India’s deepening relations with Japan February 26, 2010
Posted by southasiamasala in Guest authors, India.Tags: economy, foreign policy, India, Japan, trade
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Guest Author: Nabeel Mancheri, Jawaharlal Nehru University
This article first appeared on the East Asia Forum on 25 February 2010.
The Annual Bilateral Summit in New Delhi on 29 December 2009 marked a stepping stone in the relationship between India and Japan. During the summit, Dr. Yukio Hatoyama and Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Ministers of Japan and India respectively, held discussions on bilateral, regional and global issues and reaffirmed that Japan and India share common values and strategic interests. They pledged to further develop their Strategic and Global Partnership in an effort to strengthen their bilateral relations and ensure peace and prosperity throughout the region and the world.
Until the 1990s, the relationship between India and Japan had been highly asymmetrical. The Cold War created a strategic-political void between the two countries. Economically, India was too inward-looking to be of any great interest to Japan. The post cold-war realities, however, have been forging new strategic bonds.
Australia-India relations: looking for respect? December 4, 2009
Posted by southasiamasala in Brewster, David, India.Tags: Australia, China, foreign policy, India, international relations, students
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David Brewster
Auriol Weigold in ‘A media-driven view of the Australia-India relationship‘ has captured well the type of difficulties that Australia is likely to face in trying to develop a closer political relationship with India.
Weigold highlights the types of issues which many in New Delhi (and not just the Indian media) see as inhibiting the further development of the relationship. She nominates: Australia’s neutral stance on India’s border dispute with China; Australia’s failure to join the proposed Quadrilateral dialogue in 2007; and Australia’s refusal to supply uranium to India. There is some value in considering each of these issues in turn in order to understand what they really mean for both India and Australia.
First, is the question of Australia’s position on the long-running Sino-Indian border dispute. While India naturally wants as much international support as it can get in its dispute with China, it is difficult to see how Australia would have any interest in taking a position on an argument over the validity of colonial-era territorial claims. There would be significant costs to Australia from inserting itself into this dispute between these two Asian giants – for what gain?
India’s approach to Pakistan: whose side are we on? September 23, 2009
Posted by southasiamasala in Guest authors, India, Pakistan.Tags: foreign policy, India, Pakistan
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Guest author, Rajiv Kumar, Director, ICRIER
This article first appeared in East Asia Forum and the Times of India
Security hawks, the media’s foreign policy experts and the political class had a field day after July’s Indo-Pakistani joint statement. Particularly for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose astute leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee once took the boldest of steps to liberate India from its Pakistan obsession, nationalism seems confined to overtly displaying our superiority over a smaller neighbour, one fighting with its back to the wall against destabilising forces. Good foreign policy, however, has to be more nuanced so that our long-term national interests are served.
To better appreciate complex diplomatic endeavours, we must start by taking note of some facts. First, India accounts for about 80 per cent of South Asian GDP. Being so dominant, it has to bear an asymmetric responsibility for achieving stability, peace and prosperity in South Asia. This must be the bedrock of our neighbourhood policy. Second, we cannot choose our neighbours and should work with whoever we can to help Pakistan defeat the jihadis. Otherwise, there will be negative outcomes for our own experiment at building a pluralistic, multi-ethnic and democratic society. Third, the strategic balance between the two countries must surely rule out any ideas of a decisive military victory. That road leads only to mutually assured destruction. We may well have to bite the bullet one day, but it is best avoided.
The Australia-India bilateral relationship: neglected or out of sync? August 25, 2009
Posted by southasiamasala in India, Weigold, Auriol.Tags: Australia, foreign policy, India
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Auriol Weigold
Sixty-two years ago at “the stroke of the midnight hour” on 14/15 August 1947, India became an independent nation, its recent anniversary celebrated with congratulatory and hopeful words. Since 1947, however, the Australia-India bilateral relationship has attracted many ambivalent phrases to describe the stop-start, hot-cold nature of our bilateral connection.
Such phrases have suggested, for example, that Australia and India inhabit only each others’ peripheral vision, that India is Australia’s blind spot, that each should send the other the right signals about progressing the relationship and, perhaps the most graphic description of our on-again-off-again relationship, an allusion to the Grand Old Duke of York who “marched his men to the top of the hill, then marched them down again” – repeatedly.
Despite our many shared values and commonalities from democracy to cricket, these epithets resonate. How indicative are they of ongoing reservations? Arguably they express both nations’ awareness of a gulf between their international priorities over time.
India and Australia: back to the future August 24, 2009
Posted by southasiamasala in India, Stoddart, Brian.Tags: Australia, education, foreign policy, India, students
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Brian Stoddart
One interesting book on my shelves has some evocative chapter titles: Australia’s Need for Exports; The New India; Is India Stable?; Must India Remain Poor; The Resources of India; India’s Financial Position; What Does India Plan?; Australia’s Trade with India; Australia’s Participation in the New Indian Market. That book might well have been published in the past few months but it is, of course, Bertram Stevens’ New Horizons: a Study of Australian-Indian Relationships published in 1946.
The evocation for me springs from two major sources.
First, Australia does have a long history of interaction with India as we all know. One long-term resident of Madras, for example, recalled watching Australian horses thrown overboard off the southern port and herded towards shore in the 1870s, perhaps at least a hundred years after the ‘Walers’ first appeared in India. Australian racehorses, jockeys, trainers and bookmakers were all prevalent in the later nineteenth century, as were polo players and cricket coaches in the early twentieth. That was without counting missionaries and teachers and business people and all the rest who went there from very early points.
That was transformed a few generations on into a strong academic interest with the line, perhaps, beginning with Sir Harold Bailey who, although born in England, grew up in Western Australia where he trained in linguistics before going back to England where he became pre-eminent in South Asian languages. By the 1960s history and politics had become the prime focus and Australia was a world centre for India expertise.
But that leads to the second evocation, which is: how did it all go so wrong? We now have columnists telling us to get interested in India when we have already cycled at least a couple of academic generations through the system and having failed to convince successive governments of what Stevens was telling us over sixty years ago: India is important!
The mystery behind the student débâcle August 2, 2009
Posted by sandygordon in Gordon, Sandy, India.Tags: Australia, foreign policy, India, students
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Sandy Gordon
Problems with overseas students are not new. Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke famously cried over the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and agreed to let 10,000 Chinese students stay. Many of them were on dubious short courses and on visas of doubtful provenance. Nevertheless, those who stayed have mostly made excellent citizens.
Nor are the twin problems of dodgy training providers and violence against overseas students unique to Australia. According to the BBC, “Tens of thousands of foreign students may have entered the UK to study at bogus colleges … before the system of accreditation was tightened up this year”. That system was tightened up not because of concerns about providers, but on grounds of security. Ten Pakistani ‘students’ suspected of terrorism were found to be ‘attending’ colleges for various short courses that were clearly little more than an immigration scam.
As to violence against Asians, one has only to recall the wave of so-called ‘Paki-bashings’ perpetrated by extreme-right louts in the UK and to a lesser extent Canada since the 1960s to realise that Asians in Australia are not necessarily any more at threat than they are in other Western countries. Then there were the anti-Asian riots in Burnley and elsewhere in the Midlands in 2001. Australia has experienced nothing on this scale – certainly not the Cronulla riots. In Russia, Asian students are regularly hunted down and attacked by overtly racist, skinhead gangs. Many have been killed in these encounters.
None of this, of course, excuses Australians or their government for what has happened to overseas students here. But it does raise an important and hitherto un-asked question about India. (more…)