INDIANS are feeling upstaged by the rich and powerful guy next-door driving the entire town around in a swank limousine promising a merry feast.
A mix of anger and concern is palpable since they stayed away from the opening in Beijing of the Chinese-led One Belt One Road (OBOR), or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
If they saw it coming since it has been in the works for four years, they found no effective way to counter it. Concepts they have floated or boosted, like Sagar Mala and Indian Ocean Rim, did not take off since they lacked the deep pockets the Chinese have.
Even the United States, on whose support India seemed to count heavily, joined the bandwagon at the last minute. In came the United Nations and multilateral agencies. That Japan or Australia has reservations or Europeans kept away is not much of a consolation.
Seeing the overwhelming support from Asean nations and across Asia, it is essential to know why India should — and ask whether it should — keep out.
Is India working contrary to the collective wisdom of 29 nations who attended the Beijing meet and two scores of others that have signed up? Can it match China that is spending roughly US$150 billion (RM640.3 billion) a year in these 68 countries?
More honey and manna would be showered in terms of goods, markets and infrastructure. But, there are also fears, not without basis, of being inexorably dovetailed into the vortex of one giant economy and its geopolitical and geo-economic goals.
The simple, unpalatable word is neo-colonialism.
Some have publicly acknowledged the likely pitfalls of putting all eggs in one large basket. But no one wants to be left out.
Pakistan’s debt obligation indicates that Beijing is happy to entrap even its closest ally. The layout of most of the proposed land-based projects almost entirely connects countries to China, but very little connects other countries to each other.
Large and resourceful, even if poverty-ridden, India doesn’t think it wants to be part of it. But, it is already boxed-in.
The China factor is overwhelming. Burgeoning bilateral trade cannot hide the deep distrust by India and equally deep disdain of India by China. Doves and hawks abound in Indian intelligentsia, but also in China.
In a sense, the age-old Indian psyche has been challenged. Even when invaded and colonised in the past, India held sway in the vast sub-continent south of the Himalayas. With OBOR, China wants to alter this.
Global realignments have been fortuitous for India. The Soviet Union’s demise left it without its biggest ally, standing alone, more non-aligned than it had been in the cold war era. That was when “Look East” began. But “East” is no longer benign.
Connecting with the West and aligning strategically with the US, nurtured through Clinton, Bush Jr. and Obama eras, India has received a jolt under Trump — who hasn’t?
Indeed, the inward American thrust, away from South and Southeast Asia has vacated a vast geopolitical and geo-economic space for China and its OBOR. But, it doesn’t help to blame the winner.
India has issues that probably no one else has. Its real concern is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CEPC), a key component of the BRI and China’s road to the Indian Ocean. The Modi government has near-unanimous support to raising the sovereignty issue since this new Silk Road traverses the territory in Jammu and Kashmir that Pakistan wrested illegally and equally illegally, ceded it to China.
Opinion is divided whether India should have boycotted the BRI’s opening without leaving a window open to possibly reconsider its decision at a future date.
Since Beijing has said the BRI was not touching sovereignty issues, India could have attended, making it clear that it was doing so without prejudice to its territorial dispute with Pakistan. But it’s not that simple.
There is an important rider to which India has got no response from China so far. Beijing considers the India-Pakistan territorial dispute a legacy of the colonial past that ought to be negotiated and settled bilaterally. But, does Beijing concede that the settlement would cover territory it acquired from Pakistan? If so, then the dispute is not just bilateral.
Given the closed-clasp China-Pakistan relationship, Beijing cannot accommodate India. Pakistan protested a public offer to re-name CPEC, made by Chinese envoy to India. When New Delhi, too, ridiculed it, Beijing retracted.
It is difficult to buy Beijing’s arguments that it plans to splash a few trillion as a benign gift to the world. This should not surprise anyone among the 68 nations and is not necessarily an argument against BRI. Great powers often provide global public goods through actions that benefit others, and enrich themselves.
All is not lost for India. It can revive the Asian Highway programme as a counter-narrative. Some of its neighbours who scuttled it so that India should not benefit, may now join in.
Every nation today is suffering from the ongoing global slowdown. A project of this magnitude owned by all stakeholders could do for Asia what the New Deal did in the 1930s for the US.
Mahendra Ved, NST's New Delhi correspondent, is the president of the Commonwealth Journalists Association 2016-2018 and a Consultant with Power Politics monthly magazine.