Central Asia’s pipeline politics and India’s energy quest

Although Central Asia emerged out of the ashes of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, yet the ‘Five Stans’ (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) as a single geopolitical entity has emerged as new hotspot of global politics by virtue of its huge untapped hydrocarbon potentials and promises of new discoveries. That is perhaps the reason that even after the disintegration of the USSR, the geopolitical importance of Central Asia has never waned down, instead emerged as a grand chessboard for regional and extra-regional players. In the quest for energy security and diversity of supply sources by the energy consumers, the heartland region has witnessed a new great game in the scramble for resources to which many now call as the New Great Game for not just controlling but administering the energy resources of the region. This article examines the position of India in Central Asia and her policy initiatives in the epic quest for oil and energy in the traditional bastion of Russia and the new grand chessboard of China and the USA and endeavours to unearth if India at all have a foreign policy discourse towards the region.