Mekong
versus Metookong
China
appears more serious on sub-regional cooperation than India
The
historic city of Dali famous for its Three Pagodas and located in the
southwest Chinese province of Yunnan recently hosted the ministerial
meeting of the Greater Mekong Subregion Economic Cooperation Programme.
Coordinated by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), this programme involves
China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar with Yunnan being
the main torchbearer on behalf of China. The programme was launched
in 1992 and over the past eleven years, around $ 1 billion has been
piut on the ground in power and transport projects. But it was only
last November in Phnom Penh that the six heads-of state met for the
first time to give the programme a renewed political momentum and chart
a ten-year strategic framework for cooperation in diverse areas like
energy, health, education, environment, transport, tourism and telecommunications.
Coming almost a year after this summit, the Dali meeting assumed special
importance. It reiterated the commitment of the six countries to the
three Cs–connectivity, competitiveness and community-in the region.
In an apparent bid to counter the Chinese, India too has made
a foray into the Mekong Basin. In July 2000, with much fanfare and recalling
its ancient links to the region, India announced a Ganga-Mekong Swarnabhoomi
Project involving India, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar
leaving out China where, incidentally, the Mekong originates. The project
was grand in scope envisaging cooperation in areas like road and rail
infrastructure, tourism, IT and education. But unlike the Chinese-backed
initiative in the Mekong Basin, the Indian-championed project is floundering.
True, over the past year Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee has had successful
visits to Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, apart from to China as well.
The statement issued after the first ASEAN-India summit in Phnom Penh
in November 2002 reaffirmed mutual interest in the Mekong-Ganga Project
and also highlighted India’s desire to participate in the Greater Mekong
Programme. How these fine words and sentiments will translate into actual
projects and investments by India remains to be seen. But Sanskritic
chauvinism is the wrong way to go about winning friends. The website
of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs makes the ludicrous claim
that Mekong comes from Ma Ganga. And Mr. Jaswant Singh was forced to
drop the word Swarnabhoomi when the Vientiane Declaration formally announcing
the Mekong-Ganga initiative was adopted in November 2000.
China is championing another idea that is of great interest to India,
particularly to our northeast and east whose economic future is tied
as much to India as it is to East and Southeast Asia. In August, 1999
academic scholars from four countries-China, India, Bangladesh and Myanmar–
met in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan and adopted a document now referred
to as the “Kunming Initiative”. The provincial government
of Yunnan has been the most enthusiastic votary of this initiative that
contemplates cooperation in trade, tourism and transport. But the Indian
government has been less than enthusiastic. The official establishment
here sees the Kunming Initiative as a sinister ploy to increase Chinese
influence in our troubled northeast. That China provided support to
some militant groups in the Northeast in the 1960s and 1970s is not
in doubt. Whether it continues to do so is open to question. Whether
it has larger designs on the northeast, barring perhaps on Tawang in
Arunachal Pradesh (because of its historical and cultural ties with
Tibet) is also debatable. After all, the package formula for solving
the border dispute offered first by Zhou Enlai in 1960 and by Deng Xiaoping
in 1979 did envisage the Chinese retaining the western sector and giving
up its claims in the eastern sector.
Rich in biodiversity, Yunnan with a per capita income similar to that
of India and a population of the size of Punjab and Haryana combined,
is particularly fascinating. China has officially designated 56 ethnic
groups as minority nationalities. Of these groups, the maximum number–
25– are to be found in Yunnan alone, the ancestors of some of whom
migrated to northeast India long ago. Yunnan was at the pivot of the
southern Silk Route and the city of Lijiang played a key role in Sino-Indian
cultural history. Kunming is the home of the great eunuch Muslim admiral
Zheng He who made seven epic sea voyages from Taiwan to the Persian
Gulf and Africa, including repeated trips to Calicut. In more recent
years, it was to Kunming that Dr. Dwarkanath Kotnis, immortalized in
V. Shantaram’s 1946 classic Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani, first went in
1937, dispatched by Jawaharlal Nehru as part of a medical relief mission.
Dr. Kotnis is still a hero in China but largely forgotten in his home
country. In 1992, the Chinese issued a stamp in his honour and in January
2001, the visiting Chinese leader Li Peng met with his three sisters
in Mumbai.
During 1942-44, the US Air Force regularly flew in food, medical and
other supplies from Kolkata to Kunming over a treacherous Himalayan
route that became internationally known as “The Hump”. This
formed the backdrop to James Hilton’s haunting book The Lost Horizon
that gave the world Shangri La. Zhongdian is now reckoned to be that
haven of bliss and peace. In 1942-43 under the most harrowing of conditions,
the US Army led by the colourful Joe Stillwell constructed what has
come to be known as the Stilwell Road. This ran from Ledo now in Arunachal
Pradesh to Lashio in Myanmar and then on to Kunming. The approximately
1700 km -long road (of which about 60 kms are in India, about 1000 kms
in Myanmar and the rest in China) still exists but in a state of extreme
dilapidation.
Yunnan could well be India’s gateway into China’s south and northwest
which are already the focus of massive development programmes. Although
the WTO is increasing the powers of the central government in Beijing,
China remains a country where the provinces have great economic autonomy,
much more than what Indian states enjoy. A few days back, a high-powered
delegation from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan and a major centre for
scholarship on India, was in India to solicit investments in IT and
other sectors and next week a team from Zhejiang province will come
to woo investors in the automotive industry particularly. Doing business
with China really is doing business with its provinces, a reality that
is yet to dawn fully in this country. Four years after the Kunming Initiative
was first unveiled, it remains essentially an academic exercise on our
side. Now, we have an excuse since Bangladesh appears to be reluctant
to provide transit to Kolkata. If Y2K” (Yunnan to Kolkata) is not
possible immediately, we should go ahead with providing connectivity
of the northeast to Myanmar and Yunnan hoping that Bangladesh would
come around at some stage. As Beijing has “allowed” Yunnan
to take the leadership role in the Kunming Initiative, why not New Delhi
give a similar role to West Bengal, Assam and other northeastern states.
Similarly, in talks with Nepal on water management, why not UP and Bihar
take a more proactive role since their vital interests are involved.
Subregional cooperation is not a recipe for the Balkanisation of India
but it is a way of building new bridges, both physically and politically.
