It’s a busy foreign affairs calendar for India. The diplomats must live up to the challenge

Acouple of events, in the past week, spilling into the current one, mark the busy foreign affairs calendar for the government of India, besides testing the agile diplomatic arc, which India needs to draw.

Last week, India’s close long-term ally and neighbour Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister of Bangladesh, was on a four day tour. The bilateral visit took stock of the ongoing joint projects between the neighbours and reaffirmed further deepening of bilateral ties on several issues related to trade, energy security, and connectivity.

The two sides agreed on an interim water sharing agreement for Kushiyara River, a challenging issue for India and Bangladesh, given the complex nature of democracies in the two countries. This water sharing agreement could serve as a test case for the long pending and much more contentious water sharing agreement for Teesta River.

Meanwhile, India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Union Minister for Defence Rajnath Singh landed in Tokyo for a 2+2 Ministerial dialogue with Japan. The emphasis was on increasing economic and strategic security partnership between the two countries with a clear view on the Indo Pacific theatre. It comes at a time when China has been testing Japan’s patience by lobbing a few missiles in the latter’s maritime economic zones in the Taiwan straits and a belligerent North Korea declaring itself a full non-reversible nuclear power state. Meanwhile, India continues to stall China at its northwestern borders, while keeping an eye on the dragon’s mischief in the greater Indian exclusive economic maritime zone. It helps that India and Japan are partners in several multilateral and plurilateral platforms and both are in leadership roles next year for the powerful G20 and G7 groupings respectively.Jaishankar’s remarks summarised the way forward “for ensuring a free, open, inclusive and prosperous Indo-Pacific… That is done through a range of policies and mechanisms, including cooperation in the Quad framework, utilization of Asean platforms and participation in bodies like ReCAAP, Supply Chain Resilience Initiative, etc. Together, we are also poised to take forward the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative, Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, amongst others.”Around the same time Piyush Goyal was in the American west coast negotiating with 13 other nations on a new age economic partnership stewarded by the US, called the Indo Pacific Economic Partnership (IPEF). Most of the 13 nations in IPEF are in South or Southeast Asia. India joined three out of four pillars of IPEF negotiations and chose to sit out on the trade pillar. This should be seen in the context of India setting itself a target of $2 trillion in exports by 2030.

However, it is not part of any large trade agreement bloc. India had earlier walked out of Regional Comprehensive Economic partnership, due to the disproportional influence of China in the trade agreement. The IPEF may not be a binding trade agreement yet, but it still has an important trade pillar on which other pillars related to secure supply chains, tax and regulations and climate fiancé are dependent. Meanwhile, Ukraine managed to gain some upper hand in the war against Russia, where its forces managed to push back Russian troops in the northeast and gain some 3000 square kilometer territory. Incidentally, Chinese and Nepalese legislative wings signed an agreement reconfirming a push ahead to China funded Belt and Road initiative in Nepal.

(The author is a foreign affairs commentator)