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HomeDiplomacySouth Asian interests global, must put neighbourhood first: Ex-NSA Shivshankar Menon

South Asian interests global, must put neighbourhood first: Ex-NSA Shivshankar Menon

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Speaking at a CPR event, Menon says India needs to do things in neighbourhood as it is a continental and maritime power.

New Delhi: South Asian interests are global and it needs to integrate the region and put the neighbourhood first, former national security adviser Shivshankar Menon said Tuesday.

Instead of worrying about what interests other major power blocks hold in the region, South Asian countries, including India, should focus on its strengths, Menon said at a two-day event organised by Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in the national capital.

“If we seek exclusivity we are being stupid. We need to concentrate on our affinities which are cultural, linguistic, ethnic and economic,” said the former NSA.

“The world is not going to solve our problems in South Asia. We need to do things in our neighbourhood because we are both a continental and maritime power,” he added.

At a panel discussion on ‘Geopolitics and Geo-Economics in a Changing South Asia’, Menon said there’s more to India than what is understood.

“We can’t say we’ll work only in this region. We should make issue-based coalitions based on our interests,” he said, adding that South Asia doesn’t need to be like Western powers.

Historian Srinath Raghavan chaired the panel that was attended by CPR professor Nimmi Kurian and foreign affairs analyst Zorawar Daulet Singh. The experts deliberated on how external factors are affecting developments in South Asia.


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Economic reach

Speaking at the event, Singh said South Asia needs to increase intra-regional trading.

“95 per cent of South Asian trade is with the rest of the world and not amongst each other. Only 1 per cent of total investment in the subcontinent is intra-regional investments,” he said.

Menon agreed, “The main contention in the world today is going to be economy. That’s where we as South Asia need to actually position ourselves and there’s India.”

Singh cited the example of the markets of the West and China to suggest what strategies could be adopted in expanding economic reach.

“China is no longer only contained within East Asian political economy and recycling production in Western markets, but it’s actually developing physical and geo-economic ties with all its neighbours,” added Singh.

Importance of institutions

Raghavan pointed out that Indian institutions fared poorly compared with other countries.

“For me institutions are not the answer,” said Menon, adding that South Asia should instead think about managing change and setting up crisis management mechanisms.

He cited the “best” example of the India-China “border settlement”.

Kurian, however, said that institutions are key for setting up norms and rules, but wasn’t certain if India could achieve this. She asked, “We (India) talk about conflict resolution but can we talk about heavy concepts without the notion of justice?”


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‘Not sole lens’

Asked about how the US-China dynamics and China’s attempts at reaffirming India’s peripheries have impacted India and South Asia, Kurian said, “The problem of Asian geopolitics is geopolitics itself. Excess of geopolitics itself a problem.

“There’s an entire set of issues, actors (that) completely remain invisible from research and policy imagination, transitions as a peg helps us to at least move out of the self-conscious need to rebalance, that over-dependence on geopolitics,” she said.

“It [geopolitics] is an important lens but cannot be the sole lens,” added Kurian.

Menon too said that India is obsessed with China “but its actions don’t reflect that”.

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