South Asia: India vies for influence with China over COVID-19
South Asia: India vies for influence with China over COVID-19
WRITTEN BY SABYASACHI BISWAL
24 April 2020
Ever since the World Health Organisation declared the newly found COVID-19 strain a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on January 30, the Government of India has officially registered almost 12,974 active cases of infection, 507 deaths and 2,230 recoveries, as of April 19.
A number, which would have tanked exponentially to 8.2 Lakh by April 15, according to Jt. Secretary (Health and Family Welfare) Lav Agarwal, was apparently avoided due to proactive, and early interventions in the areas of screening, detection, movement restrictions, and active prophylaxis, much before India touched 100 cases, on March 13. In fact, India was one of the few countries that scored a perfect hundred in a tracking survey created by researchers at Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford.
The tracker however, is not a measurement of comparative success and relies on indicators such as school closures, travel bans, emergency investments in healthcare, fiscal measures, and investment in vaccines. Nonetheless, the aggregation of the scores into a “Policy Stringency Index” only underlines India’s foresighted urgency in implementing the necessary advisories laid down in WHO’s “Global Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan”.
Furthermore, in addition to the home front, India has also been looking equally proactive in offering a regional South Asian response to tackle the pandemic, with a revived readiness. The response draws inspiration from India’s extensive ‘Neighbourhood First’ and ‘Panchsheel’ policies, in paving way for a long term, and cooperative soft-power diplomacy with its neighbouring states. Prime Minister Narendra Modi under such auspices called for a video conference on 15 March with leaders of the member states of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), to discuss measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 in the region.
India and the renewed vigour of SAARC
The capacity of COVID-19 to penetrate into the region of South Asia has been a matter of utmost concern, not only for the leaders of South Asia, but also for WHO. With cases reported in almost all South Asian countries, the pandemic is no longer knocking on the door but is within the house itself. Furthermore, with a dense population demography, unequal living standards, fiscal struggles, overstretched health infrastructure, over-dependency on out of the pocket medicare consumption, and close geographical proximity to China, South Asia will always be a handful of steps away from a humanitarian disaster over the course of the pandemic.
Countries like the Dominican Republic have requested Indian medical and drug supplies in bulk to counter COVID-19. This has great potential to allow India to usher in a new age of ‘medical diplomacy’, countering China’s own Health Silk Route”.
Moreover, looking through the lens of Wallerstein’s World Systems Theory, South Asia acts as a strongly positioned semi-peripheral order, failure or cessation of which due to a catastrophe can lead to a global supply chain fallout of production, consumption, extraction, and labour.
Keeping these in mind, the 15 March video conference by heads of government underlines a renewed urgency for South Asian unity, and the surprising renewal of SAARC as an effective regional organisation, a position which has been questioned and reviewed many times because of its apparent stagnation due to bilateral skirmishes, hegemonic interventions, general mistrust, and external roadblocks in the form of China. With the attendance from heads of governments of seven out of eight member states, with Pakistan being represented by its Health Minister, along with the Secretary General of SAARC, and Director of SAARC Disaster Management Center (DMC), it seemed like the prospect of SAARC is not dead after all.
Narendra Modi, acting as the figurehead of the conference, called upon the SAARC leadership to prepare, act, and together defeat the pandemic. He also proposed the creation of a COVID-19 Emergency Fund, requesting voluntary contribution from member states, while pledging an amount of USD 10 million as an initial contribution from India. Apart from these, India also made several other lucrative offers to SAARC partners, which aim to strengthen their contingency in fighting COVID-19 effectively. These include – Rapid response teams for swift medicare intervention; online training capsules for emergency response; continuous communication between healthcare specialists of SAARC nations; monitoring of travel restrictions over intra-regional trade; infographic website for COVID-19 awareness; technology sharing, including information platform, surveillance, and AI; using SAARC DMC to adapt best practices; creation of a common research platform to share ideas on prophylaxis, interventions, and diagnostics; and common pandemic protocols to be applied at shared borders.
India as South Asia’s regional leader?
India’s role as a symbolic big brother of the region is useful and obvious in many capacities to fight COVID-19. India is one of the few countries who have collated international praise for successfully tackling, and eliminating many contagious, and non-contagious diseases like smallpox, and polio over the last few decades. It also has a repository of its own protocols to tackle deadly virulent like Bird Flu, 2002-03 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Nipah, and Zika, with accurate testing methods, and diagnosis that has been developed in collaboration with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Moreover, India leads the way in enforcing early prevention measures to tackle coronavirus in South Asia, including Visa suspension, regulation on outbound travel, and quarantine measures for foreign arrivals from 11th March 2020 onwards, an action that garnered praises from WHO Representative to India, Dr Henk Bekedam. On top of that, Indian authorities have also been airlifting foreign nationals of neighbouring Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Nepal, a courtesy that India has also offered to Pakistan.
India also stands a huge chance of becoming one of the few countries that can counter China’s narrative over the global pandemic, at least in its own backyard. Modi’s callout to SAARC leaders only enforces a counter-narrative that projects SAARC as a self-sufficient regional power, without the need of an external intervention from China, who has been accused of irresponsible management of the situation in the first place.
Beijing’s attempts to right the wrong
China has launched a substanial public relations campaign, charming every governments and regions alike by pouring in medical equipment and pro-bono medical consultancies in order to balance the diplomatic ramifications due to COVID-19, which threatens to affect its image as a trusted global player. In fact, the global pandemic and China’s (mis)handling of the crisis has already made 64% of US companies move their production facilities elsewhere, preferably Vietnam.
This, added with the US-China trade war, also threatens to dismantle the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and the highly conjoined Chinese labour market, which is expected to open much inflated than its Asian counterparts. However, the savior complex is not without its set of problems for India, which threatens to create a visible crack in SAARC’s roadmap for healthcare cooperation, by making important SAARC member states like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal depend on Chinese healthcare liberality.
In fact, the veracity of this assumption can be reflected through the relationship between China and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in fighting the pandemic at a joint foreign ministers meeting in Laos on 20 February. This event encouraged China to spread its outreach over COVID-19 prevention, and technology sharing in West Asia, Europe, and elsewhere. China also successfully tackled the point of friction over South China Sea to create a successful import-export network over medical equipment and relief materials with Southeast Asia.
Moreover, many Southeast Asian countries appreciated China’s early medical intervention, and censored pandemic related information and statistics in their country, according to the whims of their giant neighbour, which can be iterated through Cambodian PM’s declaration ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’, before his visit to Beijing on 2nd February 2020. In fact, certain Southeast Asian states developed a false sense of security, and granted leeway in their own preventive policies, in order to sympathise with the Chinese politbureau, and protect their long-term diplomatic relations. Only Singapore and Vietnam were immune to such grand political gestures, because of their experience with the SARS outbreak in 2002-03.
Chinese inroads in South Asia
Similarly, in South Asia, China is currently making in-roads as a responsible global health leader, with extensive public campaigns that goes by the moniker “Health Silk Road”. The moniker not only acts as a sympathy-building brand name for the otherwise vilified Beijing, but also keeps the prospect of the BRI afloat, by making the Health Silk Route its natural, and theoretical expansion. In later stages, this will only exemplify the Chinese narrative around the advantages of BRI, without any likely fallout.
China has been one of the first countries who jumped forward to support Sri Lanka through technical and fiscal assistance, after a World Bank forecast of recession, and economic growth between -3% to 0.5%. China has granted Sri Lanka a concession loan of USD 500 million to fight COVID-19. Apart from that, Jack Ma’s foundation has donated almost 20,064 detection kits to Sri Lanka, with Chinese companies such as China Merchants Ports Group, the parent company of Hambantota Port, donating a massive package of PPEs and medical equipment.
China has also been pouring in a substantial amount of fiscal support, healthcare staff, equipment, and materials to build makeshift hospitals for their all-season ally – Pakistan. This has come after a ridiculous gamble by Pakistani leadership to not evacuate its citizens from Wuhan amid wide uproar, as a show of symbolic solidarity with Beijing. In fact, China and the US are currently engaging in a dumping war over Pakistan, pouring in medicare aid to assert their dominance over Islamabad. Notwithstanding international restrictions, Pakistan has also opened its land borders along the controversial Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) to allow Chinese cargos into Pakistan through Gilgit-Baltistan.
Even after being a neutral party, groups in Nepal, mainly Trans Himalayan Development Center, and Friends of Silk Road, with the help of Chinese propagandist media, have been engaged in extensive PR campaign for solidarity with China over the pandemic. The government of Nepal has largely been neutrally observant. However, China, through Ma’s foundation, has also donated a large amount of masks, ventilators and PPEs to Nepal, and has repeated the same process in Bangladesh, and Maldives, much to India’s chagrin. In fact, with most of the Chinese shipment from Europe and West Asia passing close to Maldives waters, China is looking to boost its ties with Maldives through medical equipment and fiscal aid, to protect its interest over the Indian Ocean region.
The way forward for India, bridging gaps, realizing potential
India’s sincere effort in curbing the effects of the pandemic internally and regionally is applauded almost everywhere around the globe. Not only regionally, India is also a massive global player currently, supplying medical aid and consultancies to whosoever has asked for it, without any question. However, its swift and decisive actions elsewhere have been extremely slow and lackadaisical when it comes to reviewing pandemic prevention beyond the scope of enforcement in their own home ground. The high population density has threatened to fail any social distance practice adopted by the state.
Moreover, high prevalence of non-communicable diseases, poor living conditions, sub-par sanitation facilities, and a crippling public welfare healthcare system has stacked all odds against the current Modi-led government. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), India currently ranks 150th in healthcare and survivability index, which is worse than the average of South Asia as a region itself. Moreover, even if India functions on war-like contingencies to tackle pandemics/epidemics, 21.9% of India’s population lies below the poverty line, and the lack of robust healthcare has increased the percentage of distress financing, or out of pocket expenditure at 62%-65%, one of the highest in a developing country.
These statistics alone have the capacity of undermining any regional capacity building India has in projecting itself as an effective manager of both communicable and non-communicable diseases.
Furthermore, as one of the largest start-up potentials in South Asia in terms of biotechnology, microbiology, raw material production, technology, and engineering, India is yet to realise this massive potential in its healthcare sector. Regardless of India’s potential as a counter-narrative to China’s public propaganda, the pharmaceutical sector in India is heavily dependent on Chinese Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API), importing at least 68%-69% of its requirement, amounting to USD 2.4 billion. India even paid the price of this overdependence, when drug prices in India soared post-Chinese lockdown due to COVID-19.
India, over the course of its 70 years of diplomatic relations with China, has also received a package of 1.7 Lakh PPEs, with many more such packages underway, once restrictions lift in China over imports of faulty equipment. One might highlight this gesture as a strong bond between Delhi and Beijing through successful informal talks that took place in Wuhan and Chennai, however, the realist and propagandist media of China will leave no stone unturned to project China’s global image of a guardian angel, which would only hamper India’s footing as a big brother in SAARC.
Moreover, such gestures also run contrary to a constant vilification of Chinese efforts by Indian media, and nationalist members of the legislature, who have not only called out China on its callousness in handling the virus, but have also contributed to the racist drumbeat by referring to COVID-19 as the ‘Chinese virus’ or ‘Wuhan Virus’. It seems that India’s domestic politics have fallen short of the values it has sought to project international, where they also have the burden to come forward as an effective production unit, with a surplus of healthcare innovations, and medical equipment in order to be taken seriously as a regional leader, or a global player.
Therefore, in conlclusion, it is important that India stands up to these domestic challenge before the cessation of its nation-wide lockdown, and radically revamps its healthcare system to ease the current burden before the second wave of transmissions of COVID-19 occur. The controlled maneuver of this burden internally once the lockdown ends will only help India to focus on its regional commitments in South Asia longer term by pouring in medical aid, and consultancies, without resentment from India’s own voting public.
With its rate of recovery doubling in the past few weeks, India’s breakthrough in using a combination of Lopinavir and Ritonavir has been viewed in some quarters as mitigating COVID-19. Countries like the U.S., Brazil, and currently Dominican Republic have requested India to supply these drugs in bulk, because of their percieved effects on the viral strain. This has a great potential in making India usher in a new age of ‘Medical Diplomacy’, countering China’s Health Silk Route, and potentially, longer term, rolling back the Belt and Road Initiative’s influence once the world leaves the COVID-19 induced lockdown.
In the end, India’s regional potential does look threatened by a Chinese intervention, however, India’s foresightedness, and its newfound footing in soft power diplomacy and medical diplomacy, added with its real time war like contingencies based on traditional neighbourhood specific policies can effectively tackle this threat, if Delhi is proactive in finding the gaps both internally, and in its foreign policies. Moreover, India also has to avoid Pakistan on the way to realising its goal, who has been used repeatedly by China to chain India in petty regional skirmishes, and not fulfill its ambitions as a growing global power.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Sabysachi Biswal is currently pursuing his post-graduate degree from Jindal School of International Affairs, specialising in Peace and Conflict Studies. His additional interest lies in West Asian Studies, Indian Politics, Sino-Indian Studies, and South Asian Studies. Image credit: Ministry of External Affairs (India)/Flickr.