VIENTIANE: The 10-nation ASEAN, whose leaders met for their 8th summit in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh earlier this week, is naturally happy with all the attention it is getting from China and India. "They feel if these two countries are keenly competing for a share of the cake, the United States cannot be far behind," an Asian diplomat said. Hours after China signed a free trade area agreement with ASEAN that will be put in place in 10 years, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee made a similar proposal when he addressed the first India-ASEAN summit in Phnom Penh Tuesday. Vajpayee, currently winding up a two-day trip to Laos, agreed to undertake "concrete cooperation" for a free-trade area linking the world's second most populous nation with Southeast Asia within a 10-year time frame. ASEAN leaders welcomed the Indian offer and a task force co-chaired by India and Malaysia that is already looking into ways of enhancing economic linkages between the two sides will draw up the roadmap for the creation of an India-ASEAN free-trade area. "There apparently is a feeling that ASEAN has to find its center of gravity before China begins to call the shots," one diplomatic observer said, adding that India would help maintain a balance. He said Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong's reference to India being one wing of the ASEAN jumbo jet with the other wing being the three full dialogue partners from East Asia- China, Japan and South Korea should be seen in this context. Indian officials denied that New Delhi's proposal had anything to do with the Chinese move. "We are not in competition with any country or any group of countries," asserted External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha, who was a member of the prime minister's delegation to the summit with ASEAN as well as the bilateral visits to Cambodia and Laos. He also noted that India was a "latecomer" to ASEAN as a full dialogue partner while China had attained that status some years ago. But senior officials in the prime minister's delegation acknowledge that rivalry between India and China was inescapable, not only in southeast Asia but in other regions of the world. "Given the nature of our sizes and our ambitions, a certain amount of rivalry is inescapable, but it need not be an unhealthy one," one official said. The free trade pact sealed by Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji and the ASEAN leaders at Phnom Penh is expected to become a reality between 2010 and 2015 and cover 1.7 billion people and a trade volume of $1.2 trillion. Diplomatic observers say the ASEAN leaders' enthusiastic response to a similar proposal from Vajpayee may be a reflection of the underlying nervousness about a closer embrace by their neighbor to the north. Ethnic Chinese form a considerable section of the populations of many of the ASEAN countries and Beijing, by aggressive diplomacy and salesmanship, has already cornered a fair share of the markets of the region. But it is not only China and India that are in a race in Southeast Asia, as a visit by South African President Thabo Imbeki to Phnom Penh during the summit showed. Japan, another full dialogue partner of ASEAN, also signed an agreement during the summit to work on a framework to develop a free-trade area with an expanded market of at least $4.9 trillion. This pact is only at the initial stage of agreeing to develop a framework.
Source: IANS