Describe briefly China’s ‘One Belt One Road (OBOR)’ Initiative and analyze India’s major concerns. (2019, 20 Marks)
Xi Jinping announced the Silk Road Economic Belt at Astana in September 2013 and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road at Jakarta a month later. Renamed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), they form the largest connectivity programme any state has attempted. India is the only major economy to have refused it outright, and its objections run from a single corridor to the shape of the Asian order.
The initiative in brief
- Architecture: an overland “belt” of six economic corridors (the New Eurasian Land Bridge, China–Mongolia–Russia, China–Central Asia–West Asia, China–Indochina Peninsula, Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar and the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor) and a maritime “road” of ports across the Indian Ocean to East Africa and the Mediterranean.
- Scale: about 150 countries have signed cooperation documents; cumulative engagement has reached about $1.4 trillion since 2013, with a record $213.5 billion in 2025, 43% of it in energy (Griffith Asia Institute data).
- Motives: exporting surplus industrial capacity, developing the western provinces, easing the “Malacca dilemma” that Hu Jintao flagged in 2003, and converting economic weight into influence. Nadège Rolland reads it as the scaffolding of a Sinocentric Eurasia.
- After debt distress in Sri Lanka and Zambia, Beijing has promoted “small and beautiful” projects since 2021; Italy, the only G7 member to join, left in December 2023.
India’s major concerns
Sovereignty. CPEC, the flagship, passes through Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir. Staying away from the first Belt and Road Forum in May 2017, India declared that no country can accept a project ignoring its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity; it has kept out of the BRI paragraph of every SCO declaration since, Tianjin (2025) included. The Kabul trilateral of 20 August 2025, where China, Pakistan and Afghanistan pledged to extend CPEC into Afghanistan, widens that corridor on India’s western flank.
Norms and debt. The same statement demanded international norms, transparency, financial responsibility and ecological balance. Unpublished contracts, tied Chinese contractors and the 99-year lease of Hambantota (2017) gave Brahma Chellaney’s phrase “debt-trap diplomacy” its currency.
Maritime encirclement. Gwadar, Hambantota, Kyaukphyu and the Djibouti base suggest dual-use access along India’s sea lanes, the “string of pearls”, constraining Indian power projection.
The neighbourhood. BRI money draws Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives into a Chinese orbit; Nepal signed a BRI cooperation framework in December 2024.
Economic dependence. Chinese-built logistics, standards and digital networks would deepen the asymmetry seen in India’s $112.16 billion trade deficit with China in FY2025–26.
Water. Tibetan mega-projects feed fears for the Brahmaputra, though the planned western route of the South–North Water Transfer taps Yangtze tributaries, not it.
How far are the concerns justified?
- Shivshankar Menon (April 2017) granted that BRI could supply public goods Asia needs, but judged CPEC economically unjustified, noted that its strategic port was built first, and warned that it would “solidify and legitimise that occupation”. A geopolitical project, he predicted, would meet countervailing forces, as the Quad shows.
- Deborah Brautigam counters that Hambantota was not a seizure of collateral and that partners sought the loans. India is itself the largest borrower from the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which blunts a purely financial objection.
- BRI has limits too: CPEC engagement fell by 77% in 2025, with no new Chinese investment in Pakistan.
- India’s answers, INSTC, Chabahar, Kaladan and IMEC (2023), remain slower and thinner than Beijing’s offer.
Conclusion
India’s refusal rests on a non-negotiable principle, CPEC’s route, and on the judgement that infrastructure is influence. The sound response is not a rival mega-programme but standards-based connectivity with Japan, the EU and Gulf partners, competing where China’s offer is weakest: transparency, sustainable debt and respect for sovereignty.