{"id":651,"date":"2015-07-08T01:21:29","date_gmt":"2015-07-08T01:21:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/?p=651"},"modified":"2015-07-12T12:01:38","modified_gmt":"2015-07-12T12:01:38","slug":"modi-can-lead-south-asias-regional-and-global-integration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/?p=651","title":{"rendered":"Modi can lead South Asia\u2019s regional and global integration"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Gupta-400x256\"<\/a>India\u2019s domestic and international economic choices have not always been the wisest.<\/p>\n

At independence, India was determined to transcend the distorted pattern of economic integration with the world that two centuries of exploitative colonialism had engendered. But in the process, it ended up effectively locking itself out of global trade and investment flows altogether\u2014just at the time when advanced countries were tearing down their mercantilist tariff walls to make way for the liberal, post-war trading order.
\n Central planners in New Delhi foisted an import substitution industrialisation model of development, one suited to middle-income, primary-product exporters, upon an impoverished agrarian society. In doing so they condemned all but a privileged pocket of urban and public sector employees to the margins of the modern economy.
\nTwo decades later, as East and Southeast Asia\u2019s tiger economies were taking advantage of Japanese firms\u2019 outward direct investment (ODI) strategies to make labour-intensive and export-oriented manufacturing activities the centrepieces of their inclusion programmes, New Delhi ushered in the high noon of license-raj socialism. To this day India\u2019s employment protection legislation in the formal manufacturing sector remains among the most restrictive in the world. The share of manufacturing goods in India\u2019s exports is declining. And Indian and South Asian small and medium enterprises are mostly absent from Asia\u2019s dynamic vertically-integrated, production-sharing chains.<\/p>\n

India and Pakistan were founding members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), yet at its very outset opted to write a prohibitory exception to mutual trade relations into its rules. In the bitterness of partition and their first war over Kashmir, New Delhi imposed a trade embargo to choke off the nascent Pakistani state\u2014a legacy that has cautiously begun to be repaired since the late 1990s. Regionally, too, India to its detriment appears unable to purposefully engage within the current Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership negotiations, despite the gradual evisceration by the West of the most-favoured-nation principle in the multilateral system.<\/p>\n

A once integrated subcontinent is now among the least integrated spaces in the world. India must take the lead in restoring the economic unity of the subcontinent. The subcontinent\u2019s economic links to East Asia remain insubstantial. India must exercise a leadership role in constructing multiple lines of communication that imaginatively network the subcontinent with production processes and final markets in East Asia and the Pacific.<\/p>\n

India must not pass up the latest grand opportunity presented by China\u2019s ambitious \u2018One Belt, One Road\u2019 initiative to build complementary cross-border connectivity links that both bind it to the periphery and integrate it via the \u2018belt\u2019 and the \u2018road\u2019 to global networks, while respecting the interests of all parties involved. Elevating the periphery to the core of its relationship with China will also promote possibilities for Sino\u2013Indian cooperation in Asia and undermine the geopolitical one-upmanship which has hitherto characterised their regional strategies.<\/p>\n

In February 2014, at the 17th round of Special Representative talks in New Delhi, Beijing formally invited India to join its ambitious Maritime Silk Route (MSR) project. The Narendra Modi government should aim to make China\u2019s activities in South Asia complementary to its own neighbourhood policy. India should exert its influence to craft the contours of the MSR\u2019s South Asian blueprint in order to chip away at the steep transaction costs associated with the subcontinent\u2019s post-1947 borders. It should also draw up an integrated view of how the various proposals under the rubric of China\u2019s \u2018One Belt, One Road\u2019 initiative\u2014the MSR, the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) corridor, and rail, road and port development in Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar\u2014can be harmonised to serve both India\u2019s peaceful rise within its extended Asian neighbourhood and Asia\u2019s peaceful rise to the forefront of world affairs.<\/p>\n

At a time when New Delhi lacks the funds\u2014and perhaps the intent\u2014to underwrite the modernisation programs of its common neighbourhood, it must not be seen to undermine an initiative that it does not at any rate possess the wherewithal to subvert. \u2018One Belt, One Road\u2019 is the centrepiece of the Xi Jinping administration\u2019s \u2018new type of international relations\u2019 concept\u2014an imposing win\u2013win scheme that aspires to embed the China Dream within a neighbourhood community of common destiny. Co-opting \u2018One Belt, One Road\u2019 in South Asia will liberate New Delhi from its penchant to oscillate between viewing the subcontinent as its exclusive sphere of influence and longing to vault over the neighbourhood to pursue flashier adventures abroad.<\/p>\n

By recreating the famous historical land and sea routes along which commerce and civilization once traversed, \u2018One Belt, One Road\u2019 will also reawaken India in no small measure to its own golden age of cross-border contact. South Asia was once a great entrepot for commercial exchange between China and Rome. Asia\u2019s seas were a genuine mare liberum (free sea) that no sovereign sought to control. The spread of Buddhism from South Asia along the \u2018belt\u2019 and \u2018road\u2019 wove a common world of religious-cultural ambiance and sensibility that signified both integration and cosmopolitanism.<\/p>\n

Standing in the UNESCO offices in March 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping extolled the profound impact of Buddhism on China. For his part, Modi, a firm devotee of the Buddha, commenced his recent China tour at a shrine built to commemorate a famous Chinese Buddhist monk who had visited his ancestral village in Gujarat during the Tang Dynasty era. A 21st century infrastructure project geared to connect the Asian heartland to its hinterland and beyond might yet revive a set of loose integrative norms, which can foster principles of order and self-restraint in East Asia and South Asia.<\/p>\n

Modi, unrestricted by the blinkers of his elitist predecessors, should exercise his abundant leadership qualities to walk India and South Asia confidently down this path.
\nSource:Eastasiaforum<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

India\u2019s domestic and international economic choices have not always been the wisest. At independence, India…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":652,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[17,13,5,9,33,2],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["http:\/\/southasiantimes.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Gupta-400x256.jpg",400,256,false],"thumbnail":["http:\/\/southasiantimes.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Gupta-400x256-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["http:\/\/southasiantimes.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Gupta-400x256-300x192.jpg",300,192,true],"medium_large":["http:\/\/southasiantimes.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Gupta-400x256.jpg",400,256,false],"large":["http:\/\/southasiantimes.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Gupta-400x256.jpg",400,256,false],"1536x1536":["http:\/\/southasiantimes.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Gupta-400x256.jpg",400,256,false],"2048x2048":["http:\/\/southasiantimes.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Gupta-400x256.jpg",400,256,false],"enternews-featured":["http:\/\/southasiantimes.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Gupta-400x256.jpg",400,256,false],"enternews-medium":["http:\/\/southasiantimes.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Gupta-400x256.jpg",400,256,false],"enternews-thumbnail":["http:\/\/southasiantimes.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Gupta-400x256.jpg",400,256,false]},"author_info":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/?author=1"},"category_info":"Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Stories","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":653,"href":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651\/revisions\/653"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.southasiantimes.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}