INTRODUCTION

Our guest today is Captain Sarabjeet Parmar, who retired last June from the Indian Navy after nearly four decades of service dating back to 1987. He has written and spoken widely on a range of topics including maritime security and doctrine in the Indo-Pacific region. He currently has various affiliations including as distinguished fellow at the United Service Institution of India as well as the Council for Strategic and Defense Research. We will start our conversation by talking about how to think about India's role in Southeast Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific given its status as the world's most populous country and one of the centers of Indo-Pacific thinking on geopolitics and geoeconomics. Make sure you watch, listen, or read the full episode as we go through a range of other subjects including US-China competition and various other issues including the South China Sea, Myanmar and much, much more.

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INDIA’S STRATEGIC STAKES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA IN INDO-PACIFIC PERSPECTIVE

ASEAN Wonk: So welcome to the podcast, Sarabjeet, and let's start, if we can, on India's defense ties with Southeast Asia. We last saw each other at an Indo-Pacific conference in Indonesia early this year, and there have been a number of defense-related touch-points at play amid leader exchanges, including the deployment of Brahmos to the Philippines and the finalization of the defense credit line when the Vietnamese prime minister visited India. As a practitioner and as someone who has worn the uniform, I'm wondering how do you see these various developments on the defense side? Because you've had an opportunity to see this in a multi-decade period, and we also have a number of developments that keep popping up in the news, including Malaysia's Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim who was in India. And in terms of how to characterize this or quantify it, it would also be interesting to get your sense of whatever characterization you would like to place on it, whether it's a letter grade or between a a scale of one to ten. What score would you give New Delhi with respect to India’s Act East Policy in Southeast Asia, given the fact that this is entering into its tenth year, and we're seeing so many of these developments happening?

Captain Sarabjeet Parmar: Morning, Prashanth. It's great to connect online, and thank you so much for this opportunity to come onboard your platform. And that's a volley of questions. So let's start from the top then. Alright? So let's go back to around the Look East policy time of around early 1990s. And that's the time when India was coming out of sort of being accepted by the global community. You know, the Cold war was behind us. We were looking for new relations, which have now fructified into very strong strategic partnerships, especially with the US. And we were more aware that we need to engage various countries at various levels to come of our own and to be recognized as a maritime nation as well as a growing regional power. And also, at that point in time, the Asia-Pacific part. Indo-Pacific was not on the horizon at that point in time. And so the journey started off. And so we've come a long way since then. We have engaged ASEAN nations bilaterally. There are a number of exercise we do. I'll give you certain examples as we go by. And then we've engaged ASEAN navies as an entity on its own in the last exercise we did with the ASEAN maritime forces. 

And plus when you look at the relationships that have grown and you mentioned a few, so let me take on a few right now. Vietnam, for example. You know, there were a lot of commonalities between the defense equipment Vietnam had and India had because the source was the same coming from USSR and then, of course, Russia. And we have engaged Vietnam, and we even had a mobile training team positioned in Vietnam for training of crew and technical people on the Kamov aircraft, which is a common defense equipment. Then there were talks on submarines. We both had the SSKs of Russian origin, and therefore, there was sort of talk. I don't know if it rectified at that point in time. And last year, we gave a corvette to the Vietnamese navy. We've also had Vietnamese officers coming for training to India. I've been a directing staff at our Wellington staff college, so we have offices from forty nations who come. Some nations send three officers, some send one depending upon the understanding, But the presence is there. And then, of course, with Vietnam, we do also go sometime back into the past where there has been support between Vietnam and India. And then, of course, we had certain differences in between. But as I said, after the Cold War, a lot of that ice has been broken. And today, when we look at the $300 million credit line which you mentioned, it opens up an avenue for not only more interaction between the armed forces, but also, we export opportunities for Indian defense industry, which is coming of age. And if you read the latest statistics, I mean, we have developed twenty three hundred percent from a certain baseline. 

“And today, when we look at the $300 million credit line which you mentioned, it opens up an avenue for not only more interaction between the armed forces, but also, we export opportunities for Indian defense industry, which is coming of age.”

Over time, that baseline will change and the percentages change. But it's an indication from where we have come. And fifty percent of our defense exports go to the US, which is a little surprising for many people. But we are looking at exporting defense equipment to other nations. And I think the advantage India has, and that goes especially for a lot of nations whose defense budgets are not that high, is that they do not require too much of high-tech technology. What they need is something for boosting their capacities and capabilities. And more importantly on the capability part is to maintain and sustain that equipment. And therefore, India provides that sort of equipment at not very expensive rates, but something that suits the requirement. It's something that we have understood and developed on our own coming through what the prime minister says on Atmanirbhar. And so therefore, Southeast Asia provides an excellent market for India's exports. And if you look at the figures that come from SIPRI, you know, Southeast Asia is perhaps one of the areas or part of the Indo-Pacific that imports a lot of defense equipment from outside. So that's an opportunity there. And therefore, that's one example with Vietnam. 

But let me give you an example of Philippines here. So now our relationship with Philippines on defense and security was perhaps not that higher magnitude as it was with other Southeast Asian or Indo-Pacific nations, but over time it has developed. And personally, I always felt that, you know, whenever we sail through the South China Sea, Philippines was sort of a void, which has changed. And that I think is a great news on that part. And, of course, I'd like to come to the sale of Brahmos missiles to the Philippines. And, of course – a little word on India's stance in South China Sea –  over time, India's remarks on South China Sea and the security situation have been somewhat guarded, and there's a reason for it. When you look at the statements deposited at the time of ratification of UNCLOS, there is alignment in India's and China's approach to certain aspects. One is innocent passage in territorial seas, on military activities in the EEZ. So India's approach has been very cautious. But last year, for the first time, we made a mention that, yes, the judgment of the arbitration between Philippines and China must be respected. So that's the first time that we sort of have taken a different view and made very clear what we are looking at that because that looks at stability. It does not necessarily encompass the alignment of the views as I've just mentioned. It it requires a modicum of enhancing stabi