There can be no better way to reach out to a region than inviting its leaders as chief guests at the Republic Day celebrations. That makes the invitation to five from Central Asia a smart diplomatic move. Like it hosted 10 leaders from ASEAN earlier to boost the Act East policy, this should mark a milestone in an “Act North” or “Act North-West” policy that, indeed, both sides sorely require. 

The region is actually “near-north” for India going by the distance involved since the Himalayas have stopped being a barrier, and the presence of a perennially-adversarial Pakistan en route cannot be allowed to hold back the initiative. 

But as policy thrusts go, especially from the Indian side, going by past experience, the interest and emphasis flag from time to time and the momentum gets lost, making it difficult to resume in a significant way. 

Since nobody waits in this competitive world, others step in to fill any space. This has happened to India, among other regions, in Central Asia, to obvious advantage to a stronger China that has much more to offer. 

Strategic importance

Such competition apart, an outreach to Central Asia has also become a necessity for India if it is serious about seeking a balancer to the US-driven move in South and South-East Asia to ‘contain’ China. Whatever its dispute with China, India needs to retain and exercise its strategic autonomy, especially in its close neighbourhood. In that context, the role of Russia and what India's Ministry of External Affairs calls Eurasia cannot be overemphasized.   

The annual summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin this month – the 20th in a series – witnessed some significant discussions and moves in the run-up to the R-Day visits by the Central Asians and carry significant inputs that need to be pushed further. 

India, as also Eurasia – Russia and the Central Asian Republics (CARs) - have a common adversary in terrorism and need to make it a common goal to work on. All of them are threatened by the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan. If and when the Taliban regime will stabilize will depend upon its fight with the Islamic State-Khorasan, not to minimize the role of a relatively weakened Al Qaida. 

The threat is all the more significant since the Afghanistan-Pakistan – Af-Pak -- region hosts a large variety of Islamist militant groups who may have competing territorial and other ambitions but are bound by an ideology that has successfully promoted violent means. 

This, and the desire to see the end of the US’ two-decade presence in Afghanistan did motivate the Eurasians, Iran and China to forge a loose alliance of sorts, but they all have a common need to fight terrorism. 

The Afghanistan factor

While China may chart a somewhat different course since it has a close alliance with Pakistan, the Eurasians, and up to a point Iran, would need to return to the standpoint that India, edged out of Afghanistan for now, espouses. 

How the prodigals work together needs close coordination and watching, without ignoring the importance of a revived move to reintroduce the Russia-China-India collaboration. 

India, on its part, needs to return to Chabahar port where it let go of the initiative because of American pressures and the latter’s sanctions on Iran. India lost, and the US also lost the potential advantage of a developed Chabahar that would have allowed an alternate access to Afghanistan. It is an issue that requires early corrective by all concerned.     

As for India, it needs to ‘return’ to Central Asia. Former Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral would call the region India’s “extended neighbourhood” and nurtured it as ambassador to the erstwhile Soviet Union in the mid-1970s.  After Moscow, Tashkent (now capital of Uzbekistan) was his “second home”, where Raj Kapoor and Bollywood were equally popular. 

India’s outreach to CARs has fluctuated. It gained some momentum in the post-Soviet 1990s, especially when K. Raghunath was the Foreign Secretary. But it got stymied when the Taliban captured power in Afghanistan, yielding Pakistan the upper hand. 

This writer was part of a team visiting CARs just when Pakistan’s then Pakistan foreign minister Gauhar Ayub Khan was also visiting, lobbying hard for the Taliban. The CARs were wary of the Taliban since they were already busy fighting Islamist militancy in and around the Ferghana Valley, covering large swathes of territory covering three of the CARs. None bought Pakistan's line. 

Security aspects apart, there is a lot India can do, which it has not done so far. Gujral once told this writer of his failed attempt to resume Delhi-Tashkent flights by Air India. The state-owned airline found it uneconomical. But that was the time all airlines flying Delhi-Moscow hopped through different Central Asian capitals. They still do. 

Investment opportunities

Indian entrepreneurs have also shown little interest in Central Asia that was a virgin territory ready to be invested in the 1990s, and still remains so. Admittedly, they are small markets. But simultaneous operations in more than one, if not all of the CARs, can make them worthwhile.  

A young Indian entrepreneur this writer then met admitted to arriving as a teetotaler, but switching to meat and vodka, as he put it, to “understand the people and the market well.”   However, such initiative has been confined to small and medium level enterprises. Virtually unknown on the home territory, some pharmaceutical companies succeeded in tapping that market starved of medicines in the post-Soviet period. 

There is still scope for large Indian enterprises, including India-owned MNCs who have kept away. The “next level” of relationships that Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has offered to the CARs should cover not only fighting terrorism, but also economic ties, including investment and IT. 

It is also time to re-introduce Bollywood, post-Raj Kapoor, to the present generation of the young in the “extended neighbourhood”  of Central Asia. 

(The author is a senior journalist and foreign policy analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at mahendraved07@gmail.com)