Sri Lanka has a new president in nationalist outsider Anura Kumara Dissanayake. His victory is a testament to the vitality of the nation’s democracy: Two years after demonstrators forced the resignation of the island’s president and prime minister, protest leader Dissanayake prevailed against two well-connected centrists.
However, for regional behemoth India, the results cap a troubling trend. Dissanayake has New Delhi worried because his party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, made a name for itself in the 1980s with an anti-India terror campaign. While the new president has tried to mend fences, including during a visit earlier this year, India will consider him a poor exchange for his predecessor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was distrustful of China and supportive of Indian investment.
Similar political transitions have transformed South Asia. Last month, Bangladesh’s long-serving prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was overthrown and fled to India for refuge. Earlier in the summer, K.P. Sharma Oli, who has always been close to Beijing, returned as Nepal’s prime minister.
An “India out” campaign in the Maldives swept its current president, Mohamed Muizzu, to power last year. Moreover, it is likely Indian officials would prefer that Imran Khan, who remains wildly popular with the Pakistani electorate, stays in the jail where most believe his country’s military has put him.
New Delhi began the year secure in its relationships with Kathmandu, Dhaka and Colombo; the only neighbor it can now mostly count on is the tiny monarchy of Bhutan — a decades-old treaty ally that manages its security and foreign policy in close cooperation with India.
While internal developments obviously drove most of these political transitions, Indian policy has done the country no favors. While Indians like to remind people that theirs is the world’s largest democracy, their neighbors complain that New Delhi does not always promote and support democratic values in the region.
Indeed, pro-government commentators openly boast that India’s foreign policy has succeeded by “shaping democratic verdicts” in its neighborhood and “turning a blind eye to democratic deficits.”
Sometimes, though, realpolitik is just short-sightedness. Hasina’s exit in Bangladesh followed elections a few months earlier that most — including the US — did not view as free and fair. India overlooked that and appeared taken by surprise when she turned out to be massively unpopular after all.
Similarly, New Delhi’s courting of the military junta in Myanmar — which memorably led then-US president Barack Obama to upbraid India’s parliament in 2010 for “shying away” from the defense of democracy — might soon turn sour. Indian officials were incensed at the time, insisting that the strong hand of the Burmese military was needed to manage the volatile border. Now anti-government rebels control large parts of that same frontier, making ties to the junta more of a liability than an asset.
It did not have to be this way. When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was first elected in 2014, he invited leaders of neighboring nations to his swearing-in. He had an opportunity to reset relations with all of them, and to create new partnerships based on economic integration and mutual respect for democracy.
In the years since, diplomats ceded control of relations with those countries — and with China, with whom India shares the longest of its borders — to the security establishment. That has turned out to be a crucial mistake. If you see your neighbors primarily through a security lens, you risk picking allies and condoning behavior that together alienate large swathes of the electorate. When political winds shift, such bets can turn rapidly.
You might think that India’s extraordinary soft power would make up for some of these missteps. However, the influence of its movies and media, which are followed closely across South Asia, can be unhelpful. After the Maldives election, popular Bollywood stars said they would stop vacationing there. Moreover, hypernationalist news media focuses relentlessly on stories that citizens of these smaller neighbors feel portray their countries unfairly.
India would be wise to study China’s relations with its neighbors. That would give policymakers some idea of what not to do, as well as what might work. Economic integration is essential: As the region’s biggest market, India needs to be a source of prosperity for its denizens. On the other hand, expecting smaller nations to kowtow is a mistake. India’s rise might be as inevitable as China’s, but neither would-be superpower can afford to ignore the aspirations of its neighbors.
Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Would China attack Taiwan during the American lame duck period? For months, there have been worries that Beijing would seek to take advantage of an American president slowed by age and a potentially chaotic transition to make a move on Taiwan. In the wake of an American election that ended without drama, that far-fetched scenario will likely prove purely hypothetical. But there is a crisis brewing elsewhere in Asia — one with which US president-elect Donald Trump may have to deal during his first days in office. Tensions between the Philippines and China in the South China Sea have been at
A nation has several pillars of national defense, among them are military strength, energy and food security, and national unity. Military strength is very much on the forefront of the debate, while several recent editorials have dealt with energy security. National unity and a sense of shared purpose — especially while a powerful, hostile state is becoming increasingly menacing — are problematic, and would continue to be until the nation’s schizophrenia is properly managed. The controversy over the past few days over former navy lieutenant commander Lu Li-shih’s (呂禮詩) usage of the term “our China” during an interview about his attendance
Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), the son of former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee Politburo member and former Chongqing Municipal Communist Party secretary Bo Xilai (薄熙來), used his British passport to make a low-key entry into Taiwan on a flight originating in Canada. He is set to marry the granddaughter of former political heavyweight Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政), the founder of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital in Yilan County’s Luodong Township (羅東). Bo Xilai is a former high-ranking CCP official who was once a challenger to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) for the chairmanship of the CCP. That makes Bo Guagua a bona fide “third-generation red”
An article written by Uber Eats Taiwan general manager Chai Lee (李佳穎) published in the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) on Tuesday said that Uber Eats promises to engage in negotiations to create a “win-win” situation. The article asserted that Uber Eats’ acquisition of Foodpanda would bring about better results for Taiwan. The National Delivery Industrial Union (NDIU), a trade union for food couriers in Taiwan, would like to express its doubts about and dissatisfaction with Lee’s article — if Uber Eats truly has a clear plan, why has this so-called plan not been presented at relevant
RSS