No other region can quite match South East Asia in its proximity to India in multiple senses. It is also a region projected to be, along with India, the growth engine of the world for the foreseeable future. The region is finally opening up to India and Indians in unprecedented ways. Hundreds of flights every week connect India to the region. Indian tourists are flooding ASEAN countries thanks to newly liberalized visa regimes for Indians. Trade, commerce and investment flows are on the upward trajectory. Long years of cultivating our relations with the region appear to be bearing fruit. All this makes it worthy of far greater scholarship as well as public awareness in India.
Ambassador Gurjit Singh’s highly readable ‘The Durian Flavour” is packed with policy prescriptions as well as practical suggestions. One would be hard put to find another work whose scope covers our relations with ASEAN in such breadth and depth - from its early tentative beginnings, gradual development, to the present momentum of a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ and including a playbook for the future. Even rarer to find is a work of this kind by a practitioner – one who has been both envoy to a key ASEAN country (Indonesia) as well as India’s Ambassador to ASEAN, and who has also spent many years of scholarship on the subject. He thus brings unique perspectives to bear on his scholarly yet lucid addition
to the literature on our relations with the region with which we share an unsurpassed civilizational affinity.
To an observer, the progress of India’s relations with ASEAN may appear to be of a glacial pace. It is true that dramatic developments in the relationship (such as the presence of all ten ASEAN leaders at our Republic Day in 2018) have been few and far between.. That is the result of many factors that the book brings forth – from the differences engendered during the Cold War and the strategic hesitancy to engage India more closely among some countries in the region to the vast diversity of political systems and economic conditions among its member countries that makes decision making itself a fraught exercise, along with a few miss-steps along the way. Of late however, the rapid growth of bilateral relations with these countries has given ballast to our relations with ASEAN as a group and vice versa.
The value of the book lies in it not being limited to the official viewpoints alone but referencing as it does a wide spectrum of strategic thinkers and academics in the region. It marshals conclusions from a bottom up look through attitudinal surveys among both Indians in India and citizens of ASEAN countries. These surveys are useful as they point to the fact that attitudes on both sides are changing in positive ways.
For Indians, it is easy to be lulled by the romance of our civilizational affinity with the region and to think that relations will organically grow from that. The book recounts Tagore’s beautiful words after his visit to Java in 1927:
In a dim, distant, unrecorded age we had met,
thou and I—
When my speech became entangled in thine
and my life in thy life.
However, it is important to remember that our meeting ‘in that unrecorded age’ was through the functional medium of trade and commerce, not through colonialism or proselytization. So too in today’s world, while civilizational affinity has a part to play, functional cooperation is the more certain foundation for our relations. The book explores this in some detail, going into every aspect of our relations with ASEAN – be it the civilizational and historical links or recent economic, defence, security and people-centred cooperation. It traces the growth of our relations from humble beginnings to the multi-faceted cooperation we see today. It also examines the dynamic context in which this relationship has grown mirroring the evolution of geopolitics in the region as well as events such as the Covid pandemic and its repercussions. Unfortunately, our economic engagement with ASEAN (especially in the context of RCEP) as well as the pace of our defence and security cooperation has, to a large extent, been hostage to the China factor.
The Durian Flavour concludes with a chapter devoted to India-ASEAN relations in a changing global order. It makes the case for functional cooperation between the QUAD and ASEAN and recounts some positive movements in this direction. However, further progress along this line would depend on whether the QUAD’s present functional agenda will survive. China does loom very large over ASEAN, cartographically as well as metaphorically, and this contributes to at least some of its hesitancy to fully engage with partners and in areas that China is sensitive about.. A normalization of India-China relations may bring its own dividend in our relations with South East Asia.
In his foreword to The Durian Flavour, former President of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, sums up the work well for its “forward looking approach to overcoming perception gaps.….with practical suggestions, useful for both academics and policymakers’.
The reader might legimately ask – why reference the durian? It is not a fruit that is universally loved and is largely unfamiliar to Indians. But, as Ambassador Gurjit Singh explains, like the durian, India-ASEAN relations require adjustment, accommodation and acceptance to enjoy its fruit!
