- Puan Sohana Enver Azyze, Chief Operating Officer of ISIS Malaysia,
- Dr Ram Madhav, President of India Foundation (IF),
- HE Shri BN Reddy, High Commissioner of India to Malaysia,
- HE Shri Prashant Agrawal, Additional Secretary (South) Ministry of External Affairs India,
- Major General Dhruv C Katoch, Director of India Foundation
I would like to congratulate Datuk Professor Dr Mohd Faiz Abdullah of the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS), and Dr. Ram Madhav of the India Foundation for organising this inaugural India-ASEAN Strategic Dialogue.
I visited Delhi twice—last year and this year – to attend the Raisina Dialogue, and I also visited Mumbai in March. I believe there is great potential for India and Malaysia to collaborate, particularly in the semiconductor sector, where there are many areas for cooperation.
H.E. B.N. Reddy, Indian High Commissioner to Malaysia, is working hard to establish a memorandum of cooperation on semiconductors, as our ecosystems are highly complementary. Malaysia wants to be part of India’s semiconductor story. We can be an interesting addition and important part of your story.
After spending time engaging with Indian officials from various Ministries and States, I have consistently told my own officials to engage not only at the national level but also at the state level. We in ASEAN need to understand and comprehend large countries such as India, China, and the United States at both the national and state levels.
For instance, Gujarat has a population of more than 60 million, Uttar Pradesh has 241 million, while Malaysia’s population is 34 million. We are talking about a vastly different scale; the state level in India is huge. Thus, ASEAN needs to engage at all levels and create people-to-people interactions and relationships at both the national and provincial tiers. We must endeavour to understand India’s twenty-eight states and eight union territories.
India and ASEAN began dialogue in the early 1990s, which was when ASEAN itself started broadening its work. ASEAN began in 1967 primarily concerned about security during the Cold War. Only after the Cold War ended did the global environment permit us to diversify relationships and deepen conversations with other regions. India began engaging ASEAN at around the same time.
Let me take a longer historical view. Before the emergence of dominant Western naval powers—the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British, and eventually the United States after the Second World War—the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean, Malacca Straits, South China Sea, and parts of the Pacific were primarily traversed by the fleets and people from India, the Arab region, and Chinese merchants, the various people of Southeast Asia. They traded for more than a thousand years before the emergence of dominant Western naval global powers. Perhaps this history can help us think about what a multipolar world may look like.
We could all agree that the unipolar world is coming to an end. But, what comes next? Drawing on history, a multipolar world may feature multiple actors, diverse sources of money and capital, and multiple sources of technology and innovation, no longer concentrated in just one or two major countries. I think that is what a multipolar world would look like.
Moving from the world of globalisation being presented as McDonald’s plus Coca Cola, I hope we will see more a la carte choices, with diverse options like Dhal, Chilli, and Curry, rather than a world dominated by a single, monolithic. Mind you, a world of just McDonald’s and Dim Sum are no good either.
At the moment, too much of the literature concentrates on bipolar contestation: the US-China conflict, confrontation, and technologically driven bifurcation. If you go to the bookshop or read the news, everything is seen through the prism of US versus China.
But this is where the ASEAN-India relationship is at the heart of the global question. Is the new global order going to be a bipolar “G2” arrangement, or one that has multiple sources of power, capital, money, and technology? The ASEAN-India relationship is crucial because we do not want a bifurcated or bipolar world. A bipolar world does not provide adequate space for India, ASEAN, European Union, or other smaller and middle powers.
ASEAN and India must truly develop a comprehensive relationship so that we can withstand the urge and the tendency to view the world through a bipolar arrangement. The ASEAN and India relationship will grow, but I think we should specifically emphasise the following areas:
Building peace
It is important that we build peace. Peace and security are crucial for everything else. Peace in South Asia and Southeast Asia is fundamental to global peace. It is in the interests of India and ASEAN to ensure we maintain regional peace in both South and Southeast Asia. Peace and security in the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean are also fundamental for global peace.
Forging human development
We have to work on human development together. For a long time, Asian societies assumed we could grow rich by exporting to the US, which was seen as the consumer of last resort, and often the first resort.
Even today, that understanding persists among businessmen from various parts of ASEAN and China, Japan, South Korea and India. We still hope to eventually see the US settle down and continue consuming our exports. But we know that order is ending.
Creating a strong middle class
We must now focus on how to create a strong middle class in ASEAN and India so that we consume and create consumers to consume, rather than just relying on the US as the final source of consumption. This requires a fundamental resetting of our economies. In ASEAN, our human development challenge can be summed up in two lines:
- We must do everything to prevent Gen Z protests, which are about jobs, social mobility, and securing better pay and economic security.
- We must ensure that ASEAN grows rich before we get old.
This is the same challenge India faces. We must work together to prevent Gen Z protests and ensure we become richer before our societies age. Human development is important, and it should be at the heart of trade.
Growing technology together
The ASEAN-India relationship is also about the need to grow technology together. How do nations in the Global South can develop mutually beneficial technology that grows our societies? How do we prevent technology from being dominated by a few “Tech Bros” – the monopolists of this era? How do we move beyond that to create and diffuse new technologies like AI to benefit the largest number of populations around the world, especially adapting and adopting technologies to improve their health and living conditions?
This is a challenge in which India is particularly strong and capable: creating technology for the many and for the bottom millions of the world’s populations. Cooperation on energy is also important. Energy is a question we will have to deal with, and ASEAN is advancing its ideas on an ASEAN power grid, which is an area where we could work together as well.
To sum it up, there is a substantial agenda for us to work on together. I wish you well. I hope to see this dialogue continue for many years to come, and I hope we will have a very deep, multifaceted relationship between ASEAN and India.
Thank you very much.