- Friday, May 03, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIA’S external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar on Thursday (7) stressed the country’s ties with the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) region saying it is one of the major hubs for India’s global economic engagement and the coronavirus pandemic has necessitated a new urgency to re-imagine the cooperation and expand its ambition more.
Addressing a Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) event in New Delhi, Jaishankar said the centrality of the ASEAN to the Indo-Pacific and the importance of ties between India and the bloc are self-evident.
“But if they have to continue to be salient, then we must strive to go beyond ideas and concepts that have outlived their shelf life,” he said without elaborating.
The 10-nation ASEAN is considered a major influential bloc in the region and several countries like the US, China, Japan and Australia are its dialogue partners.
The Indian external affairs minister said the larger ASEAN region is seeing “significant” socio-economic changes and the pandemic has accelerated those changes.
“It is important that we — India, the ASEAN and our relationship — we recognise that a different world awaits us. It is one that puts a greater premium on trust and transparency, resilience and reliability, as also on choices and redundancy,” he said, adding, “Our contemporary conversations will be relevant only if we adequately capture these emerging concerns.”
Jaishankar also noted that India’s ties with the ASEAN are rooted in history, geography and culture and a growing awareness of the potential they hold for mutual interests and development is what has energised them in recent times.
He said as cooperation between the two sides grew in the course of the last 25 years, new facets and domains emerged for collaboration and connectivity and security were among the more notable ones.
“As a result, our Look East policy matured into an Act East one. Its success is reflected in drawing India more comprehensively into the Indo-Pacific. There is no doubt that the ASEAN is one of the major hubs for India’s global economic engagement,” Jaishankar said.
“As it develops, it is natural that we would like to re-visit the level of ambition that we have set for our partnership. That is also influenced by autonomous changes in the region. But what has given this objective a new urgency is the necessity to re-imagine our cooperation in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said.
The Indian minister said a crisis can often be the basis of creativity and the endeavour should be to come out of the current pandemic stronger.
The members of ASEAN are Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.
India’s ties with ASEAN have been on an upswing in the last few years with a focus on accelerating cooperation in the areas such as trade and investment and security and defence.
The ASEAN region along with India together comprises a combined population of 1.85 billion people, which is one-fourth of the global population and their combined GDP has been estimated at over $3.8 trillion (£2.7 trillion).
