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IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2015 Second Plenary Session
Rao Inderjit Singh, Minister of State for Defence, India
I would like to begin by congratulating the International Institute of Strategic Studies and the Government of Singapore for having organized yet another successful round of the Shangri-La Dialogue.
This annual Dialogue has emerged as a premier forum for exchange of views among strategic thinkers, policymakers and practitioners interested in Asia-Pacific defence & security issues. I would like to thank the organisers for the excellent arrangements and the warm hospitality that has been extended to my delegation.
This Plenary Session of the Shangri La Dialogue is on the theme “New Forms of Security Collaboration in Asia”. This is a timely subject becausebothparts of this topic are presently seeing changes - by this I mean that on one hand Asia is acquiring a new salience and significance in the world, and on the other the meaning of security cooperation in today’s world is also changing in varied ways.
Almost everyone now agrees that the 21st Century will be the ‘Asian Century’. Effectively, we are seeing a gradual return to the historical pattern where Asian economies contributed a major share of the global output. We should welcome this trend because it is only fitting that Asia, which houses an overwhelming majority of humanity should also account for a major portion of the world’s economy. The growth of Asia is important not only for Asian countries; it has implications for overall global prosperity. A rising Asia will also become the principal engine to sustain the growth of the global economy.
Security threats in this dynamic Asia have not only multiplied but are acquiring new forms. Even as traditional forms of threat persist, newer threats are emerging that are potentially more disruptive, more complex and dispersed. Countering these require a collaborative effort of all states in Asia. The case for a strong security architecture for Asia has never been stronger. The question is are we ready for it as yet. Such an architecture will require innovative forms of international cooperation among Asian countries and also between Asian and non-Asian countries.
Probably the greatest threat to today’s societies comes from the growth of terrorism and religious extremism. Terrorists have learnt to make use of new technologies, including the internet, to violently disrupt our lives and economies. Moreover, terrorist networks are often financed through other criminal activity including narcotics smuggling, which pose a security threat in themselves, making the combination even more dangerous. The threat is highest for open, democratic and pluralistic countries like India, because terrorism and extremism challenge the very fabric and tolerant ethos of our societies.
Countering the scourge of terrorism requires active collaboration between countries, for real-time exchange of actionable intelligence, for monitoring and interdicting the financial channels that sustain terror networks, and for preventing the recruitment and training of terrorist recruits. The recent rise of ISIL in West Asia has also shown the need for collaboration between police and immigration authorities of different countries to prevent the travel of foreign terrorist fighters to the theatres of conflict.
Some of the new forms of security collaboration we see today have arisen because we have begun to define our security in a more comprehensive manner than before. New concepts like food security, energy security, water security, information security and security of navigation have emerged in strategic discourse. We have also come to look upon natural disasters and mass epidemics as security threats, as they can often disrupt our lives and societies much more dramatically than even military threats.
These new and holistic conceptions of security have led to new forms of security cooperation between nations. Earlier, countries used to secure themselves from traditional military threats by adopting forms of neutrality or by aligning themselves in mutual defence arrangements with other countries. In our age, we have evolved a new form of security cooperation, one that is based on regular, structured dialogue between different nations rather than on formal alliances. ASEAN in southeast Asia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Central Asia are examples of this new form of security cooperation.
ASEAN is without doubt the best example of a forum that promotes an environment of shared security in its region through a transparent, open, and inclusive dialogue. Not only has it fostered such dialogue among its own constituent members, but has also taken the lead in creating wider fora like the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit, which provide countries from within and outside the region an opportunity to confer together. For India, the centrality of ASEAN is an important part of our vision for an open, mutual, inclusive and rules-based security architecture in the Asia Pacific region, where disputes are resolved through dialogue and diplomacy rather than by unilateral show of force. Over the past two decades, India has rapidly expanded its engagement with the ASEAN, from a sectoral dialogue partner to a full strategic partnership. Recently, we inaugurated our separate diplomatic mission to the ASEAN, to underline the importance we attach to this grouping as an economic and strategic entity. We intend to meet the expectations of our friends within ASEAN who want India to play a more proactive role in helping address traditional and nontraditional security threats in Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific.
For most Asian countries to continue to grow rapidly, they will require assured access to energy resources and other commodities. We must remember that most of the world’s shipping traffic including energy shipments traverse Asian waters. The same can increasingly be said of global value chains. Ensuring freedom of navigation in these waters is thus essential for all our security.
For us in India, freedom of navigation on the seas has always been important since our history has been shaped by the constant maritime inter-flow of goods and people between our coasts and other countries in Asia and Africa. The territory of India includes a coastline of 7500 km, 1200 islands, and 2.4 million square kilometres of Exclusive Economic Zone. We are determined to build on our maritime traditions, to foster security, cooperation, prosperity, and safety from nature’s fury for all countries to which we are connected by the seas around us.
India has always opposed the threat or unilateral use of force to resolve maritime territorial disputes, as this can disrupt normal trade flows threatening the economic security of all countries that depend on free-flow of marine commerce. We always urge all parties to such disputes to abjure military solutions and rely on diplomacy and international maritime law to come to a mutually acceptable outcome.
Freedom of navigation and energy security is also threatened by piracy in crowded sea-lanes. Cooperation between countries on exchange of information on white shipping and creation of Marine Domain Awareness has acquired new salience to prevent such threats at sea. We in India are creating robust systems of coastal surveillance and monitoring, and are increasingly collaborating with partner countries to share best experience, conduct joint exercises and to exchange information. The joint Coast-Guard ‘Dosti’ exercises between India, Sri Lanka and Maldives are an excellent example of such collaboration between littoral states. I would like to specially mention the bilateral naval exercises forum SIMBEX we have developed with Singapore, the 15th round of which just concluded with the participation of an indigenously built stealth frigate and an anti submarine warfare corvette from India.
India also took the lead in 2008 to establish the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium. Today it brings together 35 navies of the region with an aim to enhance mutual understanding of maritime challenges and develop our collective capacity to address these challenges.
Effective coastal surveillance can significantly enhance our ability to protect merchant shipping from piracy and to fight threats like smuggling, poaching and illegal fishing, and trafficking of people. India has created a robust system of coastal surveillance relying on radar systems, interceptor boats and registration and identification of bona-fide fishing vessels. We have also collaborated with other countries in the Indian Ocean like Seychelles and Mauritius to help build their capabilities for coastal surveillance.
Another increasingly important form of security collaboration between nations is Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief. Tsunamis and earthquakes have taken major toll on the lives and livelihoods of Asian citizens in recent decades. Similarly, major industrial accidents or oil-spills in the oceans can be hugely disruptive and often require a concerted response from all the countries in the region to provide immediate relief and long-term rehabilitation. Our armed forces increasingly undertake joint exercises to enhance inter-operability among themselves while responding to such crises. Enhancing our collective HADR capacity requires advanced countries to share technologies and platforms with countries that are willing to play a positive role in this regard. This can be a force multiplier and enable a stronger coalition to emerge in dealing with natural disasters and maritime threats.
In India, we are gradually strengthening our capacity to respond to such disasters not just in our own territory, but also in other parts of South Asia, in collaboration with our neighbours. Such collaboration was evident in the way we were able to respond when Maldives was faced with a potential drinking water crisis last year after its water treatment plant was destroyed in a fire. Recently, we again took the lead in rushing rescue and relief teams to help the citizens of Nepal after the devastating earthquake. As far back as 2004, we had worked together with Sri Lanka, Maldives and Indonesia to deliver immediate relief to the coastal areas devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami. An Indian naval vessel INS Saryu has just participated in the week-long ASEAN Regional Forum Disaster Relief Exercise (DIREX-15) in Penang, northern Malaysia, in collaboration with the navies of China, Malaysia and Thailand.
Evacuation of nationals trapped in situations of military conflict is another scenario where states need to work together to leverage each other’s strengths and capacities. When we recently evacuated our citizens from the war-zone in Yemen, we also pulled out thousands of citizens of other countries. The same was the case in evacuation operations undertaken from Libya, Syria and Iraq.
The increasing penetration and dominance of the internet in our lives has created another potential new threat to our security, and also established a new arena for states to collaborate for mutual security. As our systems for running public transportation, electricity distribution, and public service delivery become more and more dependent on virtual networks, hackers and other mischievous elements acquire the ability to bring our life to a halt through the simple insertion of a line of malicious code into our computer systems. The day-to-day transactions of the banking system and corporate finance can also be threatened if there are chinks in our cyber-security. Increasingly, the internet and social media are also emerging as tools used by terrorist and extremist groups to motivate, radicalise and recruit vulnerable populations for their destructive purposes. Countering all of this requires a high degree of technical competence among our law-enforcement agencies, and also the willingness to work together with each other to collectively keep one step ahead of the miscreants. It also requires greater sharing of governance of the internet among nations and multiple stakeholders.
Another form of non-traditional security threat that Asian countries have to increasingly confront is the result of environmental degradation. Excessive mining or deforestation in one country can often have serious environmental consequences in a neighbour, including floods, droughts, water and air pollution. Once more, countering such threats requires states to work together to understand geo-climatic phenomena, to establish mutually acceptable rules of the game and to monitor their implementation.
Finally, incidences of global pandemics are another new source of security risk for countries. Asia has been witness to the economic havoc that the SARS epidemic wrought on our societies. As our countries become more and more inter-connected, and our citizens travel across the world on a daily basis, no country or region can insulate itself from such crises. Asia must work with the rest of the world to develop collaborative mechanisms for early detection and containment of global epidemics. Regular exchanges between our health authorities, and creation of regional response-systems will be crucial to further such collaboration.
These were some of my preliminary thoughts on the new types of security threats that we face in Asia, and the forms of collaboration that are required to counter them. As we march forward into this ‘Asian Century’, we will no doubt come across even newer sources of threat to our collective security. However, I am confident that as long as we have the will to work together in a spirit of mutual accommodation and restraint, there is no threat that can arrest the rise of Asia. I look forward to the views of my fellow panelists on the subject.
In last one week several media outlets were busy writing that India is going to give Shangri-La Dialogue 2015 a miss
.
Rao Inderjit Singh, Minister of State for Defence, India
I would like to begin by congratulating the International Institute of Strategic Studies and the Government of Singapore for having organized yet another successful round of the Shangri-La Dialogue.
This annual Dialogue has emerged as a premier forum for exchange of views among strategic thinkers, policymakers and practitioners interested in Asia-Pacific defence & security issues. I would like to thank the organisers for the excellent arrangements and the warm hospitality that has been extended to my delegation.
This Plenary Session of the Shangri La Dialogue is on the theme “New Forms of Security Collaboration in Asia”. This is a timely subject becausebothparts of this topic are presently seeing changes - by this I mean that on one hand Asia is acquiring a new salience and significance in the world, and on the other the meaning of security cooperation in today’s world is also changing in varied ways.
Almost everyone now agrees that the 21st Century will be the ‘Asian Century’. Effectively, we are seeing a gradual return to the historical pattern where Asian economies contributed a major share of the global output. We should welcome this trend because it is only fitting that Asia, which houses an overwhelming majority of humanity should also account for a major portion of the world’s economy. The growth of Asia is important not only for Asian countries; it has implications for overall global prosperity. A rising Asia will also become the principal engine to sustain the growth of the global economy.
Security threats in this dynamic Asia have not only multiplied but are acquiring new forms. Even as traditional forms of threat persist, newer threats are emerging that are potentially more disruptive, more complex and dispersed. Countering these require a collaborative effort of all states in Asia. The case for a strong security architecture for Asia has never been stronger. The question is are we ready for it as yet. Such an architecture will require innovative forms of international cooperation among Asian countries and also between Asian and non-Asian countries.
Probably the greatest threat to today’s societies comes from the growth of terrorism and religious extremism. Terrorists have learnt to make use of new technologies, including the internet, to violently disrupt our lives and economies. Moreover, terrorist networks are often financed through other criminal activity including narcotics smuggling, which pose a security threat in themselves, making the combination even more dangerous. The threat is highest for open, democratic and pluralistic countries like India, because terrorism and extremism challenge the very fabric and tolerant ethos of our societies.
Countering the scourge of terrorism requires active collaboration between countries, for real-time exchange of actionable intelligence, for monitoring and interdicting the financial channels that sustain terror networks, and for preventing the recruitment and training of terrorist recruits. The recent rise of ISIL in West Asia has also shown the need for collaboration between police and immigration authorities of different countries to prevent the travel of foreign terrorist fighters to the theatres of conflict.
Some of the new forms of security collaboration we see today have arisen because we have begun to define our security in a more comprehensive manner than before. New concepts like food security, energy security, water security, information security and security of navigation have emerged in strategic discourse. We have also come to look upon natural disasters and mass epidemics as security threats, as they can often disrupt our lives and societies much more dramatically than even military threats.
These new and holistic conceptions of security have led to new forms of security cooperation between nations. Earlier, countries used to secure themselves from traditional military threats by adopting forms of neutrality or by aligning themselves in mutual defence arrangements with other countries. In our age, we have evolved a new form of security cooperation, one that is based on regular, structured dialogue between different nations rather than on formal alliances. ASEAN in southeast Asia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Central Asia are examples of this new form of security cooperation.
ASEAN is without doubt the best example of a forum that promotes an environment of shared security in its region through a transparent, open, and inclusive dialogue. Not only has it fostered such dialogue among its own constituent members, but has also taken the lead in creating wider fora like the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit, which provide countries from within and outside the region an opportunity to confer together. For India, the centrality of ASEAN is an important part of our vision for an open, mutual, inclusive and rules-based security architecture in the Asia Pacific region, where disputes are resolved through dialogue and diplomacy rather than by unilateral show of force. Over the past two decades, India has rapidly expanded its engagement with the ASEAN, from a sectoral dialogue partner to a full strategic partnership. Recently, we inaugurated our separate diplomatic mission to the ASEAN, to underline the importance we attach to this grouping as an economic and strategic entity. We intend to meet the expectations of our friends within ASEAN who want India to play a more proactive role in helping address traditional and nontraditional security threats in Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific.
For most Asian countries to continue to grow rapidly, they will require assured access to energy resources and other commodities. We must remember that most of the world’s shipping traffic including energy shipments traverse Asian waters. The same can increasingly be said of global value chains. Ensuring freedom of navigation in these waters is thus essential for all our security.
For us in India, freedom of navigation on the seas has always been important since our history has been shaped by the constant maritime inter-flow of goods and people between our coasts and other countries in Asia and Africa. The territory of India includes a coastline of 7500 km, 1200 islands, and 2.4 million square kilometres of Exclusive Economic Zone. We are determined to build on our maritime traditions, to foster security, cooperation, prosperity, and safety from nature’s fury for all countries to which we are connected by the seas around us.
India has always opposed the threat or unilateral use of force to resolve maritime territorial disputes, as this can disrupt normal trade flows threatening the economic security of all countries that depend on free-flow of marine commerce. We always urge all parties to such disputes to abjure military solutions and rely on diplomacy and international maritime law to come to a mutually acceptable outcome.
Freedom of navigation and energy security is also threatened by piracy in crowded sea-lanes. Cooperation between countries on exchange of information on white shipping and creation of Marine Domain Awareness has acquired new salience to prevent such threats at sea. We in India are creating robust systems of coastal surveillance and monitoring, and are increasingly collaborating with partner countries to share best experience, conduct joint exercises and to exchange information. The joint Coast-Guard ‘Dosti’ exercises between India, Sri Lanka and Maldives are an excellent example of such collaboration between littoral states. I would like to specially mention the bilateral naval exercises forum SIMBEX we have developed with Singapore, the 15th round of which just concluded with the participation of an indigenously built stealth frigate and an anti submarine warfare corvette from India.
India also took the lead in 2008 to establish the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium. Today it brings together 35 navies of the region with an aim to enhance mutual understanding of maritime challenges and develop our collective capacity to address these challenges.
Effective coastal surveillance can significantly enhance our ability to protect merchant shipping from piracy and to fight threats like smuggling, poaching and illegal fishing, and trafficking of people. India has created a robust system of coastal surveillance relying on radar systems, interceptor boats and registration and identification of bona-fide fishing vessels. We have also collaborated with other countries in the Indian Ocean like Seychelles and Mauritius to help build their capabilities for coastal surveillance.
Another increasingly important form of security collaboration between nations is Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief. Tsunamis and earthquakes have taken major toll on the lives and livelihoods of Asian citizens in recent decades. Similarly, major industrial accidents or oil-spills in the oceans can be hugely disruptive and often require a concerted response from all the countries in the region to provide immediate relief and long-term rehabilitation. Our armed forces increasingly undertake joint exercises to enhance inter-operability among themselves while responding to such crises. Enhancing our collective HADR capacity requires advanced countries to share technologies and platforms with countries that are willing to play a positive role in this regard. This can be a force multiplier and enable a stronger coalition to emerge in dealing with natural disasters and maritime threats.
In India, we are gradually strengthening our capacity to respond to such disasters not just in our own territory, but also in other parts of South Asia, in collaboration with our neighbours. Such collaboration was evident in the way we were able to respond when Maldives was faced with a potential drinking water crisis last year after its water treatment plant was destroyed in a fire. Recently, we again took the lead in rushing rescue and relief teams to help the citizens of Nepal after the devastating earthquake. As far back as 2004, we had worked together with Sri Lanka, Maldives and Indonesia to deliver immediate relief to the coastal areas devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami. An Indian naval vessel INS Saryu has just participated in the week-long ASEAN Regional Forum Disaster Relief Exercise (DIREX-15) in Penang, northern Malaysia, in collaboration with the navies of China, Malaysia and Thailand.
Evacuation of nationals trapped in situations of military conflict is another scenario where states need to work together to leverage each other’s strengths and capacities. When we recently evacuated our citizens from the war-zone in Yemen, we also pulled out thousands of citizens of other countries. The same was the case in evacuation operations undertaken from Libya, Syria and Iraq.
The increasing penetration and dominance of the internet in our lives has created another potential new threat to our security, and also established a new arena for states to collaborate for mutual security. As our systems for running public transportation, electricity distribution, and public service delivery become more and more dependent on virtual networks, hackers and other mischievous elements acquire the ability to bring our life to a halt through the simple insertion of a line of malicious code into our computer systems. The day-to-day transactions of the banking system and corporate finance can also be threatened if there are chinks in our cyber-security. Increasingly, the internet and social media are also emerging as tools used by terrorist and extremist groups to motivate, radicalise and recruit vulnerable populations for their destructive purposes. Countering all of this requires a high degree of technical competence among our law-enforcement agencies, and also the willingness to work together with each other to collectively keep one step ahead of the miscreants. It also requires greater sharing of governance of the internet among nations and multiple stakeholders.
Another form of non-traditional security threat that Asian countries have to increasingly confront is the result of environmental degradation. Excessive mining or deforestation in one country can often have serious environmental consequences in a neighbour, including floods, droughts, water and air pollution. Once more, countering such threats requires states to work together to understand geo-climatic phenomena, to establish mutually acceptable rules of the game and to monitor their implementation.
Finally, incidences of global pandemics are another new source of security risk for countries. Asia has been witness to the economic havoc that the SARS epidemic wrought on our societies. As our countries become more and more inter-connected, and our citizens travel across the world on a daily basis, no country or region can insulate itself from such crises. Asia must work with the rest of the world to develop collaborative mechanisms for early detection and containment of global epidemics. Regular exchanges between our health authorities, and creation of regional response-systems will be crucial to further such collaboration.
These were some of my preliminary thoughts on the new types of security threats that we face in Asia, and the forms of collaboration that are required to counter them. As we march forward into this ‘Asian Century’, we will no doubt come across even newer sources of threat to our collective security. However, I am confident that as long as we have the will to work together in a spirit of mutual accommodation and restraint, there is no threat that can arrest the rise of Asia. I look forward to the views of my fellow panelists on the subject.
In last one week several media outlets were busy writing that India is going to give Shangri-La Dialogue 2015 a miss
.
