Coronavirus: Modi calls up leaders in neighbourhood, as India tries to thwart China’s new 'Health Silk Road' initiative

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is calling up his counterparts in India’s neighbourhood, as New Delhi stepped up its engagements with the countries in South and South-East Asia in order to pre-empt China’s new “Health Silk Road” move to use the COVID-19 crisis and spread its tentacles in the region.

New Delhi is also extending a currency swap facility to its neighbours to help them mitigate the impact of the crisis on their economies, in addition to providing them with Paracetamol and Hydroxychloroquine tablets as well as protective gears for healthcare professionals, face masks and other medical equipment.

The Prime Minister spoke to Myanmar’s state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi over the phone on Thursday. He underlined the “importance of Myanmar as a vital pillar of Neighbourhood First policy of India”, according to a press release issued by his office. He conveyed to her that India would stand ready to provide all possible support to Myanmar for mitigating the health and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the travel and transport curbs as well as the lockdowns imposed by many nations around the world to contain it.

Modi spoke to Suu Kyi just days after China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sent a military medical team to Myanmar to help the South East Asian nation to deal with the pandemic. This was the second medical team Beijing sent to help Nay Pyi Daw deal with the COVID-19 outbreak in Myanmar.

New Delhi took note of the arrival of China’s military medical team in Myanmar, where the armed forces continued to hold sway even after the victory of the Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy in the landmark elections in 2015.

The two other nations China sent its military medical teams are Laos and its “iron brother” Pakistan.

The Prime Minister also pledged India’s consistent support to Bangladesh to deal with the crisis when he called up his counterpart in the neighbouring country, Sheikh Hasina, on Wednesday.

China is sending a medical team to Bangladesh too – responding to a request from Hasina’s Government.

What caused unease for New Delhi is that Bangladesh asked China to send a team of doctors and nurses, although India had assured all other South Asian nations itself that its “Rapid Response Teams” of healthcare professionals would be on standby to be deployed in any neighbouring country. Modi, himself, had promised to send the teams on request from any South Asian nations, when he had held a video-conference with Hasina and other leaders of the SAARC on March 15 to work out a strategy to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

The only neighbouring country where New Delhi so far deployed its Rapid Response Team of healthcare professionals is the Maldives.

India, however, sent two consignments of medicines, gloves and masks to Bangladesh to help it respond to the pandemic. Besides, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Bhuvaneshwar will conduct a series of online courses in Bangla on the management of the COVID-19 for the healthcare professionals of Bangladesh on May 12 and 13. New Delhi, earlier, arranged similar webinars in English for all the SAARC nations.

Not only Suu Kyi and Hasina, but the Prime Minister also spoke to Maldives President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih and Nepalese Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli earlier this month.

He reached out to Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc of Vietnam, President Joco Widodo of Indonesia and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore over the past few days. He is also likely to speak to Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa soon.

Modi’s calls to the leaders of South Asia and South-East Asia are just continuation of the process he started as early as on March 15, when he convened a video conference of the leaders of the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) to work out a strategy to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and to deal with its economic implications. A senior official in New Delhi said that the Modi government had anticipated that China would try to use the crisis to expand its footprints around the world and that was why India had moved fast to counter as much as possible the communist country’s bid in its neighbourhood.

India recently activated a currency swap facility of $ 150 million for Maldives.

It was activated as a component of the $ 400 million currency swap agreement India earlier inked with Maldives in July 2019. The agreement was a part of the $1.4 billion economic assistance package New Delhi had announced for Maldives in December 2018 to help the just-installed Solih Government pull the tiny island nation out of a $ 3 billion debt-trap with China. The erstwhile regime led by Abdulla Yameen Gayoom had put Maldives into the debt-trap by awarding the state-owned companies of China contracts to build several infrastructure projects, mostly on unsustainable loan terms.

China of late extended support to Maldives to expeditiously build a facility to quarantine suspected COVID-19 patients. It also sent medical supplies to the Indian Ocean archipelago.

Even as the Solih Government in Male expressed its gratitude to Beijing, China’s envoy to Maldives, Zhang Lizhong, utilized the opportunity to seek continuation of the projects, which the communist country’s state-owned companies had embarked on the tiny nation as part of its ambitious and controversial cross-continental connectivity projects under the Belt-and-Road Initiative.

The Reserve Bank of India is also working with the Central Bank of Sri Lanka to finalise a $400 million currency swap agreement for the neighbouring island nation.

China already provided a preliminary $500 million concessional loan to Sri Lanka to help it cushion the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sri Lanka had to lease out the Hambantota Port to China for 99 years after its construction by a company based in the communist country resulted in a huge debt burden on the tiny Indian Ocean nation. After the return of the ‘Rajapaksa Clan’ to power in Colombo – Gotabaya Rajapaksa as President and Mahinda Rajapaksa as Prime Minister, China has renewed its interests in projects in Sri Lanka, particularly focusing on the ones it could use to expand its geo-strategic influence over the island nation.