Book Review: Indian Aviation and Foreign Policy-Convergence:
An unusual book which tries to synthesise aviation policy with foreign policy to political advantage out of better connectivity in our neighbourhood. It analyses the shortfalls in our aviation policy in the last few decades which led to growth of international hubs in our neighbourhood on both east and west initially with Indian outbound traffic and how this disadvantage can be overcome by corrective policies. It goes into the foreign policy endeavours on our east and west and attempts to show that with poor connectivity in the regions leads to poor people to people and thereby lack of interest in India by our neighbours.
India allowed our Airlines to lag behind by policy hurdles so that other incoming international airlines could carry more inbound and outbound passengers which led to an imbalance between the share of our airlines taking air traffic abroad to foreign airlines and also led to development of aviation Hubs in our neighbourhood on the east and west. Consequently, Indians used these hubs like Singapore or Dubai and others to connect while traveling abroad. However, with a high growth of our outbound traffic to reach 50 million soon( this prediction by World Tourism Organisation got caught in the Covid Pandemic) is a great asset for setting our outbound aviation on the right direction and also for our foreign policy mandarins to leverage this advantage by an appropriate synthesis of our aviation policy with foreign policy. The book also analyses the half baked attempts made earlier in 2003 by Prime Minister Vajpeyi for better connectivity with ASEAN and SAARC countries but failed to reach the objective because of poor synthesis of aviation and foreign policy objectives.
The book also discusses how China is using its huge outbound tourism traffic as a tool of foreign policy intervention. It both incentivises and punishes countries by controlling its outbound traffic, something we cannot do. However, the book suggests strategies, both non- monetary and monetary to incentivise our outbound tourism to countries of political advantage.
Finally, the book discusses a flaw in our Act East Policy as it ignores the strategic importance of Andaman and Nicobar islands, not from a military point of view, by projecting our soft power to convey to the world that our physical jurisdiction is not the Indian peninsula but also the Bay of Bengal right upto the western entrance of Malacca Strait, by opening the islands selectively by direct international flights to it four exiting airports spread over from one end to the other of the island chain, while at the same time following the Supreme Court guidelines which allows‘ High Value- Low Volume’ tourism.
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