Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim on Monday makes his debut trip to India as prime minister, seeking support for his country’s application to join the Brics bloc and to rekindle a bilateral relationship that was worth over US$16 billion in trade last year.
During its first prime minister-led delegation’s visit to India since 2018, Malaysia hopes to bolster ties with one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies. India is the largest buyer of Malaysian palm oil and a key exporter of rice to the Southeast Asian nation.
The application to join Brics, which was submitted to the current chairman Russia, is aimed at cushioning a potential impact on Malaysia from the escalating US-China trade and tech war, analysts say.
Brics comprises founder members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, as well as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, offering preferential trade and investment with countries covering 45 per cent of the world’s population.
Anwar’s three-day visit is also a chance to reset Malaysia’s relations with India, analysts say, following a hangover from a spat with New Delhi under a previous Malaysian administration and China increasingly dominating the Southeast Asian nation’s foreign policy space.
“It is bizarre that there has not been a prime ministerial visit [by Malaysia to India] for six years,” political analyst and Malaysia expert Adib Zalkapli said.
“The pandemic and the years of political uncertainty in Malaysia perhaps have distracted the government from important bilateral relations. Anwar’s visit reverses the benign neglect by the previous administrations.”
During his visit, Anwar is scheduled to hold talks with his counterpart Narendra Modi, Malaysia’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Sunday, as well as meet India’s captains of industry and deliver a lecture on Malaysia-India ties.
The visit marks the first top-level visit by a Malaysian leader since former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad in 2019 accused India of having “invaded and occupied” Kashmir. His comments triggered a limited boycott of Malaysia’s palm oil – one of its biggest exports – by Indian traders.
India has been Malaysia’s top export market for its palm oil for 10 years running, buying 2.84 million tonnes in 2023, or nearly 20 per cent of Malaysia’s total palm oil exports, according to Malaysian government data. In contrast, China bought 1.47 million tonnes of palm oil shipments.
Malaysia is also heavily dependent on India for its domestic food supply.
In March, Malaysia’s government put in a request to import an additional 500,000 metric tonnes of rice from the world’s largest rice exporter, as a prolonged drought crimped domestic output and put pressure on national grain stockpiles. The request was on top of an earlier rice export quota of 170,000 metric tonnes allocated for Malaysia for the year.
India also has deep cultural links with Malaysia, whose minority ethnic Indians make hundreds of thousands of annual visits each year to their ancestral family villages and perform religious pilgrimages in temples, mostly in India’s south.
There is also a burgeoning strategic dimension in the relationship to serve as ballast to counter China’s influence, which looms large over the contested South China Sea, analysts say.
“Beijing’s rapid ascendency in the past three decades has transformed the entire power and economic equation in the region, and until recently, there was no adequate power balancer to this new power dynamic apart from the West,” said Collins Chong Yew Keat, a foreign affairs analyst with the University of Malaya.
The visit presents an opportunity for Malaysia to explore deeper defence cooperation with India, which has been upgrading its security and naval capacities and is carving out an increasingly important role in Asia’s regional maritime resilience, Chong added.
It is a role outlined in Modi’s Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative launched in 2019, which presents the South Asian power as potentially the “primary power challenger” to China, Chong said.
