Geopolitical Great Game in India’s Periphery

As India appears to be caught in the conflict dyad with Pakistan’s heinous terrorist strategy, China is making inroads in the Neighbourhood from Afghanistan to Myanmar.

Geopolitical Big Players have a tolerance for power vacuum and instability in pockets of the World where they can further their own interests, much as they would refuse to acknowledge the same.  India’s periphery is wracked by instability for several reasons from the inequities of the Partition of the Subcontinent to power ambitions of military and political leaders, economic penury and development subsistence thus attracting the attention of major powers given the immense geostrategic significance of  South Asia.

The region abuts the Indian Ocean – a major seafare for global maritime trade in waters that are hardly placid. South Asia also abuts the major global powers China and Russia, the latter offset by Central Asia, but significant none the less. As the global divide that is evident post the War in Ukraine between the West and Russia and China there is a jostling for denial and thus occupation of geopolitical space in South Asian countries taking advantage of power vacuum and instability. Afghanistan, Myanmar and Bangladesh standout amongst these.

Afghanistan known for the 19th and the 20th Century as the graveyard of empires is proving on today as well. Having humbled the mighty United States and NATO in the first two decades, surprisingly others are seeking to partner with the Taliban with a heinous past of violence and suicide attacks through which it regained power in Kabul. Ironically Russia despite the Soviet experience of the 1980’s is seeking to return to Afghanistan starting with the economic and trade sphere which is always the first step to gaining political access. 

China under President Xi Jinping is following suit as Beijing is willing to squander the economic largesse of the Belt and Road Initiative [BRI]  in Afghanistan a virtual bottomless pit for absorbing aid and assistance while promising oil and strategic minerals. With the United States under global retreat so to say under the 47th President Donald Trump, Western moves are cautious. Nevertheless Mr Trump has expressed the necessity for having a footprint in the Bagram Air  Base in Afghanistan – a sprawling military aerospace complex ostensibly to see Chinese nuclear facilities in Lop Nor in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region further North.

Today the United States under Trump administration sees Afghanistan as a basket case of sorts but the lure of strategic minerals and China attempting to grab a lion’s share may just about lead Washington to recast priorities.

And in the regional domain Pakistan having lost out on primacy with the present defacto rulers in Kabul which were seen as its acolytes, there is competition now with archrival India. Indeed and the Taliban are shrewdly playing along with these global power seekers like a chameleon wooing one and the other almost concomitantly.

On the Eastern flank of India is Myanmar where a civil war broke out after the Military – Tatmadaw usurped power in a coup in February 2021. Military takeovers are not  unusual in Myanmar but this time the numerous ethnic armed organisations and even the majority Bamar community rose in armed rebellion.

Given other major hotspots, the World had little time for Myanmar but Russia and China have been active in providing favours to the military junta for survival with limiting the strictures in the United Nations Security Council. The military is now employing the Russian playbook to hold engineered elections in which the King’s parties will win a majority and install the coup leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing as the President.

Of late China has put pressure on the Ethnic groups who had captured large swathes of territory including State capitals to seek a compromise with the military and have succeeded at least in the Northern Shan State. The United States appears disinterested while the regional grouping of ASEAN of which Myanmar is a member and India are waiting in the wings for the situation to unravel. 

Yet another country in India’s periphery which is experiencing a power vacuum of sorts in Bangladesh and the political as well as law and order situation is so complex the big players appear to be baffled. But the Interim Administration under chief advisor Professor Mohammad Yunus a pioneer of the small banking revolution and Nobel laureate is inviting forces inimical to India to the country holding the lure of access to the North East.

Surely this is a path to disaster for Bangladesh but the unelected leader whose hatred for the deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina presently in exile in India is well known is blind to reality hurtling the people of Bangladesh into the vortex of powerplay in Bay of Bengal.

India will have to up the game in the periphery activating the Neighbourhood First policy in a tangible way to offer alternatives to China’s rejuvenated Belt and Road Initiative [BRI] exploiting the vacuum of overall United States geopolitical disinterest.