Opinion Quest for influence

President Xi Jinping’s successful consolidation of budding bilateral partnerships with the Maldives and Sri Lanka this week underlines China’s expanding challenge to India’s regional primacy. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks to deepen bilateral and global cooperation with China in the formal talks with Xi in Delhi, he can’t ignore China’s growing capacity to limit India’s freedom of action in the subcontinent and the Indian Ocean. For decades, India had to endure the multiple negative consequences for its national security from China’s all-weather partnership with Pakistan and cope with Beijing’s quest for influence in Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. Delhi must now prepare to deal with China’s emergence as the most powerful extra-regional actor in the Maldives and Sri Lanka.

In Malé and Colombo, Xi arrived to enthusiastic welcomes and unveiled China’s impressive plans to boost economic cooperation with both countries. Delhi has no reason to object since India too is inviting China’s investments. After all, China is the world’s second largest economy and the biggest trading partner to most countries in the world. But some of China’s economic cooperation in the subcontinent is coming at India’s expense. The Maldives, which cancelled the Malé airport contract with the Indian company, GMR, has now handed over the modernisation of the airport to a Chinese company.

Advertisement

Worse still, Malé and Colombo are playing the China card against India and Xi is happily encouraging them. In both countries, Xi affirmed that China does not interfere in their internal affairs and will oppose others doing so. The reference to India, which has been involved in the democratic transition of the Maldives and promotion of Tamil minority rights in Sri Lanka, is obvious. That China’s active political cultivation of the two island-states is driven by a desire to gain strategic access to critical locations in the Indian Ocean has been evident for some time. Not surprisingly, Malé and Colombo have embraced Xi’s proposal for a maritime silk road. Xi announced plans to intensify defence and maritime cooperation with both the Maldives and Sri Lanka. As Malé and Colombo come close to crossing India’s implicit red lines on security cooperation with third countries, Delhi will need to do much more than lodge protests. Nor is it enough to merely proclaim, as the NDA government has done, that neighbourhood diplomacy is a top priority. If it wants to meet China’s challenge, Delhi needs to reform, root and branch, the manner in which it does political and economic business in the subcontinent and the Indian Ocean.