First India-Central Asia summit

Context: Indian Prime Minister will be holding the first India-Central Asia summit, in a videoconference with five Presidents from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
About Central Asia

• Central Asia is a region in Asia which stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north
• It includes the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
• All five nations became independent states after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, post-Cold war.

Proposed agenda for the summit

• Government officials have stated that the major areas of focus for the conference would be trade and connectivity, building development partnerships and enhancing cultural and people-to-people contacts.

Trade

• The participants are expected to discuss ways to increase trade between India and the Central Asian countries.
• Currently, the bilateral trade stands at a meagre $2 billion and also a major proportion of this is attributed to energy imports from Kazakhstan by India. India’s exports to this region remain minuscule.

Connectivity

• India hopes to expand its trilateral working group on Chabahar with Iran and Uzbekistan to strengthen connectivity to the region.

Development partnership

• India has previously extended a $1 billion Line of Credit (LOC) for development projects in the areas of energy, healthcare, connectivity, IT, and agriculture in 2020 and an expansion on this front could be on the agenda given India’s expertise in the above sector and its experience with developmental aid.

People-to-people contacts

• India would do well to increase the number of educational opportunities for students from Central Asian countries. This would help build essential people-to-people contacts with Central Asian nations and will help build goodwill for India in the longer run.

Other aspects

• Global and regional developments are also likely to form a part of the discussions.
• The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rebuilding of the economies affected by the pandemic is likely to be a major aspect of the discussions.
• The volatile Afghanistan situation is also likely to be discussed.

Challenges
Ukraine-Russia tensions

• The growing tensions between Russia and the U.S. led-West over the troop build-up on the Ukraine-Russia border could pose a challenge to the relationship.
• The five Central Asian nations being former Soviet States enjoy close strategic ties with Russia. During the recent uprising in Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan President had received support from Russia.
• Given the increasingly strategic alignment with the U.S., India would be caught in a catch 22 situation in case a war breaks out.

Afghanistan issue

• Though the Afghanistan issue has been discussed at the National Security Advisers meet of India-Central Asia countries as well as at the meeting of India-Central Asia Foreign Ministers, not all Central Asian countries are on the same page as India on dealing with the Taliban.
• With the exception of Tajikistan, all have exchanged high-level diplomatic visits with Kabul, while at least two, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have reopened their missions in Afghanistan.

China factor

• In a recently organized virtual summit, China has offered $500 million in assistance to the Central Asian region and pledged to ramp up trade between the two sides to $70 billion by 2030. Currently, China’s trade with the five countries crossed $40 billion in 2018, roughly 20 times India’s trade with the region for 2018.
• China has several big projects of strategic importance with the Central Asian region including natural gas pipeline, crude oil pipeline, highway and expressways.
• The growing Chinese influence in the region could undermine Indian efforts to build a robust relationship with the nations of the Central Asian region.

Connectivity challenges

• Connectivity to Central Asia remains one of the major challenges to deepening the relationship between India and the region given that India lacks direct land route access to the region.
• Pakistan has been reluctant to provide land route access.
• The alternate route of connectivity through Chabahar port in Iran and Afghanistan to Central Asia has not made much progress and the recent takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban further decreases the chances.