India's Geopolitics and Southeast Asian Security

Summary

Introduction

As the weakest of the major powers in Asia, India is understandably the least consequential for the ordering of Southeast Asian security. Nevertheless, India's importance for security politics of Southeast Asia is beginning to grow, if only slowly. The debate on India's rise and its implications for Asian and global balance of power centres around the new expectations and residual scepticism about the sustainability of India's recent impressive economic performance — of around 8 per cent annual growth rates during the first decade of the twenty-first century. If India can maintain this performance, India's political and military weight in Southeast Asia will undoubtedly improve. The last few years have also seen the maturation of India's “Look East” policy launched in the mid-1990s. The expectations on India's rise have also begun to inject a new dynamism into India's relations with the great powers of Asia — the United States, China, and Japan. As a result, India is no longer marginal to either the regional politics of Southeast Asia nor the great power system that shapes it. For the first time since the mid-1950s, when its economy turned inward and its foreign policy drew closer to the Soviet bloc, India is now becoming an important factor in the security calculus of Southeast Asia.

India's Regional Diplomacy

India's enthusiasm for participating in and shaping regional political and security arrangements is relatively new. After its early disappointments in trying to build Asian unity and solidarity in the 1950s, India's political emphasis decisively turned global and multilateral. The presumed leadership of the non-aligned movement (NAM) gave India a stage to articulate its larger aspirations. But the obsession with NAM inevitably diluted the inheritance from British Raj, which was at the heart of the imperial defence system in the entire Indian Ocean littoral. To be sure, newly independent India nursed the ambitions of sustaining the Raj legacy on regional security.