The relationship between India and Pakistan continues to be held prisoner by past traumas despite both countries’ effort to move ahead. A case in point is the current controversy over India’s decision to grant Pakistani cricketer Javed Miandad a visa to visit the country to watch the just-concluded cricket match that was the first between the two sides in nearly four years.

Miandad was supposed to attend the last one-day cricket match in Delhi on January 6th, but a section of India’s media and right-wing Hindu political groups heavily condemned the trip, forcing the veteran cricketer to cancel his journey. The player has family ties with Dawood Ibrahim, an organized crime kingpin who was accused of participating in the 1993 serial bombings of Mumbai that claimed hundreds of lives. Miandad’s son is married to Ibrahim’s daughter. 

The English daily, The Hindu, writes that “the visit was cancelled as the Pakistan Cricket Board did not want any controversy affect the cricketing ties and wanted to avoid focus shifting away from cricket to other matters, sources in the Ministry of Home Affairs said security reasons might have forced him to change his mind.” 

But this issue transcends any individual and is really a question of mindset. Despite a focus on long-term interests and changing political scenarios in which both countries are trying to deepen their understanding and gradually redefine their relationship, how much longer will people continue to harp on the same old issue which is quickly losing relevance?  

Those who have been opposing Miandad’s visit forget that the Mumbai serial blasts were a response to large-scale religious riots perpetrated by Hindu fundamentalists against the minority Muslim population in 1992 in the wake of the demolition of a disputed 16th century mosque in the eastern Indian town of Ayodhya. The culprits of the riots have yet to be held accountable for their actions, a fact the media in India fails to cover.

India has, however, moved beyond the political narratives of 1990s. The right wing Hindu parties, like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Shiv Sena and others have seen their support weaken over the last ten years. They are looking for an opportunity to revive the same divisive sentiment to polarize the voters along religious lines and reap electoral dividends in the 2014 elections.

The immediate impetus for such a strategy is the third successive victory of Narendra Modi in the recent Gujarat elections. Modi first came to fame for his role in the 2002 crisis in his state that saw riots against Muslims claim the lives of more than 1,000 people, according to some estimates. Various reports and the popular perception continue to blame Chief Minister Modi and his state administration for not suppressing and perhaps encouraging the chaos and the corresponding lives that were lost as a result. Modi has won the praise of Hindu fundamentalist forces for his abrasive politics and complete disregard for minorities and pluralism in the state he governs.

The normalization of Indo-Pakistan relationship will undermine the very raison d'etre of right-wing groups, which thrive on stoking anti-Muslim sentiments. By linking Miandad with Dawood Ibrahim, these forces want to inflame the sentiments of the people. 

A similar plan is at work when right-wing groups demand that India make the arrest and sentencing of Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed, believed to be the mastermind of the 26/11 attack in Mumbai in 2008, a precondition to normalizing relations with Pakistan.

But India’s geopolitical interests and the subcontinent’s inclination towards peace demands a deeper engagement with Pakistan. Such engagement cannot be held hostage by hawkish fringe groups that thrive on the two neighbors’ continued animosity. 

India and Pakistan have been prisoners of political parochialism for too long. Today, Pakistan understands the consequences of harboring and nurturing religious extremist forces, including the threat that poses to its own internal security. India similarly realizes the folly of a Pakistan-centric foreign policy that has muddled its geopolitical vision. It now wants to look beyond brinksmanship with Islamabad and engage its neighbor politically and economically.

The new visa regime and greater economic integration between the countries is an indication of a growing detente between the traditional enemies who have fought four wars since 1947.

The greater political and economic bonding will also mean the marginalization of the right-wing religious fundamentalist groups in both countries. However, these entrenched forces are not easily defeated and will continue resisting the forces for peace through actions like those that forced Javed Miandad to cancel his trip to New Delhi. 

The Delhi police filed charges with a local district court on Thursday, setting in motion a trial for the horrific rape case that has gripped the nation in recent weeks. Five of the six men accused of perpetrating the rape are being charged with murder, rape and kidnapping among other charges. If convicted the defendants are nearly certain to be given the death sentence. The sixth man being accused of the rape is a juvenile and will therefore have his case handled by the Juvenile Justice Board.

Late in the evening on December 16th a 23-year-old paramedic student was brutally attacked and raped in a private bus that was driving through the busy streets of the nation’s capital. She died weeks later in a Singaporean hospital as a result of the injuries she sustained during the senseless and barbaric attacks.

The death of Damini, as the victim is popularly known as (her real name has been withheld from the public), has enraged the entire nation and prompted near-continuous protests throughout the capital over the last three weeks. 

Faced with constant and relentless pressure from protestors, politicians and the media, the police acted swiftly in preparing the charge sheet in just twenty days, something extraordinary by the standards of the Delhi police force.

But there are cases not very far from Delhi where victims search in vain for justice for months after the incident.

A case in point is a 16-year-old girl from the state of Haryana in northern India, who was gang-raped by at least eight men in September. The girl was from a poor, lower caste Dalit family, and her multiple attackers were primarily from higher class families who held positions of power in the rural village in which she lived. They raped her for three hours, video-taping their crimes, and threatened to kill her and her family if she told anyone about the attack.

For over a week the girl kept silent out of fear for her life and social prestige in her village. She also doubted that anything would come of telling people of the atrocity she had suffered, given her family’s social status relative to those of her attackers.

Protests have erupted all over India after a 23-year-old rape victim died in a Singaporean hospital on Friday night. The girl had been airlifted to a hospital in Singapore after her condition failed to show any significant improvement during her 10-day stay at Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital.

“She was courageous for fighting for life so long against the odds but the trauma for her body was too severe to overcome,” said the CEO of the Mount Elizabeth Hospital, Singapore.

People came pouring onto the streets en masse Saturday morning when news of the victim’s death first broke. They continue up to the present.

On Saturday protests occurred throughout the larger New Delhi area but were primarily concentrated at Jantar Mantar, near the Indian parliament in the central part of the city. 

“We want justice”, Hang the Rapists”, “We feel ashamed of the government”, “Treat Women as Humans”- were some of the banners the protestors-turned-mourners carried. A sign being held by an elderly man carried a particularly powerful message: “Rape Olympics: India wins gold; one every 22 minutes”.

Sensing trouble the government took swift action to close down major parts of central Delhi, including government offices and India Gate, a World War II monument that was the site of protests all last week. The government also deployed paramilitary forces in large numbers to augment the Delhi police who were already on the scene. India’s military also cancelled its planned New Year’s celebrations in the capital city in honor of the victim.

Also in response to public anger, the governement charged the six culprits accused of the rape with murder. The victim’s family demanded nothing less with her brother telling media outlets, “The fight has just begun. We want all the accused hanged, and we will fight for that, till the end.”

Additionally, the government has also announced a series of measures to instill a sense of security among women in the national capital and the country writ large. One such measure the government has proposed is publishing the names, photos, and addresses of convicted rapists. Other steps include enacting a quota requiring that women make up one-third of Delhi’s police force.

Early last week the government announced two committees - one to propose measures to speed up sexual assault trials and a second one to investigate the lapses that led to the Delhi rape that took the life of the 23-year-old paramedic.

But the question remains: are these administrative measures enough to address India’s poor treatment of women? 

Despite the fact that women hold top political positions in the country -- including Sonia Gandia, the leader of the Congress Party as well as Sushma Swaraj, leader of the main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party -- India continues to hold a medieval mindset when it comes to women’s rights. This is perhaps best seen through the alarming and ever-rising levels of violence against women in the country.

As the BBC reports, there were 24,000 reported cases of rape in India last year, a 9.2% increase over the previous year. In nearly 55% of these cases, the victims were between the ages of 18 and 30. It’s telling that, according to police records, the victims knew their attackers in 94% of these cases.  For example, neighbors were the perpetrators in a third of these cases while parents and relatives were often involved in other ones. 17% of rapes reported nationwide occurred in Delhi.

And rape is only part of the story. Police records from 2011 show kidnappings and abductions of women were up 19.4%, while the number of women killed over dowry payments rose by 2.7%. Increases of 5.4% and 5.8% took place in the number of cases of torture and molestation respectively, while the trafficking of women increased by an astonishing 122% in 2011 compared with the previous year.

The large scale protests in Delhi and other parts of the country are an early indication that attitudes in India are changing -- for the better.

Last month the United Nations published a highly critical internal report in which it admitted it didn’t do enough to protect Tamil civilians in the final months of the Sri Lanka civil war. In late 2008, the UN had withdrawn staff from the northern part of the country in anticipation of the Sri Lanka government’s bloody military offensive against the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, more commonly known as Tamil Tigers). Tamil civilians had pleaded with the UN to stay at the time, but the international organization said it was unable to ensure the safety of its staff members. Still, the new report raises real questions about the international community’s response during and after the conflict.

A UN report from last year, however, issued a damning indictment of the Sri Lankan government’s actions during the conflict, and called on Colombo to “issue a public acknowledgment of its role in and responsibility for extensive civilian casualties in the final stages of the war.” The UN believes that the final offensive alone may have resulted in more than 40,000 deaths. The senseless violence depicted in the UN report is also shown in the documentary, “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields,” which details the brutality of the war and suggests some Sri Lankan officials may have been complicit in war crimes.

The international community has strongly condemned the Sri Lankan government for its refusal to allow an international investigation into these alleged war crimes. Along with the criticism offered by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper has threatened to boycott next year’s Commonwealth Summit in Sri Lanka. There is also a campaign underway in the United Kingdom urging its Prime Minister, David Cameron, to follow Harper’s lead.

As Sri Lanka’s neighbor and the country with the greatest degree of influence on Colombo, India’s support for the Sri Lankan government is perhaps crucial in its ability to rebuke the international community on this issue.

The ethnic and historical links between Sri Lankan and Indian Tamils as well as New Delhi’s own regional influence in South Asia give India an enduring interest in its southern neighbor. An earlier attempt to broker peace between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers ended in disaster when Indian peacekeeping forces that were deployed to implement the 1987 India-Sri Lanka accord ended up fighting the LTTE. This was followed by the LTTE’s assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, which prompted India to publicly distance itself from the neighboring civil war.

However, according to journalist Nitin Gokhale, author of Sri Lanka: from War to Peace, in 2006 India began quietly extending military support to the Sri Lankan government, including the delivery of five Mi-17 helicopters. Gokhale reports that these helicopters played a crucial role in several of the Sri Lankan Air Force’s missions aimed at crushing LTTE resistance.

India’s Sri Lankan policy was undoubtedly driven by its need to retain leverage over Colombo in the face of growing Chinese influence. In recent years, Beijing has made a slew of investments in the island country such as building a port at Hambantota. China has also strongly backed Colombo’s call for non-interference in its internal affairs, and is widely believed to have been instrumental in helping to modernize Sri Lanka’s military force which finally allowed it to suppress the LTTE separatist movement.

The Indian government has also offered tactic approval of the government’s 2009 military offensive against the LTTE, despite occasionally calling on Colombo to respect “Tamil rights” and address the deteriorating humanitarian situation.

In this context, it is difficult to believe that India’s support for a U.S.-sponsored resolution against Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council in March represents a fundamental change of policy.  The Congress-led government in India almost certainly supported the resolution in order to retain crucial coalition allies in Tamil Nadu. Furthermore, the Ministry of External Affairs was less than enthusiast in pressing the resolution’s cause in a statement: "While we subscribe to the broader message...any assistance from the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights or visits of UN Special Procedures should be in consultation with and with the concurrence of the Sri Lankan Government. A democratic country like Sri Lanka has to be provided time and space to achieve the objectives of reconciliation and peace." 

While it would be too much to ask for New Delhi to institute a panel assessing its own role in the Sri Lankan civil war, at the very least the international community should encourage India to call upon upon Sri Lanka to recognize the credibility of the 2011 UN report on accountability, and to support an international probe on alleged war crimes that may have occurred in the last few months of the civil war.

Pratyush is a journalist based in New Delhi, India.  His areas of interest include South Asia, the Middle East and China. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics.

The health of the Delhi gang-rape victim deteriorated further on Wednesday as the government announced the creation of a commission to probe the incident.

The 23-year-old medical student was brutally raped by six men in a moving bus in New Delhi on December 16th. Six individuals have been arrested in connection with the crime, which has sparked major protests in New Delhi, the country's capital, as protesters demand that the government take stronger measures to ensure women’s safety.

According to local media reports, the girl’s blood pressure dropped and she remains on ventilator support in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the hospital she is being treated at. 

The girl briefly suffered from bradycardia -- a condition where the victim suffers from a slow or irregular pulse --Tuesday night but doctors have successfully stablized her heart beat, Zee News reported.

The victim is currently being treated at Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital but doctors are reportedly considering transferring her to Medanta Medicity, a hospital also in India’s capital city. Experts from private hospitals have continuously been consulted on the best form of treatments, including for a possible stomach infection.

On Tuesday, doctors had said the girl’s condition had improved slightly since Monday night and that she was psychologically "stable, conscious and meaningfully communicative." 

The doctors also said that internal bleeding had been brought under control and her blood platelet and leukocyte count also improved after administering plasma and platelets. They did temper expectations by warning that internal bleeding could resume.

The hospital provided counseling to the family of the victim to help them cope with the trauma and provide emotional support to the victim.

Government Announces Commission To Probe Delhi Gang-Rape Case

Amid stinging criticism and nationwide protests over the country’s poor record on protecting women, the Indian government announced on Wednesday that it is setting up a commission to probe the Delhi rape case.

Speaking to reporters in New Delhi, Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram said an enquiry commission headed by former High Court judge Usha Mehra would investigate the incidient and identify lapses in law enforcement that allowed the brutal crime to occur.

The minister also said the panel has been asked to recommend broader measures to ensure the safety of Inidan women in general and Delhi in particular. The government insists that it is serious about finding lasting solutions to women's safety.

The commission’s final report is expected within three months and an interim report may be issued before then.

“Whatever we are doing now is only intended to demonstrate the government’s serious intent on the matter that we will apprehend and punish the perpetrators. We will try and find out what went wrong and fix responsibility. We will also amend the laws as deemed necessary. There are three parts to what we are doing,” Chidambaram noted.

Sreeja V N is a reporter for the International Business Times, where this report first appeared.

India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) began a two-day meeting in New Delhi on Thursday, to commemorate twenty years of relations between New Delhi and the ten-member organization.

A press release from the Indian government said:

"India is hosting the ASEAN-India Commemorative Summit in New Delhi on December 20 and 21, 2012 to mark the 20th anniversary of the ASEAN-India dialogue partnership and the 10th anniversary of ASEAN-India Summit-level partnership. The theme of the summit is ‘ASEAN-India Partnership for Peace and Shared Prosperity’."

Although ASEAN-India ties stretch back to 1992, the past few years have seen rapid growth. India’s July 2003 accession to ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia was one impetus for this expansion. During the same year, at the 2nd ASEAN-India Summit, India and the ten-member organization signed the ASEAN-India Framework Agreement on Comprehensive Economic Cooperation, which pledged both sides would work to establish an ASEAN–India Free Trade Area (FTA) covering goods, services, and investments.

The first of these came in 2009 when, after six years of negotiations, the two sides signed the ASEAN-India Trade In Goods (TIG) Agreement. The AITIG came into force the following year and ASEAN-India economic relations have enjoyed a boom in the years since.

“ASEAN-India trade has been growing at over 22 percent during the last six years and, in fact, trade between India and ASEAN in 2011-2012 has increased by more than 37 percent and the trade now is $79 billion, which is more than the target of $70 billion set [at the 7th ASEAN-India Summit in Thailand in October 2009],” Indian Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai pointed out this week.

Earlier this year, Shri Anand Sharma, India’s Minister of Commerce, Industry, & Textiles, also said the two sides expected two-way trade to top $100 billion by 2015.

Reaching this goal just got much easier as New Delhi and ASEAN concluded negotations for FTAs in services and investments during the first day of the ASEAN-India Commemorative Summit.

"This represents a valuable milestone in our relationship. I am confident it will boost our economic ties in much the same way the FTA in goods has done,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said of the two new FTAs when addressing the summit on Thursday.

Even so, this expansion in ASEAN-India trade is still dwarfed by ASEAN’s trade with other economic partners, most notably China. Last year ASEAN-China two way trade grew 23.9% to U.S. $362.85 billion, according to the Chinese government. By contrast, Sino-Indian trade in 2011 was just U.S. $73.9 billion, albeit that was a nearly 20% increase from the year before.

Still, the dynamics of the trilateral ASEAN-China-India relationship could change in the years ahead, as both ASEAN and India grow increasingly wary of China’s rising power. New Delhi has indicated that it may seek to use growing apprehension towards Beijing among its neighbors as a means of more fully implementing its “Look East” policy. This has included steadily strengthening relations with Japan in recent years, as well as entering into a joint oil exploration contract with Vietnam for oil blocks in the South China Sea.

Indeed, Prime Minister Singh suggested on Thursday that New Delhi views the FTAs through a strategic as well as economic lense:

"We see our partnership with ASEAN not merely as a reaffirmation of ties with neighbouring countries or as an instrument of economic development, but also as an integral part of our vision of a stable, secure and prosperous Asia and its surrounding Indian Ocean and Pacific regions," Singh said.

Unsurprisingly, India's growing ties with ASEAN has made it the target of criticism from China on multiple occassions. New Delhi has therefore had to maintain a careful balancing act between deepening ties with China’s neighbors and not unnecessarily provoking Beijing, which could retaliate in a number of ways, including: its alliance with Pakistan, on the Sino-Indo contested border, or by increasing the frequency of Chinese naval deployments in the Indian Ocean.

As ASEAN nations increasingly look to other powers like Japan and India to help them contend with China’s rise, New Delhi may find it difficult to not upset this fragile balance. It should count on China to remind it each and every time it has failed to maintain this balance.

Zachary Keck is assistant editor of The Diplomat. You can find him on Twitter: @ZacharyKeck.

At every South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) conference member states advocate strengthening regional integration through the creation of some kind of common economic union, expanding people-to-people contacts, and reclaiming South Asia’s shared heritage.  

No doubt engagement between these eight nations has increased over the years. Trade between the bloc and people to people contacts have both grown, while travel restrictions have declined. That being said, the national mentality is still firmly entrenched and each country’s actions continue to be driven by narrow calculations of national interest.

Even at the societal level there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of interest in different nations. For example, recently a factory fire in Bangladesh killed 100 people. The story was given minimal coverage by the Indian media, however, and the coverage it did receive garnered little interest among the Indian public.

Instead, most Indians remained engrossed in their own debates and business.

The same indifference is apparent with Pakistan, as demonstrated by the apathy India displayed when factory fires in Karachi and Lahore resulted in more than 300 deaths.  This is particularly appalling when one considers that every time 20 people in Pakistan are killed in a bomb blast it becomes a big news story in India. Indians grasp on the bombing, of course, because it is ripe for politicizing. The tragic fire in a garment factory fails to elicit similar feelings. Indeed, tragic fires in neighboring countries fail to elicit much emotion at all.

It’s self-rewarding to boast of South Asia’s thousands of years of shared history, culture and civilization. But this ignores the reality that such an umbilical connection is increasingly only true when one is speaking in the past tense. Instead of communicative and technological innovations binding the region closer together, South Asians are drifting further apart. Grandiose rhetoric at SAARC conferences can only further obscure this point; words alone can't change it.

India’s main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), suffered a humiliating defeat during the recent parliamentary debate on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the retail sector. Most notably, the party failed to enact its strategy of isolating and embarrassing the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in both houses of parliament.

Thinking that it could exploit the weaker support for the Congress Party among its UPA coalition partners, the BJP forced the government to vote on a contentious FDI initiative led by the ruling coalition. The whole idea to undermine the Congress-led UPA government in both the Lower and Upper House failed, however, as parties outside the coalition came to its rescue when it came time to vote. Much to the BJP’s chagrin, the government initiative was easily approved.

It is still not clear how much the nation benefitted from the debate on FDI. What is apparent is that the vote has improved the standing of the Congress Party and its UPA coalition government. If the idea was to isolate the ruling party in parliament, then the BJP made a serious miscalculation.

In fact, it was the Hindu nationalist party that was embarrassed by the vote. After all, it was the BJP that first proposed allowing FDI in the retail sector when it was in power in 2004. Thus, a party that once championed the cause of economic liberalization and free market economics is suddenly sounding Leftist in its partisan bid to secure a strategic victory over the UPA ruling government. 

It should be noted that the BJP’s more protectionist proclivities at the national level is clearly the result of political jockeying than any real change in its policy orientation. This is evident from, among other things, the fact that the party still champions economic liberalization policies in state governments that it controls. For instance, the BJP-government in Gujarat is actively seeking foreign investment with people like Chief Minister Narendra Modi travelling to different parts of the world to promote the state as an ideal destination for investment. Interestingly, Modi is the most popular leader of the BJP and is widely expected to be the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in the upcoming 2014 elections. 

As Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta notes, the BJP’s blunder over FDI in retail is not an isolated incident. Repeatedly since losing control of the central government in 2004, the BJP has demonstrated that it refuses to accept this loss and continues to act as though the UPA government is about to collapse. Consequently, the opposition party has failed to build an effective five-year opposition plan, and instead only developed strategies for each session of parliament. This has allowed the scandal-ridden UPA government to retain an image of strength and confidence. 

Instead of playing the role of a constructive opposition, the rightist BJP has been obstructing parliament even on issues of little importance. This has allowed the UPA to portray the BJP as the culprits behind the country’s problems. The wisdom of this strategy was confirmed by the 2009 general elections in which BJP suffered one of its worst political debacles in recent memory, including losing over 20 seats in the lower house of parliament.

The BJP’s opposition tactics are believed to have hurt its appeal with some of its core constituencies, such as the middle class and urban voters. Among other things, analysts point to the BJP’s opposition to the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal that had broad support among India’s middle class. Some believe that the BJP is repeating its mistake by opposing FDI. 

The BJP faces an identity crisis – whom does it seek to represent and what vision or principles does it stand for? At this point, the answers to these critical questions remain elusive.

India more forcefully asserted itself into the South China Sea dispute on Monday, with a senior naval officer saying New Delhi is prepared to deploy ships to the disputed waters should its oil exploration interests come under threat.

Indian Navy Chief Admiral D.K Joshi said that his country stands ready to intervene in disputes in the South China Sea if Indian state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp’s (ONGC) joint oil exploration venture with Vietnam came under threat.

"Not that we expect to be in those waters very frequently, but when the requirement is there for situations where the country's interests are involved, for example ONGC Videsh, we will be required to go there and we are prepared for that," Joshi told reporters.

The admiral went on to say that the Indian Navy has been holding exercises to prepare for such contingencies.

His comments came in response to Vietnam accusing two Chinese fishing boats of cutting the cables of a Vietnam vessel doing seismic oil exploration in the South China Sea on Friday. Vietnam has increased its own naval patrols in the disputed waters in response to the perceived threat.

Last summer ONGC agreed to a Vietnam proposal to jointly develop oil in an area of the South China Sea that China also claims, and one that Beijing had said it planned to auction off exploration rights to.

In response to the Indo-Vietnamese joint ventures, an editorial in China’s official Global Times stated,“It’s clear that such cooperation between Indian and Vietnamese companies in the South China Sea is motivated more by politics than economic interests.”

The editorial went on to argue, “New Delhi wants to further complicate the issue and seeks to pin down China in the area so it could gain dominance in affairs across the region.”

Also of note, in July 2011 an Indian naval vessel making a port call in Vietnam was contacted on an open radio frequency by someone identifying themselves as the "Chinese Navy" stating that "you are entering Chinese waters."

China has taken India's latest comments in stride, exercising uncharacteristic restraint. When asked about Admiral Joshi's comments this week, a spokesperson for China's Foreign Ministry said, "China opposes unilateral oil and gas development in disputed waters of the South China Sea. We hope that concerned countries respect China's position and rights, and respect efforts made through bilateral talks to resolve disputes."

Joshi’s comments came as India and China began two day of negotiations over their disputed land borders, which led to a brief but bloody war in 1962. Tensions were already running high ahead of the talks after Beijing issued new passports that included a map showing the disputed territory with India as part of China. In response, the Indian embassy had printed its own visas showing the territory as falling within the Indian state. Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan also objected to the new passports, and the United States has pledged to raise the passport issue with China.

Tensions in the South China Sea between China and its Southeast Asian neighbors had also been rising in the weeks leading up to Friday’s incident with Vietnam’s oil exploration vessel. ASEAN and China failed to make any progress on the South China Sea standoff at the recent ASEAN and East Asia Summits in Cambodia, and many ASEAN nations and its general secretary were irked by new regulations China issued which appear to give Chinese maritime border patrol authorities the right to board and search foreign ships in some of the disputed waters.

It’s unlikely that the Indian Navy will become a formidable force within the South China Sea in the near to medium term. The country, after all, is far more concerned with maintaining its primacy over China in the Indian Ocean amid the People Liberation Army-Navy’s (PLAN) continued build-up and modernization. Furthermore, in the not too distant future New Delhi may have to deploy more of its naval forces to its Western front to protect the transit of its oil imports from the Middle East and parts of Africa should the U.S. reduce its own presence in the Persian Gulf as Washington achieves greater energy self-sufficiency in the decades ahead.

Nonetheless, Joshi’s comments reflect a budding naval rivalry between India and China that some experts, like C. Raja Mohan, have been warning about it. India has long spoke of exercising greater influence in East and Southeastern Asia as part of its “Look East” policy, which is almost certainly to include strengthening ties to Chinese neighbors like ASEAN nations and Japan that are also increasingly concerned by Chinese assertiveness. This is almost certain to play into China’s historic and modern fears of strategic encirclement.

Zachary Keck is assistant editor of The Diplomat. You can find him on Twitter: @ZacharyKeck.

Bilateral relations between India and Maldives have hit a new low this week after a commercial deal between an Indian company and the Maldives government was cancelled.

The controversy erupted over last week’s cancelation of a U.S. $511 million contract between the Maldives government and a consortium of the Indian-based GMR Infrastructure and Malaysia Airports Holdings to run the Ibrahim Nasir International Airport in Male. The GMR had won the contract through an international bidding process overseen by the World Bank-affiliated body International Finance Corporation in June 2010 when Mohammed Nasheed was still the president of Maldives.  Difficulties arose when Nasheed was ousted from power earlier this year and Mohammed Waheed replaced him as president

A Singaporean court arbitrating the dispute issued a stay on the Maldives decree to terminate the contract, ordering that it continue to be executed as the court hears the case in full. The government in Male has indicated it will ignore the court’s ruling.

For weeks, Masood Imad, a media secretary in the Maldivian presidential office, has been making hawkish statements against Nasheed and Indian interests in the country. Today he went further by accusing GMR of bribing Nasheed with millions of dollars in order to secure the contract. He also questioned GMR’s claim of having paid a U.S. $100 million fee to the Maldives government in 2010 and said the government had received only U.S. $78 million.

“Where has the remaining $22 million gone? Did it go to Nasheed’s account?” he was quoted as saying by Indian media outlets. Adding, “Our government has already filed a criminal police complaint against GMR on this matter after we served them with an eviction notice.”

The Indian government has threatened to suspend U.S. $25 million in budgetary aid to the Maldives if the latter does not reconsider the contract.

The threat of aid suspension appears to have impressed upon the Maldives government the seriousness of the situation. Maldives Foreign Minister Abdul Samad Abdullah spoke to his Indian counterpart Salman Khurshid on Tuesday and assured him that President Waheed would soon be sending a detailed letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

According to an Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson, during the conversation on Tuesday, Abdullah told Khurshid that the Maldives government would not allow relations between India and Maldives to be undermined and that there was consensus on this issue. For his part, Khurshid reminded Abdullah of his earlier discussions noting that the legal processes involved in the GMR case should be permitted to take its own course based on the contractual obligations of the parties involved, and Male should not allow the situation to go out of hand.

“It is expected that no arbitrary and coercive measures should be taken pending the outcome of the legal process underway.  Resort to any such actions would inevitably have adverse consequences for relations between India and the Maldives,” the MEA spokesperson said. 

Incidentally, the GMR issue had come up during discussions between Manmohan Singh and Mohammed Waheed when the two recently met in Delhi. At the time the Maldives President had assured the Indian Prime Minister that negotiations would be held with GMR to resolve the issue amicably. The MEA went on record today saying that no negotiations had thus far been held.