Alternative Narrative To The BRI For India

Multiple connectivity projects, through land, water, and air, with South East Asia, Central Asia and Africa could be a fitting response for India to China’s aggressive Belt and Road Initiative, argues BALADAS GHOSHAL

- Baladas Ghoshal

No other issue in recent diplomatic history has received so much attention and responses, both positive and negative, as China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a multifaceted economic, diplomatic and geopolitical undertaking that has earned many sobriquet and nomenclatures, from the “New Silk Road” to “One Belt One Road”. BRI is an ambitious and dream project of China’s paramount leader Xi Jinping, who is now presiding over China’s US$ 10 trillion economy, with spending of nearly US$150 billion a year, in the 68 countries that have signed up to the initiative. As many as 120 countries, including 29 at the top leadership level, attended the inaugural of the initiative, underlining President Xi Jinping’s description of this being the “project of the century.”

With such massive infrastructure and connectivity projects, unparalleled in history, China is attempting to not only influence politically and strategically over the host countries through its economic offensive but also impose a Sino-centric regional and global order, based on might over rules. Such a project will automatically impinge on India’s own security interests and its vision of an open, inclusive, consultative, cooperative, collaborative and rule-based regional order, and therefore calls for a strategic response and an alternative narrative to Beijing’s BRI in collaboration with like-minded countries and those who do not subscribe to hegemonic world view.

What is BRI?