If the cliché ‘timely’ was ever appropriate in the context of statecraft, it was this week when Prime Minister Narendra Modi took several initiatives on Central Asia. The most significant of these was hosting the first India-Central Asia Summit, with the participation of the Presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, in a virtual format.
A few days earlier, veiled in secrecy, the leadership on both sides mutually agreed to cancel the unannounced visit of these five Presidents to New Delhi to be joint chief guests at the Republic Day Parade on January 26. The secrecy was mandated by protocol considerations. It was never made public that Central Asian heads of state would grace the Republic Day events, so calling off their simultaneous travel to India had to be a delicately sensitive operation.
When the Soviet Union unravelled and the five “…stans” in Central Asia became sovereign entities, India and the United States were the first countries to establish embassies in their capitals, and invest considerable diplomatic capital in them along with business initiatives. The US has been preparing for such a day for many decades although, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed, the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley was taken by surprise. The US State Department sent in large teams of diplomats to staff embassies in the new Central Asian republics. They spoke Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbek, but found that they were hamstrung and could not effectively function in any of the Central Asian capitals.
Russian continued to be the lingua franca in these capitals. More often than not, ethnic Russians who had lived in these new republics when they were constituents of the USSR, continued to man the ministries, and for all practical purposes run governments. More than three decades later, along with the local language, Russian is legally the language of ‘inter-ethnic communication’ in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. In Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, Russian is the ‘co-official language’.
India, on the other hand, was totally unprepared for the disintegration of the USSR. But then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao was determined that India should preserve, and retain the considerable political and soft power capital it had accumulated all over Central Asia historically and during the Soviet era. Like the US State Department, South Block, the seat of India’s Ministry of External Affairs, too sent diplomats, although in smaller numbers, to the Central Asian capitals. They were all Russian speakers, of whom there was no shortage in the Indian Foreign Service (IFS).
These Indian diplomats, including some young IFS officers whom then Foreign Secretary JN Dixit handpicked as Ambassadors, out of turn in seniority, took to Central Asia like fish to water. With their language skills they made major inroads into the new republics in every sphere. Those were the days when India and the US had begun talking to each other instead of talking at each other because the Cold War, which distanced the two countries, had ended. During early visits to these “…stans,” this author found that US diplomats, all of them non-Russian speakers, were seeking advice from and relying heavily on their Russian-speaking Indian counterparts on diplomatic and other matters of state.
With the passage of time, the US corrected course, and made up for their initial mistakes. India, on the other hand, lost interest in Central Asia once Rao was voted out of office, and short-lived, unstable governments were in power in New Delhi. The momentum of Rao’s initiatives was lost, and South Block, for all practical purposes, gave up on Central Asia. Which is why Modi’s new Central Asian outreach this week is ‘timely’.
It is appropriate that the structure of India-Central Asia summits has been institutionalised by deciding that the second such summit will be held in 2024, and thereafter, every two years. At the next lower level, the existing dialogue mechanism of regular India-Central Asia foreign ministers’ meetings will be expanded to include meetings of commerce and culture ministers. The last such will be the most important in future, in consolidating what Modi and the five Presidents started at their first summit.
Cultural co-operation between India and Central Asia has a meaning that cannot be overstated given their shared history. The January 27 summit has acknowledged it: an innovative Indian proposal to commission a dictionary of common words used in India and Central Asia is proof of this. At a mass level, these common words relate to food. Samosa, pulav, and tarbooz are among the most popular examples since these and many other dishes popular in India came to the subcontinent from Central Asia.
Even more appropriate is an invitation to the Indian film industry from Central Asian heads of state to explore their picturesque countryside, and use those locations for shooting films. Indian films are hugely popular all over their region, and constitute the biggest reservoir of popular goodwill for India. All these will lend substance to an Indian proposal to invite a 100-member youth delegation from Central Asian countries every year to promote people-to-people understanding.
Modi offered to host a permanent India-Central Asia Centre in New Delhi which could also act as the secretariat for their future plurilateral summits. A decision to continue regular meetings of secretaries of national security councils of all the summit countries is important because it could have far-reaching ramifications in the light of developments in Afghanistan and Iran. Resource-rich, geopolitically-vital Central Asia has many suitors. Even if half of the vision in speeches delivered at India’s first summit with the region fructifies, India can be a favourite among these suitors.
K P Nayar reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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