IAN HALL |

This article is a summary of the Mabini Dialogue talk given by Professor Ian Hall at the Foreign Service Institute of the Philippines on Friday 6 August 2016.

Since the early 1990s, India’s relations with South East Asia have been transformed. New Delhi’s ‘Look East’ policy, begun by Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, and now tagged by Narendra Modi as ‘Act East’, has helped build better economic links and greater security cooperation with regional states.

In the decade between 2003-04 and 2013-14, as one observer recently noted, the two-way trade between India and ASEAN members increased from $13bn to $75bn. To put that in perspective, the value of India’s trade with ASEAN is now about the same as he value of its trade with China. Perhaps more important is the inward investment India receives from ASEAN states, which totals about one eighth of all foreign direct investment into the country.

The economic health of South East Asia is now a significant concern for India. So too is its stability and security. Today, more than half of India’s total trade transits the Strait of Malacca. For that reason, India’s government has made it clear that it considers the South China Sea ‘the property of the world’, as former External Affairs Minister S. M. Krishna on South China Sea. More recently, at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar reaffirmed India’s insistence on freedom of navigation and over-flight in the area.

India is watching the unfolding of the territorial disputes in the region attentively, partly because it might be able to learn lessons from China’s behaviour – and the responses of other claimants – that might apply in India’s own border dispute with the People’s Republic. For strategic reasons, India is also keen to ensure the South China Sea does not become a ‘Chinese lake’. Aside from possible disruptions to trade and investment, New Delhi is concerned by the possibility that China could establish bases in the region that would allow it to project military power into the Indian Ocean.

To minimise that possibility – and to acquire the means to manage it, should it eventuate – India has upgraded its naval and air base in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, helpfully situated in the Bay of Bengal close to the Malacca Strait, and forged defence cooperation agreements and/or strategic partnerships with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam, as well as with Japan.

Over time, however, these ties will likely be tested, as India moves to build and deploy nuclear-powered submarines armed with nuclear-tipped missiles. Its first nuclear-powered submarine, the Arihant, is currently undergoing sea trials. It is anticipated that it will eventually be joined by another five such boats, each armed with either twelve missiles with a range of about 750km or four of a range of about 3000km.

At those ranges, as at least one recent observer has noted, the Arihant could not strike targets in northern China, like Beijing, from the Bay of Bengal. To do that, it would have to either launch its weapons from the South China Sea, or transit that area into the East China Sea.

An Indian deployment of nuclear-armed submarines into the South China Sea would not just irritate China, it would pose a challenge to ASEAN too. Back in 1995, it declared the region a nuclear weapon-free zone in the so-called Bangkok Treaty. Regional states – and their publics – might well balk at the presence of Indian nuclear arms in the region, though it is possible that some, looking for New Delhi to play a bigger role in managing Chinese assertiveness, might welcome it. Either way, their eventual deployment will complicate the strategic dynamics of an already complicated region.

Article by Griffith Asia Institute Acting Director and Centre for Governance and Public Policy Professor, Ian Hall.