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New Delhi and Jakarta are now joining hands with a strategic vision to back their bilateral ties after largely ignoring each other even as their strategic interests have been converging rapidly
Why is Indonesia’s plans to shift its capital met with criticisms?
One must avoid an over-interpretation and an over-assessment of the suspected car bomb explosion outside the Australian Embassy at Jakarta on September 9,2004, which caused the death of nine persons and injuries to over a hundred others, most of them innocent civilians.
Smaller states in the region are now looking to India to act as a balancer in view of China's growing influence and PM Modi must make the most of President Jokowi's arrival by getting serious
Twelve innocent civilians, 11 of them Indonesian nationals, were killed in an explosion on August 5, 2003, in the US-franchised JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta. The Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) was suspected. If the JI is ultimately established to have been responsible, it would be the second major post-9/11 terrorist strike organised by it
A strong alignment between India and Indonesia holds the key to Delhi's much-vaunted "strategic autonomy" and Jakarta's quest for a "dynamic equilibrium" in Asia. It will also set the template for India's security cooperation with other regional powers in Asia.
Though Indonesia is not a claimant in the South China Sea, Jakarta and Beijing have entered into skirmishes in the Natuna area for long.
As I was driven into the heart of Jakarta from its international airport, I could hardly believe I was in the capital of a Muslim country, with the world's largest Muslim population. I noticed very few external signs of the Islamic character of the country in the form of mosques, calls to prayers over powerful loudspeakers, quotations from the Holy Koran written on the walls, men with beard and a white cap and women with their heads covered .
New Delhi is yet to get its defence engagement with Jakarta in shape. Through the decade-long UPA rule, Delhi and Jakarta had been talking about expanding bilateral defence cooperation. But progress had been rather slow thanks to the government's dysfunctional defence policies.
As the two biggest Asian economies, China and Japan are directly involved in infrastructure development in many Asian countries and this has led to fierce rivalry between the two. The recent decision of the Indonesian government to offer the construction of Jakarta-Bandung high speed network to China came as a bolt from the blue to Japan.
As the pressure on the new government in Jakarta increases to overtly declare its status against the Chinese in the South China Sea, it also risks falling into the 'extended coercive diplomacy' strategy of the Chinese which focuses on the coercion of an adversary aligned with the US.
The trip reinforced both the growing strategic alignment between New Delhi and Jakarta as well as its limits.
