Authors: Narayanan (Hari) Gopalan Lakshmi and Yves Tiberghien, UBC
Considerably surprisingly, India took ten days to touch upon US Home of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s go to to Taiwan and the following large-scale stay fireplace drills launched by China. On 12 August 2022, New Delhi said that it sought a ‘de-escalation of tensions.’ Then on 28 August 2022, New Delhi accused Beijing of militarising the Taiwan Strait by means of its Excessive Commissioner in Sri Lanka.
Absent from New Delhi’s statements was any affirmation of assist for the ‘One China’ coverage. India has not publicly supported the ‘One China’ coverage for greater than 12 years as a protest in opposition to Beijing’s observe of issuing stapled visas to guests from Arunachal Pradesh — a border area administered by India however which China claims as a part of southern Tibet.
India’s strategic ambiguity over the ‘One China’ coverage impacts its relationship with Taiwan. New Delhi has been sluggish to capitalise on the chance supplied by Taiwan’s New Southbound Coverage, an initiative that goals to strengthen Taipei’s relations with ASEAN, South Asia and Oceania. That should change if New Delhi needs to turn out to be an essential stakeholder within the Indo-Pacific area.
India must strengthen commerce and people-to-people ties with Taipei by explicitly mentioning Taiwan in its Indo-Pacific coverage. The deepening of ties is not only a response to the current chill in India’s relationship with China, it displays the congruence of pursuits between the 2 democracies and rising public assist for higher relations in Taiwan and India.
Regardless of pursuing multilateral partnerships underneath the umbrella of pacts such because the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Financial Cooperation (BIMSTEC), India has been cautious of explicitly formulating an Indo-Pacific technique for worry of antagonising Beijing — a reticence that has progressively disappeared over the previous 5 years.
After China and India had been concerned in a stand-off alongside Bhutan’s Doklam plateau in 2021, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined India’s first Indo-Pacific coverage framework in June 2018. The doc explicitly states that it’s not a China containment technique whereas declaring that ASEAN is central to India’s Indo-Pacific imaginative and prescient. It then stresses the significance of the peaceable decision of disputes, an open commerce regime and the sustainable improvement of maritime assets and safety.
The technique additionally focusses on deepening regional connectivity. Strengthening the connection with Taiwan would come underneath the umbrella of supporting an ‘open commerce regime’ and ‘deepening connectivity’ — each of which align with India’s ‘Act East’ method and Taiwan’s ‘New Southbound Coverage’.
India’s Indo-Pacific stance has been additional calibrated since 2018. India has stepped up its engagement with its Quad companions over 5 Quad conferences. India has additionally began taking a extra vocal stance on South China Sea disputes, declaring in July 2020 that the area needs to be thought-about part of the ‘international commons’. It has since deployed frontline warships to the South China Sea.
India has additionally labored with Japan and Australia to attain regional provide chain resilience. Of their first official dialog in September 2020, Modi and former Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga agreed that the ‘financial structure of a free, open, and inclusive Indo-Pacific area should be premised on resilient provide chains’. In the meantime, New Delhi’s Oceania division goals to attract India’s administrative and diplomatic concentrate on a area stretching from the western Pacific to the Andaman Sea.
Strengthening ties with Taiwan could be a useful addition to India’s Indo-Pacific coverage. Following the Doklam stand-off in 2018, the Ministry of Exterior Affairs submitted a report that referred to as for a ‘versatile method’ when coping with China, together with by growing connections with Taiwan. Individuals in Taiwan present an growing, though nonetheless divided, degree of assist for nearer hyperlinks with New Delhi.
Regardless of sturdy assist for strengthening bilateral ties, the connection between India and Taiwan has considerably underperformed. Whereas commerce grew from US$1 billion in 2000 to over US$7 billion in 2019, it includes just one per cent of Taiwan’s whole commerce. The variety of Taiwanese vacationers in India was solely 33,500 in 2016 — roughly the identical because the variety of Indian vacationers in Taiwan.
Some argue that India ought to designate Taiwan as a commerce companion, conclude free commerce negotiations began in 2021 and prioritise deepening people-to-people ties in politics, assume tanks and universities. The free commerce settlement, when accomplished, is more likely to have a powerful semiconductor part, with corporations corresponding to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Firm and United Microelectronics Company invited to arrange amenities in India.
The rising diaspora of extremely educated Indian professionals in Taiwan, round 5,000 in quantity, may additionally play a serious position in enhancing people-to-people ties. The projected rise within the variety of Indian college students pursuing college schooling in Taiwan, which elevated from round 1000 in 2015 to 2239 in 2020–2021, may assist enhance connectivity between the 2 international locations.
It’s time for India to cease being too deferential in direction of Beijing and seize its Taiwan second by shifting rapidly on two fronts — commerce and people-to-people ties. New Delhi may obtain this by incorporating Taiwan into its Indo-Pacific coverage and boosting tourism and academic hyperlinks with Taipei.
Narayanan (Hari) Gopalan Lakshmi is an MPPGA graduate from UBC and Postgraduate Analysis Scholar on the Asia-Pacific Basis of Canada.
Yves Tiberghien is Professor of Political Science and Director Emeritus of the Institute of Asian Analysis on the College of British Columbia. He’s additionally a Distinguished Fellow on the Asia-Pacific Basis of Canada.
