Toward the end of India’s Near East: A New History (Hurst, 2024), Avinash Paliwal noted that India’s “over-investment” in Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina could lead to trouble, given her growing unpopularity. “Hasina,” wrote Paliwal, a Reader in International Relations at SOAS University of London, “could well experience a groundswell of protests going forward.” As events would have it, by August 2024, Hasina had fled the country, taking refuge in India, after millions took to the streets in what would become known as the July revolution. Meanwhile, New Delhi’s Bangladesh policy—heavily dependent on Hasina’s iron hand—would have to be rebuilt from scratch.
Paliwal’s book—his second following 2017’s My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal—proffers a new analytical framing, which he calls India’s “Near East,” i.e. the neighboring nations of Bangladesh and Myanmar, but also the Indian states that are collectively known as the “northeast.” Why mix the domestic and international? “This book argues that India’s domestic state-building is inextricably connected to its international diplomacy,” writes Paliwal, particularly in a region that was “once administratively united under colonialism.”
Understanding the trajectories of the northeast states and India’s struggle at nation-building in what was once seen as the periphery of the Raj, the book argues, would be impossible without factoring in New Delhi’s engagement with Dhaka and Yangon or Naypyidaw. And India’s relations with both Bangladesh and Myanmar have been heavily influenced by the state’s aims in the northeast.
CASI Managing Editor Rohan Venkat spoke to Avinash Paliwal about the “near east” framing, what history can tell us about how India is reacting to Bangladesh and Myanmar today, how the US and China fit into the region and why “connectivity” alone is not the answer to the myriad issues facing the region.
Rohan: How did you settle on the “Near East” framing?
Avinash: The idea of writing this book was, in the initial years, about India's relationship with Myanmar. Having worked on India-Afghanistan relations, I thought I would look in the other direction, at a neighbor that has been relatively understudied. The more I went into that particular relationship, it became apparent that this book cannot be just about India-Myanmar. It has to be about something bigger, because you cannot explain India's relationship with Myanmar without understanding India's approach toward the states in India’s northeast—and Bengal. So midway into this project, it became clear that I had to write a book which will cover the entirety of the region, including Bangladesh, including West Bengal, including the entirety of India's northeast and Myanmar.
With the title, that was where the struggle truly came—whether to use the term “Near East” or not. I settled on it partly because I felt that this is an act of liberating that term from its old British or Ottoman colonial connotations. This is not just any Near East, depending on where the sun rises and where the empire is. It is simply India's Near East. I could sense that New Delhi was thinking about this region with much more coherence and cohesion at least in certain policy corridors than we usually merit New Delhi with, and that was not often reflected in academia.
Rohan: Essentially, you're putting India's post-independence approach to neighboring states of Burma/Myanmar and Bangladesh in conversation with its own state-building struggles in the Northeast. You've spoken of a silence in the literature that needed to be addressed in the literature, and of these areas being separated by “epistemic boundaries.”
Avinash: If you look at it historically, the literature has been siloed. You will have scholars who look at bilateral relationships, or India's foreign policy choices and practices in its neighborhood who are, if not completely, somewhat disconnected with how India was building its own state during this period post-independence. That silo makes very little sense. You simply create an analytical blinker.
This is a history in inverse, where I'm telling the story of India's state building outside in. By which I mean, how events and processes in Bangladesh and Myanmar or, for that matter, in China and Pakistan made India take decisions within its own territorial political boundaries in its northeastern states. It is also a history in inverse of India's diplomacy and statecraft with its neighbors by looking at it inside out, where India's domestic imperatives—whether those were electoral, party political, developmental imperatives or ideological—shaped India's foreign policy toward immediate neighbors.
I felt there was a crying need for analytical unity or some kind of linkage between these different literatures, which often were never truly in conversation with each other.
Rohan: The title has been brought up in at least one review critiquing it as hewing to a colonial view. How do you respond to that idea?
Avinash: Yes, that's an interesting standalone review by a former practitioner, and needless to say, I disagree with it. I felt the review struggled with certain basic understandings of political science concepts and how actual politics works, even though policies could be much more siloed in terms of how a bureaucrat looks at policymaking, either domestic or international. In some sense, that review clarified to me the need for a book like this where you have to move beyond policy framings, which can create binaries or partitions between the domestic and the international. The book is not saying that India is a colonial power or that India has a colonial approach toward its neighbors, quite the opposite in fact. It is a story of India's struggle even when it wants to respect the sovereignty and integrity of its neighbors.
Rohan: You also mentioned that the approach taken by New Delhi and the Indian State was more cohesive than the literature betrayed…
Avinash: The official policy lines that come from the Ministry of Home Affairs, from the Ministry of External Affairs, from the Prime Minister's Office, prima facie often indicate that these policies also are siloed just like in academia. But when I started to engage in archives and with policymakers, there was much more appreciation of these interlinkages at an operational working level. The desk in the Ministry of External Affairs includes Bangladesh and Myanmar together. It's a single desk, headed by a joint secretary level officer. And that officer is very aware of the domestic political constraints and opportunities that guide their thinking in real time on the relationship with Dhaka and Naypyidaw as much as they have to engage with the chief ministers of various Indian states in the northeast of India as well as in West Bengal. There was much more analytical awareness of these interconnections. Now whether that necessarily leads to an effective policy is a different issue, but I could not fault the Indian policymaker with failing to look at the region with some degree of cohesion.
Rohan: Could you nutshell your themes for readers, to just give us a sense of what's in this book?
Avinash: This journey starts in 1937 when Burma was separated from India. And it comes all the way up to early 2024, when I finished writing the book and we could see signs of political stress in Bangladesh and a raging civil war in Myanmar since the February 2021 military coup. To handle such a big historical canvas, I took the support of four analytical themes. One is identity politics, the second is cross-border migration, the third is political economy, and fourth is official antinomies or official contradictions.
Let me very briefly talk a little bit about each of these themes. Identity politics is one of the most powerful features that defines India's approach toward this region. These could be ethnic identities, communal identities, or even ideological or revolutionary identities around which political or militant mobilization was and is observable. Not only is India’s Near East one of the most intricately partitioned lands anywhere on earth, but it also gave birth to various ideological extremes from ethnic nationalism to very extreme left-wing mobilization and violence to being the birthplace of the Hindutva movement's political manifestation—thanks to a very violent process of targeting religious minorities, which were Hindus in East Pakistan as it was then called, and Muslims in West Bengal and other parts of India—to also being the cradle of the liberal constitutional idea that defined India for a good part of its independent life after 1950.
A very important example of this is the ethnic nationalism that the Naga communities expressed, using political channels and in social and cultural ways, but also in terms of armed separatist militancy. One of the longest running separatist insurgencies anywhere in the world is in India and Myanmar, with the Naga demand for autonomy. We have had a ceasefire between the Naga movement and the state of India since 1997. That ceasefire stands still today, but we don't know that it will continue to remain in place moving forward. So, you can see how different forms of identity politics were really shaping India's Near East and in so, shaping India itself.
Cross-border migration is another very central feature, arguably not just of India's Near East, but to all of India's social, political, and economic life. This particular concept includes cases of mass displacement, during Partition and in 1971 when almost 10 million people were basically pushed out of East Pakistan because the Pakistani military went on a genocidal spree against its own Bengali citizenry. It also includes the transborder movement of Naga or Mizo or Manipuri communities across the Indo-Myanmar borderlands, which is central in some sense in defining both the opportunity of cross-border trade and cultural connect, but also movement of armed insurgents, which increases anxieties in India about its security dynamics.
The politics of Assam, for example, has been defined by the movement of people from Bangladesh prompting the anti-foreigner, anti-Bengali sentiment there. Even today, the Citizenship Act and the National Register for Citizens, which have been central to the Indian state’s contract with its own people, is being defined by the historical movement of people in India's Near East. So, this was a very central theme to my mind that had to be addressed.
The third is political economy. If you look at India's Near East, especially Indian states in the northeast, these are relatively underdeveloped places. Apart from being dominated by agriculture and some natural resources, these are states which have not seen heavy industrialization. These are not states which have enough revenue generation capacity to feed their own populations adequately. So, they have historically been reliant quite significantly on loans and subsidies by the central government. This has also been the case because of the disruption that was caused during Partition in 1947 when, especially in Bengal, the jute and the cotton industries were completely disrupted. Undivided Bengal under colonial period was one of the largest suppliers of jute and jute bags to the world, which was a key product to global trade then. Partition split this up. All the jute production went into East Pakistan and the jute processing mills were in Calcutta and in Alipore. And that created a fundamental disconnect, which fed into communal disturbances, political disturbances, and partisanship at a social political level, the effects of which we continue to see today.
When you create these borders, you make what used to be legal, legitimate economic or other interactions suddenly illegal overnight. What we see after 1947 is an expansion in illegal trade across the border between different parts of India's northeast with Bangladesh as well as Myanmar. Today, illegal trade in timber, rice and drugs has been absolutely pivotal in shaping the political economies of this region. The city of Moreh, which is in Manipur, is the trans-shipment hub for most of the drugs that come from the Golden Triangle (the term for a region of Southeast Asia that produces large amounts of illicit drugs). And a lot of this economic interaction creates finances which are unaccounted for, but are absolutely central to the electoral landscape or the dynamics of India's Near East and India's own states in the Northeast. That's why political economy was absolutely essential.
And finally, there was the element of official antinomies, contradictions. The state of India would want to change or organize this region based on its own administrative or political views, would initiate policies and acts which were done in good faith, but this created second-order negative effects which have continued to riddle the state of India with a lot of insecurity and violence still, as we can see in the case of Manipur.
A couple of examples. The first is the ever-loaded Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which gives legal immunity to armed forces to combat an insurgency. That act also goes against certain constitutional rights that the people of states like Nagaland or Assam or Manipur or Mizoram are entitled to. Some of the fundamental rights are being trampled upon because the security of the state becomes much more important than the rights of an individual citizen. That's a potent contradiction, which has continued to stymie India's political ambitions of integration and unity in the region until today.
The second example of this could be another article which is not talked about much, but I think is important: Article 244A of the Constitution of India, which basically allowed the creation of a state within the state of Assam previously. This became a shortcut to the creation of new states like Meghalaya. The idea was to give more autonomy to communities within Assam that felt underrepresented, with the hope being that giving them statehood within the union would reduce identity politics. But what we saw was a second order negative effect where Assamese pride got hurt so much that Assamese nationalism itself took a very violent turn and ended up completely reshaping the vocabulary of politics from primarily parliamentary processes to armed politics, especially in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Rohan: Is there a capital A or small A argument through the book?
Avinash: There is no singular argument but I think there is a singular learning. Given the situation we see in India, and across the world, it appears easy to spark social disunity or social communal disharmony for various political reasons in a region, especially one as sensitive as India's Near East. But it's very difficult to build bridges between people. The last few years are a testament to this particular learning. I'll give you three dates. The 1st of February 2021 when the Myanmar military undertook a coup. The idea was to actually secure the state under military rule. Instead what we have seen is a raging civil war and the balkanization of Myanmar over the last four years. Then the 3rd of May 2023 when Manipur imploded with a huge social conflict between the Meitei and the Kuki communities within India. That was a sign of what can happen when majoritarian ideas come to define national and state level politics and practices in India, and how overconfidence can really kill some very well intended ideas of bringing people together. And of course, most recently, the 5th of August 2024 when we saw the collapse of the Sheikh Hasina regime in Bangladesh. This I would say is the core learning of this book. These are regions that require very sensitive handling, they require humility. They require, especially for governments sitting in national capitals, respect for local customs and requirements with a lot of care rather than shoehorning ideologies, which often are ill-fitting with the lived realities of people in these parts of the world.
Rohan: The implication is that governments have not been treating the region with care?
Avinash: Let me take the case of India. Over the past few years, we have had the Hindu nationalist BJP in power. And I think even within the BJP, there was a realization that in Manipur something failed. We have seen recent moves that are helpful, with the removal of the chief minister and President's Rule. There is an acknowledgement, even within the Government of India, that something went horribly wrong. The fact that it took them two years to replace the chief minister of a state who belongs to the same party ruling in the center shows how difficult these things can truly be.
But this is not just a failure of the BJP. Most of the book covers periods where the Congress was in charge, and its desire to remain electorally dominant in the northeast and to fight insurgencies using divide and conquer strategies and tactics at a ground level really ended up fostering more disunity and discontent and mistrust among communities both within themselves and with the Government of India. The same charge can be made with governments in Bangladesh, or Pakistan before 1971, and Myanmar. It is something that these governments have struggled to deal with, and it's not that they're not right. They've somewhat succeeded in making sure there's no more territorial revisionism, but it has come at the cost of constant corrosive political tension in India's Near East.
What we saw with the last three, four years was really a much more expanded, violent manifestation of processes that were already tense, which exploded into the open. The relationship India has with Bangladesh today is a testament to what can go wrong when you lose sight of what the people are actually thinking.
Rohan: Part of the official antinomy comes because, perhaps unlike India’s relationship with China or Pakistan, there is a desire here for better relations and connectivity that is then undone by other policies that lead to more division.
Avinash: The more I hear the term “connectivity,” the more it becomes clear that the region is disconnected. You cannot expect strategic unity or economic connectivity while fostering social division. The two things just don't go hand-in-hand. If you don't want people to come and travel across borders for whatever reason, whether it's political, security sensitivities, or economic sensitivities, you cannot expect to build roads and bridges and ports and expect that infrastructure to become the hallmark of connecting. Ultimately, you have to connect people, and most of the focus that we have seen when we look at India’s Act East or previously Look East policies, was on infrastructural connectivity, which would invariably favor a few businesses rather than communities writ large.
If the question of distribution of wealth, cross-border generation of wealth or people-to-people connectivity is not addressed with some degree of honesty, this is where you can see the antinomies play out very vividly. How do you expect to connect with the people, such as those of Bangladesh, when you term them termites? That just does not work. And we can see the anxiety that particular kind of narrative has created even today when India is trying to refigure its approach toward the interim government.
Rohan: In your last book, you engaged with differing groups of thought within India with regards to Afghanistan, and particularly questions of either conciliating or taking a harder line. Is the intent versus execution question one of differing groups of thought in India or a more cyclical matter?
Avinash: Unlike the first book, the scope of India's Near East is much bigger. This made looking at parochial bureaucratic debates very difficult, even though it is important. The theme of official antinomies is what allowed me to address some of those debates and to show them using the frame of the contradiction.
Now, there has been a lot of cyclical flow of ideas that we see play out, where Delhi is struggling over whether to support a junta in Pakistan or in Burma, whether to deal with democratic forces, whether it was Aung San Suu Kyi in the late 1980s, or to support elections in Bangladesh, or to really figure out whether it is worth it to push an inclusive democratic politics in the region. And again, the learning here is that India is effectively regime agnostic when it comes to its neighborhood. It is happy to deal with the autocrats. It is happy to deal with democrats. It is happy to deal with everything in between and beyond until its national interest, as defined at a particular point in time, is being addressed.
This was a consistent feature, which I believed to be the case both in India's relationship with Bangladesh and Myanmar. One central element of this was India's perception—both its threat perception and the reality—of how its strategic adversities in the region, China and Pakistan, were exploiting India's vulnerabilities in its east, both in India's domestic politics, whether it was the Naga movement, the Mizo movement in Assam, but also in India's relationship with Bangladesh, where Islamist politics is quite rife historically and increasingly on the rise today, or Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar, which creates certain awkwardness when dealing with Naypyidaw or previously Rangoon. In this book, I felt that Indian debates were much more about how to handle what you get rather than having strong preferences about regime type as such.
Rohan: Regime agnostic it may have been, but some of the analysis makes it clear that New Delhi struggled to figure out an approach that didn’t put all its eggs in one basket. The book was prescient on what was likely to happen in Bangladesh. How do you see the current moment?
Avinash: I think history is rhyming when it comes to India and Bangladesh. And rhyming with such a degree of precision, it’s somewhat scary, I must admit. The relationship right now is just about stable. It's not an outrightly hostile relationship, even if it's riddled with a lot of anxiety on both sides. India does not trust the interim government to be able to deliver long-term state stability. It desires elections in Bangladesh, and that desire for elections is not just limited to India. There is uptake for that idea of having elections sooner than later in the armed forces of Bangladesh and the opposition parties like the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and other groups. And Bangladesh continues to feel that not only did India put all its eggs in one basket by over-supporting Sheikh Hasina and enabling her excesses, but also that it is unwilling to respect some of the popular desires and demand for respect as a sovereign nation by Indian policymakers in New Delhi. The Bangladeshi perspective is manifesting in a rise of conservatism and Islamist politics as well as the Jamaat-e-Islami making a comeback.
But none of this has not happened before. I'll give you a very specific example. If you look at Chapter 7 of this book, seven months after the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding leader of independent Bangladesh, it led to a period of huge instability both domestically and with India. The relationship went from being very friendly because India trusted and relied a lot on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to becoming very frosty. And that's exactly what we see happening after August 2024, where India was quite reliant on and quite comfortable working with Mujibur Rahman's daughter, former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. And since her ouster, which was also violent, India’s relationship with Dhaka has been very frosty.
India is insecure about how China and Pakistan will exploit the situation. That is exactly the kind of concern India had in 1975. India is insecure about the rise of serious Islamist politics in Bangladesh. That was exactly the concern in 1975, where India felt that Bangladesh might convert from being a constitutional republic to an Islamist theocracy. Then, there are concerns about what will happen to India's connectivity projects. The fate of the Adani project, the Godda power plant, which is supposed to supply energy to parts of Bangladesh, is in limbo.
These concerns, and of course, the big question mark about the situation of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh, also deeply animated Indian politics and policy in 1975, 1976, and are continuing to animate India's politics and policy today. The causal mechanism of it could be different. India was a very staunchly secular country in 1975 and is quite Hindu nationalist in 2025. But you can see history rhyming today, and this is where I feel the value of the book truly comes in. If you want to see what is likely to happen in the future, I would say look in the past and the trajectory of this relationship will become more or less clear moving forward.
Rohan: If we're looking at the past for what's going to happen, well, what is going to happen?
Avinash: Once the elections happen, I think there will be a phase of renegotiation of this bilateral between most likely the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which is poised to come back into power, and the government of India. Both sides are clear, at least privately, that they do not want the bilateral relationship to go toward a hostile direction. I can again see India renegotiating its relationship with the BNP just like it did in November 1975, where it worked with the then military strongman, Major General Ziaur Rahman. It was a cold relationship, but not fully hostile. I think a similar renegotiation happening between Delhi and an elected BNP-led government, most likely. Would that mean that the relationship will go from anxiety to happiness or some degree of comfort? I don't know. But I do feel there is a desire both in New Delhi and in Dhaka outside of the interim government to stabilize this bilateral because this constant corrosive anxiety on both sides is not sustainable. It can lead to very unexpected, unintended outcomes and consequences.
Rohan: One of the points of the book is, if India was not on good terms with Dhaka, it usually then needed Yangon or Naypyidaw much more. Where are things likely to go in India's relationship with Myanmar, which doesn't have as much public attention within India, broadly?
Avinash: First, let me very quickly speak a little bit about the situation in Myanmar itself before coming to the India-Myanmar relationship. There is a civil war and there is very powerful militant pushback against the junta by the Three Brotherhood Alliance—the Kachin Independence Army, the Karens, all the ethnic armed organizations, as well as the National Unity Government that came into being after the coup in 2021. So much so that the junta has lost control of almost all its territorial boundaries and checkpoints and crossing points with both China and India. And even its connection with Thailand is under stress by ethnic armed organizations. So, this is an embattled junta. This is a country which has been de facto divided into statelets, operating on their own. This is a multi-sided stalemate of sorts where the junta is not powerful enough to win back all territory or people, but neither are the ethnic armed organizations and resistance forces able to lead to a total collapse of the junta itself.
Both India and China have decided to engage with the junta. Unlike India, China has also engaged and supported a lot of these ethnic armed organizations much more intimately. It is a much bigger strategic force in Myanmar's domestic conflict and can create strategic effects, though even Beijing does not have the magic wand of bringing all these sides together into a negotiated settlement. India's engagement with the resistance has been very tactical, very limited.
In Manipur, we have already seen India’s policy toward the junta ricochet in terms of the cross-border support that the conflict in Manipur has received. I'm not saying that the situation in Myanmar caused the Manipur conflict, but it fed into it. I do not foresee India increasing its equities in Myanmar substantially. It is trying to connect Mizoram through a road to a port in Rakhine State. Most of that road is under rebel control. The port is still under control of the junta because of Sittwe, but the rest of Rakhine State and Chin State is under control of the Chin National Front and the Arakan army.
So, India has to take a call. Do you want to engage with these ethnic armed organizations to realize your connectivity ambitions or not? China has taken a call that it will deal with them and it will deal with whoever comes in between to make sure that the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor becomes a reality, even if a truncated one. That's a debate that is going on in Delhi today. And I think moving forward, when the penny drops, whether you keep going or not depends truly on the civil war in Myanmar itself. If we look at a moment where the junta collapses, which I think is unlikely, then it completely puts India's policy toward Myanmar in serious jeopardy. But we are not there yet.
Rohan: Is history rhyming there as well in India's policies with Myanmar? Is India stuck in a cycle of dealing with autocrats, then dealing with insurgencies, then dealing with democrats and just condemned to sort of go round and round, or is there space for India to learn from the past rather than simply repeat the cycle?
Avinash: In Bangladesh, where India's policy has really fluctuated between supporting autocrats, whether it is civilian autocrats or military dictators to supporting elections in the hope that a friendly democrat will come to power. With Myanmar, I think there has been a uniformity of policy direction in favor of the junta. The only time India did not support the junta and, in fact, went outrightly against them, was in 1988 when the 8888 movement began, and Aung San Suu Kyi came to the fore as the leader of the democracy movement. That particular moment has had an out-sized impact on the interpretation of India's approach toward Myanmar, where it came to be known as a country that supports democracy, that wants to work with inclusive forces in Myanmar. But on deeper interrogation of the causes of that decision in '88, taken by Rajiv Gandhi, then Prime Minister, you realize that it had very little to do with democracy.
A lot of that decision-making was centered around the Congress Party's desire to change its political fortunes in the state of Assam, which was facing a raging insurgency. And the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) was both popular and militarily potent at that point in time. ULFA cadre were operating from bases in Bhutan and in Burma in 1988-89. And in Burma, they were operating from territories held not by the junta or the government at that point in time, but resistance forces or ethnic armed forces, which was the Kachin Independence Army. To change that calculus, India needed to engage with the KIA, KIO and some other groups, the Chin groups, and then Karen groups. That tactical negotiation of working with an ethnic armed organization led to a strategic blunder where India couched that tactical support, which was effectively a counter-insurgency operation really, as a bigger political strategic play in which it was supporting the democratic forces. And the arrival of displaced student activists in Delhi, and the arrival of Aung San Suu Kyi, lubricated that calculation. But that was not the cause of why they supported the democracy movement.
The narrative overtook reality to a certain extent, and I think that was an anomaly. You can see very quickly New Delhi realizing that the junta was absolutely not going anywhere. And after 1991, when the elections took place in Myanmar and were quashed again by the junta, it became very clear to India that it had to deal with the junta in Myanmar, otherwise it would lose out to its other strategic rival, China, which was engaging the junta to a considerable degree even then. There is an element of continuum when it comes to India-Myanmar relations today rather than cycles. That continuum is what is defining or shaping the faith in New Delhi of making sure that it does not burn any bridges with Naypyidaw because the last time they did it, it did not pay dividends. Now, one can argue that the situation today is different from the 1980s and the 1990s, and I would agree with that assessment. But that has not led India to really overhaul its policy toward Myanmar in any fundamental sense.
Rohan: India is growing closer to the US, but as you point out toward the latter half of the book, this is one of those spaces where India and the US do not have simple agreements on how to handle the region. And given that we're going into a potentially more fractious period, thanks to Trump, I'm curious, how do you see the involvement of these two big powers—the US and China—and how India has to deal with them here?
Avinash: Let me tackle the China question first before I come to the United States. China has always defined India's strategy in the region, whether it be East Pakistan or India's relationship with Bangladesh or Myanmar. It has always been a very powerful strategic feature, and this is something which I learned while doing research for this book. The impact of Chinese covert support, armed support, and even political support to the Naga movement, to the Mizo movement, to the Manipuri outfits, which took the root of violence in the 70s and 80s, cannot be underestimated. This was not just an India-Pakistan proxy warfare story. This was as much a Sino-Indian rivalry, especially during the Maoist period, until 1976. Of course, when Deng Xiaoping came, things started to calm down, which would eventually lead to a resetting of relations post-1987, when Rajiv Gandhi visited Beijing.
But that element of Chinese excess and interference cannot and must not be underestimated. Today, we are seeing a much more heightened and a much more at-scale version of that kind of engagement of China with India and its neighbors. There is the Belt and Road Initiative. There is Chinese financing and Chinese arming of various armed forces in India’s neighborhood, including Bangladesh and Pakistan. Sri Lanka has a very strong Chinese footprint, so does the Maldives. And Myanmar is effectively again being shaped by Chinese diplomatic and economic approaches. Today, unlike in history, China is a much more resident power in South Asia. And that is the biggest challenge for India. How do you deal with the region, where you were the resident power and you wanted to make sure that no other extra-regional powers become as potent as you do, but today you have failed in achieving that objective? This is where the question of India working with its Western partners truly kicks in.
India has worked with the US or the Soviet Union before, but it was on its own terms. And whenever it would feel that the Americans were getting too deep and tight with the Pakistanis, it would go toward Moscow. It would try to calibrate its relationship with Beijing to a certain degree. But the intensity of the great power politics today and the involvement is of a very different degree. You're absolutely right in saying that India does not get along well with the US everywhere in the region. Right now, post-Trump, it's a whole new world, so we need to see where this goes. But during the Democratic administration under Joe Biden, you could see the Indian vs. American divergences on Bangladesh play out quite openly and quite strongly. The whole idea that the Americans did a regime change—which, by the way, it's absolutely false, and that did not happen—really defined the quality of mistrust between India and the US in India's east. For that matter, the US completely looking away from the situation in Myanmar and not engaging with the junta, despite India continuingly asking the US to support India's case in Myanmar by engaging with the junta—you can see these divergences.
In my view, it shows that India does not work with its partners in the region in a uniform sense. It wants to select where to work together and with whom it wants to shape the terms of those interactions. It wants sight of what the Western partners are doing in the region. If the Americans are coming to Sri Lanka, they need to work with India. If the Americans are coming investing money in Nepal, there have to be silent guarantees and acceptance from New Delhi. So, I think you can see this element of selectivism, where in some neighboring countries, India is more comfortable with having its Western partners work with it than in other countries. Bangladesh is one case where India has been a lot more skeptical of Western power, even though it was not inimical. Moving forward, I think this is likely to remain the case, unless of course the Trump administration does a full 180 degrees—which it is perfectly capable of doing and says that "No, the Indian viewpoint on Bangladesh is the valid viewpoint." But of course, that would create second-order effects in Bangladesh and elsewhere.
Rohan: You mentioned China being a resident South Asian power, unlike in the past. We also hear, on a larger scale, the story of India's rise, its global heft and so on. So, does India have more capacity today to influence its neighborhood than it did fifty years ago? How does China’s presence in the region square with the idea of a more powerful India?
Avinash: India is absolutely more powerful today than it was even ten years ago. I have absolutely no illusions about that in the region and elsewhere. This might not seem to be the case when we look at India's relationship with its neighbors, but in absolute terms, India is a bigger power today than it was before. And it's a more assertive power today in some senses, at least when you look at the post-Cold War period. The problem, of course, that India faces is that China is even more powerful and much more powerful. So, this is an issue of relativity rather than absolute numbers.
China was relatively much more equal to India in the 1950s and 1960s or the 1970s than it is today. And this asymmetry is growing at scale—in the tech sector, in the defense sector, in terms of Indian and Chinese economies. India is not a match to China's national power today as perhaps it could have been in let's say the 1950s or the 1960s. This is what really complicates India's regional dilemmas and anxieties.
I'll give you an example somewhat away from India’s Near East. In Sri Lanka, India was able to assert its red lines of not allowing Chinese military vessels or submarines to take base in Sri Lanka or really shape Columbus' calculus on China quite strongly. It has struggled to do so over the past few years. We have seen Chinese spy ships take dock in Sri Lanka. We have seen, even in Maldives further south, China becoming much more important and much more present, if not socially and culturally or politically, but definitely in a strategic sense by just having a lot more investments in these countries and working with the elites. And that is where India truly is when it comes to its power. It is a powerful country. It is not someone that India's neighbors can ignore just because there's China. That has to be noted. No Indian neighbor, perhaps barring Pakistan, can discount India today despite Chinese presence. And India has those capabilities. But the neighbors are also not as fearful or concerned about Indian sensitivities as they used to be a couple of decades ago.
Rohan: Are there misconceptions about India and India's Near East that you found yourself constantly having to correct?
Avinash: What I've struggled with is a lack of appreciation of how important this region actually is for India itself. When we talk about India as a power or India even as a modern contemporary independent nation state, there's a lot of focus on India's boundary dispute with China. There's a lot of focus on India's ongoing rivalry with Pakistan and the Kashmir issue. There's a lot more focus on the wars that India has fought with Pakistan in the west and of course 1971 to a certain degree. But the place where debates in India about citizenship, state building, and statecraft truly happened were actually in the east. In an intellectual sense, that's the fight—to lend focus to a region whose value is absolutely central to the making of India and is likely to remain central to the making of India moving forward. But it is not seen as much in public popular discourse as the Kashmir issue or Pakistan.
The second misconception, especially I see myself being frustrated by, is this idea of connectivity. That you can build a road, build a port, build a bridge and build a rail line and you'll connect and you'll be fine. It just doesn't work like that. Connectivity is not a panacea.
Rohan: Finally, do you have recommendations for our readers?
Avinash: I have recommendations, but they might not all be directly about India or India's Near East. I will give you a recommendation of books, more in the spirit that they speak to some of the themes that we have been discussing.
We spoke about China and I think these two books are ones which I would highly recommend to your reader. One is Zhou Enlai; A Life, a biography by Chen Jian. It's a great piece of scholarship and it’s effectively a history of modern China. The second book is a personal political history of China, At the Edge of Empire; A Family’s Reckoning with China by Edward Wong. He is a Chinese-American journalist, and was the chief correspondent for The New York Times in Beijing for many years. It's a great piece of work, a very personal history of his family and its relationship with China.
The third book that I would recommend very, very highly, is a piece of powerful political fiction called You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue. It reimagines the meeting of Spanish conquistadors with the Aztecs in Mexico. Everyone should read it. It really puts questions around colonialism and decolonization into sharp focus. Two more books I would recommend are Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan. This is political fiction based on the Sri Lankan Civil War in the 1980s, coming up all the way to 2009 from a Tamil perspective. And lastly, My Friends by Hisham Matar. Hisham Matar is a Libyan-American author who has written a lot about the politics of Libya and more. It is a great introduction to life in exile, to friendship, and political violence and autocracy, and what that means for people who are democratically minded and liberal in their world views.
Avinash Paliwal is a Reader in Diplomacy and Public Policy at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
Rohan Venkat is a CASI Managing Editor for India in Transition.
India in Transition (IiT) is published by the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) of the University of Pennsylvania. All viewpoints, positions, and conclusions expressed in IiT are solely those of the author(s) and not specifically those of CASI.
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