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With BIMSTEC, Modi govt should let India’s border states do the talking, not New Delhi

While India projects its border states as bridges to neighbourhood, its policy in reality remains led and steered by New Delhi.

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In an important shift in India’s neighbourhood foreign policy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has invited the leaders of the BIMSTEC — not the SAARC leaders like in 2014 — to his swearing-in ceremony on 30 May.

BIMSTEC, or the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, and a host of sub-regional initiatives (including the Mekong Ganga Economic Cooperation and the Bangladesh China India Myanmar Economic Corridor) have brought a level of diversity and complexity in recent years to India’s foreign policy. These emphasize Modi’s Neighbourhood First policy, the rechristened Act East policy.

But there is one missing element in this ambitious shift – border states.

Centralising impulse

For all its enthusiastic rhetoric, there is a curious paradox at the heart of India’s sub-regional discourse. While the rhetoric projects the border states as bridges to the neighbourhood, in actual practice India’s neighbourhood policy remains unambiguously top-down, and firmly led and steered by New Delhi.

This is both puzzling and problematic since the notion of sub-regional cooperation is fundamentally based on geographically proximate border regions within two or more countries, and allowing these regions to take the lead in decision making.

But New Delhi turns this logic virtually on its head by regularly hosting the BIMSTEC’s Working Groups on regional governance issues such as disaster management, customs cooperation, and regulation of passenger and cargo vehicular traffic. In comparison, China’s sub-regional discourse reveals a sobering picture. It is not Beijing but the country’s border province of Yunnan that regularly hosts the Greater Mekong Subregion Working Groups on a range of regional governance issues such as environment, tourism and agriculture.


Also read: Finally, a summit where Modi govt made no meaningless, empty promises


The centralising impulse is evident in India’s discourse on border trade as well. For instance, trade permits on trading routes with Nepal and China are no longer issued at Uttarakhand’s border town Dharchula but in capital Dehradun, causing long procedural delays and rise in costs. Such dichotomies represent a classic instance of suboptimal sub-regionalism at work, a discourse that has clearly ended up aiming low and hitting lower.

These dichotomies have also meant that there has been virtually no political incentive to invest in an institutionalised two-way engagement between national and subnational policy actors. This is a cause for serious concern and can result in institutional gridlocks between the Centre and states at a time when the international engagement by border states is increasing.

Tackling domestic conflicts

If recent trends are anything to go by, resource conflicts between the national and subnational governments could be a potential minefield. Bihar’s demand for an equity stake in power projects being executed by India in Bhutan as well as the Teesta river dispute between India and Bangladesh arising out of the deadlock between the Centre and West Bengal bring out the inadequacy of existing institutional arrangements to negotiate such conflicts.

This inadequacy adds an extra edge to domestic resource conflicts, such as when the Centre contested Nagaland’s claim that Article 371 (A) of the Constitution gave the state the right to develop its natural gas reserves. If Delhi does not step in to fill this policy vacuum, these growing federal-state conflicts will erode overall state capacity in damaging ways. Re-calibrating federal-state platforms such as the MEA’s Division on States or the Inter-State Council to anticipate and address such challenges has to be the first order of business for the Indian government.


Also read: First Nepal, now Maldives: India needs to un-muddle its neighbourhood policy


When practice meets policy

By privileging the formal, state-led, inter-governmental processes, Indian diplomacy has completely ended up overlooking a range of practices at the border regions that are fundamentally reshaping India’s engagement with its neighbourhood. Subnational-steered policy networks need to be recognised as a field of governance in their own right, with a capacity to rescale India’s foreign policy beyond solely national frames. Local networks, both formal and informal, can work with, and not necessarily at cross-purposes, with the Centre on regional public goods.

Bottom-up market driven processes of economic integration are today resulting in the rise of a new set of stakeholders with stakes in sub-regional integration processes. There are three reasons why a serious engagement with these processes is absolutely critical. Firstly, there is growing evidence that border regions are beginning to effectively engage the Centre to deepen sub-regional integration processes. The effects of this lobbying can be seen in India’s proposed decision to open 70 border haats along its border with Bangladesh — with 35 of these in West Bengal, 22 in Meghalaya, five in Tripura, and four in Assam. (At present, there are four border haats operational — two each in Meghalaya and Tripura.) Meghalaya and Tripura also recently successfully lobbied the Modi government to allow them to sell surplus power to Bangladesh.

Secondly, direct transborder subnational links have on occasion bypassed the Centre to break difficult logjams and bottlenecks. A case in point is the construction of the 726 MW Pallatana gas power project in southern Tripura. Given the challenges in transporting heavy equipment to Tripura due to the difficult terrain, Bangladesh allowed transhipment of heavy turbines and machinery through its territory — which proved to be a critical factor in the successful completion of the project.


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


Thirdly, sub-regionalism’s greatest potential arguably lies in its capacity to position the local as a central actor. It will be suboptimal to conceive them as mere agents that monitor the implementation of service delivery systems.

Border states as primary points of contact can also function as bridges that plug transboundary governance gaps in sub-regional Asia through networks like Asian Environmental Compliance and Enforcement Network.

The future is federal

A foreign policy with a practice-based template can incorporate domain and field knowledge that national-level policy makers have no means of acquiring on their own. Policy need not always dictate practice; instead, policy and practice need to co-evolve into an institutionalised two-way flow of communication. Institutionalising consultations with a new set of border stakeholders such as legislative bodies (both at the central and state levels), media, and civil society organisations can go a long way in ensuring that these actors become informed interlocutors in shaping India’s evolving neighbourhood policy.

A lot will, however, depend on the feedback loops that are put in place. It is only then that one can create a level-playing field between central- and state-level policy actors. India’s neighbourhood policy can produce a modest but valuable space for border states to become
active partners in framing and fashioning the terms of India’s engagement with its neighbourhood. But this is neither guaranteed nor infallible. If it is to succeed, leveraging the location of border states has to go hand in hand with the federalisation of India’s foreign policy.

The author is Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. 

This is the first in a series of articles titled “Policy Challenges 2019-2024” under ThePrint-Centre for Policy Research (CPR) collaboration. A longer version of this piece is available on the CPR website at www.cprindia.org. The full policy document on a range of issues addressed in this series will be available on CPR’s website from 4 June.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Oh yeah? Why? Because those border states are not part of India? Or because the writer thinks the Modi govt does not represent the border states?

  2. Dear gen the system will improve and get its moral finer on grid which by the way hasn’t been lost by the margin u imagine if generals like you support the system and NOT drive itdown the drain. SO Please write something constructive to support the family that made you an army commander. Don’t carry your past prejudices into retirement and decry the organisation

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