New Delhi, Nov. 21: Indian public sector company ONGC Videsh Nigam Limited will continue to operate with Vietnam in the South China Sea where it has been allotted two blocks for exploration, government sources said today.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had also told Premier Wen Jiabao in Bali on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit last week that India’s interest in the South China Sea was “purely commercial”.
New Delhi sees the row at two levels; firstly the territorial dispute between China and Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia. The second level is the issue of the freedom of navigation through the waterway.
The two blocks where ONGC is exploring are regarded by Vietnam as its waters. Beijing’s repeated position that it does not want companies to function in the South China Sea without its permission means that the issue is fraught with the possibility of dragging India into the dispute over the ownership of the waters.
The sea holds the promise of rich oil and gas deposits but has not been fully explored.
The Indian policy on the South China Sea also has two facets: firstly it favours the freedom of navigation in international waters and, secondly it wants the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which China is a signatory, to apply.
Even India’s own maritime boundaries are not yet fully delineated (the dispute over the Sir Creek with Pakistan and a part of the waters near the Sunderbans with Bangladesh being just two examples).
This is where the South China Sea issue becomes more global than regional. So far, China has not taken measures to impose what American strategic thinker Robert Kaplan calls “area-denial” or “sea-denial tactics” by force. But China is modernising and expanding a navy that has the capability to resort to such force.
In July an Indian warship, the INS Airavat, was “buzzed” while sailing from one port to another in Vietnam, meaning that it was raised by an unidentified radio caller and told that it was in Chinese waters. But there was no effort to block its path.
In New Delhi, the government believes that despite the potential of a stand-off, Beijing will have to be engaged on several issues because there is no step that it has taken to force issues militarily whether in the water or on the disputed land boundary with India.
“It is not just a cliché but a fact that we (India and China) are likely to be both competitive and complementary,” foreign secretary Ranjan Mathai said in a lecture at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis today.
“The promise of an India-China engagement is mirrored with China having emerged as India’s largest trading partner, with prospects of growth continuing and a bilateral trade target of $100 billion by 2015… therefore, there is need for continued engagement with China across all spectrums, despite outstanding problems on the border issue.
“China will be an important partner in fostering Asian stability, and in ensuring economic linkages between countries that could work to dissuade conflict. There will, of course, be many balancing acts required,” said Mathai.
