. In recent years, the Narendra Modi government has successfully enhanced engagement with Middle Eastern powers like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Out of those engagements emerged the ambitious India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) initiative. IMEC is a promising initiative connecting South Asia with the GCC region and Europe. Signed in September 2023 on the sidelines of the G20 summit in New Delhi, IMEC became the flavour of the season for many strategic pundits and fodder for think tanks.

However, given the changed geopolitical scenario in Eurasia, India needs to recalibrate IMEC carefully. Although a beneficial project, it faces daunting challenges, the cauldron in Eurasia being the major one. With stability eluding the region, IMEC’s future, too, remains ambiguous. At a more fundamental level, the positioning of IMEC itself has been flawed. Most commentaries seek to pit it against China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Confusing the geo-economic with the geo-strategic is one of the old-school traits that many in India fail to overcome. It must be remembered that almost all the member countries of the GCC are partners in the BRI while at least 17 out of 27 EU member countries have closer trade ties with China. Only Italy decided to quit the BRI recently while the rest continue to enjoy Chinese largesse.

There is IMEC-related romanticism too, with some scholars overemphasising the millennia-old history when India traded with Europe through ports in the Gulf. It is a fact that India traded in spices and textiles with Europe in return for gold in the good old days — so much so that scholars in Rome used to bitterly complain to their emperor that India was draining all the gold from their kingdom. But today’s reality is different. Oman, whose ports were an important part of the route in ancient times, is not even part of IMEC.

Then there is the logistics nightmare. In the IMEC scheme, goods from India will reach Middle Eastern ports like Jebel Ali (Dubai) by sea lines. From there, they will be transported through the land route to Haifa in Israel. Beyond Haifa, it will again be a journey through the sea lines to European ports like Marseille in France and Trieste in Italy. Some argue that it bypasses the Suez Canal and thus helps save time and money for the exports. This is contestable. Seventy-five ships pass through the Suez Canal every day in normal times. Each carries a minimum load of 1,00,000 tonnes. If the Suez needs to be bypassed, it requires massive rail infrastructure through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Israel. One has to look at the numbers just to understand the magnitude of the challenge. A single reasonably long freight train can carry 5,500 tonnes of goods. That means for every ship diverting to the Middle East, we need a minimum of 18.5 trains to carry that load to Israel. One can easily calculate the number of trains required and the time this would consume if even a fraction of the ships decide to junk Suez and take this route. Moreover, countries on the land route like Jordan and Egypt are still not part of IMEC.

Undoubtedly, beyond these nightmarish challenges lies the opportunity of the $18 trillion economy of the EU that India can explore. But it must also be kept in mind that the EU’s GDP growth is sluggish at around 1 per cent, and China is already a big presence in the EU market with a more than 55 per cent share in the manufactured goods sector and a significantly growing share in other key sectors. That leaves less scope for India to penetrate.

India has a history of such projects. Long before venturing into the IMEC initiative, in 2000, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government announced the North-South corridor project with much fanfare. It was duly signed by India, Russia and Iran in 2003. Two decades later, while the project remained on paper for India, China quickly entered and built formidable ties with the two countries.

Similarly, we talked about a Look East policy in the 1990s, seeking to build strong ties with the roaring Asian Tigers. It became the Act East policy under PM Modi. Yet our engagement with a region that became a free trade partner in 2010, and a comprehensive strategic partner in 2022, remained below par. While India’s trade with ASEAN remains at $120 billion, China’s trade is touching $1 trillion and growing rapidly.

Besides IMEC, Eastern and Central Europe, Russia and ASEAN are important regions for India’s geostrategic objectives. It is time India reconfigured its global engagements, going beyond old-world romanticism and Cold War calculations, and followed a multidirectional approach with specific end goals.

The writer, president, India Foundation, is with the BJP. Views are personal