Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
Washington has now moderated Secretary for Defense Leon Panetta’s statement that the US, as a fighting force, would be in the barracks by mid-2013.
US forces may now come out to fight as and when necessary until their departure at the end of 2014. Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
South Asia is a vast region encompassing eight nations (if we include Afghanistan) and over one-fifth of humanity.
It is difficult to do it justice in this short summary of the year’s events. Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
Australia’s Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, would have been more politically comfortable had she left the issue of uranium sales to India rusting in the ‘parking lot’.
The pressing question is therefore: why visit the issue now? Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
The CIA considers India a ‘swing state’ in Asia, meaning that the way in which it chooses to lock into existing security structures will have important implications for the Asian security order.
India’s emergence is especially important in the context of China’s rise and the apparent relative decline of the US. This confronts Australia with stark choices between its economic imperative not to alienate China and its long-standing strategic reliance on the US. Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
India claims there is a strong connection between its need to lift an estimated 440 million people out of poverty, and its stance on trade liberalisation and climate change.
The country’s Planning Commission recently estimated India’s poverty rate at 37 per cent. Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
South Asia and the Indian Ocean region were locked in a four-power ‘quadrilateral’ structure for significant periods during the Cold War.
On one side were India and the former Soviet Union. On the other side Pakistan stood beside the US against Soviet and ‘leftist’ influence, at one point even being a member of the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO). Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
The idea that nation states possess a ‘strategic culture’ that directs their actions on the world stage was once popular.
George Tanham of Rand Corporation claimed that India’s international outlook was shaped by the hierarchical attitude deriving from caste and the then Brahmin-caste domination of key institutions. Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
India and China are Asian mega-population powers. Each has enviable economic growth rates, but each also has a mega-sized problem with corruption — and each is handling it differently.
Corruption in India is nothing new. But recent accusations appear to place India in the same class as Africa’s worst kleptocracies. Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
The crucial issue is the future of nuclear-armed Pakistan, a country of 160 million, mixing a highly sophisticated — albeit semi-feudal — elite with a poorly educated, poverty ridden peasant and tribal mass base.
The US will be doing its sums, including with the material seized from the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad. Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
Corruption in India is, of course, nothing new. But the recent accusations appear to put the country into the category of one of the worst African ‘cleptocracies’. They have also paralysed the Indian parliament and gravely damaged the reputation of the hitherto successful Congress-led government of Manmohan Singh. The following account of some recent cases gives a sense of the scale and cost of corruption in India.
Former Mines Minister and Chief Minister of Jharkhand, Madhu Koda, is in jail on allegations of having syphoned off about US$1 billion, mainly from corrupt mining deals, during his short tenure. Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
India’s Look East policy was initiated out of failure: the failure of India’s Cold War strategy of ‘playing both ends against the middle’ while at the same time attempting to adopt a pro-Soviet ‘tilt’; and the failure of India’s command economy, which by 1990 had managed to command only 0.4 per cent of world trade – insufficient to cushion India from the 1989-90 oil shock. While the collapse of the Soviet Union was no fault of India, it left New Delhi searching for an alternative set of economic and strategic approaches. The ‘Look East’ policy seemed to fit both needs.
India, however, initially had a hard job to claw its way back into those parts of Asia to its east. ASEAN itself was borne out of concern about an encroaching communist bloc and tempered in the fires of the Vietnam War. It viewed India’s still clunky economy and former Soviet bloc ‘tilt’ with suspicion. Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
The United States and its allies are engaged in two wars in South West Asia. But this costly involvement does not appear to have won the US and the West the influence they would expect to enjoy in the region. This is not due so much to military factors, but rather to the fact that there are now a number of alternatives to the financial and economic influence of the West. The most immediate implication of any such decline in influence is likely to be a diminution of the capacity of the West to assert its governance and human rights agendas.
This decline of Western influence was starkly illustrated by the failed attempts of a number of Western powers to influence the Sri Lankan government of Mahinda Rajapaksa in the dénouement of the Sri Lankan civil war in May 2009. Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
India is a rising economic star and also wants to be a world venue for major sporting events. But violent jihadi groups have a strong incentive to undermine that image. As a result, New Delhi’s Dhyan Chand National Stadium, with its glistening new astro-turf, was in complete lockdown for the opening of the Hockey World Cup. Security was so tight that the President of the Federation of International Hockey, Leandro Negre, was stopped and searched. Players were confined to their hotels when not playing or training and were heavily escorted between venues. As it transpired, the two weeks of competition went without a hitch from the security point of view.
The Hockey World Cup was a test run for the Commonwealth Games, scheduled for 3-14 October, again in New Delhi. Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
While no reasonable person would shed too many tears for the passing of the Tamil Tigers (except for the number of civilian deaths involved), we should, perhaps, shed some tears for Sri Lanka itself.
A generation ago, Sri Lanka had an ambition to become another ‘Asian Tiger’. And it had every prospect of so doing had not the vicious civil war intervened. Read more…
Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU
Australia is not the only country on the receiving end of China’s new-found diplomatic ‘forthrightness’. India too has recently received a sizzling serve from the Beijing end of the court.
As pointed out in South Asia Masala, the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is also claimed by China, is the current immovable object in the Sino-Indian relationship. However, on this occasion that tricky problem has been exacerbated by a planned visit of the Dalai Lama to the disputed state and to Tawang, birth-place of the revered Sixth Dalai Lama, which lies within the borders claimed by India. Read more…