Opinion | Dilli To Dili: India's 'Acting East' In East Timor

When President Draupadi Murmu received the Grand Collar of the Order of Timor-Leste, the newest Asian country's highest honour, from her counterpart Jose Ramos-Horta on August 10, a new chapter was written in India's foreign policy. Timor-Leste, or East Timor, may not be huge, but it marks a much-awaited breakthrough for India's "Act East Policy," which was upgraded from the erstwhile "Look East Policy" by Narendra Modi soon after he was sworn in as the Prime Minister for the first time in 2014. At a time when Quad, Aukus, Squad, and other strategic alliances are taking shape to protect the region from the emphatically long and rapidly overreaching tentacles of the dragon or Loong (as per the Communist Party of China's latest English sobriquet for the mythical creature), the tiny oil-rich nation with a name that is both a tautology and a pleonasm is going to be the newest country to have an Indian embassy.

Double Name, Strategic Location

The name Timor is derived from the Malay word timur, meaning east, while Leste in Portuguese means east as well. Therefore, both East Timor and Timor Leste become "East East" when the country's official names are translated into English. The former Portuguese colony, which was later occupied by Indonesia, is arguably one of the most inconspicuous countries in Asia and the world. It hardly features in any international academic discourse these days, even though it is strategically located in the heart of the Indo-Pacific - the region that has become the talk of the town in international relations and global affairs.

Founding Fathers Of Fledgling Democracy

The unitary semi-presidential republic is headed by Jose Ramos-Horta, the co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, and Xanana Gusmao, a former soccer goalkeeper-turned-guerilla leader, whose name is derived from the American 1970s rock and roll group Sha Na Na and is pronounced that way. It has been the freest country in Asia in the annual Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF) Press Freedom Index over the last few years. Timor-Leste is ranked 20th in the world according to the RSF index, while its multifaceted Prime Minister Gusmao had brief stints in journalism by publishing his poems in a local newspaper and later co-writing the first-ever Lonely Planet travel guide on his country a couple of decades ago. However, the young democracy is covered by the international media only when "someone is attacked by a crocodile in one of our pristine beaches," a human rights activist ruefully mentioned when I met her during my recent visit to its capital, Dili.

X-Factor In India-Timor-Leste Ties

When it comes to social media, Timorese President Horta's X (formerly Twitter) handle reflects his country's positive feelings and an attitude of camaraderie towards India. The 74-year-old president, who is a few months older than the Indian Prime Minister, has used X only four times this year - twice reposted and twice posted. His back-to-back reposts came during this year's Vibrant Gujarat summit in Gandhinagar, Gujarat on January 9. Horta first reposted Modi's post about their meeting and the influence of Mahatma Gandhi on the Timorese independence leader. His second repost came on the same day about his one-on-one meeting with Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel, posted by the official Vibrant Gujarat X handle. Significantly, Horta's first post on X this year was congratulating Modi after his "reelection for a third consecutive term" on June 6, while his post this year came on August 12, posting the promotional poster of Radio and Television of East Timor (RTTL) about his interaction with his Indian counterpart, President Murmu.

Long-Distance Love Between Democracies

However, the diplomatic journey between Delhi and Dili has taken a long and obscure route over the past couple of decades since India became one of the first countries to recognise the independence of Timor-Leste in 2002. Then Minister of State (MoS) for External Affairs in the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, Omar Abdullah, attended the event, but since then, there have been hardly any high-level visits to the strategically significant country that has emerged as one of India's strongest democratic allies until the Indian President chose the Asian country as part of her just-concluded three-nation Asia-Pacific tour. A country that was one of the earliest supporters of India's candidature for a permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) way back in 2003 remained in the South Bloc - diplomatically administered by the Indian embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia - for nearly two decades. Since Abdullah's arrival and before President Murmu's visit last week, only two ministerial delegations were sent to Dili. Krishan Pal Gurjar, then MoS for Social Justice and Empowerment, visited the island nation in 2018. A year later, Raj Kumar Ranjan Singh, then MoS for External Affairs, landed in Dili in October last year after PM Modi announced the decision to open an embassy in Timor-Leste during the 20th ASEAN-India Summit in Jakarta on September 7 last year.

Delhi's Distant Destination Dili

Additionally, only two other prominent Indians visited the country. Congress MP and former Union Minister Shashi Tharoor made a sojourn to the country in 2011 after being invited by President Horta in a personal capacity as a friend of Timor-Leste's founding leader since Tharoor's UN days. Horta's fellow Nobel Peace laureate, Kailash Satyarthi, was invited during his presidential inauguration in 2022 and made the trip after taking "five separate flights over two days in order to make it on time," as described by Qatari media Al Jazeera. The Southeast Asian country's lack of air connectivity with the rest of the world can often be described as a lag behind any diplomatic outreach and activities. Only three foreign cities - Singapore, Denpasar in Bali, Indonesia, and Darwin in northern Australia - have direct air connectivity with Timor Leste's only international airport in Dili. Undoubtedly, this played a huge hindrance to both bilateral relations as well as people-to-people connectivity.

Propelling Public Diplomacy

In fact, for a long time, it was further undermined by some bureaucratic red tape as well. For years, Indian visa-seeking Timorese citizens, as well as the approximately 100 Indian expatriates in Timor-Leste, were forced to change flights and spend more on air tickets to get their consular work done at the Indian embassy in Jakarta when the consulate in Bali could have performed the same service and shortened the distance and number of flights. This was a clear case of bureaucratic misjudgment, indifference, and a lack of any outreach intent or public diplomacy. In fact, the then Indian government "literally threw our small Indian community members in Timor-Leste under the bus during the brutal civil war in 2006," a couple of long-time Indian expatriates informed me during my visit to Dili. They further complained that "every single Indian was left to fend for themselves after repeatedly reaching out to the Indian embassy in Jakarta and MEA in Delhi without receiving any response to those SOS calls." Unlike the current government-led rescue and evacuation missions in Wuhan, Ukraine, and other places, Timor-Leste was hardly a footnote in the foreign ministry's diplomatic documents under the archaic "Look East Policy" in those days. However, with the current government, which has intensified and magnified its stronger public diplomacy image under Modi and since late Sushma Swaraj took over the helm of the Ministry of External Affairs in 2014, and with her successor Dr S Jaishankar continuing to give further impetus, establishing the diplomatic mission in the heart of Dili is certainly going to bolster diplomatic ties and further consolidate people-to-people contact. In fact, the small Indian expat community has recently built a Lord Ganesha temple, and many of them feature regularly in a cricket league played on the only cricket ground in the country, near the Peace Memorial inside the Tasitolu Peace Park.

Counter-Balancing Chinese Influence

Therefore, India's move to build a new embassy is also going to have geopolitical and strategic significance. With China increasing its massive footprint in the country through its heavy investments in infrastructure development, energy, food, and ports under President Xi Jinping's showpiece Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a proactive role for India is greatly needed to maintain the balance of power in the region. Especially since Australia, the regional superpower in the Pacific, which actively played a huge role during Timor-Leste's liberation, fell out of favour in the 2004 spying scandal and the subsequent maritime boundary delimitation dispute, India's growing presence alongside Japan is expected to counterbalance the growing Chinese influence. However, for that, India has to enhance its bilateral trade and investment partnership manifold. Even though India has extended duty-free access to the import of products from Timor-Leste as part of its Duty-Free Tariff Preference (DFTP) scheme for LDCs, compared to Beijing's investments, which include the construction of the presidential palace and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, India's trade and economic involvement - including the comparatively minuscule export volume of $43.26 million during 2023 (according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade) - is substantially small.

A New Beginning For Bilateral Ties

Nonetheless, this marks a new beginning. The upcoming embassy is being temporarily set up at the most prominent hotel in Dili's city centre inside a mall, the only such entity in the country, which has witnessed a series of wars, conflicts, and civil wars for decades. From a personal experience, despite sitting almost idle for more than a decade, India's Bollywood soft power still rules the roost in Timor-Leste. Every Timorese I met during my three-day stay in the tiny nation addressed me as "Rahul" because Karan Johar's 25-year-old magnum opus Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is still the most popular Indian movie across the country, with every single one of them crooning the title song, which they learned while watching the movie on Indonesian entertainment channels during their struggles for independence and its aftermath. "The movie and the song came to symbolise a new meaning of love in those tough times in our predominantly Christian country," the activist said.

(Suvam Pal is a Taipei-based broadcast journalist with TaiwanPlus news channel)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.