Relationship with India reshaping and growing
Australian and Indian relations have been on shaky ground in recent years following random acts of violence against Indian students. A Taskforce was created to review the situation and member Ashok Malik shares its findings.
“War,” Georges Clemenceau famously said, “is too important to be left to the generals.” Similarly diplomacy and the engagement between two countries is simply too important to be left to diplomats. This pithy principle was behind the formation of the Australia India Institute (AII) Taskforce on Perceptions, which submitted its report in July.
The AII Taskforce comprised three Indians and three Australians, only two of the six having officially served as diplomats. It was required to make an assessment and arrive at recommendations related to the gamut of Australia-India relations – government to government, of course, but much more civil society to civil society, business to business, ordinary Australian to ordinary Indian. The report came in the background of random acts of violence against Indian students in Melbourne in 2009-10.
It was crucial not to be overwhelmed by recent events. The Australia-India relationship is 65 years old, if one dates it to India’s independence. It is over 200 years old, if one considers the first Indian explorations of Australia, albeit under a colonial umbrella. In this time-frame, individual acts of violence over a 12 or 18 month period would seem only a blip. Given Australia and India are flanking powers in the eastern Indian Ocean – a region of extraordinary trade and geostrategic importance in the early 21st century – the future can only be imagined.
What did the Taskforce find? While it is difficult to encapsulate a 20,000-word document in a few paragraphs, much less pick just one theme, a certain commonality does emerge. Australian and Indian publics like each other, without necessarily knowing much about each other. This seems to come in the way of the two countries optimising synergies they sometimes don’t even realise exist.
Take the prism of business. To Australians, India is a huge market for energy resources – coal, natural gas, uranium too. Otherwise it is a difficult place to do business in. The regulatory maze that has kept the Indian mining industry closed to outsiders and the public procurement scandals that accompanied the 2010 Commonwealth Games haven’t helped.
Nevertheless to draw broad conclusions about India’s economic opportunities from, say, the Commonwealth Games mess would be erroneous. It would be as much of a mistake as to dismiss Australian multiculturalism as a sham on the basis of those sporadic though gruesome cases of mugging in 2009.
Australians see themselves as enterprising, but Indians don’t experience the ambition of Australian business. Half of India’s US$1.8 trillion GDP comprises services. Australia has expertise in this area, but its marquee brands are missing in India. Other numbers too tell a sobering story: Australian FDI in India in 2010-11 amounted to A$755 million. To put that in perspective, India’s GDP is 7.5 times larger than Malaysia’s – but Australian FDI in Malaysia in 2010-11 was four times that in India.
The upshot is Australians see India as too tough a business environment to negotiate. To Indians, the Australian approach appears short-term and unduly mercantilist. From specific vantage positions, both perceptions are perfectly valid or horribly limited – and limiting.
Formal diplomacy feeds as well as feeds on such perceptions. As the Taskforce report says, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) are “two foreign ministries divided by the same calling: diplomacy”.
DFAT combines commerce and traditional diplomacy. On an Australian prime ministerial or government visit, it would be perfectly in order to discuss and promote specific companies and deals. The MEA has begun to acquire an economic profile only recently. There is still a school that is “culturally uncomfortable discussing specific business deals”. As a result, Indian politicians/diplomats wonder if their Australian interlocutors are too pushy. Australians, in turn, ask if their Indian interlocutors are too obdurate.
Australians and Indians have an old history. They fought and died together at Gallipoli. They drifted away during the Cold War. They make for one of contemporary cricket’s most compelling rivalries. Their relationship has been defined by spirit and emotion, idealism and hope, and occasionally testy theatre.
The Taskforce believes this can be one of the world’s pivotal relationships in the 21st century. Australia and India have just under a hundred years to live up to that prediction.
Ashok Malik is an Indian writer and columnist. He was a member of the Australia India Institute (AII) Taskforce on Perceptions and is currently an Emerging Leaders Fellow at the AII.
