T20 Mid-Year Conference - At the heart of the Indo-Pacific: Why Mumbai Matters?

These remarks were delivered by Manjeet Kripalani, Executive Director, Gateway House, as a special address, ‘At the heart of the Indo-Pacific: Why Mumbai Matters?’, at the Think20 Mid-Year Conference organised by Think20 and G20.

Good evening, and welcome to Mumbai.

I am Manjeet Kripalani, and I am the executive director of Gateway House, a foreign policy think tank in Mumbai. I bring you greetings from the heart of India’s financial and commercial capital, and welcome you most warmly to our port city on the Arabian Sea.

The Indo-Pacific framework stands for two central concepts: maritime security and economic development. Both these pillars intersect here in Mumbai.

When Gateway House was started in 2009, it was based on the premise that when you look out of the window in Delhi, you see South Block and North Block; but when you look out of the window in Mumbai, you see the Gateway of India, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, the vast trade that took place over centuries through favourable monsoon breezes. You see the Reserve Bank of India, and the Bombay Stock Exchange, the oldest exchange in Asia.

The European colonial empires were built on maritime dominance. Three hundred years later, the circle is complete, with maritime affairs once again dictating world politics and economics. The Indo-Pacific has become central to geopolitics, and it feels appropriate that the “Indo” in the Indo-Pacific is represented here in Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra, the centre of India’s maritime affairs. Mumbai then, offers a different perspective of India’s interests. They are historically international, and historically maritime, and both are intertwined.

The great Maratha ruler, Shivaji, created a navy in India at a time when Indian rulers were looking landward rather than at the seas like their Europeans counterparts were. Shivaji’s navy was a force to reckon with in Mumbai’s waters and the North Konkan under the intrepid Admiral Kanhoji Angre. Angre built a fleet of just 80 ships; most were mere fishing boats reengineered by the local kolis, the original inhabitants of Mumbai. This fleet challenged European mercantile and maritime dominance in the Arabian Sea, insisting on the Maratha Empire’s rights to taxation and sovereignty on its own territorial waters. It was a first for any local kingdom in the Indian Ocean littoral as territorial waters were a European concept then. Angre had extraordinary success. The Europeans referred to him as the Prince of Pirates – but in fact, Angre was fighting what would today be referred to as “state-sponsored piracy” where the monarchs of Europe sent out their ships to loot and plunder for their liege from lands far afield.

Thus began the modern maritime naval expertise in Mumbai, and the making of Mumbai as a trading hub. Asia’s first dry dock for shipbuilding was built in Bombay in 1750 by Lovjee Nusserwanjee Wadia. The Wadias were also the first Indian ship builders. A 100 years later, in 1875, Sassoon Docks, the country’s first wet docks, was built in Bombay.

The first railway to operate in India ran from Bombay (Bori Bunder or today’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) to Thane in 1853. The cotton trade began to boom, and numerous cotton associations were set up followed by the first cotton mill set up in Bombay in 1854 – for those of you who have the time, I urge you to visit the splendid Cotton Exchange on the eastern sea board of the city. It was one of the first exchanges in India to organize and regulate the commodities trade.

It was around this trade – enabled by local merchants as brokers, agents, bankers, stevedores – that the rapid growth of the city as a global financial centre East of the Suez was facilitated. Between the 1870s and 1940s, Bombay was the biggest money market in the world after London, and much before New York or Hong Kong.

An eco-system of educational excellence and expertise began to be built around it – which stands till today. The Bombay Stock Exchange was begun in 1875 by Premchand Roychand, a cotton trader. It is the oldest stock exchange in Asia and the tenth oldest in the world. Shortly thereafter, Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute, or VJTI, the oldest engineering college in Asia, was founded in 1887 in Bombay.

The arts and women began to flourish around this. Cornelia Sorabji, a graduate of Bombay University, in 1892 became the first woman to study law at Oxford University and was India’s first woman barrister. The first commerce college in Asia was the Sydneham College of Commerce, founded in 1903, and the first school of architecture in Asia was the Sir J. J. College of Architecture, part of the Sir J. J. School of Art, where Rudyard Kipling’s father was the principal.

It was inevitable that several of India’s pioneering freedom movements were launched from Bombay, because of the presence of the educated and the wealthy traders in the city.

Bombay was also the centre of modern India’s naval expertise. The early roots of the Indian Navy and its Sword Arm, the Western Fleet (est. 1968), were in Bombay, specifically in an East India Company marine force known as the Bombay Marine (1686 to 1830). When India become a Republic on 26 January 1950, it became the Indian Navy.The Indian Naval fleet in Mumbai played a key role with its aircraft carrier INS Vikrant in the 1971 India-Pakistan War, with the Vikrant’s Alize and Seahawk fighter jets pounding East Pakistan ports and military installations.

More than war and relevant to our current times, the Indian Naval ships from Mumbai have played exemplary roles in rescue and disaster relief missions as they did during the devastating December 2004 Tsunami, when ships from Mumbai were the first to reach Tsunami hit Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

These attributes and dimensions are the same that are present in the new Indo-Pacific collaborations. Today, 14 of the 24 official large Indo-Pacific countries have consulates in Mumbai – Australia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Maldives, New Zealand, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, the US. Most of the European partners in the Indo-Pacific, like Germany and France, and our former colonial ruler the UK, also have active missions here – making Mumbai a natural western pillar of the Indo-Pacific commitments.

The city’s vibrant diplomatic corps has been present here for 200 years. The vibrant trade ensured that the first diplomatic missions in India were in fact established in Bombay, and their writ ran all the way to Aden, in Yemen and to Zanzibar in East Africa. Even today, many of the nearly 50 missions here are still larger than their embassies. The earliest Indo-Pacific countries to open their account in Bombay were Siam (now Thailand) and the United States – in 1838. Japan followed in 1903.

The diplomatic missions enhanced trading ties. American clippers sailed into Bombay harbour in the mid-1800s, and America’s first millionaire, Elias Haskett Derby, made a fortune trading in Deccan cotton, sourced from Bombay. One of the earliest imports from the U.S. was ice cream and ice cut from Boston’s lakes and shipped from its harbour to Bombay in the 1800s. These Indo-Pacific linkages have been nurtured over the years.

Now is the time to add Mumbai once again into the fold of the great cities of the Indo-Pacific – Dubai, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Taipei, New York. All look East, but Mumbai looks West too, to the “Indo” portion of the Indo-Pacific that includes a newly booming and transforming West Asia and to an east Africa that is growing in confidence. Its regional connections are centuries old. The British Empire’s West Asian foreign policy was run out of Mumbai, and till 1956, the Rupee was legal tender in many parts of that region – all well regulated by the Reserve Bank of India.

Mumbai is still the financial capital of India. Its financial eco-system is sophisticated – successful financial entrepreneurs, private banks, central bankers, stockbrokers, venture capitalists, private equity, fund managers abound. Add to it advertising, media, Bollywood, progressive artists, international back offices, a manufacturing hub in Pune, its hinterland – and the dazzling new, ultramodern cultural centre next door. The country’s best transport and 24-hour electricity from the Tata companies, make Mumbai the safest city in India for women – an essential ingredient of great cities. A world class Metro system, with new roads and affordable housing will soon transform the city.

The Reserve Bank of India has managed India’s economy well and is among the most well-respected and trusted central banks in Asia. It has been an active player in India’s digital revolution which has created new models of fintech and finance, tested at continental scale. These can be replicated in other emerging economies, particularly the 14 Pacific Island countries which are otherwise isolated and can facilitate digital public goods and commerce for them.

Multinationals are making India a part of their global supply chains, to diversify and de-risk, and Mumbai is headquarters to several of these enterprises. More than 40% of the S&P500 have an office in Mumbai. The city contributes a fourth of India’s revenue and its infrastructure buildout is on at full stream – you can see signs of that all around Mumbai.

This city has historically been the center of commerce in the Indian Ocean region. It is already regaining that role as the Indo-Pacific region becomes more closely integrated.

Manjeet Kripalani is Executive Director, Gateway House.

For interview requests with the author, or for permission to republish, please contact outreach@gatewayhouse.in.