Growing India-South Korea Strategic Synergy: The Defense Domain - The Diplomat, 13 September 2019

In this week's column for The Diplomat, I wrote on the growing strategic synergy between India and South Korea and how that is beginning to impact upon the defence domain.

In the first week of September, Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh was on a five-day tour of Northeast Asia, making South Korea his second stop after Japan. During the visit, the Indian minister met his counterpart, Jeong Kyeong-doo, with the two leaders highlighting the potential for expanding their cooperation in the defense and security sectors.

After undertaking a comprehensive review of the defense relations, the ministers signed two agreements, one to extend logistical support to each other’s navies, and a second one to deepen defense educational exchanges. The agreement on naval logistics sharing is particularly a significant one, given that India has such arrangements so far only with the United States and France. India is currently negotiating such an agreement with Japan.

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While it is a clear demonstration of the deepening strategic partnership between India and South Korea, the military logistics agreement will also go a long way in enhancing India’s strategic reach in the Indo-Pacific. India’s limited naval presence in the Pacific can be addressed by the agreement as the Indian military will be in a position – to take just one example – to use the South Korean military facilities if needed.

In another important development, the two countries have developed a roadmap that will strengthen India-South Korea defense industry collaboration. This is a key area given that the Indian government has decided not to use Chinese systems and components in the broad defense electronics sector and India is yet to develop indigenous capability to fill in this gap.

Given the high-end and sophisticated nature of the South Korean defense electronic capabilities, this offers itself as an ideal win-win opportunity for Seoul and New Delhi. A defense ministry statement noted that Rajnath Singh, at a meeting of the CEOs of Korean and Indian defense industries in Seoul, listed a number of possible areas for cooperation including land systems, aero systems, naval systems, R&D co-operation and collaboration in testing, certification, and quality assurance.

Elaborating on the defense trade potential in India, the minister went on to add that “India offers tremendous business opportunity to Korean defense industries in India with liberalized licensing regime, attractive FDI provisions, strong and skilled industrial work force, single window clearances and establishment of Defense Investor Cell to facilitate investors and various other industry friendly initiatives.”

Other lines of effort also bear noting in this regard. For instance, the defense minister also invited the Korean defense industry to participate in the next DefExpo — DefExpo 2020 — that will be held in Lucknow in February 2020. The Indian defense minister has also established a joint task force to identify military systems and hardware that can be produced in India through the participation of Korean defense industries, which will be useful in avoiding the import costs of these systems.

India’s push for stronger defense cooperation comes against the backdrop of the Indian Army’s induction of the K-9 Vajra self-propelled howitzers, which is a version of the South Korean K-9 Thunder. South Korean defense industry, Samsung-Techwin, and India’s Larsen & Toubro had entered into an agreement for the sale of 100 howitzers in May 2017.

The first batch of these howitzers entered service in November 2018, with the second batch to be supplied in November 2019 and the final batch of 50 is to be delivered in November 2020. The South Korean Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) announced in 2016 that it is working on a new fully automatic projectile-and-charge loading system that will be retrofitted to the K9, fitting the howitzers with a robotic turret, thereby reducing the role of crew operating the howitzers. Partnership between the Indian Larsen & Toubro and the Samsung-Techwin could strengthen indigenous effort to develop and strengthen remote control systems in India’s defense sector.

According to the defense ministry statement, the minister had also said that “We are progressing towards becoming a manufacturing hub of defense equipment and investors can use India as a spring board to export defense equipment manufactured in India to various friendly countries in South East Asia, Middle Asia, Middle East Asia, South Asia and Africa.”

The broader push for India-South Korea defense and strategic collaboration was taken during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Seoul in February this year. There is a growing synergy and complementarity between South Korea’s New Southern Policy and India’s Act East Policy, both of which seek to establish a stable, secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific order. Recalling President Moon Jae-In’s visit to India in 2018, Modi said during his Korea visit that “the coordination of India’s Act East Policy and Korea’s New Southern Policy is giving a strong platform to further deepen and strengthen our Special Strategic Partnership.” He further added, “we have made significant progress in our relations in a very short time. This is based on our shared vision of progress and roadmap of our relations in future, people, peace and prosperity.”

While India’s relations with South Korea are improving, it remains to be seen how New Delhi will maneuver around a couple of trouble spots. One is the worsening tensions between South Korea and Japan, another of India’s vital strategic partners in the region. A more critical one is Seoul’s closeness to China (despite South Korea’s own occasional difficulties with Beijing). Both require careful and sensitive handling.

What Did Moon's India Visit Achieve?, @Diplomat, July 13, 2018

In this week's column for The Diplomat, I wrote on South Korean President Moon Jae-In's visit to India.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in was in India this week on a four-day state visit, after which he moved on to Singapore. The visits put a focus on South Korea’s foreign policy development under Moon and its efforts to strengthen ties with regional states.



The visits have been cast as part of Moon’s New Southern Policy, focused on India and ASEAN. Part of the rationale in this policy is that Moon is trying to diversify South Korea’s relations, particularly with significant countries in the region, beyond just China. In the backdrop of some strains in the bilateral relationship between Seoul and Beijing, there are some within South Korea who endorse this changed approach in its foreign and strategic engagements and consider it as “a timely, even necessary, development.”

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Considering the larger geopolitical developments underway in the Indo-Pacific, the expectation might have been that both Moon and Prime Minister Narendra Modi would have tried to drive the bilateral relationship from an economic and trade to a security and strategic perspective.

But a look at the bilateral engagements and agreements signed by the two sides shows that economic and commercial ties still dominate this relationship. The two sides signed 11 agreements including on Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, and anti-dumping.

To be sure, South Korea has long played a key role in India’s economic growth story since the early 1990s, when India liberalized its economy and opened its market. But at the same time, while trade and economic ties are important to give substance to the partnership, the two sides should not lose sight of the strategic imperative that are forcing critical shifts in their foreign policies and there are immense possibilities for the future.

During the visit, Moon and Modi announced a shared vision for building a new era of India-Korea Special Strategic Partnership, a reference to the tag that the relationship was elevated to during Modi’s visit to Seoul in 2015.

The vision spells out a number of initiatives in the foreign policy and strategic realm, reflecting the regional anxieties and tensions and a shared approach to addressing these. The two leaders have, for instance, emphasized freedom of navigation, overflight, and unimpeded lawful commerce; resolving disputes on the basis of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and international law; as well as contending with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which is a shared priority. They also pledged to strengthen various elements of military-to-military cooperation as well through areas like training, exchanges, and research and development.

To be sure, that shared vision does not mean South Korea and India are entirely aligned across the board on issues. South Korea so far has not been part of initiatives such as the so-called “Quad” or even other related minilaterals, in part because its own approach to China is a more complex and ambivalent one.

Nonetheless, there have been clear efforts by the Moon government to cultivate ties with other regional states such as India, whether as part of a diversification strategy or to make further inroads with respect to new strategic partners and markets. Recent incidents, including accusations of China flying military aircraft into the Korean air defense identification zone without providing prior notification and China’s combative reactions to the South Korean decision to deploy a U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea, have shaken Seoul’s confidence in Beijing. Even as relations between Seoul and Beijing have shown signs of warming up, South Korea’s quest for a broader foreign policy approach along with the need for newer markets are visible in Moon’s outreach.

Within this context, trade is still likely to be critical in the India-South Korea relationship. Especially after its business was hit hard last year following China’s reactions to South Korea’s THAAD decision, Seoul is looking to diversify its economic presence and India offers plentiful opportunities in this regard. The large export market, in addition to providing infrastructural development support, can push the India-South Korea economic relations to newer heights. In 2015, during Modi’s visit, the two sides had signed a Framework of Cooperation in the areas of road transportation and highways and another MoU in maritime transport and logistics. The two sides are also eyeing development and infrastructure projects in third countries such as in Afghanistan.

One other area where new cooperation could emerge is in defense technology. South Korea’s expertise in developing high-end defense electronics should be of particular interest to India. One of the agreements signed during the visit pertains to defense industry collaboration, and India last year signed an agreement for the development of artillery guns under the Make in India initiative. To be sure, there are obstacles: as an example, India’s plans to collaborate with South Korea for the co-production of the 12 minesweepers for the Indian Navy fell apart earlier this year due to cost and transfer of technology issues. But there definitely potential here for closer cooperation, as there is in the India-South Korea relationship more broadly.