-By Suvam Pal

“Ek, do, teen (one, two, three) used to be my favourite Hindi song during my university days in Ohio in the USA,” Taiwan’s newly sworn-in Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim mentioned during a Taiwan-India-USA supply chain event in Taipei, a few days ago. The former Taiwanese representative to the United States underlined her interest in India by quoting the chart-topping, foot-tapping song, vivaciously performed on screen by then-Bollywood heartthrob Madhuri Dixit, in the 1988 Bollywood blockbuster Tezaab.

Earlier, at last October’s Yushan Forum, the most high-profile annual Taiwanese think tank event, the name of the only country Taiwan’s then-presidential candidate and now, the sworn-in President Lai Ching-te cited in his speech was India. While stressing that Taiwan’s peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region were crucial to peace and prosperity in the world and Taiwan would continue to cooperate with neighbours under the New Southbound Policy, he stated, “In the healthcare field, for instance, Taiwan has trained over 1300 local medical professionals in Southeast Asia and India.” When then Vice President Lai, who also uses his English name William, was delivering his seven and half minute long speech at the event organized annually by the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation on the second day of the forum Indian Member of Parliament Sujeet Kumar of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) was on the podium as part of the panel with the theme of “Start a New Blueprint for Asian Development.” Interestingly, Kumar represents a regional opposition party that has a good working relationship with India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the national level. The MP from the Indian state of Odisha has been the only sitting Indian lawmaker to visit Taiwan in more than a decade, even though parliamentarians from the European Union and many European countries, as well as the U.S. and UK, have recently travelled to the self-governed island, claimed by China as part of its territory. Interestingly, two of India’s top ministers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, had the experience of traveling to Taiwan years before their party, the BJP, wrested power in 2014, and they became prominent parts of the government.

But since the bloody clash between the Indian Army and China’s People’s Liberation Army on the Galwan border on June 15 in 2020, resulting in the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers and at least four from the Chinese side, India has expedited cooperation, collaborations and exchanges with Taiwan at different levels without crossing the redline of the “One China Policy” it has been following for decades but referring to it as its ‘well-known’ position rather than stating it explicitly for more than a decade. India still has no formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan, but as Lai articulated in his speech at the 2023 Yushan Forum, it came closer to Taiwan during the COVID-19 outbreak. Since then, the engagements between the two countries have grown manifold.

Previous President Tsai Ing-wen, who had quite inconspicuously visited India in 2012 following her defeat against Taiwan’s then-incumbent president Ma Ying-jeou, kickstarted the informal bilateral ties between the two countries since the pandemic in 2020 following the Galwan clash. On October 13, 2020, Taiwan’s first woman President posted on Twitter (now X) about her “fond memories” from time spent in “incredible” India, with the Hindi salutation of “Namaste” and her personal photographs at Taj Mahal. Two days later, on October 15, 2020, she went on to tweet about Taiwan being “lucky to be home to many Indian restaurants” and how she “always go for chana masala and naan,” while “chai” always took her back to her travels in India. According to some diplomats from both India and Taiwan, Tsai took a “special interest” in forming multi-level rock-solid ties between India and Taiwan during her tenure. She envisaged the potential of having India as a reliable partner and playing a pivotal role in the Indo-Pacific very early in her Presidential tenure. According to some sources, who closely worked with Tsai, she shepherded two landmark partnerships between Taiwan and India – the joint venture between India’s Tata Group and Taiwanese foundry Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (PSMC) to manufacture the first semiconductor chip in India, and the migration and mobility agreement to bring in Indian workers to help Taiwan address a shortage of workers in the manufacturing, construction, fishery, agriculture, and other sectors – just before her wrapping up her eight years-long stay at the Presidential office.

President Lai and Vice President Hsiao are predominantly expected to follow in her footsteps and have already spoken about carrying forward Tsai’s capstone foreign policy legacy of New South Bound Policy and engaging with India further. President Tsai’s two terms were unique and unprecedented as the incumbent Taiwanese President and the Indian Prime Minister had prior experience of visiting each other’s countries. But Harvard-educated doctor-turned-politician Lai has never visited India even though Vice President Hsiao attended the Raisina Dialogue – India’s most high-profile multilateral conference on geopolitics, annually organized by the premier think tank, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), in Delhi – in 2018. In September 2021, at the time of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-publicized three-day U.S. tour, including his first face-to-face meeting with President Joe Biden, and attendance at the maiden in-person Quad summit, Hsiao, the then Taiwan’s de facto Ambassador to the U.S., elucidated in an interview to an Indian news channel, “Taiwan and India, in particular, have a lot of strengths where we complement each other. In the technology area, in manufacturing, and in so many other areas. The issue of fighting the pandemic has been highlighted, and India’s capacity to produce vaccines makes India a very important country in the global fight and; I believe there are many opportunities where we can partner being stronger together and helping each other as well as the world overcome the pandemic.”

However, like his Vice President, new President Lai is also known to have privately expressed his love for watching Bollywood movies like Dangal and Three Idiots. Another important person in the Lai administration, Joseph Wu, who has taken over as the new head of Taiwan’s National Security Council (NSC), has been unabashed about his love for India during his just-finished tenure as the longest-serving Foreign Minister of Taiwan. Therefore, with the trio at the helm, it’s beyond doubt that India-Taiwan relations under the newly sworn-in government in Taiwan are expected to grow without being juxtaposed with China.

Author is a Taipei-based broadcast journalist working for the TaiwanPlus news channel.  His X handle is: @suvvz

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