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Project Mausam hopes to checkmate China, which is pushing for its Silk Route initiative
India was wide-eyed when China aggressively pushed its Silk Route project - and it was then that New Delhi decided to give Beijing a dose of its own medicine by launching an ambitious initiative to re-establish maritime and economic links with 39 littoral nations.
The grandiose effort seemed promising.
This was in 2014, a year after the Silk Route project received a big push from China. Three years later, the project has hardly shown forward movement except for holding of seminars. A sum of Rs 150 crore has also been spent on Project Mausam, which is similar to Arabic word 'mausim' that means monsoon, alluding to the tradewinds that brush past the Indian shores and scoot off to lands far and wide.
Project Mausam hopes to revive centuries- old contacts with communities and cultures located along sea-faring routes.
"The endeavour through Project Mausam is to link the cultural route and maritime landscape across the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and secure its energy and trade interests on the other hand," says a senior government official, who added that India's initiative is a robust answer to China's Silk Route strategy.
With China increasingly trying to squeeze India's space in the Indian Ocean, New Delhi has come out with several strategic, economic and cultural initiatives to stay the course in the third largest water body which, according to foreign secretary S Jaishankar, is unique in its character as in no other part of the maritime world have "fundamental economic activities...been so directly derived from cycles of nature".
Participating in the second edition of the Indian Ocean Conference in Colombo on September 1, Jaishankar also said that "this ocean evolved its own special identity that is based on mobility, acceptance and interpenetration". The foreign secretary talked about the shared history of India and countries situated along the Indian Ocean.
"The historical inheritance is visible across its expanse, whether it is Hindu temples in Bali [Indonesia] and My Son [Vietnam], in fact, all the way from Zhengzhou to Arab communities in Aceh [Indonesia] and Eastern Sri Lanka or the Waqwaq settlers in Madagascar," the 62-year-old Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer said, outlining the broad...