India Uzbekistan relations reached a new level and further the former’s economic and strategic penetration in Central Asia with the visit to New Delhi last week of Uzbekistan’s President Islom Karimov, who signed an agreement that could lead to India’s ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) prospecting for oil and gas inside its neighbor’s territory in cooperation with Uzbekneftegaz.

Recent developments in India Uzbekistan relations

In meetings with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, both sides agreed to raise the level of bilateral India Uzbekistan relations to a “long-term strategic partnership”. The heads of state signed 34 accords across a wide range of issues that, alongside the hydrocarbon sector, included cooperation in pharmaceuticals and information technology.

Under their provisional agreement, OVL, the overseas arm of India’s state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, will form working groups with Uzbekneftegaz in a view towards joint activities in third countries, allowing OVL to continue to increase access to Central Asia’s vast energy resources.

As reported last month, New Delhi and Astana signed new agreements for energy-industrial cooperation, most notably an accord that had been in the works for over three years for OVL to acquire a 25% stake in Kazakhstan’s offshore Satpaev exploration bloc. Also, Kazakhstan already supplies India with nuclear fuel from its significant uranium deposits, while India plans to increase its civil nuclear program, which already counts 20 nuclear reactors.

The Karakalpakistan region of Uzbekistan holds up to 70 billion cubic meters of unexplored natural gas by some estimates. In return for the possibility of Indian assistance there, Uzbekistan is holding out the offer of shale gas technology to India for prospecting in such regions as Assam, Gujarat, and Rajasthan.

Strategic horizons for India Uzbekistan relations

Moreover, India’s continuing relationship with and participation in the project for a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline has contributed to increasing its profile in the region. Turkmenistan’s interest in TAPI has only increased since the Nabucco project for sending its gas to Europe has lately stutter-stepped.

Bilateral energy cooperation in India Uzbekistan relations extends to Afghanistan where, according to Indian newspaper The Hindu, the two countries have cooperated to supply electricity to Kabul, with Uzbekistan furnishing the power for the transmission network built by India.

Karimov’s unsettled authoritarian rule in Uzbekistan had made cooperation with India problematic until the two sides decided to focus first of all on security and anti-terrorism issues. Since then, economic cooperation has increased markedly. Uzbekistan is the 13th-biggest gas producer in the world, a fact often overlooked because of its large population consumes a significant proportion of the production, which it is therefore not a “strategic” export as it is for Kazakhstan and, for example, Turkmenistan.

India Uzbekistan relations: India’s turn to Central Asia?

Two decades after the independence of the Central Asian states, India’s relatively low profile in the region has acquired higher relief as it searches for “poles of attraction” other than Russia and China, which in the late 1990s had begun to establish a condominium (not an apartment, but an international law term for “joint rule”) over that part of the former Soviet territory.

Disorder in the immediate post-Cold War international transition militated against the extension of such ties. Only in 1999, for example, did Turkmenistan’s erstwhile president Saparmurad Niyazov make his first visit to India. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, opened the door to US “boots on the ground” in the region, which no one anticipated even during the supposed heyday of the so-called “unipolar moment” following the end of the Cold War.

Now, however, the limits of American strategic (and, after the financial crisis of 2007-08, also economic) leverage against Russia and China are becoming more evident.

Consequently, the five Central Asian states are casting about for counter-balances against the two large Asian powers. Kazakhstan’s somewhat closer relations with India earlier in the decade, which seemed to promise increased trade ties, foundered for a time upon the difficult geography: on top of the transportation difficulties endemic to the region, New Delhi has no border with any Central Asian state.

As for Uzbekistan, it is one of only two doubly-landlocked countries in the world, i,e., entirely surrounded by other landlocked countries (and the landlocked Caspian Sea). (The other is Liechtenstein.)

In the last few years, India has thus become one of the Central Asian counterbalances against Sino-Russian hegemony. Nor is Uzbekistan alone in deepening its relations with the subcontinent. Given India’s need to increase its energy imports, it is no surprise that a significant economic axis for its newly developing cooperation with Central Asia is in the oil and gas sector.

[First published in Asia Times Online/]