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INTRODUCTION Robin Jeffrey Two incidents help to explain the reason for this book, a book about a new, constantly interacting world, yet a world in which local skills, history, and emotions reach out more widely and potently than ever before. In 2008, a news item highlighted aspects of old and new times: the Indian Navy pursued pirates in the Gulf of Aden and sank a Thai vessel that pirates had hijacked. “An Indian Navy, sinking a Thai boat in the Arabian Sea?”, many consumers of English language media would have asked. “When did India become a great seafaring power?” Surely it should be the Royal Navy or the U.S. Navy that squared off with maritime malefactors? And “pirates”? The word returned to common use in 2008, not in reference to musical comedy or Hollywood swashbuckling, but to sea-borne criminals threatening shipping from the Suez Canal to the Strait of Malacca. In 2008, too, the city of Mumbai was attacked by a handful of terrorists from dusty Punjab in Pakistan who slipped into the city from the sea. The police who interrogated the sole surviving attacker took hours to make sense of him because “the Mumbai Police officers … were Marathi speakers, unable to communicate with the south Punjab resident.”1 The task that this book sets itself — the task the Mumbai police wrestled with — is to understand local subtleties and nuances within the larger context of globalization.The “actors” in this book — India, Australia, and the ASEAN countries — might once have seemed an unusual combination. For the first two generations after the Second World War, these were distant neighbours and an unlikely triangle. Australia, to be sure, had interests in Southeast Asia, but these varied enormously — from confrontation with Indonesia and war in Vietnam, to military bases in Malaysia. In spite of assertions about things in common, India and Australia struggled to find genuine partnerships either xxii Robin Jeffrey in diplomacy or commerce.2 And India, champion of a global non-aligned movement, did not begin to “look east” until the 1990s.3 So much has changed, as the present book illustrates. Emerging from ascetic stand-offishness, India, since the 1990s, has sought recognition as a conventional “great power”. Its interests in the countries of ASEAN range from fascination with the economic successes of Singapore, to a sense of family involvement that extends back to the Hindu kingdoms of Bali and mainland Southeast Asia. India’s closer engagement with Australia, which is only slowly being appreciated, dates in part from the beginning of the twenty-first century and the arrival of large numbers of Indian students — 65,000 in mid-2008.4 Many will stay in Australia, and most will retain long-term connections. Previously, three reasons explained why Australia-India relations always seemed to be filled with unfulfilled potential. First, the human dimension was narrow. People of Indian extraction in Australia were fewer and of more recent standing than similar populations in Canada, the United Kingdom or the United States,5 and thus the constant two-way traffic, which creates relationships and diversifies commerce, was small. Second and relatedly, though the volume of India-Australia trade grew from the 1980s, the bulk of it lay in Australia’s export of a narrow range of raw materials.6 Third, until the 1990s, Australia and India were wedded to antagonistic partners — Australia to the United States and India to the Soviet Union. As India and the United States warm to each other in the twenty-first century, defence and intelligence cooperation between Australia and India becomes less inhibited. By 2005, the dynamics of the relationship were changing. This is seen most clearly in the people traffic: In 2005, a surprising number of Indian tourists (79,000) visited Australia and 94,000 Australian tourists went to India. India had become Australia’s fastest growing merchandise export market.7 Expanding global trade, and Australia’s role as a trading nation, have focused Australian attention on trading routes as never before. Similar considerations apply to many of the countries of ASEAN and certainly to ASEAN’s corporate aspirations as a facilitator of, and hub for, trade. As Prabhakar tells us in this book, 50,000 ships today pass through Indian territorial waters each year and another 50,000 call at Indian ports. India’s Andaman Islands, the southernmost of which is closer to Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia than to mainland India, can be seen as the guardians of the Strait of Malacca, through...

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