SOUTH-EAST ASIA: Vietnam (Dialogue)

Looking beyond Malacca

• The visit of Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang this week to Delhi offers the prospect of extending India’s security perimeter to the east of Malacca, to include the South China Sea and the Western Pacific.
• The Champa Kingdom, that reached its peak during the 9th to 10th centuries, underlines the depth of the civilisational contact between India and Vietnam.
  
• More recently, in the mid-20th century, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh were at the forefront of the efforts to forge a new Asian identity.
• India was among the handful of nations that backed the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia in 1978 to oust the genocidal clique of Pol Pot. When the United States, Europe, China, Japan and the ASEAN sought to isolate Vietnam in the 1980s, Delhi stood like a rock with Hanoi.
• Indo-Vietnamese ties today are defined by the declaration of a comprehensive partnership in 2003 and a strategic one in 2007, built around a broad-based convergence of interests, and rooted in a relative improvement of the regional and global positions of Delhi and Vietnam.
• It is now more than four years since Delhi and Hanoi identified the broad themes of their strategic partnership. These include among many others, maritime and energy security, expanded defence and intelligence cooperation, and collaboration in high-technology sectors.