Will India join Customs Union?

Will India join Customs Union?


About 30 countries have expressed interest in forming a free trade zone with the Customs Union. Ajay Bisaria, the head of the Eurasian Department of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, said in March 2013 that India was planning to sign an economic cooperation agreement with the Customs Union. In October 2013, Russia and India decided to form a working group to study the opportunities of signing such a document. India approved the formation of the group in November 2014.

Professor Andre Volodin of the Russian Diplomatic Academy believes that India's decision needs to be studied in its historical context before talking about the form of cooperation with the Customs Union or the Eurasian Union. "There, they usually carefully watch what is happening in Russia and have noticed that Russia started a small turn towards its Asian partners (China, India and other countries, in 2012, that gradually became more serious and conceptual. Indian partners have long been ready to cooperate with us in different formats. Speaking about the format of cooperation now is very hard. Life is complicated, and it will always suggest the final variant, but the fact of India's membership and intensification of our contacts gives India and ourselves a lot."

Nandan Unnikrishnan, vice president of the Observer Research Foundation, opined that it was too early to talk about joining the EaEU: "We are now only talking about opportunities to form a free trade zone, and if such a variant works out, we may talk about strengthening cooperation with the Eurasian Economic Society."

Boris Volkhonsky, the head of the sector for Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, agrees that India's membership in either of the unions was hasty, they need to discuss a free trade zone first.

"Any economic integration processes cannot be imposed. The Customs Union was born from the natural historical, economic and geographic ties and the proximity of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus. The fact that such different and distant countries as Vietnam, Egypt and India show interest in forming a free trade zone with the Customs Union and the Eurasian Economic Community in the future means that it is indeed a durable association, a very attractive form of cooperation."

Volkhonsky is pessimistic about cooperation between the CU and India in the near future: "We know how long it has been taking (and it has not been completed) to process India joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. There is a mass of bureaucratic longstops on the way. Luckily, many of them were eliminated at the Dushanbe summit in September this year, a working map was created to adjoin new members, and there is hope that India joining the SCO will happen in the near future, Russia could assist here as the chair of the SCO. The next summit will be held in Russia in the summer of next year. I think that the first step towards a closer path of integration would be for India to join the SCO because not only would India join, Pakistan will probably do it too, and that would unite a huge space and lift the main problem in Russian-Indian trade relations - the lack of a common border."

 

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