Airline diplomacy: Can India make use of VietJet?s timely announcement?

By Sourajit Aiyer

Sourajit Aiyer researches for South Asia Fast Track.


In the last few months, I have travelled from India to multiple airports in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. It was ironical that India’s direct air-connectivity with some of these countries, perceived to be on friendly terms with it, still remains below-par. At the same time, the common sight that stood out at each of these airports was the ubiquitous China Southern or China Eastern aeroplane, reaffirming that airline diplomacy is an integral part of China’s increasing outreach to developing Asian countries.

A welcome move

One of the most glaring examples is probably the direct air-connectivity between India and Vietnam, a country with the friendliest of relations with India, amongst all the East-Asian nations. To reach Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, one needs a stop-over, either in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok or Singapore, while wasting precious hours and becoming impatient. So, the recent news of the soon-to-arrive direct services to India from Ho Chi Minh City by the Vietnamese low-cost airline, VietJet, is a much-needed breather.

If the four-flights-per-week schedule is launched from July, smoother flow of people between the countries will hopefully become a precursor for broader business and trade linkages between those people, especially now, even as business travellers increasingly use low-cost airlines to fly around. As of now, Vietnam comprises of only 1.5 percent of India’s trade volumes. As far as business is concerned, this news still raises four counter-views on India’s ability to leverage this opportunity.

Doubts about India’s ability

First, the fact that it took a Vietnamese airline and not an Indian airline to bridge the connectivity gap is surprising, especially after Prime Minister Modi’s pro-active outreach to invite all the ASEAN leaders as chief guests during the Indian Republic Day parade on 26th January 2018, an event which even China’s Xinhua could not ignore.

Despite those efforts by the Indian political establishment to move closer to the ASEAN as a potential countermeasure to the growing Chinese influence in the Asia Pacific, one is still to see an Indian airline pro-actively following up on its own government’s efforts. This is akin to the business ties between India and Israel despite their political overtures of late. Had it been an Indian airline announcing direct connectivity, the business enterprise profits, jobs and incomes might have been more than otherwise.

Second, following this announcement, the Indian media has gone on to create a hype around VietJet’s past tactics of using bikini-clad models to do a mid-flight ramp walk. A quick search of multiple Indian news networks reaffirmed the Indian media’s primary obsession with only “sensational tabloid drivel.” It is another thing that VietJet had to pay a massive fine to the authorities since it had not obtained the requisite permissions for such marketing tactics.

Nevertheless, this blatant hype by the media might only colour the branding of Vietnam, otherwise a scenic tourist destination, in the mind of an average Indian male tourist who may just correlate it with their biased perception of Pattaya and Phuket, especially those Indian males going on sales-incentive trips. Such biased branding may be counter-productive to building deeper business ties in the long-run.

Third, it is yet to be seen if the majority of the air-traffic moves from India to Vietnam or the other way around. Given that it is a Vietnamese airline which is taking the plunge after seeing the growing number of Indian tourists thronging Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore, one suspects the motivation is to attract Indian tourists to Vietnam. Ergo, India to Vietnam traffic would typically be heavier.

However, this also highlights how far behind the Indian tourism industry has remained in attracting the volume of foreign inbound tourists that it scores by virtue of its historical and scenic tourism sights. Thus, whether India can leverage this opportunity to attract Vietnamese tourists to India, after failing to attract commensurate tourist numbers from Malaysia and Thailand despite the growing number of Indian tourists going there, becomes the critical question.

Lastly and most interestingly, Indian news networks shared this news between 16th and 19th March 2018, despite the original report from Vietnam officially coming out as early as 5th March, which is almost after two weeks. If this does not show the glaring gap in the ability of the Indian news channels to capture relevant news-bytes from abroad that have a pressing relevance to matters concerning India and more so, from countries to whom its politicians are making a concerted outreach, then what else does? If such is the gap in breaking news, the gap in business ties is bound to be chronic.

A positive outlook

Nevertheless, airline diplomacy is often the precursor to bigger things, and hopefully, the easier flow of people should bode well for eventual, deeper business and trade ties between India and Vietnam. The correlation between the Chinese trade and Chinese airlines probably offers the best support to this logic, but one will have to wait and watch how India eventually ranks on the four counter-views mentioned above before one can say for certain that it leveraged this opportunity in the best possible way.

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