When ‘fortress’ Singapore fell to the Japanese on February 15, 1942, Winston Churchill exclaimed: “Australia is threatened, India is threatened.” Dead right! Within months, the enemy was at the gates of India.
The one line signalled the strategic value that a port which overlooks the Strait of Malacca has for the security of India, and for much of the south Pacific, together called the Indo-Pacific now. Anyone who controls the strait can control the shipping between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and all the trade between the east and the west.
Empires have gone, politics has changed; geographies haven’t. Landmasses and water bodies lie where they had been, as vulnerable to threats from armies, navies, pirates, tsunamis and hurricanes as they had been a century or more ago.
Prabowo Subianto, president, Indonesia | Reuters
No wonder we are rolling out the red carpet for Prabowo (Sanskrit prabhaava) Subianto as the chief guest on the 75th Republic Day. The ex-general, now president of Indonesia, can offer us any number of garrisons on the strait, if he so wills. We have found one in Sabang, which we are dredging with the Indonesians for our submarines to dock. Even otherwise, our warships have been sailing into their seas for joint exercises and making calls at Indonesian ports.
We have been slow in waking up to the threats from the east. The Andamans had fallen to the Japanese in the World War, but we drew patriotic comfort by saying that Netaji Bose was part of the conquering army, though the gravestones of Kohima and Imphal tell us another story of how close we came to be conquered from the east. In 1965, L.B. Shastri’s generals and admirals missed a few heartbeats when Suharto’s Indonesia threatened to invade the Andamans, just 90 nautical miles from Sumatra, to relieve the pressure that India was bearing on Ayub Khan’s Pakistani troops.
India and Indonesia had started off as bosom post-colonial pals, with first president Sukarno having been the chief guest to India’s first R-Day in 1950, and Jawaharlal Nehru sailing on battleship INS Delhi as the chief guest to their first I-Day. A little known aside to the story is that Nehru’s visit had almost ended in disaster. Someone had, by mistake, loaded live ammunition in the warship's guns that were fired in welcome salute.
The bonding got warmer at Bandung in 1955, but the two began drifting away by the 1960s, when the junta that controlled Sukarno was befriended by the Chinese and Pakistanis. India, too, began ignoring the east, where petty nail-clipper republics prospered under American patronage. India woke up to face the east by the 1990s when Narasimha Rao launched his look-east, building bridges and roads to the east. Narendra Modi has modified it to act-east, engaging them on economic, commercial, cultural and strategic fronts.
Prabowo will bargain hard; he wants our BrahMos missiles and heavy arty, but needs easy bank loans to buy them. He may have cancelled his flight from Delhi to Islamabad at our instance, but remember, his first port of call after taking over as president last year was Beijing. He had signed deals worth $10 billion on infrastructure, green energy, digital tech, and farming, got them to bankroll his free meals for the poor, and—surprise-of-surprises!—agreed to jointly explore the waters around the Natuna Islands which are disputed between Indonesia and China. If that isn’t like India and China agreeing to jointly explore Aksai Chin, what is?
All the same, welcome excellency! We, too, bargain hard. Good bargaining ensures good deals for both sides.
prasannan@theweek.in