Political pundits while analysing India’s foreign policy tend to examine its implementation in the Indo-Pacific region, where after the economic liberalization, the traditional cultural sphere of influence has been supplemented with economic imperatives. However, the keen interest in the Indo-Pacific maritime spaces may lead to a state of myopia, since other regions of the “extended neighbourhood” may often be overlooked.
One of them is Central Asia, which is of strategic importance for India’s security. In recent years, we witnessed an augmented political engagement in Central Asia’s political process by India, driven by the withdrawal of the American troops from Afghanistan in 2021. The increased interest is evidenced by the India-Central Asia Dialogue and the recently conducted First India-Central Asia Summit in 2022. The second meeting is anticipated to be held this year.
The intertwined political structure
In 1995, an Indian-born Professor at Columbia University, Jagdish Bhagwati, coined the term “spaghetti bowl” while depicting the framework of US preferential trading arrangements. It means interweaving and complexity of economic preferences between its trade partners. Similarly, today’s political and economic landscape in Central Asia is marked by the existence of numerous formats in political and economic spheres—the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Organization of Turkic states (OTS), Central Asia + formats, and some of specific mechanisms such as Regional Security Dialogue of Afghanistan and Quadrilateral and Coordination Mechanism (QCCM). At the same time, there is no mechanism which unites the five Central Asian states— Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—as a single political entity.
