India plans to set up a satellite tracking station in Vietnam. It is likely to be located at Ho Chi Minh City in Southern Vietnam, and will be linked electronically to another of its tracking stations in Indonesia. India has already asset up a string of similar centres in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Brunei, Biak in eastern Indonesia and Mauritius. These centres are used to track satellites in the initial stages of their flight.
India’s space programme is increasing rapidly with a launch scheduled every month. The Indian Space Research Organisation, (ISRO), has perfected the art of space research on a shoe string budget. The proposed Vietnam station will come up at just US$23 million. The new centre, besides tracking, will also be able to receive and process images from India’s observation satellites.
The facility will be used for civilian purposes such as agricultural, environmental and scientific uses. It will also give Hanoi access to capabilities of India’s satellite network.
The depth of the convergence between India and Vietnam grows more apparent when one considers that India is currently training Vietnamese submariners and has offered Vietnam a $144 million (US$100 million) credit line to buy patrol boats. Hanoi has, in turn, offered India the rights to explore for oil in some areas of the South China Sea that it claims. Both countries have disregarded Chinese protestations over this venture. Both countries have also fought wars against China, India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979.
The facility gives India a strategic lift. As New Delhi sees it, if China can make inroads into South Asia via Pakistan, there is no reason why it cannot use Vietnam to expand its own influence into the South China Sea. More so when it is not a claimant in the territorial dispute over the Sea.
For China, however, India’s presence is an irritation it could well do without. Gu Xiaosong, an expert on Southeast Asian studies (at the Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences) has alleged that India “has no territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea” and wishes to merely “stir up trouble in the region to serve its own ends, which is to counterbalance China’s influence”. In China’s perception, at a time when it has problems with its economic growth, huge amounts of capital exiting the country, Taiwan electing a leader who seeks to slow and possibly reverse the country’s growing economic dependence on the mainland and the US seemingly returning to the region and forming alliances anew, India’s newly-developed toehold in Vietnam and Hanoi’s enhanced prowess is a distraction it could do without.
While Beijing can counter India and Vietnam individually, it must surely be concerned by the growing alliances that are being formed against it by countries both within and beyond the region. India’s satellite tracking facility in Ho Chi Minh City is only one indicator of these alliances.