Philippine Intervention
delivered by
Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro L. Locsin, Jr.
during the
ASEAN Post-Ministerial Conference Session with India
04 August 2021
Co-Chairs, Excellencies.
I thank Thailand for its able coordinatorship of ASEAN-India Dialogue Relations, and look forward to working with Singapore.
I am pleased to welcome His Excellency, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, whose wisdom on Indo-Pacific dynamics has guided me in many crucial decisions. With sharp insight he counsels that “[t]he Indo-Pacific is unquestionably the arena for the contemporary version of the Great Game, where multiple players with diverse ambitions display their strategic skills.”[1] Every boy who’s thrilled to Kipling’s Kim knows the thrill and never outgrows it. Thank God because nothing’s changed but the costumes of the outsiders.
In that arena, multilateralism is imperative. For the Philippines, ASEAN and “ASEAN Centrality” are the core of that multilateral order. We seek to reduce even more its former marginality; while staying skeptical of great power schemes that seek to drag in ASEAN piecemeal into larger quarrels, more dangerous rivalries, and far bigger ambitions that we as a region of peace do not share.
The ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific advances ASEAN-led mechanisms such as the East Asia Summit, as platforms for dialogue and implementation. The Philippines welcomes India’s Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative as complementary to the ASEAN Outlook. Both emphasizing the need for a safe and rules-based maritime domain.
We support India’s initiative for an ASEAN-India Joint Statement on the ASEAN Outlook and the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative.
We commend India’s active participation in the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Regional Forum, and SOMTC Plus India. We aspire for a region of peace, growth, stability and freedom especially from non-state transnational threats to which we are especially vulnerable. We look especially to India as teacher in this particularly perilous field of fire — which describes our respective countries situations in this regard.
The pandemic has brought immeasurable suffering and unbearable sorrows to our peoples; crushed our economies; near exhausted our resources. In rebuilding our economies, we begin first and foremost with our peoples: mass inoculation and equipping them with the skills for a digitized world.
We must provide equitable access to opportunities for those severely impacted by the pandemic, including vulnerable groups, and micro, small and medium enterprises. With India’s expertise, it is mutually beneficial to enhance cooperation on the digital economy, connectivity and facilitating cross-border data flows.
All these will come to nothing if we fail to act on the climate crisis. India’s role is key. Our planet is dying. If climate action does not measure up to what is needed, we all face the same fate of diminished existence or extinction altogether.
Integral to climate action is fostering a culture of resilience and sustainability through biodiversity conservation and environmental protection. ASEAN and India will benefit greatly from collaborating on disaster management, green recovery and smart cities. The Philippines is also interested in partnering on biotechnology, a key program of India’s Five-Year Science and Technology Plan.
Let me add a personal note: I passed the Cheaper Medicine Act in Congress on my boast that India would come to the rescue if American Big Pharma retaliated for the law. The Philippines will always advocate strengthening ASEAN’s relations with India, from whom we still have much to learn, Jawar-har-lal Nehru’s mantra of “unity in diversity” comes easily to mind. Fresh from the violence of India’s Freedom at Midnight — a phrase I appropriated to announce the victory of democracy over dictatorship in the same hour in the first weeks of 1986 — the challenge was to find that unity. It continues to elude us. Our midnight unity dissolved in the first morning of freedom. Looking back, we were united only in our hatred of tyranny; but it seems in little else. In its wisdom of how differences enrich us and should unite us, it captures ASEAN-India relations and gives clear guidance on how we move forward together. Thank you.
[1] S. Jaishankar, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (2020).