What remains after the summit motorcades leave?

The day I landed in New Delhi for the BRICS summit, there was already chatter on Indian television about how much the whole thing cost.

On one channel, presenter Arnab Goswami wondered whether critics expected Vladimir Putin to be put up in Paharganj, Delhi’s famously chaotic budget-hotel quarter — imagine the old Pudu area of Kuala Lumpur crossed with Penang’s backpacker-quarter Chulia Street, then add several thousand people, several thousand horns and the distinct possibility that your taxi driver knows a shortcut which somehow takes longer.

The debate also introduced me to the useful Hindi expression “naraz fufa”, for the perpetually offended uncle at a family gathering who can always find something wrong. The BJP, India’s ruling party, had used it while responding to opposition leader P Chidambaram, who had questioned what India was actually getting out of BRICS.

Malaysia has no shortage of the same uncle. We just never bothered giving him such an efficient name. Ours generally lives in the family WhatsApp group, where he specialises in multiple question marks and information forwarded by somebody’s cousin in Johor.

Still, the grumpy uncle has a point. Malaysians have also asked what we get from hosting large international gatherings, with their convoys, security cordons, hotel bills and dinners involving more cutlery than most of us own at home. The Asean summit in Kuala Lumpur last year prompted the same questions, and they are perfectly fair ones.

After following Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim around India for several days, I found myself asking pretty much the same thing.

There was no shortage of official business. Anwar and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi discussed trade, investment, semiconductors, tourism, education and various other matters that normally arrive in press statements wearing their best bureaucratic attire.

Malaysia’s singing PM

Yet the thing many ordinary Indians seemed to notice was Anwar singing Kishore Kumar.

His rendition travelled across Indian television and social media, reaching people who would probably never willingly read a BRICS declaration. Malaysians had seen something similar when Donald Trump arrived for the Asean summit in Kuala Lumpur last year and briefly danced along with traditional performers at KLIA, with Anwar joining him for a few seconds.

It is a reminder that governments can spend weeks drafting language about “people-to-people ties”, only for an old Hindi song or a slightly awkward dance to do considerably more work.

But summit diplomacy eventually has to produce something more durable than a viral clip, and one of the conversations that interested me most in Delhi was with Arun Rajendran of Segula Technologies, a French engineering company with a large operation in India.

His explanation was refreshingly free of ceremony. Experienced engineers in India were becoming more expensive, while Malaysia already had much of the manufacturing base needed to take on more specialised engineering work. If we trained enough people properly, some of that work could eventually move here.

That caught my attention far more than another discussion about the world order. In other words, a company was saying that there could be better engineering jobs here if we got the skills right.

That is something a parent with a child studying engineering can understand without first having to Google “multipolarity”.

Other Indian businesses were looking at Malaysia too, including companies already buying large amounts of our palm oil and others interested in using Malaysia as a base for Southeast Asia. Of course, meetings are not investments, announcements are not jobs, and handshakes – however firm – remain surprisingly difficult to deposit at a bank.

That is why the real test comes later.

Malayalee connection

Then we flew south to Kerala (now known as Keralam), where the mood changed completely. After several days of giant conference halls, security checks and enough accreditation tags to start a small stationery business, Anwar was talking about old friends, Malayalee lawyers and the centuries-old links between the Malabar coast and the Malay world.

At Markaz in Kozhikode, he slipped two Malayalam words into his speech: “Entha varthanam?” (roughly, “What’s up?”) The crowd responded immediately. At another gathering, he noticed that what had been advertised as a high-tea appeared, at that moment, to consist mainly of water, briefly raising the prospect of a diplomatic incident over missing beverages.

Then came the Malayalee jokes. Anwar recalled the lawyers who had stood by him during the difficult years of his political career, before suggesting that one Malayalee weakness was knowing when to stop talking. This was a bold complaint from a politician who happened to be holding a microphone.

After the crowds that greeted him, he even joked about contesting an election in Kerala. Tambun, as far as we know, remains safe.

I also discovered a Malabar porotta with a faint coconut-oil finish that was so good it made a more persuasive argument for closer Malaysia-India relations than several official speeches I had heard that week.

Behind the jokes and the food, however, was something more substantial. Anwar spoke about the movement of people, religion, culture and trade between the Malabar coast and the Malay world over centuries. Those connections existed long before BRICS, Asean or anyone decided that every relationship between two countries required the word “strategic” somewhere in the description.

What really matters

Perhaps that is the better way to look at these summits. They provide the room, get leaders and businesses in front of one another and give officials a chance to push things along. Cultural familiarity helps too. A Kishore Kumar song may open a door which another 12-page joint statement merely leans against.

But eventually, the naraz fufa is entitled to come back and ask what happened next.

Six months or a year from now, did Segula create those engineering jobs? Did more Indian companies invest here? Did Malaysian businesses find new customers in India? Did talks about tourism lead to more flights and visitors?

Those are better measures of success than the length of a motorcade or the grandeur of a summit venue.

Putin might not be checking into Paharganj any time soon. The rest of us are still entitled to ask what was left behind after he checked out.

Predeep Nambiar is FMT’s northern region bureau chief.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.

Subscribe to our newsletter and get news delivered to your mailbox.